Card 6.1 · Root VI — The Philosophy of X Family
Philosophy of Religion
What kind of claim is a religious claim?
Philosophy of religion examines religious concepts, claims and practices — what they mean, whether they can be known, and what follows from them.
Where it sits
Under VI. Philosophy of X. Depends on 1.8 Natural theology, 2.2.5 Revelation. Borders 3.2.6 Divine command, 6.31 Philosophy of culture.
Narrower questions under this one:
The recurring problems
| Problem | The question |
|---|---|
| Divine attributes | Whether omnipotence, omniscience and goodness are jointly coherent |
| Foreknowledge and freedom | Whether God's knowing entails that choices are fixed |
| The problem of evil | Whether suffering is compatible with a good, powerful God |
| Religious language | How finite terms could apply to an infinite subject |
| Religious diversity | What epistemic significance follows from persistent disagreement among religious traditions |
| Miracles | Whether testimony can justify belief in extraordinary events attributed to divine action; the violation-of-law conception is one influential formulation |
| Religious experience | Whether it is evidence, and for whom |
| Theism and non-theism | Whether religious ultimacy must involve a personal creator God, or may be understood in non-theistic terms |
Key figures
| Figure | Dates | Tradition | Contribution |
|---|---|---|---|
| Epicurus | 341–270 BCE | Greek | An early argument from evil, traditionally attributed to Epicurus and preserved through later sources |
| Al-Ash'ari | 874–936 | Islamic | Affirmed real divine attributes without specifying a creaturely mode |
| Ibn Sina | 980–1037 | Islamic | Necessary Existent; divine knowledge of particulars in a universal manner |
| Maimonides | 1138–1204 | Jewish | Negative theology: God's essence is approached through negation; descriptions of divine actions concern their effects rather than the essence itself |
| Ibn Arabi | 1165–1240 | Islamic | Wujud and divine self-disclosure; later associated with the doctrine called wahdat al-wujud |
| Thomas Aquinas | 1225–1274 | Scholastic | Analogical predication |
| J. L. Mackie | 1917–1981 | Analytic | The logical problem of evil |
| Alvin Plantinga | b. 1932 | Analytic | The free will defence |
| William Rowe | 1931–2015 | Analytic | The evidential problem of evil |
| Xenophanes | c. 570–478 BCE | Greek | Critiqued anthropomorphic conceptions of the gods: horses and cattle, if able to depict gods, would make them resemble themselves; also argued for a non-anthropomorphic divinity |
| Søren Kierkegaard | 1813–1855 | Danish | Faith as passionate commitment involving a qualitative leap under objective uncertainty |
Also on this question: Franz Rosenzweig Shinran
Connections
→ 1.8, 2.2.5 · ↔ 3.2.6, 1.7, 1.2, 6.31, 3.1 · ◇ theism, atheism, agnosticism, fideism, religious pluralism · ○ Islamic golden age; Scholastic; Modern; Tables 1 and 8
→ narrower questions · ↔ questions it borders · ◇ the positions, mapped in Part III of the book · ○ the eras and comparison tables (Parts IV and V)
The full card is in the book
In The Coordinates of Thought this card goes on to a worked example that sets the answers against one case, and to where the question touches daily life — page 244.
On Coordinates of Thought
Conversations about this question in Faith & reason:
- Can a believer say “none of the proofs work” and lose nothing? Judah Halevi’s answer 6 replies
- Scholastic reasoning was rigorous, but it was rigour inside a fence 6 replies
- Al-Ghazālī was right: much of what philosophers call demonstration is only probable reasoning 6 replies
- Reading group: Pascal’s wager fragment and the pages around it, in French and English 6 replies
- The “double truth” doctrine was never Ibn Rushd’s view 5 replies