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the Philosophy of Religion , pp. and Reason: Aristotelian Strategies in Kierkegaard«s Ethics, ̄ Journal of Religious Studies, vol. 30, no. 2, , pp.
Table of contents

We therefore currently lack a decisive criterion that would enable clear rulings whether some movements should count as religions e. But while consensus in precise details is elusive, the following general depiction of what counts as a religion may be helpful:.

Introduction to Kierkegaard: The Religious Solution

This definition does not involve some obvious shortcomings such as only counting a tradition as religious if it involves belief in God or gods, as some recognized religions such as Buddhism in its main forms does not involve a belief in God or gods. Although controversial, the definition provides some reason for thinking Scientology and the Cargo cults are proto-religious insofar as these movements do not have a robust communal, transmittable body of teachings and meet the other conditions for being a religion.

For a discussion of other definitions of religion, see Taliaferro , chapter one, and for a recent, different analysis, see Graham Oppy , chapter three.

2. The Meaning of Religious Beliefs

But rather than devoting more space to definitions at the outset, a pragmatic policy will be adopted: for the purpose of this entry, it will be assumed that those traditions that are widely recognized today as religions are, indeed, religions. It will be assumed, then, that religions include at least Hinduism, Buddhism, Daoism, Confucianism, Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and those traditions that are like them.

This way of delimiting a domain is sometimes described as employing a definition by examples an ostensive definition or making an appeal to a family resemblance between things.


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Given the above, broad perspective of what counts as religion, the roots of what we call philosophy of religion stretch back to the earliest forms of philosophy. From the outset, philosophers in Asia, the Near and Middle East, North Africa, and Europe reflected on the gods or God, duties to the divine, the origin and nature of the cosmos, an afterlife, the nature of happiness and obligations, whether there are sacred duties to family or rulers, and so on.

As with each of what would come to be considered sub-fields of philosophy today like philosophy of science, philosophy of art , philosophers in the Ancient world addressed religiously significant themes just as they took up reflections on what we call science and art in the course of their overall practice of philosophy. While from time to time in the Medieval era, some Jewish, Christian, and Islamic philosophers sought to demarcate philosophy from theology or religion, the evident role of philosophy of religion as a distinct field of philosophy does not seem apparent until the mid-twentieth century.

A case can be made, however, that there is some hint of the emergence of philosophy of religion in the seventeenth century philosophical movement Cambridge Platonism. The Cambridge Platonists provided the first English versions of the cosmological, ontological, and teleological arguments, reflections on the relationship of faith and reason, and the case for tolerating different religions.

While the Cambridge Platonists might have been the first explicit philosophers of religion, for the most part, their contemporaries and successors addressed religion as part of their overall work. There is reason, therefore, to believe that philosophy of religion only gradually emerged as a distinct sub-field of philosophy in the mid-twentieth century. Today, philosophy of religion is one of the most vibrant areas of philosophy. Articles in philosophy of religion appear in virtually all the main philosophical journals, while some journals such as the International Journal for Philosophy of Religion , Religious Studies , Sophia , Faith and Philosophy , and others are dedicated especially to philosophy of religion.

Philosophy of religion is in evidence at institutional meetings of philosophers such as the meetings of the American Philosophical Association and of the Royal Society of Philosophy. What accounts for this vibrancy?

Philosophy of Religion (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

Consider four possible reasons. First: The religious nature of the world population. To engage in philosophy of religion is therefore to engage in a subject that affects actual people, rather than only tangentially touching on matters of present social concern. Perhaps one of the reasons why philosophy of religion is often the first topic in textbook introductions to philosophy is that this is one way to propose to readers that philosophical study can impact what large numbers of people actually think about life and value.

The role of philosophy of religion in engaging real life beliefs and doubts about religion is perhaps also evidenced by the current popularity of books for and against theism in the UK and USA.

One other aspect of religious populations that may motivate philosophy of religion is that philosophy is a tool that may be used when persons compare different religious traditions. Philosophy of religion can play an important role in helping persons understand and evaluate different religious traditions and their alternatives. Second: Philosophy of religion as a field may be popular because of the overlapping interests found in both religious and philosophical traditions.

