Philosophy of religion
Overview
Branch of philosophy that studies key metaphysical and epistemological
concepts, principles, and problems of religion.
Topics considered include the existence and nature of God, the
possibility of knowledge of God, human freedom (the free will problem),
immortality, and the problems of moral and natural evil and suffering.
Natural theology is the attempt to establish knowledge of God without
dependence on revelation. Traditional arguments for the existence of God
include the ontological argument, the cosmological argument, and the
argument from design.
Main
discipline concerned with the philosophical appraisal of human religious
attitudes and of the real or imaginary objects of those attitudes, God
or the gods. The philosophy of religion is an integral part of
philosophy as such and embraces central issues regarding the nature and
extent of human knowledge, the ultimate character of reality, and the
foundations of morality.
Historical development » Ancient origins
Philosophical interest in religion may be said to have originated in the
West with the ancient Greeks. Many of the enduring questions in the
philosophy of religion were first addressed by them, and the claims and
controversies they developed served as a framework for subsequent
philosophizing for more than 1,500 years. Plato (427–347 bce), who
developed the metaphysical theory of Forms (abstract entities
corresponding to the properties of particular objects), was also one of
the first thinkers to consider the idea of creation and to attempt to
prove the existence of God. Plato’s student Aristotle (384–322 bce)
developed his own metaphysical theory of the first, or unmoved, mover of
the universe, which many of his interpreters have identified with God.
Aristotle’s speculations began a tradition that later came to be known
as natural theology—the attempt to provide a rational demonstration of
the existence of God based on features of the natural world. The
Stoicism of the Hellenistic Age (300 bce–300 ce) was characterized by
philosophical naturalism, including the idea of natural law (a system of
right or justice thought to be inherent in nature); meanwhile, thinkers
such as Titus Lucretius Carus in the 1st century bce and Sextus
Empiricus in the 3rd century ce taught a variety of skeptical doctrines.
Although not an original work of philosophy, De natura deorum (44 bce;
“The Nature of the Gods”), by the Roman statesman and scholar Marcus
Tullius Cicero, is an invaluable source of information on ancient ideas
about religion and the philosophical controversies they engendered.
In the Hellenistic Age philosophy was considered not so much a set of
theoretical reflections on issues of abiding human interest but a way of
addressing how a person should conduct his life in the face of
corruption and death. It was natural, therefore, that the various
positions of Hellenistic philosophers should both rival and offer
support to religion. A vivid vignette of the nature of these overlapping
and competing philosophies is to be found in the account of the Apostle
Paul’s address at the Areopagitica in Athens, as recorded in the Acts of
the Apostles. Confronted by Stoics, Epicureans, and no doubt others,
Paul attempted to identify their “unknown God” with the God and Father
of Jesus Christ.
By the 3rd century, Christian thinkers had begun to adopt the ideas
of Plato and of Neoplatonists such as Plotinus. The most influential of
these figures, St. Augustine of Hippo (354–430), elucidated the doctrine
of God in terms of Plato’s Forms. For Augustine, God, like the Forms,
was eternal, incorruptible, and necessary. Yet Augustine also saw God as
an agent of supreme power and the creator of the universe out of
nothing. Augustine’s alteration of Platonic thought shows that such
thinkers did not take over Greek ideas uncritically; indeed, they may be
seen as using Greek ideas to elucidate and defend scriptural teaching
against pagan attack. They borrowed key Greek terms, such as person
(soma; persona), nature (physis; natura), and substance (ousia;
substantia), in an effort to clarify their own doctrines.
Historical development » Medieval traditions
The Platonism of Augustine exercised lasting influence on Christian
theologians and was given renewed expression in the writings of the
theologian and archbishop Anselm of Canterbury (1033–1109), whose
ontological argument has remained at the centre of philosophical
speculation about God’s existence (see below Epistemological issues).
In the 12th and 13th centuries the influence of Plato was gradually
replaced by that of Aristotle, whose philosophical importance was most
clearly demonstrated in the works of St. Thomas Aquinas (1225–74), the
foremost philosopher of Scholasticism. Aquinas’s grand achievement was
to wed Aristotelian methods and ideas with the Augustinian tradition of
viewing philosophy as an ally rather than an opponent of religion, thus
providing a new philosophical direction for Christian theology.
