A Dictionary of Philosophy of Religion, Second Edition

Charles Taliaferro, Elsa J. Marty, Charles Taliaferro, Elsa J. Marty

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781501325250
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy of Religion

A Dictionary of Philosophy of Religion is an indispensable resource for students and scholars. Covering historical and contemporary figures, arguments, and terms, it offers an overview of the vital themes that make philosophy of religion the growing, vigorous field that it is today. It covers world religions and sources from east and west. Entries have been crafted for clarity, succinctness, and engagement. This second edition includes new entries, extended coverage of non-Christian topics, as well as revisions and updates throughout. The first edition was named a Choice Outstanding Academic Title of the Year.

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A POSTERIORI. Latin, “from later.” A posteriori knowledge stems from experience or observation and so cannot be known beforehand by pure reason or conceptual analysis. We know a posteriori, for example, that Socrates was executed in 399 BCE. Some traditional arguments for God’s existence such as the teleological and design arguments are developed a posteriori.

A PRIORI. Latin, “from earlier.” A proposition is known a priori when it is known without employing empirical observations or experience. Arguably, one may know a priori that there cannot be a square circle. Some philosophers contend that God can and should be known a priori (as in the ontological argument), as God’s existence is necessary and not dependent on contingent states of affairs.

ABDUCTION. From the Latin ab + ducere, meaning “to lead away.” Abductive reasoning explains phenomena on the grounds of prior probability or reasonability. For example, one might argue for theism on the grounds that if theism is true, it is more probable that there would be an ordered cosmos with conscious, valuable life, than if a nontheistic alternative is assumed to be true, such as secular naturalism. Abductive reasoning is most often employed in comparing a limited number of alternative theories. The earliest theistic design arguments in English were abductive in structure as opposed to inductive. Henry More reasoned that the cosmos was akin to what appears to be language; if we assume there is a creator, the cosmos is (as it seems) intelligible, whereas it does not seem intelligible if there is no creator.

ABELARD, PETER (1079–1142). Abelard is best known for his metaphysics, ethics, and understanding of atonement. In metaphysics, he adopted a form of conceptualism, a position midway between Platonism and nominalism. In ethics, he greatly stressed the role of intentions and desires. He thereby put stress on the moral relevance of our interior life. If Abelard is correct, then an ethic that focuses exclusively on external action is inadequate. In theology, he is attributed with what is sometimes called a subjective theory of the atonement, wherein the saving work of Christ is accomplished by sinners being subjectively transformed by Christ’s heroic, loving self-sacrifice. Abelard did emphasize such subjective transformation, but there is reason to think he also accepted a traditional Anselmian account of the atonement. Abelard carried out an extensive correspondence with Héloïse, which reflected on their love affair and its tragic end. The correspondence includes debate over marriage, romantic love, and the vocation of a philosopher. His principal works are: On the Divine Unity and Trinity (1121), Yes and No (1122), Christian Theology (1124), Theology of the “Supreme Good” (1120–1140), and Know Thyself (1125–1138).

ABJURATION. An act of renunciation, for example, the repudiation of an opinion or a vow now deemed spurious.

ABORTION. Intentional termination of pregnancy. Religious and moral arguments against abortion tend to stress the value of the fetus or unborn child as a person, potential person, human being, or sacred form of life. Some religious denominations and traditions contend that the decision to abort in the early stages of pregnancy should be a matter left to individual conscience and not subject to strict prohibition.

ABRAHAMIC FAITHS. Christianity, Judaism, and Islam are called Abrahamic because they trace their history back to the Hebrew patriarch Abraham (often dated in the twentieth or twenty-first century BCE). Judaism, Christianity, and Islam each see themselves as rooted in Abrahamic faith, as displayed in the Hebrew Bible, the Christian Old Testament (essentially the Hebrew Bible) and New Testament, and the Qur’an.

