“Religion” in Anglo-American (Analytical) Philosophy of Religion
LUDGER VIEFHUES-BAILEY
THE SCOPE OF ANALYTICAL PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
Despite its nearly exclusive concern with topics related to Christian theology, analytical philosophy of religion (APR), like analytical philosophy in general (AP), constitutes a varied field in which philosophers with at times conflicting metaphysical and methodological commitments converse.1 Thus, we cannot assume that sets of agreed-upon metaphysics or methodologies describe the type of philosophy under review. A more promising approach to characterizing APR, and to analyzing which conceptions of “religion” operate within its texts, begins with Michael Dummett’s idea of a common analytical tradition (AT). According to Dummett, a philosopher of religion is part of AT if her works fulfills the following two criteria: first, she appeals to a certain lineage of writers (originating with Russell, Moore, and Frege, and continuing with those, like Wittgenstein, who refer to them, or those who refer to the ones who refer to them). Second, she adopts a certain philosophical style.2 Whereas Dummett himself does not explain what constitutes this characteristic style, I will argue that his “stylistic criterion” in fact reveals an “institutional criterion.” A philosopher appealing to the requisite lineage of writers belongs to AT if she works in the context of the institutions of professional philosophy dominant in the United States and United Kingdom.
Analyzing the notions of religion operative in exemplary texts of APR will show how this particular Anglo-American philosophical professionalization leads to a deprofessionalization with regard to the field of religious studies (RLST). Unlike philosophers who work within the so-called continental context, self-described analytics do not engage the now decades-long critical evaluation of the concept of religion within the field of religious studies. Thus, to see how religion is conceptualized in the exemplary texts under consideration, we cannot turn to extensive hermeneutical discussions. Rather, we have to examine the conceptual choices that produce the operative concept of religion in a given text. Contrasting these choices with those of scholars in RLST will yield insights into the conceptions of religion shared in many texts of APR and into the price these conceptions exert on the projects pursued by APR.
In particular, I will demonstrate how the texts of APR allow readers to see religion either as a cultural system or as a concern for an individual consciousness. This rhetorical construction, as well as the focus on the logical and epistemic structure of propositional beliefs, obscures the focus on the social interactions within which religious beliefs are formed and lived. While communal practices of knowledge production are central for the arguments of Hick, Alston, and Swinburne, whose works we will examine among others, these authors do not engage in a detailed analysis of such practices. A more sustained conversation with the perspective of other scholars in religious studies, as well as a hermeneutical self-examination, would help APR to further its own goals of clarifying and evaluating the meaning of religious beliefs.
PROFESSIONALIZATION AND DEPROFESSIONALIZATION
First, why should we assume that an institutional criterion lurks behind the stylistic one? Pace Dummet, observing the texts of AT we find not one single but a multiplicity of styles ranging from a penchant for using formal logic, to attention to linguistic distinctions prevalent in ordinary English, to Wittgensteinian aphorism.3 Nevertheless, Joshua Ross admits that he found Dummett’s idea, that “style” delineates the body of AP, helpful to explain his own reaction to a lecture on Levinas that he had heard. The method of presenting ideas, the allusions to other philosophers (like Hegel and Rosenzweig), he writes, left him alienated, feeling confronted with a mode of philosophizing meant for the “inner circle of adherents.”4 In contrast, Ross concludes that texts in the lineage of AT use a style so broad as to encompass “all other schools as well—provided only that they are writing for fellow professionals.”5 Implied in his text is therefore the judgment that AP is the type of philosophy that is written in a style accessible for all professional philosophers. Yet, the universal quantifier Ross uses in this statement evidently excludes the authors of the continental lineage whose philosophical method left him excluded.
As a second example for the institutional criterion, let me point out how it operates in Dean Zimmerman’s characterization of APR. He describes both AP and APR as pluralistic and modest enterprises in which philosophers engage who hold multiple and divergent metaphysical outlooks. Importantly, Zimmerman concludes, analytical philosophers are required to take into considerations views that seem “crazy” to them.6 There is, however, one notable exception. The requirement that the analytic philosophers entertain “crazy” views does not extend to those of philosophers outside of the analytic lineage. Zimmerman observes that “almost invariably” analytic philosophers consider the philosophical claims of those in the lineage going back to Heidegger (and those who respect and aim to inherit it, without fully endorsing all of its claims or methodology) to be misguided and “impenetrable.”7 What motivates this exclusion of philosophers in the continental lineage from the scope of “crazy” views to be considered, as in Zimmerman’s text, or from the circle of understandable philosophy, as in Zimmerman and Ross? Apparently, the so-called continentals do not count as fellow professionals.
