boundaries of the category ‘knowledge’ are fuzzy. For example, was it
knowledge when physicists in the nineteenth century attributed the ability of
light to travel through a vacuum to ether? It may even be true that the
definition of knowledge is uncertain, as when some philosophers use Gettier
examples to raise the possibility that knowledge cannot be defined, even as
‘justified true belief’ (Gettier 1963). But definitional uncertainty and fuzzy
boundaries would seem to be general characteristics of almost all human
conceptualization (e.g. Laurence and Margolis 1999). They are not reasons to
abandon the distinction between knowledge and non-epistemic religious claims.
Neither is the truism, which I heartily endorse, that all claims which count as
knowledge are context-bound and corrigible.
It seems inevitable that theologians will want to make religious claims that
lie unmistakably outside the bounds of knowledge. As soon as they do, they
leave the study of religions and engage in religious reflection. That happens,
for example, when a systematician moves from explicating the thought of
Thomas Aquinas to drawing implications for faith. It also happens when an
exegete goes beyond talking about the context-specific meanings of the
Yogastrasor about medically demonstrated benefits of certain physical
exercises and makes claims that subtle physiological channels not detectable
by any normal empirical means really do exist. Such claims simply do not
belong within the study of religions. In this sense, the study of religions requires
a rigorous restraint, but one that is epistemological, not religious.
My point is not that religious claims are somehow inherently flawed.
Through modal logic we can construct worlds in which what appear in
our world as religious claims—‘There is a God who forgives sin’, ‘I was a pandit
in my previous life, but this will be my last birth’—would count as knowledge,
although we might then question whether we would still want to call these
claims religious. I also do not mean to say that theology has no place in our
world. Religious reflection has an extremely important place within religious
communities, nor is it limited to those communities. For a number of practical
reasons, I find enterprises such as interreligious dialogue and comparative
theology (cf. Clooney 2005) welcome developments. Nevertheless, people are
entitled to disregard religious claims and thinking that depends upon them in
a manner in which they are not entitled to disregard, for example, the existence
of the ground on which they walk or, more abstractly, Newton’s equations
defining motion.^8 Indeed, many people do disregard religious claims, sometimes
rather aggressively (Dawkins 2006; Dennett 2006; Harris 2006).
While theology—more broadly, serious religious reflection—has its place,
that place is not the study of religions. For example, the study of religions does
not aspire to make ‘progress in discovering the truths of religion’, as Thomas
Ryba (2004: 109) seems to hope. That is partly because at least for the
foreseeable future there seems to be no progress to be made.^9 Instead, the study
of religions aspires to understand and explain human religious thought and6
GREGORY D. ALLES