University of Oxford

Graduate Student, Theology

DPhil Candidate

St Cross College, Oxford University

Thesis Title: God and the Evolved Mind: The rationality of theism in light of naturalistic explanations of religion

About

Is it rational to believe in God? This is a question which has exercised philosophers for centuries and persists as a source of heated debate in contemporary analytic philosophy of religion. A tradition of thought originating in Ludwig Feuerbach challenges the rationality of theistic belief on the grounds that it originates in the human desire for a supreme being who embodies the negation of all human weaknesses. Sigmund Freud develops this thought in terms of the craving for an eternal father-figure who can promise us justice in a cruel world and can assuage our ultimate dread of annihilation. Common to these and similar, subsequent critiques of theism is the idea that belief in God is produced by belief-forming faculties which are either malfunctioning or are directed towards a goal other than truth—ostensibly, psychological comfort. Such strategies are typically rejected by theistic philosophers because they commit the genetic fallacy; they mistakenly confuse the question of a belief’s origin with the question of its truth or falsity. However, as philosopher of religion Alvin Plantinga has rightly acknowledged, knowing about the origin of a belief can tell us a great deal about whether the processes which gave rise to it are reliable — that is, truth-directed — and thus whether an individual would be warranted in holding that belief. Two central questions on which my research will focus are:
--Do naturalistic accounts of religious belief pose a challenge to the rationality of belief in God which is held primarily on the basis of argumentation and evidence, or only to belief which is held on the basis of religious experience?
--Which of the two contemporary philosophical accounts of epistemic justification (externalism or internalism) provides a more promising way of answering the challenge from naturalistic epistemology?
The questions addressed in this research also have wider implications across the philosophy of religion which I hope to be able to explore, in particular, to the epistemology of religious experience — the question of whether religious experience is a reliable basis for belief in God — and to the analogical design argument for the existence of God, which hinges crucially on the possibility of accurate human perceptions of order and purpose in the universe.

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