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The End of Philosophy of Religion

October 26, 2014     Time: 30:53
The End of Philosophy of Religion

Summary

Many are calling for the elimination of Philosophy of Religion departments at universities. Agnostic philosopher Paul Draper offers insights.
What is Philosophy of Religion?" by Paul Draper http://philosophyofreligion.org/?p=14582#more-14582

Transcript The End of Philosophy of Religion

 

Kevin Harris: There has really been a lot of talk about, not only philosophy, Dr. Craig, but philosophy of religion as of late. There have been some very aggressive voices who lead sort of a campaign to get rid of philosophy of religion. A man that you've debated, a good philosopher Paul Draper, weighs in on this at Philosophy of Religion.[1]] Maybe it is just a social media phenomenon among some non-professional or non-specialists, but it has come up in some of the blogs and there has been a lot of discussion on it. So I am glad to see Paul Draper weigh in on that with this article. You have had a chance to debate him.

Dr. Craig: Yes. Draper is a fine philosopher at Purdue. We had occasion to interact at conferences. We even had a debate once at West Point. I have the highest respect for him as a thinker.

Kevin Harris: He writes on this blog for Philosophy of Religion - “What is Philosophy of Religion?” He begins,

The academic study of religion is a tricky business, because religions make claims about reality that are as cherished by their members as they are incredible to non-members. Thus, both philosophy of religion, which is a sub-discipline of philosophy, and the relatively new discipline of religious studies face an important question about their aims.

Dr. Craig: I think that the distinction he is making is a very important one that I noticed as a young philosopher as well. Philosophy of religion is a sub-discipline of philosophy, like philosophy of science or ethics or epistemology. This will typically be practiced by professional philosophers. They would be apt to be members of the American Philosophical Association and participate in professional meetings of that organization.

By contrast, religious studies is a sub-discipline of the religion department at a university, and is typically a study of comparative religions – Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism, and their respective claims. People who are interested in religious studies would typically be persons who are members of religion departments and participants in the American Academy of Religion and would attend the professional meetings of that Academy.

So these religious questions are being addressed by two very different disciplines that are very different in their texture and their feel, for those of us who participate in both of them. I think that Draper is incorrect in saying that the new boy on the block is religious studies. Quite the contrary, I would say religious studies is really a relatively old discipline. People for a long time have been interested in comparing the different truth claims and systems of religion. What is relatively new is philosophy of religion. As it is currently practiced, this is a discipline which has only really arisen since the mid-20th century. So it is a extremely young discipline that is currently practiced by, in America, analytic philosophers of religion.

Kevin Harris: Draper goes on to say,

Do those aims include addressing the truth question – the question of whether any of the claims about reality that religions make are true? On the one hand, inquiry in religious studies has generally avoided this question, especially in the United States, where great effort has been made to distinguish the secular and “scientific” discipline of religious studies, which is properly taught in public universities, from the sectarian discipline of theology, which is taught only in private religious institutions and which, at least historically, sought not just to identify, clarify, and systematize the beliefs of a particular religious community (dogmatics), but also to justify them (apologetics). Philosophy of religion, on the other hand, can’t completely ignore the truth question and still be philosophy. This is not to say that the truth question is the only question philosophers of religion should address, but it is one such question, and thus it is worth asking how this one part of philosophy of religion is best approached.

Dr. Craig: Here he distinguishes between the questions that are explored in religious studies and in philosophy of religion.[2]] I think he is absolutely correct to say that those who pursue religious studies are very rarely concerned with the truth of what they are studying. They are simply trying to accurately describe the belief systems of these different religions, and then how they impact the lives of their adherents, how they see reality, and so forth. By contrast, philosophers of religion are very interested in the truth of the worldviews that they study. Is there a personal creator and designer of the universe distinct from the cosmos? Or is there no such being as God? Is the universe itself some sort of totalizing absolute of which everything is a part? These are questions of truth that philosophers are vitally interested in exploring.

