philosophy of religion

Ancient origins

Philosophical interest in religion may be said to have originated in the West with the ancient Greeks. Many of the enduring questions in the philosophy of religion were first addressed by them, and the claims and controversies they developed served as a framework for subsequent philosophizing for more than 1,500 years. Plato (427–347 bce), who developed the metaphysical theory of Forms (abstract entities corresponding to the properties of particular objects), was also one of the first thinkers to consider the idea of creation and to attempt to prove the existence of God. Plato’s student Aristotle (384–322 bce) developed his own metaphysical theory of the first, or unmoved, mover of the universe, which many of his interpreters have identified with God. Aristotle’s speculations began a tradition that later came to be known as natural theology—the attempt to provide a rational demonstration of the existence of God based on features of the natural world. The Stoicism of the Hellenistic Age (300 bce–300 ce) was characterized by philosophical naturalism, including the idea of natural law (a system of right or justice thought to be inherent in nature); meanwhile, thinkers such as Titus Lucretius Carus in the 1st century bce and Sextus Empiricus in the 3rd century ce taught a variety of skeptical doctrines. Although not an original work of philosophy, De natura deorum (44 bce; “The Nature of the Gods”), by the Roman statesman and scholar Marcus Tullius Cicero, is an invaluable source of information on ancient ideas about religion and the philosophical controversies they engendered.

In the Hellenistic Age philosophy was considered not so much a set of theoretical reflections on issues of abiding human interest but a way of addressing how a person should conduct his life in the face of corruption and death. It was natural, therefore, that the various positions of Hellenistic philosophers should both rival and offer support to religion. A vivid vignette of the nature of these overlapping and competing philosophies is to be found in the account of the Apostle Paul’s address at the Areopagitica in Athens, as recorded in the Acts of the Apostles. Confronted by Stoics, Epicureans, and no doubt others, Paul attempted to identify their “unknown God” with the God and Father of Jesus Christ.

By the 3rd century, Christian thinkers had begun to adopt the ideas of Plato and of Neoplatonists such as Plotinus. The most influential of these figures, St. Augustine of Hippo (354–430), elucidated the doctrine of God in terms of Plato’s Forms. For Augustine, God, like the Forms, was eternal, incorruptible, and necessary. Yet Augustine also saw God as an agent of supreme power and the creator of the universe out of nothing. Augustine’s alteration of Platonic thought shows that such thinkers did not take over Greek ideas uncritically; indeed, they may be seen as using Greek ideas to elucidate and defend scriptural teaching against pagan attack. They borrowed key Greek terms, such as person (soma; persona), nature (physis; natura), and substance (ousia; substantia), in an effort to clarify their own doctrines.

Medieval traditions

The Platonism of Augustine exercised lasting influence on Christian theologians and was given renewed expression in the writings of the theologian and archbishop Anselm of Canterbury (1033–1109), whose ontological argument has remained at the centre of philosophical speculation about God’s existence (see below Epistemological issues).

In the 12th and 13th centuries the influence of Plato was gradually replaced by that of Aristotle, whose philosophical importance was most clearly demonstrated in the works of St. Thomas Aquinas (1225–74), the foremost philosopher of Scholasticism. Aquinas’s grand achievement was to wed Aristotelian methods and ideas with the Augustinian tradition of viewing philosophy as an ally rather than an opponent of religion, thus providing a new philosophical direction for Christian theology.

Aquinas, however, was only the first among many equals in philosophical reflection on the nature of religion in this period. The rediscovery of the philosophical writings of Aristotle by Islamic scholars ushered in a period of intense philosophical activity, not only in the schools of Islam but also among Jewish and Christian thinkers. From the late 9th to the early 14th century, philosophers as diverse as al-Fārābī, Avicenna, al-Ghazālī, Moses Maimonides, and John Duns Scotus explored reason and revelation, creation and time, and the nature of divine and human action.

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In the late Middle Ages the cooperation between philosophy and theology broke down. Later medieval theologians such as William of Ockham moved away from the Platonic and Aristotelian discourse that had dominated both philosophy and theology. Ockham and other nominalists of the period rejected the claim that the properties displayed by objects (e.g., redness and roundness) are universals that exist independently of the objects themselves. In addition, a strong theological voluntarism shifted the focus of theological discourse away from God’s intellect and the rationality of his creation and toward the absolute power and arbitrariness of God’s will.

Philosophers and theologians of the Renaissance and the Protestant Reformation looked upon Scholasticism as a highly sophisticated but needlessly speculative welding of pagan philosophy and Christian theology that tended to obscure authentic Christian themes. Renaissance thinkers rejected the medieval tradition in favour of the pristine sources of Western philosophy in Classical civilization. The Reformers emphasized both the supremacy of Scripture and the relative inability of the unaided human mind to reason about God in a reliable fashion. But although both movements were critical of medieval thought, neither was free of its influence.