The Oxford Companion to Philosophy Part 83 pptx

William James, A Pluralistic Universe (New York, 1909). B. Russell, The Principles of Mathematics (1903), 2nd edn. (London, 1937), ch. 26. —— Philosophical Essays (London, 1910), ch. 6. T. L. S. Sprigge, The Vindication of Absolute Idealism (Edinburgh, 1983), ch. 5. relativism, epistemological. Relativist theories of *knowledge are as old as Methuselah, or at least Protagoras, and as fashionable as Foucault or Rorty, but their exact import remains elusive. Protagoras put it pithily, and provoked Socrates to question what he meant, and how it could possibly be true, by saying: ‘Man is the measure of all things; of what is that it is, and of what is not that it is not.’ This bon mot is striking but susceptible of many inter- pretations. Protagoras was principally concerned with perceptual knowledge and individual human variations. He seems to have thought that whatever any given individual believed was true (for him or her). Socrates has little trouble showing the absurdities of this, since the individual has to understand what it is to make perceptual mistakes, whether detected by himself or others. Indeed, global *relativism at the level of ‘true for me’ has so little to recommend it that its popularity with ordinary people is truly astonishing. We need only ask whether the claim that ‘X is true for me’ is itself merely true for me (and so on) to realize that what merit there may have been in the original relativization attached not to the truth-predicate, but to something in the content of the belief. One can indeed make a case for certain local relativisms, such as the relativities supposed to be involved in judgements of taste. But if such judgements do amount to no more than affirmations of personal or group likings, then these affirmations themselves seem to stand beyond relativization. Sometimes the rhetoric of relativism merely draws our attention to the need for a conceptual framework to inter- pret reality without denying that there is a reality to be thus understood, but full-blooded relativism eschews the very idea of an uninterpreted reality that is as it is independently of us or of some scheme of understanding. Here the issues merge with those of metaphysics and semantics and the relativism debate moves confusingly between such issues as *idealism and *realism, *coherence versus *cor- respondence theories of truth, *pragmatism and (again) realism. One persistent argument for radical relativism is that which points to the impossibility of saying, understanding, or communicating any truth without employ- ing a language or conceptual scheme. It is then urged that the truth so conveyed is radically dependent upon the scheme in which it is set. If the relativist denies that truths expressed in one language or culture are capable of expression in others, there is room for argument about this thesis. But in fact the argument itself must be couched in a scheme or a language, and that would apparently pre- judge the issue. The idea of a *conceptual scheme here staggers under the weight that relativism puts upon it, since, understood in an everyday fashion, the topic is perfectly discussable (e.g. the question ‘Can the concept of ennui be expressed in English?’ can be discussed in Eng- lish), whereas the relativist will always insist that there is a philosophical sense in which no vantage-point is available from which to gain a purchase upon the conceptual scheme itself. The scheme seems to be at once in the world and beyond it. This is simply one aspect of the problem posed by the status of relativism itself as a truth. Is it true relative only to some culture or language or individual, or does its truth transcend such restrictions? If the former, then there are perhaps contexts in which it counts (relatively) as false; if the latter, then the thesis seems to be abandoned. The range of the relativist relation is important. Per- haps we should take Protagoras seriously when he offers mankind as the relativization, and see this as an alternative to individual, cultural, or linguistic relativization. But what then of Martians? c.a.j.c. D. Davidson, ‘On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme’, in Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation (Oxford, 1984). Plato, Theaetetus. Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton, NJ, 1979). relativism, ethical. The view that moral appraisals are essentially dependent upon the standards that define a particular moral code, the practices and norms accepted by a social group at a specific place and time. Given that there is in fact a plurality of social groups, with differing mores, the relativist argues that there exists no point of view from which these codes can themselves be appraised, no ‘absolute’ criteria by which they can be criticized. In support of his claims, the relativist refers to anthro- pological evidence of cultural diversity, historical and geo- graphical, now known to be enormously greater than could have been suspected by moralists like Hume or Kant. The relativist theory also draws on notions exten- sively deployed elsewhere in recent philosophy, such as ‘alternative *conceptual schemes’ and *‘language-games’. On some accounts cultural divergence can amount to ‘incommensurability’, the complete absence of common concepts and perspectives. Accepting the prima-facie divergences of moral outlook, a critic can none the less argue that the relativist tends to exaggerate their implications. Some common basic human values can be discerned over a great range of cultures, communities, social groups: e.g. moral condemnation of the leader who uses his power to exploit and oppress his people; and the agreement, among radically different groups, about the need for impartial determin- ation of disputes by an authorized individual or body. Some writers, John Finnis for one, propose several ‘basic forms of good’ including knowledge, life, sociability, ‘practical reasonableness’, that underlie and give a ratio- nale to moral rule-making, and provide significant common ground between groups and their codes. That suffices to give access to reasonable dialogue and makes 800 relations, the nature of possible criticism both of one’s own moral outlook and of the outlooks of others. It has sometimes been thought that moral relativism gives a special support to toleration as a moral attitude to codes which diverge from one’s own. Paradoxically, however, if that were accepted as a universal (and universally morally approvable) attitude, it would contradict the relativism which disallows any universally authoritative principles! r.w.h. J. Finnis, Natural Law and Natural Rights (Oxford, 1980). D. McNaughton, Moral Vision: An Introduction to Ethics (Oxford, 1988). B. Williams, Morality (London, 1973). —— Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (London 1985). relativism, linguistic: see metaphysics, problems of. relativity theory, the philosophical relevance of. In Ein- stein’s special relativity temporal relations are not absolute; events happening simultaneously at different places in one frame of reference will not be simultaneous in all frames of reference. Minkowski’s geometrical interpretation of the theory, which treats time as a fourth dimension, has been widely regarded as profoundly affect- ing our conceptions of *space and *time: but his often quoted remark that space and time will ‘sink into mere shadows, and only a kind of union of them shall survive’ is the sort of purple pronouncement which should be treated with scepticism. General relativity raises questions about the relation between physics and geometry, denying the latter its traditional role as an *a priori discipline; and it bears on the traditionally metaphysical dispute whether all motion is relative and whether space and time are relations among things or exist independently. m.c. J. R. Lucas and P. E. Hodgson, Spacetime and Electromagnetism (Oxford, 1990). relevance logic. A system of logic in which premisses and conclusion are relevant to one