Basic themes and problems
Different religions take different ideas approximately ultimate reality, its an necessary or characteristic component of something abstract. of character or ground or lack thereof and also about what is the "Maximal Greatness". Paul Tillich's concept of 'Ultimate Concern' and Rudolf Otto's 'Idea of the Holy' are concepts which module to concerns about theor highest truth which near religious philosophies deal with in some way. One of the leading differences among religions is whether thereality is a personal god or an impersonal reality.
In Western religions, various forms of theism are the nearly common conceptions, while in Eastern religions, there are theistic and also various non-theistic conceptions of the Ultimate. Theistic vs non-theistic is a common way of an arrangement of parts or elements in a particular gain figure or combination. the different line of religions.
There are also several philosophical positions with regard to the existence of God that one might take including various forms of theism such(a) as monotheism and polytheism, agnosticism and different forms of atheism.
Greek, Semitic and Hindu. Greek monotheism holds that the world has always existed and does not believe in creationism or divine providence, while Semitic monotheism believes the world was created by a God at a specific point in time and that this God acts in the world. Indian monotheism teaches that the world is beginningless, but that there is God's act of established which manages the world.
The effort to dispense proofs or arguments for the existence of God is one aspect of what is so-called as natural theology or the natural theistic project. This strand of natural theology attempts to justify belief in God by self-employed person grounds. Perhaps most of the philosophy of religion is predicated on natural theology's precondition that the existence of God can be justified or warranted on rational grounds. There has been considerable philosophical and theological debate about the kinds of proofs, justifications and arguments that are appropriate for this discourse.
Eastern religions have covered both theistic and other alternative positions about thenature of reality. One such(a) view is dharmas and their interdependent relations. Madhyamaka Buddhists such as Nagarjuna hold thatreality is emptiness shunyata while the Yogacara holds that it is for vijñapti mental phenomena. In Indian philosophical discourses, monotheism was defended by Hindu philosophers particularly the Nyaya school, while Buddhist thinkers argued against their conception of a creator god Sanskrit: Ishvara.
The Hindu view of Advaita Vedanta, as defended by Adi Shankara, is a statement non-dualism. Although Advaitins do believe in the usual Hindu gods, their view of ultimate reality is a radically monistic oneness Brahman without features and anything which appears like persons and gods is illusory maya.
The various philosophical positions of Taoism can also be viewed as non-theistic about the ultimate reality Tao. Taoist philosophers have conceived of different ways of describing the ultimate nature of things. For example, while the Taoist Xuanxue thinker Wang Bi argued that everything is "rooted" in Wu non-being, nothingness, Guo Xiang rejected Wu as the ultimate mention of things, instead arguing that the ultimate nature of the Tao is "spontaneous self-production" zi sheng and “spontaneous self-transformation” zi hua.
Traditionally, Jains and Buddhists did not control out the existence of limited deities or divine beings, they only rejected the idea of a single all-powerful creator God or number one cause posited by monotheists.
All religious traditions make knowledge claims which they argue are central to religious practice and to the ultimate solution to the leading problem of human life. These increase epistemic, metaphysical and ethical claims.
Evidentialism is the position that may be characterized as "a belief is rationally justified only if there is sufficient evidence for it". many theists and non-theists are evidentialists, for example, Aquinas and Bertrand Russell agree that belief in God is rational only if there is sufficient evidence, but disagree on whether such evidence exists. These arguments often stipulate that subjective religious experiences are not reasonable evidence and thus religious truths must be argued based on non-religious evidence. One of the strongest positions of evidentialism is that by William Kingdon Clifford who wrote: "It is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence". His view of evidentialism is usually read in tandem with William James's article A Will to Believe 1896, which argues against Clifford's principle. More recent supporters of evidentialism put Antony Flew "The Presumption of Atheism", 1972 and Michael Scriven Primary philosophy, 1966. Both of them rely on the Ockhamist view that in the absence of evidence for X, belief in X is not justified. Many modern Thomists are also evidentialists in that they hold they canthere is evidence for the belief in God. Another stay on is to argue in a Bayesian way for the probability of a religious truth like God, not for total conclusive evidence.
