Philosophy of Religion Chapter 1. Section 3. What is Philosophy of Religion? Philosophy is the most critical and comprehensive thought process developed by human beings. It is quite different from religion in that where Philosophy is both critical and comprehensive, Religion is comprehensive but not necessarily critical. Religion attempts to offer a view of all of life and the universe and to offer answers to most , if not all, of the most basic and important questions which occur to humans all over the planet.
The answers offered by Religion are not often subject to the careful scrutiny of reason and logic. Indeed many religious beliefs defy logic and seem to be unreasonable. Religion has its basis in belief. Philosophy , on the other hand, is a critic of belief and belief systems.
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Notify me of new comments via email. Notify me of new posts via email. Create a free website or blog at WordPress. Frame, I ran across this gem and thought I should share it: It is hard for me to draw any sharp distinction between a Christian theology and a Christian philosophy.
Doctrine of the Knowledge of God , For more, see:. Rate this:. Share this: Twitter Facebook. Like this: Like Loading When arguing with other Christians, theologians can appeal to revelation to support their claims. When arguing with opponents who do not accept revelation, they cannot Summa Theologiae 1. Yet this restriction is not really a disciplinary maxim designed to oppose philosophy to theology, but a pragmatic admission that one cannot successfully persuade opponents by appealing to premises they deny.
Like Cooperation, the Disjunction view holds that philosophy and theology are different forms of inquiry. Similarly, like Cooperation, the Disjunction view also that agrees that there can be no real conflict between the conclusions of philosophy when true and those of theology.
But the Disjunction view goes further: Disjunction advocates deny that there is any significant overlap between philosophy and theology at all. Disjunction does not subordinate philosophy to theology or treat philosophy as an essential tool for theology. Of course, even those who explicitly advocate Disjunction will occasionally deploy some methods associated with philosophy: carefully defining terms, making formally valid arguments, uncovering contradictions in opposing views, etc.
Yet these methods are found in any form of rational inquiry, and so presumably they do not belong to philosophy alone. Some thinkers—even some Christian thinkers—endorse the Disjunction view because they deny that theology is really a propositional, truth-apt discourse that proceeds by way of arguments and evidence.
Instead, theology is something else entirely—poetry, perhaps; or a form of worship, praise, or prayer Caputo This view of theology implies a sharp contrast with Aristotelian and scholastic philosophy, modern philosophy, and contemporary Anglo-American Analytic philosophy, though perhaps not with philosophy tout court.
Other versions of the Disjunction view figure even more prominently in the Christian tradition. The foundational Protestant reformers, Martin Luther and John Calvin, both advocate Disjunction, in part because they both reject the synthesis of philosophy and theology that characterized late medieval scholasticism. According to Luther, philosophy and theology proceed from entirely different perspectives, with different starting points and different goals [ ]; Grosshans Philosophy considers its objects of inquiry from the perspective of common human reason and sense experience, with the goal of trying to understand things as they actually are in the real world.
Theology considers its objects of inquiry from a creational and eschatological perspective, with the goal of trying to understand them in relation to God as their creator and final end. Even when philosophy and theology do consider the same object of inquiry—for example, the human being—this difference in perspective ensures that the lines of inquiry remain completely separate.
But his exploration only serves to contrast this philosophical view of the human being with the perspective of theology. They do not belong to the same universe of discourse. Like Luther, Calvin holds that the Fall has corrupted the power of human reason, but has not destroyed it altogether Institutes 2. When restricted to its proper sphere—matters pertaining to the natural world—philosophy remains valuable. But Calvin further distinguishes philosophy from theology at the level of method, by denying that true theology engages in abstract, speculative reasoning, which he associates with philosophy, and insisting that any legitimate knowledge of God must be practical and affective Institutes 1.
Instead, we should focus our loving attention on what God has actually done, paradigmatically in the person and work of Christ Institutes 3. For Luther and Calvin, then, there can be no genuinely philosophical theology. Even though both agree that philosophical speculation can arrive at some limited truths about, e. From the other direction, the properly Christian notions of God as creator and of the human being as imago dei , e.
Of course, Luther and Calvin can only hold these views because of the way they understand philosophy and theology. They both identify philosophy with late medieval scholasticism, and they both understand theology as a kind of existential encounter with God and Christ, as revealed in the scriptures. Different accounts of philosophy and theology would yield different construals of the underlying disjunction, or no disjunction at all.
None of the three views considered so far—Integration, Cooperation, and Disjunction—assume any real, essential conflict between philosophy and theology. All three views allow for apparent conflict, due to errors of reasoning or interpretation, or when either discipline departs from its own proper sphere, but they do not assert that Christian theology or Christian faith is irrational from the point of view of philosophy, nor do they hold that any significant Christian doctrinal claims can be falsified by sound philosophical reasoning.
