17 - Knowledge-First Epistemology and Religious Belief

Summary

Knowledge-first epistemology gives up the traditional project of defining knowledge in terms of necessary, sufficient, and informative conditions. Rather, the approach gives knowledge itself explanatory primacy within epistemology. This chapter explores two ideas that have been prominent among knowledge-first authors and considers their implications for religious epistemology. The first is to equate one’s evidence with one’s knowledge, or with some relevant subset of one’s knowledge. The second is to reverse the traditional order of explanation between knowledge and justified belief; that is, to explain justification in terms of knowledge rather than the other way around. These ideas, we argue, have interesting implications for a variety of issues in religious epistemology, including the nature of evidence (and defeating evidence) for theism, and the prospects for Public Reason Liberalism.