REL 2000 Final

He is best known for developing a hierarchy of human needs. Unlike Freud who spoke of neurotic, unhealthy individuals, Maslow dealt with the needs of healthy individuals.

Abraham Maslow

Comte was one of the first thinkers to take an evolutionist view towards human thinking about the universe. Comte taught that our understanding of the universe goes through three stages - the theological stage, the metaphysical stage, and the positive stage. The theological stage is what we would today call primitive religion. The metaphysical stage still sees underlying causes for everything that happens. But these causes are no longer the will of spirits. Rather they are rules or principles that cause the world to work as it does.The positive stage, called positivism, is closest to what we would call modern science. There is no room for unknown entities or hidden forces.(Sociological View)

Adophe Comte

Process philosophy, or process theology as it is called by religious thinkers, has a panentheistic approach to God. God is beyond the world but also within the world. As part of the world, God is not static but constantly changing. Process theologians see God not as being coercive but rather persuasive. God is a lure that pulls the world, and human beings, in a particular direction. But all things are free to ignore God's pull. This leads to the possibility of evil in the world.

Alfred North Whitehead

the belief that the world is filled with spirit. Eventually polytheism, the belief in multiple gods developed. In was only later, in the beginning of the Axial Age (discussed below), do we see the beginning of monotheism, the belief in one God. There does seem to be a direct procession from animism to polytheism to monotheism.

Animism

An agnostic says that we cannot have knowledge of God. An atheist claims that God does not exist. Many philosophers denied that we can have any knowledge of God.

Atheism and Agnosticism

was coined by philosopher Karl Jaspers (1883 - 1969) to refer to the years 800 to 200 before the Common Era. Other thinkers such as scholar Karen Armstrong (b. 1944), in her book The Great Transformation (2007), has expanded the phrase to include the beginning of the Common Era. During this period a number of great thinkers arose in both the East and the West who transformed religion. A large part of this transformation was an emphasis on human behavior rather than metaphysical speculation.

Axial Age

Pascal's Wager - Blaise Pascal (1623 - 1662) was a French philosopher and mathematician, and a religious Christian. He saw the case to believe as a kind of wager. One could either believe or not believe. And either there is a God or there is no God. If one believes and there is a God, one receives the reward of heaven. If one believes and there is no God, one has simply wasted some time in Church. If one does not believe and there is no God, it does not matter. But if one does not believe and there is a God, that person will suffer eternal damnation. Looking at every side of the wager, the best choice is to believe.

Blaise Pascal

Jung saw a positive value in religion. Jung believed in a collective unconscious. People shared certain unconscious ideas not because of some mystical connection between their brains but because of similarity of brain structures. Whereas Freud believed the unconscious was something filled with repressed, negative content, Jung saw it as much more neutral. Certain symbols and images, which Jung called archetypes filled this collective unconscious. Religious ideas such as water as a symbol of rebirth or light as a symbol of creation were present across various cultures and religions.

Carl Jung

studying Geertz's view of religion, we see that this system of symbols has a double purpose. Geertz called religion a model, and claimed it was both a "model of" and a "model for." A "model of" is descriptive, giving us a worldview. A "model for" is prescriptive, telling what we ought to do, or to use a term academics would use, an ethos.

Clifford Geertz

A statement is true if it is coherent with other beliefs within someone's belief system. "the opening chapter of Genesis can be interpreted to mean God created the universe over six very long eras" would be coherent with the statement, "the earth is billions of years old." A religious statement is true if it is coherent with a person's other beliefs.

Coherent theory of truth

The correspondence theory of truth teaches that truth corresponds to reality. The statement "God exists" means that there really exists a God. Again, if one accepts the correspondence theory of truth, then one accepts certain statements are true which are impossible to scientifically verify.

