THE PRESBYTERIAN UNIVERSITY OF EAST

AFRICA

COURSE CODE: ARE 311

COURSE TITLE: PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION

SEMESTER: SEPT – DEC 2024

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ARE 311: PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
SELECTED TOPICS

TOPIC 1: INTRODUCTION
1.1 Definition of Terms
1.2 Rationale for studying Philosophy of Religion

TOPIC 2: NATURE AND SCOPE OF PHILOSOPHY

2.1 Metaphysics
2.2 Epistemology
2.3 Logic
2.4 Axiology

TOPIC 3: NATURE AND THEORIES OF RELIGION

3.1 Introduction
3.2 Anthropological Theory of Religion
3.3 Sociological Theory of Religion
3.4 Psychological Theory of Religion
3.5 Marxist Theory
3.6 Theological Theory of Religion
3.7 Meaning of Religious Beliefs

TOPIC 4: THEISM
4.1 Introduction
4.2 Existence of God
4.3 The Quest for God
4.4 Culture and Conceptualization of God
4.5 The Christian God
4.6 The Islamic God
4.7 Arguments for the Existence of God

TOPIC 5: THEODICY
5.1 Introduction
5.2 Need for theodicy
5.3 St. Augustine’s Theodicy
5.4 The Theodicy of Leibniz
5.5 The Theodicy of Barth

TOPIC 6: MEANING AND ORIGIN OF ATHEISM

6.1 Meaning of Atheism
6.2 Problems of Definition
6.3 History of the Word Atheism
6.4 The Epistemology of Atheism
6.5 Atheistic Theories
6.6 Arguments against the existence of God

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TOPIC 7: THE PROBLEM OF EVIL
7.1 Introduction
7.2 Why is there evil in the world?
7.3 Philosophical Explanations for Evil
7.4 Plotinus and St. Augustine
7.5 Religious Explanations of Evil

TOPIC 8: PHILOSOPHY AND THEOLOGY

8.1 Introduction
8.2 Philosophical Theology
8.3 The relationship between Theology and Philosophy
8.4 Foundations of modern Philosophical Theology
8.5 Philosophical and Rational Theology

TOPIC 9: RELIGION AND SCIENCE

9.1 Introduction
9.2 Origin of Conflict between Science and Religion
9.3 The Problem of Original Sin
9.4 The Authority of the Bible
9.5 The Problems of Miracles
9.6 Time and Eternity
9.7 Divine Action
9.8 Creation and Cosmology
9.9 Creation and Evolution
9.10 Theological Anthropology, Evolution and Neuroscience
9.11 Redemption, Evolution and Cosmology
9.12 An Interaction Model for Religion and Science

TOPIC 10: FAITH AND REASON

10.1 Introduction
10.2 Faith and Reason
10.3 Faith and Rationality

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ARE 311: PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION

TOPIC 1: INTRODUCTION

Definition of Terms

Philosophy

Various attempts made by scholars to define philosophy has always been inadequate, not
because of the deficiency of the proponents of the theories, but because such propounded
theories have always not been all-encompassing in its definition of philosophy .

The word philosophy comes from the Ancient Greek philosophia which literally means love
of wisdom. The introduction of the terms philosopher and philosophy has been ascribed to
the Greek thinker Pythagoras. The word philosophy is also derived from two Greek words
philein meaning to love, to strive after, to search for and from the word Sophia which means
wisdom.

James Richmond (1966) defines philosophy as an inquiry into reality as a whole. But this
definition has been faulted on the basis that philosophy goes beyond the realm of perceived
realities alone. Fredrich Ferre (1933-2013) defines philosophy as one’s way of thinking
most comprehensively. However, the distinction between philosophy and other disciplines is
not so much its comprehensiveness as its critical nature.

Omoregbe (1993) defines philosophy as a rational inquiry into the nature and meaning of
reality. It is a search for the nature and meaning of things. The philosopher seeks to know,
understand the nature, meaning and purpose of things. Oshitelu (2002) believes that
philosophy implies primarily reflection upon simple, crude experience which it presupposes.
It is a critical and systematization of all knowledge drawn from empirical, rational learning,
and common experience.

Generally, Philosophy is the study of general and fundamental problems, such as those
connected with reality, existence, knowledge, values, reason, mind, and language.

Philosophy is distinguished from other ways of addressing such problems by its critical,
generally systematic approach and its reliance on rational argument. In more casual speech,
by extension, philosophy can refer to the most basic beliefs, concepts, and attitudes of an
individual or group.
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Religion

Various attempts have been made to define and explain the term religion.
1. Generally the term Religion has been defined as an organized system of beliefs and
rituals centering on a supernatural being or beings.

2. One of the earliest definitions was given by a Latin Philosopher Marcus Tullius
Cicero (106-430 BC), a Roman statesman, a lawyer and an Academic. In his book
De natura deorum (On the Nature of the gods) he derives the meaning of religion
from relegere (to treat carefully).Those who carefully took in hand all things
pertaining to the gods were called religiosi, from relegere.

3. Lucius Caecilius Firmianus Lactantius (250-325 BC), a Christian author who

became an advisor to the first Christian Roman Emperor Constantine 1, derives the
term religion from religare (to bind) i.e We are tied to God and bound to Him by
the bond of piety.

4. St Augustine (354-430 AD) the Bishop of Hippo Regius in North Africa commonly
referred to as Augustine of Hippo in his book City of God, derives religio or the
meaning of Religion from religere in the sense of recovering i.e having lost God
through neglect and that we recover Him and are drawn to Him.

5. Max Lynn Stackhouse (1935-2016) defined religion as a comprehensive worldview

or metaphysical moral vision that is accepted as binding because it is held to be in
itself basically true and just even if all dimensions of it cannot be either fully
confirmed or refuted.
6. Edward B. Tylor (1832-1917) defines religion as a belief in spiritual beings.

7. Emile Durkheim (1858-1917) defines religion as a unified system of beliefs and

practices, relative to the sacred things which unite all those who adhere to them into
one single moral community called the church. He warns that, in defining religion, it
is vital for us not to proceed from our prejudices, passions or habits.

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Philosophy of Religion

Philosophy of religion is the philosophical examination of the themes and concepts involved
in religious traditions as well as the broader philosophical task of reflecting on matters of
religious significance including the nature of religion itself, alternative concepts of God or
ultimate reality, and the religious significance of general features of the cosmos such as the
laws of nature, the emergence of consciousness etc.

Philosophy of religion also includes the investigation and assessment of worldviews such as
secular naturalism that are alternatives to religious worldviews.

Charles Taliaferro (2014) defines Philosophy of religion as the philosophical examination of

the central themes and concepts involved in religious traditions.

The philosophy of religion differs from religious philosophy in that it seeks to discuss
questions regarding the nature of religion as a whole, rather than examining the problems
brought forth by a particular belief-system. It can be carried out dispassionately by those who
identify as believers or non-believers.

Rationale for studying Philosophy of Religion

Philosophy of religion is studied for two main reasons:

1. It plays an important role in helping persons understand and evaluate different

religious traditions and their alternatives.

2. Philosophy of Religion as a field may be popular because of the overlapping interests

found in both religious and philosophical traditions.

TOPIC 2: NATURE AND SCOPE OF PHILOSOPHY

In terms of content philosophy is concerned with four distinct areas of study, which are
usually called the four branches of technical Philosophy. These are:

1. Metaphysics
2. Epistemology

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3. Logic
4. Axiology

Metaphysics
Metaphysics is the study of the most general features of reality, such as existence, time, the
relationship between mind and body, objects and their properties, wholes and their parts,
events, processes, and causation.

In its original meaning Metaphysics refers to what goes beyond the study of nature. Generally
speaking, metaphysics as a branch of philosophy deals with questions that are concerned with
what lies after or beyond the physical world of sense experience; it deals with the realm of
the supra-sensible. Traditionally, metaphysics has been subdivided into four areas namely:

a) Cosmology
b) Theodicy
c) Ontology
d) Rational psychology

Cosmology: Cosmology is the study of the universe or cosmos. The early Greek philosophers
were interested in explaining rationally the origin and nature of the universe. At the time,
there existed many myths about the ones found in African societies. Thus philosophers
addressed themselves to problems related to time and eternity, to the necessity of the laws of
nature etc.

Theodicy: Etymologically, the term Theodicy from two Greek words theos meaning god
and dike, meaning justice. It is an explanation of why a perfectly good, almighty, and all-
knowing God permits evil. The term literally means justifying God.

Ontology: This is the philosophical study of ‘Being” of whatever is. According to

philosophers, all things, both living and non-living have one thing in common, ‘being’.
Despite this common element, all things or beings participate in being in different ways.
Accordingly, minerals for example are different from plants; animals are different from
human beings etc. To examine the meaning of ‘being’ is the primary task of ontology.

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Rational or Philosophical Psychology: This branch of metaphysics is also referred to as the
philosophy of mind. One of its starting points is the awareness that we perform certain
activities such as perceiving, imagining, remembering, feeling, understanding and willing.
These activities are attributed to what is commonly called the ‘mind’ as opposed to the body.
A question is raised in this context, with regard to the relationship between mind and body
e.g. whether they are two totally different types of entity. This question pertains to the famous
mind-body problem, which is connected rationally with trying to determine whether the mind
survives the destruction of the body. Attempts to answer questions in this area of metaphysics
are rendered difficult by the complexity of the concepts in order and by the fact that often
there are no clear criteria for determining the meaning of the concepts used by different
thinkers.

Epistemology
Epistemology is concerned with the nature and scope of knowledge such as the relationships
between truth, belief, and theories of justification. Epistemology dates back to the ancient
Greece.

It is derived from two Greek words Episteme meaning knowledge and logia meaning study.
Thus epistemology is the systematic inquiry into the nature and ground of experience, belief
and knowledge. It is called a second order discipline concerned with the ‘how’ and ‘why’
rather than ‘what’. It does not aim directly to add to our store of knowledge but it is a
systematic reflection of knowledge itself. It aims at exploring scientifically what we can
know, how we can know and how reliable that knowledge is.

Logic

Logic is the systematic study of the forms of inference, i.e. the relations that lead to the
acceptance of one proposition on the basis of a set of other propositions called premises.
More broadly, logic is the analysis and appraisal of arguments.

Logic deals with establishing the consistency of statements. According to R. J. Njoroge and
G.A. Bennaars (1986), it is the study of correct reasoning. Logic attempts to establish the

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truth or falsehood of statements. It also justifies the validity and soundness of arguments.
Traditionally, logic is classified into three sub branches namely:

1) Inductive logic
2) Deductive logic
3) Symbolic logic

Inductive Logic: This is a process whereby general law or conclusion is inferred from
particular instances. It starts from the particular and reasons to the general. In other words
inductive reasoning proceeds from a particular to a general idea. If an event or a process is
repeated several times and consistently, then conclusions are drawn. For example, it has been
established that for an object to float in water, its density should be less than one gram per
cubic centimeter. Therefore all objects with such density must float in water. This law has
been held without further inquiry.

Deductive logic: This is a process of reasoning whereby a particular conclusion is inferred or

deduced from a general premise. These premises often take the form of general statements or
propositions. Deductive reasoning starts from a general principle to a particular principle, for
example:
Example 1

All men are mortal

Mugaka is a man
Mugaka is mortal

Example 2
All university students are bright
Atieno is a university student
Atieno is bright.

More technically, such reasoning is often expressed in the form of a syllogism i.e. the first
two statements need to be stated before the third.

Symbolic logic: Symbolic logic is purely mathematical. Here symbols are used to represent figures
or ideas e.g, in mathematics:
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∏ Represents 22
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∑ Represents summation or total number of variables.

In some mathematical problems certain symbols or letters of the alphabet represents certain values
e.g.
If, a=2,b=3, c=6

Calculate the value of:

ab, bc, 2b-a, c/a, ac+2b

From a logical point of view an individual is able to make concrete conclusions.

In mathematics of equations, x is used to represent the unknown. An individual is able to use

the laws of logic to make calculations and comprehend the value of the unknown. Fore
example x+4=13. The symbol x represents a number which must be added to 4 to bring 13.
This follows that to know the value of x, 4 must be subtracted from 13.

