ABSTRACT
In this chapter, I urge a new and broader mandate for what I call critical religious axiology, an area of study preoccupied with whether certain common religious views, whatever their factual credentials, might be axiologically inadequate. Cultural evolution is responsible for insights about unhappy axiological consequences of religious claims, but it may also spur improvements in the future, leading us to new understandings of religious claims or to new religious claims, and critical religious axiology should be examining them. I illustrate this claim and defend its importance by reference to three examples. First, I show how a fictionalist form of religious life could evolve to replace religious forms of life that cultural evolution leads us to view as axiologically inadequate. Second, I show how one might remain fictionalist about Christian propositions while adding another level or layer to one's religiousness through a nondoxastic faith directed to a more general religious proposition such as ultimism. Third, in conversation with the views of Ronald Dworkin, I display the interest of a rather different new religious option, which realises the status of axiological purity by focusing on value alone and making it transcendent.
