What Is Philosophy of Religion?

Philosophy of religion is the rational examination of the concepts, claims, and arguments that arise from religious thought and practice. It asks not what any particular tradition teaches but whether what is taught can be defended: whether there is a God or transcendent reality, whether such a being's nature is even coherent, whether religious belief can be rational, whether religious language succeeds in saying anything, and what follows for morality, meaning, and the human predicament. It is philosophy applied to religion — argument and analysis rather than devotion, scripture, or church history — and it proceeds, in principle, from premises available to believer and unbeliever alike.

This page fixes the subject matter, separates the three different kinds of question the field pursues, lays out the map of available positions, and distinguishes philosophy of religion from the neighbouring disciplines it is most often confused with. The later pages take up each problem — the arguments for and against theism, the problem of evil, the divine attributes, religious language, and faith and reason — in detail.

Three questions, not one

It is tempting to think the philosophy of religion is just the question "Does God exist?" But that single question conceals three logically independent ones, and progress depends on keeping them apart. They mirror the structure used throughout these notes (compare the free-will problem, which is likewise split into a metaphysical, a normative, and a conceptual question):

• The metaphysical question — is there a God, or a transcendent reality at all? This is the question of existence: whether the world contains, or depends on, a being of the relevant kind. It is the province of natural theology (arguments that there is such a being) and of atheological arguments (arguments that there is not, above all from evil).
• The epistemic question — can we know, and when is religious belief justified? Even if there is a God, it is a further question whether anyone is in a position to know it, and how belief could be warranted: by argument and evidence, by religious experience, by testimony of miracles, or as properly basic without argument at all. This is the domain of religious epistemology and of faith and reason.
• The semantic question — what does religious language mean? Before asking whether "God is good" is true or known, we must ask what it says. Is talk of a timeless, immaterial, infinite being literally meaningful, or only analogical, symbolic, or expressive? The verificationist challenge pressed this hard, and the answer shapes everything: a sentence that says nothing can be neither true nor justified.

A complete view must answer all three, and the answers interact. A non-realist who holds that "God exists" is not a factual claim at all (semantic) thereby dissolves the metaphysical question; an evidentialist who demands proportioning belief to evidence (epistemic) makes the success of the arguments decisive in a way a fideist does not.

The map of positions

On the metaphysical question, the principal positions are arrayed by what they affirm about the divine and whether they affirm anything:

The default subject of Western philosophy of religion is classical theism — the "God of the philosophers," a being possessing the omni-attributes to their maximal degree — because it is the conception against which the central arguments and the problem of evil are pitched. But the field is steadily widening to take in process and open theism, and the non-Western traditions — Hindu, Buddhist, Confucian, Daoist — whose conceptions of ultimate reality are often non-personal or non-theistic, and which generate philosophical problems of their own.

A useful taxonomy of the existence question itself distinguishes:

• Theistic arguments — that God does exist: the ontological, cosmological, teleological, moral, and experiential arguments.
• Atheological arguments — that God does not exist: the problem of evil, divine hiddenness, and incoherence-of-attributes arguments.
• Neutral / second-order considerations — about burden of proof, the meaningfulness of the dispute, and the epistemology of belief without proof.

What philosophy of religion is not

The field is defined as much by its method as its subject, and three contrasts sharpen it:

• Not theology. Theology reasons from within a tradition, typically taking the existence of God and the authority of a revelation as starting points, and works out their consequences (systematic theology) or interprets their sources (biblical, dogmatic theology). Philosophy of religion takes nothing as given by faith; it subjects the starting points themselves to scrutiny. The boundary is porous — philosophical theology and the recent analytic theology deliberately straddle it — but the difference in burden is real: the theologian may presuppose what the philosopher must argue for.
• Not religious studies. Religious studies (the history, sociology, anthropology, and psychology of religion) describes religion as a human phenomenon — what people believe and do, and why — without evaluating whether the beliefs are true. It is descriptive and empirical; philosophy of religion is normative and evaluative. (The descriptive findings can nonetheless feed atheological arguments: see the projection theories of Feuerbach, Marx, and Freud, and the cognitive science of religion.)
• Not apologetics. Apologetics is the defence of a faith, advocacy with a conclusion fixed in advance. Philosophy of religion follows the argument where it leads and is equally prepared to find for atheism; many of its central practitioners (Hume, Mackie, Rowe) were unbelievers. The discipline's credibility depends on this evenhandedness — the same standards are applied to a design argument and to the argument from evil.

A field, not a single debate

Because the three questions are independent, the philosophy of religion is genuinely a field rather than an extended argument about existence. Its main provinces, each developed in its own pages:

• The existence of God — the arguments for and against, and the canonical trio of ontological, cosmological, and teleological arguments.
• The nature of God — the concept of God and the coherence of the divine attributes: omnipotence, omniscience and foreknowledge, eternity, goodness and simplicity.
• The problem of evil — the chief reason to doubt theism, in its logical and evidential forms, the theodicies that answer it, and the related problem of divine hiddenness.
• Religious epistemology — faith and reason, evidentialism and Reformed epistemology, religious experience, and miracles.
• Religious language — whether God-talk is meaningful, analogical, or non-realist.
• Religion's bearing on value and life — religion and morality (the Euthyphro dilemma, divine-command theory) and the meaning of life.
• Religion in a plural and scientific world — religious diversity, science and religion, and the critiques of religion.
• The wider traditions — non-Western philosophy of religion and the history of the field.

Where this leaves us

The philosophy of religion is best entered not through a verdict but through a grid: three questions (does it exist? can we know? what does it mean?) crossed with a range of positions (theism, atheism, agnosticism, and their variants). Almost every dispute in the field is located somewhere on that grid, and most confusion comes from sliding between its cells — answering a semantic worry with a metaphysical argument, or treating a failure of proof as a proof of non-existence. The next page fixes the central object of the metaphysical question by asking exactly what is meant by "God"; with the concept of God in hand we can then weigh the arguments for and against its existence.