The Ends of Philosophy of Religion

Terminus and Telos

T. Knepper

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137324412
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophical Metaphysics

Knepper criticizes existing efforts in the philosophy of religion for being out of step with, and therefore useless to, the academic study of religion, then forwards a new program for philosophy of religion that is in step with, and therefore useful to, the academic study of religion.

Part I

Critical

Chapter 1

The End and Ends of Philosophy of Religion

WITH THIS CHAPTER I BEGIN THE CRITICAL section of my book, focusing particularly on Nick Trakakis’s The End of Philosophy of Religion. As I mentioned in my preface, I made my first acquaintance of Nick’s book at a time when I was on the lookout for new projects in the philosophy of religion. Its title alone sounded promising, suggesting not only an incisive critique of the current state of the philosophy of religion but also a robust proposal for its future. But these hopes were dashed when I discovered that The End of Philosophy of Religion falls short at both ends. Not only does it mistake what threatens to terminate a certain philosophy of religion, but it also lacks a viable alternative program for a philosophy of religion that is historically grounded and religiously diverse. But I find these shortcomings instructive, enabling a clearer view of that which is wrong with our currently ascendant philosophies of religion as well as a faint glimpse of what could be right about a future philosophy of religion. So I will take them here as a way of previewing my critique of analytic and continental philosophy of religion in Chapters 2 and 3 as well as my construction of an alternative philosophy of religion in Chapters 4, 5, and 6. In other words, this chapter serves as an introduction to the rest of the book.1

1. The End of Philosophy of Religion

What The End of Philosophy of Religion claims to do is “drive one further nail into the coffin of philosophy as it is usually practised in the analytic tradition,” though with the “peculiar twist” of focusing on the philosophy of religion.2 As I suggested before and will proceed to argue, this nail misses the mark: if the coffin’s being tacked shut, it is so for reasons other than those identified by Trakakis. But first I want to question whether there is even a body in the coffin—whether Trakakis’s reading of analytic philosophy of religion is so narrow that the corpse it attempts to inter is but straw.

My initial suspicion comes from one of the book’s central chapters—Trakakis’s critique of theodicy as too objective and detached, too scientific and logical, too professional and technical. The entire chapter is premised by the claim that theodicy is “one of the heartlands of analytic philosophy of religion”; those analytic philosophers of religion who in some way object to the problem of theodicy are therefore “lonely voices in the wilderness.”3 Given this premise, it seems reasonable to surmise that the majority of analytic philosophers of religion not only fail to discuss the “meta-theodical question of whether it is legitimate (in some significant sense) to offer a theodicy in response to the problem of evil,” let alone to question “the very idea that God has morally sufficient reasons for permitting evil,” but also, in actually doing theodicy, privilege “the observer’s point of view at the expense of the outlook of the one who is in the throes of pain and despair” and therefore “only add to the evils of the world, rather than illuminating or counteracting them.”4 But in an attempt to bolster his critique, Trakakis notes more than twice as many analytic philosophers of religion who are criticizing theodicy rather than doing theodicy. And so one cannot help coming away from this chapter feeling that there is actually a considerable amount of diversity within analytic philosophy of religion (at least with respect to the theistic problem of evil).5 More significantly, one cannot help wondering whether Trakakis’s critique is less rejection of than wrinkle in the ongoing analytic philosophy of theodicy.

My second suspicion of straw-manning—Trakakis’s defense of perspectivalism vis-à-vis epistemic foundationalism6—is almost the inverse. Here it is not the case that noted diversity is marginalized; instead actual diversity is unnoted. Granted, it is not entirely clear what Trakakis means by perspectivalism: at first it seems to include metaphysical antirealism, as it is said to reject “any conception of an objectively existing reality, a real world-structure of which there are interpretations, a way the world really is in contrast with our modes of interpreting it”; but later it leans distinctly toward the epistemic, admitting the possibility of agreement with the realist “that the existence and nature of God, like that of physical objects, is independent of what any human being thinks or believes.”7 But even here I find it hard to believe that analytic philosophy of religion, which by and large seems to have moved beyond classical foundationalism, would disagree with what appears to be the central claim of Trakakis’s epistemic “perspectivalism”—the conditioned and contingent nature of knowledge—two examples of which follow:

