Exploring the Philosophy of Religion

David Stewart

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781351219846
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Exploring the Philosophy of Religion, 7th Edition, combines the best features of a text and a reader by offering clear analysis coupled with important primary-source readings.
Professor David Stewart called upon his 30-plus years of teaching experience to introduce students to the important study of philosophical issues raised by religion. Beginning students often find primary sources alone too difficult so this text offers primary source materials by a variety of significant philosophers including a balanced blend of classical and contemporary authors but the materials are supported by clearly written introductions, which better prepare students to understand the readings.

Chapter 1
The Varieties of Religious Experience

Introduction Philosophy and Religion

Both philosophy and religion are common terms, although defining them precisely is difficult due to the diversity of meanings each has acquired. The word religion derives from a Latin term that referred to the bond between man and the gods, and in the view of most persons religion implies a belief in some kind of supernatural being or beings. This is the definition of religion usually offered by dictionaries, but such an understanding of religion would exclude some religious traditions; for example, in Confucianism the question of the existence of supernatural beings never arises.

Further complicating the problem of arriving at a satisfactory definition of religion is the wide diversity of religious traditions. Every culture has a religious tradition of some sort, and these are as varied as the cultures that gave them birth. Many religious traditions are thoroughly bound up with cultic and ritual practices, but others are not. Some religions are tied to a priesthood, but this is not true of all. Divine revelation plays an important role in some traditions, but the relative importance of revelation in contrast with what can be known by reason alone is itself often a matter of disagreement.

In the study of religion, one response to this diversity of meanings is to adopt a neutral, descriptive approach. That is, one simply investigates a religion in its various cultural manifestations, describing religious phenomena, whatever they may be. Such descriptive study concentrates on comparing or contrasting the various modes of religious awareness that are encountered and perhaps deriving certain conclusions from this descriptive analysis about the nature of the religion under study. Whatever the merits of this approach may be, it cannot be considered a philosophical study of religion, for philosophy is the critical examination of human life and thought.

The study of religion, like the study of any other organized human activity, can be approached from a variety of standpoints. The historian, sociologist, and psychologist each approach religion with a unique concern. The historian will be interested in the development of a religious tradition over time, its similarities to other traditions, and the influence that a religion has on the economic, political, and social affairs of a particular society. The sociologist is concerned with discovering what societal values are expressed in a religious tradition, how the religious beliefs of a group provide cohesiveness in a society, and how stratifications within the society are affected by its religious traditions. The psychologist will focus on belief structures themselves as indicative of a particular kind of self-understanding. Of course, the concerns of historians, sociologists, and psychologists will overlap, for the borderline between disciplines is not always sharply defined.

Besides the differences among the interests of the various academic disciplines, there is also the difference between being a student of a religion and being a believer in that religion. A student, on the one hand, might investigate Islam and try to understand what Moslems believe, how those beliefs are incorporated into ritual, what the various Moslem sects are, and how the beliefs of Islam relate to other religions in the Near East—all without accepting the tenets of Islam as true. A believer, on the other hand, may adopt the neutral stance of a student of religion, but the believer’s attitude toward a religion will inevitably be influenced by personal religious commitments, particularly if the religion under scrutiny is the believer’s own. The believer’s attitude is a much more existential one, since the religion under scrutiny is not just a subject for academic study, but also a matter of personal commitment. The principal difficulty encountered in studying one’s own religious tradition is in adopting an objective viewpoint (insofar as any objectivity is possible in religious study).

The philosophical study of religion, by virtue of the critical task of philosophy, demands detachment from personal beliefs in order to critically examine the fundamental questions raised by religion. This detachment is a necessary first step if one is to conduct a truly philosophical study of religion. This does not mean that an individual committed to a particular religious tradition cannot philosophize about that tradition; that would imply that a person could not believe religiously what had been discovered philosophically, a strange state of affairs indeed! The point is that the philosophical study of religion demands a degree of detachment from personal religious beliefs. In turn, a philosophical approach to religion may well produce fresh understanding and increased clarity, upon which an even deeper commitment can be based. In a philosophical analysis of a religion, the student will be enriched by contact with the work of historians, sociologists, psychologists, and scholars of comparative religion. But encounters with these disciplines merely prepare the student for the philosophical task, which is to analyze critically the fundamental issues raised by religion and to subject these issues to rigorous scrutiny.