Axiology

Axiology is the philosophical study of theory of values. The term axiology has been derived
from Greek words axia meaning values and logia meaning study. Axiology is a very broad
area of study with several sub-branches each dealing with a different set of values. The main
sub- branches of axiology are:
(i) Ethics
(ii)Aesthetics

Ethics: This also called moral philosophy. It reflects on the origin and nature of moral values.
It inquires into the meaning of what is right or wrong, thereby distinguishing between the
good of the society. At individual level, it focuses on human behavior.

Aesthetics: This is the theory of beauty as applied in the field of art, architecture and music.
Axiology is further concerned with social, cultural and political values. In this context we
speak of social philosophy, political philosophy and philosophy of culture each of which is an
area of specialization within axiology, in as far as all of them are concerned with values.
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TOPIC 3: NATURE AND THEORIES OF RELIGION

Introduction

Religion is said to be a social-cultural system of designated behaviors and practices, morals,

worldviews, texts, sanctified places, prophecies, ethics, or organizations, that relates
humanity to supernatural, transcendental, or spiritual elements. However, there is no
scholarly consensus over what precisely constitutes a religion.

Different religions may or may not contain various elements ranging from the divine, sacred
things, faith, a supernatural being or supernatural beings or some sort of ultimacy and
transcendence that will provide norms and power for the rest of life. Religious practices may
include rituals, sermons, commemoration or veneration of deities and/or saints, sacrifices,
festivals, feasts, trances, initiations, funerary services, matrimonial services, meditation,
prayer, music, art, dance, public service, or other aspects of human culture.

Religions have sacred histories and narratives, which may be preserved in sacred scriptures,
and symbols and holy places, that aim mostly to give a meaning to life. Religions may
contain symbolic stories, which are sometimes said by followers to be true, that have the side
purpose of explaining the origin of life, the universe, and other things. Traditionally, faith, in
addition to reason, has been considered a source of religious beliefs.

Scholars have advanced various theories in an attempt to describe the nature of Religion:

Anthropological Theory of Religion

This was advanced by Ludwig Andreas Feuerbach (1804-1872). Feuerbach based his
anthropological theories of religion on his discoveries about human nature. In his book, The
essence of Christianity, he believes that religion is nothing other than the worship of human
nature. When man thinks he is worshipping God he is only worshipping himself, that is, his
own nature which he projects outside himself as God. To him, the God that the religious man
worships is nothing other than the projected image of human nature.

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Sociological Theory of Religion

Emile Durkheim (1858-1872) in his book, The elementary forms of religions gives a
sociological interpretation of religion, as a creation of the society. It is the society which
created and uses religion as an instrument of control. It is, according to Durkheim (1965),
people that engage in religious life to celebrate the awesome power of their society. The
society uses religion as the instrument of control and means of moulding their minds so that it
may be able to direct their thinking. The society exercises such a powerful influence on its
member that the latter personifies its force into divine entity. The almighty God is simply a
symbol of the might of the society. What religious people also call the commandments of
God is nothing other than the moral demands of the society.

Psychological Theory of Religion

Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) the founder of psychoanalysis, gives a psychological

explanation of religion in his books, Totem and Taboo, and Future of Illusion. Religion,
according to him is a continuation into adulthood a child’s attitude towards his father.
Realizing his weakness, a child naturally seeks the protection of his father whom he sees as
very powerful, and able to protect him. He therefore frequently turns to his father for help and
protection in times of difficulty. Religion is nothing other than this childhood mentally
extended into adult hood. Faced with the odds of life the forces of nature, death, disease, etc.
man realizes his weakness and helplessness. Like a child he spontaneously seeks the
protection of a father, and finding none he imagines one for himself. Thus, God according to
Freud, is an imaginary being; an imaginary father.

Marxist Theory

Karl Marx (1818-1883) attributed the origin and continuing existence of religion to the
economic exploitation of the masses in the capitalist system. He agreed with Feuerbach that
God is nothing other that the projection of the best qualities in man and that religion is man’s
self alienation. But he accused Feuerbach of indulging in metaphysical abstraction in his
conception of the human essence.

Karl Marx tries to explain the driving force behind man’s reclining into religion. The answer,
according to Marx is simple; it is exploitation, the economic exploitation and oppression of
the masses in the capitalist system. The masses who are suffering under the oppressive and

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exploitative capitalist system look up to the sky for an imaginary saviour who will come and
deliver them from the hands of their capitalist exploiters. They then invent the idea of God to
whom they pray and look forward to for deliverance. Thus, religion is the product of
exploitation, oppression and suffering.

Theological Theory of Religion

The Italian theologian, P. Rosario, traces the origin of religion to human nature itself, which
according to him has a religious dimension. The human spirit is constantly and continuously
searching for its source, i.e., the intimate spirit. This search of the finite spirit for the infinite
spirit its source is what constitutes religion. This can be traced to the submission of St
Augustine as the restlessness of the human spirit for its source; the infinite spirit or, in other
words, God. That is why man experiences uneasiness, dissatisfaction and insecurity. He
experience an emptiness or a vacuum within him and nothing finite can satisfy his most basic
desire which he often does not quite understanding himself.

Meaning of Religious Beliefs

Prior to the twentieth century, a substantial amount of philosophical reflection on matters of

religious significance has been realist. That is, it has often been held that religious beliefs are
true or false. Xenophanes and other pre-Socratic thinkers, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, the
Epicureans, the Stoics, Philo, Plotinus differed on their beliefs or speculation about the
divine, and they and their contemporaries differed about scepticism, but they held that there
either was a divine reality or not. Medieval and modern Jewish, Christian, and Islamic
philosophers differed in terms of their assessment of faith and reason.

They also faced important philosophical questions about the authority of revelation claims in
the Hebrew Bible, the Christian Bible, and the Qur’an. In Asian philosophy of religion, some
religions do not include revelation claims, as in Buddhism and Confucianism, but Hindu
tradition confronted philosophers with assessing the Vedas and Upanishads. But for the most
part, philosophers in the West and East thought there were truths about whether there is a
God, the soul, an afterlife, that which is sacred.

Two prominent philosophical movements arose that challenged a realist philosophy of God
namely:

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 1. Positivism
2. Wittgensteinian Philosophy of Religion

Positivism

Positivism is a term introduced by Auguste Comte (1798–1857), a French philosopher who

championed the natural and social sciences over against theology and the philosophical
practice of metaphysics. The term positivism was used later. sometimes amplified to Logical
Positivism by A.J. Ayer by a group of philosophers who met in Austria called the Vienna
Circle from 1922 to 1938. This group, which included Moritz Schlick and Max Planck,
advanced an empirical account of meaning, according to which for a proposition to be
meaningful it needed either to be a conceptual or formal statement in mathematics or about
analytic definitions or about matters that can be empirically verified or falsified. Ostensibly
factual claims that do not make any difference in terms of our actual or possible empirical
experience are void of meaning.

Wittgensteinian Philosophy of Religion

Wittgenstein’s early work was interpreted by some members of the Vienna Circle as friendly
to their empiricism, but they were surprised when he visited the Circle and, rather than
Wittgenstein discussing his Tractatus, he read them poetry by Rabindranath Tagore (1861–
1941), a Bengal mystic (see Taliaferro 2005b: chapter eight). In any case, Wittgenstein’s later
work, which was not friendly to their empiricism, was especially influential in post-World
War II philosophy and theology and will be the focus here.

In the Philosophical Investigations (published posthumously in 1953) and in many other

works (including the publication of notes taken by his students on his lectures), Wittgenstein
opposed what he called the picture theory of meaning. On this view, statements are true or
false depending upon whether reality matches the picture expressed by the statements.
Wittgenstein came to see this view of meaning as deeply problematic.

The meaning of language is, rather, to be found not in referential fidelity but in its use in what
Wittgenstein referred to as forms of life. As this position was applied to religious matters,
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D.Z. Phillips (1966, 1976), B.R. Tilghman (1994), and, more recently, Howard Wettstein
(2012), sought to displace traditional metaphysical debate and arguments over theism and its
alternatives and to focus instead on the way language about God, the soul, prayer,
resurrection, the afterlife, and so on, functions in the life of religious practitioners. For
example, Phillips contended that the practice of prayer is best not viewed as humans seeking
to influence an all powerful, invisible person, but to achieve solidarity with other persons in
light of the fragility of life. Phillips thereby sees himself as following Wittgenstein’s lead by
focusing, not on which picture of reality seems most faithful, but on the non-theoretical ways
in which religion is practiced.

TOPIC 4: THEISM

Introduction

Theism can be defined simply as the study or discourse about God. It is derived from the
Greek word theos meaning. In 1948 Bertrand Russell, a foremost historian of western
philosophy and Fredrick Copestones agreed on the definition of God as: a supreme personal
being, distinct from the world and creator of the world’.

Existence of God

In answer to the why men worry about God’s existence, St. Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274)
argued that we need a rational demonstration of God’s existence because his existence is not
self-evident, that is, not known by definition or implanted by nature to every person. In actual
sense, many people doubt the existence of God; some others out rightly deny it. Some often
claim we can not tell whether he exists or not.

French philosopher, Michel Foucault (1926-1984), argues that if humanity were in

generalized doubt with regard to the existence of God, there would be unimaginable disaster
both in life and thought of humans to such an extent that it would result in ‘the death of man”

The Quest for God

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Miguel de Unamuno (1864-1936) has attempted to answer why man is continually
preoccupied about the question of God when he says, “man is preoccupied about the question
of God because he is pre-occupied about himself, about his own existence, the meaning and
purpose of his existence, his past and his future.” The search for the meaning of human
existence is according to Unamuno, prompted man’s basic thirst for immortality, the thirst for
self-perpetuation, which underlies all human endeavours. Thus, man’s thirst for God is rooted
in his natural thirst for immortality.

Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980) describes this natural thirst for immortality as a desire to
become God. It manifests itself, according to Sartre, in man’s feeling of emptiness and
uneasiness within him. Man naturally feels a vacuum, an emptiness, to fill the emptiness he
experiences within him and to seek a foundation for his being, mankind therefore cannot stop
thinking or talking about God, nor can religion ever be completely wiped out of human
society as long as the thirst for immortality, the instinct of self– perpetuation, remains part of
human nature.

Culture and Conceptualization of God

The way God is conceived and portrayed in any religion is a reflection of the worldview and
beliefs of the culture that gave birth to that religion (Omeregbe, 1993). Every religion is the
product of culture and part of that culture. Christianity is the product of Jewish Hellenistic
Roman culture and an integral part of that complex culture. Islam is a product of the culture
of the Arabs. Confucianism and Taoism are products of the Chinese culture and integral parts
of that culture.

It is through culture that people live their lives and interpret their life experience. It colours,
shapes and limits a people’s view of reality, for it serves as the lenses through which people
look at reality and interpret it. This explains why it is impossible for the people of one culture
to have identical worldview and value as those of the people of other cultures because they
look at reality and interpret it through different cultural lenses. The difficulty experienced by
people in a given cultural setting in accepting and effectively comprehending the concept of
God brought to them from another cultural background is understandable on the ground of
differing cultural settings.

Anthropomorphism is common to all religions in the concept of God. That is, he is conceived
in the image and likeness of man, with all human attributes. He has eyes, ears mouth, hands,

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feet, nose, emotions etc. like human beings. He can be offended and become angry like any
human being. He can become tired after working hard, and would need rest.

The God of religion is as emotional as human beings; he can hate, can become jealous, can be
moved with anger when offended and is often vindictive. The God of religion is, in short an
anthropomorphic deity.

The almightiness of God is also called into question because he is portending to have human
limitations and human weaknesses entailed in human beings. Scholars have argued that he is
able to remove evil from the world which he is said to have created nor is he normally perfect
since he is also subject to anger, jealousy and hate like human limitations and thus cannot be
infinite or almighty. Thus, there is an intrinsic concentration in the concept of the God of
religion.