Since the seventeenth century, “theism” has been the common term used in English to refer to the central concept of God in the Abrahamic faiths. According to the classical forms of these faiths, God is the one and sole God (they are monotheistic as opposed to polytheistic) who both created and sustains the cosmos. God either created the cosmos out of nothing, that is, ex nihilo, or else it has always existed but depends for its existence upon God’s conserving, creative will (some Islamic philosophers have claimed that the cosmos has always existed as God’s sustained creation, but the great majority of philosophers in these three traditions have held that the cosmos had a beginning). Creation out of nothing means that God did not use or require anything external from God in creating everything. The cosmos depends upon God’s conserving, continuous will in the same way light depends on a source or a song depends on a singer. If the source of the light goes out or the singer stops singing, the light and song cease. Traditionally, creation by God is not thought of as an inventor who might make something that is then ignored. The idea of God creating everything and then neglecting it—the way a person might make a machine and then abandon it—is utterly foreign to theism.

In these religions, God is said to exist necessarily, not contingently. God exists in God’s self, not as the creation of some greater being (a super-God) or force of nature. God is also not a mode of something more fundamental, the way a wave is a mode of the sea or a movement is a mode of the dance. The cosmos, in contrast to God, exists contingently but not necessarily—it might not have existed at all; God’s existence is unconditional insofar as it does not depend upon any external conditions, whereas the cosmos is conditional. Theists hold that God is, rather, a substantial reality: a being not explainable in terms that are more fundamental than itself. God is without parts, that is, not an aggregate or compilation of things. Theists describe God as holy or sacred, a reality that is of unsurpassable greatness. God is therefore also thought of as perfectly good, beautiful, all-powerful (omnipotent), present everywhere (omnipresent), and all-knowing (omniscient). God is without origin and without end, everlasting or eternal. Because of all this, God is worthy of worship and morally sovereign (worthy of obedience). Finally, God is manifest in human history; God’s nature and will are displayed in the tradition’s sacred scriptures.

Arguably, the most central attribute of God in the Abrahamic traditions is goodness. The idea that God is not good or the fundamental source of goodness would be akin to the idea of a square circle: an utter contradiction.

Theists in these traditions differ on some of the divine attributes. Some, for example, claim that God knows all future events with certainty, whereas others argue that no being (including God) can have such knowledge. Some theists believe that God transcends both space and time altogether, while other theists hold that God pervades the spatial world and is temporal (there is a before, a during, and an after for God). The Abrahamic traditions include figures who so stress the transcendental “otherness” of God that any positive theistic claims are hedge d by an insistence upon the incomprehensibility and indescribability of God. See also APOPHATIC THEOLOGY.

ABSOLUTE, THE. From the Latin absolutus, meaning “the perfect” or “completed” (as opposed to the relative). “The absolute” is often used to refer to God as the ultimate, independent reality from which all life flows. Although philosophers and theologians as far back as Nicholas of Cusa have used the term in reference to God (e.g., Nicholas of Cusa argued that God is both the Absolute Maximum and the Absolute Minimum), today the term is primarily associated with idealist philosophers of the nineteenth century such as Ferrier, Bradley, Bosanquet, and Royce. The term—in its modern idealist sense—originated in the late eighteenth century in the writings of Schelling and Hegel and was transmitted to the English through Samuel Coleridge’s The Friend (1809–1810). Russian philosopher Vladimir Soloviev used the term to refer to reality, which he conceived of as a living organism. The term has also been embraced by some Eastern philosophers, such as Sri Aurobindo, who considered “the absolute” as an appropriate alternative to the name Brahman. It is most commonly used in the fields of metaphysics, value theory, and natural philosophy.

ABSOLUTION. From the Latin absolvo, meaning “set free.” Absolution is the forgiveness of sins and the removal of any connected penalties. It refers primarily to a Christian practice in which a priest or minister absolves the sins of people in the name of God following their confession, but it may also be used simply to refer to God’s direct forgiveness without any human intermediary.

