Philosophy
of Religion
Definitions of Faith
I. Credential —acceptance of unproven
dogma and information
II. Fiducia —more than intellectual
assent; involves hear and will
III. Fideis —trust with cognitive element,
uses history and reason
Three Distortions of
Faith
I. Intellectual distortion—acceptance of
proposition given by authority
II. Voluntaristic distortion—lack of
evidence made up for by act of will
III. Emotionalistic distortion—no concrete
fact, only subjective emotion
Challenges to Religious Belief.

Introduction.
– In recent centuries, several philosophers
have challenged central assumptions of
religious belief, often with the purpose
of advancing atheism.
David

Hume.
1. The Irrationality of Believing in Miracles
– a. Thesis: it is never reasonable to
believe second hand reports concerning
miracles.
– The wise person should proportion his
belief to the evidence; this counts for
sensory evidence from testimony as
well.
b. Evidence and belief.
 c. Reasons for not trusting testimonies.
– ii. The character or number of the
witnesses: too few or of a doubtful
character.
– i. The opposition of contrary testimony:
when witnesses contradict each other.
– iii. The manner of delivering the testimony:
when delivered with bias, hesitation,
violent declaration.


d. Definition of a Miracle.
– i. General definition: "a miracle is a
violation of the laws of nature".
– ii. More accurate definition: "a
transgression of a law of nature by a
particular volition of the deity, or by the
interposition of some invisible agent".

e. Main argument against miracles.
– i. Uniform experience of nature amounts to a direct
and full proof against the existence of any miracle.
– ii. Argument in propositional form.
 (1) The evidence from experience in support of a
law of nature is extremely strong.
 (2) A miracle is a violation of a law of nature.
 (3) Therefore, the evidence from experience
against the occurrence of a miracle is extremely
strong.
– iii. General maxim about testimonies: a testimony is
reasonable only if its truth is more likely than its
falsehood.

f. Four additional arguments against
miracles.
– i. Witnesses lack Integrity.
– ii. Predisposition to Sensationalize.
– iii. Abound in Barbarous Nations.
– iv. Miracles Support Rival Religious
Systems.

g. Miracles in Christianity: two
interpretations of Hume’s point.
– i. Friendly interpretation: the miracles
and prophecies in the Bible are not
rational, and can only be believed
through an act of divinely inspired faith.
– ii. Unfriendly interpretation: belief in
miracles is so irrational that it requires
miraculous stupidity on the part of the
believer.
Karl Marx
. Religion as the Opium of the Masses
 a. Thesis: religion is like a drug insofar as
it is created by people as a means of
dealing with genuine suffering and
oppression.
 b. 19th century critics of religion
commonly offered psychological and
sociological explanations for how
presumably erroneous religious
convictions arise in the minds of believers
and how they function in society.


c. The opium of the people.
– i. It is a projection of the best conception we
have of human life. It lulls people into
complacency to accept their present status in
hopes for a better life in the hereafter.

d. Marx’s Naturalism.
– i. Theologians often defend the concepts of
God and religion with arguments about the
first cause of the world; Marx believes that
these questions are misguided and prove
nothing
Friedrich Nietzsche.
The Death of God:
 a. Thesis: civilization has “killed” (i.e.,
outgrown) God through advances, and we
need to find a new value system as a
replacement for religion.
 b. The significance of the end of religious
belief.
– i. Parable of the madman: announces
the death of God and the effects this
has produced.

c. The consequences of the end of
religious belief.
– i. The value system of religion is gone,
and we have no fixed truth to rely on –
not even science, which is left over from
belief in God.
 d. Religion, science, pessimism, and need.
– i. People are reluctant to give up religion
because of a certain need to believe and
to rely on something. The instinct of
weakness preserves religions,
metaphysics, and other kinds of
convictions.

. The Problem of Evil
Introduction.
 a. Principal question: how could an allgood God permit human suffering and
other evils.
 b. Sometimes discussed to clarify God’s
nature and human expectations of God;
other times as an argument against the
existence of God.