The Christian God

In the same view, the God portrayed as the Christian God is also anthropomorphic in nature.
The triune nature of this God, immediately confirms this. The Christian God, the father, is
depicted to have sent the son–Jesus into the world for the salvation of humanity. This shows
that they are ontologically distinct beings. When the second person has accomplished his
mission, the third person (the Holy Spirit) was also sent by the same person (the father) on a
mission to the world. It was the first person (the father) who created the world; it was the
second person who came to the world to redeem it, while the third person came later to
sanctify it. Each had its own specific role and function in relation to the world one is the
creator, the other is the redeemer, while the third is the sanctifier. All these show clearly that
the doctrine of the trinity of God is a doctrine of three ontologically distinct beings
constituting one being.

The Islamic God

The Islamic Theologian Gafar Sheikh Idris, discuss the anthropomorphic nature of the Allah
of Islam in his article “The Attribute of God: An Islamic point of view. But philosophy of
religion will ask if God is really an anthropomorphic being? If God were really to possess
these human traits, he would be imperfect and limited, for imperfection and limitation are
implied in these attributes.

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Arguments for the Existence of God

The existence of God has been a long standing source of controversy for ages. From Plato to
contemporary times, many have tried to answer in one way or the other with arguments.
These arguments have mostly been aimed at proving that God exists. These arguments can be
classified into the following:

1. Ontological Arguments
2. Cosmological Arguments
3. Arguments from Design
4. Moral Arguments

The Ontological Argument

Ontological arguments are arguments, for the conclusion that God exists, from premises
which one supported to derive from some sources other than the observation of the world e.g.
from reason alone. In other words, ontological arguments are arguments form nothing but
analytic, a priori and necessary premises to the conclusion that God exists.

The first and best known ontological argument was proposed by St. Anselm of Canterbury in
the 11th century A.D. Anselm's argument had the following steps:

1. God is, by definition, that than which nothing greater can be conceived.
2. It is greater to exist than not to exist.
3. Suppose God does not exist; then we can conceive of something greater than God,
viz. a being like God but that exists.
4. If we can conceive of something greater than God then we can conceive of something
greater than that than which nothing greater can be conceived.
5. It is not possible to conceive of something greater than that than which nothing
greater can be conceived.
6. Therefore it is not possible to conceive of something greater than God.
7. Therefore our supposition that God does not exist was false.
8. Therefore God exists.

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Anselm then proceeds to show that God exists necessarily, ie. that he has to exist, he couldn't
have failed to exist.

Criticism of Ontological Argument

Critiques of ontological arguments begin with Gaunillo (994-1083), a contemporary of St.

Anselm. Perhaps the best known criticisms of ontological arguments are due to Immanuel
Kant, in his Critique of pure Reason. Most famously, Kant claims that ontological arguments
are ciliated by their reliance upon the implicit assumption that “existence” is a predicate.
However, Bertrand Russell observed, it is much easier to be persuaded that ontological
arguments are no good than it is to say exactly what is wrong with them. This helps to
explain why ontological arguments have fascinated philosophers for almost a thousand years.

The Cosmological Argument

Proponent of cosmological arguments thinks that the existence of contingent things, that is,
things that could possibly not have existed point to the existence of a non contingent or
necessary being, God, as their ultimate cause, creator, grand energizer, or Source Being. This
argument is often viewed from various areas:

1. Motion: Human experience has taught us that things do move, probably set in motion by
other things. These are in turn moved by some other things. For according to Aquinas,
whatever is moved is moved by another. “But this progress of movement cannot be unending;
there must be a last point of movement. Moreover there would even be no movement at all it
there were no points from which the movement started. This point must not be moved by
another, for if it were, there would be a regression to infinity of motion which makes
impossible nonsense of any movement at all. The starting point of all movement is a first
mover, an unmoved mover, he accounts for all the series of subsequent movements. This first
unmoved mover is God.

2. Efficient Causality: In the universe, we empirically notice that things are produced or
caused by others. Nothing can be an efficient or productive cause of itself; otherwise it would
be prior to itself, which is impossible. For the things that cause another must exists before the
caused, in order to cause it. If things are thus caused efficiently in a series, there must be a
starting point where the causing began from which the intermediate, which is responsible for
all other causes, is what all people God.
19
3. Argument from Contingent and Necessary Being : Beings of our daily experience come
and go, begin and disappear. They are contingent, and ephemeral. That is to say they are not
necessary in their existence. They must not necessarily exist. Equally they can cease to exist.
They are only possible. At a given time they were not. And they will stop sometime. Their
reality is not necessary, but possible. But if all realities experienced by us are merely possible
it is possible that there was sometime when they were not. There was time when nothing was.
That time, nothing existed, since nothing had the necessity to exist. Thus, there would now be
nothing if that situation persisted. But things do exist now.

What accounts for the existence of things that were merely possible must be a reality that is
itself outside of the possible. This reality is a necessary being whose existence has a necessity
that gives existence to all other realities that have only possible or contingent existence. This
necessary cause of all contingent realty, itself uncaused, noncontingent, and necessary is God.
Only the necessity of God can explain the contingency of other beings otherwise there
possesses its own necessity of Aquinas, what all men call God.

Descartes Formulation

These three theistic arguments are summarized in Rene Descartes cosmological argument
from ‘my being’. Since I know myself to exist and that I am not the cause of my being who
am finite, there must be another being that explain my being’s existence. The derivation of
myself. Since a cause must contain as much reality as the effect, the being that caused me
must be a thinking being; a being that possesses the ideas and all the perfections. I attribute to
God Therefore God exists.

Criticism of Cosmological Argument

Empiricists generally, and especially Hume and Kant, reject the proofs. They deny the
progression into the transcendental, the hormonal and the invisible world from the
exponential one. They questioned the motion of causality, as it is used to extend to the
unknown world of God. Causality, Kant argues, applies only to the world of sense
experience. Beyond experience, we cannot venture. Since we cannot reach or go there, that is,
outside here, outside our world of experience, we cannot therefore prove that God who is
outside our physical domain exists.

20
This also has many forms, one being that if there exists a contingent being, ie. a being that
might have existed or might not have existed, there must exist a necessary being, ie. a being
that had to exist, that couldn't have not existed, to, as it were, explain its existence.

The Argument from Design

This argument is also called Teleological argument. Teleological argument derives its name
from the Greek word teleos meaning issue, order, fact, design and logos meaning discourse,
science, and knowledge. Hence, teleology is the description of the factual issues of the
universe arising from the reality that one discovers in them; an embedded order, design and
consequent purposefulness. Historically, this argument was proposed by many philosophers,
and given classic formulation with a famous 'watch on the heath' example by William Paley
in his Natural Theology (1802). Paley's argument goes something like this:

1. Watches display order.

2. The universe displays order.
3. Like things have like causes, for the most part.
4. The cause of the watch is an intelligent designer.
5. Therefore, probably, the cause of the universe is an intelligent designer.
This argument, however, had already been severely attacked by David Hume in his
Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (1779), and received another severe blow in the form
of the theory of evolution. More recently Richard Swinburne, Nolloth Professor of the
Philosophy of the Christian Religion at Oxford, has given a new version of the argument
from design using probability theory in his book The Existence of God. There has been some
debate over how appropriate and how successful it is to use the tools of the philosophy of
science to show that God's existence is more probable than not. The basic structure of the
argument is:

1. There exists order in the world.

2. The order in the world is probably not due to chance.
3. The order in the world is not due to humans.
4. The order in the world cannot be explained by science.
5. Therefore, the order in the world is probably due to and explained by God.
6. Therefore, probably, God exists.

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Moral Arguments

Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) is the founder and greatest proponent of this proof. Human
moral experience witnesses a consciousness of moral duty. Duty is an internal imperative of
doing well and avoiding evil. This is a natural datum founded on a logical premise of a moral
law-giver. This sense of duty resides in man’s interior self. It is a dictate of practical reason
characterized by duties and responsibilities for the good of all. At the same time, it is a moral
route to God. One can have absolute moral obligations only if there is an absolute Being,
God, to other men. These cannot be based on mere subjective, consequentiality and
utilitarian grounds as Bertrand Russell, and Jasmine and other pragmatic ethicists, utilitarian
or relativists would hold. Otherwise they would not be absolutes.

The moral argument holds essentially that if moral dictates are commands of conscience,
there must be a commander to command them. The commander is God. If there are laws, e.g.
natural laws, there must be a law giver, God. In his book on Theodicy, he emphasizes religion
within the limits of reason alone, Kant conclusively argues to God’s existence from the idea
of man’s natural desire for different grades of goods up to his desire for the highest good.
“The idea of the ultimate good cannot be realized by man himself. Yet he discovers within
himself the duty to work for this end. Hence, he finds himself impelled to believe in the
cooperation of management of a moral Ruler of the world, by means which alone this goal
can be reached.”

Criticism of the Moral Argument

Critics of the moral argument accuse it of imposing God on humanity to explain what could
be socially, naturally and civilly explained. That God is supreme legislator is purely
arbitrary. After all, they conclude, the only objectivity in morals is its subjectivity and factual
evolution. Humanity could as well be the author of moral laws including so call moral
absolutes.

TOPIC 5: THEODICY

Introduction

Etymologically, the term Theodicy from two Greek words theos meaning god and dike,
meaning justice. It is an explanation of why a perfectly good, almighty, and all-knowing God
22
permits evil. The term literally means justifying God. Although many forms of theodicy have
been proposed, some Christian thinkers have rejected as impious any attempt to fathom
God’s purposes or to judge God’s actions by human standards

It is to answer the question of why a good God permits the manifestation of evil, thus
resolving the issue of the problem of evil. Some theodicies also address the evidential
problem of evil by attempting "to make the existence of an all-knowing, all-powerful and all-
good or omnibenevolent God consistent with the existence of evil or suffering in the world."
Unlike a defense, which tries to demonstrate that God's existence is logically possible in the
light of evil, a theodicy attempts to provide a framework wherein God's existence is also
plausible. The German philosopher and mathematician Gottfried Leibniz (1646-1916)
coined the term theodicy in 1710 in his work Theodicee, though various responses to the
problem of evil had been previously proposed. The British philosopher John Hick traced the
history of moral theodicy in his 1966 work, Evil and the God of Love, identifying three major
traditions:

1. The Plotinian theodicy, named after Plotinus

2. The Augustinian theodicy, which Hick based on the writings of Augustine of Hippo
3. The Irenaean theodicy, which Hick developed, based on the thinking of St. Irenaeus

The problem was also analyzed by pre-modern theologians and philosophers in the Islamic
world. German philosopher Max Weber (1864–1920) saw theodicy as a social problem,
based on the human need to explain puzzling aspects of the world. Sociologist Peter L.
Berger (1929–2017) argued that religion arose out of a need for social order, and an “implicit
theodicy of all social order” developed to sustain it. Following the Holocaust, a number of
Jewish theologians developed a new response to the problem of evil, sometimes called anti-
theodicy, which maintains that God cannot be meaningfully justified. As an alternative to
theodicy, a defense has been proposed by the American philosopher Alvin Plantinga, which
is focused on showing the logical possibility of God's existence. Plantinga's version of the
free-will defence argued that the coexistence of God and evil is not logically impossible, and
that free will further explains the existence of evil without threatening the existence of God.

Similar to a theodicy, a cosmodicy attempts to justify the fundamental goodness of the

universe, and an anthropodicy attempts to justify the goodness of humanity.

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Need for Theodicy

The German philosopher Max Weber interpreted theodicy as a social problem and viewed
theodicy as a problem of meaning. Weber argued that, as human society became increasingly
rational, the need to explain why good people suffered and evil people prospered became
more important because religion casts the world as a meaningful cosmos.

Weber framed the problem of evil as the dilemma that the good can suffer and the evil can
prosper, which became more important as religion became more sophisticated. He identified
two purposes of theodicy

1. To explain why good people suffer (a theodicy of suffering)

2. Why people prosper (a theodicy of good fortune).

A theodicy of good fortune seeks to justify the good fortune of people in society; Weber
believed that those who are successful are not satisfied unless they can justify why they
deserve to be successful. For theodicies of suffering, Weber argued that three different kinds
of theodicy emerged predestination, dualism, and karma all of which attempt to satisfy the
human need for meaning, and he believed that the quest for meaning, when considered in
light of suffering, becomes the problem of suffering.