another. It was born out of a paper by Wilhelm Ackermann, ‘Begründung einer stren- gen Implikation’, in the Journal of Symbolic Logic for 1956. In that paper Ackermann developed a formal theory of implication which was free of both the paradoxes of *material implication (which C. I. Lewis had avoided in his calculus of *strict implication) and those of strict implication (to which Lewis had succumbed). Ackermann’s idea was of an implication in which the antecedent ‘has a logical connection’ with the consequent. Anderson and Belnap transmuted this, and gave two explications of ‘logical connection’ or ‘relevance’: one was ‘variable-sharing’, meaning at the propositional level sharing of content (in a valid entailment, premisses and conclusion must share a variable); the other was of dependency, that when an entailment is valid there is a way of deducing the conclusion from the premisses with no funny business, that is, in which the premisses really are used to obtain the conclusion. In satisfying these criteria, relevance logic distances itself from classical logic, in which a contradiction entails any proposition whatever (so premisses and conclusion need share no variable) and any logically true proposition is derivable from any other propositions whatever (so the latter are not ‘used’ in deriving the former). Several decades after its conception, relevance logic is now an accepted logic. What is not accepted, however, is—as was intended—that it is the one true logic to displace classical logic. It is part of a panoply of logics—classical, modal, intuitionist, linear, substructural, and so on—each one of which benefits from being elaborated in the context of others. Relevance logics are essentially those which reject weakening or dilution in its full classical form, as being a source of irrelevance. (Weakening says that if one proposition follows from another, it also follows from it in conjunction with any other proposition.) Linear logics do so too, and reject contraction as well (that repeated uses of an assumption can be replaced by a single use), emphasizing for constructive purposes the need to track uses of assumptions; they reintroduce irrelevance through the so-called ‘exponentials’, or modal connectives. Relevance logics have axiomatic, natural deduction, and sequent (or ‘consecution’) proof theories; algebraic and possible-worlds semantics; and have been used as the basis for arithmetic and set theory. They should be distin- guished from dialetheic or paraconsistent logics, in which true contradictions are admitted. The idea of relevance simply has the consequence that contradictory assumptions do not spread or permeate to force triviality—as in classical theories—because of the rejection of the idea that a contradiction entails everything. As a consequence of this rejection, these logics also reject detachment for material implication (or disjunctive syllogism), basing valid detachment instead on the relevant conditional (or entailment). s.l.r. J. M. Dunn, ‘Relevance Logic and Entailment’, in D. Gabbay and F. Guenthner (eds.), Handbook of Philosophical Logic, iii (Dor- drecht, 1986). S. Read, Relevant Logic (Oxford, 1988). reliabilism. In traditional epistemology what makes a belief justified, being a matter of the believer’s rationality and responsibility, must lie within his ‘cognitive grasp’. That is, for a belief to be justified the believer must be aware of what makes it justified. This restrictive, internalist conception of justification has the sceptical effect of dis- qualifying far too many beliefs that intuitively seem justified. Reliabilism, a form of externalism, holds that a belief can be justified if formed as the result of a reliable process, even if the believer is unaware of what makes it justified. Different versions of reliabilism impose various constraints designed to meet certain internalist objec- tions, such as that reliabilism cannot disallow irrational and irresponsible epistemic behaviour without lapsing into internalism, and they spell out in different ways the operative standard of reliability, which may involve explanatory as well as statistical factors. k.b. reliabilism 801 *justification, epistemic; knowledge; epistemology, problems of. The Monist, 68/1–2: Knowledge, Justification, and Reliability (1985). religion, history of the philosophy of. Since the terms English-speakers translate as ‘philosophy’ and ‘religion’ have taken dozens of meanings in the European languages from antiquity on, it is impossible to speak of ‘philosophy of religion’ as if it were one subject-matter stretched across Western intellectual history. The term is ambigu- ous even in contemporary usage, and its historical application provokes any number of problems. But the term has taken on a fairly specific technical sense in recent Eng- lish-language philosophy. ‘Philosophy of religion’ com- prises philosophical analyses of certain concepts or tenets central to the monotheistic Western religions and especially to Christianity. These concepts or tenets typically include the rationality of belief in *God, the demonstrabil- ity of God’s existence, the logical character of religious language, and apparent contradictions between divine attributes and features of the world—say, between omnipotence and evil, miraculous interventions and natural law, omniscience and free will. The field has also reached out to include topics concerning the incarnation of God, the inspiration of Scripture, religious rituals or sacraments, the forgiveness of sin, mystical experience, and personal immortality. ‘Philosophy of religion’ and its equivalents in other European languages are fairly new, as philosophical terms go. They were coined towards the end of the eighteenth century as replacements or specifications of the earlier term ‘natural theology’. Hence in texts of the 1780s and 1790s the content of ‘philosophy of religion’ is a set of rationally discoverable truths helpful to religion and accessible to philosophy. This Enlightened philosophy of religion is the means of accommodating a newly critical philosophy with a somewhat sanitized Christianity. But the term had already changed its meaning by the early decades of the nineteenth century. For readers of Schleier- macher on religion, ‘philosophy of religion’ comes to refer to a moralized and aesthetic teaching about cosmic purposes. For Hegel, it is at least a study of the ways in which God is represented in religious consciousness. Hence it is one of the last stepping-stones on the way towards a properly philosophic understanding of the divine. ‘Philosophy of religion’ has something very much like the Hegelian sense in John Caird’s An Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion (1880), which is one of the texts by which the term was popularized in English. Indeed the Hegelian sense of the phrase remained so strong for English-speakers into the 1950s that some analytic philosophers preferred to speak of ‘philosophical theology’ rather than ‘philosophy of religion’. These terms are now used for the most part as if they were interchangeable. Whatever the terms used, it is important to see that contemporary English-speaking ‘philosophy of religion’ treats topics and arguments that were earlier conceived as belonging to very different studies. The topics and arguments fell under what certain Greek philosophers called simply ‘philosophy’ or ‘metaphysics’, what patristic and medieval Christians called ‘wisdom’ or ‘holy teaching’ or ‘theology’, and what philosophic writers in the modern period called ‘natural theology’ or ‘preambles of faith’ or ‘natural religion’. These different titles indicate very different views on the principles and procedures to be used in addressing such topics and arguments. The remainder of this entry will point to a few of the more interesting or influential of those views. Greek philosophers before Socrates took up what we call religious matters in at least three ways. First, some of them criticized and even mocked implausible or contradictory features of ordinary religious