Correspondence Theory of Truth

Cosmological Proof of God - This is an a posteriori argument based on our experience of the world. It was articulated by Thomas Aquinas (1225 - 1284); four of his five proofs of God are various formulations of it. In a nutshell, everything that moves has cause. That mover has a cause, which has a cause, and so forth. But there cannot be an infinite chain of causes. So there must be a first cause, what Aristotle called the "Unmoved Mover." This is God.

Cosmological Proof of God

Is he (God) willing to prevent evil, but not able? then he is impotent. Is he able, but not willing? then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? then whence evil?"

David Hume

For example, why is murder wrong? Because the Ten Commandments teach that it is wrong. Where did the Ten Commandments come from? They were revealed by God. Therefore, murder is wrong because God said it is wrong. The theory of ethics which says that right and wrong are God's will is known as Divine Command Theory.

Divine Command Theory

there are two kinds of substances in the world, mind and matter or soul and body. Matter takes up space and works by physical laws. Mind does not take up space and is a totally separate substance. Plato was a dualist as was Descartes. If there are two substances, the body can die and decompose while the mind or soul can survive death. Plato, in his dialog the Phaedo, tried to prove that the soul survives and returns to the perfect World of the Forms. Plato was extremely influential in Western theology, particularly Christianity. When someone says that the soul goes to a better world after death, their words are pure Plato.

Dualism

Functionalist approach. Functionalists will study a primitive culture and try to ascertain the function of various religious rituals. He later abandoned this approach. The criticism of Evans-Pritchard will lead directly to a phenomenologist approach to religion, which we will be looking at shortly.

E.E Evans Pritchard

was a British anthropologist and one of the founders of social anthropology. His landmark work was a two volume work called Primitive Culture. Tylor imagined the primitive philosopher, sitting on a stone contemplating the universe, as the founder of religion. At the center of his vision was animism, the belief that everything, plants, animals, and even inanimate objects, are animated by spirits. These primitive spirits are at the heart of religion, not just in ancient times but in modern times. In fact, one of the key contributions of anthropologist is that modern humans are in essence no different from primitive humans. Tylor defined religion as "belief in spiritual beings."

Edward Tylor

One of Durkheim's most important ideas is the notion of sacred and profane. Societies had sacred objects (in primitive societies called "totems.") These sacred objects had special rules and laws, unlike profane objects which had no limitations. For example, in modern Western religions the Sabbath becomes a sacred time with special limitations. The rest of the week is profane, available for any secular activity. The key idea of Durkheim is sacred objects are not intrinsically holy but instead come to symbolize and represent the society. Through such sacred objects, members come to worship their society as a whole. The sacred fulfills a functional role, a symbol of the culture and the society.

Emile Durkheim

Nietzsche was the one who had pronounced "God is Dead." He had no use for the Western philosophical tradition, which was based on Christian ethics. He called this slave ethics. He looked at the ancient Greek controversy between Apollo, the God of rationality, and Dionysus, the God of passion. Europe had followed the path of rationality, and the life of passion had been lost. Nietzsche called for a person to be an ubermensch (literally an overman or a superman), living lives of passion. Part of such a life was the realization that one must expect an "eternal recurrence." One should live a life of freedom and passion, because one must live it over and over.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Schleiermacher was one of the leading theologians of the early Christian Reformation. He emphasized the importance of emotion in any description of religion. Schleiermacher, like many other Protestant thinkers, wanted to return to the meaning of the text of the Bible. He believed that the Catholic Church, with its Canon law and multiple types of interpretation, had lost the basic meaning. For Schleiermacher, the question became what the text actually meant to the person who wrote it. There is a right understanding of scripture and the goal of the interpreter is to uncover that meaning. This was part of the overall "return to scripture" that marked early Protestantism.

Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768 - 1864).

