Most approaches to the Philosophy of Religion tend to treat ‘religion’ as equivalent to classical theism – that is, belief in an all-powerful and loving creator possessing the traditional attributes accorded to him by the major faiths. For the most part, this is good practice. Key questions in the Philosophy of Religion like the existence of God and the problem of evil take as their starting point exactly this assumption. However, it is important to remember that Philosophy of Religion is concerned with much more than just ‘the god of the philosophers’. William James defined religion as:
... the feelings, acts and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they consider the divine. The Varieties of Religious Experience II
This includes both belief and non-belief and all shades in between. Any position taken on such matters is open to philosophical investigation and raises general questions of reasoning, evidence, interpretation and language. In addition, religious practices such as ritual, worship and prayer; the political and social role of religions; issues of morality and behaviour; and metaphysical speculations regarding existence and survival after death are included in this investigation.
Since our understanding of the divine can be so varied, it is not always possible to provide general descriptions that cover all forms of belief. Nevertheless, certain terms have become standard in philosophical discussions of religion.
The term theism has come to be used in two distinct ways. In its broadest sense theism refers to a belief in a deity or deities, and is useful as a general term for any orthodox religious belief. This belief may take the form of monotheism which acknowledges only a single God, as in the Abrahamic religions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam; or polytheism which acknowledges multiple Gods, as in Hinduism, Shinto and the ancient religions of Egypt, Greece and Rome. In its more specific sense, theism usually describes a classical form of monotheism which conceives of God as personal, all-powerful and active in his involvement in the world. Such a definition includes traditional Christianity and has been the most common focus of philosophical enquiry.
In contrast to this, the seventeenth century saw the emergence of a rational attitude towards God that became known as deism. As the explanatory power of science increased, thinkers began to trust less in church authority and more in reason and observation of the natural world. To a deist, God is merely the grand architect of the laws of nature: he does not interfere in the world but allows nature to develop according to those laws. As a result, deists reject any form of revelation such as miracles, prophecy and scripture.
The differences between theism and deism are symptomatic of a tension that underlies a great deal of philosophical thinking about religion, that between natural theology and revealed theology. Natural theology is the belief that an understanding of God can be achieved through the use of reason and evidence: because of its emphasis upon rational and empirical study, this approach has dominated philosophical enquiry into religion for hundreds of years. Revealed theology, on the other hand, denies that God can be understood in this way and insists instead upon faith, scripture, revelation and personal experience. This fundamental distinction between faith and reason is behind some of the most intriguing questions within the Philosophy of Religion.
Another member of the theist family is pantheism, the belief that the whole universe is identical with God and that everything that exists constitutes a unity: other forms of reality are only modes of this unity. Pantheists differ from theists in that they deny that God has any ‘personhood’ (ie desires, intentions, thought) and that he is ‘other’ than the world or distinct from it. As a philosophical position, pantheism tends to derive from the work of Spinoza, the seventeenth-century Dutch thinker. But elements of pantheism can also be found in certain non-theistic beliefs such as Taoism, which posits a single, unchanging, dynamic principle that embraces everything that exists. In addition, some (almost pantheist) religious positions have been categorised as non-theism because they do not recognise or require the existence of a deity: Buddhism is the most common example, but certain types of post-theist Christianity, such as that espoused by Paul Tillich, also qualify.
One consequence of the investigations of natural theology in the Enlightenment was the development of atheism as a philosophical position, although the idea is logically as old as theism itself. Atheism covers a range of non-beliefs, but at its core is the absence or rejection of any belief in a supernatural being. In the eighteenth century this became attractive after the failure of natural theology to provide convincing arguments for the existence of God, and since that time atheism has recurred as a central element in many movements, notably Existentialism, Marxism and Humanism. Until recently ‘atheism’ was generally considered a pejorative term implying dangerous heresy and a lack of moral restraint, and it is still regarded as such by many societies. Nevertheless, it has been popularised in the last decade under the informal title of New Atheism by such thinkers as Daniel Dennett, Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris. The New Atheists are aggressively antitheist, opposing science and reason to institutionalised religion.
We are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further. Dawkins, A Devil’s Chaplain
The materialist claims of atheists, their allegiance to reason over faith, the appropriate response to ‘mistaken’ beliefs and the question of the burden of proof in matters pertaining to God – all are central to the Philosophy of Religion.
Another form of non-belief is agnosticism which argues that the truth about religion cannot be known. Although often used loosely to describe a position of non-commitment, agnosticism is properly an expression of scepticism about the possibility of certainty in metaphysical questions. Belief, on the other hand, is a different matter – which accounts for the existence of both agnostic theists and agnostic atheists.
Philosophy of Religion addresses questions that have a very long history. Many were first asked by the ancient Greeks, including Plato and Epicurus; some were restated by the early Church Fathers like Tertullian and Augustine; and most received their fullest treatment at the hands of medieval thinkers like Anselm and Thomas Aquinas. Since then they have exercised modern philosophers including Descartes, Hume, Kant, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, James, Russell and Wittgenstein, to name only a few. The debate continues in our own time with the resurgence of fundamentalism and the rise of scientific atheism.