My post on bigotry, like all my posts on religion, received ferocious and bitter criticism. Among these criticisms is that sincere religious belief is inherently irrational and so cannot justify conscientious refusals to provide services to a same-sex wedding. Others complained that even if religious belief is sincere and conscientious, those who act on such beliefs are nonetheless culpable for wrongdoing because in at least some sense they should have known better. In general, then, many commenters think that people who have moral beliefs based on their religious are guilty of some epistemic impropriety. In some important sense, they have ignored relevant counterevidence or cannot adduce any good reasons to support their position, and so deserve criticism.

This lead me to wonder what BHL commenters think epistemic impropriety is, so I thought I’d ask you to explain the epistemic impropriety in the following case of a thoughtful, believing Christian, taken from Alvin Plantinga’s Warranted Christian Belief. Let’s call her Damaris for the philosopher who converted to Christianity after listening to St. Paul give a lecture to the Athenian philosophical community:

Consider such a [Christian] believer: as far as we can see, her cognitive faculties are functioning properly; she displays no noticeable dysfunction. She is aware of the objections people have made to Christian belief; she has read and reflected on Freud, Marx, and Nietzsche (not to mention Flew, Mackie, and Nielsen) and the other critics of Christian or theistic belief; she knows the world contains many who do not believe as she does. … Can she be justified (in this broadly deontological sense) in believing in God in this way?

The answer seems to be pretty easy. She reads Nietzsche, but remains unmoved by his complaint that Christianity fosters a weak, whining, whimpering, and generally disgusting kind of person: most of the Christians she knows or know of—Mother Teresa, for instance—don’t fit that mold. She finds Freud’s contemptuous attitude toward Christianity and theistic belief backed by little more than implausible fantasies about the origin of belief in God (patricide in the primal horde? Can he be serious?); and she finds little more of substance in Marx. She thinks as carefully as she can about these objections and others, but finds them wholly uncompelling.

On the other side, although she is aware of theistic arguments and thinks some of them not without value, she doesn’t believe on the basis of them. Rather, she has a rich inner spiritual life, the sort described in the early pages of Jonathan Edwards’s Religious Affections; it seems to her that she is sometimes made aware, catches a glimpse, of something of the overwhelming beauty and loveliness of the Lord; she is often aware, as it strongly seems to her, of the work of the Holy Spirit in her heart, comforting, encouraging, teaching, leading her to accept the “great things of the gospel.” (as Edwards calls them), helping her see that the magnificent scheme of salvation devised by the Lord himself is not only for others but for her as well. After long, hard, conscientious reflection, this all seems to her enormously more convincing than the complaints of the critics. Is she then going contrary to duty in believing as she does? Is she being irresponsible? Clearly not. There could be something defective about her, some malfunction not apparent on the surface. She could be mistaken, a victim of illusion or wishful thinking, despite her best efforts. She could be wrong, desperately wrong, pitiably wrong, in thinking these things; nevertheless, she isn’t flouting any discernible duty. She is fulfilling her epistemic responsibilities; she is doing her level best; she is justified (WCB, pp. 100-1).

Plantinga draws some important distinctions between whether one has a justified belief, one that involves responsibility of “being within one’s intellectual rights” and other forms of epistemic error or mistake. So answer me this: which mistake has Damaris made? If she has done something worse than believing falsely or responding as best she can to being born in bad epistemic circumstances, what has she done? For what would you hold her responsible and blame or criticize her? And if you think she has done nothing wrong, then what if she based her moral beliefs on Christianity as well? Has she committed some new and culpable epistemic error? If so, what is it? I’m genuinely curious.