The sociologist Peter L. Berger (1929-2017) characterized religion as the human attempt to
build order out of a chaotic world. He believed that humans could not accept that anything in
the world was meaningless and saw theodicy as an assertion that the cosmos has meaning and
order, despite evidence to the contrary. Berger presented an argument similar to that of
Weber, but suggested that the need for theodicy arose primarily out of the situation of human
society. He believed that theodicies existed to allow individuals to transcend themselves,
denying the individual in favour of the social order.

The philosopher Richard Swinburne (1996) says "most theists need a theodicy, They need
an account of reasons why God might allow evil to occur. Without a theodicy evil counts
against the existence of God."

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St. Augustine’s Theodicy

St Augustine of Hippo (354–430 A.D) contributed in no small measure in bringing Christian

theology to its present state. St Augustine’s theology can be designated as a development of
Platonism and Neo– Platonism. His theodicy can be classified under four themes namely:

1. Evil as privatio boni (privation of good)

2. Freewill argument,

3. Principle of plenitude

4. Aesthetic theme.

Under the first theme, Augustine affirmed that the mistake we all make is our attempt to think
of evil as something, a substance. Augustine opined that evil is not a thing but rather a
privation, an absence of being, for there is no substance created by God which is not good.
Describing this, and bearing in mind that theism demands we hold that God is the creator of
all there is, he writes; “to you, then, evil is utterly not and not only you, but to your whole
creation likewise, evil is not.” This conclusion springs from his premise that “…… I saw
clearly and realized that you have made all things good, and that there are no substances not
made by you (Confession. 7:12), as quoted by (Watson 1967).

Aside of this, Augustine also held, under the principle of plenitude theme, that the good in the
world outweighs evil in it. It is doubtful that this principle of plenitude has less to do with
another theme called the Aesthetic theme, where he argued that what we refer to as evil
occur when we fail to look at creation form a holistic point of view. This is because for
Augustine, what we refer to as evil is just apart of the mixture of good and bad, which is
necessary to have an excellent picture of the universe. It is like a mixture of bright and dull
colours, which in the end will give a good picture to behold.

The fourth theme under which Augustine discussed the problem of evil is the Freewill
Argument. Here, Augustine held that freewill is a gift from God. His argument is that moral
evil is as a result of man’s misuse of his freewill by turning away from God, the Supreme
Substance towards lower things.

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The Theodicy of Leibniz

For Leibniz , the issue involved in the problem of evil is two fold (Murray, 2003). These are
the underachiever problem’ and the holiness problem’. The underachiever problem means
that the present world is a vast under achievement when one considers the nature of God as
described by monotheism and the holiness problem states that since God is the author of
everything that exists, and evil is one of such, God is thereby implicated and it cannot
therefore be claimed God is pure or holy. The doctrine of the best possible world was
adduced holy by Leibniz to justify the presence of evil in the world. Thus, for Leibniz, there
is no underachievement. But we must note that this position gives room for the need to
qualify the term omnipotence.

The Theodicy of Barth

For Karl Barth (1886-1968) what we call evil is “nothingness”, that is something that has
been vanquished or destroyed. For him, God is the sovereign over all and his sovereignty
extends over nothingness. His goodness nonetheless cannot be affected by evil, since it is not
part of God’s positive will. He went further to assert that the power of this nothingness (Das
Nistalitige) has been defeated by the power of Christ on the cross.

TOPIC 6: MEANING AND ORIGIN OF ATHEISM

Meaning of Atheism

Scholars disagree how best to define and classify atheism, contesting what supernatural
entities applies to; whether it is an assertion in its own right or merely the absence of one, and
whether it requires a conscious, explicit rejection. Varieties of categories have been proposed,
most of which treat atheism as absence of belief in deities.

Problems of Definition

Some of the problems and controversy involved in defining atheism comes from difficulty in
reaching a consensus for the definitions of words like deity and god. In the eighteenth
century, this view has also fallen into disfavour as atheism has come to be understood as

26
encompassing belief in any divinity. With respect to the range of phenomena being rejected,
atheism may come after anything from the existence of a god, to the existence of any
spiritual, supernatural or transcendental concepts, such as those of Hinduism and Buddhism.

Definitions of atheism also vary in the degree of consideration a person must put to the ideas
of god to be considered an atheist. Minimally, atheism may be seen as the absence of belief in
one or more gods. It has been argued that this broad definition includes new born and other
people who have not being exposed to theistic ideas. Baron d’Holbach in 1772 said that “all
children are born atheists; they have no idea of God”. Also George H. Smith (1979)
suggested that the man who is unacquainted with atheism is an atheist, because he does not
believe in a god.

Hence, Smith carried the then implicit atheism to refer to the absence of theistic belief
without a conscious rejection of it, and explicit atheism to refer to the more common
definitions of conscious disbelief. In like manner, categorizations has also been made about
those who believes that there is no God, that God never existed in the past and does not exist
now; and those other atheists who maintain that God once existed but it is now dead. God is
dead they say (Omorege, 1993).

Atheism is, in the broadest sense, an absence of belief in the existence of deities. Less
broadly, atheism is a rejection of the belief that any deities exist. In an even narrower sense,
atheism is specifically the position that there are no deities. Atheism is contrasted with
theism, which, in its most general form, is the belief that at least one deity exists.

The etymological root for the word atheism originated before the 5th century BC from the
ancient Greek atheos, meaning without god or gods.

History of the Word Atheism

One of the earliest usages of the word atheoi is as it appears in the Epistle to the Ephesians
2:12, on the early third century Papyrus 46. It is usually translated into English as those who
are without God. In English, the term atheism was derived from the French atheisme in about
1587. The term, atheist, from French athee is used in the sense of one who denies or
disbelieves the existence of God, predates atheism in English, being first attested in about
1571.

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The Epistemology of Atheism

We can divide the justifications for atheism into several categories. For the most part,
atheists have taken an evidentialist approach to the question of God’s existence. That is,
atheists have taken the view that whether or not a person is justified in having an attitude of
belief towards the proposition, “God exists,” is a function of that person’s evidence.
“Evidence” here is understood broadly to include a priori arguments, arguments to the best
explanation, inductive and empirical reasons, as well as deductive and conceptual premises.
An asymmetry exists between theism and atheism in that atheists have not offered faith as a
justification for non-belief. That is, atheists have not presented non-evidentialist defenses for
believing that there is no God.

Atheistic Theories

1. Epistemological Atheistic Arguments

Epistemological atheism argues that people cannot know God or determine the existence of
God. The foundation of epistemological atheism is agnosticism, which takes a variety of
forms. In the philosophy of immanence, divinity is inseparable from the world itself,
including a person’s mind, and each person’s consciousness is locked in the subject.
According to this form of agnosticism, this limitation in perspective prevents an objective
inference from belief in God to assertions of his existence.

The rationalistic agnosticism of Kant and the Enlightenment only accepts knowledge deduced
with human rationality; this is a form of atheism. It holds that gods are not discernible as a
matter of principle, and therefore cannot be known to exist. Scepticism, based on the ideas
Hume, asserts that certainty about anything is impossible, so one can never know the
existence of God. The allocation of agnosticism to atheism is disputed; it can also be regarded
as an independent, basic world view.

2. Metaphysical Atheistic Arguments

Metaphysical atheism is based on the view that reality is homogeneous and cannot be
divided. Absolute metaphysical atheists subscribe to some form of physicalism; hence they
explicitly deny the existence of non-physical beings. And if God cannot be visibly seen,
hence, the does not exist. Relative metaphysical atheists maintain an implicit denial of a

28
particular concept of God based on incongruity between their individual philosophies and
attributes applied to God, such as transcendence, a personal aspect, or unity.

3. Psychological, Sociological and Economical Arguments

Philosophers such as Ludwig Feuerbach and Sigmund Freud argued that God and other
religious beliefs are human inventions, created to fulfil various psychological and emotional
wants and needs. This is also a view of many Buddhists. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engel,
influenced by the work of Feuerbach, argued that belief in God and religion are social
functions, used by those in power to oppress the working class.

4. Ludwig Feuerbach (1804 – 1872)

Ludwig Feuerbach wrote his epoch making book: Das wizen des christen Tums (the Essence
of Christianity) in 1841. The left wing Hegelian wrote what would later provide great
inspiration to Marx and Engels. He undertook a passionate, yet critically lucid
reinterpretation of the Christian religion. Feuerbach systematically transformed theology into
anthropodicy, and religion in to cultural philosophy. Feuerbach wanted to totally displace all
realities as unachievable. To him, man replaces God, and anthropology replaces theology and
psychological wishes replace religious representations. Man at the centre will now become
the new object of worship. No longer God. What has caused the elevation of God over man
according to him is that man saw himself incapacitated before the forces of natural and
human power. So he turned to God in projecting his wishes and fears outward. Now, he
believes, is the time to return man to his proper ideal place.

5. Karl Marx (1818 – 1883)

With Feuerbach, Marx shared the thesis that religion because it positively negates the
negation of the delimitation of man done by religion by reversing the roles of spirit and
matter, Marx claimed that he turned Hegel upside down. To change the world and restore via
action man’s lost dignity; to dethrone the supernatural and restore the material, the natural, it
is to invert religion and institute economy and welfare.

Indeed religion is both the product and the alienation of man. The basis of religious atheism
is that man makes religion, religion does not make man. Religion is the self-consciousness

29
and self-esteem of man who has either not yet found himself or has already lost himself
again.

Considering the presence and participation of religion in the massive exploitation of the
people of his days, Marx saw in religion the soothing role of the proletariat. The bourgeoisie
exploited workers by seizing the surplus they have from their labour. The Churches preached
a God of obedience and fear. The believer must submit to the capitalists. This therefore kept
the masses in a continuous dehumanizing economic bondage. Indeed religion, instead of
helping uplift man, the poor man, did diminish and dehumanize him. Religion was sedative,
an opium. It was indeed the opium of the masses. For Marx, far from being reality, religion
and the supernatural misrepresent truth and reality. It is a false metaphysics. As a matter of
fact, all unique realities have to go through a dialectic process of evolution to higher qualities
till all conflicts are resolved.

6. Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)

Friedrich Nietzsche was a son and grandson of Lutheran ministers, who read with
intellectual, prophetic eyes, the decadence of Western civilization and the culture of his time.
Morality was so low and Christianity was so caught up in worldliness that for Nietzsche it
meant the death of God. The death of God has negative consequences for man and his
society. Far from being an atheistic optimist, Nietzsche sees a formidable chain of
destruction, breakdown, cataclysm and disaster casting a spell upon the world. Its long
shadow is already hanging on us. That shadow of religion in which nothingness is deified and
in which the will to nothingness is sanctified must now be erased. Nietzsche believed that
atheism is a form of nihilism exemplified by Christianity, which is a nihilistic religion. It
must be replaced by something positive.

Arguments against the existence of God

Atheist scholars have come up with arguments negating the existence of God. The arguments
aim to show that a god or set of gods do not exist by showing a creator is unnecessary or
contradictory, at odds with known scientific or historical facts, or that there is insufficient
proof that a god does exist.

1. Empirical arguments

30
The following empirical arguments rely on observations or experimentation to yield their
conclusions.

(a) Arguments from inadequate revelations: The argument from inconsistent revelations
contests the existence of the deity called God as described in scriptures such as the Hindu
Vedas, the Jewish Tanakh, the Christian Bible, the Muslim Qur'an, the Book of Mormon or
the Baha'i Aqdas by identifying apparent contradictions between different scriptures, within a
single scripture, or between scripture and known facts.

The argument concludes that since most theistic religions throughout history e.g. ancient
Egyptian religion, ancient Greek religion and their gods ultimately come to be regarded as
untrue or incorrect. All theistic religions, including contemporary ones, are therefore most
likely untrue or incorrect by induction. H. L. Mencken in Treatise on the gods (1930) wrote
a short piece about the topic entitled Memorial Service in 1922. It is implied as part of
Stephen F. Roberts' popular quotation:

I contend that we are both atheists. I just believe in one fewer god than you do. When you
understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss
yours.

