Branches of Philosophy

Philosophy of Religion

Metaphysics

The branch of philosophy that examines the concepts, arguments and truth claims found in religious traditions: whether a god or ultimate reality exists, what religious language means and whether it can be literally true, what would justify religious belief, and how religious ways of understanding the world relate to scientific and secular ones. Historically centered on the God of the Abrahamic faiths, the ontological, cosmological and teleological arguments for and against that God's existence, and the problem of evil, the field has broadened to examine the philosophical commitments of Buddhist, Hindu, Daoist and other traditions on their own terms, and now sits at the crossing point of metaphysics, epistemology, ethics and philosophy of language.

Facts

Disputed

Key Debate

The problem of evil: whether the existence of gratuitous suffering counts as evidence against an all-powerful, all-knowing, perfectly good God, and whether any theodicy, the free will defense, soul-making, or skeptical theism, adequately answers it. 1

J.L. Mackie framed the logical problem of evil as a proof of atheism; Alvin Plantinga's free will defense is generally credited with blocking the logical version, leaving the evidential version, pressed by William Rowe, contested.

Central Question

Is religious belief ever rationally justified, and what would settle the question either way? 1

Key Debate

Whether the philosophical arguments for and against God's existence (ontological, cosmological, teleological, and the problem of evil) can settle the question at all, or whether religious belief rests on grounds, such as faith or religious experience, that argument cannot reach. 1

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Anselm's Island and the Argument That Would Not Die

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

In 1078, the monk Anselm of Canterbury proposed an argument that has never quite left philosophy alone: God, he wrote, is that than which nothing greater can be conceived, and a being that exists only in the mind is not as great as one that exists in reality, so the very concept of God requires that God exist. Critics attacked it almost immediately. A fellow monk, Gaunilo, objected that the same reasoning would prove a perfect island must exist simply because we can conceive of one, which seemed to prove too much. Centuries later Kant offered the more lasting objection: existence, he argued, is not a property that makes a concept greater the way wisdom or power would, so packing existence into the definition of a perfect being does not actually add anything to be greater by. The argument is called ontological because it tries to move from a concept straight to a claim about what exists, without appeal to evidence or observation, which is exactly what makes it so unusual among arguments for God: every other classical argument, cosmological, teleological, moral, starts from some feature of the observed world and reasons toward a cause or explanation. The ontological argument starts from an idea alone. That is also why it keeps returning. Each time philosophy develops sharper tools for reasoning about concepts, meaning and possibility, someone tries the argument again, most famously Alvin Plantinga's twentieth century modal version, which recasts greatness in terms of possible worlds rather than mere conception. Whether any version succeeds remains a live, unsettled dispute, which is itself instructive: an argument nearly a thousand years old, refined and attacked in every century since, is a working example of what philosophy of religion actually is, the sustained, technical testing of whether reason alone can reach a conclusion that matters enormously to how people live.

The Problem of Evil, Restated Each Century

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

The problem of evil has been argued in something close to its classic form for as long as philosophy of religion has existed as a discipline: if God is willing to prevent evil but not able, God is not all-powerful; if able but not willing, God is not good; if both willing and able, why is there evil at all. Philosophy of religion has spent the centuries since sorting that single question into sharper and sharper versions. The logical problem of evil argues that the mere existence of any evil is strictly incompatible with an all-powerful, all-knowing, perfectly good God, a claim most contemporary philosophers of religion now think theists can answer, chiefly through free will defenses, arguing that a world with genuinely free creatures, capable of real moral choice, is worth the risk of the evil some of them will choose, even for a God who could have made a world without that risk. The harder version, the evidential problem of evil, concedes that evil is not strictly incompatible with God's existence but argues that the sheer scale and apparent pointlessness of some suffering, a fawn dying slowly and unseen in a forest fire is the standard example, counts as strong evidence against God's existence even if it does not disprove it outright. Responses range from skeptical theism, the claim that human minds have no good reason to expect they would understand God's reasons even if they exist, to soul-making theodicies, which argue that a world containing real hardship is necessary for the kind of moral and spiritual growth a world of comfort could not produce. None of these responses has settled the question, and philosophy of religion treats that as the honest state of the field rather than a defect in it: the problem of evil is the branch's clearest case of an argument that both sides keep sharpening rather than one side simply winning.

Philosophy of Religion

45 entries

Movement

School of Philosophy

Era

Tradition

Nationality

Influenced By

In Group

Birthplace / Region

Abdolkarim Soroush

Adi Shankara

Alvin Plantinga

Anselm of Canterbury

Augustine of Hippo

Axel Hagerstrom

Badarayana

Bonaventure

Buddhadasa Bhikkhu

Cornel West

Curt John Ducasse

Daniel Dennett

George Santayana

Gershom Scholem

Gersonides

Giovanni Pico della Mirandola

Harald Hoffding

J.L. Mackie

John Anderson

Josiah Royce

Judah Halevi

Keiji Nishitani

Lewis Gordon

Lorenz Bruno Puntel

Ludwig Feuerbach

Madhva

María Elósegui

Miguel de Unamuno

Moses Mendelssohn

Nikolai Berdyaev

Pavel Florensky

Peter van Inwagen

Pico della Mirandola

Ramanuja

Richard Swinburne

Robin Collins

Saadia Gaon

Seyyed Hossein Nasr

Simone Weil

Soren Kierkegaard

Tanabe Hajime

Tommaso Campanella

Vincent Shen

Vladimir Solovyov

William Paley

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