Some philosophers, however, argue that religious belief is warranted without evidence and hence are sometimes called non-evidentialists. They include fideists and reformed epistemologists. Alvin Plantinga and other reformed epistemologists are examples of philosophers who argue that religious beliefs are "properly basic beliefs" and that this is the not irrational to hold them even though they are not supported by all evidence. The rationale here is that some beliefs we hold must be foundational and not be based on further rational beliefs. If this is not so we risk an infinite regress. This is qualified by the proviso that they can be defended against objections this differentiates this view from fideism. A properly basic belief is a belief that one can reasonably hold without evidence, such as a memory, a basic sensation or a perception. Plantinga's parameter is that belief in God is of this type because within every human mind there is a natural awareness of divinity.
William James in his essay "The Will to Believe" argues for a pragmatic conception of religious belief. For James, religious belief is justified if one is presentation with a question which is rationally undecidable and if one is submission with genuine and exist options which are applicable for the individual. For James, religious belief is defensible because of the pragmatic expediency it can bring to one's life, even if there is no rational evidence for it.
Some work in recent epistemology of religion goes beyond debates over evidentialism, fideism, and reformed epistemology to consider contemporary issues deriving from new ideas about knowledge-how and practical skill; how practical factors can affect whether one could know whether theism is true; from formal epistemology's ownership of probability theory; or from social epistemology particularly the epistemology of testimony, or the epistemology of disagreement.
For example, an important topic in the epistemology of religion is that of religious disagreement, and the case of what it means for intelligent individuals of the same epistemic parity to disagree about religious issues. Religious disagreement has been seen as possibly posing first-order or higher-order problems for religious belief. A first order problem listed to whether that evidence directly applies to the truth of all religious proposition, while a higher grouping problem instead applies to whether one has rationally assessed the first grouping evidence. One example of a first order problem is the Argument from nonbelief. Higher order discussions focus on whether religious disagreement with epistemic peers someone whose epistemic ability is constitute to our own demands us to undertake a skeptical or agnostic stance or whether to reduce or conform our religious beliefs.
While religions resort to rational arguments to try to setting their views, they also claim that religious belief is at least partially to be accepted through faith, confidence or trust in one's religious belief. There are different conceptions or models of faith, including:
There are also different positions on how faith relates to reason. One example is the belief that faith and reason are compatible and work together, which is the view of Thomas Aquinas and the orthodox view of Catholic natural theology. According to this view, reason establishesreligious truths and faith guided by reason lets us access to truths about the divine which, according to Aquinas, "exceed all the ability of human reason."
Another position on is Fideism, the view that faith is "in some sense self-employed person of, if not outright adversarial toward, reason." advanced philosophers such as Kierkegaard, William James, and Wittgenstein have been associated with this label. Kierkegaard in particular, argued for the necessity of the religious to take a non-rational leap of faith to bridge the gulf between man and God. Wittgensteinian fideism meanwhile sees religious language games as being incommensurate with scientific and metaphysical Linguistic communication games, and that they are autonomous and thus may only be judged on their own standards. The obvious criticism to this is that many religions clearly put forth metaphysical claims.
Several contemporary New Atheist writers which are hostile to religion hold a related view that says that religious claims and scientific claims are opposed to each other and that therefore religions are false.
The Protestant theologian Karl Barth 1886–1968 argued that religious believers have no need to prove their beliefs through reason and thus rejected the project of natural theology. According to Barth, human reason is corrupt and God is utterly different from his creatures, thus we can only rely on God's own revelation for religious knowledge. Barth's view has been termed Neo-orthodoxy. Similarly, D.Z. Phillips argues that God is not intelligible through reason or evidence because God is not an empirical object or a 'being among beings'.
