Abstract
An aspect of the question of the relationship between reason and faith concerns the compatibility between philosophy and religious commitment. I begin by considering some attempts that have been made in both the analytic and Continental traditions to divorce philosophy from the life of religious faith as far as possible: in particular, I discuss Martin Heidegger’s critique of the very idea of a ‘Christian philosophy’ and Bertrand Russell’s criticism of Aquinas for not living up to the Socratic ideal of following the argument wherever it leads. I then seek further to develop these criticisms by reviewing the current debate around the problem of evil in philosophy of religion as a case study of the dangers and drawbacks of religious commitment in philosophy. I conclude with some comments on the connection between ideology and philosophy, and claim that much of what passes as Christian philosophy is ideological as opposed to rational or truth-seeking in character.
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Notes
Arthur Schopenhauer, ‘On Philosophy at the Universities’, in Parerga and Paralipomena: Short Philosophical Essays, vol. 1, trans. E.F.J. Payne (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), p. 143.
Jude P. Dougherty, ‘Christian Philosophy: Sociological Category or Oxymoron?’ The Monist 75 (1992): 286.
Alain Badiou, Philosophy for Militants, trans. Bruno Bosteels (London: Verso, 2012), p. 10. It might be helpful to point out that, leading up to this passage, Badiou has identified two perspectives on the nature of philosophy, one that sees philosophy in essentially theoretical or scientific terms, the other taking philosophy in a quasi-religious sense as consisting in personal or political transformation (pp. 8–9). In the above quotation, he is concerned only with philosophy in the latter sense.
Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. Gregory Field and Richard Polt (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), p. 8.
Heidegger, ‘Phenomenology and Theology’, trans. James G. Hart and John C. Maraldo, in Heidegger, Pathmarks, ed. William McNeill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 53.
Heidegger, ‘Phenomenology and Theology’, p. 53.
Heidegger, The Concept of Time, trans. William McNeill (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), p. 1.
Heidegger, ‘Phenomenological Interpretations in Connection with Aristotle: An Indication of the Hermeneutical Situation (1922)’, translated by John van Buren in Supplements: From the Earliest Essays to ‘Being and Time’ and Beyond, ed. John van Buren (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002), p. 121.
Heidegger, ‘Phenomenological Interpretations in Connection with Aristotle’, p. 194, n9.
Hugo Ott, Martin Heidegger: A Political Life, trans. Allan Blunden (New York: HarperCollins, 1993), p. 277.
Ott, Martin Heidegger, p. 277.
Quoted in Ott, Martin Heidegger, p. 276.
Quoted in Ott, Martin Heidegger, p. 279.
Quoted in Ott, Martin Heidegger, p. 280.
Ott, Martin Heidegger, pp. 280–81.
Heidegger’s prioritization of philosophy as fundamental ontology over theology as one of the ontic sciences is evident in many places, including the following famous passage from Letter on ‘Humanism’: ‘Only from the truth of being can the essence of the holy be thought. Only from the essence of the holy is the essence of divinity to be thought. Only in the light of the essence of divinity can it be thought or said what the word “God” is to signify’. (trans. Frank A. Capuzzi, in Heidegger, Pathmarks, p. 267)
Janicaud, “The Theological Turn of French Phenomenology‘, in Janicaud et al., Phenomenology and the ‘Theological Turn’: The French Debate (New York: Fordham University Press, 2000), p. 27. Janicaud was referring here to Levinas.
Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, pp. 7–8.
S.J. McGrath, The Early Heidegger and Medieval Philosophy: Phenomenology for the Godforsaken (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2006), p. 54.
McGrath, The Early Heidegger and Medieval Philosophy, p. 179. ‘GA24’ refers to Die Grundprobleme der Phänomenologie, a lecture course delivered by Heidegger in 1927 at the University of Marburg. See Heidegger, The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, trans. Albert Hofstadter (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), p. 20.
Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, p. 8.
McGrath, The Early Heidegger and Medieval Philosophy, p. 54.
McGrath, The Early Heidegger and Medieval Philosophy, p. 179.
McGrath, The Early Heidegger and Medieval Philosophy, p. 180.
McGrath, The Early Heidegger and Medieval Philosophy, p. 180.
Richard Polt, Heidegger: An Introduction (London: Routledge, 1999), p. 18, emphasis in original.