Perspectivalism, moreover, rules out epistemological theories which hold that we can come to possess objective—that is, impartial and unconditioned—knowledge of the world. Knowledge-claims, for the perspectivalist, are never impartial or unconditioned, but are always geared toward serving our interests, needs and desires, and are always influenced by (among other things) the nature of the knower, the placement of the knower, the conditions of knowing and the process of coming to know.8

The result of a more sober reading of Nietzsche is not relativism and irrationalism but a heightened sense of the contingency and revisability of our constructions, not the jettisoning of reason but a redescription of reason.9

Nor can I imagine that contemporary analytic philosophy of religion claims to attain “absolute truth,” “the final answer on God and religion,” or “objective knowledge,” the knowledge of things “as they are in themselves.”10 And this is not just about what I find hard to believe or imagine. As suggested before, Trakakis himself cites little support for these claims.11 Moreover, as one prominent analytic philosopher has taken pains to explain, not only is there is a good deal of diversity in analytic philosophy about such matters, but most analytic philosophers of religion simply do not fit such a caricature:

[T]he view of the onto-theologian is that we can (and sometimes do) believe exactly the truths about God, undistorted by our own human circumstances, that God himself believes. Now, it is easy enough to see that if the God’s-eye point of view is wholly inaccessible (or, worse, non existent), the hope of the onto-theologian is a non-starter. Moreover, I suspect that most analytic theologians nowadays will think that, in any case, the suppositions of the paradigmatic onto-theologian are narrow-minded and optimistic at best. Mystery is inevitable, and God is clearly much more than a mere explanatory posit.12

[T]here seems to be a great deal of confusion among theologians and some postmodern philosophers about what foundationalism actually is. The problem (and I am hardly the first to point this out) is that many writers seem to confuse what most of us would call “classical foundationalism” (roughly, the view that a belief is justified only if it is self-evident, incorrigible, evident to the senses, or deducible from premises that satisfy at least one of those three conditions) with foundationalism simpliciter. Classical foundationalism is almost universally rejected nowadays.13

Of course, analytic philosophy of religion’s alleged obsession with theodicy and disdain for perspectivalism are, for Trakakis, just symptoms of an underlying malady infecting the philosophy of religion. And they are, for me, just examples of how Trakakis reads analytic philosophy of religion a bit too narrowly. What is really at stake for both of us is what is really wrong with philosophy of religion. For Trakakis, this is the overly professional and technical, overly scientific and logical, and overly objective and detached nature of analytic philosophy of religion.14 For me, it is quite the opposite—philosophy of religion is even still not yet an area of inquiry that investigates religious reason-giving in as many of the religions of the world as possible, with as many reliable tools and methods of inquiry as possible, by a community of inquirers that makes every effort to be as impartial and diverse as possible.

This is what alarms me most about Trakakis’s book—its apparent confusion of scholarly inquiry with spiritual formation.15 Trakakis accuses the philosophy of religion of ignoring or reducing to purely abstract concerns the existential and lived dimension, of failing to come to terms with “the mysterious transcendent reality that is disclosed in religious practice” due to “an attachment to scientific norms of rationality and truth.”16 And of course there is, in certain contexts, something wrong with reducing the lived dimension of religion to purely abstract concerns, with applying scientific norms of rationality and truth to religious practice, and with professionalizing and technicalizing the philosophy of religion. But the scholarly practice of philosophy of religion, at least the one I advance here, is not one such context. Philosophy of religion ought to posit and test hypotheses (in a broad pragmatic sense), for this is how humans inquire.17 It ought to apply the tools of formal logic and empirical science, where applicable, for these have shown themselves conducive to human inquiry more often than not.18 It ought to be professional and, where necessary, technical, for this is how communities of inquirers attain degrees of objectivity and precision. And it ought to conduct its affairs as critically and correctively as possible, for doing so has proved an effective way of managing and minimizing distorting biases.

