Understanding religious convictions Book

Three puzzling questions underlie many apparently separate discussions in the study of religion: the answers to them will doubtless shape the future of religion. This book offers reasoned and interlocking answers to these questions. The first concerns our religious pluralism, including the option of irreligion. Are the several camps into which the world is divided reducible to one conventional community by straightforward reasoning, or are they beyond compreshension from any one viewpoint? Or is the truth somewhere in between? Choosing the last, McClendon and Smith argue that "perspectivism" is, in one sense, true. The second question is how and whether religious language is meaningful. Passing over positivism, the authors examine some post-positivist answers (Braithwaite, Zuurdeeg, Ramsey) and develop a new theory based on these and on the work of Austin. They emphasize religious language's continuity with everyday language and show how language is embedded in the existence of community. But the success of such language, they show, remains to be decided cases by case. Thus the third question is how we can ever know our religious -or irreligious- beliefs and convicions to be justifiable. Relating these to the speech-acts which express them, McClendon and Smith show why demands for justification across the lines of convictional communities can be met, though not in a direct way, and they point to an enlarged sense of rationality by which some set or sets may prove justifiable. The authors do this without proagating their own particular (and sharply differing) conviction sets. They then argue that adopting the answers to these three questions points the way to a pluralistic "science of convictions," called theortics or even theology, which can serve as an organizing discipline for the many-sided study of religious and other convictional human phenomena.