Polt, Heidegger, p. 18. Philosophical concepts qua formal indications not only break the Wittgensteinian silence but also subvert the deference (the later) Wittgenstein and his followers showed towards ordinary language, whose ‘ruinous’ and ‘fallen’ state Heidegger sought to transform by means of his infamously difficult and nonstandard use of language.
Heidegger, ‘Comments on Karl Jaspers’s Psychology of Worldviews’, trans. John van Buren, in Heidegger, Pathmarks, p. 9.
John van Buren, The Young Heidegger: Rumor of the Hidden King (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), p. 42.
Quoted in van Buren, The Young Heidegger, p. 45.
Van Buren, The Young Heidegger, p. 44. The quotation is from Heidegger’s Wegmarken (see The Question of Being, trans. Jean T. Wilde and William Kluback, New Haven: College & University Press, 1958, p. 95). Van Buren notes (on p. 44): ‘The phrase “Heidegger’s philosophy” is a square circle’; and he goes on (on pp. 45–46) to point out some ways in which Heidegger sought to restrain students and scholars from uncritical devotion to him and his ideas, encouraging them instead to think for themselves and make philosophical questioning, and not Heidegger himself, their focus. This, however, has not prevented the flourishing of an entire cottage industry of Heidegger studies.
For further discussion of Heidegger’s method of ‘formal indication’, see Theodore Kisiel, The Genesis of Heidegger’s ‘Being and Time’ (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), esp. pp. 164–70; and Daniel O. Dahlstrom, ‘Heidegger’s Method: Philosophical Concepts as Formal Indications’, The Review of Metaphysics 47 (1994): 775–95. Dahlstrom draws an interesting parallel between philosophical concepts as formal indications and artistic compositions such as a score or a script where ‘something is expressed and formulated but in such a way that what it is can only be realized by being performed (rehearsed, interpreted, staged)’. (p. 790) Tom Greaves makes a similar comparison: ‘We might think of a formal indication as something like an artist’s sketch… A sketch is not like the rough draft of a work that tries to completely capture an experience, but the opening up of a field for experiencing that is then worked through… By contrast, our experience and the conceptualization inherent in experience often become more closely akin to painting-by-numbers. Such painting can also be a creative engagement with the phenomena, but it takes place within an established and preset framework in a way that the sketching out of experience does not’. (Starting with Heidegger, London: Continuum, 2010, pp. 16–17).
Bertrand Russell, History of Western Philosophy (London: Routledge, 2000 [first published 1946]), pp. 453–54.
Russell, History of Western Philosophy, p. 452.
Russell, History of Western Philosophy, p. 453.
Mark T. Nelson’s initial paper was ‘On the Lack of “True Philosophic Spirit” in Aquinas: Commitment v. Tracking in Philosophic Method’, Philosophy 76 (2001): 283–96. Graham Oppy replied to this in ‘On the Lack of True Philosophic Spirit in Aquinas’, Philosophy 76 (2001): 615–24. Nelson responded to Oppy in ‘What the Problem with Aquinas Isn’t’, New Blackfriars 87 (2006): 605–16, to which Oppy replied in ‘What the Problem with Russell Isn’t’, New Blackfriars 90 (2009): 680–86.
For Nelson’s outline and defence of this argument, see his paper ‘On the Lack of “True Philosophic Sprit” in Aquinas’, pp. 284–94.
As Oppy notes, ‘there are many evident reasons for rejecting (DAM); it is absurd to think that Russell would even implicitly have committed himself to such a stupid epistemological doctrine’. (‘On the Lack of True Philosophic Spirit in Aquinas’, p. 617).
See Nelson, ‘On the Lack of “True Philosophic Spirit” in Aquinas’, p. 295, where Nelson addresses the objection that Russell was an epistemic ‘pluralist’, holding that there are many sources of permissible belief (including not only reasoned argumentation but also, e.g. perception, logico-semantic intuition and memory). Nelson attempts to account for Russell’s ‘lapse’ by appealing to ‘the tendency of secular philosophers to invoke double standards when criticizing religion’.
Nelson, ‘On the Lack of “True Philosophic Sprit” in Aquinas’, p. 295.
Oppy, ‘On the Lack of True Philosophic Spirit in Aquinas’, p. 619.
