Philosophy of Religion

What it asks

Religious traditions make claims: that there is a God, that the world was made, that souls survive, that suffering has a place in a larger order. Philosophy of religion asks whether those claims are coherent, whether there is reason to believe them, and what they would mean if true.

It differs from theology in not starting inside a tradition, and from religious studies in not being descriptive. The question is not what believers hold or why they hold it, but whether it is so - which is why both believers and atheists work in the field and frequently agree about which arguments fail.

The recurring problems

The problem of evil. A being that is all-powerful, all-knowing and wholly good would prevent gratuitous suffering. There is a great deal of it. The logical version, that the propositions are strictly inconsistent, is generally thought answered by the free will defence. The evidential version, that the amount and distribution of suffering counts as evidence against, is not answered and is the strongest argument in the field.

The arguments for God. Ontological arguments derive existence from the concept and are always suspected of a trick nobody can quite locate. Cosmological arguments turn on whether the universe requires an explanation. Fine-tuning arguments turn on what a probability means with a sample of one.

Coherence of the attributes. Can a being know in advance what a free agent will do? Can omnipotence be defined without paradox? Can a timeless being act?

Diversity. Traditions make incompatible claims and their adherents are distributed by geography and birth. Any account of religious knowledge must explain why it is so unevenly distributed.

How it developed

Greek philosophers argued about divinity independently of civic religion, and the arguments they produced were absorbed into Jewish, Christian and Islamic thought.

The medieval period is the field's most productive, and it was multi-traditional. Anselm formulated the ontological argument; Aquinas the five ways; Islamic philosophers developed cosmological arguments that later reached Europe; Maimonides worked on the limits of what can be said of God at all.

Hume's Dialogues and his essay on miracles set the modern sceptical agenda, and Kant argued that the traditional proofs all fail because they overreach what reason can establish.

The logical positivists dismissed the whole subject as meaningless, and the field nearly vanished from English-language philosophy in the mid-twentieth century.

Its revival from the 1960s was one of the more surprising developments in analytic philosophy. Plantinga's work on the free will defence and on whether belief in God can be rational without argument made the field technically respectable again, and it is now substantial - though almost entirely concerned with theism of a particular kind, which is a real limitation.

The positions within it

Theism, atheism, agnosticism; fideism, which holds that faith needs no argument; reformed epistemology, which holds that belief in God can be rational without evidence; religious pluralism; naturalism. All are in the Schools section.

Where it stands now

Analytic philosophy of religion is technically sophisticated and narrow. The overwhelming majority of it concerns a conception of God shaped by Christian theism, and the field is aware of this and correcting it slowly.

The most interesting expansion is comparative: engaging with Indian arguments about the self and liberation, with Buddhist positions that reject a creator entirely, and with Islamic and Jewish philosophical theology, which worked on these questions for centuries and are usually mentioned only as sources.