Review of the Effect of Non-Epistemic Factors on Religious Belief from the Perspective of William James

Today, one of the important issues in the field of epistemology is the impact of non-epistemic factors on human religious belief. William James (1842-1919) is the first one who attributed only one factor among the eight to have influence on the belief development process to reasoning and considered the other seven factors non-epistemic. He suggested that human beliefs are formed in light of non-epistemic factors. According to his viewpoints, religion and religious beliefs are phenomena belonging to the human psyche dimension which is inner and individual. He considered religion to be associated with human emotional dimension rather than ideological one. This paper will identify that William James considers religion only a subset of emotional issues and suggests that the impact of non-epistemic factors on religious beliefs is very high. However, emotion and thought cannot be separated from each other. With reference to religious texts such as the Quran, we realize that the intellectual cognition is important in the faith parallel to emotional dimensions, and one is not merely affected by emotions in accepting the religious content but also she makes a choice using her thought. In this paper, we attempt to clarify whether the development process of human beliefs is formed apart from non-epistemic dimensions, or human existential dimensions (yet differentiated from each other) are in such interaction with each other that one cannot simply determine that the epistemic dimension is independent from other dimensions so the epistemic or emotional dimensions of human belief cannot enter the cognition domain in an independent manner.