The argument from nonbelief contests the existence of an omnipotent god who wants humans
to believe in it by arguing that such a god would do a better job of gathering believers.

(b) From the poor design of the universe

The problem of evil contests the existence of a god who is both omnipotent and
omnibenevolent by arguing that such a god should not permit the existence of evil or
suffering. The theist responses are called theodicies. Similarly, the argument from poor
design contends that an all-powerful, benevolent creator god would not have created
lifeforms, including humans, which seem to exhibit poor design.

Richard Carrier has argued that the universe itself seems to be very ill-designed for life,
because the vast majority of the space in the universe is utterly hostile to it. This is arguably
unexpected on the hypothesis that the universe was designed by a god, especially a personal
god. Carrier contends that such a god could have easily created a geocentric universe ex

31
nihilo in the recent past, in which most of the volume of the universe is inhabitable by
humans and other lifeforms precisely the kind of universe that most humans believed in until
the rise of modern science. While a personal god might have created the kind of universe we
observe, Carrier contends that this is not the kind of universe we would most likely expect to
see if such a god existed. He finally argues that, unlike theism, our observations about the
nature of the universe are strongly expected on the hypothesis of atheism, since the universe
would have to be vast, very old, and almost completely devoid of life if life were to have
arisen by sheer chance.

2. Logical arguments

The arguments deduce, mostly through self-contradiction, the non-existence of a God as "the
Creator".

(a) Stephen Hawking and co-author Leonard Mlodinow state in their book The Grand
Design that it is reasonable to ask who or what created the universe, but if the answer
is God, then the question has merely been deflected to that of who created God. Both
authors claim that it is possible to answer these questions purely within the realm of
science, and without invoking any divine beings. Christian mathematicians and
scientists, most notably Leonhard Euler, Bernard d'Espagnat and John Lennox,
disagree with that kind of skeptical argument.

(b) No scientific evidence of God's existence has been found. Therefore, the scientific
consensus is that whether God exists is unknown.
(c) A counter-argument against God as the Creator takes the assumption of the
Cosmological argument "the chicken or the egg", that things cannot exist without
creators, and applies it to God, setting up an infinite regress.
(d) Dawkins' Ultimate Boeing 747 gambit analogizes the above. Some theists argue that
evolution is akin to a hurricane assembling a Boeing 747 that the universe or life is
too complex not to have been designed by someone, who theists call God. Dawkin's
counter-argument is that such a God would himself be complex the "Ultimate"
Boeing 747 and therefore require a designer.

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 (e) Theological noncognitivism is the argument that religious language specifically,
words such as "God" are not cognitively meaningful and that irreducible definitions
of God are circular.
(f) The analogy of Russell's teapot argues that the burden of proof for the existence of
God lies with the theist rather than the atheist; it can be considered an extension of
Occam's Razor.

3. Arguments from incompatible divine properties

Arguments against the existence of God based on incompatible divine properties are as
follows:

(a) Some arguments focus on the existence of specific conceptions of God as being
omniscient, omnipotent, and morally perfect.
(b) The omnipotence paradox suggests that the concept of an omnipotent entity is
logically contradictory by considering questions such as "Can God create a rock so
big that He cannot move it?" or "If God is all powerful, could God create a being
more powerful than Himself ?"
(c) Similarly, the omniscience paradox argues that God cannot be omniscient because he
would not know how to create something unknown to himself.
(d) Another argument points to the contradiction of omniscience and omnipotence
arguing that God is bound to follow whatever God foreknows himself doing.
(e) Argument from free will contends that omniscience and the free will of humanity are
incompatible and that any conception of God that incorporates both properties is
therefore inherently contradictory: if God is omniscient, then God already knows
humanity's future, contradicting the claim of free will.
(f) The anthropic argument states that if God is omniscient, omnipotent, and morally
perfect, he would have created other morally perfect beings instead of imperfect ones,
such as humans.
(g) The problem of hell is the idea that eternal damnation contradicts God's
omnibenevolence and omnipresence.
(h) The Transcendental Argument for the Non-existence of God contests the existence of
an intelligent Creator God by demonstrating that such a being would make logic and

33
 morality contingent, which is incompatible with the presuppositionalist assertion that
they are necessary, and contradicts the efficacy of science.
(i) The "no reason" argument tries to show that an omnipotent and omniscient being
would not have any reason to act in any way, specifically by creating the universe,
because it would have no needs, wants, or desires since these very concepts are
subjectively human. Since the universe exists, there is a contradiction, and therefore,
an omnipotent god cannot exist. This argument is expounded upon by Scott Adams in
the book God's Debris, which puts forward a form of Pandeism as its fundamental
theological model. A similar argument is put forward in Ludwig von Mises's "Human
Action". He referred to it as the "praxeological argument" and claimed that a perfect
being would have long ago satisfied all its wants and desires and would no longer be
able to take action in the present without proving that it had been unable to achieve its
wants faster showing it imperfect.
(j) The atheist existential argument for the non-existence of a perfect sentient being states
that if existence precedes essence, it follows from the meaning of the term sentient
that a sentient being cannot be complete or perfect. It is touched upon by Jean-Paul
Sartre in Being and Nothingness. Sartre's phrasing is that God would be a pour-soi (a
being-for-itself; a consciousness) who is also an en-soi (a being-in-itself; a thing):
which is a contradiction in terms. The argument is echoed thus in Salman Rushdie's
novel Grimus: "That which is complete is also dead."

4. Subjective arguments

subjective arguments against the supernatural mainly rely on the testimony or experience of
witnesses, or the propositions of a revealed religion in general.

(a) The witness argument gives credibility to personal witnesses, contemporary and from
the past, who disbelieve or strongly doubt the existence of God.
(b) The conflicted religions argument notes that many religions give differing accounts as
to what God is and what God wants; since all the contradictory accounts cannot be
correct, many if not all religions must be incorrect.
(c) The disappointment argument claims that if, when asked for, there is no visible help
from God, there is no reason to believe that there is a God.

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5. Hindu arguments

Atheistic Hindu doctrines cite various arguments for rejecting a creator God or Ishvara. The
Saṁkhyapravacana Sutra of the Samkhya school states that:

(a) There is no philosophical place for a creator God in this system.

(b) It is also argued in this text that the existence of Ishvara (God) cannot be proved and
hence cannot be admitted to exist.

(c) Classical Samkhya argues against the existence of God on metaphysical grounds. For
instance, it argues that an unchanging God cannot be the source of an ever-changing world. It
says God is a necessary metaphysical assumption demanded by circumstances.

The Sutras of Samkhya endeavor to prove that the idea of God is inconceivable and self-
contradictory, and some. commentaries speak plainly on this subject.

TOPIC 7: THE PROBLEM OF EVIL

The world is plagued with innumerable ills, social, economic, political, mental and otherwise.
These ills are exemplification of the evils which humans experience in the world.

The reality of this situation constitutes enough evidence for adherents of Jainism to hold
tenaciously that this world inevitability means suffering. While this may be an overstatement
it is nonetheless doubtful if the description of these ills as mere private boni as opined by St.
Augustine in his Contrast is an accurate representations of the state of affairs.

Theodicy is an accurate representation of the state of affairs. Wikipedia Encyclopedia has it

that this theodicy scarcely attracts applause from many people, theologians inclusive (2006).
Of course, so many solutions have been advanced to justify the presence of evil in a world
created by a good omnipotent and omniscient God, without making sacrilegious statements
about God.

But as opined by Mackie, none of the proposed solutions of the problem of evil has
withstood the test criticism. There is no valid solution of the problem which does not modify

35
at least one of the constituent proportions in a way which would seriously affect the essential
core of the theistic position.

The riddle is this: Is the reality of a good God compatible with the real presence of something
antithetical to him, namely, evil? In his well known novel, The Plague, Albert Camus makes
it clear that the main reason why he does not believe in God is the impossibility of
reconciling the existence of an infinite good and omnipotent God with the stark reality of evil
in the world supposedly created by him.

Why is there evil in the world?

Since the order of the world is ruled by death, may it not be better perhaps, for God, if we do
not believe in him and fight with all our strength against death without lifting up Our eyes
towards heaven where he sits in silence?

The problem of evil or as sometimes called, the problem of theodicy in the world has been a
long puzzle to the human mind. If God exists and he is infinitely good and powerful, and if
this world was actually created by him, it is impossible to understand why there could be so
much evil in it. Epicurus, long ago, put this problem in the form of a dilemma: is God able to
prevent evil in the world and is unwilling to do so? Then he is not infinitely good; on the
contrary he is malevolent. Is he willing to prevent evil but is unable to do so? Then, he is not
omnipotent but he is on the contrary impotent. But if he is both omnipotent and infinitely
good why is there evil in the world created by him?

Philosophical Explanations for Evil

Stoicism

Stoicism is a philosophical school founded by Zeno around the third century B.C. It
flourished to the first few centuries of the Christian era. The doctrine of this school had
tremendous influence on people’s attitude towards life for many centuries. Its world view is
pantheistic. God and the universe is, according to the school, one and the same thing. God is
the soul of the universe, while the universe itself is the body of God, both constitute one
entity, and all things are parts of this entity.

It is believed by the stoics that the universe is strictly governed by rigid laws of nature
emanating from God. The whole universe is a well-ordered and harmonious system in which
everything plays a useful role. Nothing in the world is useless, and nothing happens by
36
chance. For everything has been carefully planned from eternity by God and is regulated by
the fixed laws of nature. Therefore, whatever happens does so in accordance with the laws, of
nature and is of the overall plan of the universe.

All events in the universe have been ordained to happen as part of the system and play a
useful role with him in the universe system. Event that we call evil is an integral put of the
eternal plan, an integral part of the system and contribute towards the order and harmony of
the universal system. So nothing should be seen in the micro sense, but in a holistic manner.
Good and evil are useful and complimentary. This means that even evil too is useful, if it is
part of the universal plan and it makes its own contributions towards the order and harmony
of the universe, in a accordance with the laws of nature.

It follows from this pantheistic and deterministic worldview of the stoics that there’s really
no evil in the world since every thing is part of God and every event is part of the ways in
which God orders the world through the laws of nature. We call certain things evil because
we do not understand how they contribute towards the order and harmony of the universal
system. We do not understand how they fit into the eternal plan of God. In reality nothing is
evil or useless.

Plotinus and St. Augustine

Plotinus, the founder, of the neo-platonic school, and St. Augustine both conceived evil in
negative terms. This negative view derives from metaphysics, according to which all beings
alternately derived from the transcendent deity which he calls the One. The One is absolutely
transcendent and is the ultimate source being. It is also the ultimate source of light, for both
light and being derive from the One. Everything in the universe emanated ultimately from it.
The first being to emanate from it and the only being to emanate directly from it is also a
divine being which Plotinus calls Nous which means mind or spirit. From the Nous another
divine being, the world soul, also emanated.

The world soul has two aspects, namely, the inner and the outer or the higher and the lower
aspects. The lower aspect is Nature and it is from this part of the world soul that the material
universe emanated. Matter is at the lowest level in the process of emanation. Consequently,
matter is at the lowest level of being and of light hence it lacks being and light. This very lack
of being is what evil is.

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For evil is the lack of being and matters evil and darkness. Evil is thus not a positive thing, it
is not an entity, but the privation of being, the absence of being, and the lack of being. As
long as we are in the material world, and attached to material things, we cannot avoid
experiencing evil. Plotinus, therefore recommended self-detachment from material things
through asceticism and contemplation so that the soul can frequently elevate itself from the
material world into the spiritual world. Plotinus philosophy is on the whole, a mystical
philosophy. He was himself a mystic who frequently had ecstatic experiences. Evil comes
from attachment to material things and the more we detach ourselves from them the less evil
we experience.

In like manner, St. Augustine belonged to the neo-platonic school of philosophy. He was for
a long time disturbed by the problem of evil in the world. He could not understand how there
could be such evil in a world created by God, or where evil are from. Since God is infinitely
good he could not have created evil. What then is the source of evil? Who created it? The
Manicheans greatly influenced the conclusion of St. Augustine in approaching this problem.

