Philosophy of Religion

Why was it virtually impossible not to believe in God in Western society around 1500, whereas by 2000 unbelief had become not merely possible but, for many, the most natural stance — sometimes the only conceivable one? This is the question that drives A Secular Age (2007), the most ambitious work of the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor (b. 1931). The book — nearly nine hundred pages that grew out of his 1998–99 Gifford Lectures in Edinburgh and earned him the 2007 Templeton Prize — refuses the easy explanations of secularization and offers, in their place, a historical and philosophical reconstruction of how the very conditions of belief in the West shifted over five centuries. ...

Some philosophers build systems; others dynamite them. Søren Kierkegaard belongs to the second group — but with a decisive difference: what he wanted to rescue from the rubble of the great Hegelian edifice was not another theory, but the single individual who exists, suffers, decides, and dies. Against the ambition to explain the whole of reality from a single concept, he set an apparently modest yet abyssal question: what does it mean, for me, to exist? ...

Philosophy of religion is one of the most expansive and contested fields in philosophy. Its subject matter is not religion as a social or cultural phenomenon — that falls to sociology and anthropology — but the truth claims that religious traditions make: that God exists, that the world was created, that there is life after death, that certain texts are revealed. The philosophical question is not “why do people believe?” but “are there reasons to believe?” and “what does belief mean?” ...

“Does God exist?” is perhaps the oldest and most persistent question in philosophy. It has accompanied Western thought from the earliest Presocratics — when Xenophanes of Colophon (c. 570–c. 475 BC) criticized the anthropomorphism of Homer’s gods — to contemporary analytic debates on modal logic and Bayesian probability. And yet, posed in these terms, the question conceals a trap. For before asking whether God exists, one must ask what it means, for God, to exist. Here a decisive distinction opens up — one that separates philosophically rigorous theism from conceptual idolatry: the distinction between existing (existere) and being (esse). ...

If medieval philosophy had to be represented by a single name, that name would be Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274). Dominican friar, theologian, and philosopher, Aquinas undertook the most ambitious intellectual synthesis of the Middle Ages: harmonizing the philosophy of Aristotle — newly rediscovered in the Latin West through Arabic and Greek translations — with Christian theology. The result was two monumental Summae and dozens of commentaries, disputed questions, and opuscula that shaped Catholic theology, natural law theory, political ethics, and Western metaphysics for centuries. ...

Albertus Magnus (Albert the Great) Dominican friar, Bishop of Regensburg, and Doctor Universalis. He was the teacher of Thomas Aquinas and the principal figure responsible for the systematic introduction of Aristotle into the medieval Latin world. Unlike other scholastics, Albert had a genuine interest in the natural sciences — botany, zoology, mineralogy, alchemy — combining empirical observation with philosophical reflection. Canonized and declared Doctor of the Church in 1931, he is the patron saint of natural scientists. ...

Bonaventure Giovanni di Fidanza, known as Bonaventure of Bagnoregio. Franciscan theologian and philosopher; cardinal and Minister-General of the Franciscan Order. Contemporary and cordial adversary of Thomas Aquinas. Called the Doctor Seraphicus. Bonaventure trained at the University of Paris, then the great center of Latin scholasticism, where he studied the liberal arts and afterward theology under the Franciscan master Alexander of Hales. There he taught at the same time as Thomas Aquinas, in a period when the massive arrival of the works of Aristotle — many of them mediated by the Arabic commentaries of Averroes — was forcing Christian theologians to decide how much of the new natural philosophy they could absorb without compromising the faith. Bonaventure embodies the Augustinian and Franciscan response to that challenge: rather than fully naturalizing reason as Aquinas did, he upheld the primacy of divine illumination and inner experience, refusing to treat philosophy as an autonomous knowledge severed from the wisdom that leads to God. ...

Friedrich Schleiermacher Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher was born in Breslau (present-day Wrocław, Poland) on 21 November 1768 and died in Berlin on 12 February 1834. Son of a Reformed army chaplain, he studied at the Moravian seminary in Barby and subsequently at Halle. He became a preacher in Berlin, held a professorship in Halle (1804–1807), and from 1810 was professor of theology and philosophy at the newly founded University of Berlin — of which he was one of the principal intellectual architects, alongside Wilhelm von Humboldt and Fichte. ...

Maimonides Moses ben Maimon — known by the acronym Rambam and, in the Latin West, as Maimonides — was born in Córdoba, in Al-Andalus, around 1138, and is the greatest Jewish philosopher of the Middle Ages. Fleeing Almohad persecution, his family wandered through North Africa before settling in Egypt, where Maimonides became a court physician and the spiritual leader of the Jewish community of Cairo. He was at once a jurist, a Talmudist, a physician, and a philosopher, and died in 1204. ...

