Religious Diversity and the Epistemic Justification of Religious Belief

There exists a diversity of "evidence-free" religions, contradicting one another.There will be an epistemic problem for a religious devotee either because evidence-free belief is in general not epistemically justified in the face of diversity, or because of a special problem in the religious case.I argue that in general evidence-free belief is epistemically justified in the face of diversity.Then I argue that recent arguments of Wykstra and Basinger fail to show that there is a special problem in the religious case.Finally, I give reasons why religious belief is epistemically justified in the face of diversity.Humankind knows a diversity of "religions" or "religious traditions," by which I shall mean sets of religious beliefs with associated religious practises.We shall assume that no devotees of a religion R, can show, by means which do not already make assumptions peculiar to R, that R is true or "more true" than other religions.Accordingly, let us call the religious beliefs in R evidence-free relative to other religions (or simply, evidence-free), in the sense that either they are not based on evidence at all, or if based on evidence, one could not show that the evidence was adequate without making some of the assumptions of R itself.Let us call the state of affairs so far described, religious diversity.I wish to discuss whether religious diversity renders religious belief cpistcmically defective or unacceptable within the family of human doxastic practises.If it does, and if a religious devotee became aware of the defectiveness of his belief on that account, his belief would be irrational.Now it may be that the believer cannot help but believe.But there may be steps he could take in an attempt to dislodge adherence to religious belief.He could at least adopt an attitude toward religion that reflects an acknowledgement of its irrationality.And this would surely have an impact on the manner in which he applied his religion to daily life, and on his relations with adherents of other religions.' IIn what follows I wish to focus on one feature of religious diversity: the fact that many beliefs, including the most central ones, of one religious tradition