Introduction

Abstract

In this book I intend to address an issue that I shall call the issue of the cognitivity of religion,¹ or more simply, the issue of cognitivity. Really it is not so much a single issue as a nest ofissues or, most accurately, a changeable, shifting issue that assumes different forms. Historically there seem to be two fundamentally opposed perspectives on this issue. The issue of the cognitivity of religion pre-eminently has to do with the place of knowledge in religion. However it also extends to associated or cognate concepts, such as rationality, religious understanding, and evidence for religious belief. Sometimes the issue centres on one cognate, sometimes on another. For this reason the issue of cognitivity has elicited different and opposite reactions in many periods and settings. As a consequence, while two perspectives on the place of the cognitive in religion have emerged at various times, and while an opposition between two perspectives has steadily been maintained, that opposition has not always been the same in focus. It seems that there are in religious reflection two profoundly different intuitions about knowledge and its cognates, one positive and one negative, and that the opposition between these intuitions takes various forms depending upon the circumstances of the religious context.