Martin Luther German Augustinian theologian; initiator of the Protestant Reformation. The 95 Theses (1517) against papal indulgences triggered a rupture that transformed Europe religiously, politically, and intellectually. Key Concepts Justification by faith alone (sola fide): man is not saved by works, merits, or sacraments — only by faith in Christ; against the soteriology of merit in the Catholic Church Sola Scriptura: the Bible is the sole religious authority; tradition and papal decrees have no equivalent authority. He translated the Bible into German — founding modern literary German Priesthood of all believers: all baptized Christians are priests — dissolves the clerical hierarchy as necessary mediation between God and the faithful Two kingdoms (Zwei-Reiche-Lehre): the spiritual kingdom (governed by the Gospel) and the temporal kingdom (governed by law and the sword) — clear separation that influenced political secularization Christian freedom (On the Freedom of a Christian, 1520): “A Christian is a perfectly free lord of all things and subject to no one. A Christian is a perfectly dutiful servant of all things and subject to everyone” — paradox of inner freedom with service to one’s neighbor Against free will (On the Bondage of the Will, 1525): against Erasmus — human will is enslaved by sin; only irresistible divine grace can liberate; predestination Influenced by Saint Augustine — grace, original sin, predestination Saint Paul — justification by faith (Romans, Galatians) William of Ockham — nominalism and critique of scholastic metaphysics Erasmus — textual humanism (but breaks with him) Influenced Calvin — reformed reformation and absolute predestination Kant — moral autonomy (secularization of Lutheran individual conscience) Kierkegaard — radical and individual faith against the institution Secularization and European political modernity Hegel — Reformation as a moment of Spirit in history Works 95 Theses (1517); On the Freedom of a Christian (1520); On the Babylonian Captivity of the Church (1520); On the Bondage of the Will (1525); Large and Small Catechisms (1529); Bible in German (NT: 1522; complete: 1534). ...

Saint Augustine Aurelius Augustine was born in 354 in Thagaste, in Roman North Africa, the son of a Christian mother (Monica) and a pagan father. A teacher of rhetoric in Carthage, Rome, and Milan, he traveled a long intellectual and spiritual road: he was kindled to philosophy by reading Cicero, adhered for years to Manichaeism, passed through skepticism, and found in the Neoplatonism of Plotinus the instrument that would lead him back toward Christianity. His conversion in Milan (386) — the famous “tolle, lege” (“take up and read”) scene narrated in the Confessions — was a turning point. He became bishop of Hippo and, until his death in 430, during the Vandal siege, was the greatest thinker of the Patristic age and one of the most influential figures in the whole history of the West. ...

Thomas Aquinas Born around 1225 in Roccasecca, near Aquino, in southern Italy, Thomas belonged to the high nobility, which firmly opposed his entry into the mendicant order of the Dominicans — even confining him for about a year. He studied under Albert the Great in Paris and Cologne and became a master of theology at the University of Paris. Despite the nickname “the dumb ox,” he proved to be the greatest genius of Scholasticism. After an intense experience in 1273, he ceased writing, saying that all he had produced seemed to him like “straw”; he died the following year, on his way to the Council of Lyon. Canonized in 1323, he is “the Angelic Doctor,” and Thomism remains the official reference of Catholic philosophy. ...

William James American philosopher and psychologist, co-founder of pragmatism and pioneer of modern psychology. Brother of novelist Henry James. He popularized and developed Peirce’s pragmatism in a more psychological and humanistic direction, with enormous influence on 20th-century philosophy, psychology, and theology. Key Concepts Pragmatism as method: an idea is true if it works, if it produces satisfactory consequences for action — truth as an instrumental value, not a static correspondence Truth as process: “truth happens to an idea; it becomes true, is made true by events” — truth is dynamic and verifiable in experience Radical empiricism: experience includes not only things but also the relations between them — a critique of classical empiricism that fragmented experience into isolated atoms Stream of consciousness: consciousness is not discrete and static but continuous, personal, and selective — a concept that profoundly influenced modernist literature Will to believe: when evidence is insufficient and a decision is forced and momentous (such as belief in God), it is rationally legitimate to believe on practical and emotional grounds Varieties of religious experience: religion should be evaluated by its effects on people’s lives, not by its metaphysics; mysticism has genuine psychological validity Pluralism: reality is multiple and unfinished — a critique of Hegelian absolute monism Influenced by Peirce — original pragmatic maxim Darwin — evolutionism and mental functionalism Hume — skepticism and empiricism Kant — theory of knowledge (critically) Influenced John Dewey — instrumentalism and philosophy of education Bergson — mutual influence in philosophy of life and time Wittgenstein — explicit references in Philosophical Investigations American psychology (functionalism, behaviorism) Liberal theology and the religious modernist movement Works The Principles of Psychology (1890); The Will to Believe (1897); The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902); Pragmatism (1907); Radical Empiricism (1912). ...

Xenophanes of Colophon Itinerant Greek poet-philosopher, born in Colophon, in Ionia (the western coast of Asia Minor), around 570 BCE. When the Persian conquest of Ionia began in the mid-sixth century BCE, Xenophanes left his native city and spent the rest of his life wandering the Greek world, residing for periods in Zancle and Catana in Sicily and, according to tradition, in Elea in southern Italy. He lived to an exceptionally advanced age — ancient sources suggest he surpassed ninety years — and his entire output survives only in fragments preserved by later authors such as Sextus Empiricus, Simplicius, and Athenaeus. ...