Both religious and philosophical thinking raise many of the same, fascinating questions and possibilities about the nature of reality, the limits of reason, the meaning of life, and so on. Are there good reasons for believing in God? What is good and evil? What is the nature and scope of human knowledge?

In Hinduism; A Contemporary Philosophical Investigation , Shyam Ranganathan argues that in Asian thought philosophy and religion are almost inseparable such that interest in the one supports an interest in the other. Third, studying the history of philosophy provides ample reasons to have some expertise in philosophy of religion. In the West, the majority of ancient, medieval, and modern philosophers philosophically reflected on matters of religious significance. Hegel — the list is partial. And in the twentieth century, one should make note of the important philosophical work by Continental philosophers on matters of religious significance: Martin Heidegger — , Jean-Paul Sartre — , Simone de Beauvoir — , Albert Camus — , Gabriel Marcel — , Franz Rosenzweig — , Martin Buber — , Emmanuel Levinas — , Simone Weil — and, more recently Jacques Derrida — , Michel Foucault — , and Luce Irigary —.

Evidence of philosophers taking religious matters seriously can also be found in cases of when thinkers who would not normally be classified as philosophers of religion have addressed religion, including A. Whitehead — , Bertrand Russell — , G. In Chinese and Indian philosophy there is an even greater challenge than in the West to distinguish important philosophical and religious sources of philosophy of religion.

Their work seems as equally important philosophically as it is religiously see Ranganathan Fourth, a comprehensive study of theology or religious studies also provides good reasons to have expertise in philosophy of religion. As just observed, Asian philosophy and religious thought are intertwined and so the questions engaged in philosophy of religion seem relevant: what is space and time? Are there many things or one reality?


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    • Might our empirically observable world be an illusion? Could the world be governed by Karma? Is reincarnation possible? In terms of the West, there is reason to think that even the sacred texts of the Abrahamic faith involve strong philosophical elements: In Judaism, Job is perhaps the most explicitly philosophical text in the Hebrew Bible. The wisdom tradition of each Abrahamic faith may reflect broader philosophical ways of thinking; the Christian New Testament seems to include or address Platonic themes the Logos, the soul and body relationship.

    Much of Islamic thought includes critical reflection on Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, as well as independent philosophical work. Prior to the twentieth century, a substantial amount of philosophical reflection on matters of religious significance but not all has been realist.

    That is, it has often been held that religious beliefs are true or false. Xenophanes and other pre-Socratic thinkers, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, the Epicureans, the Stoics, Philo, Plotinus differed on their beliefs or speculation about the divine, and they and their contemporaries differed about skepticism, but they held for example that there either was a divine reality or not. Medieval and modern Jewish, Christian, and Islamic philosophers differed in terms of their assessment of faith and reason. In Asian philosophy of religion, some religions do not include revelation claims, as in Buddhism and Confucianism, but Hindu tradition confronted philosophers with assessing the Vedas and Upanishads.

    But for the most part, philosophers in the West and East thought there were truths about whether there is a God, the soul, an afterlife, that which is sacred whether these are known or understood by any human being or not. Important philosophers in the West such as Immanuel Kant — and Friedrich Nietzsche — , among others, challenged classical realist views of truth and metaphysics ontology or the theory of what is , but the twentieth century saw two, especially powerful movements that challenged realism: logical positivism and philosophy of religion inspired by Wittgenstein.

    Prior to addressing these two movements, let us take note of some of the nuances in philosophical reflection on the realist treatment of religious language. Many theistic philosophers and their critics contend that language about God may be used univocally, analogically or equivocally. A term is used univocally about God and humans when it has the same sense. In terms of the later difference, philosophers sometimes distinguish between what is attributed to some thing and the mode in which some state such as knowledge is realized.

    Terms are used analogously when there is some similarity between what is being attributed, e. Theological work that stresses our ability to form a positive concept of the divine has been called the via positiva or catophatic theology. On the other hand, those who stress the unknowability of God embrace what is called the via negativa or apophatic theology. Maimonides — was a great proponent of the via negativa , favoring the view that we know God principally through what God is not God is not material, not evil, not ignorant, and so on.