Aquinas, however, was only the first among many equals in
philosophical reflection on the nature of religion in this period. The
rediscovery of the philosophical writings of Aristotle by Islamic
scholars ushered in a period of intense philosophical activity, not only
in the schools of Islam but also among Jewish and Christian thinkers.
From the late 9th to the early 14th century, philosophers as diverse as
al-Fārābī, Avicenna, al-Ghazālī, Moses Maimonides, and John Duns Scotus
explored reason and revelation, creation and time, and the nature of
divine and human action.
In the late Middle Ages the cooperation between philosophy and
theology broke down. Later medieval theologians such as William of
Ockham moved away from the Platonic and Aristotelian discourse that had
dominated both philosophy and theology. Ockham and other nominalists of
the period rejected the claim that the properties displayed by objects
(e.g., redness and roundness) are universals that exist independently of
the objects themselves. In addition, a strong theological voluntarism
shifted the focus of theological discourse away from God’s intellect and
the rationality of his creation and toward the absolute power and
arbitrariness of God’s will.
Philosophers and theologians of the Renaissance and the Protestant
Reformation looked upon Scholasticism as a highly sophisticated but
needlessly speculative welding of pagan philosophy and Christian
theology that tended to obscure authentic Christian themes. Renaissance
thinkers rejected the medieval tradition in favour of the pristine
sources of Western philosophy in Classical civilization. The Reformers
emphasized both the supremacy of Scripture and the relative inability of
the unaided human mind to reason about God in a reliable fashion. But
although both movements were critical of medieval thought, neither was
free of its influence.
Historical development » The Enlightenment
In the 17th century the philosophy of religion was taken in new
directions by René Descartes in France and John Locke in England. The
significance of Descartes and Locke lay in the fact that they were
self-confessedly philosophical innovators. In Descartes’s rationalism
(the view that reason is the chief source of human knowledge), God is
displaced from the centre of philosophical thought and becomes the
guarantor of the reliability of sense experience. Locke’s more modest
empiricism (the view that the chief source of human knowledge is
experience) led to the development of a more “reasonable” approach to
religion in which reason was held to constrain any appeal to divine
revelation. Their English and Continental followers—such as John Toland,
Matthew Tindal, baron d’Holbach, and Claude-Adrien Helvétius—rejected
tradition and hence the authority of reports of miracles and revelation.
Eschewing mystery in religion, they appealed to a universal “religion of
nature,” or natural religion, which could be established on the basis of
propositions that any intelligent and reasonable person would accept.
Enlightenment thinking on religion culminated in the late 18th
century in the work of the German philosopher Immanuel Kant. Kant argued
that time, space, causation, and substance—among other features of
reality—are innate conceptual categories through which the human mind
imposes order on experience. There can be no knowledge of matters
allegedly existing beyond these categories; thus, there can be no
knowledge of God and, hence, no theological knowledge. Having thus
written off any metaphysical justification of religion, Kant introduced
a conception of religion that arose from his idea of morality. Morally
right acts, he held, are those aimed at bringing about the highest good
(summum bonum), a state in which people are rewarded with happiness in
proportion to the level of virtue they achieve. But one cannot
rationally will to bring about the highest good unless one believes that
such a state is possible, and it is possible only in an eternal
afterlife ordered by God. The existence of God and the immortality of
the soul can thus be “postulated” as rational conditions of morality,
even though they cannot be proved theoretically. In this way religion,
for Kant, was a matter of practical reason, concerned with what people
ought to do, rather than of theoretical reason, concerned with what
people have good reason to think is true (see below Religion and
morality).
