Philosophy and Religion from Plato to Postmodernism

216 Pages·2011·1.77 MB·English

by  Charlesworth

PHILOSOPHY
AND
RELIGION
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PHILOSOPHY
AND
RELIGION
FROM PLATO TO POSTMODERNISM
MAX CHARLESWORTH
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
The revolution in philosophy of religion
Varieties of philosophy of religion
Five approaches to the philosophy of religion
1 PHILOSOPHY AS RELIGION
Introduction
Plato’s philosophical religion
Aristotle: the contemplative ideal
The neo-Platonists: philosophy and mysticism
Medieval Islamic thought and the ‘Two Truths’ theory
The Enlightenment: pure reason and religion
Summary and evaluation
2 PHILOSOPHY AS THE HANDMAID OF RELIGION
Introduction
Philo of Alexandria
The Christian Platonists
St Augustine on faith and reason
Philosophy and theology in the Middle Ages
Moses Maimonides
St Thomas Aquinas
Two critics of Aquinas’s position
Critique and conclusion
3 PHILOSOPHY AS MAKING ROOM FOR FAITH
Agnosticism in the service of fideism
Al Ghazzali: the inconsistency of the philosophers
Pascal: the reasons of the heart
David Hume: scepticism and faith
Kant: religion and practical reason
Kierkegaard: speculation and subjectivity
Agnosticism as a religious attitude
4 PHILOSOPHY AS THE ANALYSIS OF RELIGIOUS LANGUAGE
Philosophy of religion without metaphysics
Linguistic analysis
Verificationism and religious language
Reductivist accounts of religious language
Language games and forms of life
Wittgenstein and religion
Post-Wittgenstein
Language games and reality
Reinstating metaphysics
5 PHILOSOPHY AS POSTMODERNIST CRITIQUE OF THE RELIGIOUS
DOMAIN
Postmodernism and linguistic analysis
Postmodernism and the Enlightenment
The attack on foundationalism
Anti-foundationalism and the religious domain
Postmodernism and Christian theology
Heidegger and Derrida
Deconstruction and theology
Rorty’s Postmodernism and secularism
Conclusion
6 CONCLUSION

