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Chapter 1
Philosophy of Religion
A Vision for the Field
PAUL DRAPER
Philosophy of religion is the philosophical examination of religious concepts, beliefs, experiences, and practices. As such, it includes philosophical inquiry about religion-in-general, about particular religions (or families of religions), and about the non-religious and quasi-religious worldviews that interact and sometimes compete with religious worldviews.
When attending to religion-in-general, philosophy of religion seeks to analyze the concept of religion or, if analysis is misguided, to stipulate a definition of āreligionā that will work well for scholarly, or at least philosophical, purposes. It also aims to determine how religion is related to a variety of other things, including philosophy, science, morality, law, art, violence, and oppression. In addition, it addresses issues as diverse as the proper place of religion in political debate, how religion might make progress, and whether all or most religions share a common doxastic core, pursue any common goals, or respond to common forms of mystical or numinous experience. Finally, it seeks to assess the philosophical significance both of the diversity of religions and of scientific and historical work on the origins or development of religion.
When focused on a particular religion, philosophy of religion aims to analyze fundamental concepts, understand and evaluate core doctrines and practices, and investigate any distinctive experiences that play an important role in the lives of that religionās members. In addition, it attempts to identify and evaluate any answers that a religion gives to philosophical questions (e.g., Buddhist teachings about the nature of the self) and to answer any questions that a religion raises for philosophy (e.g., can philosophical work in metaphysics or logic shed any light on the doctrine of the Trinity?). In all of this, it is crucial that the philosopher of religion engage with a particular religion in a way that is both empathetic and impartial. The non-existence of a āview from nowhereā should not be used as an excuse to engage in partisan apologetics (whether religious or anti-religious).
In the English-speaking world, a substantial portion of work in philosophy of religion concerns either a single individual religion, namely, Christianity, or a small family of religions, Western monotheism. Relatively little attention is paid to non-Christian religions, to non-Western religions, or to competing non-religious worldviews, although some progress is being made. (An example of such progress is a recent Routledge series called āInvestigating Philosophy of Religion,ā which includes volumes on Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam, Judaism, and naturalism). Also, relatively little attention is given to the philosophy of religion-in-general, although once again, it appears that progress is being made as, for example, recent books on alternative concepts of God make clear (Diller and Kasher 2013 and Buckareff and Nagasawa 2016).
One of the reasons for the narrowness of focus in contemporary philosophy of religion is that religious believers tend to be more interested in the philosophy of religion than are non-believers, and most religious believers in the English-speaking world are Christians. Other sociological and historical factors also play a role, as does widespread ignorance of why non-religious philosophers should be interested in religion in the first place. An important goal for the field going forward is to broaden its focus, not just by adding more attention to non-Christian religions, including non-Western ones, but more importantly (and more realistically given current demographics), by increasing the attention given to the many fascinating philosophical issues that concern religion-in-general.
A second goal for the field concerns its identity. Philosophers of religion must never lose sight of the fact that, while philosophy of religion overlaps with theology, they are distinct fields and for good reason (Stump 2013). Part of what makes each discipline unique is how they treat (or should treat) special revelation. Ideally, philosophy of religion does not treat sacred texts or tradition as normative, while theology does. In recent years, this important distinction has become somewhat blurred in philosophy of religion. This may in part be because of what I hope is a misinterpretation of Alvin Plantingaās (1984) famous advice to Christian philosophers. Plantinga recommended that Christian philosophers use Christian beliefs as starting points for philosophical investigation in the same way that some non-Christian philosophers use scientific naturalism as a starting point for their philosophical work. This advice can be interpreted in two ways.
On the first interpretation, Plantinga is just recommending that Christian philosophers examine the implications of their religious beliefs for the philosophical problems on which they work. Interpreted this way, Plantingaās advice seems unproblematic. So long as Christian philosophers make it explicit that they are doing this, the worst that can happen is that many non-Christian philosophers will lose interest. Examining the philosophical implications of oneās worldview, whether religious or secular, is certainly a legitimate philosophical project.
According to the second interpretation, Plantinga was advising Christian philosophers to treat special revelation as data or starting points for philosophical inquiry, period. Doing that, however, is problematic because it would effectively turn philosophy (or at least philosophy of religion) into a branch of revealed theology. Even St. Thomas Aquinas was opposed to that! Appeals to special revelation have no place in most areas of philosophy of religion, including most obviously the areas of natural theology and exploratory philosophy of religion.
