Philosophy of Religion

This book shows how religious commitment can be rational and describes the place of faith in the postmodern world. It portrays religious commitment as far more than accepting doctrines—it is viewed as a kind of life, not just as an embrace of tenets. Faith is conceived as a unique attitude. It is irreducible to belief, but closely connected with both belief and conduct, and intimately related to life’s moral, political, and aesthetic dimensions. Part One presents an account of rationality as a status attainable by mature religious people—even those with a strongly scientific habit of mind. Part Two describes what it means to have faith, how faith is connected with attitudes, emotions, and conduct, and how religious experience may support it. Part Three turns to religious commitment and moral obligation and to the relation between religion and politics. It shows how ethics and religion can be mutually supportive though ethics provides comprehensive standards of conduct independently of theology. It also depicts the integrated life possible for the religiously committed—a life with rewarding interactions between faith and reason, religion and science, and the aesthetic and the spiritual. The book concludes with two major accounts. One, concerning the relation between theism and evil, explains how moral wrongs and natural disasters are possible under a God conceived as having the knowledge, power, and goodness that make such evils so difficult to understand. The other account concerns the metaphysical resources of theism and the nature of persons, human and divine, and it yields a theory that can sustain a rational theistic worldview in the contemporary scientific age.

This book combines historical scholarship with conceptual analysis focusing on the ways in which theological considerations have figured in natural law theorizing from Plato to Spinoza. Theological considerations have had a pronounced role in Thomistic natural law theorizing but much remains to explore concerning both Aquinas and other key figures in the long and complex history of natural law theorizing overall. The chapters in this book examine the relation between conceptions of natural law and theistic claims and principles, explicating the variety of those conceptions and relations in crucial periods prior to modern era. They articulate diverse ways in which natural law has been understood and the diverse ways in which theistic claims have been related to claims about the objectivity and rationality of principles of natural law. In addition to exploring Plato and the Stoics, the volume also looks at medieval Jewish thought, Aquinas, Scotus, and Ockham, and the ways in which Spinoza's thought includes resonances of earlier views and intimations of later developments. These chapters enlarge the scope of the discussion of natural law through study of how the naturalness of natural law has often been related to theses of philosophical theology. The latter are often crucial elements of natural law theorizing, having an integral role in accounting for the metaethical status and ethical bindingness of natural law. Questions of the relation between natural law and God, and the relation between natural law and divine command have been answered in a multiplicity of ways by key figures in the history of natural law theorizing. These chapters draw attention to important elements of natural law theorizing, according them the explanatory significance they deserve.

The Resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth from the dead involved a violation of natural laws, and so could have happened only if natural laws depend for their operation on God, who set them aside on this occasion. The main reason he would have for setting them aside would be any reason he had himself to become incarnate; the Resurrection would then be the divine signature on his work, showing that he had become incarnate. So any evidence from natural theology that there is a God with a certain nature, and any reason to suppose that having that nature would lead a God to become incarnate, is evidence (background evidence) that some sort of super‐miracle like the Resurrection would occur. Any evidence against the existence of God or against him being such as to become incarnate would be evidence against the Resurrection. I argue that God does have reason to become incarnate—to provide atonement, to identify with human suffering, and to reveal truth. Our evidence about the life of Jesus (the prior historical evidence) is such that it is not too improbable that we would find it if God was incarnate in Jesus for these reasons. Our evidence about what happened after the death of Jesus (the posterior historical evidence) is such that it is not too improbable that we would find it if Jesus had risen from the dead. For no other prophet in human history, is there anything like this combination of prior and posterior historical evidence. Given a moderate amount of positive background evidence, it then becomes very probable that Jesus was God Incarnate who rose from the dead.

This book is divided into three parts. Part 1 (Chapters 1 to 4) investigates how truth can be conveyed in allegory, parable, or myth by analogy and metaphor, within false presuppositions about science and history. Part 2 (Chapters 5 to 6) considers what is shown when some book or creed constitutes a revelation from God. Its content needs to be intrinsically plausible and also to be confirmed by miracle. Part 3 (Chapters 7 to 12) assesses the claim that Christian doctrinal and moral teaching and the Christian Bible constitute revealed truth. It sets out the criteria for a society descended from the society of the apostles being the Church founded by Jesus Christ, and shown by his miraculous Resurrection to be a source of revealed truth. It argues that the authority of its teaching and of the Bible depends on their being authenticated by that church. It analyses the extent of analogy and metaphor in the Church's teaching, claims that the moral teaching is intrinsically plausible, and that the Bible is to be interpreted in the light of the Church's teaching and of our knowledge of science and history.

Is it possible for there to be subjectivity without a subject, for conscious states to be truly real while there is no real self or owner that has them? One step toward answering this question involves a further question: is consciousness in some sense reflexive or self-aware? The chapters in this collection investigate the linked issues of egological vs nonegological accounts of consciousness and the reflexivity of consciousness from the diverse perspectives of phenomenology, analytic philosophy, the Buddhist philosophical tradition, and the Indian school of Advaita Vedânta. The resulting dialogue illustrates the enhanced clarity that can be achieved by philosophizing across boundaries. Together the chapters lay out the full range of possible views concerning the nature of the self and proofs of its existence or non-existence, and the full spectrum of positions on the question of consciousness' allegedly self-intimating or self-illuminating nature. In doing so they help clarify just what is involved in giving an account of consciousness that takes subjectivity and the first-person perspective seriously.

This book explores the foundations of religious commitment in the domains of metaphysics/epistemology and the ethical. Throughout, the book takes a literary (rather than philosophical) approach to theology that nevertheless makes room for philosophical exploration of religion. The book rejects the usual picture of religious life sitting atop a metaphysical foundation, in need of epistemological justification.

This book presents an historical and critical interpretation of Hume's rejection of the existence of a deity with moral attributes. It argues that in Hume's view no first cause or designer responsible for the ordered universe could possibly have moral attributes; nor could the existence (or non-existence) of such a being have any real implications for human practice or conduct. Hume's case for this ‘moral atheism’ is a central plank of both his naturalistic agenda in metaphysics and his secularizing program in moral theory. It complements his wider critique of traditional theism, and threatens to rule out any religion that would make claims on moral practice. This book situates Hume's commitment to moral atheism in its historical and philosophical context, offers a systematic interpretation of his case for divine amorality, and shows how Hume can endorse moral atheism while maintaining his sceptical attitude toward traditional forms of cosmological and theological speculation.

For most of my life, I have been dismissive of both spirituality and religion. I say this to make clear the perspective and the starting point of this book, this search. No doubt, many of my readers will think of me as simpleminded, trying to recover what I should have learned had I been rightly raised in the matrix of religion, ritual, and belief. Others, my friends from the field of science and most of my political friends, will think that I am benighted, or perhaps something of a sell out, for giving up my lifelong down‐to‐earth scientific, and admittedly hyperrational way of thinking about things. But if the very idea of spirituality seemed to me to be contaminated by sectarian religion and by uncritical and antiscientific thinking, my view of life, which manifested in my becoming a philosopher (it did not come from philosophy) pointed to something else. Spirituality is not just organized religion. Nor is it antiscience, unnatural or supernatural. There is a naturalized spirituality that I have always had a glimpse of, and this is what I want to pursue in this book.