Twentieth-Century Philosophy of Religion

The History of Western Philosophy of Religion, Volume 5

Graham Oppy, N. N. Trakakis

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317546382
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

The twentieth century saw religion challenged by the rise of science and secularism, a confrontation which resulted in an astonishingly diverse range of philosophical views about religion and religious belief. Many of the major philosophers of the twentieth century - James, Bergson, Russell, Wittgenstein, Ayer, Heidegger, and Derrida - significantly engaged with religious thought. Idiosyncratic thinkers, such as Whitehead, Levinas and Weil, further contributed to the extraordinary diversity of philosophical investigation of religion across the century. In their turn, leading theologians and religious philosophers - notably Buber, Tillich and Barth - directly engaged with the philosophy of religion. Later, philosophy of religion became a distinct field of study, led by the work of Hick, Alston, Plantinga, and Swinburne. "Twentieth-Century Philosophy of Religion" provides an accessible overview of the major strands in the rich tapestry of twentieth-century thought about religion and will be an indispensible resource for any interested in contemporary philosophy of religion.

1

TWENTIETH-CENTURY PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION: AN INTRODUCTION

Charles Taliaferro

Offering an overview of twentieth-century philosophy of religion is as daunting as offering a unified narrative of twentieth-century art. There is simply too much turbulence and diversity to make for any neat portrait. But one general observation seems secure: philosophical reflection on religion has formed a major, vibrant part of some of the best philosophy in the past century. We now have a virtual library of a hundred years of first-rate, diverse philosophy of religion. At the close of the century there are more societies, institutions, journals, conferences and publishing houses dedicated to philosophy of religion than any other area of philosophical enquiry. The enduring appeal of philosophy of religion may be seen in the fact that many prestigious twentieth-century philosophers whose names are not featured with their own chapter in this volume nonetheless did some work on the philosophy of religion. Selecting figures from the second-half of the twentieth century, Michael Dummett, Robert Nozick, Hilary Putnam and John Rawls are representative of those whose main work is remote from mainstream philosophy of religion, but who nonetheless contributed in different ways to philosophical reflection on God, revelation, the theistic problem of evil, mystical experience and the rationality of religious belief.

There are three sections in what follows. The first takes up what I suggest is the largest theme in twentieth-century philosophy of religion, the second takes up a greater breadth of projects and the third comments on one lesson we might learn from the historical study in this volume.

GODS AND GIANTS

One way to begin building up a picture of twentieth-century philosophy of religion is to invoke Plato’s famous depiction of philosophy as a battle between the gods and the giants. In the Sophist Plato depicts the gods as trying to account for the world in terms of higher, incorporeal forms, while the giants seek to privilege terrestrial, material reality. If we stretch this metaphor somewhat and depict the gods as idealists and theists and the giants as naturalists, a great deal of twentieth-century philosophy of religion may be seen as taken up in this massive, perhaps perennial, struggle.

The twentieth century in the Anglophone world began with the gods having a modest edge. F. H. Bradley and J. M. E. McTaggart propounded sophisticated idealist systems that were highly influential in philosophy of religion. While McTaggart was an atheist, he defended the view that souls are immortal, destined for a community of love. Bradley’s work encouraged monist and theistic models of the divine. Bernard Bosanquet and Andrew Seth Pringle-Patterson also advanced an idealist foundation for religious belief. The assault on idealism by G. E. Moore and especially by Bertrand Russell may be seen as (in part) a movement to more thoroughly secularize the projects of philosophy. In his classic early paper, “The Refutation of Idealism” (1903), Moore explicitly sees himself as refuting a system of philosophy that characterizes reality as spiritual. Neither Moore nor Russell were thoroughgoing lifelong naturalists (indeed, at times both presented powerful arguments against naturalism), but they did tip the scales ever so slightly toward the giants.