conceptions. So Xenophanes attacks both the immorality and the anthro- pomorphism of the poets’ depictions of the gods. Second, some Pre-Socratics proposed mechanical or physical causes for events earlier attributed more directly to divine intention or design. Third, many of them wanted to understand the divine itself in ways at odds with conceptions drawn from ordinary experience. Their efforts in both directions were caricatured by the public imagin- ation as a badly concealed impiety. So Aristophanes could in Clouds depict all philosophizers as irreligious, and Socrates could plausibly be accused in court of inventing new gods. With Plato and Aristotle, these three relations to religion are transformed in ways that fix much of the later philosophical discussion. Plato’s Socrates defends traditional mythology and participates in civic rituals. He recounts to Phaedrus details of the myth about Boreas and Orithyia, for example, and he dismisses those who would explain it more naturalistically (Phaedrus 229b–230a). He makes a point of going to religious festivals (Republic 327a) and frequently alludes to the Mysteries. His last words are a command to carry out a ritual sacrifice on his behalf (Phaedo 118a). More formally, Plato’s dialogues often turn on a rejection of doubts about the divine. The Eleatic Stranger extracts from Theaetetus a heartfelt rejection of *scepticism and a profession that all of nature issues from the divine (Sophist 265c–e). The Athenian in the Laws provides numerous sample arguments against those who would deny the existence, nature, or providence of the gods (book 10). At the same time, Plato advocates and per- forms extensive revaluations of the poetic accounts of the Olympian gods, and he composes his own myths to teach how different the divine is from ordinary conceptions of it. His constant teaching is that human beings in the present life know little enough of their own souls and less of the divine. The work of philosophy is thus to lead souls out the snares of sensory and especially political illusion so that they may begin to participate in the divine. The Pla- tonic representations of this journey include references to various kinds of divine agency, including revelation and judgement. But Plato’s most enduring representation of divine action comes in the Timaeus, which tells the story, however ironically or allegorically, of a divine artisan who makes the cosmos. 802 reliabilism It is impossible to say how much of the language and images of civic religion and of initiation into the mystery cults there may have been in Aristotle’s public works. Only the private or school writings survive intact. In them there are certainly both criticisms of popular misconcep- tions and moments of piety. More important for the later traditions are Aristotle’s arguments for the existence of a divine first mover of the cosmos and his characterization of that entity. At the end of Physics (book 8) and then sum- marily at the high point of Metaphysics (book 12), Aristotle argues that the impossibility of infinite regress in motion requires that there be a fully actualized being who causes all other motions by being the universal object of desire. In the same passage of Metaphysics, Aristotle describes the life of this being as an endless thinking on itself, a thinking that produces uninterrupted blessedness. Beyond this passage, and a few tantalizing allusions elsewhere, the Aris- totelian writings give no sense of a divine agent and certainly none of a cosmic artificer. The Platonic and Aristotelian doctrines were elaborated in many different directions during antiquity. Both entered into complex relations with the teachings of Sto- icism, which was at some times and in some places the philosophy preferred by the Roman ruling classes. The Stoic reinterpretation of pain and misfortune was made possible by an absolute doctrine of divine providence. The Stoics were quite interested in physical doctrine, and they confected a number of theories about cosmic origin. But the physical processes were held to be under the control of a divine mind, a mind that could perfectly well be asso- ciated with the traditional civic gods. These three schools—the Platonists, the Aristotelians, and the Stoics—contended at length with the gentle irreligion of the Epicureans, for whom the gods’ interventions in human affairs were hurtful fictions. What ‘gods’ the Epi- cureans allowed were fully physical and natural, subject to the same laws of pleasure and tranquillity that bound human life. A very fine illustration of the contest among these views, and of the general disdain for the Epicurean doctrines, is given by Cicero in On the Nature of the Gods. The course of philosophical speculation about the divine was altered from as early as the first century ad by contact with Judaism and then Christianity. So too were the courses of those religions. In pagan philosophy, the contact produces renewed interest in describing and pursuing the divine. In Judaism and Christianity, there is a energetic and perhaps surprising effort to present the claims of revelation in philosophically articulate ways. The renewal among pagans is most evident in the extraordinary flowering of Neoplatonism, which includes such figures as Plotinus, Porphyry, and Iamblichus. It led not only to mystagogical rereadings of Plato, but also to philosophical defences of the documents and practices of paganism. The new effort of philosophical expression can be seen among Jewish thinkers in Philo, among Christians in Clement of Alexandria and Origen. It led not only to philosophical explorations of Scripture, but also to a claim that the best philosophy is found in Scripture—indeed, that philosophy had passed to the Greeks from Israel. Beginning with the fourth or fifth century ad, it becomes increasingly difficult to speak in any sense of ‘philosophy of religion’, because it becomes difficult to talk of philosophy apart from religion. After about 500 ad, philosophy is subsumed within the three monotheistic religions—Judaism, Christianity, Islam. It is subsumed, not abolished. The most important thinkers of the three religions carried on teaching and wrote works that engaged the legacy of ancient philosophy powerfully and cre- atively. But they understood their teaching and their writing not as philosophy, but as the study of divine law, as interpretation of divine revelation, as the codification and clarification of religious traditions. It is irresponsible to call this simply ‘philosophy’ or even ‘philosophy of religion’. Medieval religious thinkers knew what ‘philosophy’ meant to the ancients, who had invented the word and the thing. They admired and appropriated the ancient legacy, but they also held that the aims of ancient philosophy had been met and decisively superseded in divine revelation. To apply the name ‘philosophy’ to the writings of those medieval thinkers is thus to ignore or undo what they made clear with such emphasis. Most medieval writing about God, nature, human knowledge, and human living is both philosophical and deeply religious, but it is self- consciously not a philosophy of religion. During the thousand years from the fifth to the fif- teenth century, the largest part of speculative talent in the West was devoted to considering questions about God. The body of writings is correspondingly enormous. A first survey of philosophically articulated doctrines in those writings is best found in a history of Jewish, Byzantine, Islamic, or ‘medieval’ philosophy. What can be said here is that hardly one of these writings neglects the issues raised by the confrontation of ancient philosophy with the monotheistic religions. In many of them the conversion or ascent from philosophy to faith is the central theme—as in Augustine’s Confessions and Bonaventure’s The Mind’s Way to God. For other medieval texts, philosophy serves as a propaedeutic to faith grasped and expressed as theology. In Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy, the figure of Philoso- phy reminds him of