Notes for Class Eighteen: Philosophy of Religion I

The philosophy of religion includes the theoretical study of God (philosophical theology) and the examination of the human belief in, and worship of, some ultimate reality in terms of which everything else is supposedly meaningful. Metaphysical issues in the philosophy of religion concern the nature of God. Epistemological issues deal with (a) the distinction between religious belief and religious knowledge (especially in regard to the question of whether religious beliefs can be rationally justified); and (b) arguments or "proofs" of the existence of God. Axiological issues address questions about how morality or value judgments affect discussions about the divine.

I. Metaphysical questions about God concern the kind of being he is. Different views include:

(a) Traditional theism: God is a perfect, all-good, all-knowing, eternal, supernatural being who creates and rules the world. He rewards virtue and punishes vice, and everything that happens is an expression of his providence. He is pure spirit with no material substance and is inadequately understood through human experience.

Objections:

(1) If God is all-good and all-powerful, why doesn't he get rid of the evil in the world?
(2) A caring God would experience joy and sorrow like us; but that would mean that God changes and is not perfect.
(3) The same applies to divine knowledge: for God to know what we experience, he would have to have experiences (which again makes him changeable).
(4) As the 19th-century philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach points out (in an idea developed further by Sigmund Freud), in order to avoid confronting our own limitations and the harsh realities of the world, we have invented a transcendent father figure (God) who is an idealization of everything we like about ourselves.

(b) Pantheism: everything is part of one unity, and that totality is God. Nature/the universe is the ultimate reality of which we are only parts (Spinoza). In Hindu (Vedic) pantheism, the goal is to recognize how the world we experience everyday is illusory and can be overcome only by union with the ultimate unchanging and perfect reality, Brahma.

Objection: nothing in our ordinary experience supports such a view, and such a view hardly would allow one to think of God as a personal being who cares about us.

(c) Panentheism: God is one with the universe but is also more than the total of all the beings in the universe; he is the complex and creative integration of the whole that is greater than the sum of its parts.

Objection: to be so linked to the world means that God cannot end evil and suffering; he can only provide prospects for optimizing further resolutions of what has already happened.

(d) Finite deity (God as a limited being): maybe God is, in fact, unable to eradicate evil in the world. If God is simply unable to get rid of all evil, that would explain why there seems to be more evil in the world than is attributable to the misuse of free will or necessary for challenging us to make ourselves better. Instead of being infinitely good and powerful, God is really very good and powerful (in fact, the best of all things that exist). He is what all things strive to be like, the lure of all things toward mutual harmony.

Objection: same as that raised against Panentheism.

(e) Transcendental anthropology: God does not transcend human experience; rather God is context for being and thinking; he is what we experience at the limit of experience and meaning, the "beyond" that is immanent in the idea of a limit.

Objection: such a God is not personal; and such a notion of religion loses its prophetic, critical function by making God merely an extension of the human.

II. Epistemological questions in the philosophy of religion concern issues relating to knowledge or beliefs about God. They raise issues about the relationship between faith (or commitment) and reason (intellectual assent). They also consider whether so-called divine revelation (e.g., in Holy Scriptures) should be taken literally or symbolically, or whether revelation should be considered important only insofar as it affects how people live their lives (not whether it is true or false).

A. Options on the relation between faith and reason, belief and knowledge, include the following:

(1) Faith and reason are incompatible: faith is not something that can be justified; it is a personal commitment which arguments and proofs simply cannot comprehend.

Objections:

(1) Faith thus sounds so personal that religious claims are unintelligible to anyone other than the believer.
(2) We can live perfectly meaningful lives without having to discover some "ultimate reality."
(3) We could have such a personal commitment without necessarily thinking that it is connected to the existence of God.

(2) Faith and reason converge: the truth about reality discovered through philosophic reasoning is the same truth that is known to the religious believer.

Objections:

(1) If religion is basically the same as ordinary reasoning, then why should we distinguish faith and reason in the first place?
(2) This seems to make God an object of intellectual study, when he should be above or apart from such inquiry.

(3) Faith and reason complement one another, but neither completely encompasses the other. Some truths known only through revelation: they simply could not have been learned through reasoning alone and might never have been understood without the guidance provided by faith. Through faith, there is at least a possibility that we might be able to understand such truths more rationally. (The 12th-century theologian St. Anselm calls this "faith seeking understanding.")

Objection: since understanding something rationally relies on thinking in human terms, then any discussion of God will have to be expressed in human terms. But if we use human terms to describe God, we will end up saying things about him (e.g., that he is jealous or is a loving father) that seem inappropriate for the ultimate principle of reality.

B. Attempts to provide rational justifications or arguments for the belief in the existence of God fall under the heading of "natural theology." There are two kinds of such arguments: those that begin with experience ( a posteriori arguments) and those that are based on reason alone ( a priori arguments). Examples of a posteriori arguments include the argument from design and versions of the cosmological argument such as the arguments from motion and causality.

