Abstract

Religious belief is a sort of religious commitment. Religious hope is also a sort of religious commitment, though religious hope does not entail religious belief. Religious behavior entails religious commitment of still another sort, though religious behavior does not necessarily involve either religious belief or religious hope. This dissertation is a comparative inquiry about what sort of rationality, if any, any of these sorts of religious commitment needs to have in order to be unobjectionable. The inquiry is propelled primarily by an analysis of Immanuel Kant's defense of the rationality of religious belief in some of his writings ; parts of Critique of Practical Reason , of Critique of Judgment , and of Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone ; and the first part of The Conflict of the Faculties , which is entitled "The Conflict of the Philosophy Faculty with the Theology Faculty") and of James Muyskens' defense of the rationality of religious hope and of religious behavior in his book, The Sufficiency of Hope: The Conceptual Foundations of Religion . The view of rationality which I propose, over against both Kant's and Muyskens' view, is this, "behaviorist" view: Among all mental states, behaviors alone--by which I mean efforts and omissions of effort, or inertias--need to be justified, in a manner which I describe, in order to be unobjectionable. Neither belief nor hope--nor any mental state which is not either an effort or an inertia--is necessarily rendered objectionable merely because it is not justified in some way. So, when being in some mental state constitutes having a good reason for some belief or for some hope, it is not because of the mental state's capacity to help make the belief or the hope unobjectionable, but because of the practical deliberative moment of being in the mental state: its capacity either to help make some behavior unobjectionable or to make some behavior objectionable