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"Hamilton was no militant atheist. He was not contemptuous of faith or of the faithful-far from it; he was a longtime churchgoer-and he was therefore, I think, all the more a threat to unreflective Christianity. At heart, he was questioning whether the Christian tradition of encouraging a temporal moral life required belief in a divine order. Could someone, in other words, live by the ethical teachings of Jesus while rejecting the existence of a creator and redeemer God? The questions with which he grappled were eternal, essential, and are with us still: how does a culture that tends to be religious continue to hold to a belief in an all-powerful, all-loving divinity beyond time and space given the evidence of science and of experience?"

"A northern-Italian miller in the sixteenth century, known as Menocchio, literate but not a member of the literary élite, held a number of unconventional theological beliefs. He believed that the soul died with the body, that the world was created out of a chaotic substance, not ex nihilo, and that it was more important to love one's neighbor than to love God. He found eccentric justification for these beliefs in the few books he read, among them the Decameron, the Bible, the Koran, and "The Travels of Sir John Mandeville," all in translation. For his pains, Menocchio was dragged before the Inquisition several times, tortured, and, in 1599, burned at the stake. He was one of thousands who met such a fate."

We naturally evaluate the beliefs of others, sometimes by deliberate calculation, and sometimes in a more immediate fashion. Epistemic intuitions are immediate assessments arising when someone's condition appears to fall on one side or the other of some significant divide in epistemology. After giving a rough sketch of several major features of epistemic intuitions, this article reviews the history of the current philosophical debate about them and describes the major positions in that debate. Linguists and psychologists also study epistemic assessments; the last section of the paper discusses some of their research and its potential relevance to epistemology

It's easy for us to ridicule the foolishness of people in the past who believed things that turned out to be absurdly false. We are horrified that the Aztecs would make human sacrifices to appease a volcano god. We laugh that people were afraid Columbus would sail off the edge of the earth. We are amazed that the people of Salem, Massachusetts would hang people for being witches and we are shocked that religious authorities would burn Giordano Bruno at the stake for teaching that the earth went around the sun. And we are particularly appalled by the hatred of the Nazis that enabled Hitler to murder millions.

"Epistemology is the study of the nature, source, limits, and validity of knowledge.  It is especially interested in developing criteria for evaluating claims people make that they "know" something.  In particular, it considers questions such as: What is knowledge?  What is the difference between knowledge and opinion or belief?  If you know something, does that mean that you are certain about it?  Is knowledge really possible?"

"Traditionally, faith and reason have each been considered to be sources of justification for religious belief. Because both can purportedly serve this same epistemic function, it has been a matter of much interest to philosophers and theologians how the two are related and thus how the rational agent should treat claims derived from either source. Some have held that there can be no conflict between the two-that reason properly employed and faith properly understood will never produce contradictory or competing claims-whereas others have maintained that faith and reason can (or even must) be in genuine contention over certain propositions or methodologies. Those who have taken the latter view disagree as to whether faith or reason ought to prevail when the two are in conflict. Kierkegaard, for instance, prioritizes faith even to the point that it becomes positively irrational, while Locke emphasizes the reasonableness of faith to such an extent that a religious doctrine's irrationality-conflict with itself or with known facts-is a sign that it is unsound. Other thinkers have theorized that faith and reason each govern their own separate domains, such that cases of apparent conflict are resolved on the side of faith when the claim in question is, say, a religious or theological claim, but resolved on the side of reason when the disputed claim is, for example, empirical or logical. Some relatively recent philosophers, most notably the logical positivists, have denied that there is a domain of thought or human existence rightly governed by faith, asserting instead that all meaningful statements and ideas are accessible to thorough rational examination. This has presented a challenge to religious thinkers to explain how an admittedly nonrational or transrational form of language can hold meaningful cognitive content."

" Why do people believe in God? What is our evidence that there is an invisible agent who has a real impact on our lives? How can those people be so confident? Enlarge This Image T. M. Luhrmann Connect With Us on Twitter For Op-Ed, follow @nytopinion and to hear from the editorial page editor, Andrew Rosenthal, follow @andyrNYT. Readers' Comments "Pascal's wager is not complete without the assumption of punishment for non-believers: torment and everlasting fire. Let's not forget that the fear of hell is essential to the process of indoctrination." Tom, Boston Read Full Comment » These are the questions that university-educated liberals ask about faith. They are deep questions. But they are also abstract and intellectual. They are philosophical questions. In an evangelical church, the questions would probably have circled around how to feel God's love and how to be more aware of God's presence. Those are fundamentally practical questions"

"There is no "but" about what happened at Charlie Hebdo yesterday. Some people published some cartoons, and some other people killed them for it.  Words and pictures can be beautiful or vile, pleasing or enraging, inspiring or offensive; but they exist on a different plane from physical violence, whether you want to call that plane spirit or imagination or culture, and to meet them with violence is an offense against the spirit and imagination and culture that distinguish humans. Nothing mitigates this monstrosity. There will be time to analyze why the killers did it, time to parse their backgrounds, their ideologies, their beliefs, time for sociologists and psychologists to add to understanding. There will be explanations, and the explanations will be important, but explanations aren't the same as excuses. Words don't kill, they must not be met by killing, and they will not make the killers' culpability go away."

"One of the most fascinating examples of heuristics and biases is what we call intuition - a complex cluster of cognitive processes, sometimes helpful but often misleading. Kahneman notes that thoughts come to mind in one of two ways: Either by "orderly computation," which involves a series of stages of remembering rules and then applying them, or by perception, an evolutionary function that allows us to predict outcomes based on what we're perceiving. (For instance, seeing a woman's angry face helps us predict the general sentiment and disposition of what she's about to say.) It is the latter mode that precipitates intuition. Kahneman explains the interplay:"