The only caveat to what he said that I would make is that while it may be true in the United States that religious studies is taught in public universities, whereas theology is only in private religious institutions, that is not the case in other countries. I did my doctoral work, for example, in theology at the University of Munich. In Germany, the theology department is one of the established and prominent departments at the university. I think probably it would be similar in England. So it is not always the case that theology is consigned to private religious organizations. In Germany, for example, it is as much a part of the university as the department of physics.

Kevin Harris: Draper goes on to make four recommendations when it comes to this particular part of philosophy of religion.

Dr. Craig: And notice, if I may interrupt, these are recommendations he is making for philosophers. He is going to tell other philosophers what they ought to do. Now, immediately one would wonder what qualifies him to make these recommendations. Why ought we listen to and follow the recommendations that he has to make about how to do philosophy of religion? I think that is important to keep in mind as we consider these four recommendations.

Kevin Harris: OK. He says,

My first recommendation is for philosophers of religion to distance themselves in every way possible from apologetics, whether theistic or atheistic. I’m not a demarcationist on most issues about the boundaries between philosophy and other disciplines, but apologetics is a special case.

Dr. Craig: Right. What he is saying here is that philosophers should not practice apologetics. Now that is very curious. He is not making a dichotomy between philosophy and apologetics, but he is just saying that apologetics is a discipline, or a practice, that philosophers ought not to engage in. It is like saying philosophers ought not to play golf, say, or philosophers ought not to attend rock concerts or something. He is giving a recommendation here as to why philosophers ought not to pursue the discipline of apologetics. What makes this odd is that he goes on to say that apologists may make use of philosophy, in which case one wonders if philosophy is an integral tool that is used by apologists, wouldn't it be good to have professional philosophers pursuing this discipline rather than amateurs? If apologetics uses philosophy legitimately, wouldn't you want it to be practiced by those who have doctorates and are skilled in that discipline so that it is done well? But Draper thinks not apparently because he thinks there is an inherent inconsistency between being a philosopher and pursuing apologetics. So when you pursue apologetics, in a sense you are betraying your role as a philosopher.

Kevin Harris: He says,

Of course, there once was a time when philosophy was considered to be the handmaiden of theology. But that time is long since past, and it would be a mistake to try to turn the clocks back.

Dr. Craig: All right. Here I think we see a very important assumption that Draper is making. He grants that at one time philosophy was the handmaiden of theology. Theology was the queen of the sciences, and philosophy served the needs of apologetics. But he says that time is gone and we shouldn't try to go back to it. In other words, Draper here is revealing his assumption of modernism. He is a modernist, or what I would call a theological rationalist.[3]] That is to say, he thinks we have no access to the truth of theological claims apart from argument and evidence. That assumption is rejected not only by medieval theologians like Bonaventure and others, but also by modern Reformed Epistemologists. Draper is here expressing his disagreement with the claim of Reformed Epistemology, that we have a warrant for our theological beliefs that is quite independent of argument and evidence. So Draper doesn't think that there is any way that you can have that sort of knowledge. That will, therefore, lead him to reject the view that it is legitimate to see philosophy as a handmaid of theology.

Now, in fact, as a Reformed Epistemologist, if someone were to ask me, “Are you a modernist or a postmodernist?” I typically tell them I am a pre-modernist. I want to roll back the hands of time, and I think that the pre-modern, medieval synthesis which had a sort of unified field of knowledge with theology at the top is the correct view. So that in itself is a philosophical question that needs to be addressed. This assumption that he is making would need to be justified. Thinkers like Alvin Plantinga and others reject this assumption. Plantinga has argued extensively that apart from the assumption that Christianity is false, there just is no good philosophical objection to the view that we can have sources of warrant for our theological beliefs apart from argument and evidence – through the inner witness of the Holy Spirit or a divine sense that God plants in our hearts. If Plantinga is right about this, then Draper is simply begging the question in making this assumption.

Kevin Harris: Why does he think that philosophers can't engage in the discipline of apologetics?