The German philosopher Georg W. F. Hegel (1770 - 1831) viewed religion as a way in which the human spirit becomes aware of itself as spirit, that is, as a manifestation of the One. Hegel's spirit (Geist) can also be rendered `mind.' The first step is called thesis - ideas about how the world works. However, every thesis raises problems and conflicts. This stage is known as antithesis - against the thesis. Ultimately this conflict works its way out through a third stage - synthesis. The synthesis solves the problem, but eventually becomes the new thesis, creating a new antithesis, and a new synthesis. This is how spirit works its way through history. We call this process a dialectic.

George Wilhelm Friedrich

e believed that a non-rational mystical tradition underlies religion and that it is a mistake to study religion using psychology or anthropology. Human beings have both a logical and a mystical mode of thinking, and to use only logic to understand religion is to ignore an important part of the human experience

Gerardus van der Leeuw

defended classical theism, teaching that even if there is evil in the world, "we live in the best of all possible worlds."

Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz

adamer was also from a Christian background. But he disagreed with previous scholars of hermeneutics that there was one proper "God's eye" view of what a text means. People do not read a text from within a vacuum. The interpreter always approaches a text from within a community, with a particular worldview, and with a purpose in mind. Often the interpreter has an agenda. Gadamer used a phrase, horizon, which he borrowed from Edmund Husserl, the founder of phenomenology (which we discussed in Module 2). The interpreter always sees a text from within a particular horizon. But the text itself has its own horizon. The act of interpretation, according to Gadamer, is always the "fusion of horizons."

Hans Gadamer

We see how the meaning of hermeneutics has changed. For Schleiermacher, the text has a fixed meaning. For Gadamer, the meaning of the text is fused with the worldview of the interpreter. For Derrida, the text has no fixed meaning and interpretation is very open ended.

Hermeneutics

The most obvious example of a top-down hierarchical organization is the Roman Catholic Church. The Pope is on top with his college of cardinals, overseeing bishops and priests throughout the world. Priests are sent to a parish by the organization. Eastern Orthodox Churches also have a hierarchical organization, headed by the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople, over various Patriarchs and Archbishops. The Anglican Church is headed by the Archbishop of Canterbury in England. On the other hand, most Protestant Churches are organized on a bottom-up basis, with autonomy on the congregational level. Another hierarchical organization is the Mormon Church, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The President of the Church is also the Prophet who speaks in the name of God. Underneath is a Quorum of Twelve Apostles, then Quorums of Seventy Apostles. This creates a tight hierarchy which keeps the faith consistent throughout.

Hiearchies

there is one kind of substance in the world (monism), and that substance is mind. Everything is mind. Matter exists as something perceived by a mind. Berkeley was an idealist as was Hegel. Eastern religions are often idealists, with the mind being some part of a universal mind. A Hindu would say "atman is Brahman." (Our individual souls are simply part of a greater soul, like waves in the ocean.) Buddhism teaches a doctrine of anatta no-soul; our individual souls are just an illusion.

Idealism

Kant introduced the "turn to the subject" studying philosophy not from a God's eye point of view but from the point of view of individual subjects or minds. Kant called this real world the noumenal world and he claimed that we humans can never know the noumenal world - i.e. what is really out there. All we can know is what Kant called the phenomenal world, the world our mind perceives. Our mind organizes how we see the world. Kant called this change the "turn to the subject."Kant claimed that reading Hume "awoke him from his dogmatic slumber."

Immanuel Kant

Derrida, from a Jewish background, was the founder of deconstructionism, a way of interpreting texts which denied any kind of fixed meaning to that text. We have now moved far from Schleiermacher. According to Derrida, the text stands unfixed and ungrounded. One of his most famous statements is "there is nothing outside the text." Derrida was not a practicing Jew, but many scholars see his approach as very close to Judaism. Religious scholar Karen Armstrong writes regarding Derrida, "His theory of deconstruction, which denies the possibility of finding a single, secure meaning in any text, is positively rabbinical." (The Case for God, page. 312). The Rabbinic tradition in Judaism teaches that there are multiple, often contradictory meanings to every word of the Biblical text - as many as 70 meanings for every verse.

