Religious Disagreement and Religious Relevance: A Perspective from Contemporary Philosophical Epistemology

Just like anyone else using the expression “religious disagreement” in contexts of argumentative debate with the intention to single out for consideration a specific kind or category of disagreement, philosophers working in what has come to be called the epistemology of religious disagreement sooner or later face the task of providing a useful answer to the following question: What is it that distinguishes religious from non-religious disagreements? In current debates, the issue is often rather swiftly dealt with along the following lines: a disagreement D qualifies as religious if, and only if, the proposition under dispute between the parties to D is a religious proposition. The obvious next question as to what it is for a proposition to be of the religious variety is then usually answered by pointing to a few allegedly uncontentious paradigms. This paper argues that the account of religious disagreement in terms of religious propositions is problematic in various respects. Many disagreements that deserve the attention of philosophers of religion concern propositions that are not at all paradigmatically religious. Such propositions may regard, for instance, such things as attire, diet, sexual orientation and preferences, or gender roles, and while any such proposition may be relevant to the religious outlook of one or another person or community, none of them are religious propositions. The paper outlines and motivates a notion of religious relevance, which, unlike the standard account, allows epistemologists of religion to do justice to the fact that there is no neat conceptual or a priori line of demarcation between religious and non-religious discourses, and that, consequently, no neat distinction between religious and non-religious disagreements is to be had.