Abstract
This topical book provides a clear discussion of the nature, causes and ways of understanding religious disagreement. Recent reflections on the fact of disagreement have been confined to particular disciplines, but one of the great strengths of this book is that it breaks new ground in bringing into dialogue discussions from a range of disciplines on the thorny and long-standing issue of what disagreement is and how one might mitigate against it. The discussion is wide ranging and utilizes a range of insights gleaned from analytic philosophy, psychology, theology and the cognitive science of religion to provide a coherent approach to better understanding religious disagreement.
The first chapter sketches a philosophical panorama of how the nature of disagreement has been understood in the history of Western philosophy from the Presocratics to contemporary thought. Clearly outlining the various positions that have been taken, the chapter concludes with a helpful summary of the causes and possible cures of disagreement as viewed by thinkers as diverse as Plato and Richard Rorty. Turning to the insights provided by psychology, Chapter 2 outlines the understandings of disagreement developed by so-called ‘dual-process’ theories of cognition, cognitive biases, neurological studies on hemisphere symmetry and moral psychology, and concludes by providing a helpful summary of the psychological factors that make disagreement likely together with some suggested cures. Central to this chapter is the argument that some forms of disagreement can be mitigated against by the appropriate use of critical thinking and de-biasing.
Chapter 3 brings into dialogue reflections from the cognitive science of religion with recent analytic philosophy on the causes of religious disagreements. The practical constraints which we need to be aware of in looking for solutions are also elucidated together with an interesting discussion of the issue of whether divergence between religious traditions undermines their respective truth claims. The difficult matter of ‘epistemic peer disagreement’ is also considered in this chapter, and helpful reflections by a number of contemporary analytic philosophers are marshalled in order to suggest that while disagreement may be seen as a problem it can also be viewed as providing both useful criticism to a position and also an antidote to a certain form of intellectual and political absolutism. The final chapter addresses the fundamental question of how it is possible to accommodate religious disagreement in a virtuous way. Linking the discussion about disagreement to virtue theory provides a way of viewing disagreement less as a problem and more as a matter of learning how to use it as a means of fostering human flourishing. In the face of such challenges, Vainio concludes by suggesting that only through learning tolerance and developing the virtues of practical wisdom can we learn to live well with often contradictory identities.