Philosophy 301: Philosophy of Religion

The following article was adapted from a chapter of a book I wrote several years ago. I apologise for the untidy formatting.

My use of G1, G2 and G3 refers to my thesis that most philosophical concepts fall naturally into three groups (see Philosophy 103a, 103b and 103c).

Contents:

1. The nature of philosophy of religion
2. The nature of religion
3. The question of religious truth
4. Arguments for God's existence
5. Arguments against God's existence
6. The question of the nature of religious language
7. The Euthyphro Dilemma (revisited)
8. What Christianity and Marxism have in common
9. A summary of The Three Groups in this article

1. It is important to note that philosophy of religion is, as
an area of study, neither for nor against religious belief,
even though many who work in this area are clearly either for or
against religious belief. What you must keep in mind is that
your exposure to philosophy of religion can only change your
attitude to religion to the extent that reasoned argument can
change your attitude. If your attitude is ultimately based on
intuition (see ) and faith (see ), rather than reason
(see ), then reasoned argument will have no very deep
effect upon it.

2. What is the nature of religion ?

It shall be claimed here that there are three basic sorts of
answer to this question.

(G1) Religion is personal faith in a set of beliefs about the
nature of the world, and in a way of life associated with
those beliefs.

(G2) Religion is a social phenomenon. It is a group of people
who are united by a shared set of beliefs about the nature
of the world, and by a way of life associated with those beliefs.

This answer is supported by the origin of the word 'religion'
itself. The word comes from the Latin word religare, which meant
'to tie together.' This suggests that, when the word was coined,
religion was seen as that which ties individuals together into
a society.

(G3) It is a short step from the G2 answer to this answer, which
is that the most important thing about religious belief and
behaviour is as a means to human ends. There are two main versions of this
answer:

(a) Religious belief is personally useful in that it
has a psychologically empowering effect on the individual and thus
tends to lead to personal success.

(b) Religious belief is socially useful in that it is
maintained and fostered by society's leaders as a
means of social control. Its moral requirements
can be used to bring about the political behaviour
desired by those who rule.

3. What is the nature of religious truth?

All religious beliefs are claimed by their holders to be,
in some sense, 'true' beliefs. Yet there are many religions,
many different sets of claims about what is religiously true.
They cannot all be correct. This is called The Problem of Multiple Religions . The basic sorts of response to this
situation go as follows:

(G1) There is only one truth, only one way the world is. Either
one set of religious beliefs express that truth, or none
do. One does: it is the one I believe. Faith is inflexible, so
only some believers, those who agree with my belief, belong to
the true religion.

Karl Barth gave an answer similar to this. He said that God
chooses to save only some believers by revealing the truth (of
God in Jesus) to them via the New Testament. True belief is an
act of God's will, not the believer's. When God gives the truth
to the believer, religion (which is sinful unbelief because it
is the attempt to know God without God's gift) is 'abolished'
in the believer. Religious truth is not given to all, only to
God's chosen few.

Not surprisingly, this answer has been criticised as too
extreme. It shuts out not only all non-Christians but also many
believers who consider themselves to accept Jesus, such as
members of the Catholic Church. Catholics hold that some people,
notably Popes, receive the truth directly from God and not via
the Bible.

(G2) There is only one religious truth, but there are several
interpretations of it. Each set of religious beliefs has a
core of truth, but not all interpretations of that truth can be
correct. It is possible for the different religions to work
towards beliefs that agree with the core of truth.

John Hick gave an answer similar to this. He suggested that
all religions are equally true and false. They are false in that
they have placed too much emphasis on their human founders
(Abraham, Mohammed, Gautama, etc.). And Christianity has done
worst in this because it went to the extreme of claiming its
human founder, Jesus, to be God-in-the-flesh. The religions are
true in that each appeals to an Absolute. For some, the Absolute
is a Person (Yahweh, God-the-Father, Allah, etc.), and for others
the Absolute is an impersonal Principle (e.g., for Buddhists the
Absolute is what is revealed by Enlightenment). There are many
different religions because there have been different historical,
cultural, and psychological responses to the Absolute. The
religions can come closer together, but this would be difficult
because it would require that they move away from their human
founders and towards the Absolute. It would be particularly
difficult for Christianity, since its human founder and its
Absolute are one and the same.