    According to Karen Armstrong, some of the greatest theologians in the Abrahamic faiths held that God. Armstrong x. A prima facie challenge to this position is that it is hard to believe that religious practitioners could pray or worship or trust in a being which was altogether inscrutable or a being that we cannot in any way understand. Let us now turn to two prominent philosophical movements that challenged a realist philosophy of God.

    Ayer by a group of philosophers who met in Austria called the Vienna Circle from to Ostensibly factual claims that do not make any difference in terms of our actual or possible empirical experience are void of meaning. A British philosopher, who visited the Vienna Circle, A. Ayer popularized this criterion of meaning in his book, Language, Truth, and Logic.

    Philosophy of Religion

    In it, Ayer argued that religious claims as well as their denial were without cognitive content. By his lights, theism, and also atheism and agnosticism, were nonsense, because they were about the reality or unreality or unknowability of that which made no difference to our empirical experience. How might one empirically confirm or disconfirm that there is an incorporeal, invisible God or that Krishna is an avatar of Vishnu? Famously, Antony Flew employed this strategy in his likening the God of theism to a belief that there is an undetectable, invisible gardener who could not be heard or smelled or otherwise empirically discovered Flew In addition to rejecting traditional religious beliefs as meaningless, Ayer and other logical positivists rejected the meaningfulness of moral statements.

    The logical positivist critique of religion is not dead. Still, the criterion of meaning advanced by logical positivism faced a series of objections for details see Copleston and Taliaferro b. Consider five objections that were instrumental in the retreat of logical positivism from its position of dominance. First, it was charged that logical positivism itself is self-refuting.

    Is the statement of its standard of meaning propositions are meaningful if and only if they are about the relations of ideas or about matters that are subject to empirical verification or falsification itself about the relations of ideas or about matters that are subject to empirical verification or falsification? Arguably not. At best, the positivist criterion of meaning is a recommendation about what to count as meaningful. Second, it was argued that there are meaningful statements about the world that are not subject to direct or indirect empirical confirmation or disconfirmation. Plausible candidates include statements about the origin of the cosmos or, closer to home, the mental states of other persons or of nonhuman animals for discussion, see Van Cleve and Taliaferro Third, limiting human experience to what is narrowly understood to be empirical seemed to many philosophers to be arbitrary or capricious.

    Broad and others defended a wider understanding of experience to allow for the meaningfulness of moral experience: arguably, one can experience the wrongness of an act as when an innocent person feels herself to be violated. If it is meaningful to refer to the right to beliefs, why is it not meaningful to refer to moral rights such as the right not to be tortured? And if we are countenancing a broader concept of what may be experienced, in the tradition of phenomenology which involves the analysis of appearances why rule out, as a matter of principle, the experience of the divine or the sacred?

    Fifth, and probably most importantly in terms of the history of ideas, the seminal philosopher of science Carl Hempel — contended that the project of logical positivism was too limited Hempel It was insensitive to the broader task of scientific inquiry which is properly conducted not on the tactical scale of scrutinizing particular claims about empirical experience but in terms of a coherent, overall theory or view of the world.

    According to Hempel, we should be concerned with empirical inquiry but see this as defined by an overall theoretical understanding of reality and the laws of nature. Moreover, the positivist critique of what they called metaphysics was attacked as confused as some metaphysics was implied in their claims about empirical experience; see the aptly titled classic The Metaphysics of Logical Positivism by Gustav Bergmann — Let us now turn to Wittgenstein — and the philosophy of religion his work inspired. In the Philosophical Investigations published posthumously in and in many other works including the publication of notes taken by his students on his lectures , Wittgenstein opposed what he called the picture theory of meaning.

    On this view, statements are true or false depending upon whether reality matches the picture expressed by the statements. Wittgenstein came to see this view of meaning as deeply problematic. The meaning of language is, rather, to be found not in referential fidelity but in its use in what Wittgenstein referred to as forms of life.