Unfortunately, it is now commonplace to find philosophers of religion improperly making explicit or implicit appeals to special revelation. For example, alternative concepts of God are often quickly dismissed simply because those concepts are incompatible with God playing the roles that, according to the Bible (interpreted a certain way), a Christian God is expected to play. Why, though, should exploratory philosophers of religion, who are interested in taking a purely philosophical approach to inquiry about Godās existence or nature, care that their models of God are āinadequate for theological discourseā or that according to their models God does not, for example, play the creator role that is essential to the God of the Bible? Yet, as surprising as this might seem, these are the sorts of reasons philosophersānot theologiansāoften give for rejecting such models. Another example concerns the approach many philosophers of religion take to their work on individual religions. The goal is not just the philosophical one of understanding the key concepts and doctrines of a religion and assessing whether or not they are coherent, but instead the narrow theological one of how to make them coherent without departing from scripture as interpreted by the religious denomination to which the philosopher of religion happens to belong.
Sometimes, the influence of special revelation is subtler, such as when non-Christian religions are interpreted (and distorted) using Christian categories (Sikka 2017); or when it is assumed that refuting naturalism establishes Western monotheism; or when it is assumed in discussions of divine hiddenness that a perfect God would be like the distant father familiar to us in some Biblical portraits of God (Schellenberg 2007, 197ā198; for an opposing viewpoint, see Rea 2018, 59ā61); or, to turn the tables, when it is assumed in discussions of divine hiddenness that our greatest good would be a personal relationship with God and so requires belief in God; or when topics such as future religious progress, which are properly part of the subject matter of philosophy of religion, are simply left unexplored. Concerning this last item, a recent Google search of āfuture progress in religionā generated a grand total of two results, while a search of āfuture progress in scienceā generated in the neighborhood of 47,600 results, a substantial portion of which exist because of work by philosophers of science.
Philosophy of religion, if it is to reach its full potential, must not function as a mere āhandmaidenā to revealed theology. This is not to deny that philosophical theology is a legitimate part of philosophy of religion, but it should be (and thankfully often is) pursued in a way that is largely unconstrained by āthe voice of authority.ā Also, no matter how philosophical theology is pursued, it is important to keep in mind that philosophy of religion is ideally a much bigger and for that reason a much more important area of philosophy than it would be if it consisted only of philosophical theology.
Another important goal for philosophy of religion is that those who specialize in it be knowledgeable about religion. Compare this to a similar goal for philosophy of science. About thirty years ago, I heard someone jokingly define a āphilosopher of scienceā as an epistemologist who reads Scientific American. It is much harder nowadays to find a grain of truth behind this joke because philosophers of science know more in general about science than they used to and because many know a great deal about at least one specific science like physics or biology. One thing that helped to strengthen the field in this regard was the establishment of a number of very strong history and philosophy of science programs. J. L. Schellenberg suggests that philosophy of religion might similarly benefit from the establishment of history and philosophy of religion programs. (This would also tend to broaden the focus of the field since the history of religion is already a broad field.) As matters currently stand, many philosophers of religion have relatively little expertise concerning religion beyond the fact that they were raised in some faith tradition. This is not a problem for topics in philosophy of religion that demand only philosophical expertise (e.g., modal ontological arguments), but it is a problem for other topics, and it helps to explain the relatively narrow focus of the field previously noted.
Familiarity with the academic study of religion would help philosophers of religion better understand both their own religion if they have one as well as other world religions. It would also be likely to increase their ability, and no doubt their willingness, to take on more of the various issues concerning religion-in-general that were mentioned above. Of course, an alternative proposal would be to let philosophers of religion with doctorates in religious studies handle all of the issues that require broad knowledge about religion, but that proposal ignores the fact that broad and deep training in philosophy makes one much better able to address all philosophical issues about religion (McKim 2017). Such training is crucial because, as even a passing familiarity with work in philosophy of religion reveals, such work quickly spills out into literally every other area of philosophy.
