lievers and nonbelievers alike were persuaded that Hume and Kant had clearly exposed
their fatal weaknesses. Another was the demise of nineteenth-century idealism. The
twentieth-century heirs of the German and Anglo-American idealists (Hastings Rashdall,
W. R. Sorley, A. C. Ewing, and A. E. Taylor, among others) had many interesting things
to say about God, immortality, and humanity's religious life. But their views increasingly
fell on deaf ears as analytic philosophy replaced idealism as the dominant approach
among English-speaking academics. (The “process philosophy” of A. N. Whitehead and
his followers emerged as an alternative to idealism and analytic philosophy that could
accommodate religious interests. It was never more than a minority viewpoint, however,
and finds itself today in much the same position that philosophical idealism was in in the
early part of the twentieth century; its demise too seems immanent.) This is not to say
that nothing of interest to philosophers of religion was transpiring during this period.
Five developments were especially important. The first was the impact of theologians
like Karl Barth, Emil Brunner, and Paul Tillich on philosophers interested in religion.
The second was the influence of religious existentialism, including both the rediscovery
of Søren Kierkegaard and the work of contemporaries like Gabriel Marcel and Martin
Buber. A third was the renewal of Thomism by Jacques Maritain, Etienne Gilson, and
others. A fourth was the rise of religious phenomenology; Rudolf Otto and others tried to
accurately describe human religious experience as it appears to those who have it.
Finally, philosophers who were sympathetic to religious impulses and feelings yet deeply
skeptical of religious metaphysics attempted to reconstruct religion in a way that would
preserve what was thought to be valuable in it while discarding the chaff. Thus, John
Dewey suggested that the proper object of faith isn't supernatural beings but “the unity of
all ideal ends arousing us to desire and actions,” or the “active relation” between these
ideals and the “forces in nature and society that generate and support” them. In Dewey's
view, “any activity pursued in behalf of an ideal end against obstacles and in spite of
threats of personal loss because of a conviction of its general and enduring value is
religious in quality”^1 (see chapter 9).
After a half century of comparative neglect, analytic philosophers began to take an
interest in religion in the 1950s. Their attention was initially focused on questions of
religious language. Were sentences like “God forgives my sins” used to express factual
claims, or did they instead express the speaker's attitudes or commitments? If those who
uttered them did express factual claims, what kind of claims were they? Could they be
empirically verified or falsified, for example, and, if they could not, were they really
cognitively meaningful? (For more on this debate, see chapters 9, 10, 18, and 19.)
What was unanticipated was that the young analytic philosophers of religion who were
being trained during this period were to become responsible for a resurgence of
philosophical theology that began in the mid-1960s and continues to dominate the field in
English-speaking countries today. The revival was fueled by a comparative loss of
interest in the question of religious language's cognitive meaningfulness (it being
generally thought that attempts to show that religious sentences do not express true or
false factual claims had been unsuccessful), and a conviction that Hume's and Kant's
allegedly devastating criticisms of philosophical theology did not withstand careful
scrutiny. On the positive side, developments in modal logic, probability theory, and so on
offered tools for introducing a new clarity and rigor to traditional disputes.
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