While perhaps surprising intellectually, from the perspective of institutional politics this is an accurate description of the current state of affairs in professional philosophy. As John Searle notes, “indeed, analytic philosophy is the dominant mode of philosophizing … throughout the entire English-speaking world.”8 Most professional philosophy departments and major associations in the United States do not extensively value philosophers working in the continental lineage, who have usually found a home in literature departments. Thus, it makes sense that Zimmerman stresses the professional pedigree of APR and the fact that most philosophers of religion in this tradition work in philosophy departments, as opposed to those in departments of religion.9 In sum: implied in the notion of “style” is the aforementioned institutional criterion. A text is written in the style of AT if it uses modes of philosophical expression that the institutions of professional philosophy in the English-speaking world adjudicate as suitably clear as opposed to “impenetrable.” Let me flag here the question of what counts as the right kind of clarity, since it makes little sense to assume that there is “clarity” in and of itself. The logical structure of the sentence (G) “there is only one God” can be made pristinely clear by formalizing it into (G’): ∃x (Px & ∀y (Py → y=x)), where we let P be the predicate “instantiates the property of divinity.” Such clarity however does not provide insight into the religious meaning of G (were we to hear [G] uttered in, say, a prayer).
A consequence of this particular philosophical professionalization under the auspices of the dominant styles of AT is, however, APR’s deprofessionalization in relationship to RLST. APR is practiced without profitable connections to the institutions of the American study of religion.10 Zimmerman sees this professional split as a problem since it limits the positive influence that APR can have on the discipline of theology. Thus, he invites theologians to articulate “Christian doctrine in ways that an analytic philosopher can understand.”11 (Note that the onus in Zimmerman’s invitation for cooperation lies on the theologians—and other professional religionists, by extension. They have to adopt modes of thinking and argument that can meet the requirements of intelligibility that have been institutionalized in APR.) Whereas philosophers affiliated with the American Academy of Religion pursue textual lineages more broadly than those defining AT and participate in the conversations of RLST, the practitioners of APR risk a certain professional isolation.
This risk is particularly acute, given the vibrant debates about how to conceptualize “religion,” the phenomenon that constitutes the subject matter of APR.12 Without engaging these literatures, APR is in danger of analyzing artifacts that reflect more the lineage of problems of professional Western philosophy than the practices and beliefs that we, in the wider academy, currently consider as “religious.” In other words, if APR presents itself as the best philosophical practice for “clarifying the meaning of religious claims and for assessing the reasons for and against the truth of those claims,” it would be important to know what constitutes a religious claim.13
At stake is not only Blaise Pascal’s famous distinction between the generic notion of God in the thought of the philosophers and the vibrant particularity of God in the testimony of the biblical prophets—a distinction that according to the theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar already tormented late medieval Christian philosophical theology, and one that the philosopher William Weischedel sees as foundational for the modern philosophy of religion.14 Rather, the problem is whether APR can engage in a self-critical dialogue such that its own particular theological and conceptual presuppositions can be critiqued. The goal is not to arrive at a truly generic philosophy of religion but to provide an enriched and self-critical philosophical imagination that can be helpful for the very projects that APR pursues.
