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1 Introduction The new vistas to which I am seeking to draw our attention were rendered in broad strokes in the preface. Here I wish to clarify a few technical and conceptual details that readers unfamiliar with my Prolegomena or Skepticism will want to know about in order fully to understand how my vision is worked out in the chapters that follow. I also wish to expose more clearly the structure of the working-out. Although the present volume’s central contentions and the main support it provides for them should be readily comprehended even by someone unfamiliar with the earlier ones, the three books share a distinctive framework that colors all aspects of my presentation here and is not completely self-explanatory. So let me begin by saying something about that. The central or basic religious proposition, which—according to a technical definition of “religion” defended as appropriate for philosophical consumption in Prolegomena—a proposition must entail in order to be religious , is the claim that there is a metaphysically and axiologically ultimate reality (one representing both the deepest fact about the nature of things and the greatest possible value), in relation to which an ultimate good can be attained. This claim, as indicated in the preface, I call ultimism. The content of ultimism, as thus expressed, may seem somewhat loose and abstract , and it may be tempting to make it more precise through philosophical analysis. But it is important that we don’t impose too much analysis, so as to allow for a suitably wide range of actual forms of religiousness within my definition and a suitably wide range of possible new elaborations for the imaginations of early humans like ourselves to feed on. Now, although ultimism is typically elaborated or, as I shall usually put it, qualified, decked out in specific religious garb, it may instead be in its 2 The Will to Imagine naked beauty that we behold it and integrate it into our religious practice . This is argued in Part I of the present book, where I also argue that a practice thus focused on generic or simple ultimism is the only form of religious faith that can be justified for twenty-first-century skeptics1 (that it is the form of faith that is justified, if any is), defending this claim against a variety of objections.2 The skeptical state I shall be assuming to be rationally required on the basis of earlier work in Skepticism involves both categorical skepticism and capacity skepticism. Categorical religious skeptics are in a state of doubt or nonbelief with respect to the proposition “There is truth in religion,” which is logically equivalent to the disjunction of religious claims or the proposition “At least one religious claim is true,” and thus also to ultimism (if ultimism is true then at least one religious claim is true, and conversely ). Since, as seen in Skepticism, sufficient and overall good evidence of truth is available for neither ultimism nor its denial, and non-epistemic factors do nothing to alter the situation in favor of believing one of these propositions, it follows that we should be categorical religious skeptics. If we do not immediately find ourselves in a state of doubt or nonbelief (passive skepticism) with respect to ultimism by listening to rational arguments , then we should deliberately pursue it (active skepticism) through appropriate private and public behavior: avoiding endorsements on either side of the issue, better acquainting ourselves with evidence to which we find ourselves resistant, and so on. What about capacity skepticism? Capacity skepticism is skepticism about whether we (still) early humans have the cognitive and other properties required to be able to access basic truths about the existence of an ultimate reality, or about the details of the nature any such reality must possess . Capacity skepticism comes in two forms, qualified and unqualified: the former is skepticism regarding the claim that as presently constituted we are 1 I use the phrase “twenty-first-century skeptics” fairly often in this book. Let me point out here, in connection with its first use, that the connotation of “twenty-first century” I have in mind is not what one might usually find, bound up with a sense of human advancement , but rather the opposite. In light of how much time the future of intelligence on our planet may encompass, we must say that ours is only the twenty-first century in a timespan that may...

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