In this paper I critically discuss the concept of religious knowledge. My aim, based on texts by the religious realists Anders Jeffner, Mikael Stenmark and John Polkinghorne, is to try and find answers to three questions: 1. What do they mean by religious knowledge? 2. What do they mean religious knowledge gives us knowledge of? 3. With which arguments and discursive and rhetorical strategies do they defend their answers to the above questions? I conclude that Jeffner, Stenmark and Polkinghorne have similar ontological and epistemo- logical perspectives. According to them, reality is not one, but consists of different layers or dimensions. Science is only suited to study the dimension of reality that we have access to through our senses. The study of divine or transcendent reality requires other forms of investigations, resulting in another form of knowledge, often called religious knowledge. The topics in religious knowledge are ethics, esthetics, values, meaning, purpose and spirituality. The relation between truth and religious knowledge is that religious knowledge is supposed to be epistemically true and, unlike scientific knowledge, true in the respect of guiding the believer successfully through life. Jeffner, Stenmark and Polkinghorne use different strategies and arguments to defend their positions. Some are philosophically grounded, and others are of a more rhetorical character. Some of the defense mechanisms are integral parts of their religious worldview, and others can be seen as various immunizing strategies. According to my interpretation I have labeled their different strategies:” reality stratified”,” the shortcomings of science”,” to choose worldview”, ”straw men”, ”the ignorant opponent”, “religious experiences”, ”different but still similar” and “the use of concepts”. As far as I´m concerned, Jeffner, Stenmark and Polkinghorne haven´t, in view of their religious realism, successfully argued for the claim that there actually exists a form of knowledge that ought to be called religious knowledge. They have not, to my mind, more than as a logical possibility, shown examples of this kind of religious knowledge and successfully argued for its kinship to knowledge as true, justified belief. With a little help from Bourdieu, I have also tried to show that Jeffner, Stenmark and Polkinghorne are participants in a discursive apologetic battle, where the combatants are armed with different forms of symbolic capital.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:umu-189473 |
| Date | January 2021 |
| Creators | Jacobsson, Roger |
| Publisher | Umeå universitet, Institutionen för idé- och samhällsstudier |
| Source Sets | DiVA Archive at Upsalla University |
| Language | Swedish |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Student thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
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