Perhaps the main criticisms of this answer are that (a) it
expects too much flexibility of faith, and (b) it underestimates
the psychological need religious believers have for a strong link
between the human founder and the Absolute.

(G3) There is only one truth, only one way the world is. But
it is much more likely that none of the religions is in
touch with that truth than that only one is or all are.

J.L.Mackie gave this sort of answer. One objection to it
is that it provides no answer to those who genuinely feel that
they are in touch with religious truth.

4. What reasons are there for believing God exists? What are the main arguments for God?

Before we come to the answers to this question we need to
note a few things about the concept of God.

Not all religions require belief in some version of God,
but since the main Western religions (Judaism, Christianity and Islam) do have this requirement, Western philosophy of religion is
concerned with the concept of God.

The belief that there is a God or gods is called theism.
The belief that there is no God or gods is called atheism. But
there is a position which rejects both those beliefs. It makes
three main claims:

(i) Despite what is claimed by both believers and
non-believers in God, we can neither prove nor
disprove the existence of God.

(ii) The existence of God is not impossible.

(iii) Neither the evidence for nor the evidence against
the existence of God is as strong as the evidence
for our best scientific theories.

This position is called agnosticism. One objection to it is that
it seems to deny the importance of a question which has, for many
centuries and many people, been very important.

We can say that there are two main concepts of God, two
descriptions of God's nature: the religious, pre-philosophical
description, and the philosophical description (called 'the God
of the philosophers').

According to the pre-philosophical description, God's nature
is as follows:

- Unlimited. God is not limited by any of our
concepts: He is beyond space and time; neither
His power nor His knowledge are limited. (The
claim that God is beyond space and time is
the claim that God is 'transcendent'. Some,
such as Benedict Spinoza, have argued that God
is in space and time, indeed, that the world and
God are the same thing. This is the claim that
God is 'immanent'. There are two versions of it.
The claim that the world is God is called
pantheism. The claim that the world is in God
is called panentheism.)

- The Creator. God created the world out of
nothing, and the existence of the world depends
on God absolutely and always.

- A person. God is a person, He has a personality.
Those who speak to God use the second person (e.g.,
"You are the Creator", they do not call
God "it".

- Loving. God loves His creation. His love is a
giving love, not a desiring love.

- Good. God's goodness is unlimited.

- Holy. God's other qualities make Him the most
awesome of beings. We call this God's holiness.

The other description of God, the 'God of the philosophers',
emerges from the answers to our present question and the questions
following.

Keep in mind that not everyone who believes in the existence
of God thinks that they need reasons for their belief; for many
people, belief is based on faith. But also, many people have
tried to support the belief with reasons. The main sorts of
arguments made from those reasons provide the answers to this
question. There are quite a lot of versions of these arguments,
but only one version of the main sorts will be given here. The
arguments, we claim here, fall into the Three Groups:

(G1) Arguments that appeal to the way the
world is or appears to be.

The basic argument of this sort starts from the very fact
that there is a world. It can be put as follows:

The world exists.
The world is a contingent thing (meaning it need
not have existed, and so needed something to
bring it into existence).
Not all things can be contingent: at least one
must be necessary, or nothing would exist.
Therefore:The world was brought into existence by that
necessary thing (which we call 'God').

Thomas Aquinas gave a version of this argument. It is called the
cosmological argument. Its weakness is not in its first premise;
few people have seriously doubted that the world exists. But what
about the second premise? Why must we accept that the world need
not have existed? Perhaps it always has and always will exist, and
there is no question of its necessity or contingency.

A second G1 argument relies on the concept of cause-and-
effect:

The world exists.
Everything that exists has a cause.
There cannot be an endless chain of causes.
Therefore: There must have been a First Cause (called 'God').