The final and perhaps most ambitious and controversial part of this vision for philosophy of religion is that the field will become the first area of philosophy to wholeheartedly embrace an ideal of balanced inquiry. One-sided inquiry is a problem in all areas of philosophy (with the possible exception of logic). Philosophers typically act like quasi-lawyers, searching only for arguments that support their positions and for objections to arguments that appear to support competing positions. Further, the positions philosophers defend so vigorously are not ones that they originally arrived at as a result of balanced philosophical inquiry. Indeed, in many cases those positions were not generated by philosophical inquiry at all. Instead, they are often accidents of birth or graduate training. Ideally, philosophers should act more like quasi-scientists, testing hypotheses by arguments they construct solely for the purpose of such testing. This, however, would require a significant cultural shift in the discipline.
The lawyerly behavior of philosophers is especially problematic in philosophy of religion because the vast majority of philosophers of religion are Christian theists, so nothing remotely like an effective adversarial system exists in the field. Indeed, the resulting bias in philosophy of religion as a whole is obvious to any objective inquirer familiar with the literature in the field. Also, philosophy of religion is of enormous practical significance. It deals with issues the resolution of which can make a profound impact on how we live our lives. Thus, too much is at stake to tolerate anything but the very highest standards of inquiry.
The solution to this problem of one-sided inquiry will depend in part on individual philosophers of religion making a serious effort to spend some of their time constructing arguments and developing positions that contribute to the development, understanding, or defense of a worldview that those philosophers do not themselves hold (Oppy 2017). This is not to say that these philosophers have to believe that all of those arguments or positions are sound or true. Again, the goal of such activity would be to test, not to convince, and the arguments in question may be āargumentsā in little more than the logicianās sense (sets of statements, one of which is designated as the conclusion). Expecting such change may seem unrealistic, but as more philosophers become aware that the sort of one-sided inquiry that is the norm in their discipline typically provides only the illusion of justification for their philosophical, religious, political, and ethical beliefs, a commitment to balanced inquiry or at least some significant movement in that direction may very well occur. Indeed, there are positive signs already that change is on the horizon.
This vision for the field of philosophy of religion has, not surprisingly, influenced the contents of this volume. Specifically, the main focus of the book, unlike the main focus of the field in its current state, is on philosophy of religion-in-general instead of on the philosophy of a particular religion or family of religions. Thus, in Part I of the book, J. L. Schellenberg and Robert McKim write chapters on the Google-invisible topic of future religious progress. It is hoped that their efforts will jump-start work in the field on this important topic. Part II of the book (as well as the bookās final chapter) addresses the issue of life after death. Mark Johnston follows the demands of morality wherever they lead and arrives at a highly original conception of the afterlife (or elsewhere-life), one that involves neither the resurrection of the body nor the survival of an immaterial soul. Dean Zimmerman, in his chapter, makes it clear that he will not be joining Johnston on this trip, although in some sense he arrives at the same destination by a different route. In Part III of the book, Mark Murphy pursues a highly unconventional approach to the problem of evilāhe tries to solve it by denying that an absolutely perfect being must be morally perfect. Laura Ekstrom pushes back, arguing that a perfect God has, not only justifying, but requiring reasons to prevent setbacks to the well-being of Her sentient creatures.
Part IV of the book, which consists of three chapters, addresses an additional topic in the philosophy of religion-in-general, namely, alternative concepts of God. Tim Mulgan defends a disjunction of two positions, one of which involves a conception of God that is very much like Murphyās, and the other of which, a form of axiarchism, is similar in some ways (but dissimilar in others) to the conception of God defended by Fiona Ellis in the chapter following Mulganās. Although Mulgan, unlike Murphy, claims that the God he describes is morally perfect, he would agree with Murphy that God is not motivated by any moral requirements to prevent setbacks to our well-being. Ellis is unhappy with Mulganās spin on classical theism, in part because of its commitment to supernaturalism. Both Ellis and I, in the final two chapters of the book, attempt to articulate ideas of God that are compatible with the naturalism that some (e.g., Steinhart 2017) believe will guide religion into the future instead of signing its death warrant. However, Ellis and I pursue our common goal in opposite ways, she by making God more abstract than Mulganās God and I by making God more concrete.
It is my hope that this volume will play some small role in encouraging other philosophersāwhether they are Christians, Buddhists, naturalists, agnostics, or none or all of the aboveāto explore similar topics and to follow the argument wherever the hell it leads them. For what it is worth, I am quite confident it will not lead them to Hell.1
Note
1I am grateful to James Elliott and John Schellenberg for helpful comments on earlier drafts of this chapter. References
Buckareff, Andrei A. and Yujin Nagasawa, eds. 2016. Alternative Concepts of God: Essays on the Metaphysics of the Divine....