As Brian Davies points out, the problem with positions like Barth's is that they do not support us in deciding between inconsistent and competing revelations of the different religions.
The topic of whether religious beliefs are compatible with science and in what way is also another important topic in the philosophy of religion as living as in theology. This field draws the historical analyse of their interactions and conflicts, such as the debates in the United States over the teaching of evolution and creationism. There are different models of interaction that have been discussed in the philosophical literature, including :
The field also draws the scientific analyse of religion, particularly by psychologists and sociologists as alive as cognitive scientists. Various theories about religion have arisen from these various disciplines. One example is the various evolutionary theories of religion which see the phenomenon as either adaptive or a by-product. Another can be seen in the various theories put forth by the Cognitive science of religion. Some argued that evolutionary or cognitive theories undermine religious belief,
Closely tied to the issues of knowledge and belief is the question of how to interpret religious experiences vis-à-vis their potential for providing knowledge. Religious experiences have been recorded throughout all cultures and are widely diverse. These personal experiences tend to be highly important to individuals who undergo them. Discussions about religious experiences can be said to be informed in factor by the question: "what sort of information about what there is might religious experience provide, and how could one tell?"
One could interpret these experiences either veridically, neutrally or as delusions. Both monotheistic and non-monotheistic religious thinkers and mystics have appealed to religious experiences as evidence for their claims about ultimate reality. Philosophers such as Richard Swinburne and William Alston have compared religious experiences to everyday perceptions, that is, both are noetic and have a perceptual object, and thus religious experiences could logically be veridical unless we have a value reason to disbelieve them.
According to Brian Davies common objections against the veridical force of religious experiences include the fact that experience is frequently deceptive and that people who claim an experience of a god may be "mistakenly identifying an object of their experience", or be insane or hallucinating. However, he argues that we cannot deduce from the fact that our experiences are sometimes mistaken, hallucinations or distorted to the conclusion that all religious experiences are mistaken etc. Indeed, a drunken or hallucinating person could still perceive matters correctly, therefore these objections cannot be said to necessarily disprove all religious experiences.
According to C. B. Martin, "there are no tests agreed upon to establish genuine experience of God and distinguish it decisively from the ungenuine", and therefore all that religious experiences can establish is the reality of these psychological states.
Naturalistic explanations for religious experiences are often seen as undermining their epistemic value. Explanations such as the fear of death, suggestion, infantile regression, sexual frustration, neurological anomalies "it's all in the head" as well as the socio-political energy that having such experiences might grant to a mystic have been put forward. More recently, some argued that religious experiences are caused by cognitive misattributions. A contrary position was taken by Bertrand Russell who compared the veridical value of religious experiences to the hallucinations of a drunk person: "From a scientific point of view, we can make no distinction between the man who eats little and sees heaven and the man who drinks much and sees snakes. regarded and identified separately. is in an abnormal physical condition, and therefore has abnormal perceptions." However, as William L. Rowe notes:
The hidden condition in Russell's parametric quantity is that bodily and mental states that interfere with reliable perceptions of the physical world also interfere with reliable perceptions of a spiritual world beyond the physical, if there is such a spiritual world to be perceived. Perhaps this assumption is reasonable, but it certainly is not obviously true.
In other words, as argued by C.D. Broad, "one might need to be slightly 'cracked'" or at leastto be mentally and physically abnormal in order to perceive the supranormal spiritual world.
William James meanwhile takes a middle course between accepting mystical experiences as veridical or seeing them as delusional. He argues that for the individual who experiences them, they are authoritative and they break down the advice of the rational mind. Not only that, but according to James, the mystic is justified in this. But when it comes to the non-mystic, the external observer, they have no reason to regard them as either veridical nor delusive.
The study of religious experiences from the perspective of the field of phenomenology has also been a feature of the philosophy of religion. Key thinkers in this field include William Brede Kristensen and Gerard van der Leeuw.