OSCILLATION BETWEEN SYSTEM AND PRIVACY
Consider how John Hick conceives of the essential characteristics of religious phenomena in his influential An Interpretation of Religion. Despite Hick’s claim that “religion” is a family-resemblance concept without one unifying “common essence,” he nevertheless identifies the “generic concept” of salvation/ liberation as a characteristic for contemporary religion.15 He argues that religious activity shifts from concerns with the maintenance of communities to a concern for individual salvation/liberation after an alleged revolution in human consciousness during the so-called axial age (ca. 500 BCE to 500 CE). Built into Hick’s use of the axial age is a dual opposition: (1) one between collective and individual religion, and (2) one between social stability and transformation. The concern for salvation and change is understood as an individual quest originating in the consciousness of great religious women or men.16
In RLST we find other instances where, as in Hick’s work, the function of soteriological religion is allocated to the side of the individual and that of social maintenance to the side of communal religion. Contrasting Hick with other authors who engage this distinction can highlight what kind of notion of religion operates in his thought. The Buddhist studies scholar Richard Gombrich, for example, understands soteriological religion as primarily a matter of individual beliefs, which are only secondarily related to a system of ethics and right practices. Communal religion represents society’s self-awareness. Such religion exists in the minds of individuals but it leaves no room for “individual initiative, primarily it is a pattern of action.”17 Gombrich and others, such as Melford Spiro, however, do not privilege one of these functionalities of religious practice over others. Far from describing different types of religious entities, they are heuristic devices helping us organize the various functions that religious symbols and practices can and do play in the lives of practitioners. It would be difficult, for example, to attribute the feeding of monks, which is part of what Milford Spiro describes as kammatic Buddhism, as representative of either soteriological or communal religion. Feeding monks is an act that comes with the promise of the accrual of merit for a better rebirth, and thus is part of the soteriological orientation that Spiro detects as prevalent among the Buddhist villagers he studies. At the same time, the practice of offering food to monastics also functions in the establishment and maintenance of social bonds among villagers and between villagers and monks. In short: If we compare other uses of the soteriological/communal religion distinction with Hick’s uses of it, we see that his strategy produces two types of religion (as opposed to two functions of the same phenomenon): archaic and contemporary religion. This move allows him to shape a concept of religion, in which the religious phenomenon is generically centered on events affecting and resulting from changes in an individual religious specialist.
This particular conception of religion provides the basis for Hick’s epistemological argument. The soteriological transformation of an individual consciousness is the result of this individual’s religious experience. In it she encounters the Real, that is, “the supposed unity-of-reality-and-value that is thought of as God, Brahman, the Dharma, Sunyata or the Tao.” Hick construes individual religious experience in analogy to perceptual experience as a composite of external informational input and mental categories that organize this input into a meaningful experience.18 His creative extension of Kantian epistemology allows Hick to claim that, despite their various phenomenological contents, religious experiences can relate the same external reality. Moreover, drawing on Richard Swinburne’s “principle of credulity” (PC), Hick defends religious experience as prima facie innocent until proven guilty. Absent specific grounds for doubt, a religious person is justified in trusting that her religious experience represents indeed things as they are. For Hick, a religious claim is one that originates in an individual experience that is structured by traditional and culture-specific categories. In this model, individual experience, as it is created through the categories available in a given religious tradition (Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, Islam, Buddhism), secures that the religious belief connects with the appropriate reality and thus can have a positive truth-value.
Let me flag the unclear status of the role of community in Hick’s picture. On the one hand, Hick positions individual experience in contrast to the goals and practices of communal religion, as we have seen. On the other hand, in pointing to cultural and traditional contexts in which such individual experience is processed, Hick imagines religious communities as neatly separated interpretive systems that neither overlap nor interact with one another. In Hick’s understanding of religion, instances of cultural and religious hybridism, as studied in numerous anthropologies of religion, cannot become visible. Inversely, the strategy of presenting Islam, Christianity, Buddhism, and Judaism as homogenous cultural systems obscures the selectivity with which Hick presents the essential religious features of each of these (cf. Reçber).19 Thus religion appears split in Hick’s picture both as a phenomenon located in individual consciousness and as one located in separated cultural systems.
Community makes a third appearance in Hick’s philosophizing, namely, through his application of Swinburne’s principle of credulity. The standards by which we decide whether or not an experience can count as trustworthy representation of what is the case are community-specific. Swinburne and Hick, for example, characterize the imbibing of consciousness-altering substance as a defeater of PC. They see no obligation to judge the experience of such a person to be epistemically trustworthy. Yet, how do the philosophers adjudicate religious experiences that are related to practices of extreme fasting, to those of prolonged meditative regiments, or to the ritual inhaling of special herbs, and so on? Hick and Swinburne understand the ideal religious phenomenon as that which results from the experiences of an individual who has separated himself to the highest degree possible from communal interference and who contemplates the absolute in maximal quietude. At the same time, the communal location of this very epistemic ideal remains unexamined and it is noteworthy that in Hick’s actual analysis, the experiences of women and peoples outside of hegemonic European and US cultures remain unacknowledged.20 This lack of self-examination glosses over an epistemological problem: What is the relationship between societal practices that establish trustworthiness and our epistemic practices of knowledge production?
