A History of Philosophy of Religion

The problems treated throughout these notes — the arguments for God, the problem of evil, the divine attributes, faith and reason — did not arise all at once but developed over two and a half millennia, each era reframing the questions in its own terms. This page gives the chronological narrative, the connective tissue for the topic-organised pages: how the philosophy of religion grew from Greek metaphysics and biblical monotheism, through the great medieval synthesis, the early-modern turn to criticism, the 19th-century revolt, and the 20th-century collapse and revival.

It complements the Abrahamic traditions page (which focuses on cross-confessional interaction) and the key figures reference.

Ancient

Greek philosophy supplied the conceptual resources; the Hebrew scriptures supplied the personal, creator God. Their eventual fusion is the origin of Western philosophy of religion.

• Plato — the Forms and the Form of the Good as the highest reality; the demiurge of the Timaeus (a craftsman who shapes pre-existing matter, not a creator ex nihilo); the immortality of the soul (Phaedo); the Euthyphro's dilemma about piety and the gods. Platonism gave later theism its vocabulary of transcendence, the Good, and the soul.
• Aristotle — the Unmoved Mover of the Metaphysics: a first cause of motion, pure actuality, "thought thinking itself," drawing the cosmos as a final cause (object of desire) rather than creating it. This is the seed of the cosmological argument and of the eternity/immutability attributes, though Aristotle's god is impersonal and does not create.
• The Stoics — a pantheistic divine Logos / providence pervading and ordering nature, and an early problem-of-evil discussion.
• Epicurus — the sharpest ancient statement of the problem of evil (the "Epicurean paradox" of God's willingness and ability), and a deistic-leaning theology of gods indifferent to the world.
• Plotinus and Neoplatonism — the One beyond being, from which all reality emanates; the via negativa and the mystical ascent. Neoplatonism profoundly shaped Augustine, Maimonides, and Islamic falsafa.

Medieval

The medieval achievement was the synthesis of Greek philosophy with the monotheism of the three Abrahamic faiths — a joint, cross-confessional project (treated in detail on that page).

• Augustine (5th c.) — Neoplatonist Christian; evil as privation and the free-will and soul-making materials; time as created with the world; faith seeking understanding.
• Anselm (11th c.) — the ontological argument and the perfect-being method; fides quaerens intellectum.
• Islamic falsafa and kalām — Avicenna's contingency argument and essence/existence; al-Ghazālī's Kalām argument, occasionalism, and critique of the philosophers; Averroes's Aristotelianism and reflections on reason and revelation.
• Jewish philosophy — Maimonides' negative theology and divine simplicity.
• Thomas Aquinas (13th c.) — the grand synthesis: the Five Ways, analogy, the faith/reason harmony, and the classic treatment of the attributes.
• Scotus and Ockham (13th–14th c.) — the univocity of being and the modal ontological argument (Scotus); nominalism, the hard/soft-fact solution to foreknowledge, and divine-command voluntarism (Ockham).

Early modern

The early-modern period turned from synthesis toward criticism, as the new science and the rise of epistemology reframed every question.

• Descartes (17th c.) — a rationalist restatement of the ontological and a causal cosmological argument; God as guarantor of knowledge; universal possibilism about the eternal truths.
• Spinoza — radical pantheism: Deus sive Natura, one infinite substance; the critique of anthropomorphic and revealed religion (the Theologico-Political Treatise).
• Leibniz — the contingency argument from the Principle of Sufficient Reason; the term and project of theodicy ("the best of all possible worlds").
• Pascal — the Wager and the God of the philosophers vs. the God of faith.
• Locke — reasonable religion, faith subordinate to reason's certification of revelation; the seed of evidentialism.
• Hume (18th c.) — the watershed critic: the Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion dismantle the design argument and press the problem of evil; "Of Miracles" challenges testimony for the miraculous; the critique of causation undercuts the cosmological argument.
• Kant — the destroyer and reconstructor: the Critique of Pure Reason argues that all the theoretical proofs fail (existence is not a predicate; causation cannot be extended beyond experience), but the Critique of Practical Reason restores God as a postulate of practical reason, required by morality. Kant relocates religion from metaphysics to ethics.

The nineteenth century

The 19th century mounted the great revolt against theism, supplying the debunking critiques and the existential reframings.

• Hegel — religion as a stage in the self-realisation of Geist (Absolute Spirit), its pictorial truth fulfilled in philosophy.
• Schleiermacher — religion relocated to feeling (the "feeling of absolute dependence"), insulating it from rational critique — the ancestor of the independence model.
• Kierkegaard — fideism and the "leap of faith"; truth as subjectivity; the critique of speculative reason in religion.
• The masters of suspicion — Feuerbach (God as human projection), Marx (religion as ideology/opium), Nietzsche (the "death of God," ressentiment), and later Freud (religion as wish-fulfilment) and Durkheim (the sacred as society) — the debunking tradition.
• Darwin (1859) — On the Origin of Species removes the biological design argument's force, the most consequential scientific event for the philosophy of religion.
• W.K. Clifford vs. William James — the ethics-of-belief debate (evidentialism vs. the will to believe).

The twentieth century to today

The 20th century saw the philosophy of religion nearly die and then revive.

• Logical positivism (1920s–50s) — the verificationist challenge (Ayer): religious language is meaningless, neither true nor false. For a time this threatened to end the subject. Its self-refutation, and the falsification debate (Flew, Hare, Mitchell), reopened the question of religious language.
• Wittgenstein and the language-game reconception (D.Z. Phillips) — religion as a form of life, the non-realist and independence readings.
• Process theology (Whitehead, Hartshorne) — a revised, dipolar, persuasive God and a process theodicy.
• The analytic revival (1960s–present) — the rebirth of rigorous philosophy of religion in the analytic tradition: Plantinga (the modal ontological argument, the free-will defense, Reformed epistemology, warrant), Swinburne (the Bayesian cumulative case and the coherence of theism), Mackie and Rowe (the logical and evidential problems of evil), Adams (modified DCT), Hick (soul-making and pluralism), Stump and Kretzmann (eternity), Schellenberg (divine hiddenness), and the rise of analytic theology.
• Recent currents — open theism; the science-and-religion dialogue and NIODA; the cognitive science of religion; the New Atheism; and the broadening of the field to non-Western and comparative philosophy of religion.

Where the history sits

The philosophy of religion has moved through a recognisable arc: ancient Greece supplied the metaphysical concepts (the Good, the Unmoved Mover, the One) and Israel the personal creator; the medieval Abrahamic synthesis fused them into classical theism with its arguments and attributes; the early-modern turn (Hume, Kant) subjected the proofs to a criticism from which the demonstrative ambition never recovered, relocating religion toward practical reason and feeling; the nineteenth century mounted the debunking revolt and (with Darwin) removed the design argument's biological force; and the twentieth saw the verificationist near-death followed by a vigorous analytic revival that reframed every classical question — the arguments, evil, the attributes, and above all religious epistemology — in the probabilistic and externalist terms that organise these notes. Understanding which era a problem comes from explains why it is posed as it is; the method page takes up how the field is pursued today, and the figures page gives the principal contributors in brief.