Aquinas gave a version of this argument too. It is called the
argument to a First Cause. There are two weaknesses. First, why
can there not be an endless chain of causes? (This is another way
of asking, "Why assume the world had a creator?") Secondly, if
God exists, and if everything that exists has a cause, what
caused God? The religious answer to this has been that God is a
'self-caused' being. But does this make sense? How could a thing
bring itself into existence? But that question assumes that there
was a time when God did not exist. The reply to it is that God
does not exist 'in time', rather, God is eternal (meaning, God
exists 'outside of time'). But does the concept of existence
really include the meaning that a thing can exist 'outside of
time'?

Another G1 argument (a reply to the question "Why assume the
world had a creator?") relies on the religious concept called
revelation. It claims that God has revealed Himself to certain
people, and, through them and their writings, to all of us.

The weakness of this argument is that it requires us to
rely on the authority of those people and their writings. Not
all of us find ourselves able to do so. And there is another
problem with relying on authority (see section 7, below).

A secondary appeal to revelation claims that God has revealed
Himself to us in miracles. We can boil the concept of a miracle
down to the concept of 'an event that cannot be explained by
science'. There have been, and continue to be, many such events.
Science cannot yet explain all events, and perhaps it never will.
But is this sufficient reason to see God revealed in such events?
The world of the unexplained was once much larger than it is now.
Science has shrunk it drastically. To look to that world for God
is to end up with what has been called 'The God of the Gaps' -
the God to explain the gaps in our knowledge.

Perhaps the most popular G1 argument goes as follows:

Things like houses and clocks have the appearance
of having been designed to serve certain purposes.
Indeed, the whole world - and living things in
particular - has the appearance of having been
designed for various purposes.
We know that things like houses and clocks have
been designed (by us).
Therefore: We have good reason to suppose that the whole
world has a Designer (God).

Aquinas gave a version of this argument. It is called the argument
to a Designer (it has also been called the Teleological Argument).
It has been criticised (by David Hume) as follows.

The argument's basic form is:

a is x.
b is x.
a is y.
Therefore : b is y.

This is the form of the inductive argument called 'argument by
analogy', and so even if its premises are all true its conclusion
is uncertain. (See Philosophy 302: Philosophy of Science). Further, we have seen
things being made by humans, so we have good reason to believe
that those things were designed, but we have never seen a whole world being built, so we do not even know that it was built, let
alone designed.

Another difficulty for the argument to a Designer is that
science has come up with a very good explanation of how living
things happen to have the appearance of being designed to live
where and how they live. Darwin's Theory of Evolution is that
a species is made up of individuals that are alike in most ways
but not all ways. If the way an individual is different helps it
to survive and reproduce in its surroundings, it can be said to
have been 'selected' by its surroundings to pass on its successful
difference to its offspring. This is why members of a species
appear to have been designed.

(G2) Arguments that appeal to the notion or concept of God. A
notable example goes like this:

My notion of God is of a perfect being.
A perfect being is a being that has every
quality to the highest possible degree.
A being could not be perfect unless it
existed, since existence is a quality a thing
would have to have in order to be perfect.
Therefore: My notion of God is of a thing that exists.

This is called The ontological argument . Anselm and Descartes gave
version of it. The main criticism (Kant's) goes as follows:

The argument claims that "existence is a quality". It
says that God has qualities like perfect power, perfect
knowledge, perfect goodness, and existence. But this
involves a mistake about the notion of existence. When
we list the qualities of a thing, we do not list its
existence; we do not say, for example, that a tree is
something that:
is green
is leafy
is branched
is made of wood
is existent.

To do this would be to confuse the 'is' of predication
with the 'is' of existence. No, a thing has to
exist in order to have qualities, and so we cannot list
its existence among its qualities. The question of its
existence is separate from the question of its qualities.
We have to establish that a thing exists before we can
show that its supposed qualities are real. But the
argument does not do that. Also, the argument leaps from our
concept of God to the reality (outside of our concept) of God,
and surely this is a logical mistake.

