1 Enlightenments, the philosophy of religion and the history of philosophy
Most analytic philosophers of religion pay scant attention to the history of their discipline, although many see some level of continuity between their own aims and those of their predecessors, even if the methods need drastically revamping. Richard Swinburne, for example, describes a rapid expansion of a new publicly acceptable atheism in the eighteenth century, which made it an imperative to justify the core claims of religious belief. Swinburne locates himself firmly in the tradition of inductive arguments for Godâs existence, which flourished in the eighteenth century and, as he sees it, reached their peak in William Paleyâs Natural Theology (1802). The subsequent abandonment of natural theology after Hume and Kant had their say was, in his view, a mistake. What he sees as part of the long and glorious past of using the âbest available secular criteria to clarify and justify religious claimsâ should, he thinks, have a long and industrious future.1
Other notable contemporary thinkers who link their philosophies of religion to the eighteenth century include William Rowe who notes an influence from the methods of Samuel Clarke and William Wainwright whose thought has been shaped by Jonathan Edwards.2 There are many others. Wainwright is representative in seeing himself as engaged in the task of using analytic techniques to recover insights of earlier thinkers in order to apply them to contemporary problems. The assumption that there is continuity between the aims and objectives of eighteenth-century and contemporary philosophy of religion is widely shared â both by those who would promote natural theology and those who would reject it.
The eighteenth century is particularly significant. It is commonly accepted that the philosophy of religion in its current form originated with the criticisms levelled at religion during the European Enlightenment.3 This is of critical importance because the historical precedent gives analytic philosophy of religion a substantive part of its legitimacy. The justification of belief against the atheist unbeliever is confirmed as the primary purpose of the discipline and religious claims are consolidated as propositions of fact to be judged objectively through the methods of science. This particular reading of history interprets the natural theology of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as primarily reactive, emerging in opposition to a growing atheism. Natural theology is then interpreted as the attempt to claim that a proof of theism can be achieved through reason or empirical evidence independently of any faith conviction, thereby achieving a significant degree of certainty.
Furthermore, the same reading of history is adopted by philosophy of religionâs keenest theologically minded despisers. The aims and objectives of the philosophy of religion have been scorned for being part of a âsoulless, aggressive, nonchalant and nihilisticâ materialism, worse than just redundant but violent and damaging, not only in their effects but also in their very nature as a product of secularism.4 A product, that is, that took shape with the Enlightenment in the eighteenth century. Disdained for being inherently nihilistic in the way it buys into the secular episteme, the ideology of abstraction is regarded by some Christian theologians as a âpost-Christian paganism,â a ârefusalâ of Christianity and an anti-Christian invention.5 On this view, anti-philosophy and the end of metaphysics is a âsupreme opportunityâ for religion, giving it a chance to break free from the ideals â seen as false idols â that underpin the modern philosophy of religion.
Both those on the defence and those on the attack adopted the same reading of history. The philosophy of religion is understood as a child of the Enlightenment using secular scientific ways of arguing for the purpose of justifying belief. What underpins this narrative is a particular understanding of Enlightenment, either as one project of secularisation or as a movement that contains a secular materialistic programme from which the philosophy of religion in its current form appeared. Determining what this Enlightenment might have been in the past becomes, therefore, essential for imagining the nature of philosophy of religion in the future.
Enlightenments and their projects: how enlightenment has been defined
The first use of the term âEnlightenmentâ is usually attributed to Kant and tends to refer to Western European thought from 1688 to the French Revolution in 1789, and it is typically seen to advance a commitment to human reason as an objective source of knowledge, a faith in the empiricism of the new science and a rejection of religious tradition, scholasticism, faith-based religious claims and the social-political establishment. It often tends to be viewed as an anti-theological, secular movement that gives rise to a distinctly a-theological conception of reason substantially different from what came before.
This understanding of it and of the philosophy of religion to which it is believed to give rise has much to do with Peter Gayâs long-dominant construal of the Enlightenment as a singular âprojectâ in the shape of a unified trend towards a secular world view. His The Enlightenment: An Interpretation (1967) depicted the Enlightenment as a largely uniform anti-Christian movement, and this portrayal had a long-lasting impact for decades afterwards.6 Gayâs Enlightenment was distinctly French: an age in which the anti-clerical philosophes overthrew the ecclesiastical establishment, culminating in the French Revolution. On this reading, the Enlightenment is a tradition of thought characterised by reasonâs usurping of religion and overcoming of a revelation usually conceived of as a- or anti-rational.
Despite its now widespread rejection by historians of philosophy, the âone-projectâ account has been formative for theological conceptions of how the Enlightenment should be understood. Colin Guntonâs suggestion that âthe Enlightenmentâs programmeâ is one that seeks âto replace God with the individual as the source of all authorityâ7 is typical. Alister McGrath tells us that the movement called âThe Enlightenmentâ asserted the omnipotence of human reason, with the result that âethics since the Enlightenment has sought to distance itself from theology.â8 This understanding of an inherently secular Enlightenment implicitly sets up some sort of antipathy between reason and faith, with substantial ramifications for how the relationship between theology and philosophy is conceived.