Fyodor Dostoevsky.
. God and Human Suffering:
 a. Thesis: the suffering of innocent
animals and children seems to serve no
greater good, and we would expect God to
prevent these things.
 b. Dialogue between two brothers, Ivan
(an atheist) and Alyosha (novice monk).


c. Main problem.
– i. Innocent animals and children
frequently suffer, and there is no
apparent good that comes from this to
justify it.
– ii. Believers in God are often the sources
of suffering, which compounds the
problem.
– iii. Divine punishment of the offenders
would not solve the problem.
John Mackie
The Logical Problem of Evil
 a. Thesis: belief in an all good and all
powerful God is logically inconsistent with
the fact of suffering in the world
 b. The only adequate solutions to the
problem are to deny God’s goodness,
God’s power, or the existence of evil.
However theologians do not take this
route


c. Inadequate solutions
– i. Goodness cannot exist without evil. Mackie
responds that evil may be necessary to recognize
goodness, but evil is not ontologically necessary for
goodness to exist
– Ii. The universe is better with some evil in it; for
example, without poverty (a first-order evil) there
would be no charity (a second-order good). Mackie
responds that first-order evils like poverty will also
allow for second order evils, such as malevolence
– Iii. Free will defense: evil is the result of human
choice, for which God bears no responsibility. He
responds that God could have created a world
containing free creatures that always chose to do
good
John Hick




A Soul-Making Theodicy
a. Thesis: human creation is a developmental
process during which time we evolve to
eventually become a more perfect likeness of
God; suffering is part of the process.
b. Hick follows Irenaeus, who maintained that
human creation involves a two step process:
(1) we are created in the image of God, and,
(2) after much development, become recreated in the likeness of God.
c. Hick’s view is compatible with evolutionary
theory.
Mysticism and Religious Experience



Introduction
a. Mystical experiences are a kind of
religious experience that specifically
involves a sense of union with God.
b. Unanimity thesis: there is a
presumption in favor of the reliability of
mystical experiences because mystics in
different religions generally report the
same thing (i.e., a unity of all things).





. Hindu Mysticism.
a. Thesis: Hindu mysticism involves
experiencing the Self-God (Atman Brahman),
which is the ultimate reality of all things that
lies at the core of each of our identities.
b. Bhagavad Gita.
i. Dialogue between Arjuna (an expert archer)
and Krishna (his chariot driver Krishna) about
engaging in a bloody family feud. Krishna
teaches Arjuna about the Self-God and the
meditative path of yoga.
ii. Those who cannot accomplish it in this life
can try again in the next.


c. Patanjali’s Yoga Sutra describes an
eight-step meditative process that leads
to this mystical experience.
i. Appetitive restraint, social observance,
bodily postures, breath regulation,
suppression of the senses, focus, even
awareness, and meditative union.


The Limited Authority of Mystical
Experiences: William James.
a. Thesis: the claims of various mystics
and concluded that they may be justly
authoritative for the mystic having the
experience, but they have no authority
over the nonmystic




b. James defends three points.
i. Mystical states are authoritative for the
mystic because they are directly perceived in a
way similar to the way our senses perceive the
world around us.
ii. “No authority emanates from them which
should make it a duty for those who stand
outside of them to accept their revelations
uncritically”.
iii. Mystical experiences show that our normal
consciousness of



The Untrustworthiness of Mystical
Experiences: Bertrand Russell.
a. Thesis: mystical claims about the
world are untrustworthy because they
require abnormal physical states.
b. Three common points in reports of
mystical experiences: the unity of the
world, the illusory nature of evil, and the
unreality of time.


c. In spite of the unanimity of reports of
mystical experiences, Russell argues that
they should be dismissed because they
require abnormal bodily states.
d. There may be some psychological
benefits to moderate mystical
experiences, particularly as it gives the
sense of “Breadth and calm and
profundity
Relationship of God
to the World
I. God as Efficient Cause—shapes the cosmic
process from preexistence matter and forms
II. God as the source of the cosmic process
which arises as an inner self-manifestation from
the Divine Being
A. Plotinus—all reality consists of a series of
necessary emanations from the One as the
Eternal Source
B. Spinoza—the universe arises by logical
necessity from the Divine Nature and is
itself God
C. Hegel—the universe is a dynamic
evolution of the Absolute Spirit
III. God as the ever-changing final stage
of the ongoing cosmic process—not its
efficient cause or ground
A. According to Samuel Alexander, in
its evolution from primal space-time
the world is ever on the move toward
an infinitely perfect goal
B. While it perpetually strives toward
this goal it never attains a state of
absolute perfection
IV. God is the final cause of the Cosmic
Process
A. Aristotle’s view of matter as
uncreated and eternal, but considers
God not only the efficient cause but
also the final cause that at its ends or
goal induces change in the world
B. Whitehead modifies this approach
and rejects God as efficient Cause or
creator, but considers God as the final
cause that brings order into the world
Proofs for the
Existence of
God
Cosmological
(Causal)
Thomas Aquinas
I. Attempts to prove God’s existence from
everyday experiences of the ordinary
world around us
A. Knowledge must be fed to us
through the senses
B. Since God, thus, cannot be seen,
we know God directly, but only through
his effects
II. He produced the “Five Ways”
A. The first is from movement in the
sense of change from potency to act;
the Final Mover
B. The second seeks to prove God’s
existence as Efficient Cause, from
whom we must have derived our
existence and the existence of the
worlds as we know it; The Creator or
Maker
C. The third way deals with the very
nature of being—this being is called
“contingent”, beings happen to exist, but
they might never have existed all; the
Necessary Being
D. The fourth way begins from the
pattern which objects make in the
“Hierarchy of Nature”
1. Some things are more perfect than
others
2. Different things can be good in
varying degrees according to their
position in the “Hierarchy of Being”
3. This hierarchical goodness must
have some ultimate explanation which
must itself be unlimited; the Source of
all Perfection and Value
E. The Teleological Way—argues from the
complexity of nature and the law and
order underlying
Teleological Proof
I. William Paley wrote Natural Theology
(1802) represents the 18th century view in
its “classical form”
II. He writes that there could not be a
design without a designer:
Arrangement, disposition of parts,
subserviency of means to an end,
relation of instruments to arise, imply
the presence of intelligence with mind.
The existence of such a complicated
and interrelated world requires the
existence of an eternal omniscient
designer for such a magnificent world
could not have been the result of blind,
unthinking chaos.
III. Paley’s world was Newtonian, based
on a static mechanical model of nature
A. It was a world of design, not
development
B. It was concerned with the order of
nature, not the history of nature
Ontological Argument
I. Anselm (1033-1109) was foremost
among scholastic thinkers
II. Wanted to defend the faith by
intellectual reasoning rather than by
arguments based on Scripture and other
authorities
III. Cur Deus Homo; important
contribution to the theology of the
Atonement—interpreted the doctrine in
terms of the satisfaction due to the
outraged majesty of God
IV. The Monologian; was to establish the
being of God solely from the consideration
of truth and goodness as intellectual
notions
V. The Proslogian; the above reasoning
was given a more systematic form
VI. Popular until the latter half of the 13th
century: Descartes and Leibniz would
revive it
VII. If we accept Anselm’s definition of
God as that being greater than which
cannot be conceived, the ontological
argument asserts that it is contradictory to
conceive fo God’s non-existence, since
existence is inherent in God’s perfection
VIII. To simplify this proof, one scholar
devised the following outline:
A. I have an idea of God
B. I am finite
C. My idea of God is infinite
D. Therefore the idea of God must
be—the idea must have originated with
the infinite mind
IX. Anselm’s argument is a priori, without
recourse to empirical existence
Moral Proof
I. Immanuel Kant develops this proof
after he destroyed the first three
II. He established the possibility of belief
in God by means of a method which would
have vast repercussions in modern and
contemporary philosophical theology
III. His proof:
A. Duty comes to us in the form of a
categorical imperative
B. It is categorical in contradistinction
to hypothetical, it is absolute and
unconditional
C. It could not follow the formula; you
ought to do your duty if because this is
reconcilable with you ought to do your
duty if you have sufficient desire or
inclination to do it