It is here that Trakakis’s mistaken examples of what is wrong with analytic philosophy of religion in particular are suggestive of what might really be afflicting philosophy of religion in general. Take Trakakis’s critique of theodicy, for example. For me, what is obviously missing in this is attention to whether and how “the problem of evil” plays out in nontheistic contexts, and therefore consideration of whether and how theodicy and evil are even appropriate categories for philosophy of (all) religion in the first place.19 To be fair, Trakakis does recognize that, in the case of theodicy, “the heart of the problem lies with the kind of God, or the specific conception of God, that forms the basis of discussion.”20 And he even goes on to add that this is “to call attention to the nature of the divine reality that is taken to be experienced in the world’s religious traditions.”21 But there is then no mention of religious traditions outside of the Abrahamic fold nor really any awareness that “the nature of divine reality that is taken to be experienced” in such religions might be quite different—indeed, might not even be taken to be divine or real. The moral is not that “comparative theodicy” should stop because it is either too ethnocentric or too dispassionate. Rather, it needs to be done better—more diversely, objectively, and critically. Here, arguments that philosophy of religion should end due to its immorality or irrationality are just more arguments in the data set of philosophy of religion.22

Speaking of this data set, it strikes me that it is rather impoverished, that most philosophers of religion just do not have enough thick descriptions of reason-giving in the religions of the world, that most philosophers of religion (of both the analytic and continental stripes) are too busy rushing to judgment about the truth or value of some religious belief or practice to be bothered with the hard work of gaining a hermeneutically sensitive and ideologically aware understanding of that which is under investigation. And so, in the case of Trakakis’s second critique, I see the problem not as one of perspectivalism but one of critical contextualism. In part my claim is based on my belief that the contingent and conditioned nature of knowledge is not under disagreement. In part it is based on my belief that what philosophy of religion needs most is not to come to agreement about a theory of truth or reality but just to get busy employing what seem to be our “shared standards.”23 I could be wrong about both. Still, I do not believe I am wrong in thinking that we philosophers of religion just do not know enough about the instances and patterns of reason-giving in the religions of the world. And by “enough,” I mean much more than knowing that; I mean understanding, for starters, the grounds, ends, and motives; speakers, audiences, and opponents; genealogies, contestations, and alterations of instances of religious reason-giving, and, beyond that, how such instances fit in to overall patterns of religious reason-giving. Here, The End of the Philosophy of Religion seems to be of two minds. Its chapter on Nikos Kazantzakis’s The Poor Man of God (Chapter 5) is a fine example of a hermeneutically sensitive reading of a text (albeit one that practices only a hermeneutic of affirmation). But even here, it appears in a rush to appropriate (in order to score points against analytic philosophy of religion). And this is true of the book in general, which presupposes and proclaims those very things that philosophers of religion would want to investigate, above all that divine reality is so transcendent or mysterious, humans so finite or limited, that the latter cannot know anything about the former.

It is largely for this reason that The End of the Philosophy of Religion fails also at the other end, containing few signs of a viable alternative set of goals and methods for the philosophy of religion. Its concluding chapter does advocate, with Bruce Wilshire, the retrieval of the “value of myth,” which served as “a fountain of wisdom in ancient cultures,” and, with David Tacey, the fashioning of a “new image of God,” which “must be expressed in a new language.”24 But as this new image of God is said to be “intimate, intense, and immanent,” and this new language is said to express the existence of this God as a matter of “reasoned trust” or “mystical faith,” these ends seem not only to exclude a significant portion of the world’s religions but also to beg some of the very questions that a philosophy of religion should want to investigate.25 And the same is true of Trakakis’s other attempt to steer a new course for the philosophy of religion: his aforementioned, Chapter 5 reading of Kazantzakis’s The Poor Man of God, which, in contradistinction to the preceding four chapters—chapters that are admitted to be terminologically, stylistically, and methodologically analytic in appearance—seeks “to take a glimpse at what a ‘philosophy without philosophy’ (to borrow Blanchot’s turn of phrase) might look like, what form a ‘weak philosophy’ (to borrow from Vattimo) . . . could assume in practice.”26 What follows, though, is by no means clear, appearing most to resemble a “deconstruction without deconstruction”—a stylistically Derridean exposition of The Poor Man of God (complete with shifting marginalia) that seeks to locate not those interstices at which the text undermines itself but those quotes on which a continued critique of analytic philosophy of religion can be grounded. What is clear is that, once again, answers to the very sorts of questions that philosophers of religion should want to ask are assumed—answers, moreover, that privilege a certain Western-Romantic understanding of God:

Truth is like that. And the ultimate truth, Truth Itself, that is, God, always evades neat and accurate formulations, much to the consternation of philosophers and theologians.27

The mind, with its sophisticated proofs and refutations, wishes to augment its authority, to “spread itself out and conquer the world not only by means of heaven but also by force” (300), whereas the simple...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Part I. Critical
• Part II. Constructive
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography