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Do religious beliefs aim at the truth?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 May 2005

MICHAEL SCOTT
Affiliation:
School of Social Sciences, The University of Manchester, Oxford Road, Manchester, M13 9PL

Abstract

This paper evaluates Brian Zamulinski's argument from considerations of relative likelihood for preferring a ‘religion-as-fiction’ hypothesis to metaphysical realism. The paper finds that the argument fails to consider numerous variant hypotheses, and that the ‘religion-as-fiction’ hypothesis is poorly formulated. It is concluded that an argument from likelihood about the status of religious belief will not, in the way Zamulinski constructs it, give support to a hypothesis unless supplemented by an estimate of its probability. Moreover, once probability is taken into account, the ‘religion-as-fiction’ hypothesis looks very weak.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
© 2005 Cambridge University Press

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