Historical development » Philosophy of religion since the 19th century
It is a short but significant step from postulating the existence of God
as a condition of morality to regarding the idea of God as a
“projection” of human concerns. It is a step that a number of thinkers
after Kant—including the German philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach and the
Austrian founder of psychoanalysis Sigmund Freud—readily took. They saw
religion as compensation for, and therefore an escape from, unhappy
aspects of the human condition. A notable and influential example of
this approach is that of Karl Marx, who saw religion as “the sigh of the
oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world and the soul of
soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.” Along with those
who viewed the idea of God as projection were thinkers, sometimes under
the influence of modern science, who neither accepted nor rejected God’s
existence. The English biologist Thomas Henry Huxley coined the term
agnosticism as a name for the view that there is no conclusive evidence
for or against the existence of God. However, many scientists, like the
American botanist Asa Gray, sought ways of harmonizing scientific
advances with orthodox Christianity.
Forms of religion based on idealism (a philosophical movement that
stressed the spiritual or ideational in the interpretation of
experience) abandoned the idea of a transcendent God and identified the
divine with wholly immanent attitudes or processes. Friedrich
Schleiermacher, for example, saw religion as the feeling of absolute
dependence or the recognition of contingency, while G.W.F. Hegel, the
greatest of the idealists, identified true religion with the development
of the entire world order. Not only is God in history; God is history.
These views, often raised against mechanistic and utilitarian attitudes
in the 19th century, were attractive because of the vague religiosity,
sometimes of a pantheistic character, that they encouraged.
During the 20th century philosophical interests were secularized,
with the consequence that the strong link between mainstream philosophy
and the discussion of religious questions was weakened. In the 1920s and
’30s the logical positivists, and later the noncognitivists, declared
that metaphysical and theological (as well as ethical and aesthetic)
sentences are literally meaningless because they cannot be verified
through sense experience. Sentences about the qualities of God or about
the nature of spiritual experience, for example, make claims about
entities or events that cannot be empirically observed or demonstrated.
Thus, sentences such as “God is love” and “divine grace works upon the
soul” are empty of cognitive content and therefore neither true nor
false.
The widespread abandonment of logical positivism in the 1950s and
’60s (due in part to its inability to account for the meaningfulness of
certain scientific propositions and counterfactual truths), led to a
revival of traditional metaphysics and a consequent resurgence of
interest in themes in the philosophy of religion that had engaged
thinkers before Kant, such as Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716). As
a result, contemporary philosophy of religion, certainly in the
English-speaking world, has much more in common with medieval philosophy
than it does with the philosophy of the 19th century. Continental
(German and French) philosophy of religion, however, continues to be
rooted in the more iconoclastic tradition of Feuerbach and Freud.
Main philosophical themes
The main themes that arise in the philosophy of religion have been
shaped by issues concerning the relation between human language and
thought on the one hand and the nature of the divine on the other. If it
is possible neither to think nor to speak about God, then it is
obviously impossible to argue philosophically about him. The
difficulties can be seen by considering some extreme positions. If
language about God or the divine is totally equivocal, then saying that
God is good or claiming to know that God is good bears no relation
whatever to standards of human goodness. If language about God is wholly
anthropomorphic, then God is reduced to human proportions, eliminating
any transcendent reference. Yet if God is utterly transcendent, it is
doubtful that humans could possess an adequate concept of him or form
true propositions about him.
While philosophers have varied a great deal in their accounts of
language about God (though all acknowledge the use of metaphors and
models in conveying understanding), they have generally recognized that
some element of univocity is indispensable if there are to be credible
claims to reason about God’s reality. It is sometimes argued that such
language is best expressed in negative terms: God is infinite (not
finite), timeless (not in time), and so on.
Main philosophical themes » Epistemological issues
The main epistemological question in the philosophy of religion is: Can
God be known? This apparently simple question quickly leads to issues of
considerable complexity. There are two main areas of debate: (1) whether
it is possible to prove the existence of God—and, if not, whether there
is nevertheless a sense in which religious belief is reasonable—and (2)
whether knowledge of God is obtainable from sources other than human
reason and sense experience.
Proofs of the existence of God are usually classified as either a
priori or a posteriori—that is, based on the idea of God itself or based
on experience. An example of the latter is the cosmological argument,
which appeals to the notion of causation to conclude either that there
is a first cause or that there is a necessary being from whom all
contingent beings derive their existence. Other versions of this
approach include the appeal to contingency—to the fact that whatever
exists might not have existed and therefore calls for explanation—and
the appeal to the principle of sufficient reason, which claims that for
anything that exists there must be a sufficient reason why it exists.