I have spent time with Hick’s work because it shares salient features of its strategies of conceptualizing religion with other contemporary works of APR: the oscillation between religion as system or as matter of individual experience and the neglect of a detailed analysis of religion as the product of shared social practices. For example, in William Alston’s Perceiving God we find a similar use of Swinburne’s idea of epistemic trustworthiness, one that focuses not on individual beliefs but on systemic epistemic practices.21 Wholesale cultural practices are to be evaluated as trustworthy, such as Christian mystical perceptual practice (CMP), the focus of Alston’s work. He defends the right of the practitioner to trust the outcome of these epistemic practices that, in the case of CMP, lead to what is claimed to be a perception of the God. Alston uses the term “doxastic practice” to refer to our systemic ways of forming beliefs and of evaluating them based on the systems of background knowledge that are implied in these practices. We can consider such beliefs as prima facie justified until we find reasons to override this trust. However, what constitutes such overriders depends on the relevant background knowledge. Alston examines mystical perceptual practices such as CMP. They are firmly established in their cultures and their output cannot be shown to sufficiently indicate their individual unreliability, since they come with their own culture- and practice-specific overrider systems.22 For the practitioner of each of these practices, it is rational to engage in them and to consider them as prima facie justified. This allows the practitioner, according to Alston, to “sit tight” and to continue her practice. If the practice is sufficiently socially established, if it is self-supporting (that is, produces the religious fruits that it promises), and if it does not run into contradictions with other socially established doxastic practices, then a belief formed through this mystical practice (MP) is justified.
In contrast to Hick, Alston emphasizes the social nature of our epistemically trustworthy practices. Only those practices that are socially established can be considered as candidates meriting epistemic trust—presumably because they have reliably produced what they claimed to produce. Yet, we find again the split between “religion as individual experience” and “religion as system” that characterized Hick’s conception of religion. On the one hand Alston discusses the religious phenomenon primarily in analogy with individual sensory perception. CMP (along with other such MPs) is built on the model of sensory perception. Here, as in Hick, religious beliefs originate in an individual’s experiential encounter with Ultimate Reality.23 On the other hand, Alston talks about the “major world religions” or “major systems of religious beliefs” (Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam, Christianity, and Judaism) as providing identifiable and characteristic sets of systemic doxastic practices.24 Given that the study of religion as a field has witnessed a sustained critique of the idea that it makes sense to organize the multiplicity of religious life into the categories of major “world religions,” the Alstonian philosopher should wonder whether the idea of religious system is viable.25
Alston is not alone in reconstructing religious traditions as coherent and high-level systems, such as Buddhism, Hinduism, and Christianity. For example, David Basinger critiques the tendency of most APR on the topic of religious diversity to focus on high-level intrasystemic diversity, contrasting, for example, the claims of “theistic systems” with those of “a-theistic religious systems.” Highlighting inner religious diversity, Basinger cautions against this focus. Like his colleagues in APR, however, Basinger keeps the system-language alive. He assumes the existence of the Christian belief system, the Jewish belief system, and so on—systems that are identified by sets of internally shared beliefs.26
More recent anthropological work about the hybridity of religious practices can further undermine the idea of religious systems, which are defined by characteristic doxastic practices and, at the same time, expand on Alston’s idea. For example, Jean DeBernardi’s study of spirit media in Malaysia shows the hybrid and changing nature of the practices of spirit possession in which these media engage.27 In her case studies we find that practitioners merge so-called Buddhist, Hindu, and Christian symbols and practices. Yet, the media and their clients seem to derive the promised benefit from the practices, which would attribute to them the status of a self-supporting practice in Alston’s sense. Moreover, these practices are socially established in specific strata of their respective societies. In short, the hybrid nature of these practices further challenges the project of finding system-specific doxastic practices. Instead, what we see are local practices of belief formation and their localized social support.
