The Principles of the Philosophy of Religion

The philosophy of cannot be studied independently of matters of empirical fact. The philosopher cannot merely analyse the concept of religion without reference to particular religions, for to do this would be to run the constant risk of refutation on the grounds that some did not fit in with the analysis. He can give an account of what the term means, using the ideas of family resemblance or religious making characteristics ,1 but this must be done by examining particular religions and seeing what they tend to have in common, or in what complex way they are related. If is a family-resemblance type of concept, there will be no complete account of what a is, but the more religions one takes into account, the more complete will be the definition. So it will have to be decided which religions to examine; and also how closely to examine them. A superficial acquaintance may well lead to complete misunderstanding; probably through interpreting one in terms of a way of thinking appropriate to another. So it becomes obvious that the philosopher of religion's first job is to deal not with , but with particular religions; in comparison with the magnitude of this task, any resulting description of the general concept of may well seem unimportant. How then should the philosopher deal with a particular ? His job is to understand it, in the sense of mastering its logical structure. He is concerned with separating out its elements, and finding the relations between them. But in order to do this, he must find some way of tackling the religion's complexity. This complexity is of several different kinds. The most alarming is the variation between the accounts which different people who contemporaneously profess the same give of that religion. The more sophisticated the religion, the greater is this variation. If the has professional theologians, the philosopher can go to them hoping that their accounts will be conceptually tidier than any accounts he may be able to extract from non-theologians; but he may well be faced with disagreement among the theologians themselves. He cannot select the best theologian without using grading criteria, but he cannot rely on there being any criteria agreed on within the itself. He must, in fact, have criteria of his own

Epistemology · American Constitutional Law and Politics · Philosophy · Religion and Society Interactions · Study and Philosophy of Religion