Philosophy of religion, 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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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