Epistemology Classrooms

Based on my experience with analytic philosophers (hereafter 'philosophers'), I would say the great majority (>75%) of them are non-theists. So prevalent are atheists and agnostics among philosophers that, upon meeting each other or congregating in a group for the first time, it is often the case that one or more of them will take it for granted that everyone else among them is an atheist or agnostic. Philosophers will sometimes put down a position by comparing that position to religion (to wit, Nietzsche used to refer to Kant as "the clever Christian"; it wasn't a compliment). I once enraged one of my colleagues by jokingly saying that if anyone in the department were to convert to or adopt a religion, he would be that person. And when a quasi-relativistic epistemological theory (like semantic or inferential contextualism) is proposed, the test of whether that theory is too relativistic is whether that theory permits religion to count as knowledge or justified belief. Needless to say, I fit right in. Religious claims strike me as so obviously absurd that I am probably a worse philosopher because of it. (Imagine trying to give a charitable interpretation of Descartes' Third Meditation - the one where he presents the cosmological argument for the existence of God - when you think the concept 'God' is not only fictional, but very close to vacuous. That's right: I think that many sentences containing the word 'God' are neither true nor false, but positively meaningless.)

Given the contemporary landscape of academic philosophy, you'd expect that there would be pervasive discrimination against religious philosophers. However, I do not think that is the case. In my experience, once it is revealed that someone in their ranks is, for example, a believing Christian, most philosophers I know will act with respect toward that person, and not be openly dismissive of or hostile toward that person's beliefs. That's not to say that they use kid gloves when talking about religion - far from it - but when they do debate religion they will do so on the basis of reasons and evidence and refrain from leveling ad hominem attacks against their interlocutors - and the theistic philosophers will respond in kind. Some of the very sharpest analytical minds I know are believing Christians. (I have to admit, I am not quite able to make sense of it. I think of it as a kind of cognitive dissonance.) It's when I talk to religious philosophers that I feel the least threatened (by which I mean, existentially threatened) by religion. To put it bluntly: religious philosophers tend to be quite rational in their religious belief; the religious doctrines they affirm are usually sanitized of the more despotic and unreasonable aspects of religion.

Religious philosophers are mostly harmless and reasonable. I still think their religious views are crazy, but when I talk to them, I get more hopeful about the prospects of people getting along despite their deep ideological differences.