Throughout the history of Christian thought, many prominent Christian philosophers and theologians have criticized philosophy, or fulminated against what they regard as philosophical overreach, but few if any have regarded philosophy and theology as essentially incompatible, in the sense just outlined.
Key figures who are often regarded as Conflict advocates, turn out, upon closer inspection, to hold a different view. Rather, the incarnation seems paradoxical only to fallen, sinful human reason , [ 46—47]. But, as discussed above, accepting this claim about the incarnation has been the norm throughout the Christian tradition. Moreover, according to Kierkegaard, even though the truth of the incarnation exceeds the limits of human reason, the claim that reason has limits is itself one that can be assessed by human reason [ ]; Evans According to Barth, we cannot establish the truth of theological claims using generally persuasive arguments available to any rational enquirer.
But Barth had no quarrel with using philosophy in an Anselmian mode, to elucidate and clarify the implications of divine revelation, and in principle he even allows that there could be a genuinely Christian philosophy [ 6]; Diller These prominent Christian thinkers all criticize what they see as philosophical hubris, but they do not set philosophy and theology as such in essential opposition, and they do not agree that any belief-worthy Christian doctrines actually are irrational—still less that they can be falsified by sound philosophical reasoning.
In a way, this conclusion should be unsurprising. Williams ; Crisp et al. Christian thinkers have differed about the degree to which sin and the Fall have caused human reason to malfunction, but the suggestion that theological truths conflict with properly functioning human reason is alien to the orthodox Christian tradition, and so it is unsurprising that few major Christian thinkers have endorsed it. Far more common is the claim that some theological truths are inaccessible to philosophy because they somehow surpass human reason.
On this line, when there is an apparent conflict between a philosophical conclusion and some Christian truth, the conflict is treated as a sign that philosophy has overstepped its own proper boundaries, not a sign that Christian truth actually conflicts with human reason. By and large, even the sharpest Christian critics of philosophy have held this view. This historical survey has focused on prominent models of the relationship between philosophy and theology in the history of Christian thought.
The survey also illuminates some contemporary philosophical and theological debates about how to understand this relationship. Notwithstanding its Patristic origins, the Integrationist view has been especially prominent in recent philosophy of religion. Plantinga argues that Christian philosophers qua philosophers are entitled to base their arguments on revealed truths, and urges them to investigate distinctively Christian questions that may be of no interest to the wider philosophical community.
According to Nicholas Wolterstorff, the demise of Enlightenment-style foundationalism has thoroughly blurred the distinction between philosophy and theology:.
What difference does [this distinction] make, now that analytic philosophers no longer believe that for some piece of discourse to be a specimen of philosophy, the writer must base all his arguments on public philosophical reason? Call it what you will. Wolterstorff ; see also Stump 48—49; Timpe Yet this prominent Integrationist line has been strongly criticized by other philosophers of religion, who implicitly endorse some version of the Contrast view, on which philosophy cannot legitimately appeal to theological sources of evidence like revelation and Church authority Simmons ; Schellenberg ; Oppy ; Draper 2—4.
At the same time, according to many Christian theologians, analytic philosophy as such is almost uniquely unsuitable for investigating properly theological questions Milbank ; Hart — On the view of these critics, analytic philosophical theology does not revive the Patristic integration of philosophy and theology at all; rather, it remains a distinctly anti-theological form of modern philosophy.
Contemporary philosophers and theologians continue to debate the proper relationship between philosophy and theology. Before considering these debates in further detail in Section 3 , however, it is useful to briefly survey recent work in analytic philosophical theology. The fact that the Integrationist view has been so prominent among contemporary analytic philosophers of religion has helped shape a philosophical climate in which self-identified philosophers, working in departments of philosophy, find it completely natural to investigate explicitly Christian theological questions, from within the framework of normative Christian orthodoxy, in the course of their academic work.
Recent work in analytic philosophical theology has engaged with nearly every major Christian doctrine. This section lays out the most significant philosophical problems associated with each doctrine and identifies some of the foundational philosophical responses from contemporary thinkers.
In the traditional terminology, the Father, Son, and Spirit are three distinct divine persons personae in Latin; hypostases in Greek who share a single divine nature substantia in Latin; ousia in Greek; see Tanner 5, 24, Responses to the logical problem can be grouped into several families, each with its own advantages and disadvantages.
Social trinitarians attempt to secure the divine unity by arguing that a single divine nature can support three separate consciousnesses. They may also claim that the three persons necessarily love each other so perfectly and act in such harmony that they are properly regarded as a single God.
On Latin trinitarianism, even though the Father, Son, and Spirit are numerically distinct persons , they are not numerically distinct divine agents. When they act, they do not merely act in perfect harmony as on social trinitarianism. Rather they are somehow a single actor, with a single will, carrying out a single action.