The arguments by Aquinas known as the Five Ways—the argument from
motion, from efficient causation, from contingency, from degrees of
perfection, and from final causes or ends in nature—are generally
regarded as cosmological. Something must be the first or prime mover,
the first efficient cause, the necessary ground of contingent beings,
the supreme perfection that imperfect beings approach, and the
intelligent guide of natural things toward their ends. This, Aquinas
said, is God. The most common criticism of the cosmological argument has
been that the phenomenon that God’s existence purportedly accounts for
does not in fact need to be explained.
The argument from design also starts from human experience: in this
case the perception of order and purpose in the natural world. The
argument claims that the universe is strongly analogous, in its order
and regularity, to an artifact such as a watch; because the existence of
the watch justifies the presumption of a watchmaker, the existence of
the universe justifies the presumption of a divine creator of the
universe, or God. Despite the powerful criticisms of the Scottish
philosopher David Hume (1711–76)—e.g., that the evidence is compatible
with a large number of hypotheses, such as polytheism or a god of
limited power, that are as plausible as or more plausible than
monotheism—the argument from design continued to be very popular in the
19th century. According to a more recent version of the argument, known
as intelligent design, biological organisms display a kind of complexity
(“irreducible complexity”) that could not have come about through the
gradual adaptation of their parts through natural selection; therefore,
the argument concludes, such organisms must have been created in their
present form by an intelligent designer. Other modern variants of the
argument attempt to ground theistic belief in patterns of reasoning that
are characteristic of the natural sciences, appealing to simplicity and
economy of explanation of the order and regularity of the universe.
Perhaps the most sophisticated and challenging argument for the
existence of God is the ontological argument, propounded by Anselm of
Canterbury. According to Anselm, the concept of God as the most perfect
being—a being greater than which none can be conceived—entails that God
exists, because a being who was otherwise all perfect and who failed to
exist would be less great than a being who was all perfect and who did
exist. This argument has exercised an abiding fascination for
philosophers; some contend that it attempts to “define” God into
existence, while others continue to defend it and to develop new
versions.
It may be possible (or impossible) to prove the existence of God, but
it may be unnecessary to do so in order for belief in God to be
reasonable. Perhaps the requirement of a proof is too stringent, and
perhaps there are other ways of establishing God’s existence. Chief
among these is the appeal to religious experience—a personal, direct
acquaintance with God or an experience of God mediated through a
religious tradition. Some forms of mysticism appeal to religious
tradition to establish the significance and appropriateness of religious
experiences. Interpretations of such experiences, however, typically
cannot be independently verified.
Religions typically defend their core beliefs by combining
evidential, moral, and historical claims as well as those that concern
human spirituality. Because these claims together reflect the religion’s
conception of what knowledge of God is, they must be taken into account
when endeavouring to establish whether any particular belief within the
religion is reasonable.
The Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) also
appeal to revelation, or to claims that God has spoken through appointed
messengers to disclose matters which would otherwise be inaccessible. In
Christianity these matters have included the doctrine of creation, the
Trinity, and the Incarnation of Jesus Christ. Various attempts have been
made to establish the reasonableness of the appeal to revelation through
the witness of the church and through signs and miracles, all of which
are thought to herald the authentic voice of God. (This is the context
in which Hume’s classic critique of the credibility of reported miracles
must be understood.) Yet appeals to revelation by the various religions
conflict with each other, and the appeal to revelation itself is open to
the charge of circularity.
Main philosophical themes » Metaphysical issues » The idea of God
The claim that there is a God raises metaphysical questions about the
nature of reality and existence. In general, it can be said that there
is not one concept of God but many, even among monotheistic traditions.
