Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the Philosophy Department at King's College of London and the LMU in Munich, online at historyofilocity.net.

Today's episode will be an interview about religious tolerance in the Reformation in early modern Europe with Maria Rosa Antoniatsa.

Hi, Maria Rosa. Hi. Thank you very much for coming on the podcast. Yeah, my pleasure.

You've published on this topic before, and in a recent article you wrote about it, you said, and I'm just a quote from you, whether there is or there is not such a thing as religious truth is in itself neutral as regards toleration.

So can you explain why? Yes, you will have already been discussing the problem of religious wars and all the disruption, which is terrible violence as well to you open the in particular, the modern Europe.

So one typical way to address this sort of problem is to think well, if religious wars were the result of a fight over the fine points of theology, wouldn't it be the best thing just to try to eliminate that by saying that there is no such thing as objective religious truth.

And this is, in fact, what historically has been done by certain prominent thinkers, for instance, Pinosa, one distinctive thesis of Spinoza is to say that religion theology does not have to do with truth at all, it has to do with other things with piety, with obedience, not with truth, truth as to do with philosophy.

So the question I have been asking in this article is really the case that a fruitful path to religious toleration will be to think that there is no such thing as religious truth and objective religious truth.

And the my thesis is that this question is actually neutral to the question of religious toleration because when we are dealing with toleration, the question is not whether a doctor in a or some proposition is true or is false, the question is what one believes to be true can be tolerated.

So the question is not whether a group of believers are or are not to believe in something true, the question is whatever they believe to be true is that to be tolerated.

So I might, for example, think that your beliefs about God are false or your beliefs about let's say the Eucharist are false, but as long as I think that it's okay that you believe something false in some sense of okay, then I'll tolerate you.

Yeah, so it's not whether I think there is a fact of the matter about the Eucharist, it's more maybe like at a second order or like a meta level, it's really what I believe about the status of your religious beliefs and how important it is or the way in which it's important that they're true. That's what makes the difference.

Yes, I think so because in fact, if you are a religious believer and for instance, if you believe that it is integral to your religious beliefs to pray five times a day, turning toward mecca, say, it would not be tolerant of your beliefs to say, no, look, that is really not something which is true in order to have a proper worship of God.

And in fact, I think that historically this move has been done in saying, well, we can ground the religious toleration in a minimal set of beliefs in the most extreme versions of this, it has as in the case of spinosa has been said that we can just say that religion does not have to do with truth at all.

But I don't think that that is in itself tolerant of the beliefs of people who are actually religious believers because from that point of view, that is true.

And if you are telling them, no, that is nothing to do with truth, you are not tolerating their beliefs.

It's almost like you're not taking that religion seriously.

Exactly, exactly.

Would it make a difference if we said that although a lot of religious beliefs, like let's say the Trinity or what happens with the host and the Eucharist, so some of these things that we've seen being matters of controversy during the Protestant reformation,

would it make a difference if we said sure those things are kind of like mysterious and it's not very clear what we should think about them, they're very difficult, deep theological issues, but there will be a core of things that everyone should agree with.

For example, the existence of God, and the reason everyone should agree with those things is that just the natural use of reason should establish them.

And so then you might think someone could say, I'm tolerant because I only require that people agree to whatever natural reason should establish.

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