Robert McKim

Robert McKim is Professor of Religion and Philosophy at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he has held appointments since the 1980s. Trained in analytic philosophy of religion, he is best known for two interlocking projects: a sustained argument that the world is religiously ambiguous, and a critique of religious exclusivism in light of religious diversity. In Religious Ambiguity and Religious Diversity (2001), McKim contends that the evidence for and against theistic and naturalistic worldviews is sufficiently balanced that tentative belief, ongoing inquiry, and epistemic humility are the rational responses; he develops this in dialogue with J. L. Schellenberg's divine hiddenness argument, to which his work is closely related. Against Religious Exclusivism (2012) extends the analysis to soteriological and epistemic exclusivism, arguing that confident claims of unique access to religious truth are difficult to sustain given the cognitive conditions of diversity. McKim's work has been engaged by analytic philosophers of religion working on hiddenness, pluralism, and the ethics of belief, including Schellenberg, Paul Griffiths, and Peter van Inwagen, who has defended a more confident exclusivism. Critics charge that McKim's ambiguity thesis underestimates the evidential weight of particular traditions and risks a tepid pluralism; defenders see it as a disciplined application of evidentialist norms to contested religious terrain.