Cases like these do not disable Alston’s argument about the prima facie justification of beliefs produced by doxastic practices that are socially entrenched and thus pragmatically judged to be reliable. Rather, analyzing this anthropological material would allow him to highlight the fact that such practices are best understood not as unchanging mechanisms inherent in religious systems but rather as malleable and contested social activities. Acknowledging the social embeddedness would help to clarify the relationship between the social establishment and the epistemic status of a religious belief. Such clarification will bring with it a shift in what constitutes a paradigmatic case of religious knowledge production. Instead of focusing on an isolated individual’s experience, the philosopher is asked to consider the social activities of, for example, spiritual direction or of the gurukula and monastic communities. At these sites, we can analyze how religious (and at times political) institutions shape and discipline the relevant doxastic practices that are aimed producing religious knowledge. Taking these practices as paradigmatic of what constitutes a religious phenomenon would avoid the split between “religion as individual experience” and “religion as cultural system.” Moreover, such a paradigmatic shift would require a deeper philosophical analysis of how our practices of knowledge production are intertwined with other social practices.
RELIGION AND STATEMENTS OF FACTS OR EXPRESSIONS OF ATTITUDES
The previous discussion also shows how the texts of APR are centrally concerned with evaluating the epistemic status of religious beliefs, which are assumed to have a discernible logical structure. This focus on the logical and epistemic structure of religious beliefs is a reaction to how logical positivists, such as Russell and Ayer, dismissed or defended religious claims. For example, in his famous lecture “Why I Am Not a Christian” (1927), Bertrand Russell distinguishes between emotional attachments and arguments about fact and identifies the former as the real reason why people “accept religion.”28 A. J. Ayer had famously argued that religious statements were meaningless, because they were impossible to verify. Devoid of propositional content, these statements express a religious person’s emotive or practical attitudes.29 In the 1950s, philosophers turned Ayer’s critique into a defense by arguing that religious statements are best understood not as providing descriptions of how things objectively are, but as expressions of personal attitudes toward the world.30 For example, in a debate with Antony Flew, R. M. Hare argued that religious beliefs expressed a fundamental attitude toward the world (something he calls a “blik”) and not an explanatory hypothesis that could be proved or disproved.31
In contrast, Hick, Alston, and most current practitioners of APR hold that religious beliefs are best analyzed as statements of facts and not as expressions of values. The fortunes of logical positivism have waned (and with it those of verificationism or falsificationism); yet the underlying disentanglement of statements of facts from expressions of attitudes still operates in the work of the later defenders of religious beliefs. Consequently, religion in these texts appears as primarily concerned with believing certain propositional claims. Yet, the problem arises of how can we understand and evaluate such beliefs outside the varied contexts of their practice, including those of expressing attitudes and values? For example, Norman Malcolm concludes his defense of the logical soundness of Anselm’s ontological proof for the existence of God with the following observation: This proof can only be “thoroughly understood by someone who … views it from the inside … and who has, therefore, some inclination to partake, in that religious form of life.” We may find, contra Kant and many others, that the logical structure of the argument is unproblematic. For example, we can follow Malcolm in his refutation of Kant’s critique of a necessary being and still lack a full understanding of what Anselm means by the concept of a “being a greater than which cannot be conceived.” Clarifying its meaning would require understanding “the phenomena of human life that give rise to it.”32 And such a life contains interrelated practices of referring and of expressing convictions, values, and attitudes.
Malcolm, like most practitioners of AP, assumes that the ontological argument will not suffice to induce a “living faith” in the reader.33 Maximally, these arguments can show that the philosophical objections to the rationality of religious beliefs are insufficient. Likewise, Plantinga states that his “ontological argument triumphant” is not a “successful piece of natural theology,” because not everybody may accept its premise that for all possible worlds, there is at least one world in which it is possible that there is a maximally great being that is omniscient, omnipotent, and perfectly good. Plantinga admits that his argument can only show that “there is nothing contrary to reason in accepting this premise.”34 While his proof can show that a religious person is not irrational in believing that God exists, a nonbeliever cannot be compelled by the argument to endorse this belief. Even Richard Swinburne’s reconstruction of the cosmological argument in The Existence of God does not aim to provide rational certainty.35 Rather, his aim is to show—by using Bayes’s theorem, which assigns probability to an event by weighing evidence and background knowledge related to it—that it is more probable that God exists than that God does not exist. The technical question of how to assign numerical values to factor in the evidence derived from, say, Jesus’s resurrection aside, Swinburne’s program can highlight why the proofs of APR are not religiously compelling, despite their pristine logical structure. We have to know what constitutes evidence, how to weigh it, and how to relate it or distinguish it from background knowledge—and we have to know what constitutes the right kind of background knowledge. All of this requires, however, a thorough understanding of the meaning of the claims in question, to echo Malcolm.