(G3) Arguments that appeal to pragmatic reasons for
believing in God. One such argument can be put as:

The question of God's existence is so important
that we are forced to choose between belief and
non-belief.
If we choose belief, we stand to gain eternal
bliss - or so Christianity tells us.
If we choose non-belief, we stand not only to
lose eternal bliss but to suffer eternal torment
- or so Christianity tells us.
If the claims of Christianity are false, and
death is the end of us, then we have lost little
by believing.
If the claims of Christianity are true, then we
have gained everything by believing.
Therefore: Christian belief is clearly the best bet.

This argument, given by Blaise Pascal, is known as Pascal's Wager .
William James also gave a version of it. A major criticism of
Pascal's version is that it presents us with a false choice
between belief or non-belief in the God of Christianity only. The
choice is false because the argument applies equally well to the
God of Judaism, to the to God of Islam, indeed to the God of any
religion that promises reward for belief in God and punishment for
non-belief.

5. Question: What reasons are there for believing God does not exist? The arguments against God are of the same three general sorts as the arguments for God:

(G1) Arguments that appeal to the way the world is or appears to
be. For example:

God is said to have created the world.
God is said to be all-knowing, all-powerful, and
all-good.
But not all of these claims can be true, since
there is a large amount of evil, both chosen
(e.g., murder) and unchosen (e.g., natural
disasters) in the world.
It cannot be said that God is unaware of the
evil, since He is all-knowing, nor that He
is powerless to remove the evil, since He is
all-powerful, nor that He would not want to
remove it, since He is all-good.
Therefore: Such a God does not exist.

This argument is called The Problem of Evil . There have been
several sorts of reply to it. For example, it has been said that
there must be evil if there is to be free-will; we are not free
unless we are free to choose between good and evil. But note that
this reply only answers the problem of chosen evil.

(G2) Arguments that appeal to the notion of God. For example:

God is said to be all-knowing.
Such knowledge must include knowledge of the
future.
So at the creation of the world, God had full
knowledge of every choice that every human would
ever make.
There could not be such knowledge unless human
choices must be as they turn out to be.
Humans are said to have free-will.
Free-will means the ability to make choices that are not predetermined.
So a choice cannot be free if it must be as it
turns out to be.
It makes no sense to say that God, with full
knowledge of every choice we would ever make,
could have created us with the ability to
make non-predetermined choices.
Therefore: The notion that there is such a God makes no
sense. This argument is called The Problem of God's Prescience .

One reply to this argument is that God did not create the world
in time (at a time), rather, God created time and the world
together. Therefore, God does not see time as past/present/
future, God sees time in a way we cannot imagine, a way we can
only call 'the ever-present'. Therefore, God cannot be said to
have fore-knowledge of our choices.

(G3) Arguments that appeal to pragmatic
reasons for disbelief in God. For example:

It is only worthwhile believing in God if the
belief has useful results.
History has shown and continues to show that
the belief in God has, on the whole, negative
results.
Therefore: Belief in God is not worthwhile.

It might be argued in reply to this that the belief is not based
on good results, and that even if it was, history shows the
opposite of what the argument claims: religion has been the
inspiration of much artistic (and even scientific) progress.

Another argument, similar to this but expressed on a more personal level, might be called The Unspecifiability of Pascal's Wager . Pascal's Wager (see the G3 part of section 4, above) has the problem that although it specifies belief in Christianity's God as the best bet, it cannot logically support such a specification. Thus it also suffers from The Problem of Multiple Religions (see section 3, above).

6. Question: Are religious claims propositions?

So far in this article we have assumed that religious
claims are propositions, that they are the sort of thing
that can be either true or false. And this
assumption is fair enough, considering that, until recently,
people have always treated them as propositions and many have
held some of them to be true. Recently, however, some religiously
inclined thinkers have argued against that long-held assumption.

(G1) Religious claims are propositions, they can be true or
false, and some of them are true. The true ones are known
via being revealed to the faithful, either directly (by religious
intuition) or indirectly (by scripture).

This is what has been assumed by most religious people
during most of history. The assumption that religious claims
are propositions is called Cognitivism, so we can call this
answer Cognitivist Revelationism . The main criticism is that
it fails to provide us with any reasoning in support of religious
claims; and further, it bases religious belief on sheer faith
in the authority of either (a) someone who claims to have
religious intuition, or (b) writings claimed to have a divine
origin.

