Millions of people profess knowledge of the reality of God, claiming miracles witnessed or voices heard. If what really causes them to believe that t… - Brian Leiter

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Millions of people profess knowledge of the reality of God, claiming miracles witnessed or voices heard. If what really causes them to believe that they know of God’s existence (and that they have had these experiences) is an unconscious, infantile wish for the protection of an all-powerful father-figure, then we have reason to wonder about the epistemic status of their belief.

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About Brian Leiter

Brian Leiter (born 1963) is an American philosopher and legal scholar who is currently Karl N. Llewellyn Professor of Jurisprudence at the University of Chicago Law School, and founder and Director of Chicago's new Center for Law, Philosophy, and Human Values.

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Just as Darwinian adaptationists assume that every biological phenomenon must be explained in terms of natural selection (no matter how unconducive to reproductive fitness it may appear initially), so too Nietzsche assumes that whatever explains “life” must also explain these particular instances of life which appear hostile to it. "'Life against life,'" Nietzsche says is a "self-contradiction" that "can only be apparent; it has to be a sort of provisional expression, an explanation, formula, adjustment, a psychological misunderstanding of something, the real nature of which was far from being understood" (GM III:13). … The crux of Nietzsche’s explanation turns on three claims:

Ideologies involve a mistake about their origin: agents think that the ideology arose because of its responsiveness to epistemically relevant considerations (e.g., evidence, reasons, etc.), when, in fact, it arose only because it was responsive to the interests of the dominant economic class in the existing economic system.

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Continental morality critics are plainly not without ethical views of their own—namely, views, broadly, about the good life for (some or all) human beings—since it is on the basis of these views that they criticize “morality.” Therefore, we need to understand the contours of the “morality” to which these critics object—for ease of reference, we will call it “morality in the pejorative sense” (MPS)—since it must be distinguished from the normative considerations that inform their critiques. … We can usefully divide Continental critics of morality into two camps … In the first camp are those thinkers who see the individual’s acceptance of morality as such as an obstacle to the individual’s flourishing; in very different ways, Nietzsche and Freud are these kinds of morality critics. In the second camp are those philosophers who see morality as among the “ideological” instruments that sustain socio-economic relations that are obstacles to individual flourishing. On this second account—most obviously represented by Marx and perhaps some of his descendants associated with the Frankfurt School.

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