Oppy, ‘On the Lack of True Philosophic Spirit in Aquinas’, p. 620, emphasis in original.
Oppy, ‘On the Lack of True Philosophic Spirit in Aquinas’, pp. 620–21.
I am here quoting from Nelson, ‘What the Problem with Aquinas Isn’t’, p. 609.
Nelson, ‘What the Problem with Aquinas Isn’t’, p. 611.
Nelson, ‘What the Problem with Aquinas Isn’t’, p. 611, emphasis in original.
J.S. Mill, likewise, defends these values as part of his political program of ‘liberalism’, which seeks to protect and enhance the freedom of the individual. As he memorably stated in On Liberty (1859): ‘Who can compute what the world loses in the multitude of promising intellects combined with timid characters, who dare not follow out any bold, vigorous, independent train of thought, lest it should land in something which would admit of being considered irreligious or immoral?… No one can be a great thinker who does not recognize, that as a thinker it is his first duty to follow his intellect to whatever conclusions it may lead’. (On Liberty, ed. David Bromwich and George Kateb, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003, pp. 101–2.)
Oppy, ‘What the Problem with Russell Isn’t’, p. 682.
Oppy, ‘What the Problem with Russell Isn’t’, p. 684.
See J.L. Mackie, ‘Evil and Omnipotence’, Mind 64 (1955): 200–12; H.J. McCloskey, ‘God and Evil’, Philosophical Quarterly 10 (1960): 97–114; and H.J. McCloskey, God and Evil (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1974).
See William Rowe, ‘The Problem of Evil and Some Varieties of Atheism’, American Philosophical Quarterly 16 (1979): 335–41.
See Michael J. Almeida and Graham Oppy, ‘Sceptical Theism and Evidential Arguments from Evil’, Australasian Journal of Philosophy 81 (2003): 496–516, and Trent Dougherty and Justin P. McBrayer (eds), Skeptical Theism: New Essays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).
Michael P. Levine, ‘Religion and Suffering’, in Graham Oppy (ed.), The Routledge Handbook of Contemporary Philosophy of Religion (London: Routledge, 2015), p. 340.
The philosopher in question is Keith Parsons, who in explaining his reasons for quitting philosophy of religion stated that, ‘I now regard “the case for theism” as a fraud and I can no longer take it seriously enough to present it to a class [i.e. a class of students] as a respectable philosophical position’. The charge of ‘fraud’ is analogous to the criticisms of Christian philosophy made here, and as Parsons himself clarifies, ‘I do not mean to charge that the people making that case [in support of theism] are frauds who aim to fool us with claims they know to be empty’. Parson’s comments were posted on September 1, 2010, on the patheos.com website.
See Alvin Plantinga, ‘Advice to Christian Philosophers’, Faith and Philosophy 1 (1984): 253–71.
Plantinga, ‘Advice to Christian Philosophers’, p. 262.
Plantinga, ‘Advice to Christian Philosophers’, p. 270.
Plantinga, ‘Advice to Christian Philosophers’, p. 260, emphases in the original.
Merold Westphal, ‘Taking Plantinga Seriously: Advice to Christian Philosophers’, Faith and Philosophy 16 (1999): 173.
Eleonore Stump, ‘Orthodoxy and Heresy’, Faith and Philosophy 16 (1999): 147.
There is even a tendency amongst Christian theologians and philosophers to ridicule the view that religious belief is, or should be, based upon philosophical arguments or evidential considerations. I suspect this is another (although unintended) consequence of Plantinga’s methodological proposals in conjunction with his anti-evidentialist (‘Reformed’) epistemology. Consider, in this context, the following comments made by Kevin Hart, in response to a critique I had made of phenomenology (which I characterized as a philosophical method that cannot provide us with the tools to defend and substantiate fundamental religious convictions):
I am not engaged in apologetics…but if I were I would not go door to door with the ontological argument or the teleological argument, or with a volume by Swinburne under my arm so I could argue, tooth and nail, that the resurrection of Jesus very probably happened. Rather, I would want people to read the testimonies about Jesus with all due care, and to come to see, in the context of prayer, that it is indeed possible to live in a relationship with the one he called ‘Father’, a relationship that can be sustained and nourished by the sacraments of the Church.