(G2) Religious claims are propositions, they can be true or
false, and some of them are true. Those that are true
are known via reasoned argument.

This is the answer that has been given by some religious
philosophers, at least since Irenaeus, and especially since
Aquinas. We can term this Cognitivist Naturalism about religious
claims, since the reasoned approach to religion has long been
called Natural Theology. One criticism is that religion built
on reason turns out to have much less content, much less detail,
than revealed religion. Instead of the wide God of religion, we
end up with the narrow God of the philosophers.

A second sort of G2 answer follows the lead of Wittgenstein's
second theory of meaning. It says that religious claims are made
from within a certain sort of 'language-game'. We can think of
a 'language-game' as being a vocabulary shared by the members of
a group in society who are grouped according to their life-style,
which might be scientific, philosophic, religious, artistic, etc.
Each 'language-game' has its own way of deciding on the truth,
and cannot be persuaded by arguments expressed in the vocabulary
of a different group.

We can call this answer The Language-Game Theory . One
criticism of it is that if we accept it we have to accept that
either:

(a) Reality is singular (there is only one way the world
is), but truth, language-game truth, is not about
reality.

(b) Reality is multiple (there are many ways the world is),
and truth is about reality, so truth is also multiple,
and each language-game expresses its own truth.

(G3) Religious claims are not propositions; they can be neither
true nor false. This position is called Non-Cognitivism about religious claims. It's several versions include arguments that religious claims are used to:

- arouse emotions and motivate the individual,

- motivate cooperative behaviour,

- communicate religious experiences,

- stimulate and foster religious experiences.

7. According to Plato, while Socrates was waiting to be put
on trial for his life he met a man named Euthyphro who was
pressing serious charges against his own father. The man claimed
that he was doing this because he knew it was his religious duty.
Socrates asked him how he knew it was his duty. Euthyphro's reply
amounted to saying he simply knew it was what the gods would find
good. Socrates then asked him the following deceptively simple-
looking question:

Is the good loved by the gods because it is good, or
is it good because it is loved by the gods?

This question poses a dilemma for religious believers. (A dilemma
is a choice between two alternatives, neither of which is free
of trouble.) The two alternatives are:

(i) There is a standard of goodness with which God's
goodness must agree.

(ii) God's goodness is the standard of goodness.

And the troubles involved in this choice are:

- If (i) is the case, it follows that God is not ultimate:
there is something (a standard of goodness) with which
God must come into agreement.

- If (ii) is the case, then whatever you believe to be
what God says is good you must believe and accept as
good, no matter how much less than good it may seem.
If (i) had been the case, religious authority could
have been criticised if it failed to measure up to the
standard of goodness; but, since (ii) is the case,
religious authority cannot be criticised.

This is known as The Euthyphro Dilemma .

The question Socrates asked applies not only to gods and
goodness; it poses a dilemma for anyone who tries to justify a
claim by appealing to an authority. Is the claim true because
there is a standard of truth with which the authority agrees,
or is it true because the authority is the standard of truth?

8. There is a strong relationship between religion and politics.
A good example of this is what is called Liberation Theology .
This a religious movement which seeks to make an alliance between
Christianity and Marxism. This may seem surprising; after all, the
two sets of believers are usually seen as enemies, since Marx
criticised religion as 'the opium of the people' - a drug to
distract them from the faults of the capitalist system. However,
there are some remarkable similarities between Christianity and
Marxism:

- Both make a prediction about the end of history.
Christianity predicts that history will end with
the 'second coming' of Jesus on the 'day of
judgment', and Marxism predicts that history will
end in the establishment of a communist utopia.

- Both appeal to the poor and abused: Christianity to
the poor and abused in general, and Marxism to the
exploited laborer.

- Both see art as symbolic of truth.

- Both have inspired movements of fanatical followers
who have tried to establish new societies run
according to their beliefs.

9. A Summary of The Three Groups in this article.