caa a22 4500 386387184 CHVBK 20180307112102.0 cr unu---uuuuu 161130e198906 xx s 000 0 eng 10.1017/S0034412500001803 doi S0034412500001803 pii (NATIONALLICENCE)cambridge-10.1017/S0034412500001803 Holyer Robert Arkansas College, Batesville, Arkansas 72503, USA Scepticism, Evidentialism and the Party Argument: A Pascalian Perspective [Elektronische Daten] [Robert Holyer] Sceptical arguments, it is commonly claimed, may succeed in disarming some powerful objections to religious belief, but they do nothing more than establish a state of parity between the believer and the objector. For this reason, they make no positive contribution to the justification of religious belief and therefore are of value only to the fideist who insists that religious beliefs do not have and do not need rational support. However, while this opinion is widely held by philosophers of religion, it ignores the fact that sceptical arguments have given rise to a constructive tradition in epistemology: what is often referred to as naturalism. In what follows I shall develop a suggestion from this tradition, and that is that sceptical arguments lead not to an abandonment of claims to justified belief but to a revision and contextualization of our epistemic standards. Though this suggestion can be found in a number of philosophers in this tradition, my inspiration for it comes from Pascal, who made an important place for scepticism in the evidentialist argument for Christianity which we find in the Pensées. To develop this suggestion, I shall first sketch a position inspired by Pascal and then argue that the possibilities it suggests have been insufficiently considered in a number of recent discussions of the importance of sceptical arguments in the epistemology of religious belief. Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1989 Religious Studies Cambridge University Press 25/2(1989-06), 191-208 0034-4125 25:2<191 1989 25 RES https://doi.org/10.1017/S0034412500001803 text/html Onlinezugriff via DOI 1 research-article jats NATIONALLICENCE 856 40 https://doi.org/10.1017/S0034412500001803 text/html Onlinezugriff via DOI NATIONALLICENCE 100 1- Holyer Robert Arkansas College, Batesville, Arkansas 72503, USA NATIONALLICENCE 773 0- Religious Studies Cambridge University Press 25/2(1989-06), 191-208 0034-4125 25:2<191 1989 25 RES CC0 http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0 nationallicence BK010053 XK010053 XK010000 NATIONALLICENCE NATIONALLICENCE NL-cambridge