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Epistemic Foundations of Religious Worldviews



Man's attempt to understand himself and his world around him can be divided into three ways:

1. The way of authority. Much of what we know is based on this secondary source of information. Newspapers, books, teachers, TV shows, social consensus, religious authority, Scriptures, etc are few examples of this. We have epistemic value tags for any given source claiming authority of knowledge. For instance, one might rate a popular newspaper as more credible than a not-so-popular newspaper. Some Indian schools of philosophy do not consider it right for Scriptural revelation to be treated at par with these other secondary sources (some even consider authority as subject to the way of reason for including interpretation, which is a way of reasoning).
2. The way of experience. This refers to sense-experience and also includes the mystic experience in the Indian philosophical classification (the word pratyaksha refers to direct or immediate perception).
3. The way of reason. Arithmetic and geometry as a science do not need an exploration of the world. These are rational sciences which possess the nature of exactitude and universality. 2+2=4 doesn't change on moon and is not expected to change in 2020. The laws of logic, similarly, are examples of unalterable, self-evident truths.

Religious philosophies or perspectives regarding ultimate concerns in the world may be divided into the following three schemes accordingly:
1. Revelational Perspectives that claim to be based on authority and faith.
2. Empirical Perspectives that are based on experience and adhere to the scheme plurality-immanence-contingency-finitude-process.
3. Rational Perspectives that seek for exactitude and adhere to the scheme unity-transcendence-necessity-infinity-immutability.

A detailed exposition of each of these schemes and their foundational contribution to the development of world-views is given in Epistemics of Divine Reality (e-version only, 2007). It attempts to look at the epistemic foundations of religious philosophies and theologies and evaluates the noetic infrastructure of world-views such as polytheism, pantheism, monism, and monotheism.
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