I should perhaps add, lest there be any misunderstanding, that none of these three lines of
thought holds that “anything goes” in religious belief; they agree that some of the
religious beliefs that people hold are ones they're not entitled to. The Reformed
epistemologists have been more emphatic on this point than the others, but there's no
disagreement. The problem with Enlightenment eviden
end p.248
tialism, so say the Reformed epistemologists, is not its contention that some religious
beliefs are entitled and some not, but that it operates with a mistaken criterion for
entitlement.
Second, all three developments contest the standard picture of religious beliefs as add-on
explanations: explanations that the religious person adds on to the beliefs she shares with
her nonreligious fellows. An alternative that emerged in the three developments I will be
discussing—prominent in the Wittgensteinians, part of the ever-present theoretical
background in Heidegger—is that religious beliefs are interpretive in character, and that
in good measure the reality and experience that they interpret are not transcendent reality
and mystical experience but ordinary reality and ordinary experience: beauty, morality,
cruelty, love, birth, death, authority, origins. The difference between the religious and the
nonreligious person remains even when we set off to the side mystical experiences and
convictions purely about the transcendent. In good measure the interpretations that
constitute the religious person's belief-structure are not interpretations of other things but
alternative interpretations of the same things.
In this respect, all three movements are inheritors of the understanding of religion
developed by Schleiermacher in his Speeches on Religion to Its Cultured Despisers
(1988). The “essence” of religion, for Schleiermacher, consisted in a certain mode of
interpretation-as, specifically, in the interpretation of ordinary, finite, contingent reality
as the manifestation of something of an entirely different order: the infinite, the whole,
whatever. Schleiermacher says, in one passage, that “to accept everything individual as a
part of the whole and everything limited as a [presentation] of the infinite is religion”
(105).^1 Accordingly, “to a pious mind religion makes everything holy and valuable, even
unholiness and commonness itself” (113).
Enlightenment Evidentialism
As will be clear from what I have said, all three of the movements I am considering have
been polemical in their orientation. That is to say, they have placed themselves in
opposition to earlier views, both mounting arguments against those views and developing
alternatives. It's my judgment that one does not fully understand the significance of the
moves made unless one understands the polemical partner. Accordingly, it's with a brief
sketch of the polemical partners of Reformed epistemology and of Wittgensteinianism
that I will begin; I'll save a sketch of Heidegger's polemical partner for when we get to
him.
In the Enlightenment of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries there