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philosophy of religion
philosophy of religion, discipline concerned with the
philosophical appraisal of human religious attitudes and
of the real or imaginary objects of those attitudes, God or
the gods. The philosophy of religion is an integral part of
philosophy as such and embraces central issues
Charles Sprague Pearce: regarding the nature and extent of human knowledge, the
Religion
ultimate character of reality, and the foundations of
morality.

Historical development
Ancient origins
Philosophical interest in religion may be said to have
originated in the West with the ancient Greeks. Many of
the enduring questions in the philosophy of religion were
first addressed by them, and the claims and controversies
they developed served as a framework for subsequent
Raphael: detail from School of philosophizing for more than 1,500 years. Plato (427–
Athens
347 BCE), who developed the metaphysical theory of
Forms (abstract entities corresponding to the properties
of particular objects), was also one of the first thinkers to consider the idea of creation and to
attempt to prove the existence of God. Plato’s student Aristotle (384–322 BCE) developed his
own metaphysical theory of the first, or unmoved, mover of the universe, which many of his
interpreters have identified with God. Aristotle’s speculations began a tradition that later came
to be known as natural theology—the attempt to provide a rational demonstration of the
existence of God based on features of the natural world. The Stoicism of the Hellenistic Age
(300 BCE–300 CE) was characterized by philosophical naturalism, including the idea of natural
law (a system of right or justice thought to be inherent in nature); meanwhile, thinkers such as
Titus Lucretius Carus in the 1st century BCE and Sextus Empiricus in the 3rd century CE taught
a variety of skeptical doctrines. Although not an original work of philosophy, De natura
deorum (44 BCE; “The Nature of the Gods”), by the Roman statesman and scholar Marcus

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Tullius Cicero, is an invaluable source of information on ancient ideas about religion and the
philosophical controversies they engendered.

In the Hellenistic Age philosophy was considered not so much a set of theoretical reflections
on issues of abiding human interest but a way of addressing how a person should conduct his
life in the face of corruption and death. It was natural, therefore, that the various positions of
Hellenistic philosophers should both rival and offer support to religion. A vivid vignette of the
nature of these overlapping and competing philosophies is to be found in the account of the
Apostle Paul’s address at the Areopagitica in Athens, as recorded in the Acts of the Apostles.
Confronted by Stoics, Epicureans, and no doubt others, Paul attempted to identify their
“unknown God” with the God and Father of Jesus Christ.

By the 3rd century, Christian thinkers had begun to adopt the ideas of Plato and of
Neoplatonists such as Plotinus. The most influential of these figures, St. Augustine of Hippo
(354–430), elucidated the doctrine of God in terms of Plato’s Forms. For Augustine, God, like
the Forms, was eternal, incorruptible, and necessary. Yet Augustine also saw God as an agent
of supreme power and the creator of the universe out of nothing. Augustine’s alteration of
Platonic thought shows that such thinkers did not take over Greek ideas uncritically; indeed,
they may be seen as using Greek ideas to elucidate and defend scriptural teaching against
pagan attack. They borrowed key Greek terms, such as person (soma; persona), nature (physis;
natura), and substance (ousia; substantia), in an effort to clarify their own doctrines.

Medieval traditions
The Platonism of Augustine exercised lasting influence on Christian theologians and was
given renewed expression in the writings of the theologian and archbishop Anselm of
Canterbury (1033–1109), whose ontological argument has remained at the centre of
philosophical speculation about God’s existence (see below Epistemological issues).

In the 12th and 13th centuries the influence of Plato was gradually replaced by that of
Aristotle, whose philosophical importance was most clearly demonstrated in the works of St.
Thomas Aquinas (1225–74), the foremost philosopher of Scholasticism. Aquinas’s grand
achievement was to wed Aristotelian methods and ideas with the Augustinian tradition of
viewing philosophy as an ally rather than an opponent of religion, thus providing a new
philosophical direction for Christian theology.

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Aquinas, however, was only the first among many equals in philosophical reflection on the
nature of religion in this period. The rediscovery of the philosophical writings of Aristotle by
Islamic scholars ushered in a period of intense philosophical activity, not only in the schools of
Islam but also among Jewish and Christian thinkers. From the late 9th to the early 14th
century, philosophers as diverse as al-Fārābī, Avicenna, al-Ghazālī, Moses Maimonides, and
John Duns Scotus explored reason and revelation, creation and time, and the nature of divine
and human action.

In the late Middle Ages the cooperation between philosophy and theology broke down. Later
medieval theologians such as William of Ockham moved away from the Platonic and
Aristotelian discourse that had dominated both philosophy and theology. Ockham and other
nominalists of the period rejected the claim that the properties displayed by objects (e.g.,
redness and roundness) are universals that exist independently of the objects themselves. In
addition, a strong theological voluntarism shifted the focus of theological discourse away from
God’s intellect and the rationality of his creation and toward the absolute power and
arbitrariness of God’s will.

Philosophers and theologians of the Renaissance and the Protestant Reformation looked upon
Scholasticism as a highly sophisticated but needlessly speculative welding of pagan
philosophy and Christian theology that tended to obscure authentic Christian themes.
Renaissance thinkers rejected the medieval tradition in favour of the pristine sources of
Western philosophy in Classical civilization. The Reformers emphasized both the supremacy
of Scripture and the relative inability of the unaided human mind to reason about God in a
reliable fashion. But although both movements were critical of medieval thought, neither was
free of its influence.

The Enlightenment
In the 17th century the philosophy of religion was taken in new directions by René Descartes
in France and John Locke in England. The significance of Descartes and Locke lay in the fact
that they were self-confessedly philosophical innovators. In Descartes’s rationalism (the view
that reason is the chief source of human knowledge), God is displaced from the centre of
philosophical thought and becomes the guarantor of the reliability of sense experience.
Locke’s more modest empiricism (the view that the chief source of human knowledge is
experience) led to the development of a more “reasonable” approach to religion in which

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reason was held to constrain any appeal to divine revelation. Their English and Continental
followers—such as John Toland, Matthew Tindal, baron d’Holbach, and Claude-Adrien
Helvétius—rejected tradition and hence the authority of reports of miracles and revelation.
Eschewing mystery in religion, they appealed to a universal “religion of nature,” or natural
religion, which could be established on the basis of propositions that any intelligent and
reasonable person would accept.

Enlightenment thinking on religion culminated in the late

18th century in the work of the German philosopher
Immanuel Kant. Kant argued that time, space, causation,
and substance—among other features of reality—are
innate conceptual categories through which the human
Immanuel Kant mind imposes order on experience. There can be no
knowledge of matters allegedly existing beyond these
categories; thus, there can be no knowledge of God and, hence, no theological knowledge.
Having thus written off any metaphysical justification of religion, Kant introduced a
conception of religion that arose from his idea of morality. Morally right acts, he held, are
those aimed at bringing about the highest good (summum bonum), a state in which people are
rewarded with happiness in proportion to the level of virtue they achieve. But one cannot
rationally will to bring about the highest good unless one believes that such a state is possible,
and it is possible only in an eternal afterlife ordered by God. The existence of God and the
immortality of the soul can thus be “postulated” as rational conditions of morality, even
though they cannot be proved theoretically. In this way religion, for Kant, was a matter of
practical reason, concerned with what people ought to do, rather than of theoretical reason,
concerned with what people have good reason to think is true (see below Religion and
morality).

Philosophy of religion since the 19th century

It is a short but significant step from postulating the existence of God as a condition of
morality to regarding the idea of God as a “projection” of human concerns. It is a step that a
number of thinkers after Kant—including the German philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach and the
Austrian founder of psychoanalysis Sigmund Freud—readily took. They saw religion as
compensation for, and therefore an escape from, unhappy aspects of the human condition. A
notable and influential example of this approach is that of Karl Marx, who saw religion as “the
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sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world and the soul of soulless
conditions. It is the opium of the people.” Along with those who viewed the idea of God as
projection were thinkers, sometimes under the influence of modern science, who neither
accepted nor rejected God’s existence. The English biologist Thomas Henry Huxley coined the
term agnosticism as a name for the view that there is no conclusive evidence for or against the
existence of God. However, many scientists, like the American botanist Asa Gray, sought ways
of harmonizing scientific advances with orthodox Christianity.

Forms of religion based on idealism (a philosophical movement that stressed the spiritual or
ideational in the interpretation of experience) abandoned the idea of a transcendent God and
identified the divine with wholly immanent attitudes or processes. Friedrich Schleiermacher,
for example, saw religion as the feeling of absolute dependence or the recognition of
contingency, while G.W.F. Hegel, the greatest of the idealists, identified true religion with the
development of the entire world order. Not only is God in history; God is history. These views,
often raised against mechanistic and utilitarian attitudes in the 19th century, were attractive
because of the vague religiosity, sometimes of a pantheistic character, that they encouraged.

During the 20th century philosophical interests were secularized, with the consequence that
the strong link between mainstream philosophy and the discussion of religious questions was
weakened. In the 1920s and ’30s the logical positivists, and later the noncognitivists, declared
that metaphysical and theological (as well as ethical and aesthetic) sentences are literally
meaningless because they cannot be verified through sense experience. Sentences about the
qualities of God or about the nature of spiritual experience, for example, make claims about
entities or events that cannot be empirically observed or demonstrated. Thus, sentences such as
“God is love” and “divine grace works upon the soul” are empty of cognitive content and
therefore neither true nor false.

The widespread abandonment of logical positivism in the 1950s and ’60s (due in part to its
inability to account for the meaningfulness of certain scientific propositions and counterfactual
truths), led to a revival of traditional metaphysics and a consequent resurgence of interest in
themes in the philosophy of religion that had engaged thinkers before Kant, such as Gottfried
Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716). As a result, contemporary philosophy of religion, certainly in
the English-speaking world, has much more in common with medieval philosophy than it does
with the philosophy of the 19th century. Continental (German and French) philosophy of

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religion, however, continues to be rooted in the more iconoclastic tradition of Feuerbach and
Freud.
Main philosophical themes
The main themes that arise in the philosophy of religion have been shaped by issues
concerning the relation between human language and thought on the one hand and the nature
of the divine on the other. If it is possible neither to think nor to speak about God, then it is
obviously impossible to argue philosophically about him. The difficulties can be seen by
considering some extreme positions. If language about God or the divine is totally equivocal,
then saying that God is good or claiming to know that God is good bears no relation whatever
to standards of human goodness. If language about God is wholly anthropomorphic, then God
is reduced to human proportions, eliminating any transcendent reference. Yet if God is utterly
transcendent, it is doubtful that humans could possess an adequate concept of him or form true
propositions about him.

While philosophers have varied a great deal in their accounts of language about God (though
all acknowledge the use of metaphors and models in conveying understanding), they have
generally recognized that some element of univocity is indispensable if there are to be credible
claims to reason about God’s reality. It is sometimes argued that such language is best
expressed in negative terms: God is infinite (not finite), timeless (not in time), and so on.

Epistemological issues
The main epistemological question in the philosophy of religion is: Can God be known? This
apparently simple question quickly leads to issues of considerable complexity. There are two
main areas of debate: (1) whether it is possible to prove the existence of God—and, if not,
whether there is nevertheless a sense in which religious belief is reasonable—and (2) whether
knowledge of God is obtainable from sources other than human reason and sense experience.

Proofs of the existence of God are usually classified as either a priori or a posteriori—that is,
based on the idea of God itself or based on experience. An example of the latter is the
cosmological argument, which appeals to the notion of causation to conclude either that there
is a first cause or that there is a necessary being from whom all contingent beings derive their
existence. Other versions of this approach include the appeal to contingency—to the fact that
whatever exists might not have existed and therefore calls for explanation—and the appeal to
the principle of sufficient reason, which claims that for anything that exists there must be a
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sufficient reason why it exists. The arguments by Aquinas known as the Five Ways—the
argument from motion, from efficient causation, from contingency, from degrees of perfection,
and from final causes or ends in nature—are generally regarded as cosmological. Something
must be the first or prime mover, the first efficient cause, the necessary ground of contingent
beings, the supreme perfection that imperfect beings approach, and the intelligent guide of
natural things toward their ends. This, Aquinas said, is God. The most common criticism of the
cosmological argument has been that the phenomenon that God’s existence purportedly
accounts for does not in fact need to be explained.

The argument from design also starts from human experience: in this case the perception of
order and purpose in the natural world. The argument claims that the universe is strongly
analogous, in its order and regularity, to an artifact such as a watch; because the existence of
the watch justifies the presumption of a watchmaker, the existence of the universe justifies the
presumption of a divine creator of the universe, or God. Despite the powerful criticisms of the
Scottish philosopher David Hume (1711–76)—e.g., that the evidence is compatible with a
large number of hypotheses, such as polytheism or a god of limited power, that are as plausible
as or more plausible than monotheism—the argument from design continued to be very
popular in the 19th century. According to a more recent version of the argument, known as
intelligent design, biological organisms display a kind of complexity (“irreducible
complexity”) that could not have come about through the gradual adaptation of their parts
through natural selection; therefore, the argument concludes, such organisms must have been
created in their present form by an intelligent designer. Other modern variants of the argument
attempt to ground theistic belief in patterns of reasoning that are characteristic of the natural
sciences, appealing to simplicity and economy of explanation of the order and regularity of the
universe.

Perhaps the most sophisticated and challenging argument

for the existence of God is the ontological argument,
propounded by Anselm of Canterbury. According to
Anselm, the concept of God as the most perfect being—a
being greater than which none can be conceived—entails
Luca della Robbia: St. Anselm that God exists, because a being who was otherwise all
perfect and who failed to exist would be less great than a
being who was all perfect and who did exist. This argument has exercised an abiding

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fascination for philosophers; some contend that it attempts to “define” God into existence,
while others continue to defend it and to develop new versions.

It may be possible (or impossible) to prove the existence of God, but it may be unnecessary to
do so in order for belief in God to be reasonable. Perhaps the requirement of a proof is too
stringent, and perhaps there are other ways of establishing God’s existence. Chief among these
is the appeal to religious experience—a personal, direct acquaintance with God or an
experience of God mediated through a religious tradition. Some forms of mysticism appeal to
religious tradition to establish the significance and appropriateness of religious experiences.
Interpretations of such experiences, however, typically cannot be independently verified.

Religions typically defend their core beliefs by combining evidential, moral, and historical
claims as well as those that concern human spirituality. Because these claims together reflect
the religion’s conception of what knowledge of God is, they must be taken into account when
endeavouring to establish whether any particular belief within the religion is reasonable.

The Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity, and

Islam) also appeal to revelation, or to claims that God
has spoken through appointed messengers to disclose
matters which would otherwise be inaccessible. In
Christianity these matters have included the doctrine of
Giotto: The Nativity creation, the Trinity, and the Incarnation of Jesus Christ.
Various attempts have been made to establish the
reasonableness of the appeal to revelation through the witness of the church and through signs
and miracles, all of which are thought to herald the authentic voice of God. (This is the context
in which Hume’s classic critique of the credibility of reported miracles must be understood.)
Yet appeals to revelation by the various religions conflict with each other, and the appeal to
revelation itself is open to the charge of circularity.

Metaphysical issues
The idea of God
The claim that there is a God raises metaphysical questions about the nature of reality and
existence. In general, it can be said that there is not one concept of God but many, even among
monotheistic traditions. The Abrahamic religions are theistic; God is both the creator of the

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world and the one who sustains it. Theism, with its equal stress on divine transcendence of the
universe and immanence within it, constitutes a somewhat uneasy conceptual midpoint
between deism and pantheism. Deist conceptions of the divine see God as the creator of a
universe that continues to exist, without his intervention, under the physical impulses that he
first imparted to it. In pantheism, God is identified with the universe as a whole. Theism itself
has numerous subvarieties, such as occasionalism, which holds that the only real cause in the
universe is God; thus, all other causes are simply signs of coincidence and conjunction
between kinds of events occurring within the created order. For example, heat is not what
causes the water in a teakettle to boil but is simply what uniformly occurs before the water
boils. God himself is the cause of the boiling.

An important object of metaphysical reflection is God’s nature, or the properties of that nature.
Is God simple or complex? If omniscience, omnipotence, and beauty are part of the divine
perfection, what exactly are these properties? Is timeless eternity part of God’s perfection?
Can an omnipotent being will that there be a four-sided triangle or change the past? Does an
omniscient being know the future actions of free agents? (If so, how can they be free?) Does
an omniscient being who is timelessly eternal know what time it is now?

God and the universe

Whatever may have been the influence of Classical philosophy on the Abrahamic religions,
they have not, in general, accepted the Greek idea of the eternity of matter but have stressed
the contingency of the universe as the free creation of God. It has been argued, most notably
and influentially by Aquinas, that neither the eternity of matter nor the doctrine of creation can
be established by reason alone; thus, the belief that the universe is not eternal and was created
by God must be derived from revelation. Some, including Augustine, have claimed that God
created the universe from a standpoint outside time; others claim that God, like the universe, is
in time.

It is at points such as these in the philosophy of religion that philosophical arguments have less
to do with establishing the truth of some proposition and more to do with working out a
consistent and intelligible account of religious doctrine. At least since Augustine, philosophers
in the Abrahamic religions have seen one of their tasks to be the achievement of a greater
understanding of their own faith. They have examined the logical consequences of religious

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doctrines and sought to establish their consistency with the consequences of other beliefs, as
illustrated in the remainder of this section.

God and human action

Philosophical reflection on the nature of God has typically assumed that God is the sum of
perfection and is omnipotent and omniscient. Questions have arisen not only about the exact
meaning of these claims but also about their consistency with widespread beliefs about human
beings, chiefly the belief that they usually act freely and responsibly and should be held
accountable for their actions. If God, being omniscient, knows the future, then God
presumably knows what each person will do in the future. But if these actions are known by
God, how can the person be free not to do them? And if the person is not free not to do them,
how can he be held accountable for what he does? Even more difficult, perhaps, is the
question: If God is omnipotent and exercises providential control over his creation, how can
people be other than puppets?

Various strategies have been devised to overcome or to diminish the force of such difficulties.
It has been supposed, for example, that God is outside time and so does not, strictly speaking,
know anything beforehand. It has also been suggested that God does not know what humans
will freely do before they actually do it. Some thinkers have drawn a distinction between the
first cause of all that happens, which is God, and secondary causes, including humans and
other creatures. And some philosophers of religion have been content with a conception of
human freedom that is consistent with causal determinism, the view that all events and choices
are determined by previously existing causes. According to them, an action is free if it is
voluntary and uncoerced, and an action can be voluntary and uncoerced even though it is
causally determined. These issues remain the subject of vigorous debate among contemporary
philosophers.

The soul and immortality

The belief in life after death, which is maintained by each of the Abrahamic religions, raises
the metaphysical question of how the human person is to be defined. Some form of mind-body
dualism, whether Platonic or Cartesian, in which the mind or soul survives the death of the
body, has been favoured by many theologians. Others have claimed that some version of
physicalism or materialism is most consistent with scriptural ideas about the resurrection of
the body. The former group has a tendency to disparage or downplay the importance of
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embodiment; the latter group, however, faces the problem of giving an account of the
continuity of the person across the temporal gap between bodily death and bodily resurrection.

Religion and morality

Another concern of philosophers of religion is whether morality is dependent upon religion or
is independent of it. Among those who take the former view, some say that morality depends
upon religion in the way in which eating depends upon having an appetite: Religion provides
the motivation that makes people behave morally. To prove this, however, it would be
necessary to determine whether the behaviour of religious people is generally morally superior
to that of nonreligious people. Others hold that morality depends on religion because the very
idea of morality makes sense only if there is a God who sets objective standards or who will
reward and punish people in the life to come. Otherwise, it is claimed, morality is a matter
either of individual preference or of cultural or social convention.

Many of those who believe that morality is independent of religion have claimed that moral
truths can be adequately discerned through reason, conscience, or moral intuition. In this
connection it is worth noting that those who believe that religion is the basis of morality face
the following dilemma: If the commands issued by God are morally obligatory, then that is
because either: (1) they express independently justified moral values, or (2) God’s commands
are necessarily morally good. If alternative 1 is true, then morality is independent of religion.
If alternative 2 is true, then what is morally good seems to depend implausibly on God’s
whim: if God commanded the torture of human infants, then it would be morally good to
torture human infants. But this is absurd. This problem was first raised by Plato in his dialogue
Euthyphro.

According to another perspective, derived from Kant, not only is it not the case that morality
depends on religion, but in fact the reverse is true. As discussed above, in the Kantian
tradition, the existence of God and the immortality of the soul are “postulates” of practical
reason, or rational conditions of willing to bring about the highest good. Alternatively, they are
conditions of adhering strictly to the moral law, which demands that one perform morally right
acts only because they are right and not for any other reason, such as the goodness or badness
of their consequences. Only in an eternal afterlife ordered by God would such perfection be
possible.

The problem of evil

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Perhaps the most difficult issue concerning the relation between morality and belief in God is
the problem of evil. If God exists and is omnipotent and perfectly good, why does God allow
horrendous evils such as the Holocaust? Why is any evil at all allowed by the divine? The
problem is of ancient origins and has long been discussed by philosophers and theologians in
the Abrahamic religions in relation to the Fall of Man—the expulsion, whether literal or
metaphorical, of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden.

Few (if any) philosophers and theologians have been prepared to claim, with Leibniz, that the
existing world is the best of all possible worlds. If it were not, Leibniz argued, what sufficient
reason would God have had to create it? Apart from Leibniz’s view, three positive strategies
have been developed. One stresses the importance of free will in accounting for moral evil
(resulting from free human actions) as opposed to natural evil (resulting from natural events
such as earthquakes and plagues); it argues that a world in which people act freely, albeit
sometimes in an evil way, is to be preferred to a world of automata who do only what is right.
Another strategy stresses the idea that some evils are a logical precondition for the existence
of certain goods. The virtues of compassion, patience, and forgiveness, for example, can be
developed only in response to certain needs or weaknesses. A world that contains these goods
is better than one in which their exercise and development is impossible. The third approach
emphasizes the “cognitive distance” between human understanding and God’s will, noting that
humans cannot know in detail what the justification of God’s permission of evil might be. It is
possible, of course, to combine these three positions, or elements of them, in attempting to
offer an overall response to the problem of evil.

Some thinkers have approached evil, or certain evils, from the opposite direction. They have
argued not that evil presents an overwhelming problem for theism but that it provides an
argument for a life after death in which the injustices and inequities of the present life are
remedied.
Philosophy, religion, and religions
There is some tension within the practice of the philosophy of religion between those who
philosophize about religion in general or about abstract religious concepts and those who
consider the concrete expressions of religion in one of the great faiths. In the 19th century,
when the term philosophy of religion became current, the first attempts were made to define or
characterize the essence of religion in phenomenological or psychological terms such as the
recognition of contingency, the feeling of absolute dependence, or the sense of awe before the
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sacred. It must be said, however, that approaching religion in this rather abstract way has no
great potential for offering philosophical illumination, nor does it raise many serious
philosophical issues.

A similar tension afflicts the discussion of religious pluralism. Some philosophers of religion
see the world’s religions as offering multiple embodiments of one basic religious or ethical
stance. These religions are understood as ways of gaining cognitive access to the divine. The
problem with offering such a metareligious account lies in the danger of misdescribing the
beliefs and attitudes of the adherents of these traditions. For, it seems likely, whatever theorists
of religion may say is really true of such people, they themselves will typically see their own
religion as offering an exclusive salvific message and goal.

Because Western philosophy of religion tends to concentrate upon the philosophical traditions
of the Abrahamic religions, it may appear that it unduly neglects the philosophical traditions of
the other great faiths, such as Hinduism and Buddhism. To this charge there are two replies.
The first is that, as a matter of fact, the relation between Western philosophy and the
Abrahamic religions has been very rich, particularly so in the case of Christianity. This is
attested by the vast literature on issues of philosophy within these religious traditions.
However, the idea that the Abrahamic religions have been subjected to one rigid, oppressive,
philosophical orthodoxy is wide of the mark. Rather, the interaction between philosophical
argument and Abrahamic theologies has been very diverse, with a wide variety of positions
being expressed and defended. What has united these various and often conflicting positions is
a sense of common indebtedness to the philosophical traditions originating in Greece and
Rome. This remains so even when religious thinkers in the fideistic tradition—which regards
faith as being based not on evidence but rather on an act of will—have tried to repudiate the
claims of reason and argument in the name of faith.

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.
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1/9/23, 5:03 PM philosophy of religion -- Britannica Online Encyclopedia

Citation Information
Article Title: philosophy of religion
Website Name: Encyclopaedia Britannica
Publisher: Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc.
Date Published: 09 November 2022
URL: https://www.britannica.comhttps://www.britannica.com/topic/philosophy-of-religion
Access Date: January 09, 2023

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