80 theory
rocks happily has become. (For the ancient Greek skeptics, it is often pointed
out, it was anything but a “purely theoretical issue,” but that is another story,
and not one I need to tell today.) While no one can say that there are only so
many possible answers a religious person can give to the atheist or to the
religious skeptic, three main approaches are familiar to all of us.
The traditional approach, and the one that is still that of the Roman Cath-
olic Church, is to continue (albeit with contemporary sophistication) the me-
dieval attempt to prove the existence of God (neo-Thomism). This is not an
approach I find possible for myself, at any rate, for the following reasons:
First, in order to understand talk about God, whether or not that talk takes
the form of a proof, one must be able to understand the concept “God.” But
there are very different possible conceptions of what it is to understand the
concept “God,” in a way that has no analogue in the case of, say, a mathematical
proof. Secondly, even if one understands the concept “God,” to accept any of
the traditional proofs, one has to find a connection between that concept and
the highly theoretical philosophical principles involved in those proofs, prem-
ises about conditioned and unconditioned existence, and about what sorts of
necessity there are. Some of the most profound religious thinkers of the last
two hundred years (particularly the religious existentialists from Kierkegaard
to Rosenzweig and Buber) have had no use at all for this sort of philosophizing;
and I would be the last to say that they lacked the concept “God.” What the
traditional proofs of the existence of God in fact do isconnectthe concerns of
two different salvific enterprises: the enterprise of ancient and medieval phi-
losophy,^19 which, after all, is the source of the materials for these proofs, and
the enterprise of monotheistic religion. While it is certainly possible to have a
deeply worthwhile religious attitude that combines these two elements—in-
deed, the effort to do so has contributed profoundly to Judaism as well as to
Christianity and Islam—it is also possible to have a deeply fulfilling religious
attitude while keeping far away from metaphysics.
A second familiar response to religious skepticism is that of the dogma-
tists: “my religion is true and every other belief is wicked (especially atheism),
or no better than witch doctoring (other religions).” (A friend remarked, “I
understand this is very popular among people philosophers don’t talk to.”)^20
Not only is this response a denial of the very raison d’etre of philosophy itself,
which John Dewey so well defined as “criticism of criticisms,”^21 but, in a mar-
velous discussion of the psychology of “fanaticism” inThe Critique of the Power
of Judgment, Kant argues that this is, at bottom, not religion but a disease of
religion.^22
Part of Kant’s point is that the “fanatic” (his term for what I just called
“the dogmatist”) treats religious beliefs as if they were as sure as ordinary
perceptual beliefs. I remarked a few moments ago that skepticism about the
existence of houses and rocks has happily become a purely theoretical issue.
In practice, as Kant pointed out inThe Critique of Pure Reason, perception of