The Abrahamic religions are theistic; God is both the creator of the
world and the one who sustains it. Theism, with its equal stress on
divine transcendence of the universe and immanence within it,
constitutes a somewhat uneasy conceptual midpoint between deism and
pantheism. Deist conceptions of the divine see God as the creator of a
universe that continues to exist, without his intervention, under the
physical impulses that he first imparted to it. In pantheism, God is
identified with the universe as a whole. Theism itself has numerous
subvarieties, such as occasionalism, which holds that the only real
cause in the universe is God; thus, all other causes are simply signs of
coincidence and conjunction between kinds of events occurring within the
created order. For example, heat is not what causes the water in a
teakettle to boil but is simply what uniformly occurs before the water
boils. God himself is the cause of the boiling.
An important object of metaphysical reflection is God’s nature, or
the properties of that nature. Is God simple or complex? If omniscience,
omnipotence, and beauty are part of the divine perfection, what exactly
are these properties? Is timeless eternity part of God’s perfection? Can
an omnipotent being will that there be a four-sided triangle or change
the past? Does an omniscient being know the future actions of free
agents? (If so, how can they be free?) Does an omniscient being who is
timelessly eternal know what time it is now?
Main philosophical themes » Metaphysical issues » God and the universe
Whatever may have been the influence of Classical philosophy on the
Abrahamic religions, they have not, in general, accepted the Greek idea
of the eternity of matter but have stressed the contingency of the
universe as the free creation of God. It has been argued, most notably
and influentially by Aquinas, that neither the eternity of matter nor
the doctrine of creation can be established by reason alone; thus, the
belief that the universe is not eternal and was created by God must be
derived from revelation. Some, including Augustine, have claimed that
God created the universe from a standpoint outside time; others claim
that God, like the universe, is in time.
It is at points such as these in the philosophy of religion that
philosophical arguments have less to do with establishing the truth of
some proposition and more to do with working out a consistent and
intelligible account of religious doctrine. At least since Augustine,
philosophers in the Abrahamic religions have seen one of their tasks to
be the achievement of a greater understanding of their own faith. They
have examined the logical consequences of religious doctrines and sought
to establish their consistency with the consequences of other beliefs,
as illustrated in the remainder of this section.
Main philosophical themes » Metaphysical issues » God and human action
Philosophical reflection on the nature of God has typically assumed that
God is the sum of perfection and is omnipotent and omniscient. Questions
have arisen not only about the exact meaning of these claims but also
about their consistency with widespread beliefs about human beings,
chiefly the belief that they usually act freely and responsibly and
should be held accountable for their actions. If God, being omniscient,
knows the future, then God presumably knows what each person will do in
the future. But if these actions are known by God, how can the person be
free not to do them? And if the person is not free not to do them, how
can he be held accountable for what he does? Even more difficult,
perhaps, is the question: If God is omnipotent and exercises
providential control over his creation, how can people be other than
puppets?
Various strategies have been devised to overcome or to diminish the
force of such difficulties. It has been supposed, for example, that God
is outside time and so does not, strictly speaking, know anything
beforehand. It has also been suggested that God does not know what
humans will freely do before they actually do it. Some thinkers have
drawn a distinction between the first cause of all that happens, which
is God, and secondary causes, including humans and other creatures. And
some philosophers of religion have been content with a conception of
human freedom that is consistent with causal determinism, the view that
all events and choices are determined by previously existing causes.
According to them, an action is free if it is voluntary and uncoerced,
and an action can be voluntary and uncoerced even though it is causally
determined. These issues remain the subject of vigorous debate among
contemporary philosophers.
Main philosophical themes » Metaphysical issues » The soul and
immortality
The belief in life after death, which is maintained by each of the
Abrahamic religions, raises the metaphysical question of how the human
person is to be defined. Some form of mind-body dualism, whether
Platonic or Cartesian, in which the mind or soul survives the death of
the body, has been favoured by many theologians. Others have claimed
that some version of physicalism or materialism is most consistent with
scriptural ideas about the resurrection of the body. The former group
has a tendency to disparage or downplay the importance of embodiment;
the latter group, however, faces the problem of giving an account of the
continuity of the person across the temporal gap between bodily death
and bodily resurrection.