Jacques Derrida

Frazer noticed how tribes throughout the world used myths based on themes from this tale. He spent his lifetime collecting the myths. He built an evolutionary view of religion based on these tales. First came magic, represented by this golden bough. This was replaced by religion, based on spirits and gods. Finally, religion would be replaced by science, based on empirical knowledge.

James Frazer

Joachim Wach (1898 - 1955) in his book Sociology of Religion, teaches that there are three different forms of religious expression. There is the theoretical which covers the doctrines, beliefs and stories that make up a religion. There is the sociological which covers the community and interpersonal relations of those who practice. And finally, there is the practical which covers the rituals, rites, modes of worship, and other day-to-day activities of those who practice the religion.

Joachim Wach

Rather faith begins with an experience of God. Hick followed Kant in his belief that we can only know the phenomenal world (the world of experience) rather than the noumenal world (the world of reality.) As such we can only know our experience of God, not the reality of God. Based on this, Hick was a strong advocate of religious pluralism. (Pluralism is the belief that multiple religious approaches can all be true and people must respect different religious teachings from their own.) Rather evil is necessary because in provides for "soul-building" to use Hick's term

John Hick

They served a metaphysical purpose, expressing a sense of awe before the universe. Campbell felt that this sense of awe cannot be reached through pure reason. Myths also served a cosmological purpose, explaining the creation of the universe. They served a sociological purpose, explaining the structure and institutions of society. Finally, they served a pedagogical purpose, teaching members of a community as they go through life.

Joseph Campbell

taught that the five books of Moses, which Jews call the Torah, was really made up of four separate documents. There is the J document where God's name is Jahweh, the E document where God's name is Elohim, the P or Priestly document with most the ritual instructions (including the creation story in Genesis which is about the Sabbath), and D which is Deuteronomy, the second teaching of Moses. Different scholars disagree on the details of how they were put together. But all agree that they were put together rather late by a person known as R - the Redacter. This theory is an anathema in more fundamentalist clergy seminaries but is taught in liberal seminaries.

Julius Wellhausen

Marx was a materialist. Materialism is the idea that matter or the physical world is the ultimate reality. Mind or spirit is of secondary importance. Marx hated religion believed that is was the opiate of the people. Religion was built on economics

Karl Marx

scientific or rational truth

Logos

There are two kinds of statements we can make about the world. logical statements, true mathematically or by definition. And we can make empirical statements or scientific statements, true based on experience about the universe. The word "positivism" means that only statements based on experience are legitimate.In his later years Wittgenstein changed his mind. He realized that people speak about God, religion, ethics, and beauty all the time. These words become part of a shared language. In his book Philosophical Investigations, published posthumously, Wittgenstein called this approach "language games."

Ludwig Wittgenstein

Most encounters are what Buber called I-It, where people meet and use and experience one another without really encountering the other. However, the ideal encounter between two people is what Buber called I-Thou, where two people are totally in the presence of one another. Such a total encounter with another person cannot become a mere experience to be analyzed.

Martin Buber (Judaism)

there is one kind of substance in the world (monism), and that substance is matter. We have a body but no soul. When we die our body dies and nothing is left. The cells that make up our body decay and the material becomes part of other substances. Hobbes was a materialist as was Marx. Many modern scientists and most atheists are materialists. To materialists death is the end; there is nothing more.

Materialists

Economics are built on religion.Sociologist Max Weber, one of the key thinkers on religion whom described above, studied religious leadership in his sociological studies of religion.

Max Weber

the branch of philosophy that studies - what is reality? What are the things that make up the world? Our answers to these questions will help us explore what happens when we die.

Metaphysics

He built on the work of Otto, using the word "sacred" instead of "holy" as compared to "profane." His study of the sacred and the profane reflects the earlier work of Emile Durkheim. The profane is the ordinary, day-to-day reality of how people live. The sacred is when the spiritual breaks into the ordinary world. It grows out of the human need for transcendence, something beyond the ordinary. Eliade used the term heirophanies for those moments when the sacred breaks through to this world.