Interestingly, Hart goes on to say, in a manner reminiscent of Plantinga:
The theological virtues, Aquinas says, are faith, hope, and charity. It should be noted that knowledge is not one of them; and yet Aquinas goes on to point out that the gifts of the Holy Spirit entwine themselves in and around those virtues, strengthening them, and supplementing them: knowledge, understanding, counsel and wisdom are of particular interest to the philosopher, since, Aquinas says, they direct the intellect (see Aquinas, Summa theologiæ, Ia-IIæ q. 68). But one receives them only once one has committed oneself to Christ. Crede ut intelligas, as Augustine says.
(In Graham Oppy and N.N. Trakakis (eds), Interreligious Philosophical Dialogues, vol. 4, Routledge, forthcoming.)
Belief in God, and commitment to Christ, come first. Understanding then follows. This Augustinian paradigm is Plantinga’s also, and indeed Plantinga has long been a follower of Augustine in terms of how to think of the nature and goals of philosophy and of scholarship more generally. See, for example, Plantinga, ‘Augustinian Christian Philosophy’, The Monist 75 (1992): 291–320.
A similar case of ‘bad faith’ is evident in the way in which some Christian churches (specifically those, like the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches, which see themselves as possessing the fullness of religious revelation) enter into dialogue with other churches or faiths. Is genuine dialogue possible if I (as one partner in the dialogue) am already convinced that I possess the whole truth, and so the other does not have something to tell me which I could not in principle discover from my own tradition? Would not dialogue, in such circumstances, be nothing more than a thinly disguised apologetics? Timothy Ware, a leading theologian and bishop of the Orthodox Church, writes in reference to the Orthodox Church’s membership in the World Council of Churches and its participation in the ecumenical movement: ‘We Orthodox are there, not simply to bear witness to what we ourselves believe, but also to listen to what others have to say’. (The Orthodox Church, 2nd ed., London: Penguin, 1993, p. 324) But is not this disingenuous? For, if the Orthodox already know or possess the truth, then in what sense could they (genuinely) listen and learn from others? Ware’s response (in the section subtitled ‘Learning From One Another’, pp. 325–27) is that, by listening to (non-Orthodox) others, the Orthodox stand to better understand the truth they have been entrusted with. However, this is a very selective form of listening: the others enable us to better see how we are right, rather than being humbly open to correction by others.
See Beverley Clack, ‘Distortion, Dishonesty and the Problem of Evil’, in Hendrik M. Vroom (ed.), Wrestling with God and with Evil: Philosophical Reflections (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007), pp. 197–215.
Clack, ‘Distortion, Dishonesty and the Problem of Evil’, p. 207.
Clack, ‘Distortion, Dishonesty and the Problem of Evil’, pp. 207–8. Specifically, Clack considers Frida Kahlo’s painting, ‘Henry Ford Hospital or the Flying Bed’ (1932), which illustrates Kahlo’s response to her experience of miscarriage, and Chuck Palahniuk’s novel Lullaby (2002), which tells the story of a grieving husband and father who believes himself responsible for the deaths of his wife and children.
Clack, ‘Distortion, Dishonesty and the Problem of Evil’, p. 205, emphasis in original.
Clack, ‘Distortion, Dishonesty and the Problem of Evil’, p. 199.
Clack indeed begins her paper with an incisive quotation from Candide.
Clack, ‘Distortion, Dishonesty and the Problem of Evil’, p. 205.
Kenneth Surin, Theology and the Problem of Evil (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986), p. 124.
Surin, Theology and the Problem of Evil, p. 123.
Clack, ‘Distortion, Dishonesty and the Problem of Evil’, p. 212.
Flew, ‘Theology and Falsification’, in Antony Flew and Alasdair MacIntyre (eds), New Essays in Philosophical Theology (London: SCM Press, 1955), p. 96. Flew derived his parable from a similar story in John Wisdom’s ‘Gods’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 45 (1944–45): §6.1, pp. 191–93.
Flew, ‘Theology and Falsification’, p. 97.
Flew, ‘Theology and Falsification’, pp. 98–99.
Flew, ‘Theology and Falsification’, p. 99.
See, for example, the responses by R.M. Hare and Basil Mitchell (each of whom offered their own parables by way of reply), in Flew and MacIntyre (eds), New Essays in Philosophical Theology, pp. 99–105.