Main philosophical themes » Metaphysical issues » Religion and morality
Another concern of philosophers of religion is whether morality is
dependent upon religion or is independent of it. Among those who take
the former view, some say that morality depends upon religion in the way
in which eating depends upon having an appetite: Religion provides the
motivation that makes people behave morally. To prove this, however, it
would be necessary to determine whether the behaviour of religious
people is generally morally superior to that of nonreligious people.
Others hold that morality depends on religion because the very idea of
morality makes sense only if there is a God who sets objective standards
or who will reward and punish people in the life to come. Otherwise, it
is claimed, morality is a matter either of individual preference or of
cultural or social convention.
Many of those who believe that morality is independent of religion
have claimed that moral truths can be adequately discerned through
reason, conscience, or moral intuition. In this connection it is worth
noting that those who believe that religion is the basis of morality
face the following dilemma: If the commands issued by God are morally
obligatory, then that is because either: (1) they express independently
justified moral values, or (2) God’s commands are necessarily morally
good. If alternative 1 is true, then morality is independent of
religion. If alternative 2 is true, then what is morally good seems to
depend implausibly on God’s whim: if God commanded the torture of human
infants, then it would be morally good to torture human infants. But
this is absurd. This problem was first raised by Plato in his dialogue
Euthyphro.
According to another perspective, derived from Kant, not only is it
not the case that morality depends on religion, but in fact the reverse
is true. As discussed above, in the Kantian tradition, the existence of
God and the immortality of the soul are “postulates” of practical
reason, or rational conditions of willing to bring about the highest
good. Alternatively, they are conditions of adhering strictly to the
moral law, which demands that one perform morally right acts only
because they are right and not for any other reason, such as the
goodness or badness of their consequences. Only in an eternal afterlife
ordered by God would such perfection be possible.
Main philosophical themes » Metaphysical issues » The problem of evil
Perhaps the most difficult issue concerning the relation between
morality and belief in God is the problem of evil. If God exists and is
omnipotent and perfectly good, why does God allow horrendous evils such
as the Holocaust? Why is any evil at all allowed by the divine? The
problem is of ancient origins and has long been discussed by
philosophers and theologians in the Abrahamic religions in relation to
the Fall of Man—the expulsion, whether literal or metaphorical, of Adam
and Eve from the Garden of Eden.
Few (if any) philosophers and theologians have been prepared to
claim, with Leibniz, that the existing world is the best of all possible
worlds. If it were not, Leibniz argued, what sufficient reason would God
have had to create it? Apart from Leibniz’s view, three positive
strategies have been developed. One stresses the importance of free will
in accounting for moral evil (resulting from free human actions) as
opposed to natural evil (resulting from natural events such as
earthquakes and plagues); it argues that a world in which people act
freely, albeit sometimes in an evil way, is to be preferred to a world
of automata who do only what is right. Another strategy stresses the
idea that some evils are a logical precondition for the existence of
certain goods. The virtues of compassion, patience, and forgiveness, for
example, can be developed only in response to certain needs or
weaknesses. A world that contains these goods is better than one in
which their exercise and development is impossible. The third approach
emphasizes the “cognitive distance” between human understanding and
God’s will, noting that humans cannot know in detail what the
justification of God’s permission of evil might be. It is possible, of
course, to combine these three positions, or elements of them, in
attempting to offer an overall response to the problem of evil.
Some thinkers have approached evil, or certain evils, from the
opposite direction. They have argued not that evil presents an
overwhelming problem for theism but that it provides an argument for a
life after death in which the injustices and inequities of the present
life are remedied.
Philosophy, religion, and religions
There is some tension within the practice of the philosophy of religion
between those who philosophize about religion in general or about
abstract religious concepts and those who consider the concrete
expressions of religion in one of the great faiths. In the 19th century,
when the term philosophy of religion became current, the first attempts
were made to define or characterize the essence of religion in
phenomenological or psychological terms such as the recognition of
contingency, the feeling of absolute dependence, or the sense of awe
before the sacred. It must be said, however, that approaching religion
in this rather abstract way has no great potential for offering
philosophical illumination, nor does it raise many serious philosophical
issues.
A similar tension afflicts the discussion of religious pluralism.