If, however, as we have seen, even the task of discovering an essential nature of religion seems impossible, how can the philosopher begin? One answer to this question is to recognize that there is no such thing as religion, only religions. Religions can be grouped into various traditions, and within these traditions, certain fundamental and common questions will emerge. This means that, for example, a philosopher analyzing a family of Eastern religions would discover a different set of questions than would emerge from the study of an ancient animistic religion. Each religion raises its own set of questions, and part of the philosopher’s job is to ferret out these fundamental issues and submit them to as thorough an examination as possible.

One of the challenges in approaching the study of religion in a college course is defining the scope of what will be covered. One method or type of course is the history-of-religions approach, which looks at the content of specific religious traditions, examines the growth and development of that content, and compares it with the content of other religions. While interesting and important, and even when including some treatment of the philosophical themes of various religions, this approach is a descriptive survey method, not a philosophical one. Sometimes, courses or books based on the comparative approach to the study of religion can become a little like the commercial recordings of “One Hundred of the World’s Best-loved Melodies” or “Mozart’s Greatest Hits.” While providing breadth, such broad comparative study of religion risks losing the depth of analysis that is important to philosophy and appropriate to major themes such as God, evil, death, and faith. Some persons coming to a philosophy class on religion may therefore be disappointed to discover that it does not offer thumbnail sketches of the beliefs of Islam, Taoism, Confucianism, Hinduism, and other of the world’s great religions. As interesting as such a comparative study would be, it would not focus on the themes that are the primary concern of a philosophical study.

A philosophical study of religion is also affected by the meaning of the term philosophy itself. With its beginnings in Greece, philosophy as a discipline has become identified with a particular way of thinking. Western philosophy places great emphasis on the human faculty of rationality and the role played by reason and argument in discovering truth. Its methods are argument, analysis, dialectical reasoning, and discursive thought. Philosophy asks such religious questions as, Is faith rational? Can the claims of the Judaeo-Christian tradition about God be proved? How can we harmonize belief in a benevolent God with the fact of evil and suffering in the world? What influence should religion have on public policy? Western religions are not the only traditions to raise such questions, but because of the interplay between philosophy and religion in the West, philosophy of religion as a discipline has taken on a decidedly Western cast. But, as we will see in the selections that follow, non-Western religious traditions also deal with some of the same issues. Given the increasingly global nature of trade and the growing interplay among cultures, it is important that philosophical questions not be dealt with in an exclusively Western frame of reference, but that, where possible, they be seen in both their Western and Eastern forms. In doing so, however, it is important not to treat Eastern approaches as simply Western responses in different terminology, but to recognize the distinctive contributions they make to our understanding of philosophical themes.

In general, we can say with the contemporary philosopher John Hick that philosophy of religion is philosophical thinking about religion. But we must understand this as philosophical thinking not about religion in general, but about the problems raised by a particular religious tradition. To quote Hick, the philosophy of religion “seeks to analyze concepts such as God, holy, salvation, worship, creation, sacrifice, eternal life, etc., and to determine the nature of religious utterances in comparison with those of everyday life, scientific discovery, morality, and the imaginative expressions of the arts.”¹ We must emphasize, however, that these concepts, while central to the Judaeo-Christian tradition, are not universal to all religions. When we look at what philosophers in both the Jewish and the Christian traditions have pointed to as central concerns, we find a cluster of problems—the nature and existence of God, the problem of evil, the relation between faith and reason, the meaning of death, the relationship between morality and religion, the question of human destiny, and the influence of religion on public policy issues. It is to these concepts, therefore, that we will seek to apply the rigors of philosophical analysis.

The Relation of Philosophy and Religion

The philosophy of religion, in the sense just defined, can be a useful tool in understanding religion, but the two are distinct. As has already been mentioned, philosophy can concern itself with different religions—the religions of the East, ancient religions, contemporary religions, religions of Native Americans, and so forth. In each case, the philosopher’s task is to determine the central issues and analyze them through careful scrutiny and investigation. In this sense, philosophy of religion is analogous to similar philosophical efforts aimed at other human disciplines. There can be philosophy of science, philosophy of education, philosophy of law, philosophy of art, philosophy of culture, and philosophy of psychology, to name just a few possibilities. In each case, the philosophical study of the discipline is distinct from the discipline itself. A philosophical study of law would raise such fundamental notions as the nature of justice, the meaning of rights, the nature of equality, and the status of law itself. The philosopher dealing with science would probe beneath the methods of scientists and question the meaning of proof and such assumptions made by scientists as their belief in the uniformity and regularity of nature, the dependability of inductive reasoning, and the meaning of such fundamental concepts as cause and effect. In both cases, the philosopher is not practicing law or doing science, but is forcing to the forefront the fundamental questions raised by these activities. Lawyers may talk a lot about justice, but what do they mean by it? Scientists may believe that the present laws of physics will hold true in the future, but on what basis do they accept the conviction?

