An introduction to the philosophy of religion challenges us in a very Socratic way--we all know very well, and constantly use, all of the terms “philosophy,” “of,” and “religion,” but to define them is a mighty challenge. 

If we only study religions (e.g., what are the different types, what rituals do each have, etc.), we would ignore the specification the “philosophy of,” and instead be engaging on a “world religions” or “comparative religions” class.  These are great classes, but certainly not our pursuit.

1. Nevertheless, there is a lot of information about the different religions that will greatly benefit our study--whatever it may be--given the fact that we will read texts and thinkers within the canons of Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, and others that discuss all of the other religious traditions. So, as more information about religions themselves becomes applicable, I will offer introductory lectures sketching out these traditions and will also encourage you to engage in additional research on them.  Two easy to read books I highly recommend on comparative religions are: Huston Smith, The World’s Religions (New York: Harper, 2009) and Our Religions: The Seven World Religions Introduced by Preeminent Scholars from each Tradition, ed. Arvind Sharma (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1993).
   

Further, to treat “philosophy of religion” as only addressing the philosophical problems raised by religion (e.g., proofs for God’s existence, debates about free will, investigations into God’s attributes, definitions of good and evil, etc.), too, seems to ignore the full philosophical import of what religion is, when considered in total.  Thus, we will not just study philosophical problems that come up in various sacred literatures, religious writings, doctrines, or dogma.

1. The main reason being that in the spring I teach medieval philosophy, and if we were to study the earliest and best resources on proofs for God’s existence, the problem of evil, emanation theory, apopthatic theology, etc., we would simply reread everything I teach in that course.  Instead, this course, “The Philosophy of Religion,” offers us the unique experience to cull a broad range of texts: from different historical periods and different theoretical perspectives and written in different genres and styles.  However, if you are particularly interested in these basic philosophical questions of religion, they would make for excellent resources for class papers.  There are many resources available, many cited on our outside class site, and I can offer many additional textual recommendations.
   

Finally, to simply define our subject matter, “religion,” as an institution with rituals, a system of belief with practices, an explanation for the world or human history, an opiate for the masses, or salvation for creation neither would necessarily satisfy us, for we still would neither be addressing the essence of religion nor the totality of religion. 

What, then, is “religion” when we ask the question philosophically?

The question is eminently difficult and it immediately seems prudent to agree with Walter Kaufmann (the compelling contemporary philosopher best know for his work translating German, roughly WWII era philosophers like Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Buber), who wrote: “In discussions of philosophy it is usually—and quite rightly—taken for granted that there is no need of beginning with a definition. …  Discussions of religion, on the other hand, begin typically with definitions.  But not one of these definitions has won wide acceptance, nor is it likely that any ever will” (Walter Kaufmann, Critique of Religion and Philosophy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1958), 100).

Or to agree with Wilfred Cantwell Smith and William Paden, who, respectively, wrote that: “… the sustained inability to clarify what the word ‘religion’ signifies, in itself suggests that the term ought to be dropped; that it is a distorted concept not really corresponding to anything definite or distinctive in the objective world. The phenomena we call religious undoubtedly exist. Yet perhaps the notion that they constitute in themselves some distinctive entity is an unwarranted analysis. … an alternative suggestion could be that a failure to agree on definitions of religion may well stem from the quality of the material. For what a man thinks about religion is central to what he thinks about life and the universe as a whole. The meaning that one ascribes to the term is a key to the meaning that one finds in existence” (Wilfred Cantwell Smith, The Meaning and End of Religion, 17-8). 

and:

“One cannot generalize about religion on the basis of the language and norms of just a single case, just as geologists do not construct a geology on the basis of the rocks that merely happen to be in one’s neighborhood. The neighborhood rocks, analogues to one’s own local religion, are themselves instances of certain common, universal properties” (William Paden, “Comparative Religion,” in The Routledge Companion to the Study of Religion, ed. John Hinnells (London: Routledge, 2005), 208; American Professor of Religion at the University of Vermont; known for his studies in Comparative Religion).

But, to say that there is no definition, or that we should not pursue a definition, is to leave us unsure of the very question to which our semester will be dedicated.

So, let us try again.  Let us think about how we can successfully answer many questions of what something is by identifying its genus and species--e.g., I can know a lot about an oak (species) once I know that it is a tree (genus).  Let us consider, our species, that is, how the current world population stands at 6.9 billion people (1).  Let us ask, what unites 6.9 billion human beings?  And, let us propose the answer that the genus may be “religion.”  There are two ways to understand this answer.  They function similarly yet imply wholly different content, and thus interpretation.

The first is a perspective that comes about if we adopt “religion” as a genus that can then be divided up into numerous species, for example:

1. Religion: all 6.9 billion people stand in some relation to religion:
   

1. ‣Dharmic Religions: Based on Dharma, the Sanskrit word for law, duty, etc.; birthed in Indian Subcontinent and spread throughout Asia:
   

1. ‣Hinduism: 943 million adherents; 13.6% of world population.
   