ABSURD. That which is untenable or beyond the limits of rationality. When associated with existentialism, the absurd refers to there being a lack of any meaning inherent within the real world or in our actions. It gained currency in popular culture via Samuel Beckett’s theater of the absurd and works by Sartre and Camus. A phrase famously (and erroneously) attributed to Tertullian claimed that faith in an incarnate God was absurd: credo quia absurdum est—“I believe because it is absurd.” The actual quotation from Tertullian is: credibile est, quia ineptum est—“It is credible because it is silly.” (De carne Christi 5.4). Tertullian is sometimes taken to thereby valorize irrationality, but his thesis was instead that the truth of Christianity was absurd only in relation to Stoic, non-Christian philosophy. If Tertullian is correct, the tenability of Christianity is not contingent upon external, philosophical inspection.

ACADEMY. The name of the educational, philosophical community founded by Plato in 387 BCE. Its name is derived from the location in northwest Athens, which was named after the hero Academus, where Plato met with other philosophers and students. There have been various academies that have played a role in the history of philosophy of religion and theology. The most well known is the Florentine Academy, a fifteenth-century center for Christian Platonism.

ACCESSIBILITY. In analytic philosophy in the twentieth century, much attention was given to accessibility relations. Is our access to the surrounding world immediate and direct, or indirect and mediated by sensations? Bertrand Russell identified two significant modes of accessibility: one may have access to something either by acquaintance (experiential awareness) or description. In philosophy of religion, the question often addressed is whether God or the sacred may be directly experienced or perceived or may only be known descriptively or via metaphorical and analogical descriptions.

ACCIDIE . Also written as acedia. A state that inhibits pleasure and causes one to reject life. One of the Seven Deadly Sins. Often translated as sloth, accidie historically refers to a very different concept. Athanasius called it the “noon day demon” (cf. Ps. 91:6), and Thomas Aquinas referred to it as the torpor of spirit that prevents one from doing any good works (Summa Theologiae, IIa 35.1). According to Aquinas and other medieval Christians, we are surrounded by abundant reasons for joy. Thus, accidie is the intentional refusal of joy as opposed to “sloth,” which today may refer simply to being lazy or negligent.

ACOSMISM. From the Greek a + kosmos, meaning “not world.” Hegel coined the term in referring to Spinoza’s thought, which in Hegel’s (erroneous) interpretation is that the world is unreal and only God exists. This interpretation, however, would fit better as a description of the pantheism of the Hindu philosopher Śankara.

ACTION AT A DISTANCE. A causal relationship between two objects or events that are not contiguous or in spatial contact. The denial of action at a distance vexed modern accounts of the mind-body relationship, for if the mind is not spatial, it cannot causally affect spatial objects like the body, for the two are not in spatial proximity. Contemporary physics no longer posits spatial contiguity as a necessary condition for causation. Classical theism posits God as omnipresent and thus not distant from the cosmos with respect to causation. While God is thereby believed to be present at all places in terms of causally sustaining all spatial objects, God is not thereby considered to be spatial.

ACTS AND OMISSIONS DOCTRINE. At the heart of deontological ethics and in contrast to act-consequentialism, the acts and omissions doctrine asserts that an act has a greater moral significance than a failure to act (that is, an omission). Hence, killing someone would be worse than letting someone die. Those upholding a form of utilitarianism tend to discount such a distinction. For utilitarians, it is often the case that failing to rescue someone is the moral equivalent of killing that person.

ACTUAL. Some philosophers use the term “possible worlds” to refer to alternative, maximal states of affairs that are not impossible. So, there is a possible world in which there are unicorns. The actual world is not merely possible, but the world in which we live.

ACTUALITY AND POTENTIALITY. A dichotomy originally introduced in Aristotle’s Metaphysics concerning topics of substance and matter...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Title
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• Introduction
• Chronology
• Dictionary
• Bibliography
• About the Authors
• Copyright