Of those philosophers who feature in their own chapters here, the following may be seen as supporting theism, idealism or a religious understanding of the divine that goes beyond secular naturalism: William James, Henri Bergson, Alfred North Whitehead and Charles Hartshorne, Max Scheler, Martin Buber, Jacques Maritain, Karl Jaspers, Karl Barth, William P. Alston, Alvin Plantinga and Richard Swinburne. Others in the camp who flourished in the mid twentieth century include James Baillie, Nikolai Berdyaev, C. A. Campbell, A. C. Ewing, H. H. Farmer, Austin Farrer, Etienne Gilson, C. E. M. Joad, E. L. Mascal, H. H. Price, Hastings Rashdall, William Sorley, John Smith, A. E. Taylor, William Temple and F. R. Tennant. In the last quarter of the twentieth century, philosophical advocates of theism are abundant. The following are representative in addition to Plantinga, Alston and Swinburne: Marilyn McCord Adams, Robert Merrihew Adams, William Lane Craig, Alan Donagan, William Hasker, Brian Hebblethwaite, Norman Kretzmann, John Lucas, George Mavrodes, Basil Mitchell, Philip L. Quinn, James Ross, Eleonore Stump, Charles Taylor, William Wainwright, Merold Westphal, Nicholas Wolferstorff and Linda Zagzebski.

Interestingly, there are not many chapters in this volume arguing for an exclusively secular naturalist position. John Dewey allowed for religious values and was not a reductive or strict naturalist, but he certainly built a strong case against theism based on a broadly conceived naturalism. Russell dedicated serious work against theism along with idealism. And while A. J. Ayer’s logical positivism shared with Berkeleyan idealism a high role for mental states, Ayer argued forcefully against the coherence of both theism and Hegelian idealism, along with a case against the cognitive meaningfulness of ethics. The movement that Ayer championed (along with Moritz Schlick and Rudolf Carnap) provided a powerful critique of the metaphysics of religious belief. Using a refined Humean standard of meaning, Ayer, Antony Flew, Sidney Hook and Paul Edwards argued specifically against theism as well as against religious concepts of the soul. While some mid-twentieth-century critics of theism retained some idealist sympathies (Brand Blanshard and C. J. Ducasse), late-twentieth-century critics seem more solidly naturalistic, as is the case with John Mackie, H. J. McCloskey and Kai Nielson. At the close of the century some of the outstanding philosophers who have dedicated important work to the critique of theism and theistic arguments include Paul Draper, Nicholas Everitt, Richard M. Gale, Adolf Grünbaum, Anthony Kenny, Michael Martin, Graham Oppy, William Rowe, J. J. C. Smart and J. H. Sobel.

While the conflict between theistic and non-theistic projects was preoccupied with the meaning of religious belief in the 1950s through to the 1960s, the collapse of positivism has widened the agenda with a great deal of focus on the conditions for justified religious belief (how much, if any, evidence is requisite for religious belief to be rational?), the coherence and character of the divine attributes, and the classical theistic and anti-theistic arguments, from arguments from evil to arguments from religious experience and the contingency of the cosmos.

I offer several general observations about the literature on the problem of evil below, but before doing so I comment briefly on twentieth-century work on the divine attributes and theistic arguments.

Debate over the divine attributes has been massive since the retreat of positivism. Important philosophical work has been deployed in examining the coherence and interrelationship of divine goodness or perfection, omnipotence, omniscience, freedom, eternity, necessity, omnipresence, incorporeality, impassability, moral authority and worship-worthiness. Serious, but somewhat less in quantity, work has focused on God’s simplicity and on Christian conceptions of the Trinity and Incarnation. This literature naturally displays the ways in which philosophy of religion has incorporated other subfields of philosophy. So, debate over the eternity of God incorporated work in metaphysics on time, the debate over omniscience incorporated current epistemology, and so on. Not since the late medieval era has there been so much attention on the articulation, critique and reformation of the divine attributes.