truths without which his faith cannot be restored. Though Christ never appears, Christ is the end of the whole teaching. Again, in Martianus Capella and Bernard Silvestris and Alan of Lille, philosophical doctrines are presented allegorically as exterior symbols of the Christian doctrine represented within. Other authors insist that philosophy must be studied thoroughly before proceeding to higher reaches of theology. Maimonides begins the Guide of the Perplexed by rebuking his student for wanting to jump over philosophical physics in order to reach higher. Roger Bacon argues that nothing can be known of God without the prior study of languages, mathematics, optics, experiential science, and moral philosophy. In other authors, and certainly the ‘scholastic’ authors writing in Latin after 1200, the terms, topics, and arguments of Aristotelian philosophy are so religion, history of the philosophy of 803 fully appropriated that academic theology could not proceed well without them. Any list of the most influential ‘scholastics’ would include Thomas Aquinas, John Duns Scotus, and William of Ockham. These three can illustrate both the range and the diversity of engagements between Christian theology and the Aristotelian inheritance. For Aquinas, theology uses, corrects, and completes the best of ancient philosophy. Aquinas pays respectful attention to pagan philosophers and chiefly to Aristotle, whose works he expounds in detail. But whenever he writes in his own voice, as an ordained teacher of theology, Aquinas systematically transforms every Aristotelian doctrine he touches, often in a direction quite opposed to Aristotle’s own intention. Duns Scotus begins by refusing frankly to accommodate Aristotle, but what is called his ‘Augustianism’ is in fact a dialectical juxtaposition of doctrinal inspirations from Augustine, Islamic Neoplatonism, his immediate prede- cessors, and Aristotle read through Averroës. Scotus typically deploys these sources to address questions that are explicitly theological and to analyse examples at the boundary between the present dispensation and the dispensation of heaven, between the mundane and the miraculous. Finally, in Ockham, one has an immensely learned critique of Aristotle fuelling an assault on the linguistic and epistemic presuppositions of any theology that employs Aristotelian models or demonstrations. But Ockham hardly intends to undo Christianity. His whole hope is to keep in view the unbounded and yet saving power of God. Many of the medieval dispositions of faith towards philosophy carry forward into what we call the Renaissance and the early modern period, but they are complicated in at least three ways. First, the Christian reform movements that culminated in the Reformation were often sharply critical of the use of philosophy in theology or, indeed, of philosophical approaches to the divine. This criticism var- ied in intensity from one reforming group to another, and often coexisted with much philosophical erudition. Petrarch mocks Aristotle in favour of experience, then subordinates both to the Gospel. Erasmus criticizes the scholastic uses of ancient philosophy as bad theology and bad philology. But more commonly the criticisms of philosophy arose from claims about the opposition of philosophy and the Gospel, or from a vivid conviction of the impotence of sinful human reason, or from a confidence that God would teach what was needed by inspiration— and would do so often to the least lettered. The second complication in the relations of philosophy to theological topics arose from fierce disputes over the conclusions of the new sciences. The condemnation of Galileo is the most famous example in these quarrels, though also the most misunderstood. Religious opposition to the philosophical implications of new science made philosophic authors cautious in expressing their views. It thus becomes difficult to know how to construe their writings. On the surface of Descartes’s texts, for example, there is a scrupulous Catholic orthodoxy and protestations of obedience. But Descartes is also coy about some of his cosmological views and he conceals them in various ways before publishing. Spinoza builds into his Theologico-Political Treatise a series of miscues and misdirections in order to make it unlikely that a casual or dull reader will discover his views on the truthfulness of Scripture. A similar caution in writing about religious matters can be felt well into the nineteenth century. The third complication comes from a hardening and indeed impoverishment of the conceptions of philosophical reason and of religious knowing. One can see this in the Catholic writers in and after the Counter-Reformation. The threat of the Reformation was met within the Catholic Church by legislating on innumerable points of doctrine. This not only shrank the scope for religious speculation, but also reduced much of theology to law. Reli- gious argument was consequently reduced to the forms of forensic argument—to aggressive demonstrations, to the collection of proof-texts, to extended attacks upon oppos- ing positions. These complications could by no means undo the ancient engagement of philosophy with religious topics or the ancient dependence of religious thought on philosophical lessons. While the rediscovery of certain ancient texts led to a flourishing of scepticism in some sixteenth- century authors, the overwhelming majority of modern philosophers up to the first half of the nineteenth century affirmed the existence and activity of God, and most of them counted themselves Christians or Jews of one sort or another. In retrospect it is possible to suggest that some of their notions about God or religion and some of their ways of dividing religion from science hastened the demise of the intellectual engagement with questions of religion. But one cannot hold that most philosophers in modernity were uninterested in religion or that they con- sidered questions about God defectively rational. If many of the propagandists of Enlightenment were trenchant critics of religion, they often enough professed views about a divine origin or governance of nature. The only major philosophical figure who is often cited as obviously anti-theistic is David Hume. His Dialogues Concerning Nat- ural Religion are typically regarded as the charter for modern philosophy of religion. But it is exceptionally difficult to argue that atheism is the conclusion of the Dialogues, and such evidence as there is for Hume’s own atheism is biographical rather than philosophical. The relations of religion and philosophy at the end of the eighteenth century and beginning of the nineteenth were mentioned above in narrating something of the origin of the term ‘philosophy of religion’. What needs to be added is that the two main philosophers of these decades, Kant and Hegel, by no means exclude religious topics or even religious sentiments. If neither seems quite an ortho- dox Christian, both labour to save religious conclusions and to open a space for religious experience. Now it may be that their notions are so opposed to those of ordinary religion as to encourage anti-theistic scepticism. If Kant wants his reader to pass through a ‘critique of all theology 804 religion, history of the philosophy of based on speculative principles’ in order to reach what seems a positive moral theology (Critique of Pure Reason, 2. 3. 