Similarly, philosophy of religion is different from the practice of religion. Philosophy of religion is not a systematic statement of religious beliefs (which would be theology or dogmatics), but a second-order activity focused on the fundamental issues of a given religion. Christians, for example, talk a lot about God, but what is the evidence that God exists? If God’s existence can be proved, how does one go about proving it? And if God exists, how can one account for the presence of evil in the world? Such questions are philosophical in nature, and the philosopher will not be content to let them go unexamined. The task of philosophy, at least as it is conceived of in the West, is to submit claims such as those made by religions to a thoroughgoing rational investigation.

There are philosophers, however, who question Western philosophy’s focus on rational analysis. They point out that this emphasis on rationality is one-sided, for human beings are not just creatures of reason, but function through a complex unity of reason, emotion, will, appetites, and feelings. Religion, they insist, makes an appeal not just to human reason, but to emotion and feelings as well; therefore, any philosophical investigation of religion must include its nonrational as well as rational aspects. Though religion has rational elements, it appeals as well to the heart. Are people religious because they have felt the force of a powerful rational argument? Probably not. There are grounds for saying that religion seems to arise not so much from rational insight as from a powerful nonrational experience of something ultimate that demands allegiance and loyalty. How such experience arises and how it can be accounted for is the concern of the first group of readings.

Mystical Experience

Religious experience is as hard to define as religion. If we understand religion to be that which demands our ultimate allegiance, or that which involves our beliefs about God or what we consider sacred, then we can better understand religious experience. It can take many different forms, but central to it is the direct encounter with what one considers the divine, the sacred, or the ultimately important. The exploration of some of these varieties of religious experience is the task of this first collection of readings.

Ambiguity also surrounds the use of the term mysticism which is used to describe anything from an encounter resulting in unification with the divine to any experience slightly out of the ordinary. As we are using the term in this chapter, basic to all types of mystical experience is an encounter with the divine or the sacred. Mystical experience in this sense is not confined to any particular religious tradition. No single set of doctrines is associated with it, and not all mystics are even in agreement as to precisely what constitutes a mystical experience. Some mystics have found the experience to be a spontaneous and unexpected joy; others have found the experience only after a long and tortuous ascetic life. Aldous Huxley, in his book The Doors of Perception, claims to have undergone heightened experiences not unlike those of the mystics through the use of hallucinogenic drugs.

Although not every religious experience is mystical in the strict sense of the term, there are mystical elements in many different kinds of religious experience, and mystical types of religious experience seem to be found in all religious traditions. One type of mystical experience, a kind that can be called union mysticism, is the experience of complete union with the divine involving complete loss of self-identity. How the divine with which one is united is understood varies, depending on the religious tradition of the one having the experience. For Hindus, this union is with Brahman, or the One, and involves the complete loss of self or self-identity.

W. T. Stace further distinguishes between what he calls introvertive (inward-looking) and extrovertive (outward-looking) mysticism.¹ Introvertive mysticism, as in the example from Hinduism just given, offers an experience of complete withdrawal from the world and a union with the transcendent characterized variously as the One, God, or, paradoxically, the Abyss or sheer Nothingness. Extrovertive for...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• PREFACE
• CHAPTER ONE THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE
• CHAPTER TWO RELIGION AND LIFE
• CHAPTER THREE RELIGION AND HUMAN DESTINY
• CHAPTER FOUR ARGUMENTS FOR GOD'S EXISTENCE
• CHAPTER FIVE THE PROBLEM OF EVIL
• CHAPTER SIX FAITH AND REASON
• CHAPTER SEVEN RELIGION AND CURRENT ISSUES
• BIOGRAPHICAL SUMMARIES
• GLOSSARY
• INDEX