Dr. Craig: He says here that apologetics serve a religious community in a way that is antithetical to objective philosophical inquiry. Since the only source of warrant that we have for our theological beliefs are argument and evidence, it would be contrary to objective philosophical inquiry to think that you know the truth of these beliefs that are held to by your religious community independent of argument and evidence. That is impossible to have and so, as a philosopher, he thinks you couldn't have such a commitment.

What immediately springs to mind is: suppose that the philosopher has studied theology and he wants to engage in theology. Draper recognizes that theology is in the service of a religious community, and that a theologian could engage in doing apologetics in providing a reason why he believes as he does. So what is to prevent the philosopher so to speak from switching hats? Even if Draper were right that when you engage in apologetics you are not doing philosophy – you are doing theology – why can't I simply take off my philosopher's hat, set it to the side, and put on my theologian's hat and say, “All right, I am going now to do some apologetics as a theologian.” Natural theology is a branch of theology that explores arguments for God's existence. Christian evidences is a branch of theology that provides evidence for Christian claims. Why, as a theologian, can I not do that? It seems to me that the only thing that Draper could say is that you have no grounds for believing what you do as a theologian apart from arguments and evidence. That is begging the question against Reformed Epistemology and the pre-modern view that says we do have warrant for theological beliefs independent of argument and evidence.

So it seems to me that this whole article is really just a fundamental rejection of Christian philosophy and of Reformed Epistemology. If the Reformed Epistemologist is right, there is no contradiction at all in doing Christian philosophy. In looking at philosophical questions from a Christian perspective and to think that that is impossible, I think, is to beg the question against Reformed Epistemology.

Kevin Harris: He says that the “paradox of apologetics” is,

because apologists, unlike philosophers engaged in genuine inquiry, seek to justify their religious beliefs (as opposed to seeking to have beliefs that are justified). This implies that their inquiry, if it can be called that, is inevitably biased, and biased inquiry cannot ground justification . . .

Dr. Craig: All right.[[4] Here, I think, there is an important ambiguity when we talk about justification. There would be a paradox here in apologetics only if the apologist were trying to justify his beliefs to himself. If he were trying to say, “Here are my reasons why I believe as I do.” I think you can see that would involve sort of a vicious circularity because the apologist is already committed to the truth of what he believes, and then he tries to find reasons to justify that as to what he believes. But I don't think that is what apologetics is at all involved in. As I sit in my reasonable faith, there is a fundamental distinction between knowing our faith to be true and showing our faith to be true. We know our faith to be true fundamentally, I think, through the inner witness of the Holy Spirit. That is the theologian's component here. Theologically, this is how I know my faith to be true. Now, in order to show this to somebody else, I can give arguments and evidence that would justify it to them but not to myself. That is not in any way paradoxical – to give to the unbeliever arguments for the existence of God and evidences of Christianity which, if that person is an open-minded inquirer, would justify the truth of those beliefs. But one should not claim that these arguments and evidences are the grounds of my own belief. Again, that would be just a fundamental rejection of Reformed Epistemology. So I think that is really what is at the root of all of this – Draper is a theological rationalist who doesn't think that we can have warrant for our Christian beliefs that is independent of argument and evidence.

So it seems to me that so long as the philosopher holds that he has some independent warrant for his Christian beliefs, he is in no way betraying his philosophical method or honesty in engaging in the task of Christian apologetics.

Kevin Harris: He says,

My next two recommendations attempt to mitigate the powerful psychological forces that inevitably influence, mostly at the non-conscious level, inquiry about one’s religious and non-religious beliefs. To reduce the influence of various cognitive biases on philosophical inquiry about religion, I recommend that philosophers of religion use argument construction, less often as a method for making cases for the positions they hold, and more often as a method of testing those positions. This would require, of course, making a serious effort to construct arguments against one’s prior religious beliefs.

Dr. Craig: So the second recommendation is that you should formulate arguments not so much for the positions you hold as against the positions you hold. That strikes me as really odd. I would think that responsible philosophical inquiry would be very interested in giving arguments in support of the position that you hold as well as testing the soundness of arguments against you. Certainly in the work that I am engaged in, I always consider arguments against my position and try to formulate the best objections to them because, after all, your case will be so much stronger if you can show that the best arguments brought against it can be defeated. So this second recommendation is, if I understand it correctly, really unremarkable. You should consider arguments both pro and con, but I guess I don't see any reason to privilege the argument's con over the arguments for the position you hold.

Kevin Harris: He continues with the third recommendation. He says,

I also recommend that philosophers of religion make a conscious effort to allow, as J.L. Schellenberg puts it, “the voice of authority to grow dim in our ears”. All too often, viable arguments and positions never occur to thinkers because dominant, traditional forms of religion overly influence those thinkers. This is true even in the case of philosophers who are not members of any traditional religious community.

Dr. Craig: Again, he doesn't explain this any further. I am not sure what he means by “the voice of authority.” Certainly one shouldn't give arguments from authority as though that justified the position one holds.[5] But if he means that a philosopher of religion cannot be a Christian who believes, for example, in divine revelation (that God has given us an authoritative revelation of propositional truths), I don't see any reason to think that we should ignore that, or pretend that it doesn't exist. So I am not really sure what he means by “the voice of authority” here.

I am skeptical about the truth of that claim. As I say, if you just read the other side, if they've never occurred to you, you will certainly read about them from reading the attacks upon your beliefs. So, yeah, I don't think that this danger that he is talking about here in number three is all that significant.

Kevin Harris:

Finally, my fourth recommendation is to make every effort to accept genuine risk. True inquiry requires risk, which is why philosophical inquiry is aided by doubt. In experimental science, balanced inquiry is easier (though still far from easy) to achieve. Even if a scientist is sure of some cherished hypothesis, testing that hypothesis by experiment is (in many cases) inherently risky. Apologetics by comparison is very safe insofar as pursuing it is very unlikely to result in apologists rejecting any of the central doctrines of the religious communities they serve. Philosophy should be riskier – philosophers of religion must be prepared to abandon cherished beliefs. But with that risk comes greater opportunities for growth and discovery, and for freeing oneself from service to inflexible orthodoxy.

Dr. Craig: Again, I think that this shows a misunderstanding of Christian apologetics. Say as a Christian I am committed to the existence of God. I believe that I have non-argumentative, non-inferential warrant for the existence of God. Suppose I look about to see if there are any good arguments for God's existence. In fact, this is what I did. I was impressed when I first heard the kalam cosmological argument. I couldn't see any good defeaters of that argument. But I didn't embrace it immediately. I wrote a doctoral dissertation on this argument before I was convinced that it was good.

Even having done that, I had not accepted the cosmological argument from contingency such as enunciated by Leibniz. In fact, I was skeptical of this argument because I thought the Principle of Sufficient Reason on which it was based was demonstrably false. So my commitment to theism didn't make me a sucker for this particular argument for God's existence. It wasn't until reading Stephen Davis' version of the cosmological argument which employed a much more modest version of the Principle of Sufficient Reason that I became convinced that Leibniz's argument is, in fact, a good argument.

Similarly, I had never given a moral argument for God's existence. I had typically argued on university campuses that if God does not exist then there is no objective meaning, purpose, or value in life. The response I kept getting back from students were, “But there are objective values. There are things that are really right and wrong.” Now, far from refuting what I said, that actually supplied the missing premise in a moral argument for God's existence. If it is true that if God does not exist then objective moral values and duties do not exist (as I was arguing), and if it is also true (as the students were claiming) that objective moral values and duties do exist then it follows that therefore God exists. So I kind of backed into this moral argument unexpectedly through my experience with university students.

Similarly, the ontological argument – I was very skeptical about this because it seemed to me that it was quite illicit to try to argue from the mere concept of God to his actual existence in reality. It wasn't until reading and thinking about Plantinga's version of the ontological argument that my mind changed.

