Question Many philosophers who specialise in religion are atheists. How can they speak about the fundamentals of a religion without believing in those fundamentals? Won't this inevitable lead to condescension?

Accepted:
October 27, 2010

Comments

Before I tackle your question head on, let me begin with an analogy: science. The number of philosophers who specialise in science is very small indeed. I'm not going to say that such people are non-existent: but, off-hand, I can't think of any. There are, however, quite a lot of philosophers who specialise in the philosophy of science. They ask very different questions from the scientists themselves, and they seek to answer them in very different ways. A scientist will seek to discover certain laws of nature that could explain how, as it might be, electrons cause certain observable effects to arise under certain conditions. But a philosopher of science will seek to analyse the very concept of a law of nature as such, or the nature of causation itself, or to describe what it actually means to explain something. Indeed, a philosopher of science might even question whether any amount of empirical data could ever justify us in regarding a scientist's claims about electrons as being literally true at all. Scientific anti-realism, although far from being universally accepted, is nevertheless a widely held and perfectly respectable stance to take in the philosophy of science. But an anti-realist is not someone who dismisses the scientists' results at all. Quite the contrary: anti-realists will often be among the first to praise what the scientists are doing. It's just that they'll find some other reason for celebrating it, one that needn't involve truth. For instance, they might maintain that these scientific theories are nothing more than useful tools for making predictions that can be applied in technology and ordinary life, while also embracing them as the very best tools of their kind that we have at our disposal, to be utilised to their fullest extent, at least until such time as the scientists themselves come up with some even better ones.

So should philosophers of religion be religious? I can't see any reason why they should, any more than I can see why philosophers of science need to get their hands dirty in scientific laboratories. Must they even believe that there is a God? No more, I'd have thought, than a philosopher of science needs to believe in the actual existence of electrons.

But now to come more directly to your question. What are the fundamentals of a religion? It's going to vary from case to case, of course. But let's just take Christianity as an example (because I happen to have a copy of the Book of Common Prayer to hand, and so can easily refresh my memory of the Apostles' Creed). Part of it is about the existence of God; more deeply, there's some stuff about the Trinity, and then the Incarnation, and finally some stuff about the remission of sins, resurrection of the body, and things of that nature. My guess is that most ordinary religious people care little about the finer details of any of this. Maybe the remission of sins appeals to them: but does it really matter to ordinary people, whether God is simply one or alternatively three-in-one? Judging by the billions of equally content people in either camp, apparently not. (Continuing the scientific analogy, most ordinary people couldn't care less about the finer details of the latest theory about electrons, just as long as their televisions and computers work). Now, such things definitely do matter to theologians: that's their stock in trade, after all. But do they matter to philosophers of religion? I don't get the impression that they do, at least not to most of them. Philosophers of religion are more concerned with questions about such esoteric issues as the epistemic status of religious belief, the logical status of certain arguments that most people would never have dreamt of, or the question of whether religion even needs to be backed up with logically coherent arguments at all. Much of this has nothing to do with the existence or otherwise of God. And, even where that is relevant (e.g. when the beliefs or arguments in question are concerned with that very hypothesis), there's certainly no need for condescension. Like the scientific anti-realist, a philosopher of religion might still have a profound respect for religious practices without actually believing in the metaphysics that is supposed by some to be backing them up.

Question Many philosophers who specialise in religion are atheists. How can they speak about the fundamentals of a religion without believing in those fundamentals? Won't this inevitable lead to condescension? Accepted:October 27, 2010

Question Many philosophers who specialise in religion are atheists. How can they speak about the fundamentals of a religion without believing in those fundamentals? Won't this inevitable lead to condescension?

Accepted:
October 27, 2010