Abstract
When confronted with the question of which philosophical conception of religion to consider most adequate, many philosophers appeal to what I call the adequacy-argument: that we should prefer the one that looks most adequate from the perspective of religious believers. In this paper, I provide a critique of the adequacy-argument based on a pragmatic analysis of adequacy-judgments according to which reflective adequacy-judgments are forward-looking, and hence include considerations of the consequences of adopting different judgments as guides for conduct. It is this forward-looking character that is virtually absent within the current adequacy-debate. The major advantage of a pragmatic analysis of adequacy is itself forward-looking: it would enable philosophers of religion to play a more critical and constructive role vis-à-vis religious practices than presently.
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Notes
For example Brian Davies, An Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion 3rd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 35ff., Peter Vardy, The Puzzle of God Revised edition (London: Fount, 2001), Roger Trigg, Rationality and Religion: Does Faith Need Reason? (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1998), 67f., Anthony O’Hear, Experience, Explanation and Faith: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984), 17f., and William Abraham, An Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall 1985), 17.
D. Z. Phillips, Religion without Explanation (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1976), 36.
D. Z. Phillips, Recovering Religious Concepts: Closing Epistemic Divides (Houndmills: Macmillan Press, 2000), 6.
Christopher Insole, ‘A Wittgensteinian Philosophy of Religion – Or a Philosophy of Wittgensteinian Religion?’ Heythrop Journal XXXIX (1998), 152.
Alan Bailey, ‘Wittgenstein and the Interpretation of Religious Discourse’ in Robert L. Arrington & Mark Addis (eds.) Wittgenstein and Philosophy of Religion (London & New York: Routledge, 2001), 129.
Van A Harvey, ‘Contemplative Philosophy and Doing Justice to Religion’ in D. Z. Phillips and Mario von der Ruhr (eds.) Religion and Wittgenstein’s Legacy (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), 187–196. The quote is from the following ‘Voices in Discussion’, 202.
Richard Swinburne, The Coherence of Theism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977), 93.
Nicholas Wolterstorff, ‘Reformed Epistemology’ in D. Z. Phillips and Timothy Tessin (eds.) Philosophy of Religion in the 21st Century (Houndmills: Palgrave, 2001), 39–63; Mikael Stenmark, Rationality in Science, Religion and Everyday Life: A Critical Examination of Four Models of Rationality (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1995), 321; William Hasker, ‘D. Z. Phillips’ problems with evil and with God’ International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 61 (2007), 151–160.
The term ‘ordinary believers’ is used in, for instance, David Ciocchi, ‘The Religious Adequacy of Free-Will Theism’ Religious Studies 38 (2002), 47. It is rarely clarified, but seems to refer to the kind of believers who have remained unaffected by the rather radical reinterpretations of religious belief suggested by, among others, Rudolf Bultmann and Gordon Kaufman. Similar views are expressed in, for instance, William P. Alston, Perceiving God (Ithaca & London: Cornell University Press, 1991), 264ff.; William Hasker, ‘D. Z. Phillips’ problems with evil and with God’, 158.
Nicholas Wolterstorff, ‘Reformed Epistemology’, 61.
William Wainwright, ‘Theism, Metaphysics, and D. Z. Phillips’ Topoi 14 (1995), 87.
Peter Byrne, God and Realism (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), 17f.
It was Paul Grice who first drew attention to pragmatic implications in the philosophy of language. The form I use it in here is adapted from Göran Hermerén, Värdering och objektivitet (Lund: Studentlitteratur, 1972).
The parallel to a pragmatic implication becomes misleading if we think that religious practices intend to say something philosophical like when a person says ‘salt’ and a listener understands this as a request to pass the salt. We go wrong, I think, if we think of either religious practices or religious believers as consciously intending something which goes beyond these practices themselves.
For instance, D. Z. Phillips, Religion and the Hermeneutics of Contemplation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).
D. Z. Phillips, Religion and Friendly Fire: Examining Assumptions in Contemporary Philosophy of Religion (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), 11.
