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
Citation Information
Article Title: Philosophy of religion
Website Name: Encyclopaedia Britannica
Publisher: Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc.
Date Published: 06 April 2018
URL: https://www.britannica.com/topic/philosophy-of-religion
Access Date: August 25, 2019
Additional Reading Classic and general works
Classic texts include Plato, “Timaeus,” trans. by Benjamin Jowett, in Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (eds.), The Collected Dialogues of Plato, Including the Letters (1961, reissued 1989); Thomas Aquinas, The Summa Theologica of Thomas Aquinas, 22 vol., 2nd ed. rev. (1927–35), trans. by Fathers of the English Dominican Province; Anselm, St. Anselm’s Proslogion, trans. by M.J. Charlesworth (1965, reprinted 1979); Augustine, Confessions, trans. by Henry Chadwick (1991); John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 2 vol., compiled by Alexander Campbell Fraser (1894, reprinted 1959); and David Hume, “An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding,” in Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding and Concerning the Principles of Morals, ed. by L.A. Selby-Bigge, 3rd ed. rev. by P.H. Nidditch (1975).
Paul Helm (ed.), Faith and Reason (1999), includes a wide selection of primary sources. Notable general introductions to the philosophy of religion include M.W.F. Stone, “The Philosophy of Religion,” chapter 5 in A.C. Grayling (ed.), Philosophy 2: Further Through the Subject (1998), pp. 267–350; Charles Talliaferro, Contemporary Philosophy of Religion (1998); and Brian Davies, An Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion, 3rd ed. (2004). Contemporary multiauthored overviews of the subject may be found in Philip L. Quinn and Charles Taliaferro (eds.), A Companion to the Philosophy of Religion (1997); and Brian Davies (ed.), Philosophy of Religion: A Guide to the Subject (1998). Historical and language studies
L.P. Gerson, God and Greek Philosophy: Studies in the Early History of Natural Theology (1990), provides historical orientation. Paul Helm, Faith and Understanding (1997), discusses the “faith seeking understanding” tradition. Richard Popkin, The History of Scepticism: From Savanarola to Bayle, rev. and expanded ed. (2003), is a study of Renaissance skepticism and its impact on philosophy and religion. Peter Byrne, Natural Religion and the Nature of Religion (1989), examines deism and the Enlightenment. Merold Westphal, Suspicion and Faith: The Religious Uses of Modern Atheism (1993), discusses Ludwig Feuerbach, Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Sigmund Freud.
A brief, noncognitivist account of religious language is developed in R.B. Braithwaite, An Empiricist’s View of the Nature of Religious Belief (1955, reprinted 1977). A cognitivist account of religious language is defended against verificationism in Raeburne S. Heimbeck, Theology and Meaning (1969). Other valuable studies of religious language include Janet Martin Soskice, Metaphor and Religious Language (1985); William P. Alston, Divine Nature and Human Language (1989); J.F. Ross, Portraying Analogy (1981); and Ian T. Ramsey, Religious Language (1957, reissued 1993). Epistemology