2. ‣Buddhism: 463 million adherents; 6.7% of world population.
   

3. ‣Sikhism: 24 million adherents; 0.3% of world population (2).
   

4. ‣Jainism: 5 million adherents; 0.1% of world population (3).
   

1. ‣Abrahamic Religions: The monotheistic religions that are based on a historical tie to Abraham:
   

1. ‣Christianity: 2.28 billion adherents; 33% of world population.
   

2. ‣Islam: 1.55 billion adherents; 22.5% of world population.
   

3. ‣Judaism: 15 million adherents; 0.2% of world population.
   

1. ‣Taoic Religions: Based on Tao, the Chinese word for way, path, etc. (4):
   

1. ‣Taoism: 8 million; 0.1% of world population.
   

2. ‣Confucianism: 7 million; 0.1% of world population.
   

3. ‣Shinto: 3 million; 0.0% of world population.
   

1. ‣Synthetic, Non-Traditionalist, and Non-Religious (5):
   

1. ‣Agnostic: 660 million adherents; 9.6% of world population (6).
   

2. ‣Atheist: 138 million adherents; 2% of world population (7).
   

3. ‣New Religionists: 64 million adherents; 0.9% of world population (8).
   

4. ‣Baha’i: 7 million adherents; 0.1% of world population.
   

5. ‣Other Religionists: 1 million adherents; 0.0% of world population (9).
   

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Notes:

1. 1.Numbers are approximate for 2010; Britannica, available ~~here~~.
   

2. 2.Sikhism is a monotheistic religion with close similarities to Hinduism and Islam; the name derives from the Sanskrit for disciple or instruction and is based on pursuit of personal salvation (spiritual union) from the cycles of reincarnation and the veil of Maya (as the unreality of the values humans give the world) through meditation and discipline learned from a universal, non-anthropomorphic God, Vahiguru, and the teaching of ten Sikh gurus.  The “five evils” of ego, anger, greed, attachment, and lust keep us from union with God.  The path to salvation is meditative, not ritualistic.  It is considered the 5th largest world religion with most adherents living in the state of Punjab in India and the Punjab province of Pakistan
   

3. 3.Jains believe in the absolute equality of all life and absolute responsibility of each individual for his/her actions in the world.  Every soul is capable of Moksha, enlightenment or liberation from the cycle of reincarnation.  To achieve this, complete compassion and absolute nonviolence is required (killing or violence is a horrid blasphemy); this philosophy requires an ascetic life wherein most are vegan or vegetarian.
   

4. 4.The Taoic division also includes the Korean traditions Jeung San Dom (meditative) and Chondogyo (synthesis of various systems), as well as blended and/or folk religions.
   

5. 5.As of 2007, the U.S. is not in the top 20 countries with the most irreligious people; top 5: Japan (averaged 76%), Sweden (averaged 65.5%), Denmark (averaged 61.5%), Macau (averaged 60.9%), and Czech Republic (averaged 57.5%).
   

6. 6.Agnostic: the belief that nothing can be known about God or the divine, thus neither affirms nor denies belief.
   

7. 7.Atheist: the belief that God does not exist. 
   

8. 8.20th c. Asian neoreligions, neoreligious movements, non-Christian syncrestistic mass religions, etc
   

9. 9.Various religions, quasi-religions, pseudoreligions, parareligions, religious or mystical systems, and religious and semi-religious brotherhoods.
   

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The second way to understand “religion” as that which unites 6.9 billion human beings is to also suggest that “religion” is like a genus, but instead of seeking its species so as to understand it, we attempt to identify what it is in itself that is so essential.  Here, we adopt a definition of religion that is not so broad as to encompass all those species, but as something so narrow, so fundamentally essential, that it truly defines what it means to be human. 

Mircea Eliade (1907-86), the distinguished Romanian historian of religion, philosopher, and writer best known for his studies of religious experience and the theory that human experience divides reality into the sacred and the profane, defines religion somewhat similarly: “To be—or, rather, to become—a man means to be ‘religious’” (Mircea Eliade, The Quest, preface).

Granted, there are many reasons why we would not want to define “religion” and “being” as the same thing.  (Heidegger would accuse us of falling prey to a misleading metaphysics, wherein anything except the tautology being = being is false.  Wittgenstein would simply accuse us of mistaking a linguistic problem for a philosophical one.)  Nevertheless, there is also a real value to risking error and seeking to understand if, how, and why the meaning of the essence of religion could be the meaning of the essence of being. 

This sort of study would be asking us the deepest philosophical question of religion: What does it mean to ask the question ‘what is religion?’  What does the philosophical questioning into the meaning of religion say about human nature, about the human who asks these questions?  What is the meaning of religious experience, and how is this experience a fundamental human experience?