The one-project account has been promoted recently for the purpose of extolling secular reason over and above the theological. For Anthony Pagden, the Enlightenment was a movement that marginalised theology in opening up the potential for scientific knowledge, undermining the claim to one source of knowledge or one source of authority. Pagdenâs ultimate goal is to promote this particular vision of the project by advancing Baron dâHolbachâs assertion that it is up to every enlightened being to âattack at their source the prejudices of which the human race has been so long the victim.â9 Theology should be ousted. The only possible just society, he believes, is a secular one. The interpretation of the Enlightenment as one project, therefore, has proved useful both for those wishing to expunge rational thought of all religion and for those wishing to promote more theological ways of thinking conceived of as anti-rational. It also does much to encourage the assumption that if the philosophy of religion originated during the European Enlightenment, it must be a discipline at odds with theology or at least one that utilises a very different secular method.
This view of the Enlightenment has been subject to a considerable amount of criticism in recent years with the result that a much deeper appreciation for the theological underpinnings of Enlightenment thought has emerged. It has become preferable to speak of several âenlightenmentsâ rather than one and the clear-cut distinction between a secular Enlightenment and pre-modern religion has been challenged.10 Jonathan Israel has recently done much to argue that it was theological debate that lay at the centre of the early Enlightenment, and it was not anti-religious in nature.11 In addition to his work, a number of other important historical narratives have reflected greater sensitivity towards the theological roots of Enlightenment thought, most notably Charles Taylorâs A Secular Age (2007) and Michael Buckleyâs At the Origins of Modern Atheism (1987). Buckley acknowledges the strongest intellectual forces at this time were not those rejecting belief but those promoting a new form of faith.12
Although the homogenous account of Enlightenment has been considerably revised, there are still assumptions embedded in the revisionist histories about the anti-theological nature of the more radical forms of reason and faith that emerged out of the Enlightenment. Buckley himself depicts an account of faith that sees it undergoing a metamorphosis because of its flirtation with the methods of science and the search for abstract objective rationality. For Buckley, what makes religious thought enlightened is that it is fundamentally opposed to the theology of pre-modernity. This is the same reasoning that lies behind Alasdair MacIntyreâs use of the term âEnlightenment project.â For MacIntyre, the originators of Enlightenment thought may have been deeply theological, but the result was a secularised reason sharply at odds with previous theological ways of thinking. MacIntyre has it that ethics became concerned with the project of justifying morality: a project that before was totally inconceivable and unnecessary. In summary, âthe thinkers of the Enlightenment set out to replace what they took to be discredited traditional and superstitious forms of morality by a kind of secular morality that would be entitled to secure the assent of any rational person.â13
There is a suggestion here, as with many other recent interpretations, that the Enlightenment took what was essentially a wrong turn, resulting in a form of rationality that ended up justifying conservatism. Although this account of Enlightenment acknowledges its religious character, especially in its early days, it still promotes a narrative in which â in the words of Eagleton â faith is opposed to reason. This is illustrated, he thinks, through the actions of the âzealots of reasonâ who aim to reconcile religion with a new, secular form of rationality.14 These more complex accounts still assume a fundamental incompatibility between the values of the Enlightenment and those of religious faith. The new ârational religionâ that arose with the Enlightenment becomes something inherently inimical to faith. There is much more nuance in these histories than in the work of Gay, but Enlightenment is still viewed as something largely homogenous, characterised by the refutation of religious belief.
On these readings, belief comes to be seen at the time of Enlightenment as either something irrational or as something private, resulting in a focus on propositional beliefs, the privatisation of religion and the âintellectualisationâ of thought.15 What is believed to unite the scientists and philosophers of Enlightenment is their conviction that the laws determining physical and human nature are âfew, simple, clear, and verifiable by discursive reason and science.â16 The dominant view in recent intellectual history is thus that by the mid to late eighteenth century, theology and philosophy had âgone the way of Enlightenment rationalism,â the main feature of which has been defined by Isaiah Berlin as the application of science to human affairs.17 Philosophy is, in this view, converted into a natural science, thus leaving it innately secular and fundamentally opposed to theological thinking. As Israel sees it, trends towards secularisation, tolerance, equality, democracy, individual freedom and liberty of expression were powerfully impelled by a âphilosophyâ that rejected transcendent values and had no need of theology.18
This history presents the theologians of the eighteenth century as facing a difficult choice. One response to the predicament of the new rationalism was to take the road that showed religious belief is reasonable; hence, the philosophy of religion (as a distinct discipline) emerged during the Enlightenment.19 Another was the refusal of modernity and its values, which presented itself in the traditions of fideism and the rejection of natural theology. This emerges today in both anti-philosophical postmodern approaches and in fundamentalisms. Theologians who favour the refusal of modernity have drawn justification from this history for their anti-philosophical and anti-liberal standpoints. If the Enlightenment is read as a commitment to the fully universal, the clearly comprehensible and the exhaustibly justifiable, it becomes easier to dismiss it as leaving us with nothing but emptiness as it tries to fill the gulf âwith modes of purely human self-assertion.â20
Nihilism has thus come to be seen as the inevitable legacy of modernity. A...