end p.244
10 RELIGIOUS EPISTEMOLOGY
Nicholas Wolterstorff
The Task of Epistemology
Religions are highly complex components of our human existence. What is it, within
such a complex, that belongs to the subject matter of the epistemologist?
Adherence to a religion and participation therein typically incorporate such actions as
worship, prayer, meditation, self-discipline, commemorating certain persons and events,
treating certain writings as canonical, allowing one's beliefs and actions to be formed by
one's own and others' interpretation of those writings, acting in certain characteristic ways
in society, and associating with one's fellow adherents for all the above activities.
Typically they also incorporate a variety of propositional attitudes: hoping that certain
events will take place, trusting that certain events will take place, regretting that certain
events did take place, believing that certain things are true about God, about the cosmos,
about the natural world, about human beings—their misery and glory, their history, their
institutions. Wittgenstein's phrase “form of life” is appropriate: adherence to and
participation in a religion is a form of life.
What evokes adherence to and participation in a religion is typically also complex: being
reared within the religion often plays a role, as do reasoning, interpretation of the
canonical scriptures of the religion, and experience—some times experience whose
content is uncanny, sometimes experience whose content is ordinary things uncannily
experienced.
So once again, our question: What is it, within that complex that is a religion, that
belongs to the subject matter of the epistemologist? And let me make explicit what we all
know to be the case: religion always comes in the form of religions, in the plural; there is
no such thing as religion as such, only this religion, that religion, and so forth.
Well, the epistemologist will be interested in those experiences. If the experience is of
something uncanny (as I called it), he'll want to figure out whether its content is simply
an inner state of oneself or something external to the self that transcends the ordinary—
God, perhaps, or the Real, the One, the sacred, whatever. If it's of the ordinary uncannily
experienced, he'll try to understand what it is to experience the starry heavens above as a
manifestation of God's creative handiwork, to experience a child's sing-song as God
speaking to one, and so forth.
In addition, the epistemologist will be interested in those propositional attitudes—those
hopings, those trustings, those regrettings, those believings. He'll be interested in what it
is that accounts for the emergence of these attitudes; for example, are religious beliefs all
formed by inference from other beliefs or are some formed by belief-forming processes
more fundamental than that of inference? Above all, he'll be interested in the conditions
under which one and another truth-relevant merit is present in, or absent from, those
propositional attitudes. Hopes, regrets, beliefs, and so forth are rational, warranted,