Can Religious Beliefs be Distinguished from Delusions?: A Reformed Epistemologist Response

Distinguishing between sane religious beliefs and delusions is conceptually difficult, as both can exhibit epistemic features such as resistance to widely accepted counter-evidence. This paper challenges three existing approaches to this distinction before proposing a fourth alternative, while exploring its implications for the epistemology of religion debates on evidentialism, fideism, and Reformed epistemology. The first approach argues that delusions are not sincere beliefs while religious beliefs are. The second, evidentialist approach, claims that delusions are not evidence-responsive, while religious beliefs are. However, this risks cultural chauvinism by privileging one tradition’s evidence-responsiveness over another’s. The third, fideist approach, distinguishes delusions as pathological or culturally unacceptable, unlike religious beliefs, collapsing into over-relativism. The fourth, warrant-based approach adapted from Reformed epistemology, resolves these issues by distinguishing delusions as unwarranted due to their being caused by cognitive malfunction, while granting warrant to religious beliefs formed under reliable faculties and aimed at truth. This method provides a culturally sensitive yet objective framework.