Cultivating Intellectual Virtues with the Epistemic Benefits of Religious Disagreement

In recent years, intellectual virtue has garnered significant attention in the philosophical literature. Though there is significant work on how to cultivate intellectual virtues, there is less explicitly on this topic within the context of religion. I aim to show how work in the epistemology of disagreement can contribute to cultivating intellectual virtue, including in the context of religious disagreement. There are epistemic benefits to be gained from fostering disagreement, at least in certain scenarios. I explain how these ideas apply to at least some cases of religious disagreement. Any religious adherent seeking to cultivate intellectual virtues should be interested in gaining epistemic benefits, and therefore should be interested in fostering religious disagreements in the relevant types of scenarios. I conclude with a brief case study in philosophy of religion that shows that disagreement in the context of cross-cultural dialogue can be quite epistemically productive.