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God and other minds

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 February 2010

FIONA ELLIS
FIONA ELLIS*
Affiliation:
Heythrop College, University of London, Kensington Square, LondonW8 5HQ
*
e-mail: [email protected]
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Abstract

I reconsider the idea that there is an analogy between belief in other minds and belief in God, and examine two approaches to the relevant beliefs. The ‘explanatory inductive’ approach raises difficulties in both contexts, and involves questionable assumptions. The ‘expressivist’ approach is more promising, and presupposes a more satisfactory metaphysical framework in the first context. Its application to God is similarly insightful, and offers an intellectually respectable, albeit resistible, version of the doctrine that nature is a book of lessons.

Type
Articles
Information
Religious Studies , Volume 46 , Issue 3 , September 2010 , pp. 331 - 351
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2010

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References

Notes

1. Plantinga, A.God and Other Minds (Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press, 1967Google Scholar).

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10. This section is influenced by Wikforss, Asa ‘Direct knowledge and other minds’, Theoria, 70 (2004), 271–293.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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12. Churchland Matter and Consciousness, 72, welcomes this implication.

13. Aune ‘Other minds after twenty years’, 346. See also Wikforss ‘Direct knowledge and other minds’, s.2.2.

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15. This section is influenced by Overgaard, ‘Rethinking other minds’.

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17. McDowell ‘Criteria, defeasibility, and knowledge, 387.

18. Ibid., 384.

19. Ibid., 393.

20. Taliaferro Consciousness and the Mind of God, 115.

21. See also P. F. Strawson ‘Self, mind, and body’, in idem Freedom and Resentment and Other Essays (London: Methuen, 1974), ch. 8.

22. Taliaferro Consciousness and the Mind of God, 114–122.

23. See also Grigg, Richard ‘The crucial disanalogies between properly basic belief and belief in God’, Religious Studies, 26 (1990), 393–394CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Michael Martin Atheism: A Philosophical Justification (Philadelphia PA: Temple University Press, 1990), 274; and Garth Hallett A Middle Way to God (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 26.

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32. Philip Clayton ‘Panentheism in metaphysical and scientific perspective’, in Philip Clayton and Arthur Peacocke (eds) In Whom We Live and Move and Have Our Being: Panentheistic Reflections on God's Presence in a Scientific World (Grand Rapids MI: Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2004), 76–77.

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34. See Jantzen God's World, God's Body, 128.

35. Ibid., 134.

36. McDowell Mind and World, 71.

37. Ibid., 72.

38. Jantzen God's World, God's Body, 151.

39. Ibid., 134–135.

40. Ibid., 125.

41. Ibid., 126–127.

42. Ibid., 151.

43. Ibid., 153.

44. Ibid., 152.

45. See Taliaferro Consciousness and the Mind of God, 196–210.

46. Ibid., 288–338.

47. I am grateful to Mike Inwood, Gerry Hughes, Gemma Simmonds, Craig French, Brian O'Shaughnessy, Roger Scruton, and Paul Snowdon for their indispensable and generous support. I would also like to thank an anonymous referee for this journal whose comments contributed greatly to my understanding of the problem.