Mircea Eliade

stories used to explain the phenomena of the world

Mythos

Ontological Proof of God - This is an a priori argument based on the very definition of God. It was first conceived by Anselm of Canterbury (1033 - 1109). In a nutshell, Anselm defines God as "that of which nothing greater can be conceived." It is greater to exist than not to exist. Since nothing greater than God can be conceived, God must exist by definition

Ontological Proof of God

He taught philosophy in the existential tradition. (Remember that existentialism begins with human existence and teaches that people have the power to create who they are.). To Tillich, our very existence raises numerous questions as to the meaning of our lives. From this, Tillich defines religion as "ultimate concern." It is the Christian revelation that offers answers to those questions. Thus, Tillich begins with philosophy and ends with theology. Paul Tillich says that a symbol participate in that which is symbolized. To desecrate a flag is to attack the nation itself.

Paul Tillich (Protestant)

believed that human knowledge is a social construction. They taught that human beings construct a social reality which allows them to function in the world. Berger saw the establishment of the nomos as a three step process. The first is externalization, where people project their conceptions out into the world. The second is objectification, where these projections are seen as an objective reality. The third is internalization, where the objective reality is appropriated make into the mind.

Peter Berger

Philosophers have generally established three separate proofs for the existence of God - the ontological proof, the cosmological proof, and the teleological proof. The first is based on an a prioi (before experience) argument, the latter two are based on a posteriori (after experience) arguments. (In philosophy, a priori knowledge is what we know before we look out at or experience the world. This is knowledge that is true by definition. On the other hand, a posteriori knowledge is what we know after looking out at or experiencing the world.)

Philosopher proofs

philos meaning love and sophia meaning wisdom. Philosophy means "the love of wisdom." One of the major differences between philosophy and religion is that philosophy says that knowledge can be achieved only through reasoning and arguments.

Philosophy

the recognition of the legitimacy of multiple religious traditions, each containing certain truths. Pluralism has led to dialogue between various religious traditions, each learning from the other. Sometimes there are interfaith religious services, particularly on secular occasions such as Thanksgiving. A metaphor to describe this religious pluralism is that "there are many paths up the same mountain." God or the ultimate reality is at the top of the mountain. Different religions are different paths to get up there.

Pluralism

A statement is true if it leads to practical results.

Pragmatic Meaning

pragmatic truth is that an idea is true if it has a positive effect on people. James invented the phrase "flow of consciousness." The mind is not an empty container into which momentary pictures of reality appear. Rather there is a constant flow of images, sounds, and thoughts fill the mind without interruption. The author James Joyce built is novel Ulysses on James idea of the flow of consciousness.

Pragmatic Truth

This theory, founded by sociologist Rodney Stark (b. 1934) built an approach to religion that is similar to James. People choose to be religious based on a rational assessment of the cost - benefit of a particular religious tradition.

Rational Choice Theory (Rodney Stark)

to unite religious conservatives of various faiths - evangelical Christians, Mormons, orthodox Jews - to influence public policy. Falwell called his group The Moral Majority. It opposed the equal rights amendment, abortion rights, gay rights, while supporting a strong military and other conservative political causes. Although the Moral Majority was disbanded in 1989, other groups continue to support this conservative social agenda.

Rev. Jerry Falwell

Essence of religion is encountering the wholly other. The numinous is "non-rational, non-sensory experience or feeling whose primary and immediate object is outside the self." Otto also used the Latin phrase mysterium tremendum "tremendous mystery." This was the experience of the wholly other. One felt a sense of ultimacy, finality, and satisfaction. Only those who had experienced the holy could truly understand what religion is.

Rudolf Otto

He was the first psychologist to seriously discuss the unconscious. There was the id, the unconscious drives and appetites, often sexual or aggressive in nature. There was the superego, the inner voice of one's parents, one's community, or civilization as a whole. And finally there was the ego, the actual consciousness, trying to balance the demands of the id and the superego.

