Realism and Religion

Philosophical and Theological Perspectives

Michael Scott, Andrew Moore

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780754652328
• eBook ISBN: 9781351906401
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

This book draws together a distinguished group of philosophers and theologians to present new thinking on realism and religion. The religious realism/antirealism debate concerns the questions of God's independence from human beings, the nature of religious truth and our access to religious truths. Although both philosophers and theologians have written on these subjects, there has been little sustained investigation into these issues akin to that found in comparable areas of research such as ethics or the philosophy of science. In addition, the absence of any agreed approach to the problem underlines both the need for fresh thought on it and the fruitfulness of this area for further research. The editors' introduction sets the context of the realism debate, traces connections amongst the essays which follow, and proposes lines for future development and enquiry. The contributors present a variety of contrasting positions on key issues in the religious realism debate and each opens up new and important themes. Gordon Kaufman, Peter Lipton and Simon Blackburn provide the opening chapters and the context for the collection; Alexander Bird, John Hare, Graham Oppy and Nick Trakakis, Merold Westphal, and John Webster explore topics that are central to the debate. This volume of original essays will both introduce newcomers to the field and suggest new lines of research for those already familiar with it.

Chapter 1

Introduction

Andrew Moore and Michael Scott

The religious realism/antirealism debate concerns the questions of God’s independence from human beings, the nature of religious truth and our access to religious truths. Religious realists typically maintain that religious claims represent a mind-independent religious reality to which we have epistemic access (at least in part), and that religious truth should be robustly construed as a relationship between religious sentences and the reality that they describe. Religious realists also usually maintain that at least some religious claims are actually true. Religious antirealists variously reject different components of the realist’s theory: religious claims are primarily expressive rather than genuinely representational; religious truths are inaccessible to us; religious truth is a matter of the satisfaction of internal standards of religious language (or ‘language games’); religious claims are systematically false. It is this last issue that has played and continues to play a dominant role in philosophy of religion, usually in the form of arguments about either the existence of God or the coherence of claims made about God.¹ Our concern in this collection is with the other aspects of the debate. That is, we will primarily be interested in the meaning and accessibility of religious claims. Although they are less commonly discussed, it is these other aspects that in an important respect raise more fundamental issues. When one asks whether God exists or whether we have a coherent conception of omnipotence, one already assumes that talk of God is in the business of representing (or aiming to represent) a religious reality; when one asks whether religious beliefs can be reasonable and warranted, one assumes that their truth is accessible to us.

Religious Realism in Context

The debate between realists and antirealists is a focal point of contemporary philosophy that has occupied many major contemporary analytic philosophers. Extensive work has focused on identifying the core points of disagreement between realists and antirealists and providing a framework in which the debate can be helpfully pursued. Moreover, the interpretation and relative importance of the various aspects of the realism problem, as well as the types of antirealist opposition, differ with each philosophical setting. In philosophy of science, for example, the realist’s belief in the existence of entities posited by scientific theory is contested by antirealist sceptics; in ethics, the aptitude of ethical claims to express truths is as much at issue as the existence of ethical properties; in the philosophy of mathematics, the status of mathematical truth is a central issue. An understanding of the realism problem is pivotal to current research in these topics.

Against this background, work on religious realism has lagged behind. Although theologians have written on the problem,² there has been no sustained philosophical investigation of religious realism akin to that found in ethics or the philosophy of science. Philosophers of religion have made little use of the considerable technical resources for understanding the problem advanced in recent years.³ Philosophers working on realism in other fields have shied away from developing detailed arguments on religious realism — even those who have strong (realist) religious convictions or who take a position which in principle commits them to controversial views about the subject. Numerous texts on realism cite religious discourse as an example, but fall short of a satisfactory engagement with the topic. This lack of engagement with the problem is all the more surprising given the resurgence of interest in the cognate areas of religious epistemology and ontology, and the fact that religion, alongside ethical and scientific discourse, presents the most natural context in which to address and evaluate realist and antirealist arguments.⁴

The current lack of an agreed framework for discussion of the religious realism problem coupled with poor communication not only between philosophical fields which should have something to say on the topic but also between philosophy and theology, underlines both the need for new thinking and the potential fruitfulness of this area of investigation. This collection of essays by philosophers of science, philosophers of religion, moral philosophers, and theologians attempts to promote communication between these fields. There are several critical problems raised in this collection that merit particular attention:

1. The appropriate paradigm(s) for pursuing the realism debate. Should we be primarily concerned with, for instance, the character of religious truth, the reference of discourse about God, the question of God’s independence, or the descriptiveness of religious claims? While philosophers and theologians have taken various positions on each of these issues — sometimes arguing at cross-purposes with each other — little has been done towards identifying the focal problems or explaining the relationship between the different approaches.

2. What can be learnt from comparable debates in science and ethics? Can, for example, the (very different) kind of considerations used to defend scientific or ethical antirealism be applied in support of religious antirealism? Can defences of scientific realism be applied to religious realism?

3. In what ways is religious realism distinct from other kinds of realism, and what are the implications of this for realism/antirealism frameworks?

4. The relationship between philosophy and theology. Because the status of religious discourse is the province of both disciplines, the relationship between them and their respective contributions needs to be brought into focus.