The focus on religious beliefs independent of their lived context leads to the odd situation that the philosopher can produce the pristine logical clarity of a statement’s structure without elucidating its meaning. Yet, if we believe Hilary Putnam, among others, we may consider that what constitutes the meaning of a statement is not secured by its truth-values alone. Rather, it is a remnant of positivism to construe beliefs as being fixed in their reference, and thus in their truth-evaluable content, independent of the context in which these beliefs are held or expressed.36 If we want to understand what beliefs (religious or not) are about, we need to explore the practical contexts within which they appear. Thus, gaining an understanding of what a religious statement means, such as a belief in something extremely “good,” requires contextualizing it. Why does she see her illness as a test for her faithfulness to God and not as evidence against God’s good will or existence? What counts for her as evidence for her belief in the afterlife—and how does her use of evidence for religious claims differ from her use of evidence in, for example, predicting the weather?
Wittgenstein, in his “Lectures on Religion,” worries about questions like these in order to find out what constitutes the right understanding of a religious claim.37 Critiques of Wittgenstein have argued that his concern with the lived context of a religious statement disallows him from correctly valuing religious statements as properly asserting claims about the world.38 Yet, reflecting on these lectures, Genia Schönbaumsfeld has reiterated recently that Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Remarks (PR) meant to undercut precisely the alternative between religious statements as statements of facts and religious statements as expression of attitudes. Like Malcolm, she points out that Wittgenstein does not deny that religious statements have cognitive content. Rather, his work highlights that we can understand this content only if “we understand the use to which the religious ‘pictures’ are put.”39 Thus, from a Wittgensteinian perspective, religious beliefs and practices are intertwined, as are beliefs about facts and attitudes toward the world. Wolterstorff’s critique, like other, more sympathetic interpretations of Wittgenstein’s alleged noncognitivism, turns on the idea that there is only one form of stating a fact: that is, the practice of stating empirical facts without purportedly expressing values.40
This insistence on the interrelation between social practices and cognitive content brings Wittgensteinian PR, which is currently situated at the fringes of APR, in close proximity to anthropological studies of religion and to feminist philosophy of religion. Shifting away from a focus on the justification of beliefs, the latter has developed a strong interest in analyzing the social and historically situated practices of belief formation. For example, in Feminist Philosophy of Religion, Pamela Sue Anderson distinguishes the weak objectivity of those blind to their own situatedness and biases from a strong objectivity, which requires a person to combine the hermeneutical awareness of one’s own standpoint and its limitations with an attempt to epistemic empathy. Strong objectivity and the ability to think about a situation from the perspective of others is a communal practice aiming for the developing of less partial truth.41
The texts of APR under investigation face the charge of reflecting a perspective of weak objectivity. Adopting an Andersonian strong objectivity by engaging the perspectives of other scholars of RLST could help APR to develop a hermeneutical awareness of the kind of choices that inform the conceptions of religion operative in APR’s text. Doing so will allow APR to better pursue its goal of clarifying and evaluating religious beliefs in their complexity.
NOTES
1. Peter Van Inwagen and Dean W. Zimmerman, Persons: Human and Divine (Oxford: Clarendon, 2007), 9.
2. Michael A. E. Dummett, Origins of Analytical Philosophy (London: Duckworth, 1993), 4–5.
3. A. C. Grayling, Philosophy: A Guide Through the Subject (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 5; Joshua Jacob Ross, “Analytical Philosophy as a Matter of Style,” in The Story of Analytic Philosophy: Plot and Heroes, ed. A. Biletzki and A. Matar (London: Routledge, 1998), 65–67.
4. Ross, “Analytical Philosophy as a Matter of Style,” 65–67.
5. Ibid., 68, italics mine.
6. Van Inwagen and Zimmerman, Persons, 7, 11.
7. Ibid., 6, 4.
8. John R. Searle, “Contemporary Philosophy in the United States,” in The Blackwell Companion to Philosophy, 2nd ed., ed. N. Bunnin and E. P. Tsui-James (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), 1.
9. Van Inwagen and Zimmerman, Persons, 4.
10. William J. Wainwright and Nicholas Wolterstorff, God, Philosophy, and Academic Culture: A Discussion Between Scholars in the AAR and the APA (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1996).