For instance, in the following passage from an exchange between Phillips and Stephen T. Davis, where Phillips says: ‘when reference is made [by Wittgensteinians] to what people mean, the reference is to the role the words play in their lives, not to the account they would give if asked. Notoriously, in giving that account our own words can lead us astray.’ D. Z. Phillips, ‘Voices in Discussion’ in D. Z. Phillips (ed.) Philosophy of Religion in the 21st Century, 150. That this originally anonymous voice belongs to Phillips is confirmed in D. Z. Phillips, Religion and Friendly Fire, 7.
Sami Pihlström, ‘Religion versus Pseudo-religion: An Elusive Boundary’ International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 62 (2007), 3–32. It is worth noticing that Pihlström himself does not unreservedly defend the argument.
For instance Wolterstorff, ‘Reformed Epistemology’, Wainwright, ‘Theism, Metaphysics, and D. Z. Phillips’, Insole, ‘A Wittgensteinian Philosophy of Religion’.
D. Z. Phillips, ‘William Hasker’s Avoidance of the Problems of Evil and God (Or: on Looking outside the Igloo)’ International Journal of Philosophy of Religion 62 (2007), 39; Death and Immortality (London: Macmillan, 1970).
John Dewey, Theory of Valuation in Jo Ann Boydstone (ed.) John Dewey: The Later Works 1925–1953, Volume 13: 1938–1939 (Carbondale & Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1988), 219.
John Dewey, Theory of Valuation, 217. Emphasis in the original.
See Peter Byrne, God and Realism, 12ff.
Quoted in Eberhard Herrmann, Scientific Theory and Religious Belief: An Essay on the Rationality of Views of Life. (Kampen: Kok Pharos, 1995), 15.
Paul Griffiths, ‘The Uniqueness of Religious Doctrines’ in Gavin D’Costa (ed.) Christian Uniqueness Reconsidered: The Myth of a Pluralistic Theology of Religions (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 1990), 157–173; William Alston, Perceiving God: The Epistemology of Religious Experience (Ithaca & London: Cornell University Press, 1991), 265.
For instance John Hick, An Interpretation of Religion: Human Responses to the Transcendent (London: Macmillan, 1989), chapter 14.
A philosopher of religion that has drawn attention to this process within the development of the Christian mystical tradition is Grace Jantzen, Power, Gender and Christian Mysticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). A number of feminist philosophers of religion stress the point that philosophers of religion often neglect to ask critical questions about whom to consider representative, and why. As Harriet Harris puts it: ‘Feminist philosophers … want to know ‘whose beliefs’ are occupying the philosophers’ attention, and who is supplying the criteria of justification. … Who is controlling the discipline and setting its norms?’ Harriet A. Harris, ‘A Theological Approach’ in Pamela Sue Anderson and Beverley Clack (eds.), Feminist Philosophy of Religion: Critical Readings (London & New York: Routledge, 2004), 74.
See, for instance, Anthony Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992) and Ronald Ingelhart & Christian Welzel, Modernization, Cultural Change and Democracy: The Human Development Sequence (Cambridge & New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005). Harvey Whitehouse points out the importance of ritual and repeated exposition to religious messages for effective transmission of religion, and that rather brutal means of oppression are necessary to avoid freethinkers and diversity. See Harvey Whitehouse, Modes of Religiosity: A Cognitive Theory of Religious Transmission (Walnut Creek, Lanham etc.: Altamira Press, 2004).
I deliberately use the vague term ‘influence’ here to uphold the distinction between religious practices and philosophy of religion as one mode of reflection on these practices. Philosophical conceptions of religion are not themselves part of religious practices, but they have repercussions for them and it they are thus not religiously neutral—not even if we identify some type of believers as ‘representative’ or ‘ordinary’.
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Zackariasson, U. What’s Wrong with the Adequacy-argument? A Pragmatic Diagnosis. SOPHIA 50, 11–23 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-009-0153-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-009-0153-0