D. The hypothetical imperative concerns
prudential, not moral actions
E. Kant held that if this analysis of
morality was correct; then three things
would follow:
1. The Freedom of the Will, it would
be ludicrous to feel obliged to do an
action if in fact we were unable to do
it, ought implies can
2. The Immortality of the Soul, in spite
of repeated attempts we never achieve
our highest desire—to be wholly moral
or good
(a) Therefore we must have faith
in and live in the expectation of a
life beyond this one where the
supreme achievement is possible
and actual
(b) Thus, mortality demands that
we believe in the immortality of
the soul
3. The Existence of God
(a) He was aware that the pursuit of
the moral life does not always lead to
happiness and the pursuit of happiness
does not necessarily lead to the
achievement of virtue
(b) Kant held that this insight leads a
moral agent to believe in a God who
can correlate the two—happiness and
virtue
(c ) Technically, Kant did not regard
this as a “proof” of God; rather it is
regarded as an “invitation”
Soren
Kiekegaard
(1813-1855)
Introduction
I. Lived in the 19th century, but many
scholars believe he belongs to the 20th
II. His influence became prominent after
WWI
III. Known as the “Father of Christian
Existentialism”
IV. His family life
A. Father was a dominating
personality—successful in business and
retired at age of 40
B. Kierkegaard with the 7th and last
child (first child came after 4 months of
marriage
C. His mother was 45 and his father as
56 at his birth
D. His father was a man of great guilt
feelings, interpreted as
1. a result of the “premature” birth of
his first child
2. a result of his cursing God as a
young man
E. His father enjoyed taking him on
imaginary trips
F. Strict religious orthodoxy was part of
his younger years
G. He would break from his father’s
influence for a while but would reconcile
and experience a sort of “conversion” at
the age of 25
V. He entered the University of
Copenhagen in 1920 to study philosophy
A. His real interest were in literature
and philosophy
B. While at the university he seemed
to have been a charming and very
popular student
His “Conversion”
I. A series of events brought about a
spiritual crisis in his life
A. His father’s confession of a “moral
sin” committed with his servant girl
B. His broken engagement with his
fiancé, Regine Olson in 1837
1. She was a lovely and bright young
lady
2. He became engaged to Regine after
completing his degree
3. After a year he realized he had
made a mistake and the engagement
was broken
4. He never answered the “why” of
the breakup
a. He claimed to have loved her
and never loved any other
b. In his Journals, he spoke of a
“divine protest”
c. This experience began what he
referred to as his aesthetic
period
5. He wrote several books under a
pseudonym which dealt with his
relationship to Regine
a. Either/or
b. Repetition
c. Fear and Trembling
d. Editying Discourses
C. He had written against a “scandalous
paper” and he had expected his attacks
would elicit support, such did not happen
1. The paper turned on him with a
series of savage articles and cartoons
which held him up to ridicule
2. He then suffered a “martyrdom of
laughter” which resulted in isolating
him further from the masses, which he
likened at this time of a flock of dumb
geese
3. He saw this experience as
“providential” and increased his resolve to
pursue his religious writings
4. During this period he wrote his two
philosophical masterpieces
a. Philosophical Fragments (1844)
b. Concluding Unscientific Postscripts
(1846)
5. His other works at this time
included:
a. Purity of Heart
b. The Concept of Dread
c. Sickness Unto Death
d. Training in Christianity
e. For Self-Examination
II. During the last decades of his life he
came to a profound awareness of Christian
truth and believed that he was called to
witness to this truth as he saw it
A. He realized this would entail
suffering for him as an individual at the
hands of the majority
B. The writings of these years all point
to the difficulty of becoming a Christian
and the “hypocrisy” of conventional
Christianity and the institutional church
C. He finally felt called to make a direct
and unsparing attack on the state church
of Denmark
D. Articles and pamphlets which appeared
between 1854 and 1855 were published in
English as Attack Upon Christendom
E. According to Kierkegaard, where
everyone is considered Christian by the
conventional act of baptism, true
Christianity does not exit
His Thought
I. His work can be seen as a sustained
attack upon all forms of rational theology
A. Like Hegel, he uses a dialectical
method—but his methodology was
existential, that is:
B. It does not move within a closed,
necessary, logical system
C. It begins, rather, with a single
individual confronted with the
possibilities of one’s own existence
II. His existential dialectic moves with
three chief spheres
A. The Aesthetic
1. This period is identified with
“romantic sensibility”
(a) sensual immediacy—Don
Juan
(b) doubt—Faust
(c) despair—the wandering
Jew
2. Chief characteristic of this sphere is the
lack of involvement, an inability to make a
determined and permanent action
3. One becomes a drifting victim of one’s
own search for the “pleasurable” moment,
which is never satisfied and leads to
restlessness
4. This futility leads to the second stage
of the aesthetic despair—the skepticism of
Faust—which is a qualified form of despair
5. The recognition of despair is invoked in
the figure of the Wandering Jew, in whom
lurks the profounder despair which results
in complete absence of hope
6. In Sickness Unto Death, he analyses
the dialectic of despair with brilliant insight
a. Despair must come before one
realizes the true consciousness of life
b. Despair can lead to a spiritual
hardening and death
c. Yet, it can also lead one to awaken
to one’s eternal validity
7. Anxiety and despair will bring one
before a decision and this decision
requires a “leap” to a new stage
II. The Ethical
A. The leap to the Ethical Stage can
be summed up with the phrase,
choose thyself
B. The aim of the ethical life is not
simply to know the truth but to
become the truth; not to produce
objective truth but to transform
one’s subject self
C. Most ethical systems are overly formal
and cannot take into account certain
indispensable existential realities
1. For instance, he would criticize
Kant’s Moral Theology for the following
reasons:
2. It tended to make evil and sin
superficial rather than radical
3. It failed to deal adequately with the
motivation or will to carry out the
moral imperative
D. In Fear and Trembling, he wrote about
the teleological suspension of the
ethical
1. Could there be situations in which
one’s absolute obedience to God would
contravene the Categorical
Imperative—such as Abraham’s
sacrifice of his son Isaac
2. He would answer yes! For one
who knows the living God determines
his relation to the universal by his
relation to the absolute, not his
relation to the absolute by his relation
to the universal
D. For Kierkegaard, most ethical systems
fail and there must be an existential
leap to the religious stage of existence
III. The Religious
A. There are two possibilities in the
religious stage, as recorded in
Philosophical Fragments in which he
compares the religion of Socrates (who
is symbol of all philosophical idealism)
with the Christian doctrine of creation
1. The religion of immanence: the
religion of Socrates presupposes that
religious truth is in every human being
a. All people posses truth; what is
needed is a teacher or midwife who, by
skillful means, can induce the student
to give birth to the knowledge located
within
b. Each student is his/her own center
and the entire world centers on the
student
c. The teacher and the occasion of his
teachings have no special significance
2. The religion of Jesus:
a. But what if Socrates is wrong—what
if a specific moment in time is of vital
significance for the acquisition of truth?
b. Then, the teacher becomes an
indispensable and unique bearer of the
truth
c. The teacher must bring truth to the
student and give to the student the
conditions necessary for understanding
it
d. A teacher who gives the student the
requisite condition and truth is no
ordinary teacher, but should be called
Savior and Redeemer
e. The disciple, who, in a state of error
receives the condition and the truth
becomes another man . . . A man of a
different quality, or as we may call him,
a new creature
3. He regards the Incarnation as a
paradox since it exceeds all limits of
human comprehension
4. It is the Absolute Paradox, the
Absurd to which we can respond either in
Faith or in Offense
5. The paradox of the Incarnation is
doubly absurd for:
a. It claims that God has become
human, that the Eternal has become
temporal, and;
b. Human happiness can have its point
of departure in a historical event, the
historicity of which can be only be
accorded probability
6. He stresses that one’s eternal
happiness can be based upon historical
knowledge alone, for history is the sphere
of the relative and the probable
7. Eternal truth can be appropriated only
by a Faith in the Paradox held in infinite
passion
III. Truth is Subjectivity
A. Kierkegaard did not deny that there
truths independent of the knower—
what he insisted was that it wrong to
think of religious truth--, i.e., faith, as
acquired in the same way one obtains
knowledge
B. He wrote in his Journals:
The thing is to find a Truth which is
true for me, to find the idea for which I
can live and die . . . What good would
it do me to be able to explain the
meaning of Christianity if it had no
deeper significance for me and my life
C. In Concluding Unscientific Postscripts,
he stresses that it is not the objective
truth of Christianity, but the relationship of
the existing individual to Christianity which
is the fundamental problem—in religion
truth is subjective because it is a truth
that requires personal appropriation
d. He is referring to a special kind of
truth—it is existential truth, truth that
cannot be known through a parrot-like
echo but only through one’s own activity
6. Thus, religious truth requires a leap of
faith
7. This leap is a moral and religious
category and has to do with what William
James called live options, those
existential decisions of life involving
new situations
His Influence
I. The immediate effect of his writings
outside Denmark was extremely small
II. For over a century his influence would
be small, but when his impact was felt, it
was felt hard
III. He may be called the Father of NeoOrthodoxy; his system is call the Theology
of Crisis