7), many of his readers took only the negative lesson. If Hegel accredits Christian theology as a necessary misap- prehension of higher truths, he condemns it as a misap- prehension. So, after Kant and Hegel, one encounters resolutely anti-religious and anti-theistic philosophers. The best known are Marx, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche. For Nietzsche in particular the falsity and, indeed, the ini- quity of Christian doctrine need no demonstration and little reflection. What does interest him is the ‘natural history’ of religions and religious persons, that is, the cultural and individual pathologies produced by religious practice. ‘God is dead’ not because a divine entity has per- ished, but because human beings, who once confected God, have now murdered God by acting out their as yet unuttered disbelief (Gay Science, sect. 125). Yet Nietzsche’s thought, as he well knew, remains so thoroughly condi- tioned by his quarrel with religion that he still stands within the theocentric traditions of Western philosophy. Indeed it was only in the twentieth century that it became common for Western philosophers to write philosophy without so much as raising questions about God. The very existence of ‘philosophy of religion’ as a subfield within philosophy is good evidence for this. The subfield was created in the twentieth century as an academic speciality because philosophy as a whole was no longer engaged with questions about God or about religious beliefs about God. Of course, the relegation of these questions to a speciality has hardly meant their demise. Eng- lish-speaking philosophers have returned to questions about God, sometimes along unexpected paths, and have addressed them convincingly with philosophic methods or presuppositions that might have seemed little suited to religion. In recent decades, indeed, there has been a remarkable if still specialized resurgence of philosophic concern with a whole range of religious issues, including some of the most technical aspects of Christian theology. m.d.j. *God and the philosophers; God, arguments against; God, arguments for; Bonhoeffer. For reasons already made clear, it is not sensible to write a unitary history of ‘philosophy of religion’. No such history has in fact been written, nor has anyone attempted to compile the corres- ponding bibliography. There are historical anthologies of texts selected according to one or another notion of ‘philosophy of religion’, but these anthologies are necessarily both partial and anachronistic in their selections. One representative recent anthology in English is Louis P. Pojman, Philosophy of Religion: An Anthology (New York, 1987); a somewhat older and well- established one is Max J. Charlesworth, Philosophy of Religion: The Historic Approaches (London, 1972). To pursue these topics before the 20th cent., one would better begin with some of the individual works mentioned above or with the bibliographies in the entries for pertinent periods in the history of philosophy. For a more extended narrative, see now the first two volumes of Anthony Kenny’s New History of Western Philosophy: Ancient Philosophy (Oxford, 2004) and Medieval Philosophy (Oxford, 2005). religion, problems of the philosophy of. The philosophy of religion is an examination of the meaning and justification of religious claims. Claims about how the world is, often embodied in creeds, are more typical of Western religions—Christianity, Judaism, and Islam—than of East- ern religions such as Buddhism, Hinduism, and Confu- cianism. These latter tend to concentrate much more on the practice of a way of life than on a theoretical system by means of which (among other things) to justify that practice. Hence Western religions have proved a more natural target for the philosophy of religion. The central claim of Western religions is the existence of *God; and the two major problems here are: Can a coherent account be given of what it means to say that there is a God; and, if it can, are there good reasons to show that there is or that there is not such a God? In order to explain what it means to say that there is a God and to make other religious claims, theists use ordinary words such as ‘personal’, ‘creator’, ‘free’, ‘good’, etc., which we first learn to use from seeing them applied to mundane objects and states; or technical terms such as ‘omnipotent’, defined ultimately in terms of ordinary words. The question then arises: Do these ordinary words have different senses when used for talking about God from the senses they have when used for talking about mundane things, or the same senses? To use the technical terms: Are they used equivocally or univocally with their mundane senses? If the former, how could we understand what the new, religious senses are? If the latter, how could God be the inexpressible mysterious other which he is supposed to be, when he can be described by the same words having the same senses as can mundane things? The answer given by *Aquinas was that religion often uses words in somewhat the same and somewhat different senses from their mundane senses, i.e. in analogical senses. We learn the meanings of the relevant words from their application to mundane things—e.g. learn the meaning of ‘wise’ from seeing it applied to wise men, such as Socrates—and then, when they are applied to God, suppose them to be attributing to him the nearest thing to the mundane property which could belong to the cause of all things. This answer presupposes that at least some words—e.g. ‘cause’—are used univocally in religious and mundane discourse; and it has the consequence that the other words are not used in senses very different from their mundane senses. God is said to be ‘personal’, ‘bodiless’, ‘omnipresent’, ‘creator and sustainer of any universe there may be’, ‘perfectly free’, ‘omnipotent’, ‘omniscient’, ‘perfectly good’, and ‘a source of moral obligation’, and to have these prop- erties ‘eternally’ and ‘necessarily’. It has been a major concern of the philosophy of religion to investigate whether a coherent account can be given of the meaning of these expressions (bearing in mind the possibility that some of them have senses analogical with their normal senses), and whether they can be combined in a logically consist- ent way, so that the claim that there is a God can be expressed in an intelligible and coherent way. For religion, problems of the philosophy of 805 example, is God’s being eternal to be understood as his being everlasting (existing at each moment of unending time), or as his being timeless (outside time). (*Eternity.) There are serious difficulties in making sense of the idea of a personal being existing timelessly—that is, at no moment of time. How could he cause events, except by acting as or before they happen; or know about events, except by those events causing his knowledge as or after they occur? Yet if we think of him as everlasting, does his omniscience mean that he knows what we will do before we do it; and in that case how can our actions be free? Does God’s being a source of moral obligation mean that he could command us to torture children, and that it would become our duty to do so if he commanded it? Given that a coherent account can be offered of what it is for there to be a God in more or less the traditional sense, we come to the question of whether there is any good reason to believe that such a God exists. Some have claimed that if one finds oneself believing that there is a God, then it is rational to believe this without looking for arguments in support of the claim—just as it is rational for me to believe that I ate toast for breakfast or am now lis- tening to a car passing the window, if I find myself believing these things. I do not need further evidence in order rationally to believe such a thing—unless, that is, I acquire evidence to suppose that the belief is false, and in that case I may need evidence confirming the belief in order to out- weigh the former evidence and so to continue rationally to hold the belief. The view that the belief that there is a God needs no prior support from other evidence in order to be held rationally is the view of ‘reformed epistemology’, advocated by Alvin Plantinga and developed in a 1984 collection on Faith and Rationality which he co-edited. Basic beliefs are ones which the subject believes, but not for the reason that they are supported by any other beliefs which he holds. Beliefs are ‘properly basic if the subject is justified in holding them even if not supported by other beliefs’. What Plantinga calls ‘classical foundationalism’ is the view that the only properly basic beliefs are self-evident beliefs (beliefs in obvious *logical truths, such