Approaches and Arguments

A useful way into the realism problem is to consider whether religious statements aim primarily to describe the world, or instead express the attitudes of those who assert them. This debate is standardly construed in terms of whether religious statements have cognitive content. The cognitivist argues that religious statements aim to represent facts, and are true or false according to whether their representations are accurate. Religious non-cognitivism involves a positive and a negative thesis. On the negative side, religious statements do not aim to represent religious facts. In this respect, the content of religious sentences cannot be evaluated for truth because they are not about any religious subject matter. On the positive side, the non-cognitivist gives an account of how the claims of religious believers should be understood: they are expressive vehicles, and convey the believer’s attitudes, emotions, stances, prescriptions, resolutions, commitments, etc. That is, religious statements have a primarily non-descriptive function.⁵ The non-cognitivist can allow that a religious statement may have a factual content in addition to expressing an attitude. For example, the statement that an event is a miracle clearly has a descriptive element — an event occurred which is presumably in some way remarkable. But according to the non-cognitivist, what makes this a religious statement about a miracle rather than merely the report of a remarkable event, is that it expresses an attitude.

Non-cognitivism has been defended for various regions of language other than religious discourse. Aesthetic statements might be construed as the expression of certain feelings of pleasure or displeasure, rather than representing aesthetic facts; claims about what is funny might be seen as the expression of one’s amusement or lack of it, rather than a judgement with truth-apt content. Non-cognitivist theories have been set out for truth ascriptions,⁶ the modal language of possibility and necessity,⁷ knowledge,⁸ and most notably ethics.⁹ Early versions of ethical non-cognitivism proposed that ethical claims served such purposes as venting one’s feelings and persuading others to share them,¹⁰ or prescribing rules of conduct for oneself and others.¹¹ On these accounts, what the claim ‘Honesty is good’ amounts to is ‘Honesty: hooray!’ or ‘Honesty: hooray! Be honest!’ More recent work by Simon Blackburn and Allan Gibbard has developed ethical non-cognitivism,¹² or ethical expressivism as the current versions of the theory are called, into a highly that is one of the antirealist in metaethics.¹³

It is of interest to note the relative unpopularity of the religious analogue of ethical non-cognitivism. This is in part due to the close association between religious non-cognitivism and an early formulation of the theory by R. B. Braithwaite.¹⁴ Braithwaite contends that a religious statement primarily serves to express the believer’s intention to pursue a certain behaviour policy. Unfortunately, this is open to obvious counter-examples: religious beliefs that are not associated with any particular policy, or with no behavioural intentions at all. Moreover, Braithwaite partly justified his account on the basis of a now wholly discredited logical positivist theory of meaning according to which a statement is factually significant only if it is empirically verifiable. Contemporary discussions of religious non-cognitivism, taking Braithwaite as their model, are typically brief and dismissive, and the objections against it are widely considered conclusive.¹⁵

But it may be that a stronger case can be made for non-cognitivism in religion. Certainly, a potentially more promising model can be found in an unexpected source: George Berkeley’s later writings. In his A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge Berkeley notes that words can be meaningful without standing for ideas: they may, for example, excite some passion, encourage or deter action, or produce a disposition.¹⁶ However, it is over twenty years later in his dialogue Alciphron that Berkeley applies this proposal to religious discourse.

Berkeley’s account is intriguing in part because he extends the non-cognitivist aspect of his theory to a very restricted range of religious statements, and second, non-cognitivism is used by Berkeley as part of a defence of Christian faith against sceptical inquiry. The argument proceeds as follows. Suppose that words are significant only insofar as they stand for or suggest ideas, and that to know that a statement is true requires a distinct idea (or collection of ideas) corresponding to what is known. A sceptical objection emerges to certain basic Christian beliefs, about which it seems we have no distinct ideas. Take, for example, the notion of grace. Christianity, as Berkeley puts it through the mouth of his sceptical interlocutor Alciphron, ‘is styled the covenant or dispensation of grace’, and the nature, effects, and extent of grace is the subject of much theological dispute. We can, of course, have an idea of grace in its ‘vulgar sense’ as ‘beauty … or favour’. ‘But’, Alciphron continues, ‘when it denotes an active, vital, ruling principle, influencing and operating on the mind of man, distinct from every natural power or motive, I profess myself altogether unable to understand it, or frame any distinct idea of it.¹⁷ But if no distinct idea corresponds to the word ‘grace’, so the sceptical objection goes, then it is an empty term and cannot be an object of faith or knowledge.

Berkeley’s response is to introduce his earlier proposal from the Principles that terms may serve a function other than conveying ideas. For example, the term ‘grace’ should be understood as playing a role in religious statements and beliefs that serves to motivate certain actions. So Euphranor (who stands for Berkeley) replies to Alciphron: ‘Grace may … be an object of our faith, and influence our life and actions, as a principle destructive of evil habits and productive of good ones, although we cannot attain a distinct idea of it’.¹⁸ Euphranor goes on to develop a similar account of the Trinity:¹⁹

[A] man may believe the doctrine of the Trinity, if he finds it revealed in Holy Scripture that the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, are God, and that there is but one God, although he doth not frame in his mind any abstract or distinct ideas of trinity, substance, or personality; provided that this doctrine of a Creator, Redeemer, and Sanctifier makes proper impressions on his mind, producing therein love, hope, gratitude, and obedience, and thereby becomes a lively operative principle, influencing his life and actions, agreeably to that notion of saving faith which is required in a Christian.²⁰

Original sin is also given a non-cognitive account:

Original sin, for instance, a man may find it impossible to form an idea of in abstract, or of the manner of its transmission; and yet the belief thereof may produce in his mind a salutary sense of his own unworthiness, and the goodness of...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Contributors
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Mystery, God and Constructivism
• 3 Science and Religion: The Immersion Solution
• 4 Religion and Ontology
• 5 Scientific and Theological Realism
• 6 Prescriptive Realism
• 7 Religious Language Games
• 8 Theological Anti-Realism
• 9 God’s Aseity
• Name Index