It is this very ‘dogmatic’ tendency that creates conflict with the Socratic ideal of following the argument wherever it leads, as Thomas Kelly argues in ‘Following the Argument Where It Leads’, Philosophical Studies 154 (2011): 105–24.
This is a quote from William Rowe, ‘Reply to Howard-Snyder and Bergmann’, in Rowe (ed.), God and the Problem of Evil (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2001), p. 156, where Rowe is objecting to the skeptical theist response to the POE.
That this is a problem afflicting not only Christian philosophical treatments of the POE but also much of contemporary Christian philosophy in other areas, consider T.J. Mawson’s review of Paul Copan and William Lane Craig’s Creation out of Nothing: A Biblical, Philosophical, and Scientific Exploration (published in 2004): ‘At the end of Creation out of Nothing, in moving beyond exploring how the theistic doctrine of creation ex nihilo is best understood to trying to establish that the doctrine so understood and the classical theism in which it finds its home should commend themselves to any thinker, Copan and Craig have ceased being propelled forwards by any adequate substance in their premises and started being pulled along by the attractiveness in their minds of their preferred conclusion, the truth of the doctrine that they have hitherto been merely explicating’ (Philosophy 80 (2005): 459).
This is not to overlook the many important differences between religion and (political) ideology. Some religions, for instance, are focused on non-empirical realities to such an extent that they are not concerned with developing a political program.
Lloyd Strickland, ‘Philosophy and the Search for Truth’, Philosophia 41 (2013): 1079–94.
Strickland, ‘Philosophy and the Search for Truth’, p. 1082.
It might be argued, as an anonymous referee for this journal has, that philosophical inquiry could not even get off the ground if the inquiry must begin from a position of ignorance, since any quest for truth must begin from some set of beliefs (particularly beliefs garnered from or influenced by one’s historical setting). But this is a misunderstanding of Strickland’s position, which only calls for initial ignorance with regard to the proposition under investigation, not a wholesale skepticism. I would go even further, however, in allowing some degree of initial commitment to the truth or falsity of the proposition under investigation; for, what is crucial is the way in which the commitment manifests itself. Does it, for example, manifest ‘confirmation bias’, where one looks for and accepts evidence that supports one’s existing views? Or does it exhibit a preparedness to change one’s mind in light of contrary evidence?
Strickland, ‘Philosophy and the Search for Truth’, pp. 1084–85.
Strickland, ‘Philosophy and the Search for Truth’, p. 1087.
Strickland, ‘Philosophy and the Search for Truth’, p. 1087.
See Strickland, ‘Philosophy and the Search for Truth’, p. 1087, n13.
As examples, Strickland offers Searle’s argument for animal minds (which Strickland thinks is designed to rationally justify a pre-existing belief in animal minds, and as such is an after-the-fact rationalization) as well as contemporary philosophical accounts of free will. See ‘Philosophy and the Search for Truth’, pp. 1088–90.
Steven J. Bartlett, ‘Philosophy As Ideology’, Metaphilosophy 17 (1986): 1–13.
See Rowe, ‘The Problem of Evil and Some Varieties of Atheism’, p. 339.
As John F. Wippel acknowledges, such an argumentative strategy can be found in the work of Aquinas: ‘Thomas comments that if anything is found in the sayings of the philosophers which is contrary to religious belief, this is not philosophy but rather an abuse or misuse of philosophy resulting from the weakness of human reason… Hence, in cases of conflict between an alleged philosophical conclusion and something that is really contained in revelation, Aquinas concludes that the philosopher must have made some mistake in arriving at this conclusion’. (‘The Possibility of a Christian Philosophy: A Thomistic Perspective’, Faith and Philosophy 1 (1984): 276.)
Bartlett, ‘Philosophy As Ideology’, pp. 10–11.
Strickland, ‘Philosophy and the Search for Truth’, p. 1092.
Kelly, ‘Following the Argument Where It Leads’, p. 107, emphasis in original.
I am grateful to the anonymous referees for their comments on this paper, and to Patrick Hutchings for his encouragement and insights.
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Trakakis, N.N. Philosophy and Religious Commitment. SOPHIA 56, 605–630 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-017-0575-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-017-0575-z