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Philosophy of Religion

Introduction

Philosophy of religion is part of philosophy that takes philosophical methods and applies them to matters of religious concern. In simple words, we can say that it applies reason to faith. The results of the philosophical methods and the mere fact that it is made are both fascinating and the cause of enormous controversy. This study will look briefly at what religion is, at different approaches to the application of philosophy to religion, different beliefs of people about The God, existence of evil and at some basics of philosophical reasoning.

Different Religious Faiths in the World

There are a number of diverse world religions with millions and even billions of followers. The different religions make distinctive claims about the divine reality and also claim special access to it, either by way of direct revelation from the reality itself or through the witness of individuals who were or are especially attuned to it. So, different religions with their different traditions and histories make claims about the divine reality that their adherents buy into. There might be tension between the methods of philosophy and the content of religion; a tension between reason and faith.

Religious traditions frequently make claims that cannot be verified in scientific ways and which are in an important sense removed from our ordinary experience. Consider the following sample. The major theistic religions (Christianity, Islam, and Judaism) claim that there exists a God, a great invisible being who created everything and who is all-powerful, all-knowing, and perfectly good; but of course we cannot see such a being, and millions of people believe there is no such thing. Some of the great Eastern religions, including Buddhism and Hinduism, accept a doctrine of reincarnation which claims that after death people are born again as other people or perhaps other creatures, a process that is repeated until some kind of enlightened goal is achieved. This doctrine seems difficult to prove.

Christians believe that God is trinity, one God but three persons, one of whom became human and whose death and subsequent resurrection made possible human salvation; Muslims believe that the Angel Gabriel appeared in visions to the prophet Muhammad (Peace be upon him), Jews and Christians believe that thousands of years ago God chose the people of Israel and led them from Egypt to the Promised Land, parting the Red Sea and destroying the Egyptian army in the process. These again are all eyeopening claims, and it seems profoundly difficult to verify any of them by the methods commonly used in other great truth-seeking enterprises such as science and mathematics. In any case, they are not typically believed on the basis of such verification; instead, they are understood by adherents to the religions as being somehow divinely revealed.

Thus, faith beliefs appear to be of a dissimilar order from what we could call reason beliefs, the typical examples of which include beliefs based on surveillance and balanced reflection, beliefs in the sciences and in mathematics. This dissimilarity can lead to difficulty ...