as that 2 + 2 = 4), incorrigible beliefs (beliefs about our current mental states), and beliefs evident to the senses (beliefs about what we are now perceiving via the five senses). It would seem to follow from classical foundationalism that belief that there is a God cannot be properly basic, and so requires to be based on other beliefs, i.e. to be justified by argument from other beliefs. Plantinga argues (for reasons quite apart from those concerned with religious beliefs) that classical foundationalism has too narrow a class of properly basic beliefs (it should, for example, include memory beliefs). And further, he argues, it is self-defeating, because belief in classical foundationalism itself is neither (by its own standards) a properly basic belief nor, apparently, supportable by properly basic beliefs. Yet once we abandon classical foundationalism, he claims, we have no good reason for denying that belief that there is a God may be properly basic. There is much to be said for the principle that it is rational to hold any belief with which one finds oneself, in the absence of counter-evidence—a principle sometimes called ‘the principle of credulity’. But Plantinga is not advocating this as a general principle; rather, he holds that ‘there is a God’ may be held without further justification, even if ‘I am now aware of the Great Pumpkin’ may not; and he has recently developed a theory of epistemology which has this consequence. (See his Warranted Christian Belief.) This theory concerns what makes a belief ‘warranted’. Warrant is the characteristic which turns true belief into knowledge. If my belief that the Second World War ended in 1945 is warranted, then if it is also true, I know that the Second World War ended in 1945. (A belief being ‘warranted’ is very similar to its being justified or rational—that is, the believer being justified or rational in holding the belief.) Plantinga’s account of warrant is a complicated one, but its central component is that to be warranted a belief must be produced in the right way— that is, by a ‘properly functioning process’. Thus perception, memory, and induction are all processes which lead us to acquire beliefs; and plausibly we are functioning properly when we acquire beliefs by means of them (in the absence of counter-evidence). So, any belief of mine acquired by perception will be warranted (in the absence of counter-evidence—for example, my memory that I have just ingested a hallucinatory drug). So too will any belief acquired by induction from my perceptual beliefs. Plantinga suggests that we all have a sense additional to the normal five, a ‘sense of divinity’ which produces in many of us the belief that there is a God; and that, since there is a God (Plantinga claims), our cognitive faculties are functioning properly when the ‘sense of divinity’ does produce that belief. If he is right about this, then (unless— improbably—the belief is acquired by some other process) whenever we find ourselves with the belief that there is a God, we are warranted in continuing to hold it (so long as we do not find evidence or arguments tending to show that there is no God). But if we do not find ourselves with the belief that there is a God to start with, or our belief is only a weak one outweighed by counter-evidence (for example, the evidence of suffering suggesting that there cannot be a perfectly good being in charge of the universe), Plantinga does not give any positive reason to hold that belief or hold it in a stronger form so that it is not outweighed. He is concerned only to show that a simple religious believer who can give no arguments for his belief may still be warranted in holding it. If atheists and weak believers are to be given a strong belief that there is a God, they need to be shown that other things which are more evident to them make it probable that there is a God by public standards of what is evidence for what. There has been a long history in Western philosophy of positive *arguments for the existence of God. Anselm, Aquinas, Duns Scotus, Descartes, and Leibniz and innumerable other philosophers have given such arguments. Most of these arguments are arguments from observable phenomena to a God who, it is claimed, 806 religion, problems of the philosophy of provides the explanation of their occurrence. (One exception is the *ontological argument, which has as its premisses pure conceptual truths.) The *cosmological argument argues from the universe to a God who creates it; the *teleological argument argues from the orderliness of the universe (either in respect of conforming to laws of nature, or in containing animals and humans in an appro- priate environment) to a God who makes it thus. The argument from consciousness argues from the existence of conscious embodied agents (humans and animals) to a God who endows them with consciousness. The argument from religious experience argues from the occurrence of religious experiences, in the sense of experiences in which it seems to the subject that he is aware of God, to millions of people of different centuries and cultures, to a God of whom they really are aware. It is crucial for assessing the worth of such arguments whether they are to be regarded as deductive or inductive (or probabilistic) arguments, and whether they are to be taken separately or together. A deductively valid argument is one in which if you assert the premiss or premisses from which it starts, but deny the conclusion, you contradict yourself. So, for example, the cosmological argument will be a valid deductive argument if and only if ‘there is a universe, but no God’ involves a contradiction—if it is like ‘he is less than 5 feet tall and more than 6 feet tall at the same time’. It does not at first sight look as if ‘there is a universe, but no God’ is self-contradictory. If, however, the arguments are taken as inductive arguments, then they will be like the scientist’s arguments from observable data to his hypothesis of unobservable entities which cause the observable data—like the physicist’s observations of lines on photographic plates to his conclusion that they are caused by electrons or positrons; the arguments do not guarantee the truth of the scientist’s hypothesis, but they can make it very probable. Arguments for the existence of God have to be weighed against *arguments against the existence of God. The most important of these is provided by the *problem of evil: that an omnipotent and perfectly good God would not allow the occurrence of pain and suffering. The arguments for the existence of God are more plausible if regarded as inductive, and taken together. Argu- ments from observable data to an explanatory hypothesis in science, history, or any other area, in the opinion of this writer, make the hypothesis probable in so far as (1) the hypothesis makes probable the occurrence of the data, (2) the occurrence of the data is not otherwise probable, and (3) the hypothesis is simple. (*Simplicity.) Thus the hypothesis that Jones committed some crime is probable in so far as the clues are (1) such as you would expect to find if Jones committed the crime, and (2) not otherwise to be expected, and (3) the hypothesis is simple. The simplicity of this hypothesis consists in it being a hypothesis that one person did some act, which caused each of the many clues. A hypothesis that many different individuals, not in collusion with each other, did quite separate acts which caused the clues, would be much more complicated, and so would satisfy criterion (3) far less well. If arguments for the existence of God are regarded as arguments to an explanatory hypothesis, they must be judged by these criteria. Consider the teleological argument from the almost total conformity of all material objects to laws of nature, i.e. from the fact that all material objects throughout endless space and time have exactly the same powers and liabilities to act as each other (e.g. attracting each other in accordance with Newton’s laws, or with whatever are the fundamental laws of nature; and