Knowledge, Theory of (Religion) (Topical Term)

Religious epistemology, ©2017: p. 10 (Religious epistemology as we see it today is limited, hampered, constrained not just by an obsession with naturalism and theism but by its obsession with believing states (whether understood categorically or in the graded fashion to be associated with popular talk of 'credences'). As a recent overview of religious epistemology has it, the field is concerned with a variety of theories about whether 'subjects' religious beliefs' can have 'positive epistemic status')

Contemporary perspectives on religious epistemology, 1992: p. 3 (Religious epistemology is concerned with what has always been one of the central issues in the philosophy of religion, the rational justification of religious belief)

Evangelical dictionary of theology, 2001: p. 383 (Religious epistemology is the inquiry into the nature of knowledge about God and the justification of claims to religious knowledge)

Philosophy compass, Aug, 2015: p. 547 (Religious epistemology is the study of how subjects' religious beliefs can have, or fail to have, some form of positive epistemic status (such as knowledge, justification, warrant, and rationality) and whether they even need such status appropriate to their kind. The current debate is focused most centrally upon the kind of basis upon which a religious believer can be rationally justified in holding certain beliefs about God (whether God exists, what attributes God has, what God is doing, etc.) and whether it is necessary to be so justified to believe as a religious believer ought (in some sense of 'ought' more general than rational justification))

Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy, via WWW, Jan. 8, 2018 6.3 Religious epistemology (In the history of philosophy, there are several famous arguments for the existence of God: the ontological argument, the cosmological argument, and the argument from design. From an epistemological point of view, the question is whether such arguments can constitute a rational foundation of faith, or even give us knowledge of God. A further question is whether, if God exists, knowledge of God might not also be possible in other ways, for example, on the basis of perception or perhaps mystical experiences)

Encyclopedia of philosophy, 2006: v. 3, p. 320 (Epistemology, Religious - The epistemology of religion, as practiced by philosophers, is seldom concerned with the sorts of epistemological questions that emerge on a practical level in ordinary religious life, such as how to determine the correct interpretation of a scriptural text or how to know whether someone's claim to special divine guidance is to be credited. Rather, it tends to focus on the epistemic evaluation of the most basic tenets of the religious worldview in question---the existence of God, the creation of the world and God's relation to it, and the possibility of recognizing divine action in the world and divine revelation. From the 1960s on, religious epistemology has been characterized by a marked decline of fideism, with a renewal of interest in evidentialism and an even more pronounced upsurge of what may be termed experientialism)