Common threads · 6 books
Compare arguments about God with accounts of religious experience and faith. Read the disagreements without treating belief or disbelief as the starting verdict.
Books, curator notes, and what to read next.
David Hume
Keep the three speakers' arguments distinct. Compare what design arguments can establish with what they merely suggest.
Next: Fear and Trembling
Søren Kierkegaard
Read the Abraham story and the problemata with attention to the pseudonymous voice. Test the proposed tension between faith and ethics.
Next: The Varieties of Religious Experience
William James
James studies religious experience through cases. Distinguish the psychological description from an argument about religious truth.
Next: Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason
Immanuel Kant
Read the four parts on evil, moral conversion, community, and religious service. Compare Kant’s limits on religious reason with the arguments that follow.
Next: The Miracle of Theism
J. L. Mackie
Mackie evaluates arguments for God systematically. Reconstruct the strongest version of each before assessing his objections.
Next: Warranted Christian Belief
Alvin Plantinga
Plantinga asks whether religious belief can have warrant without being inferred from proofs. Compare warrant with truth.
Also includes Fear and Trembling
Faith, temporality, consciousness, absurdity, and situated freedom. Follow a set of influential encounters without flattening their authors into one school.
More paths featuring David Hume
Move from doubt and experience to the harder question of what separates knowing from being right by accident.
Also includes Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason
A demanding author study: what can we know, what should we do, and what may we hope? Begin with the shorter guides before taking on the three Critiques.
