(July 22, 2025 at 9:29 am)Alan V Wrote:(July 22, 2025 at 6:46 am)Belacqua Wrote: There is a religion called "Buddhism."
There are roughly 500 million Buddhists.
Buddhist epistemology has not been shown to be incorrect by science.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buddhist_l...istemology
Thanks for the information.
The point here is that the term "religious epistemology" means nothing.
Different religions have different views of epistemology which vary widely. Within particular religions there may be different epistemological theories.
Despite the constant claims on this forum that religious people are not allowed to question or challenge their religion's status quo, many Christians have worked to improve their epistemological theories.
Thomas Aquinas famously said "Nothing in the mind that was not first in the senses." (Nihil est in intellectu quod non sit prius in sensu). From his book De veritate (q. 2 a. 3 arg. 19) He got this from Aristotle. Since at the time most Christians didn't approve of Aristotle, long and elaborate debates were carried out, with strict logical rules.
Later, Galileo and Isaac Newton's influence on metaphysics required a reworking of epistemology, which was carried out by Kant. All three of these men were Christians. Kantian epistemology, while it still invites debate, is more or less the baseline which people believe today, whether they know it comes from Kant or not.
So rather than say "religious epistemology," you should probably specify whether you mean that of Kant, or of Aristotle, or of the Buddha, etc.
You probably didn't read the Wikipedia page about Buddhist epistemology, but you might find it interesting to note that the Buddha himself argued that "a claim to scriptural authority (sadda) was not a source of knowledge." So the constant claims we see on this forum, that religious people must unquestioningly accept their scripture, does not apply in many cases.