Alston's epistemology of religious belief and the
problem of religious diversity
JULIAN WILLARD a1 a1 Department of Theology and Religious Studies, King's College London, Strand, London, WC2R 2LS
Abstract
In this paper I examine William Alston's work on the epistemology of
religious belief, focusing on the threat to the epistemic status of Christian belief
presented by awareness of religious diversity. I argue that Alston appears to
misunderstand the epistemic significance of the ‘practical rationality’ of the
Christian mystical practice. I suggest that this error is due to a more fundamental
misunderstanding, regarding the significance of practical rationality, in Alston's
‘doxastic practice’ approach to epistemology; an error that leads to arbitrariness
among the class of rational doxastic practices. I suggest how one might remedy this
weakness, with an additional, epistemic, criterion that rational doxastic practices
must satisfy.