So what I am saying, Kevin, is that one's commitment to theism or even to Christianity doesn't make you committed to any particular argument or any arguments for the truth of this. As I've said on other podcasts, for me as a Reformed Epistemologist, I can be perfectly objective about these arguments because my faith doesn't rest on these arguments. Similarly, there is no reason to think that as a Christian that you have to be committed to the position that the historical evidence for the resurrection of Jesus makes it more probable than not that Jesus rose from the dead. As you know, Plantinga himself is quite skeptical of historical apologetics for the resurrection.[6] So the fact that you have a theological commitment doesn't mean that you just buy into every sort of apologetical argument that comes along and are incapable of assessing them critically and objectively.

Kevin Harris: What about his points here, Bill, about risk and doubt?

Dr. Craig: I don't see any reason to think that the Christian philosopher needs to be prepared to apostatize because of where argument and evidence is leading him. If Reformed Epistemology is correct, that we have another source of warrant for our beliefs independent of the argument and the evidence, then when the arguments and evidence would seem to lead me to a conclusion incompatible with, say, the existence of God, then I would be perfectly rational in saying, “This is an expression of my own personal intellectual limitations.” I haven't disproved that God exists, and therefore should become an atheist or an agnostic. Rather, I have simply encountered an argument which, in my limited reading and intellectual resources, I haven't been able to answer. But I think there is an answer, even if unknown to me, and in time I hope to find it. If I don't find it, I'd hope that some future generation of philosophers will be able to answer this objection and deal with it properly. This is not a sort of blind fideism because, as I say, you have an independent source of warrant by means of which you know, for example, that God exists and has revealed himself in Christ. So you do not need to be willing to engage in the risk of apostasy in order to carry out responsible, philosophical inquiry within such a paradigm.

Basically this whole article is really an attack upon Christian philosophy. It is saying you can't do Christian philosophy because of the theological commitments that are involved in it. I think that Plantinga and other Reformed Epistemologists have shown convincingly that that is not the case – that there is no good philosophical argument against a believer's doing good philosophical work within the paradigm of a Christian worldview.

Kevin Harris: Bill, I can't help but think that theological rationalism will put you on hold – it will put your life on perceptual hold. It is the customer service that will put you on perpetual hold because you've always got to have rationalizations and arguments and evidence weighing constantly, perpetually for and against each other.

Dr. Craig: I think you are right, Kevin, because the information overload that is out there is just enormous in terms of arguments pro and con. Perhaps the best evidence is Draper himself. This is where Draper is. He is caught in this sort of agnosticism which he cannot free himself of.

Kevin Harris: It is unlivable in a philosophical sense, it seems.

Dr. Craig: Yes, because it is like trying to balance an egg on the barn roof. It is going to roll to one side or the other. It is highly improbable that the agnostic's egg is going to manage to stay long on that peak. He will come to think, yeah, probably God doesn't exist. Or, yes, probably God does exist. But it is hard to maintain that balancing act. But if you follow this advice strictly, it seems to me that this does tend to perpetuate that sort of situation.

Kevin Harris: He wraps up the article this way,

I realize, of course, that some philosophers who are sectarian theists might be unwilling to accept my recommendations. They might regard accepting them as in some way disloyal to their religious community or to their God. Yet in some sense such an attitude evinces a lack of faith. If there really is a God and if such a God wants us to engage in inquiry concerning ultimate reality, then surely such a God would want that inquiry to be balanced. The results of balanced inquiry, however, are unpredictable. For this reason, it is arguable that a theistic philosopher who decides to follow my advice . . . must have greater faith, greater trust in God, than one who decides to pursue the paradoxical path of the apologist.

Dr. Craig: That is very clever baloney as saying that the person who is prepared to apostatize is really having greater faith. Notice, it is based upon this assumption that if there really is a God who wants us to engage in inquiry then this is the way God would want us to do it. But Draper knows how God would like us to engage in inquiry. Why wouldn't it rather be the case that if there is a God who wants us to know him that he would provide some immediate way of knowing him that would be available to every person regardless of his education, philosophical sophistication, leisure time, library resources, and so on and so forth? I think in that case God might be very happy to have us conduct philosophical inquiry within the paradigm of Christian belief that he delivers to us.[7]]