The soul and immortality
- Related Topics:
- the Five Ways
- religion
- philosophy
The belief in life after death, which is maintained by each of the Abrahamic religions, raises the metaphysical question of how the human person is to be defined. Some form of mind-body dualism, whether Platonic or Cartesian, in which the mind or soul survives the death of the body, has been favoured by many theologians. Others have claimed that some version of physicalism or materialism is most consistent with scriptural ideas about the resurrection of the body. The former group has a tendency to disparage or downplay the importance of embodiment; the latter group, however, faces the problem of giving an account of the continuity of the person across the temporal gap between bodily death and bodily resurrection.
Religion and morality
Another concern of philosophers of religion is whether morality is dependent upon religion or is independent of it. Among those who take the former view, some say that morality depends upon religion in the way in which eating depends upon having an appetite: Religion provides the motivation that makes people behave morally. To prove this, however, it would be necessary to determine whether the behaviour of religious people is generally morally superior to that of nonreligious people. Others hold that morality depends on religion because the very idea of morality makes sense only if there is a God who sets objective standards or who will reward and punish people in the life to come. Otherwise, it is claimed, morality is a matter either of individual preference or of cultural or social convention.
Many of those who believe that morality is independent of religion have claimed that moral truths can be adequately discerned through reason, conscience, or moral intuition. In this connection it is worth noting that those who believe that religion is the basis of morality face the following dilemma: If the commands issued by God are morally obligatory, then that is because either: (1) they express independently justified moral values, or (2) God’s commands are necessarily morally good. If alternative 1 is true, then morality is independent of religion. If alternative 2 is true, then what is morally good seems to depend implausibly on God’s whim: if God commanded the torture of human infants, then it would be morally good to torture human infants. But this is absurd. This problem was first raised by Plato in his dialogue Euthyphro.
According to another perspective, derived from Kant, not only is it not the case that morality depends on religion, but in fact the reverse is true. As discussed above, in the Kantian tradition, the existence of God and the immortality of the soul are “postulates” of practical reason, or rational conditions of willing to bring about the highest good. Alternatively, they are conditions of adhering strictly to the moral law, which demands that one perform morally right acts only because they are right and not for any other reason, such as the goodness or badness of their consequences. Only in an eternal afterlife ordered by God would such perfection be possible.
The problem of evil
Perhaps the most difficult issue concerning the relation between morality and belief in God is the problem of evil. If God exists and is omnipotent and perfectly good, why does God allow horrendous evils such as the Holocaust? Why is any evil at all allowed by the divine? The problem is of ancient origins and has long been discussed by philosophers and theologians in the Abrahamic religions in relation to the Fall of Man—the expulsion, whether literal or metaphorical, of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden.
Few (if any) philosophers and theologians have been prepared to claim, with Leibniz, that the existing world is the best of all possible worlds. If it were not, Leibniz argued, what sufficient reason would God have had to create it? Apart from Leibniz’s view, three positive strategies have been developed. One stresses the importance of free will in accounting for moral evil (resulting from free human actions) as opposed to natural evil (resulting from natural events such as earthquakes and plagues); it argues that a world in which people act freely, albeit sometimes in an evil way, is to be preferred to a world of automata who do only what is right. Another strategy stresses the idea that some evils are a logical precondition for the existence of certain goods. The virtues of compassion, patience, and forgiveness, for example, can be developed only in response to certain needs or weaknesses. A world that contains these goods is better than one in which their exercise and development is impossible. The third approach emphasizes the “cognitive distance” between human understanding and God’s will, noting that humans cannot know in detail what the justification of God’s permission of evil might be. It is possible, of course, to combine these three positions, or elements of them, in attempting to offer an overall response to the problem of evil.
Some thinkers have approached evil, or certain evils, from the opposite direction. They have argued not that evil presents an overwhelming problem for theism but that it provides an argument for a life after death in which the injustices and inequities of the present life are remedied.
Philosophy, religion, and religions
There is some tension within the practice of the philosophy of religion between those who philosophize about religion in general or about abstract religious concepts and those who consider the concrete expressions of religion in one of the great faiths. In the 19th century, when the term philosophy of religion became current, the first attempts were made to define or characterize the essence of religion in phenomenological or psychological terms such as the recognition of contingency, the feeling of absolute dependence, or the sense of awe before the sacred. It must be said, however, that approaching religion in this rather abstract way has no great potential for offering philosophical illumination, nor does it raise many serious philosophical issues.