(1) The design (or teleological) argument, developed by William Paley (1743-1805) and St. Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274): the complexity, intelligent order, and purposive design observed in the world indicate that there is a designing creator of the universe. The order of the universe as a whole and the intricacy of things in the universe in particular are intelligible only if we assume the involvement of some ordering force or mind aiming to achieve some purpose. A purely causal, non-teleological account (that is, one that does not provide a rationale for why something is the way it is) makes the events in the world accidental (lacking goals, intentions, purposes). But since the world and everything in it exhibit such order and intricacy, there must be a creative mind responsible for it, and that is God. In terms of the analogy:

watch = universe
watch-maker = universe-maker

Objection from Charles Darwin

(1) To detect order in something does not necessarily mean that that order is the result of some purposive activity. As difficult as it is to accept sometimes, the intricacy of relations among things can be explained naturalistically (without having to appeal to supernatural causes). Things are as they are because that is the way they have turned out, not they have turned out that way because of what they are. The world may exhibit order, but that does not mean that it exhibits purpose or design. The dynamics that explain the development of the universe are like the inner forces that shape the growth of plants and animals. We do not have to assume that some designing mind guides their growth; likewise, we don't have to assume that the development of the universe is guided by some designing mind. [Besides, it would seem that a universe that does not require God's tinkering with it would be better than one in which God is intimately involved.]
Objections from David Hume:
(2) Order is imposed by human beings on the chaos of nature; we tend to see order where there is none. Not only is there no persuasive empirical evidence for purpose in the world; despite what Darwin might think, there is not even evidence of order.
(3) But even if we agree there is order in the world, we cannot use the watch analogy--we know the unknown, fourth term of an analogy only by being empirically familiar with things independently of their being related by the analogy. Because we have no experience of the universe as such or of instances of universes having been created by other universe creators, we cannot emply the analogy.
(4) But even if we accept this, analogies allow us to conclude only so much goodness and intelligence as are evident in the things we experience. Watchmakers do not create the original materials from which they make their watches; so why should we think that God creates the materials of the world from nothing? (That is, God could be the architect of the world without being a creator.) Furthermore, if the world exhibits imperfection (as is empirically evident a posteriori), then we must conclude that its creator is imperfect as well. Evil and suffering could thus be due to a malicious or impotent creator, or a committee of finite (though powerful, though certainly not infinitely powerful) gods, or a child god who tosses off universes (for all we know) like discarded sand castles, or a god who dies in the process of creating the world. Certainly, using the analogy and beginning with experience, one cannot conclude that the creator of the universe is all-perfect, because the universe itself is not. And if nothing is allowed as evidence of the world's imperfection, then it seems that the conclusion about God being its creator is merely being assumed rather than proved.

This last objection raises the issue of the problem of evil, the claim that the existence of an all-good, all-powerful God is inconsistent with the existence of evil in the world. According to the argument, if God were able or were willing to do away with evil, he would do so. The fact that there is evil in the world indicates that he is unable or unwilling (or perhaps both) to remove evil from the world.

Against this objection, religious believers have developed a number of arguments:

1. Evil is not real; things such as sickness and disease only seem evil from our perspective. Evil is simply the absence of the way things ought to be; it is not some real or positive force (e.g., the devil).

Replies: tell the mother whose child has just died that the evil of that is just in her head. No one really believes that evil is not real. Besides, if evil is just a matter of perspective, then so is good; so we cannot say that God's creation is good either.

2. Evil is necessary to highlight and balance the good. Without evil, we would not know what the good is and would not appreciate it. Any suffering in this life will be more than compensated by the eternal rewards of the next life.

Reply: surely God could have made us such that we would be able to understand the nature of the good without forcing us to undergo the seemingly needless excesses of evil that we endure. We may learn better and become tested persons through struggle, but that is no consolation for the infant who dies a horrible death: what does he or she learn? And why does there have to be so much evil? OK, already, we get the point: good is desirable, evil is bad--enough already! Besides, this argument is making the same point that the previous argument makes: evil is not really bad because it serves a useful (good) purpose. So in the end, defenders of God say that evil is really good!

Hume raises another objection to this defense of God by pointing out that it requires that we already believe in an afterlife simply to balance the perceived evil in the world. But the existence of evil is precisely the reason not to believe in God or an afterlife. He says, why not acknowledge that evil is evidence against an afterlife and a God?

[The Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky goes even further in arguing that no reconciliation of evil and the existence of God (what is called a "theodicy") is possible. Unjustified suffering is unavengeable: not even in an afterlife can all be made right, for those who have suffered never erase the suffering. That does not mean, however, that we should not believe in God; it only means that the belief in God can never be reconciled with the reality of evil.]

3. Evil is not God's fault; it is due to human failure, sinfulness, and misuse of free will.

Reply: this does not explain why natural evil (e.g., disasters such as tornados or earthquakes) occur. And why can't God create human beings with the ability to recognize the good and to want to choose the good? If this would destroy human freedom--and God knows that by the misuse of freedom we will choose evil--then why does he create us at all? It seems that through creation God knowingly introduces evil into the world, and is thus ultimately responsible for it.

The counter-reply to this: when God creates human beings, he creates beings who are imperfect. Just as God cannot create a square circle, he cannot create a perfect human being because, by definition, human beings are imperfect. He knows that we will sin; but we are the ones who sin, not God. God does not force us to do what we want to do.