History of Religion and Kant's reflections on religion and morality are examples. The
“hermeneutics of suspicion” practiced by Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud is an extension of
the same project. According to these thinkers, religion is an expression of “false
consciousness.” Its beliefs, feelings, and practices lack rational support and rest on
motives that cannot be consciously acknowledged without destroying their credibility
(see chapter 19).
Finally, philosophy of religion can be an attempt to make sense of, or account for,
religion, and not a reflection on its object (God, Nirvana, and the like). George
Santayana's interpretation of religion as a kind of poetry, a feelingful contemplation of
ideal forms, is an example; Hume's Natural History of Religion is another. As these
examples indicate, attempts of this sort are seldom neutral. Santayana, for instance, takes
naturalism for granted, and Hume is independently convinced that historical religions are
not only irrational but morally and socially pernicious. Wittgensteinians, on the other
hand, insist that their attempts to make sense of religion are an exception to this rule;
their project, they claim, is to simply understand religion, not judge it (see chapter 18).
Until quite recently, philosophy of religion has been somewhat myopic. Since the only
religions with which Western philosophers have been intimately acquainted are Judaism
and Christianity (and, to a lesser extent, Islam), it is not surprising that they have focused
their attention on theism. (Discussions of mysticism have proved one noteworthy
exception.) Increased knowledge of Asian and other traditions has made this attitude
seem unduly parochial. There is no intrinsic reason, however, why the tools of analytic or
continental philosophy can't be profitably applied to non-Western doctrines and
arguments, and good work is currently being done in this vein by Stephen Phillips, Paul
Williams, Steven Collins, Gerald Larson, and a number of others. Paul Griffiths, for
example, has
end p.
suggested that “perfect being theology” (the attempt to explore the implications of the
concept of a reality greater than which none can be thought) can be deployed to explain
(and criticize) the emergence of doctrines of the cosmic Buddha in the Mahayana
traditions. Work of this sort is essential because a defense of one's favored religion's
perspective should include reasons for preferring it to its important competitors. The
Western doctrine of creation ex nihilo, for instance, should be compared with the
Visistadvaitin notion that the world is best viewed as God's body.^6 Again, because the
Buddhist's claim that everything is impermanent is logically incompatible with the
assertion that God is eternal and unchanging, both theists and Buddhists need to attend to
the views of each other. (For more on these issues, see chapters 3 and 16.)
Another weakness of contemporary philosophy of religion is that the analytic and
continental traditions have developed in comparative isolation from each other. This is
due to several factors. For one thing, analytic philosophers of religion are usually trained
and housed in departments of philosophy, and most of the best departments in English-
speaking countries are dominated by analytic philosophy. Continental philosophers of
religion, on the other hand, are often (although not always) trained and housed in
departments of religion or theology. Their interests, too, are different. Analytic
philosophers of religion have tended to focus on God or the religious object and on the