Abstract
Stephen Law has recently offered an argument against the rationality of certain religious beliefs that he calls the X-claim argument against religious beliefs (Law in Relig Stud, 2017, https://doi.org/10.1017/s0034412526000330). The argument purports to show that it is irrational to believe in the existence of extraordinary beings associated with religions. However, the X-claim argument is beset by certain ambiguities that, once resolved, leave the argument undifferentiated from two other common objections to the rationality of religious belief: the objection from religious diversity and the objection from unreliable sources. And though the latter pose serious obstacles to the rationality of religious belief, the X-claim argument adds no further difficulty.
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Notes
Two agents are epistemic peers with respect to a proposition P when they each have the goal of believing truly about P, they have roughly the same epistemic skills as one another, and they share all of the same relevant evidence for and against P.
This effect has been observed in children as young as 4, see Bering and Bjorklund (2004).
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Acknowledgements
The authors of the paper would like to thank Stephen Law, Dugald Owen, and anonymous reviewers of the manuscript for helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper. This publication was made possible through the support of a grant from the John Templeton Foundation. The opinions expressed in this publication are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the John Templeton Foundation.
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McBrayer, J., Ellis, W. The X-claim argument against religious belief offers nothing new. Int J Philos Relig 84, 223–232 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11153-018-9658-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11153-018-9658-1