The Manichean School was founded by Manes in the third century of the Christian era. They
had a dualistic approach to the problem, of evil. They postulated two ultimate principles in
reality. These are the principle of good namely Ormuzd and the principle of evil called
Ahriman and these are the two ultimate sources of all things. Ormuzd is the source of all good
things while Ahriman is the source of all bad things.

Ormuzd is the source of spiritual things and of light, while Ahriman is the source of darkness
and of all material things, for matter is evil. In the human person, the soul came from
Ormuzd, the principle of good while the body came from the evil principle Ahriman. These
two ultimate principles are divine and eternal. They are in an eternal conflict with each other
and this conflict extends to the things that came from them, hence good and evil, light and
darkness, spirit and matter are in perpetual conflict with each other.

Attracted by this philosophy, St. Augustine joined the Manichean school and adopted their
explanation of evil. But he later found it unsatisfactory. Having read the works of Plotinus, he
rejected the Manichean explanation of Plotinus that evil is not a positive thing; evil is not
something positive, but simply the negation of being, or in other words the absence of being,
the lack of being. Every positive thing was created by God, for God is the creator of all things
and whatever he created is good, God did not create any bad thing. Matter itself was created
by God and it is therefore good.
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Augustine thus disagreed with Plotinus who held that matter was evil. As a Christian,
Augustine had to differ from Plotinus on this point and could not go along with him to affirm
that matter is evil since matter was created by God the creator of all things. Since evil is not a
positive thing, but only negation of being, it does not make sense to ask who created it. For
evil was not created and could not be created. Nor can it exist on its own since it is not a
being. Only substances can and do exist in their own and they are all good because they were
all created by God from the above.

It follows that nothing can be completely evil. A thing can only be partially evil. Since evil is
the lack being, and nothing can completely lack of being and still remain in existence. As
regards moral evil, Augustine says it is the product of man’s misuse of his free will. Moral
evil cannot be traced to any other source beyond the misuse of man’s free will. Thus, when a
man misuses his free will by making and evil choice, he becomes the source of moral evil.
This conclusion, of St. Augustine greatly influenced many philosophic ideas and we shall
take this as our reference point on the philosophical approach to the problem of evil in the
world.

Religious Explanations of Evil

Islam

Islamic theology sees the problem of evil in the world from the viewpoint of the absolute
power and sovereignty of God, who has the whole universe and everything in it under his
sovereign control. Islam thus emphasizes the absolute power of and sovereignty of God and
man’s duty to submit unconditionally to the will of God, following the example of Abraham,
since God is the absolute creator and the lord of the universe everything is under his control,
nothing is outside his control.

What we call evil must be part of God’s purpose in the universe, and it must have a positive
role in the scheme of things according to God’s plan. Suffering can be seen by man as an
opportunity to demonstrate his unshakable faith in God and an unconditional submission to
him. Suffering can be a punishment for sin, but it can also be a test of one’s faith in God.
Hence, suffering should be endured with patience and total submission to the will of Allah.
On the other hand everything possible should be done to alleviate suffering, for example, by
alms-giving. Thus, according to Islam, God allows people to suffer either to punish them for

39
their sin or to test their faith in him. In either case it should be endured with patience and total
submission.

African Traditional Religion

African Traditional Religion believes that there is only one God who is the absolute creator,
owner and ruler of all things, and the father of all mankind. There are two worlds, namely,
the physical world of mortal men and the world of the spirits. There is interaction between
these two worlds, for those in the physical World (mortal men) pray to those in the world of
the spirits for help and protection, while those in the world of the spirits help and protect
those in the physical world. The world of the spirit is inhabited by God, the deities or
divinities, the ancestors and spirits in a hierarchical order. Thus, African Traditional Religion
believes in the existence of deities or divinities that functions as ministers of God and they
are subordinate to him. God is conceived like a Monarch, an absolute Monarch surrounded by
his chiefs (gods) who are at his service.

God wants all men to do good and eschew evil. He does not condone evil for he punishes
every evil sooner or later. Whether done in public or private. The concept of causality is
central to African Traditional Religion. Every event has a cause. Hence any evil or
misfortune that afflicts man must also have a cause. To find out the cause a diviner must be
employed. Quite often, evil is traced to a supernatural cause and is seen as a punishment from
God (usually through one of his agents) for an offence committed either in this life or one’s
previous life. Evil is always seen as a punishment for an offence. The idea of a completely
innocent man suffering misfortune for no particular reason is foreign to African Traditional
Religion.

Judaism and Christianity

The Jews at first attributed evil to God and held that evil was sent by God to guilty people as
punishment for their sins. Thus, God told David after he had sinned “Behold, I shall raise up
evil against you out of your own house.” God was therefore the source of evil. But
eventually, they later came to attribute evil to Satan”. This Satan was at first conceived as a
messenger and servant of God, but gradually it became almost a rival of God to himself. This
mythical personage, conceived as the source of evil, persisted in the New Testament period
and was frequently alluded to by Christ.

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Christian theology explains evil in the light of the suffering and death of Jesus Christ. Jesus
suffered much evil but it was turned into good by God, for Christ’s suffering and death
culminated in his glorification and salvation for mankind. Similarly, God will also, in the
final analysis, turn into good the evil that now plagues mankind. It is because he knows that
he is later going to turn it into good that God permits evil in this world. 3.3 Evaluation of the
Problem

Scholars have argued that none of the various religious and philosophical explanations of evil
given above is satisfactory. If the stoic worldview is accepted, their view seems to follow, but
no argument or logic compels one to accept their pantheistic metaphysics as the correct
portrait of reality. Plotinus and Augustine’s view of evil as a negation of being is an
understatement. Evil is certainly more than the negation of being, for there is much more to
evil than a mere negation.

The Judaic and Islamic view that God uses evil to test people’s faith in him is
anthropomorphic. If God is omniscient then he should know whether or not an individual has
faith in him. He does not need to test anybody in order to know him. The view that evil is
punishment for sin cannot stand the test of the suffering of innocent children. What offence
have innocent babies committed that they should be made to suffer so much punishment?
Hinduism, Buddhism and African traditional Religion would say, of course, that such
children are being punished for the offence they committed in their previous existence. Also,
the Christian doctrine that God permits evil in order to turn it into good in the end is
inconsistent with God’s omnipotence, for it presupposes that it is only via evil that God can
bring about good.

TOPIC 8: PHILOSOPHY AND THEOLOGY

Introduction

Theology is the systematic study of the nature of the divine and, more broadly, of religious
belief. It is taught as an academic discipline, typically in universities and seminaries. It
occupies itself with the unique content of analyzing the supernatural, but also deals with
religious epistemology, asks and seeks to answer the question of revelation. Revelation
pertains to the acceptance of God, gods, or deities, as not only transcendent or above the
41
natural world, but also willing and able to interact with the natural world and, in particular, to
reveal themselves to humankind. While theology has turned into a secular field, religious
adherents still consider theology to be a discipline that helps them live and understand
concepts such as life and love and that helps them lead lives of obedience to the deities they
follow or worship.

Theologians use various forms of analysis and argument such as experiential, philosophical,
ethnographic, historical, and others to help understand, explain, test, critique, defend or
promote any myriad of religious topics. As in philosophy of ethics and case law, arguments
often assume the existence of previously resolved questions, and develop by making
analogies from them to draw new inferences in new situations.

The study of theology may help a theologian more deeply understand their own religious
tradition, another religious tradition, or it may enable them to explore the nature of divinity
without reference to any specific tradition. Theology may be used to propagate, reform, or
justify a religious tradition; or it may be used to compare, challenge e.g. biblical criticism , or
oppose e.g. irreligion a religious tradition or worldview. Theology might also help a
theologian address some present situation or need through a religious tradition, or to explore
possible ways of interpreting the world.

Philosophical Theology

Philosophical theology is both a branch and form of theology in which philosophical methods
are used in developing or analyzing theological concepts. It therefore includes natural
theology as well as philosophical treatments of orthodox and heterodox theology.
Philosophical theology is also closely related to the philosophy of religion.

Mortimer J. Adler distinguishes philosophical theology from natural theology. While the
former is, according to him, theology done by non-Christian philosophers, the latter is done
by those who are already Christians and are actually trying to find rational proofs for their
faith.[1] Adler thinks that the term "natural theology" is a misnomer and is actually
apologetics, and cites as an example Thomas Aquinas' Summa Contra Gentiles, addressed to
the Jews and Moors in Spain, which though written as if it were philosophical theology, was
in fact, apologetics and not philosophical theology, as it was written by a Christian and not by
a pagan. In Adler's view, few if any of the books on natural theology, are sound as works in
42
philosophical theology, because they are not written by pagans. An example of philosophical
theology, according to Adler, is Aristotle's theology as found in his Metaphysics.

Contrary to Adler's view, Charles Taliaferro and Chad Meister think that doing philosophical
theology may not be restricted by whether the doer is an insider to faith or not, for anyone
doing philosophical theology only tries to consider whether a theological doctrine can make
philosophical sense or not. But, as Adler points it out, a pagan doing philosophical theology
and coming to a theological conclusion has a different route than an insider using philosophy
to examine or seek to understand his faith.

The relationship between Theology and Philosophy

The relationship between theology and philosophy has been long-debated and discussed with
the Christian tradition. Tertullian, an influential early Christian theologian and apologist,
believed that philosophy has little to do with theology, arguing that the use of philosophy
often corrupted theology, leading to unorthodox beliefs that were not grounded in the early
Christian tradition. He famously asked the question 'What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?'.
(Athens symbolized the philosophical approach because of its role as a leading center of
Hellenistic philosophy, while Jerusalem represented Christianity because of its role as an
important location and intellectual centre in the early church.) Other leaders, however, saw a
closer relationship between philosophy and theology. Justin Martyr looked at people like
Heraclitus and Socrates as possessing the divine light of revelation and believed them to be
true philosophers.

Justin saw Christianity as the True Philosophy and argued for Christianity using
philosophical methods and terminology. St. Augustine, who became one of the most
influential theologians in history and whose works laid the foundation for much of Western
philosophy (as well as much of Western theology), espoused a more middle-of-the-road,
moderate approach, arguing that philosophy and theology often complement each other while
at the same time cautioning that philosophy should not always be used in theological
discourse. Instead, he argued, one should make sure that a philosophical approach toward a
particular issue was grounded in prior Christian commitments.[5] The disciplines of
Philosophy and Theology have often been connected, with theologians and philosophers
interacting and debating similar and sometimes overlapping issues. Philosophy played a key

43
role in the formation of Western theology. Thomas Aquinas, one of the most influential
philosophers and theologians in history, for instance, borrowed much of his concepts from
Aristotle. Scholasticism dominated both the philosophical and theological landscape in the
Middle Ages, with theologians such as Aquinas, Anselm of Canterbury, Duns Scotus,
William of Ockham, Peter Abelard, Bonaventure, and Albertus Magnus playing key role in
both philosophy and theology.

In modern times, Anthony Thiselton has shown in his Fusion of Horizons the role that
philosophy has played in the interpretation of scriptures, i.e., in the field of hermeneutics.
Philosophy provides interpretive grids for apprehension of revelation. There are others, like
Sadhu Sundar Singh, for instance, who believed that it is the illumination of the Holy Spirit
that gives the truest meaning of revelation. Yet, one can't fail to see that cultural grids play an
important role in the development of theology.

Many contemporary philosophers continue to write and argue from a Christian perspective,
with Christian concepts undergirding their philosophical work. In recent decades some of the
most well-known philosophers who have written from a Christian perspective are Alvin
Plantinga, Alasdair MacIntyre, William Lane Craig, Jean-Luc Marion, Paul Tillich, Charles
Taylor, Richard Swinburne, and James K. A. Smith.