11. Van Inwagen and Zimmerman, Persons, 12.
12. Tomoko Masuzawa, In Search of Dreamtime: The Quest for the Origin of Religion, Religion and Postmodernism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993); Tomoko Masuzawa, The Invention of World Religions; Or, How European Universalism Was Preserved in the Language of Pluralism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005); Richard King, Orientalism and Religion: Post-Colonial Theory, India and the “Mystic East” (London: Routledge, 1999); Jeremy R. Carrette and Richard King, Selling Spirituality: The Silent Takeover of Religion (London: Routledge, 2005); Timothy Fitzgerald, The Ideology of Religious Studies (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000).
13. William Hasker, “Analytic Philosophy of Religion,” in The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Religion, ed. W. J. Wainwright (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 443.
14. Blaise Pascal and Léon Brunschvicg, Pensées et Opuscules, Publiés Uvec une Introd: Des Notices et des Notes par Léon Brunschvicg, Classiques Hachette (Paris: Hachette, 1959), 142–43; Hans Urs von Balthasar, Erasmo Leiva-Merikakis, Joseph Fessio, and John Kenneth Riches, The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics (New York: Ignatius Press, 1982), 18; Wilhelm Weischedel, Der Gott der Philosophen: Grundlegung einer Philosophischen Theologie im Zeitalter des Nihilismus (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1971).
15. John Hick, An Interpretation of Religion: Human Responses to the Transcendent, 2nd ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 4, 36.
16. Ibid.
17. Richard Francis Gombrich, Theravada Buddhism: A Social History from Ancient Benares to Modern Colombo, Library of Religious Beliefs and Practices (London: Routledge, 1988), 26, 41.
18. Hick, An Interpretation of Religion, 36, 243.
19. Mehmet Sait Reçber, “Hick, The Real and Al- Aqq,” Islam and Christian-Muslim Relations 16, no. 1 (2005): 3–10.
20. Pamela Sue Anderson, A Feminist Philosophy of Religion: The Rationality and Myths of Religious Belief (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997); Grace Jantzen, Becoming Divine: Towards a Feminist Philosophy of Religion (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999).
21. William P. Alston, Perceiving God: The Epistemology of Religious Experience (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991).
22. Ibid., 262.
23. Ibid., 190.
24. Ibid., 264, 266.
25. Masuzawa, The Invention of World Religions; Fitzgerald, The Ideology of Religious Studies, 2000.
26. David Basinger, Religious Diversity: A Philosophical Assessment (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2002), 2.
27. Jean Elizabeth DeBernardi, The Way That Lives in the Heart: Chinese Popular Religion and Spirit Mediums in Penang, Malaysia (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006).
28. Bertrand Russell and Paul Edwards, Why I Am Not a Christian, and Other Essays on Religion and Related Subjects (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1967), 19.
29. A. J. Ayer, Language, Truth, and Logic, 2nd ed. (London: V. Gollancz, 1956).
30. R. B. Braithwaite, An Empiricist’s View of the Nature of Religious Belief (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1955).
31. Antony Flew and Alasdair C. MacIntyre, New Essays in Philosophical Theology (London: SCM Press, 1955), 100; Paul Matthews van Buren, The Secular Meaning of the Gospel, Based on an Analysis of Its Language (New York: Macmillan, 1966); Don Cupitt, Taking Leave of God (New York: Crossroad, 1981).
32. Norman Malcolm, “Anslem’s Ontological Argument,” in Philosophy of Religion: An Anthology, ed. C. Taliaferro and P. J. Griffiths (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2003), 280, 279, italics in text.
33. Ibid., 280.
34. Alvin Plantinga, God, Freedom, and Evil (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1977), 112.
35. Richard Swinburne, The Existence of God (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991).
36. Hilary Putnam, The Threefold Cord: Mind, Body, and World (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 5:118.
37. Ludwig Wittgenstein and Cyril Barrett, Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology, and Religious Belief (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966).
38. Nicholas Wolterstorff, “Religious Epistemology,” in The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Religion, ed. W. J. Wainwright (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 256.
39. John Preston, Wittgenstein and Reason (London: Blackwell, 2008), 68.
40. Kai Nielsen, “Wittgenstein and Wittgensteinians on Religion,” in Wittgenstein and Philosophy of Religion, ed. R. L. Arrington and M. Addis (London: Routledge, 2001).
41. Anderson, A Feminist Philosophy of Religion, 76.