Rationality and religious commitment / Robert Audi.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Audi, Robert, 1941-

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Faith and reason.

Faith.

Rationalism.

Commitment (Psychology)--Religious aspects.

Commitment (Psychology).

Religion and ethics.

Physical Description:

xvi, 311 pages ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

New York : Oxford University Press, [2011]

Summary:

Rationality and Religious Commitment shows how religious commitment can be. rational and describes the place of faith in the postmodern world. It portrays religious commitment as far more than accepting doctrines-it is viewed as a kind of life, not just as an embrace of tenets. Faith is conceived as a unique attitude. It is irreducible to belief but closely connected with both belief and conduct, and intimately related to life's moral, political, and aesthetic dimensions.

Part One presents an account of rationality as a status attainable by mature religious people-including those with a strongly scientific habit of mind. Part Two describes what it means to have faith, how faith is connected with attitudes, emotions, and conduct; and how religious experience may support it.

Part Three turns to religious commitment and moral obligation and to the relation between religion and politics. It shows how ethics and religion can be mutually supportive even though ethics provides standards of conduct independently of theology. It also depicts the integrated life possible for the religiously committed-a life with rewarding interactions between faith and reason, religion and science, and the aesthetic and the spiritual.

The book concludes with two major accounts. One explains how moral wrongs and natural disasters are possible under God conceived as having the knowledge, power, and goodness that make such evils so difficult to understand. The other account explores the nature of persons, human and divine, and yields a conception that can sustain a rational theistic worldview even in the contemporary scientific age. Book jacket.

Contents:

Part I Four Epistemological Standards: Rationality and Reasonableness, Justification and Knowledge

1 Rationality in Thought and Action 3

I The contours of rationality 6

II Rationality and reasons: theoretical and practical 10

III The practical authority of theoretical reason 13

IV Rationality and its experiential grounds 16

V Rationality, reasoning, and responsiveness to experience 20

2 Justification, Knowledge, and Reasonableness 24

I Rationality and justification 24

II Rationality as normatively more permissive than justification 29

III Justification and knowledge 34

IV Reasonableness 39

V Rationality and reasonableness in the aesthetic domain 40

VI The normative appraisal of religious commitments 43

Part II The Dimensions of Rational Religious Commitment

3 Belief, Faith, Acceptance, and Hope 51

I The nature and varieties of faith 52

II Conditions for rational faith: a preliminary sketch 66

III Fiducial faith 68

IV Acceptance 80

V Faith, belief, and hope: some normative contrasts 84

4 The Diversity of Religious Commitment 89

I Religious commitment in the context of existential narratives 89

II Attitudinal and volitional elements in religious commitments 92

III Institutional aspects of religious conduct 96

IV Degrees of religious commitment 99

5 Experiential and Pragmatic Aspects of Religious Commitments 105

I Religious experiences as possible support for theism 107

II Perceptual religious experiences 112

III The normative authority of religious experience 117

IV The pragmatic dimension of support for religious commitment 125

V The doxastic practice approach to defending the rationality of theism 129

VI Religious experience, fiducial attitudes, and religious conduct 131

Part III Religion, Theology, and Morality

6 Religious Commitment and Moral Obligation 137

I Divine command ethics 138

II Divine commandedness versus divine commandability 142

III Divine commandability, obligation, and the good 151

IV The autonomy of ethics and the moral authority of God 153

V Religiously grounded conduct 160

7 Religious Integration and Human Flourishing 165

I The scope of religious integration 166

II Sociopolitical aspects of religious integration 171

III Natural theology and the obligations of citizenship 174

IV Theism and the scientific habit of mind 181

V The aesthetic dimension of religious commitment 184

Part IV The Rationality of Religious Commitment in the Postmodern World

8 Internal Challenges to the Rationality of Religious Commitment 191

I The divine attributes 192

II Pluralism, defeasibility, and rationality 197

III Rational religious disagreement, skepticism, and humility 201

9 The Problem of Evil 205

I A conception of the problem of evil 205

II The axiology of good and evil 209

III A theocentric versus a cosmocentric approach to the problem 214

IV Moral evil in a world under God 219

V Theological choiceworthiness 228

VI Natural evil 231

VII Dimensions of divine knowledge 240

10 The Challenge of Naturalism 247

I Philosophical naturalism 247

II Scientific explanation and cosmological perplexity 250

III Personhood, mental substance, and embodiment 253

IV The possibility of divine embodiment 257

V Mental causation and mentalistic explanation 264

VI Causation, causal explanation, and causal power 270

VII The causal closure versus the causal sufficiency of the physical world 276

VIII Intellectual economy and the scientific approach to the world 281.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages [297]-306) and index.

ISBN:

9780199609574

0199609578

OCLC:

709682920