Academic Connections, International
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The Received Tradition
The resources that will be put into this section will largely be annotated reading which hopefully highlight salient points of this discussion and the resultant received tradition. Of course, few things remain static, so there is much to learn and know after this period, but since we must jump into the stream somewhere, this is where I suggest is the place for most of us.
We want to also suggest it was the perceived victory of a pragmatic epistemic empiricism over rationalism that has shaped the philosophic orthodoxy that dominated from Hume and Kant and through to the logical positivists triumphs in the early part of the twentieth century. Positivism’s zenith is often thought to have been expressed in A. J. Ayers book, Language, Truth and Logic--a worthy read itself. But since the middle of the last century it’s credibility has been significantly undermined by a number of theistic philosophers including people like Alvin Plantinga and non-theistic philosophers like William Rowe. It is from these watershed critiques of positivism that the fortunes of objective/subjective distinction between science and religion have been handed us.
It appears that either they are both subjectively justified epistemic enterprises or that both suffer from withering skeptical critiques. All that to say that science and religion (roughly speaking) may well find themselves in the same (or very similar) epistemic boat(s) in that they cannot justify their foundations--they suffer from a similar epistemic circularity, but in certain doxastic practices they are surely rational.
Showing that this is the case is one of the main features of answering this common question since science, not only in the popular mind but also in many sophisticated minds, is thought to enjoy an objective and thus superior status. On the other hand, religion has been thought to have been relegated to a subjective and thus inferior status.