The special challenge for Latin trinitarianism is to explain how it can be the case that the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, so construed, really do exist as concrete, distinct entities, and are not just different names for the same entity, or different phases in the life of a not-essentially triune God.
Brian Leftow offers the most well-developed Latin model, which appeals to an extended analogy to a time-travelling chorus-line dancer Unsurprisingly, the sharpest critics of Latin trinitarianism are those who advocate a social trinity, and vice-versa: each side insists that the theoretical costs of the opposing view are too great. Philosophical responses to the logical problem of the Trinity do not divide exhaustively into social models and Latin models.
According to constitution theorists, a lump of bronze can constitute a statue without being identical to it, since we can destroy the statue by melting it down without destroying the bronze. The sharpest criticism of relative identity accounts of the Trinity takes aim at the underlying notion that identity is kind-relative in the relevant sense. Similarly, the sharpest criticism of constitution views expresses doubts about the cogency and usefulness of the metaphysics of constitution Merricks Williams By the close of the fourth century, the early Church had agreed that God the Son, the second person of the Trinity, is no less divine than God the Father.
But this Trinitarian settlement led directly to another, equally vexing question: how could Jesus of Nazareth, a human man, also be identical to God the Son? After another period of intense debate, the Church defined the doctrine of the Incarnation, which asserts that Christ is one person or one hypostasis who exists in two natures, one fully human, the other fully divine Tanner 83; Kelly — Yet, as with the doctrine of the Trinity, on its own, this conciliar terminology does not attempt to solve the underlying philosophical problem.
As Richard Cross puts it:. Cross In other words, the fundamental philosophical problem of Christology is the problem that arises when a single subject bears incompatible properties. Christ seems to be both necessarily omniscient, as the divine Son, the second person of the Trinity, and yet also limited in knowledge, as the human man, Jesus of Nazareth—and so on for other divine and human attributes.
Yet Christ is one person, not two: he just is the divine Son and he just is Jesus of Nazareth. On standard interpretations of logical consistency, nothing can have logically incompatible properties at the same time and in the same respect—hence the problem. More simply: Christ qua human is limited in knowledge; Christ qua divine is omniscient.
The thought of Thomas Aquinas furnishes a foundational source for this solution Summa Theologiae 3. Thomas Senor forcefully argues that this grammatical solution does not work, for it cannot block the relevant entailment: since the one Christ really is human and really is divine, it follows that the one Christ is also limited in knowledge qua human and omniscient qua divine , and so the contradiction remains Senor ; see also Morris Kenotic Christologies hold that at the point of incarnation, in order to become a human being, God the Son relinquished the divine attributes Forrest ; Evans , In a way, the kenotic option neatly solves the problem of incompatible properties, since Christ is not omnipotent and omniscient etc.
Kenotic Christologies have a venerable pedigree, as well as some clear Biblical warrant Philippians 2; for discussion see Evans ; McGuckin [ ]. But if omnipotence and omniscience are essential divine attributes, then it is not possible for God the Son to relinquish them during the incarnation and regain them after the incarnation while remaining self-identical.
According to Thomas V. Morris, Christ is composed of the divine mind of God the Son, a human mind, and a human body.
On his telling, Christ counts as fully divine, because he has a divine mind, which is the seat of his omnipotence and omniscience; he also counts as fully human because he has a human mind and a human body Morris Morris denies that human beings as such are essentially limited in power and knowledge etc.
This move clears the way for attributing omnipotence and omniscience etc. Richard Swinburne defends a similar Christology, but according to Swinburne, Christ is composed only of God the Son and a human body, which together constitute both a human way of thinking and acting and also a divine way of thinking and acting. If God the Son has human parts and divine parts, then perhaps the whole mereological composite can borrow properties from its constituent parts without violating the law of non-contradiction.
Grounded in unquestioning faith, religion attempts to provide its followers solace in times of despair and offer answers to the interrogations of our existence. Religious orders are ritualistically oriented toward preserving the dichotomous and revered sacred-profane boundary. The cohesive powers of such doctrines are incomparable. Philosophy discards any mythological propositions as well as ritual practices while attempting to guide individuals to the truth by actively questioning all aspects of our lived realities.
Skip to content The principles of religious belief are beyond the arena contestation, but philosophical theories encourage active thinking and logical reasoning to be the guiding lights that reveal the hidden truths of the universe, and human existence. The discipline of philosophy is grounded in an inquest of discovering the truths of human existence and the universe.
Religion is an ideological set of dogmas, based on faith about the supernatural creator of the human race and the universe. The discipline of philosophy is grounded in logical thinking that is guided by the principles of rationality. Religious doctrines are extremely powerful in mandating social cohesion.
The supernatural is not an important topic of contemplation. The sacred-profane dichotomy is nonexistent.
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