Some philosophers of religion see the world’s religions as offering
multiple embodiments of one basic religious or ethical stance. These
religions are understood as ways of gaining cognitive access to the
divine. The problem with offering such a metareligious account lies in
the danger of misdescribing the beliefs and attitudes of the adherents
of these traditions. For, it seems likely, whatever theorists of
religion may say is really true of such people, they themselves will
typically see their own religion as offering an exclusive salvific
message and goal.
Because Western philosophy of religion tends to concentrate upon the
philosophical traditions of the Abrahamic religions, it may appear that
it unduly neglects the philosophical traditions of the other great
faiths, such as Hinduism and Buddhism. To this charge there are two
replies. The first is that, as a matter of fact, the relation between
Western philosophy and the Abrahamic religions has been very rich,
particularly so in the case of Christianity. This is attested by the
vast literature on issues of philosophy within these religious
traditions. However, the idea that the Abrahamic religions have been
subjected to one rigid, oppressive, philosophical orthodoxy is wide of
the mark. Rather, the interaction between philosophical argument and
Abrahamic theologies has been very diverse, with a wide variety of
positions being expressed and defended. What has united these various
and often conflicting positions is a sense of common indebtedness to the
philosophical traditions originating in Greece and Rome. This remains so
even when religious thinkers in the fideistic tradition—which regards
faith as being based not on evidence but rather on an act of will—have
tried to repudiate the claims of reason and argument in the name of
faith.
The second reply is that these other traditions are unlikely to
contain within them distinct types of argument and reflection that are
not already present in the Abrahamic religions. This is not a claim of
cultural superiority but a reasonable hypothesis based upon the
historical richness of Western philosophy. This hypothesis is being
given some confirmation by the fact that there is a growing body of
secondary literature within Western philosophy on the ideas and
arguments of, for example, Buddhist thinkers. In this sense it may be
said to be a purely contingent, historical fact that Buddhism, say, has
not attracted a tradition of philosophical argumentation in the way that
the Abrahamic religions have.
Realism and antirealism
A renewed concern of philosophers of religion in the late 20th and early
21st centuries was to determine the sense in which religious claims may
be said to be true. The responses to this question took two broad forms.
According to the view known as realism, if God exists, then he exists
objectively, or independently of and apart from human efforts to
understand his reality. Thus, “God exists” is true if and only if God
exists; whether or not a world of cognizers believes that he exists is
irrelevant. According to antirealism, the claim that God exists is true
or false only relative to the beliefs or practices of some human group.
Some antirealists make use of the work of the Austrian-born British
philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951), particularly his concepts
of “language game” and “form of life.” According to some uses of these
ideas, religion is a system of social activities or practices involving
specific forms of language, and such language is meaningful only within
the activities in which it plays a role. The attempt to assess
expressions of religious belief by criteria derived from other language
games, such as those of science, is therefore mistaken. The strongest
forms of antirealism stress the idea that the human mind “constructs”
reality, including religious reality, through categories bestowed on it
by culture, by one or more language-games, or by some other aspect of
human endeavour. Weaker forms define truth in one of a variety of
epistemic terms—e.g., a proposition is true just in case it is
verifiable in principle, or just in case it is in some sense
pragmatically useful—and draw on a more general suspicion of or
skepticism about religion stemming from Kant, Feuerbach, and Freud.
Antirealism emphasizes the plurality of religious positions and the
validity of each position insofar as it is faithful to its own criteria
of belief. The idea of objective truth and the possibility of knowing
the truth is dismissed. Various postmodern attitudes to religion appeal
to both epistemological relativism and certain connections between
knowledge and the possession of power, including political power and
patriarchy.
As the preceding discussion indicates, although contemporary
philosophy of religion continues to address traditional questions about
the relation between faith and reason, it is now increasingly
characterized by efforts to determine the epistemic status of religious
belief rather than by attempts to secure religious knowledge. Even the
tradition of natural theology is no longer concerned with proving the
existence of God but with the more modest project of making belief in
God reasonable, or rebutting objections to the charge that such belief
is unreasonable, or showing that God’s existence is the best explanation
of the unity and diversity of the natural order.
Paul Helm