Work on the concept of God naturally helped refine and promote arguments about the existence or non-existence of God and the implications of God’s existence for human values and practices. Perhaps the greatest beneficiary of the work on divine attributes has been work on the ontological argument. According to some formulations of the argument, if one has reason to believe it is possible God exists, one has reason to believe that God exists. The tenacity of the ontological argument since the end of positivism is extraordinary. Four of the more discussed theistic arguments are arguments from contingency (or cosmological arguments), teleological arguments, moral arguments and arguments from religious experience. The development of cogent defences and reformulations of these arguments, as well as the excellent forceful criticisms these arguments have provoked, has falsified the idea that the Enlightenment (more specifically, David Hume and Immanuel Kant) put an end to philosophical theology. (To appeal to the analogy I employed above about art, the so-called death of natural theology is like the death of painting. At multiple times since the 1960s, painting has been declared dead but, for better or worse, painting in the art world seems as vibrant as ever.)

Two signs of the vibrancy of the theistic debate can be seen in reference books and in other subfields of philosophy. As for reference works, there was a profound shift in the framework of the first edition of the magisterial Encyclopedia of Philosophy in 1967 under the editorship of Paul Edwards to the framework of the second edition in 2005. Edwards designed the Encyclopedia to address religious issues in the spirit of Hume, Voltaire and Denis Diderot (see Vol. 3), namely, relentless criticism. In the second edition there is a shift to critical as well as constructive entries on virtually all areas of philosophy of religion. Quinn, the philosophy of religion editor, launched a far more capacious volume representing naturalism as well as theism and non-theistic religions in a critical but philosophically engaging setting. The same openness to philosophy of religion is evidenced in the competitive multivolume Encyclopedia of Philosophy published by Routledge, with Eleonore Stump working as the philosophy of religion editor. To get some idea of the quantity of work produced, Barry Whitney’s annotated bibliography on the problem of evil from 1960 to 1991, published by the Philosophy Documentation Center, has over four thousand entries. Also, one can see significant issues or concepts from the philosophy of religion in play in other subfields of philosophy, from ethics to philosophy of art. Most post-Second World War textbooks introducing philosophy for university and college classes contain some philosophy of religion.

While not represented in this volume, it should also be underscored how a great many theistic themes were taken in up in the twentieth century by continental existentialists and phenomenologists such as Simone de Beauvoir, Nikolai Berdyaev, Albert Camus, Gabriel Marcel and Jean-Paul Sartre. The philosophical exploration of theism was also an abiding interest of some of the best mid-and late-twentieth-century contributors to the history of ideas, such as Ernst Cassirer, F. R. Copleston, Étienne Gilson, Anthony Kenny, Arthur Lovejoy and John Passmore. These historians helped correct the beautifully written but philosophically prejudiced treatment of religion in Bertrand Russell’s famous History of Western Philosophy (first published in 1945). The philosophical reconstruction of the history of philosophy of religion has also profoundly influenced late-twentieth-century developments. Work by Fred Fredosso and Thomas Flint on Luis de Molina has informed the literature on the divine attributes, as has the work of Brian Davies, Anthony Kenny, Norman Kretzmann, Ralph McInerny and Eleonore Stump on Aquinas. The major philosophers of the past who have received considerable attention in twentieth-century philosophy of religion include Boethius, John Duns Scotus, William Ockham, René Descartes, Blaise Pascal, John Locke, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Hume, Kant, G. W. F. Hegel and Søren Kierkegaard (see Vols 2–4).

A major concern in the naturalism versus theism debate has been the relationship between science and religion. The nineteenth century hosted two dominant positions: on the one hand there were prominent historians such as William Whewell who saw religion and science in conciliatory, complementary terms, while on the other hand John William Draper and Andrew Dickson White construed science and religion in deadly combat. The title of one of White’s books says it all: A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom (1896). Both schools of thought have ample representatives throughout the twentieth century. E. A. Burtt, Whitehead, Ernan McMullin and Ian Barber, among many others, continued the Whewell legacy. Charles Gillispie, John Greene and Alexander Koyré also challenged the sweeping portrait of the Draper–White account of science and religion, which is often referred to now as ‘the conflict thesis’. At the close of the twentieth century, proponents of the conflict thesis are well represented by Richard Dawkins, E. O. Wilson and Daniel Dennett.

Apart from the general debate as to whether the practice of science is somehow inimical to the practice of religion, there is little doubt that different scientifically informed philosophies, often described as forms of naturalism, were deeply committed to the critique of theism. In the last quarter of the twentieth century this debate often centred on the prospects of a materialist account of consciousness. Flew, for example, compared the intelligibility of theism to the intelligibility of a dualist, non-reductive account of the mind. He argued that that just as it has become apparent that the human mind is not a non-physical reality, separable from the body, it should be equally apparent that there is no incorporeal, non-physical God. In a way, these naturalists used Gilbert Ryle’s critique of dualism, according to which the mind or soul is a ghost in the machine of the body, to argue that God is a mere ghost (and thus merely an object of superstition) in the cosmos. Those arguing against this position often linked their defence of theism with a sustained critique of materialist reductionism. This link between theism and the philosophy of mind is evident in one of the most important works in post-Second World War analytic philosophy of religion: Plantinga’s God and Other Minds (1967).

The theism and naturalism debate not only ranged over different accounts of the natural sciences and their success or failure in providing a secular view of nature, but also included psychology and sociology. While not philosophers themselves, Max Weber and Sigmund Freud (see Vol. 4, Ch. 20) produced philosophically significant accounts of the origin and appeal of religion. This was met with competing, non-reductive accounts such as that of Rudolf Otto and his influential phenomenological study of holiness. Much of the work by Weber, Freud, Otto and others became important reference points on philosophical work on religious experience from the 1970s to the present.

Having described much of philosophy of religion as focusing on theism (either for or against), it needs to be appreciated how many philosophers throughout the century defended idealist positions (e.g. R. G. Collingwood, Benedetto Croce, John Foster), and that some philosophers advanced models of God that moved away from classic theism. Idealists cited at the outset of this introduction, such as Bradley, did not embrace Christian orthodoxy. Boston Personalism, for example, launched by Borden Parker Bowne, and championed by E. S. Brightman and Peter Bertocci, posited a creator-God but denied God’s limitless power or omnipotence. Alternative conceptions of the divine have been central to process philosophers such as Whitehead and Hartshorne, as well as in the uniquely Platonic work of John Leslie.

By way of a final introduction to the theism versus naturalism debate in philosophy of religion over the past hundred years, the focus of attention was often on what counts as a good explanation of phenomena. Theists, generally, have given pride of place to intentional teleological explanations. Naturalists have instead occupied two positions: either recognizing teleological explanations and treating these as emergent, new phenomena or explaining teleology in terms of non-purposive forces. The former faces the challenge of explaining how a naturalist universe can generate radically new types of life and value, while the second threatens to undermine what seems like a common-sense approach to human agency. After all, it appears that I am writing the Introduction and you are reading it in order to meet certain goals and fulfil certain intentions. If the complete explanation of what we are doing makes no reference to goals, purposes and intentions, our ordinary understanding of ourselves appears to be in jeopardy.

If naturalism faces difficulties with accounting for ostensible teleology, the biggest challenge to twentieth-century theism has been the problem of evil. How can one recognize some overriding telos or purpose in the suffering and evil in the cosmos?