NOTES

INDEX
INTRODUCTION
THE REVOLUTION IN PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
The present work is a substantial revision of a book first published in 1972.1
Coincidentally, in the thirty years between 1972 and 2002, an extraordinary
revolution has taken place in the field of philosophy of religion both with respect
to its content, or scope, and its method. First, the scope of the philosophy of
religion has been vastly enlarged mainly as a result of the long overdue
recognition of the radical diversity of religions. As a result, we can no longer
speak of ‘religion’ as though it were a specific and unified field of human life;
rather, we must speak of ‘religions’ in their irreducible plurality.
These religions range from the great ‘world religions’, such as Judaism,
Christianity, Islam, Hinduism and the several kinds of Buddhism, to the minority
or ‘local’ religious systems of indigenous peoples such as the Australian
Aborigines and Amerindian groups. They also include the quasi-religious ‘ways
of life’ of classical antiquity in the West – Stoicism, Epicureanism, Plotinian
neo-Platonism – and the many forms of Gnosticism2 as well as those of small
and obscure sects such as the seventeenth-century Muggletonians in England and
the multifarious ‘Californian’ syncretistic sects of our time.3 And, of course,
there is a profusion of hybrid and unorthodox forms of all these religious
systems, and we must also note the powerful, and enormously influential, forms
of religious dualism: Zoroastrianism, Manichaeism, and medieval Catharism.4 In
short, religions are as various and diverse as human languages. One might say,
indeed, that there is a religious Tower of Babel.
That diversity of religions has always been there, so to speak, but Western
philosophers of religion have not recognised it and taken it seriously until very
recently.5 For the most part they assumed that all religions were basically the
same, despite their outward forms of expression, and could be eventually
reconciled with each other by a kind of special providence. However, whether
we like it or not, the diversity of religions, great and small, is a real and
irreducible ‘brute fact’ which cannot be glossed over or explained away.
Confronted with that diversity we can no longer simplistically define
‘religion’ as being about ‘the Holy’, or ‘the numinous’ (Rudolf Otto), or ‘the
Sacred’ (Emile Durkheim), or the object of ‘unconditional concern’ (Paul
Tillich), as though it were possible to discern a common denominator among all
the religions, and as though Western Christianity were a kind of gold standard or
benchmark for ‘real’ or authentic religions. Nor can we complacently assume
that at bottom all religions say very much the same thing.
Jacques Dupuis, the noted scholar of world religions, writes that we must
‘repudiate a universal theology of religions that would transcend the various
religious faiths… There is no such thing as a universal theology of religions;
there is only a plurality of theologies’.6 This recognition of the radical plurality
and diversity of religions has presented a direct challenge to the philosophy of
religion in that the claims to universal and exclusive validity of the major
monotheistic religions, especially Christianity and Islam, raise prima facie
insoluble questions about how their respective assumptions that they are the sole
legitimate vehicle of God’s revelation to the whole of mankind, can be
reconciled with each other. Again, they raise difficult questions about how
religions may be measured against, and compared with, each other. We are, then,
now acutely aware that the comparison of religious systems and their evaluation
as more or less ‘evolved’, or ‘developed’, or more ‘primitive’ (as in a great deal
of nineteenth-century philosophy of religion), is at best a very delicate, and
perhaps dubious, business.
The second reason for the enlargement of the scope of philosophy of religion
is to be found in the invasion of the social sciences – anthropology, sociology,
psychology, history – into the study of religious systems. Most contemporary
anthropologists and sociologists, as against late-nineteenth-century
positivistically inclined social scientists, now see religion as an essential part of
any human culture. Thus Geertz and other anthropologists see religious myths
and rituals and practices as supporting the networks of meanings that make
cultures possible and give them a particular shape.7 It is, then, no longer possible
to study religions and religious phenomena apart from their cultural contexts and
for philosophers of religion to disregard anthropologists and sociologists. Our
awareness of the diversity of religions, for example, has been powerfully aided
by the anthropologists’ and sociologists’ emphasis on the plurality of quasi-
incommensurable cultures.8
It remains true, however, that the social scientist’s concern with religion and
religious phenomena differs essentially from the interest and focus of the
philosopher of religion. Philosophy of religion is concerned to adumbrate what
might be called, in Kantian terms, the ‘conditions of possibility’ of the religious
sphere, as distinct, for example, from the ethico-political sphere, or the aesthetic
sphere, or the sphere of scientific enquiry. The inquiries of the social sciences
into religious phenomena, on the other hand, presuppose that there is such a
sphere, however loosely it may be defined, and they cannot themselves
investigate whether or not there is actually a domain which transcends the world
of our ordinary experience and which is not accessible to empirical enquiry.
Third, the emergence of new ways of doing philosophy, as in the various
tendencies misleadingly called ‘Postmodernism’, have emphasised how much
religions are ‘constructs’ or ‘inventions’ (akin to great artistic movements like
Classicism and Romanticism), and how the appropriate method of inquiring into
religion and religious phenomena is a ‘deconstructive’ one, that is, an attempt to
reveal the historical and cultural and other ways in which a discourse, or
discipline, or sphere of human thought, is built up.9
Thus, from Nietzsche to Heidegger and Derrida there has been a sustained
critique of the philosophical (metaphysical) presuppositions of Western religious
belief. Modern Western philosophy, so Derrida claims, has been obsessed by
‘foundationalism’, that is seeing the task of philosophy as the uncovering of the
ultimate foundations or fundamental principles of knowledge and of reality. This
has traditionally chimed in with Western and Middle Eastern religious views
which see God as the foundation or ground (arche) of being and the question is
whether Western religions such as Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, can be
conceptualised without the older, and what is taken to be the discredited,
philosophical or metaphysical view. In this context the ‘death of God’ which
Nietzsche proclaimed is in effect the death of a metaphysical God, and the task
of the philosopher of religion is to see what meaning can be given to religious
discourse once the traditional (and untenable) metaphysical God has been
exorcised. Martin Heidegger and Jacques Derrida have been the two main
contemporary figures concerned with this central issue upon which the
possibility of a philosophy of religion depends.
VARIETIES OF PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
The intention of this book is not to provide an encyclopedic survey of the vast
number of attempts over some two thousand years to understand the relationship
of philosophy, relying on what the medieval thinkers called ‘natural reason’, and
religious faith in all its dimensions from its ‘conditions of possibility’ to revealed
truths believed by ‘faith’. Rather, what this study attempts is to display the
various basic ways in which philosophy, in its diverse incarnations in Western
thought from Platonism and neo-Platonism, through medieval (Jewish, Christian
and Islamic) Aristotelianism, the Kantian revolution in the eighteenth century
and beyond, to the contemporary movements of Wittgensteinian analysis and
Postmodernism, has come to terms with the religious domain as that is defined
within the great monotheistic systems in the West and the Middle East.
It is the contention of this book that there is a limited number of possible
approaches to the way in which philosophical reason can relate to religious faith
and some five of these approaches are considered in detail. Paradigmatic
instances of each approach are discussed, for example Platonism is seen as a
‘type’ of one approach, the medieval Aristotelianism of Aquinas of another,
Kant’s philosophy of another, and Wittgensteinian analysis and Postmodernism,
though in very different ways, of another. These last two propose a minimalist
approach to the philosophy of religion and it may be argued that neither really
provides a space for the religious domain. But both Wittgenstein and Derrida
clearly wish to go beyond any kind of Kantian agnosticism.
This study, then, claims that these five approaches constitute a ‘grid’ on
which most varieties of the philosophy of religion may be located. As a result,
many philosophers of religion – for example, Spinoza, Hegel, Feuerbach,
Whitehead and others – receive only incidental consideration. This is especially
the case with contemporary philosophers of religion even though, as already
noted, philosophy of religion has undergone a vast transformation in the
twentieth century. Despite Nietzsche’s prophecy of the impending ‘death of
God’, and the confident predictions by Max Weber and other sociologists of the
increasing secularisation of Western societies, philosophy of religion is now a
flourishing industry. However, many contemporary philosophies of religion are
of a quasi-Kantian kind (as with the various forms of ‘religious agnosticism’),
while still others are of a Platonic kind which identify religion with philosophy
(as with ‘Process theology’), and still other philosophers of religion (such as the
American thinker Alvin Plantinga) have constructed a neo-Thomist position
based on Aquinas’s natural theology. The two contemporary examples of
philosophy of religion discussed in chapters 4 and 5 have been chosen because
they seem, at least prima facie, to represent a new minimalist and distinct
variety.