This book is a critical examination of the philosophical strategies for defending religious belief. The main strategies may be presented as conforming to the end nodes of a decision tree for a believer. The faithful can interpret a credal statement (e.g. ‘God exists’) either as a factual claim, or otherwise. If it is a factual claim, they can either be warranted to endorse it without evidence, etc., or not. Finally, should religious belief require evidential support, then ought that support be assessed by the same criteria that we use in evaluating evidence in science, or not? Each of these op ... More

This book is a critical examination of the philosophical strategies for defending religious belief. The main strategies may be presented as conforming to the end nodes of a decision tree for a believer. The faithful can interpret a credal statement (e.g. ‘God exists’) either as a factual claim, or otherwise. If it is a factual claim, they can either be warranted to endorse it without evidence, etc., or not. Finally, should religious belief require evidential support, then ought that support be assessed by the same criteria that we use in evaluating evidence in science, or not? Each of these options has been defended by prominent analytic philosophers of religion. In Part I, Herman Philipse assesses the tenability of each of these strategies and argues that the most promising option for believers who want to be justified in accepting their creed in our scientific age is the Bayesian cumulative case strategy developed by Richard Swinburne. Parts II and III are devoted to an in-depth analysis of this case for theism. Using a ‘strategy of subsidiary arguments’, Philipse concludes (1) that theism cannot be stated meaningfully; (2) that if theism were meaningful, it would have no predictive power concerning existing evidence, so that Bayesian arguments cannot get started; and (3) that if the Bayesian cumulative case strategy did work, one should conclude that atheism is more probable than theism. According to a referee, the book is ‘full of careful, rigorous reasoning – much of it original’.