A similar tension afflicts the discussion of religious pluralism. Some philosophers of religion see the world’s religions as offering multiple embodiments of one basic religious or ethical stance. These religions are understood as ways of gaining cognitive access to the divine. The problem with offering such a metareligious account lies in the danger of misdescribing the beliefs and attitudes of the adherents of these traditions. For, it seems likely, whatever theorists of religion may say is really true of such people, they themselves will typically see their own religion as offering an exclusive salvific message and goal.
Because Western philosophy of religion tends to concentrate upon the philosophical traditions of the Abrahamic religions, it may appear that it unduly neglects the philosophical traditions of the other great faiths, such as Hinduism and Buddhism. To this charge there are two replies. The first is that, as a matter of fact, the relation between Western philosophy and the Abrahamic religions has been very rich, particularly so in the case of Christianity. This is attested by the vast literature on issues of philosophy within these religious traditions. However, the idea that the Abrahamic religions have been subjected to one rigid, oppressive, philosophical orthodoxy is wide of the mark. Rather, the interaction between philosophical argument and Abrahamic theologies has been very diverse, with a wide variety of positions being expressed and defended. What has united these various and often conflicting positions is a sense of common indebtedness to the philosophical traditions originating in Greece and Rome. This remains so even when religious thinkers in the fideistic tradition—which regards faith as being based not on evidence but rather on an act of will—have tried to repudiate the claims of reason and argument in the name of faith.
The second reply is that these other traditions are unlikely to contain within them distinct types of argument and reflection that are not already present in the Abrahamic religions. This is not a claim of cultural superiority but a reasonable hypothesis based upon the historical richness of Western philosophy. This hypothesis is being given some confirmation by the fact that there is a growing body of secondary literature within Western philosophy on the ideas and arguments of, for example, Buddhist thinkers. In this sense it may be said to be a purely contingent, historical fact that Buddhism, say, has not attracted a tradition of philosophical argumentation in the way that the Abrahamic religions have.
Realism and antirealism
A renewed concern of philosophers of religion in the late 20th and early 21st centuries was to determine the sense in which religious claims may be said to be true. The responses to this question took two broad forms. According to the view known as realism, if God exists, then he exists objectively, or independently of and apart from human efforts to understand his reality. Thus, “God exists” is true if and only if God exists; whether or not a world of cognizers believes that he exists is irrelevant. According to antirealism, the claim that God exists is true or false only relative to the beliefs or practices of some human group. Some antirealists make use of the work of the Austrian-born British philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951), particularly his concepts of “language game” and “form of life.” According to some uses of these ideas, religion is a system of social activities or practices involving specific forms of language, and such language is meaningful only within the activities in which it plays a role. The attempt to assess expressions of religious belief by criteria derived from other language games, such as those of science, is therefore mistaken. The strongest forms of antirealism stress the idea that the human mind “constructs” reality, including religious reality, through categories bestowed on it by culture, by one or more language-games, or by some other aspect of human endeavour. Weaker forms define truth in one of a variety of epistemic terms—e.g., a proposition is true just in case it is verifiable in principle, or just in case it is in some sense pragmatically useful—and draw on a more general suspicion of or skepticism about religion stemming from Kant, Feuerbach, and Freud.
Antirealism emphasizes the plurality of religious positions and the validity of each position insofar as it is faithful to its own criteria of belief. The idea of objective truth and the possibility of knowing the truth is dismissed. Various postmodern attitudes to religion appeal to both epistemological relativism and certain connections between knowledge and the possession of power, including political power and patriarchy.
As the preceding discussion indicates, although contemporary philosophy of religion continues to address traditional questions about the relation between faith and reason, it is now increasingly characterized by efforts to determine the epistemic status of religious belief rather than by attempts to secure religious knowledge. Even the tradition of natural theology is no longer concerned with proving the existence of God but with the more modest project of making belief in God reasonable, or rebutting objections to the charge that such belief is unreasonable, or showing that God’s existence is the best explanation of the unity and diversity of the natural order.
Paul Helm