Sigmund Freud

What does Ellwood mean? The answer is that religion ultimately is a group experience. We study religion by studying the group. This gets to the heart of sociology. It is a top down discipline. We learn about the individual by studying the group. sociology

Sociology

Sociology and Anthropology are top-down disciplines. Psychology is bottom-top discipline.

Sociology, Anthropology, and Psychology

Existentialism is a philosophy that begins with human existence. Kierkegaard basically taught that there are three different ways we can choose to live our lives. We can choose the aesthetic life, which for Kierkegaard meant a life pursuing pleasure and satisfying desire. We can choose the ethical life, which meant following the rules, being a good citizen and a good church-going Christian. But Kierkegaard believed such Christians lacked true religious faith. The third choice was what Kierkegaard called a "leap of faith." We choose to believe, even if it irrational, even if it is absurd. FIEDIEST

Soren Kierkegard

Teleological Proof of God - This is also an a posteriori argument based from experience. Aquinas fifth proof for the existence of God was a version of this. But the most famous formulation was by the natural philosopher William Paley (1743 - 1805) Imagine you are walking on the beach and you find a watch. Studying the watch, you notice that it fits together in a way that fulfills a purpose. You conclude that the watch must have a designer. So too, the world must have a designer.

Teleological Proof of God

One partial answer given by some philosophers is to separate the problem of evil into human evil and natural evil. Human evil is caused by human free will. God did not cause the Holocaust - human beings did. But natural evil - hurricanes, tsunamis, cancer cells, birth defects, and all other acts of natural, cannot be blamed on human beings. One possible answer - what we call evil does not really exist. It just seems evil from our perspective. From God's perspective, all evil has a purpose. John Hick, mentioned above, seems to take this position when he writes of evil as "soul building." Even natural evils seem to have a role in the evolution of life. For example, evolution could not take place without mutations and various aberrations of growth. But these are exactly what cause birth defects and cancer. In other words, even these terrible events play a role in God's ultimate purpose.

The Problem of Evil

n the next topic we will look briefly at Aquinas's cosmological proof of God, based on Aristotle's idea of causation. (This is one of five famous proofs for the existence of God.) Aquinas also developed a kind of negative theology - we can know what God is not rather than what God is. This is called in Latin the via negative ("negative way"). Until the beginning of the scientific revolution, the Catholic Church saw Aquinas's vision of how the universe works as a fundamental dogma.

Thomas Aquinas

James was a pragmatist. He taught that there is no way to prove absolutely whether God exists or not. But religion is true because it leads to a happier, more fulfilling life. We call this pragmatic truth. Truth is whatever works in a positive way.

William James

God is all good

beneficent or omnibeneficent

God created the world but since then does not intervene. Many Enlightenment thinkers such as Thomas Jefferson were deists.

deism

study of knowledge

epistemology

reliance on faith rather than philosophy or science in religious matters (Kierkegaard was a fideist).

fideism

God is within the world (some use the term omnipresent)

immanent

All powerful

omnipotent

present everywhere at the same time

omnipresent

All-knowing

omniscient

God and nature are the same. The rationalist philosopher Benedict Spinoza was a pantheist.

pantheism

there are multiple gods. Similar to animism that sees god-like intentions in many natural objects.

polytheism

The word for God revealing God's will

revelation

the theology that Christianity has replaced on superseded Judaism as the one true religion. Such a view rejects not only Judaism but other religious traditions such as Islam or Buddhism as false. According to this view, there is only one true way to reach God. However, much has changed in modern times. Many modern Christians, particularly the Catholic Church since Vatican II, have rejected supersessionism.

supersessionism

belief in a God outside the natural world that intervenes in the world. Most Western religions are theistic, most Eastern religions are not.

theism

he biggest problem people have with classical theism is the problem of evil

theodicy

God is beyond the world

transcendent