Religious belief and religious skepticism Book

Think how odd it would be, writes Professor Gutting, if the central question of the philosophy of science was whether science is at all worth pursuing, or if a major preoccupation of aesthetics was the value of writing poetry. Why then, he continues, does the philosophy of religion almost exclusively question the meaningfulness of religious belief and practice? In Religious Belief and Religious Skepticism, the author, a philosopher of science, asserts that religious belief, like science and art, is a human endeavor of undeniable significance and validity. The important philosophical question, however, is not whether religion is true but rather what is the essential truth of religion and how does that truth fit in with the de facto faith of believers. This provocative study contends that true religious belief contains the realization that while we can have access to God, we have only minimal reliable accounts of God's nature and relationship to us. This realization challenges the assumptions of both believers and nonbelievers who think they have essentially exact pictures of that relationship. In Professor Gutting's final analysis, true religious faith is in fact an admitted religious skepticism that deflates the pretensions of both belief and unbelief. Gary Gutting is associate professor of philosophy at the University of Notre Dame and the editor of Paradigms and Revolutions: Applications and Appraisals of Thomas Kuhn's Philosophy of Science, also published by the Notre Dame Press.