Philosophy of Religion

Abstract

As I have already stated (p. 3), I began thinking about the philosophy of religion under the influence of McTaggart’s Some Dogmas of Religion. I have ever since believed that the holding of some dogmas as true is essential to any religion’s being worth serious consideration: dogma is essential to religion as a shell to an egg or a skeleton to a human body, without it we have only a shapeless jelly. Much as Wittgenstein has influenced my thought, he had no direct influence in this matter; we never talked on such topics, and so far as can be determined he seems not to have held anything like this attitude towards dogmas. Undogmatic Christianity is a plain absurdity; as McTaggart pointed out, the recorded teaching of Christ includes dogmas; and as Hobbes pointed out, the earliest Christian writings contain a credal formula just as dogmatic and propositional as any later creeds: ‘Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God’.