the regularities of chem- istry and biology which follow from the fundamental laws). Since God, by hypothesis, is omnipotent, he will be able to bring about this order; and if it is a good thing that such order should exist, then in virtue of his perfect goodness he will have reason for bringing it about. So the argument tries to show that (1) this order is a good state, which in consequence a God would probably bring about, but which (2) otherwise would be a vast improbable coinci- dence, and (3) that a God is a simple being. It argues for (1) by pointing out that the existence of finite beings (such as humans) with the ability to make differences to themselves, each other, and the world is a good thing. In order for humans to be able to make these differences, there have to be simple regularities in the world which humans can discover and utilize—for example, if there is a regular- ity that watered seeds grow into plants, humans can develop an agriculture; but otherwise they cannot do this. It argues for (3) that the hypothesis postulates one being who is the simplest kind of person that there can be, having infinite degrees of (i.e. zero limits to) the characteris- tics of knowledge, power, and freedom which are involved in being a person. The main argument against the existence of God has always been the ‘argument from evil’—that is, from pain and malevolence. Theists sometimes claim that since by hypothesis God is so much greater than us, we cannot expect to understand why he allows all the things that happen to happen; there are bound to be puzzling phenomena such that we cannot understand why God allows them to occur, and so we should not count evil as evidence against the existence of God. However, almost all atheists and many theists have felt that the claim that God is perfectly good would be empty of meaning unless some explanation could be given of why, being perfectly good, he allows the enormous amount of pain and malevolence that there is in the world. An explanation of this is called a ‘theodicy’. Evils are traditionally divided into moral evils (ones knowingly caused or allowed to occur by humans) and natural evils (the ones for which humans are not responsible, such as the effects of disease and earthquake). A central plank of most theodicies is the ‘free will defence’ to moral evil: the claim that if God is to give humans the great good of a free choice between good and evil, it is inevitable that there will be some moral evil. (There would be, it is claimed, a contradiction in supposing that God could cause us freely to choose the good—for to choose ‘freely’ is to choose without being caused how to choose.) Theodicy needs more complicated arguments religion, problems of the philosophy of 807 to attempt to deal with the problem of natural evil. (*Evil, the problem of.) All religions have set a high value on faith. But how is ‘faith’ to be understood? (*Faith and reason.) If it is understood as forcing yourself to believe what seems probably false, there would seem to be little merit in it. But if it is seen as giving oneself totally to attain a great good (e.g. the vision of God for oneself and others), when it is no more than probable that this goal is attainable, it would seem more plausibly a virtue. Other claims, common to all Western religions, include the claims that God hears prayers and answers them, sometimes by miracles; that God has revealed certain truths; and that there is a life after death in which the good will enjoy the vision of God and the bad will be deprived of it for ever. A miracle has often been understood as a violation of a law of nature, by God intervening in the world. But then, how can something be a law of nature if it can be violated, and so there can be exceptions to its operation; is not a purported law of nature which does not always pre- dict accurately not really a law of nature? One answer to this is to regard exceptions to the operation of a purported law of nature as showing it to be no true law of nature only if they are repeatable exceptions; you only show ‘all metals expand when heated’ not to be a law of nature if you show that regularly when a certain metal is heated under certain conditions, it expands. The occasional non- repeatable exception is a violation; and, if brought about by God, a *miracle. Hume (Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, sect. 10) has a famous argument purporting to show that there could never be a balance of evidence in favour of the occurrence of a miracle thus understood. To show a miraculous event E to have occurred at time t, we need to show first that there is some law of nature which its occurrence would violate. We need a lot of evidence from what has happened on many other occasions to show some purported law L to be a law of nature (e.g. evidence of observers to show that on many other occasions, objects have behaved in the way predicted by L). But then that evidence will tend to show that Lwill be obeyed at other times also, including at t. The evidence in favour of the occurrence of E will consist only of the testimony of a small number of observers; and so the force of their evidence will always be outweighed by the force of the testimony of many observers who testify to the operation of L on many other occasions. An obvious response is that the sums are not quite so simple—evidence of observers as to what happened on other occasions is only indirect evidence about what happened at t, whereas the evidence of the observers at t is direct evidence, and so has much more force. Why does God not make nature perfect to begin with? Why does he need to intervene in the natural order? One reason that he might have is—in order to answer prayer. He wishes to bring about good in response to human request; and, to make that possible, he leaves nature capable of improvement. Another reason for performing a miracle would be to give his authority to some prophet who had publicly prayed for the miracle to occur or whose teaching was forwarded by the miracle, and so thereby publicly to authenticate the prophet’s teaching as a revelation from God. Philosophy of religion has a concern with whether God would be expected to provide a revelation, and what are the tests that he has done so (e.g. whether the Koran, or the Christian Bible and Creeds record such a revelation). Joseph Butler’s The Analogy of Religion is a famous discussion of these issues. Whether it is coherent to suppose that human beings can survive their death depends on the correct account of *personal identity (see also *immortality). If there can be such life, the issue arises whether what Christianity, Islam, and some other religions have claimed as the character of the afterlife is compatible with the goodness of God. Such religions claim that the good (judged so to be in virtue of their faith or works—Protestants have emphasized one, Catholics the other) will enjoy the vision of God for ever, whereas the bad will be permanently deprived of it, possibly in a *Hell of endless sensory pain. Could a good God act thus? One answer is that in their life on Earth human beings freely form their character; and only a person with a good character would want to have, and so be capable of enjoying, a vision of God—it is humans who make the ultimate choice of their fate. In recent years the philosophical techniques and results of the Anglo-American tradition of philosophy have been applied not merely to the most general claims of Western religions, but also to specifically Christian doctrines (as well as occasionally to the specific doctrines of other religions). The Christian doctrines include the three central Christian doctrines of the Trinity (that God is three persons of one substance), the Incarnation (that God became incarnate as a human being, Jesus Christ), and the Atone- ment (that Christ’s life and death atoned for the sins of humans). The initial philosophical task is to see how far a clear meaning can be given to these doctrines; and the next task is to consider if there are any grounds for believing them true. It is normally supposed that revelation will provide the main grounds, but there may also be a priori arguments for or against their truth. This interest in specifically Christian doctrines has gone along with investiga- tion of how far it is possible to compare religions in respect of their truth-claims and their ability to provide ‘salva- tion’, and to whether one can say with justification that one religion is ‘the true religion’ or at least better than other religions. r.g.s. *religion, scepticism about; God, arguments for the existence of; God, arguments against the existence of; religion and epistemology; creation; revelation. R. M. Adams, The Virtue of Faith (Oxford, 1987). W. L. Craig (ed.), Philosophy of Religion (Edinburgh, 2002). P. Helm (ed.), Faith and Reason (Oxford, 1999). J. L. Mackie, The Miracle of Theism (Oxford, 1982). M. Peterson et al. (eds.), Reason and Religious Belief, 2nd edn. (Oxford, 1997). A. Plantinga, Warranted Christian Belief (Oxford, 2000). R. Swinburne, Is There a God? (Oxford, 1996). 808 religion, problems of the philosophy of religion, scepticism about. There has been an undeni- ably powerful current of anti-religious thought in the history of modern philosophy. Among its several quite distinct sources, the following are noteworthy. In his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, Hume’s ‘Philo’ showed how, in cosmological speculation, imagin- ation outruns our ability to confirm or rebut. We might (with ‘Cleanthes’) argue to a finite, anthropomorphic cause of the world; or (with ‘Demea’) do more justice to divine transcendence and mystery—but at the cost of vir- tual (if religiously toned) agnosticism. Neither route would lead to the *God of Christian theism. For Kant, the traditional arguments to God were all dependent on the *ontological argument, which in turn treated existence, invalidly, as a predicate and a perfec- tion. To argue from the world to God involved, also, illicit extension of categorial concepts (‘cause’, notably), which functioned reliably and necessarily within the phenom- enal world, and there alone. Both Schopenhauer and Nietzsche saw the case for theistic belief as quite destroyed: theism was no longer a live option—God could be pronounced ‘dead’. The task was now to accept and develop the implications of a non- theistic view of the world. Critics of teleological arguments deemed them too weak to reach beyond the world’s orderer to its creator; they also were seen as decisively damaged by naturalistic, evolutionary explanations of the development of living forms. It was no longer necessary to claim that the cause must manifest a higher level of being than its effect, e.g. that the causal origin of mind and intelligence must itself be intelligent; and an increasingly detailed and desenti- mentalized understanding of the life-world, e.g. the mutual predatoriness of species, made it correspondingly harder to superimpose a benign teleology upon nature or to see the working there of a ‘divine hand’. Some theologians welcome the demise of natural religion, arguing that it is wholly in revelation that Christian belief is founded. An appeal to revealed doctrine, however, referring back essentially to scriptural documents, was, for many, less readily seen as a path to renewed belief than to anxieties of another kind—over the radical historical uncertainties uncovered by scholarly biblical criticism. Besides, the ‘revealed’ component could not furnish the entire grounding of Christian belief. Philosophical sense still needs to be made of the connecting of revealed content with the alleged divine Source: a rational- theological component is indispensable. A further set of difficulties for Christian belief has cen- tred upon issues in the philosophy of mind. Science and philosophy again converge in the setting of the problem. The more detailed understanding is available of the embodiedness of conscious and personal life, the stronger the pressures towards forms of materialism and physical- ism, and the less plausible become religious beliefs that involve bodiless mental or ‘spiritual’ life—whether God’s life or that of the human ‘soul’. If the believer responds with a doctrine of resurrection rather than survival of dis- embodied spirits, there remains a serious philosophical problem over personal identity: is the resurrected individual the ‘same’ person who died, or a new, though qualita- tively identical, person? Problems in that area continue into the field of *religious experience. All direct encounters of person with person involve bodily presence and behaviour, visible and audible. An already well-founded religious belief is not daunted by, for example, the idea of prayer to an invisible and inaudible deity; and a believer may experience a powerful, vivid sense of the reality of God. It has become much less convincing, however, to use such religious experience as an argument to God’s reality. Naturalistic forms of explanation, Freudian and other, have been proposed for religious experience; and analogies are often drawn between religious or mystical experiences and drug- induced or pathologically abnormal states of consciousness. These cannot displace the theist’s explanation, but they certainly challenge the use of such experiences in theistic apologetic. Some religious philosophers have looked to moral experience for an alternative to the traditional theoretical arguments for God. To mount a plausible moral argument to God, however, would seem to require as a start- ing-point a cognitivist, ‘realist’ or rationalist type of moral theory. No account of moral judgement in emotivist, expressivist terms could ground an inference to a divine source of the world’s being. Even today’s advocates of *moral realism most often insist that they are dealing with human insights into a human reality, not with disclosures of a transcendent realm of values. Perhaps the area in which the difficulties facing theism are most formidable—even intractable—is the *‘problem of evil’. Once it is claimed that the being upon whom the universe depends is personal, that theistic explanation is personal explanation, then, given also that the deity is the unique, unrivalled, omnipotent ground of the world, what are we to make of the vast extent of suffering in that created world? If in nature’s fundamental laws of operation we find intelligibility, simplicity, elegance, beauty, how to explain the absence of any analogous beauty in the pattern (or absence of pattern) in the distribution of satis- faction, fulfilment, and suffering in the lives of sentient individuals? Stories about the world as a ‘vale of soul- making’ are of very limited applicability: unhelpful vis-á-vis the suffering of non-human animals, or with the congenitally mentally handicapped. Nor has sense been made of the ‘allowing’ of human suffering of such un- deserved intensity that no promised beatitude hereafter seems a morally tolerable compensation. It would be, however, absurdly one-sided to leave the matter there. It can be claimed that significant philosophical work goes on in all of these problem areas, work of relevance to the religious questions, and that in some at least of these the sceptical case is seriously challenged. Hume and Kant failed in fact to demolish the theistic ‘proofs’. Debate has rekindled on every one of these arguments. Impressive reworkings of the *cosmological argument religion, scepticism about 809 . applied to wise men, such as Socrates—and then, when they are applied to God, suppose them to be attributing to him the nearest thing to the mundane property which could belong to the cause. asso- ciated with the traditional civic gods. These three schools the Platonists, the Aristotelians, and the Stoics—contended at length with the gentle irreligion of the Epicureans, for whom the gods’. taken together. Argu- ments from observable data to an explanatory hypothesis in science, history, or any other area, in the opinion of this writer, make the hypothesis probable in so far as (1) the hypothesis