This moves us closer to understanding the approach we will undertake this semester.  To grant it even more richness, we can actually turn to the aid of dictionaries!  Here, we find even more radical disparity of definitions, but also some very interesting insights that give us a rich range of questions to fill out what it means to ask this very question of what is the philosophy of religion.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines religion as the: “Recognition on the part of man of some higher unseen power as having control of his destiny, and as being entitled to obedience, and worship” (Oxford English Dictionary, 1971).

The French equivalent of pall-bearing dictionaries, the Grand Larousse, defines religion as: “The relationship which humanity establishes with the divinity through worship; a specific group of beliefs, moral laws and cultic practices whereby humanity establishes a relationship with the divine” (Grand Larousse de la langue française, 1971).

And the more common and comprehensive Merriam-Webster defines: “Religion: (Noun) 1a: the state of a religious (a nun in her 20th year of religion); 1b1: the service and worship of God or the supernatural; 1b2: commitment or devotion to religious faith or observance; 2: a personal set or institutionalized system of religious attitudes, beliefs, and practices; 3: archaic: scrupulous conformity: conscientiousness; 4: a cause, principle, or system of beliefs held to with ardor and faith” (Merriam-Webster, “Religion,” Online).

Note these key terms: Religion is a recognition, a relationship, a state of being, a service to the divine, and a commitment. 

As Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768-1834), the German philosopher, classicist, and theologian most known for his hermeneutics (his philosophical theory of interpretation and translation), similarly intoned: “The essence of religion consists in a feeling of absolute dependence …” (Frederick Schleiermacher, The Doctrine of Faith).

These terms share in a connection to the idea of being.  Recognition, according to Hegel, is what is needed so as to be self-conscious, to be fully human.  Relationship is a fundamental dialectic with another, and a fundamental part of what it means to be a human amongst humans--according to Aristotle, humans are political animals.  The service and commitment modify and illuminate this recognition and relation.  The key differences, however, stand between religion being a matter of one’s own recognition of another or the relationship itself with another. 

This fascinating opening into difference between ideas of religion is further clarified by looking at the etymology of the term “religion.” 

The word “religion” comes to us from the Latin religio—‘an obligation,’ ‘bond,’ or ‘reverence’—whose own origin is contested.  Some, famously Cicero, claim it comes from relegere, meaning ‘to gather together,’ in the sense of ‘to go through again’ or ‘reread,’ by its conjunction of re-, ‘again,’ to -legere, ‘to read’ (the latter, a ‘laying before or out,’ derived from the Greek verb legein, logos).  Others claim it is derived from the verb religare, ‘to bind,’ in the sense of ‘enacting an obligation.’  Still others claim its origin to be religiens, ‘careful,’ being the opposite of negligens, or ‘negligence.’ 

Is an obligation something given by the self to the other, like a promise, or is it something demanded by the authority of the other?  Is the bond like a pure commune with one’s lover or loyalty like to one’s family, or is it a bind that ensnares us, comes upon us like a lasso thrown by the other?  What differences come to surface when it is rooted in a verb, as opposed to an adjective? 

Reading these multiple, possible origins together (and avoiding the linguistic debate) proves most insightful for our purposes and proposes our course goal to be the careful endeavor to understand (by going through and rereading diverse considerations of religion) this universal bind humanity has demonstrated, this obligation to something that leads us to reverence, even if this reverence may be shielded in caution and subject to rereading.

 

So, what will we study?  We will study “religion” so as to seek to understand what is so very essential about it that its experience is a universal human question. 

We will take up the idea of how it is an enactment of an obligation by seeing it as a process, as this gathering and going through.  This will serve as our first of three fundamental, philosophical features of religious experience: the path to faith.  Then, we will consider the going through again in a new light, as that which is brought on by one’s caution, by one’s questioning of the nature of this obligation: is it a bond or a bind?  This second feature will consider doubt and the ways one goes through doubt to reach an affirmation of faith.  Finally, we will look at the other end: when one’s doubt results in rejection.

We will study these three fundamental themes through a diverse array of texts:

We will read three distinct tales of the path to faith: the first from the remarkable German author Hermann Hesse, who write a novella length historical fiction account of the Buddha called Siddhartha; the second is the very first autobiography, The Confessions, by the Christian Saint Augustine (354-430 c.e.); and the third is a stunning epic poem from the 12th c. Iranian, Farid Ud-Din Attar, an adherent of Sufi Islam, called The Conference of the Birds.

We will then read two accounts of doubt progressing to an affirmation of faith: the first written by Søren Kierkegaard, the late modern Danish philosopher and a key father of existentialism, under the penname Johannes de silentio called Fear and Trembling, which reaches affirmation through the “leap of faith;” the second will be from the famous contemporary American pragmatist William James, his remarkable essay entitled “The Will to Believe,” wherein reason and will can supply an argument for the affirmation of faith.

We will conclude our semester on two accounts of doubt that results in a rejection of faith and a reduction of the religious impulse to either political-economic or psychological implants in Karl Marx’s two works, “Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right” and “Social Principles of Christianity,” and Sigmund Freud’s The Future of an Illusion.