Several of the chapters will chart the different arguments that have come into play over a theistic account of evil. Some of the twentieth-century literature has consisted in refining the work of earlier centuries. For example, recent work on whether a God who is maximally excellent (or, more modestly, completely good) can or should create a best possible world goes back to Leibniz, and the theistic recourse to appealing to freedom and greater goods has roots in pre-Christian Stoic philosophy. But what is partly distinctive about twentieth-century treatments of evil involves three elements. First, there has been enormous attention given to the twentieth century’s most infamous, profound evil: the Holocaust. Reflection on the Holocaust has led to radical movements within Jewish philosophy of religion, some of which retain theism with the explicit incorporation of belief in an afterlife, while others reinterpret the nature of the divine covenant. Secondly, there has been an increasing stress on a passabilist understanding of God, according to which God also suffers with those who suffer. Traditionally, Christians have believed that God incarnate suffers as the Christ, but denied that God the Father suffers (impassabilism). Some Christian philosophical theologians contend that attention to the affective nature of God’s presence enables us to make greater sense of how a good God may bring good or redemption out of what appears to us to be a sheer, unmitigated tragedy. Thirdly, Darwinian evolution in the nineteenth century created a challenge for theists in accounting for the cruelty of nature, vividly described by John Stuart Mill for whom nature was no better than a vicious, serial killer. Late twentieth-century theists made use instead of contemporary Western ecology, which stressed the integrated valuable character of ecosystems. Nature still had red teeth and claws, but predation was seen in more amicable terms by later ecologists than their horrified, Victorian forbearers.

BEYOND GODS AND GIANTS

A range of philosophers covered in this volume took philosophy of religion in different directions. Some of these movements were theistic, but the emphasis was not over the metaphysics or epistemology of theism. Martin Heidegger, for example, shifted attention to a phenomenology of our experience of ourselves in the world. In Heidegger’s later work we have what may be described as an extended meditation on being. His work defies any easy description; its richness is evidenced, in part, by the way in which it impacted such diverse theologians as Rudolf Bultmann, John Maquarie, Karl Rahner and Paul Tillich. Heidegger’s early work inspired philosophers to explore concepts such as authenticity in religious contexts. His later work on being and poetry attracted the attention of many Asian philosophers of religion, especially those in Buddhist studies. Derrida’s deconstruction of traditional philosophy inspired a new wave of continental philosophy of religion (leading figures at the end of the twentieth century include John Caputo, Jean-Luc Marion, Paul Ricoeur and Mark C. Taylor). This movement is quite diverse, but it may be seen as united in its promotion of apophatic theology or at least in its critique of cataphatic theology. Apophatic theology (also called the via negativa) gives primacy to what cannot be said of God, and resists cataphatic or via positiva theologies that reference God univocally or by way of analogy or metaphor. Emmanuel Levinas, a Jewish continental philosopher who rejected cataphatic theology, gave a central role to ethics over and against metaphysics. For Levinas, the heart of Judaism is to be found in ethics and a profound appreciation of the vulnerability of individual persons.

A survey of these other contributors to philosophy of religion makes clear that the field included far more than analytic conceptual analysis or debates in classical metaphysics. If one sees the field as limited to philosophers such as Richard Swinburne and John Mackie, for example, one may well conclude that while the field has shown exciting and substantial progress (the clarity, force, and scope of the arguments have increased over time), it has worked with a similar set of questions going back to Hume and Joseph Butler, or going back even further to the first English-speaking philosophy of the modern era: the Cambridge Platonists Ralph Cudworth and Henry More versus Thomas Hobbes in the seventeenth century (see Vol. 3). But when you t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Editorial Introduction
• Contributors
• 1. Twentieth-Century Philosophy of Religion: An Introduction
• 2. William James
• 3. Henri Bergson
• 4. John Dewey
• 5. Alfred North Whitehead and Charles Hartshorne
• 6. Bertrand Russell
• 7. Max Scheler
• 8. Martin Buber
• 9. Jacques Maritain
• 10. Karl Jaspers
• 11. Paul Tillich
• 12. Karl Barth
• 13. Ludwig Wittgenstein
• 14. Martin Heidegger
• 15. Emmanuel Levinas
• 16. Simone Weil
• 17. A. J. Ayer
• 18. William P. Alston
• 19. John Hick
• 20. Mary Daly
• 21. Jacques Derrida
• 22. Alvin Plantinga
• 23. Richard Swinburne
• 24. Late-Twentieth-Century Atheism
• Chronology
• Bibliography
• Index