This book advances three central propositions: (a) Claims about what is real, including a transcendent reality, if it exists, cannot be achieved by short, snappy proofs, but by the hard work of examining phenomena closely, conjecturing about how they might explained, and critically scrutinizing the explanations that are suggested by the phenomena; (b) The methodology that is needed in a critical scrutiny of religion is neither deductive nor inductive argumentation, both of which have been prominent in philosophy of religion, but abductive argumentation, in which unobservable objects are tentat ... More

This book advances three central propositions: (a) Claims about what is real, including a transcendent reality, if it exists, cannot be achieved by short, snappy proofs, but by the hard work of examining phenomena closely, conjecturing about how they might explained, and critically scrutinizing the explanations that are suggested by the phenomena; (b) The methodology that is needed in a critical scrutiny of religion is neither deductive nor inductive argumentation, both of which have been prominent in philosophy of religion, but abductive argumentation, in which unobservable objects are tentatively postulated to exist, in an effort to determine how well they explain otherwise inexplicable phenomena; and (c) The phenomena that ought to be made central to the study of religion are the varied experiences that people have reported and continue to report, especially those that suggest to educated and articulate adults that an order of reality might exist that transcends the known natural one. Empirical grounds for advancing the existence of spirits are examined in several chapters, such as the phenomena of (alleged) demonic possession and exorcism, as well as other phenomena in biblical history and in contemporary life that suggest the existence of holy beings. These phenomena are used to reconstruct the theory of spirits in a critical realist way, according to which the postulated entities are contextually defined by the causal roles these entities are deemed to play. The abductive argumentation to unobservable objects that is advocated is perhaps best known from atomism, but it has also been vital to evolutionary theory, genetic theory, psychoanalysis, and to other well known fields of scientific inquiry. Various objections are examined against the thesis of the book, including the view that the concepts of religion are mythopoeic, the claim that naturalism as it is presently known is adequate to explain all phenomena, and the position that Christian theism is incoherent. The plausibility of contextual realism is defended according to which separate domains of critical inquiry have epistemic independence from one another, so that ontological reduction is neither routinely imposed on religious claims nor deemed to be impossible. The competing claims that theism is properly basic and that probabilistic argument affords the best approach toward theism are resisted. The author calls for “naturalizing epistemology” of religion, following W. V. O. Quine, which requires paying more attention than classical empiricism has given to the circumstances in which educated and articulate adults adopt beliefs, including beliefs that accommodate God and other spirits.