Foundations of modern Philosophical Theology

During the 18th, 19th centuries, and 20th centuries many theologians reacted against the
modernist, Enlightenment, and positivist attacks on Christian theology. Some existentialistic
or neo-orthodox Protestant intellectuals like the Swiss Reformed theologian Karl Barth
turned away from philosophy (called fideism) and argued that faith should be based strictly
upon divine revelation. A popular approach in some circles is the approach of Reformed
epistemologists, such as Alvin Plantinga and Nicholas Wolterstorff, who assert that belief in
God might be foundational (or, properly 'basic') and warranted without the need for logical or
evidential justification, like belief in other minds or the external world, rather than
inferentially derived from other beliefs; it can, however, be subject to defeaters, rationally
requiring that one give up the belief. Many other philosophers and theologians, however,
disagree with this perspective and provide alternative views. Many other theologians have

44
turned to continental philosophy, analytic philosophy, and postmodern philosophy in attempts
to analyze and reframe the Christian theology in contemporary contexts.

Philosophical and Rational Theology

A key scholar in Philosophical and Rational Theology is Vincent Brummer. Vincent

Brummer’s ideas about philosophical theology and his research within the field have had
great impact on many scholars around the world.

What is Brummer’s view on philosophical theology and what alternative understandings of

the enterprise and of philosophy of religion does he explicitly or implicitly reject? Brummer
maintains that the task of philosophical theology is not to provide proofs of the truth or falsity
of the Christian faith, or to find neutral rational grounds on which to justify accepting or
rejecting the Christian, or any other, faith.

Instead the philosophical theologian asks semantic and hermeneutical questions about the
meaning and interpretation of the faith: what are the implications and presuppositions of the
fundamental concepts of the faith, and how could the claims of the faith be interpreted in a
coherent and relevant way? In this sense philosophical theology has an essential contribution
to make in the theological quest of faith seeking understanding (1992).

It is not only philosophical theology that Brummer seems to understand in this way. He
explicitly says that: Philosophical reflection aims at clarifying and limiting our conceptual
options (1992). Philosophers reflect on possible conceptual forms in order to establish
whether or not they are coherent and relevant, and in order to see what the implications
would be if we were to accept them. Therefore the aim of philosophy is not necessarily to
force conclusions but rather to limit and clarify our conceptual options and in this way to
contribute to making progress in our thinking. The extent of this limitation depends on the
range of criteria that we use. Brummer exemplifies three levels of reflection (1992):

1. Philosophical theology is the attempt to determine which conceptual forms, doctrines

or religious beliefs can be accepted without contradiction and which, positively
speaking, might be coherent.

2. Confessional theology is the attempt to determine which conceptual forms, doctrines

or religious beliefs can be accepted without becoming untrue to the community of
faith.
45
 3. Personal theology or personal faith is each believer’s attempt to determine which
conceptual forms, doctrines or religious beliefs he or she can embrace without losing
his or her integrity.

Because the criteria used in philosophical theology (consistency and coherence) are
accessible not solely to religious believers but to all members of the community of scholars, it
has a proper place within the revered precincts of the university (2006).

Brummer further contrasts philosophical theology to three other forms of theology

1. Revealed theology is the attempt to base religious beliefs and doctrines on divine
revelation or grounds internal to faith.

2. Natural theology is the attempt to rationally prove religious beliefs by appealing to

universally accepted or neutral grounds.

3. Descriptive theology is the attempt to describe religious beliefs and practices and test
the truth of these descriptions (and not the beliefs and practices themselves).

TOPIC 9: RELIGION AND SCIENCE

Introduction

The conflict between religion and science seems irreconcilable, taking into consideration the
critical manner of empirical evaluation of all things that forms the basis of scientific research
and faith-based assertions of religion. It has often led to hot debates between theologians and
scientists. It has led to the loss of faith in God by many. It is not unlikely to hear, of many
who have professed faith in religion begin to backslide after they have been exposed to the
scientific findings, especially when such are brought at par with the dictates of their religious
beliefs. The biblical account of creation in six days while the theory of evolution has it that it
took many millions of years before our planet came into existence and that the different
creatures in the earth came to their present state through a long process of evolution is such
an example. This seeming irreconcilable conflict will form the basis of our study of Religion
and science.

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Origin of Conflict between Science and Religion

The Christian faith in very significant ways prepared the ground for the theory of evolution.
(Langdon G; 1972). The Christian concept of creation provided the necessary foundations
for the development of Western Science, of which Darwinism is certainly an important result.
The Biblical view that time is both linear and irreversible, and therefore capable of
cumulative development is perhaps the most critical of all the distant progenitors of the
concepts of evolutionary theories of man’s origin. Spread within a culture saturated with
biblical concept of creation and providence.

Galileo

But from the time of the famous trial of Galileo whom Sean P.K (1987) says was reportedly
lacking in tact to Darwin, the church took a bad name. Galileo was not only an arrogant and
intolerant debater but he also took delight in humiliating his opponents and making men
appear ridiculous. His intolerance forced the church authorities to make premature decision in
circumstances which rendered a balanced judgment very difficult.

Charles Darwin

But the greatest shock was slammed on the Church by the discovery of Darwin on evolution.
Before this discovery, few Churchmen, if any, ever doubted the accuracy of the Bible. The
scripture was the “word of God” and could not be but true. All religious people accepted as
true the accounts of creation, or the story of the flood, or the ages of the patriarchs. But the
theory of evolution greatly affected all that. Everywhere there was consternation and dismay
in the Church. They clergy as a whole tended to panic. They saw the ground cut from under
their feet. The low ebb which theology had sunk made a cleavage inevitable between the old
teaching and the new. Divisions quickly appeared between those who accepted the
conclusions of the scientists. Many who believed the scientist and gave up the belief in
creation also gave up belief in the creator. After all, it does not make much sense to talk of a
creator if no creation took place. One of such victims was the hero of evolution, Charles
Darwin himself.

Charles Darwin was a former candidate for the Holy orders, and he had come to see that the
Old Testament, from its manifestly false history of the earth, and from its attributing to God a
feeling of a revengeful tyrant, was no more to be trusted than sacred books of the Hindus, or
the belief of any barbarian.
47
The New Testament did not fare better, and he could indeed hardly see how anyone ought to
wish Christianity to be true; for if so, the plain language of the text seems to show that the
men who do not believe and this would include his father, brother and almost all his friends,
will be everlastingly punished. And this is damnable doctrine.

The key to understand Darwin’s thinking is his horror of the imposition of suffering on slaves
by their masters or animals by men, and by the “clumsy, wasteful, blundering, low and
horribly cruel works of nature” as seen in the suffering caused by parasites and in the delight
in cruelty shown by some predators when catching and playing with their prey. If God is as
almighty, omniscient and possessed of inexhaustible compassion as he is painted, it revolts
our understanding to suppose that his benevolence is not unbounded. So Darwin became a
reverent agnostic. With the outstanding achievement of his theory of evolution , there could
be little doubt that it was manifestly false history of the earth in the Old Testament that have
than any other cause turned him from being a candidate for the Holy Orders to “a reverent
agonistic” (Enuku. A.A; 2003: 2). 3.2Areas of Departure between Religion and Science

The period of the Enlightenment, of the eighteen century formed the bane of the most
concerted effort to “rationalize” about the major doctrines of the Bible and hence brought it
into head-on collision with science.

The Problem of Original Sin

The thinkers of the eighteenth century launched a direct attack on the doctrine of original sin;
maintaining that it was false because it declared that human beings are by nature depraved
and sinful, thus breeding and perpetuating all kinds of myths and superstitions about human
nature. Instead of accepting the belief in human nature on the basis of the fall and original
sin, which was the Church’s explanation for the existence of evil and suffering in the world,
rationalists such as Voltaire, Rousseau and Hume argued that humanity is by nature good or
at least capable of becoming good. Indeed, human nature is so neutral that it could either be
corrupted through wrong social indoctrination or be made good, gentle, loving and unwarlike
through education and a good social environment.

Social thinkers of the enlightenment such as Rousseau even went as far as to teach that
wickedness and evil in the world are as a result of social diseases, and of an unnatural lapse
into social error through faulty reasoning. Thus, the sick and socially poisoned human society

48
would be cured through education and the triumph of reason as men and women were taught
how to become moral and enlightened (Manual 1965: 6-14).

The Authority of the Bible

Due to the great emphasis that the protestant reformation placed on the Bible as the final
judge in matters of faith and doctrine, it was to be expected that scriptural authority would be
challenged by the thinkers of the Enlightenment, since to them the Christian faith and its
dogma had to prove themselves. Indeed, the Bible soon began to loose its authority and
credibility as it became clear that certain Biblical accounts such as the creation stories, could
not stand the test of reason, especially after the discoveries of Copernicus, Galileo and
Newton had convincingly demonstrated that the earth was not the centre of the universe but
revolved around the sun. In addition, the popularization of literary and historical criticism of
the Bible by extreme anticlerical writers among the eighteenth century rationalists revealed
discrepancies which, to the age of reason, proved that the Bible was after all not infallible but
simply a book which had evolved over many centuries and which had been written by fallible
human beings.

Accordingly, the Bible had to be treated like every other human document with no special
claims to credibility except it expressed general religious ideas which could be recognized as
universally valid and were shared by other religions of mankind. The effect of treating the
Bible as an object of scientific study and not necessarily a sacred document in which God’s
word is encrypted was to strip it of its authority as a medium of divine revelation (Heron
1980: 5-6; Manual 1965: 10). This created a false impression that reason (scientific study)
and Biblical authority is irreconcilable. It is to be noted that this controversy continues to
date.

The Problems of Miracles

As the authenticity of the Holy Scriptures as a medium of divine revelation came under
increasing attack and its authority appeared to crumble, some Christians tried to appeal to the
miracles reported in the Bible to guarantee the truthfulness of its divine message. That is,
miracles were cited as proof that God was at work in the history to which the Bible attests, in
an attempt to demonstrate that God’s hand was behind its origins. However, the belief in
miracles did not hold out for long and was likewise shaken to the core by scientific
discoveries of laws of nature which regulated the natural order. Therefore, it became difficult
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for scientists to accept miracles or inferences with and suspension of those laws by some
arbitrary God.

Some rationalists decided to opt for deism, which was an essentially scientific cosmology that
took Newton’s discoveries seriously by pointing out that the universe was governed by
natural laws which rendered itself contained and self-explanatory. Whereas God was
formerly understood to be exercising providential care in the world and in human affairs ,
deists now began to see God as a heavenly clock-maker who had put the world together like a
clock but was no longer connected with it. Accordingly, it was no longer necessary for
human beings who had “come of age” to turn to God for an explanation, because the self-
explanatory world contained all that humans needed to know and this was discoverable by
reason. This deistic understanding of the world gave impetus to the growing rationalistic
reliance on reason. The result was scepticism about supernatural reality, which was seen as
interfering with this worldly view of reality. At the same time it permitted the rationalists to
both affirm the existence of God as necessary “first cause” and reject the possibility of
miracles.

Time and Eternity

The widely held assumption amongst all theologians about time is its flowing nature. Today,
eternity is no longer regarded as either timeless or unending time. Instead, God as eternal is
the supratemporal source of the world’s temporality. The theological sense of science.
Process theologians argue that the world is experienced by God through God’s “consequent
nature”. Some also believe that God is eternally transcendence to and temporally immanent
within the world. The future does not yet exist even for God, leaving God to create each
instant of physical time. All of these views, while differing in important ways theologically,
presuppose the nature of time’s flow as based on both ordinary experience and classical
physics. Einstein’s theory of special relativity directly challenges all these views by
undercutting the notion of a universal presence and the assumptions of uniform rate time’s
passage. According to Hartshorne, special relativity poses the most puzzling challenge of all
to the classical theistic notion of a universal time flow. Clearly, the issue of “time and
eternity” lies at the cutting edge of research in theology and science.

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Divine Action

The relation between divine and natural occurrence of events also highlights challenges the
twentieth-century science poses for the God-nature problem. Divine action underlies the
entire scope of systematic theology, from creation to redemption and surface explicitly in
discussions of special providence and miracles.

Traditionally, God gives the world its rational, intelligible structure as reflected in the laws of
nature through the transcendent and eternal act of bringing the world as a whole into
existence from nothing (ex nihilo). As immanent creator, God also continues to create
(creation continua) and providently direct processes and events in general towards their
consummation in the eschaton. In acts of special providence, God works through particular
events and processes with special intentions. Hence, miracles are theological understanding
of God’s action- “what nature on its own” might be sufficient to cause. Following the rise of
modern science and the Enlightenment, theological conservation and liberals split over the
meaning of “special providence”.

Creation and Cosmology

The Big Bang

Creation ex nihilo has been placed in relation to two particular features of the standard Big
Bang cosmology, which represent the beginning of time, and the anthropomorphic principle
which points to the striking correspondence between the fundamental physical constants and
laws of nature and the evolution of life. Is the Big bang relevant to the Biblical doctrine of
creation ex nihilo? Some say “yes”, the scientific discovery of an absolute beginning of all
things (including time) is empirical confirmation, or even proof of divine creation. Pope Pius
XII supported this in 1951, and also astronomer Robert Jastrow (1978).

Creation and Evolution

Christian theologians have developed a diversity of positive responses to Darwin’s theory of

evolution over the past 140 years, which by and large assume that what science describes in
terms of evolutionary biology is what theology sees as God’s action in the world. Simply put,
evolution is God’s way of creating life, a view frequently called “theistic evolution”. Scholars
taking this approach typically employ concepts such as continuous creation (creatio
continua).
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Since the 1970s, scholars have argued that chance events, from genetic variation to
environmental alterations, do not mitigate against God’s creative purposes or point to a
fundamental irrationality in the world. Instead, God is the ground and source of both chance
and law, which together serve as God’s means of continuously creating physical, chemical,
and biological complicity in a world, thus characterized by continuity and emergence,
temporality and openedended ness. Arthur Peackoke likens God to an improviser of
unsurpassed intelligence who gives birth to the world “within herself”. Evolutionary biology
also re-opens the question, of teleology. Can nature be given a limited teleological
explanation while avoiding both purposelessness and a detailed pre-conceived design?

Theological Anthropology, Evolution and Neuroscience

How are we to think about human nature and origins, including the imago dei (image of God)
and sin, in the light of evolutionary biology, socio biology, behavioural genetics, and
neuroscience? But theologians have attempted to solve this problem by proposing that
evolution is a development of matter towards spirit through God’s continuous, immanent, and
creative impulse in which nature becomes conscious of itself in humanity.

Another approach to theological anthropology starts with the Biblical concept of the human
person as a “psychosomatic unity”. Christian anthropology assumes the psychometric unity
of the person “rooted in materiality”, while the sciences should increase light on the
multilevel, used character and evolutionary history of this unity. Theologically, anthropology
also has much to gain from genetics research. Peters (1998a) discuses eight issues relating
genetics to theological assumptions about God, evolution, and the human person. These
included genetic discrimination, an intensification of the abortion controversy, patenting and
cloning, genetic determinism, and human freedom, the “gay gene” somatic versus germ-line
intervention and “playing God”. With Philip Hefner, he understands humanity as a created
co-creator. As humans, we cannot but be creative. The ethical challenge comes in aligning
our efforts with the future God is creating.

Redemption, Evolution and Cosmology

The point of departure for most theologies is that God shares in the suffering of the world and
heals us through Christ. But this raises fundamental questions: does nature need to be
redeemed? What is God’s relation to natural evil (the problem of theodicy)? What is the
relation between sin, biological death and redemption? Does redemption merely include life
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on earth, or the universe as a whole? Responses can be divided into the views that human sin
as a radically new phenomenon with no roots in our evolutionary past and the view that
human sin as emerging within human evolution from a variety of preconditions that fade
back indefinitely into the past.

The relevance of Christology to evolution depends on whether nature needs redemption.

Holmes Rolston writes, “Whatever is in travail needs redemption, whether or not there is any
sin to be dealt with”. Christ is the product of God’s immanent activity in all of evolutionary
history, and yet he is radically new revelation of God’s nature. A defining theme for most
Christian theologies is the resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth. How is this miracle to be put in
relation to science? Peacock (1993b) and Polikinghorne (1996b) offer differing responses that
illustrate the consequences of prioritizing either theology or science. Here both agree that the
resurrection is more than mere psychology, yet Polkinghorne is more committed to an “empty
tomb” the resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth also bears in the question of life after death and
general resurrection. Resurrection is not the reunion of resurrected body with an “immortal
soul” – a primarily Greek concept, but rather the eschatological transformation of the
complete person as a psychometric unity.

Evolution also poses the problem of theodicy, given the billions of years of natural disaster,
evolutionary wastefulness, suffering, death and extinction in nature. Here, the conditions for
the evolution of free creatures hinge on nature. God does not intervene, but grants the world
and humans independence. (Russell; 1990).

We come now to the doctrine of “last things” or eschatology. Some scholars, such as Reuther,
discuss eschatology primarily in the context of ecology and liberation. According to Reuther,
the biblical view of eschatology, with its incorporation of the Hebraic view at earthly
blessedness, was replaced by earthly power in the early church. The new earth is the new
heaven in which God is identified with the culmination of the human struggle for meaning.

An Interaction Model for Religion and Science

A major challenge continues to be whether science and theology can genuinely interact in a
mutually constructive way, each offering something of intellectual value to the other. J.T.
Russell (1998) has identified eight distinct ways in which this interaction can take place.

53
 1. Physical theories can act as data which place constraints on theology. For example, a
theology of divine action should not violate special relativity.

2. Physical theories can act as data to be incorporated into theology. The Big Bang
cosmology can be explained via creation ex nihilo: the explanation though, is that of
theology and not of science.

3. Theories in physics after philosophical analysis can act indirectly as data in theology.

4. Theories in physics can act indirectly as theological data when they are incorporated
into a fully articulated philosophy of nature, such as temporality in process
philosophy.

5. Theories in physics can function heuristically in the theological context of discovery

by providing conceptual, experiential moral and aesthetic inspiration. Theology can
also influence physics in the following ways.

6. Theology has provided key historical assumptions which underlay the development of
science such as the contingency and rationality of nature. These deserve a renewed
appraisal.

7. Theological theories can act as a source of inspiration in the scientific “context of

discovery”. An example is the influence of religious ideas on the pioneers of a
quantum theory, including Planck, Einstein, Bohrand Schrödinger.

8. Theological theories could provide criteria, alongside empirical adequacy, coherence,

scope, and fertility, for theory choice in physics.

TOPIC 10: FAITH AND REASON

Introduction

The term Faith is derived from Latin word fides and Old French feid and it means confidence
or trust in a person, thing, or concept. In the context of religion, one can define faith as belief
in God or in the doctrines or teachings of religion Religious people often think of faith as

54
confidence based on a perceived degree of warrant, while others who are more skeptical of
religion tend to think of faith as simply belief without evidence.

Reason refers the capacity of consciously making sense of things, applying logic, and
adapting or justifying practices, institutions, and beliefs based on new or existing
information. It is closely associated with such characteristically human activities as
philosophy, science, language, mathematics, and art, and is normally considered to be a
distinguishing ability possessed by humans. Reason is sometimes referred to as rationality.

Rationality is further said to be the quality or state of being rational that is, being based on
or agreeable to reason. Rationality implies the conformity of one's beliefs with one's reasons
to believe, and of one's actions with one's reasons for action.

Faith and Reason

While religions resort to rational arguments to attempt to establish their views, they also
claim that religious belief is at least partially to be accepted through faith, confidence or trust
in one's religious belief. There are different conceptions or models of faith, including:

1. The affective model of faith sees it as a feeling of trust, a psychological state

2. The special knowledge model of faith as revealing specific religious truths (defended
by Reformed epistemology)
3. The belief model of faith as the theoretical conviction that a certain religious claim is
true.
4. Faith as trusting, as making a fiducial commitment such as trusting in God.
5. The practical doxastic venture model where faith is seen as a commitment to believe
in the trustworthiness of a religious truth or in God. In other words, to trust in God
presupposes belief, thus faith must include elements of belief and trust.
6. The non-doxastic venture model of faith as practical commitment without actual
belief. This was defended by non-realists like J. L. Schellenberg and Don Cupitt. In
this view, one need not believe in literal religious claims about reality to have
religious faith.
7. The hope model which defines faith as hoping

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There are also different positions on how faith relates to reason. One example is the belief
that faith and reason are compatible and work together, which is the view of Thomas Aquinas
and the orthodox view of Catholic natural theology. According to this view, reason
establishes certain religious truths and faith (guided by reason) gives us access to truths about
the divine which, according to Aquinas, "exceed all the ability of human reason."

Another position on is Fideism, the view that faith is "in some sense independent of, if not
outright adversarial toward, reason. This view was famously defended by the theologian
Tertullian (160–230 BC). Modern philosophers such as Kierkegaard, William James, and
Wittgenstein have been associated with this label. Kierkegaard in particular, argued for the
necessity of the religious to take a non-rational leap of faith to bridge the gulf between man
and God. Wittgensteinian fideism meanwhile sees religious language games as being
incommensurate with scientific and metaphysical language games, and that they are
autonomous and thus may only be judged on their own standards. The obvious criticism to
this is that many religions clearly put forth metaphysical claims.

Several contemporary New Atheist writers which are hostile to religion hold a related view
which says that religious claims and scientific claims are opposed to each other, and that
therefore religions are false.

The Protestant theologian Karl Barth (1886–1968) argued that religious believers have no
need to prove their beliefs through reason and thus rejected the project of natural theology.
According to Barth, human reason is corrupt and God is utterly different from his creatures,
thus we can only rely on God's own revelation for religious knowledge. Barth's view has been
termed Neo-orthodoxy. Similarly, D.Z. Phillips argues that God is not intelligible through
reason or evidence because God is not an empirical object or a 'being among beings'.

As Brian Davies points out, the problem with positions like Barth's is that they do not help us
in deciding between inconsistent and competing revelations of the different religions.

Faith and Rationality

Broadly speaking, there are two categories of views regarding the relationship between faith
and rationality:

56
 1. Rationalism holds that truth should be determined by reason and factual analysis,
rather than faith, dogma, tradition or religious teaching.
2. Fideism holds that faith is necessary, and that beliefs may be held without any
evidence or reason and even in conflict with evidence and reason.

The Catholic Church also has taught that true faith and correct reason can and must work
together, and, viewed properly, can never be in conflict with one another, as both have their
origin in God, as stated in the Papal encyclical letter issued by Pope John Paul II, Fides et
ratio ((Faith and Reason).

Believers in faith believe salvation is possible through faith alone frequently suggest that
everyone holds beliefs arrived at by faith, not reason. The belief that the universe is a sensible
place and that our minds allow us to arrive at correct conclusions about it, is a belief we hold
through faith. Rationalists contend that this is arrived at because they have observed the
world being consistent and sensible, not because they have faith that it is.

Beliefs held by faith may be seen existing in a number of relationships to rationality:

1.Faith as underlying rationality: In this view, all human knowledge and reason is seen as
dependent on faith: faith in our senses, faith in our reason, faith in our memories, and faith in
the accounts of events we receive from others. Accordingly, faith is seen as essential to and
inseparable from rationality. According to René Descartes, rationality is built first upon the
realization of the absolute truth "I think therefore I am", which requires no faith. All other
rationalizations are built outward from this realization, and are subject to falsification at any
time with the arrival of new evidence.

2. Faith as addressing issues beyond the scope of rationality: In this view, faith is seen as
covering issues that science and rationality are inherently incapable of addressing, but that are
nevertheless entirely real. Accordingly, faith is seen as complementing rationality, by
providing answers to questions that would otherwise be unanswerable.

3. Faith as contradicting rationality: In this view, faith is seen as those views that one holds
despite evidence and reason to the contrary. Accordingly, faith is seen as pernicious with
respect to rationality, as it interferes with our ability to think, and inversely rationality is seen
as the enemy of faith by interfering with our beliefs.

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4.Faith and reason as essential together: This is the Catholic view that faith without reason
leads to superstition, while reason without faith leads to nihilism and relativism.

5. Faith as based on warrant: In this view some degree of evidence provides warrant for
faith.

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