This resource is endorsed by OCR for use with specifications H173 and H573 AS and A Level GCE Religious Studies.
In order to gain OCR endorsement, this resource has undergone an independent quality check. Any references to assessment and/or assessment preparation are the publisher’s interpretation of the specification requirements and are not endorsed by OCR. OCR recommends that a range of teaching and learning resources are used in preparing learners for assessment. OCR has not paid for the production of this resource, nor does OCR receive any royalties from its sale. For more information about the endorsement process, please visit the OCR website, www.ocr.org.uk.
Copyright © Dennis Brown and Ann Greggs 2018
The right of Dennis Brown and Ann Greggs to be identified as Authors of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2018 by Polity Press
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All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-1801-2
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Brown, Dennis, 1955- author.
Title: Philosophy of religion for OCR : the complete resource for component 01 of the new AS and A Level specifications / Dennis Brown, Ann Greggs.
Description: Medford, MA : Polity, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017048522 (print) | LCCN 2018007097 (ebook) | ISBN 9781509518012 (Epub) | ISBN 9781509517978 (hardback) | ISBN 9781509517985 (pbk.)
Subjects: LCSH: Religion--Philosophy--Textbooks.
Classification: LCC BL51 (ebook) | LCC BL51 .B77 2018 (print) | DDC 210.76--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017048522
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
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Dennis dedicates this book to his brothers Robin and Brian, and to the memory of our parents, Robert and Jean Brown
Ann dedicates her first book to her son, Billy, with all of her love and her apologies that it is not a Pokémon book
This book is the result of an interesting journey for the authors – at times enjoyable, stimulating, frustrating and all-consuming. We could not have completed it without the help of many people. We would like to thank everyone at Polity Press who has been involved in the project, especially Pascal Porcheron, Ellen Macdonald-Kramer, Neil de Cort and Leigh Mueller, who have worked tirelessly with us and have shown enthusiasm, creativity and patience in their editorial and production roles at every stage. The book is much better for their input.
Thanks are also due to Polity’s anonymous readers for their helpful comments on various chapters in the early stages, as well as our long-suffering ‘guinea-pigs’ – sixthform students at The Manchester Grammar School (MGS) who have played a valuable part in the book’s evolution, providing us with honest and sometimes forthright feedback, and sharpened the book’s clarity and exercises.
Ann would like to thank Dennis for his continued friendship, support and patience throughout the writing process – without him, she would not have had this opportunity. Ann also thanks her friends Michael, Gemma and Melanie for their unwavering ability to make her laugh. She also pays homage to her family, Patricia, Robert, Jaqueline, Paul, Thomas, Heather, Colette and Adrian, and thanks them for always believing in her, no matter what.
Dennis would like to thank Ann for her agreement to write half the book in half the time, for her intelligence and her determined and practical approach to the dynamics of writing under pressure. He would also like to thank members of the Religion & Philosophy department at MGS for various conversations on aspects of the book, in corridors on the way to lessons, in classrooms or in the department office. Their advice was always germane and their understanding of topics perceptive.
The authors and publishers are grateful to all who gave permission to reproduce copyright material. While every attempt has been made to acknowledge all the sources we have drawn upon, we would like to apologise if any omissions have been made and would invite any such copyright holders to contact Polity Press, so that these may be rectified in future editions.
Why should you study the Philosophy of Religion? A simple and quick answer is that you have chosen to take Religious Studies at AS or A Level and Philosophy of Religion is on the specification. A longer and more interesting answer is that philosophy of religion is concerned with some of the most important and enduring questions that human beings ask.
Philosophy of religion used to be thought of as an activity that only theologians engaged in, who used it as a means of justifying their belief in God, in particular the Judaeo-Christian God. During the twentieth century, however, it began to be associated with a more philosophical, rational approach that took it away from purely ‘religious’ discussions, whose purpose was to justify belief in God, towards a nonconfessional approach that focused on philosophical thinking about religion. The outcome of this shift was that philosophy of religion began to be studied by people who had no religious beliefs at all, and is now studied in the same way as the philosophy of science or the philosophy of psychology.
As you will soon discover in this book, Philosophy of Religion studies the ideas and belief systems of religions, and asks whether God’s existence may be proven, what God’s defining characteristics may be, about the relationship between God and the world – including the question of human suffering – and the nature of and difficulties with religious language. It has a very long history, reaching back, in the western tradition, to Plato and his student Aristotle. These two philosophers have had a fundamental and long-lasting influence on the development of Christian philosophy and belief. To take just one example, Aquinas was particularly influenced by Aristotle’s theory of causality and he developed this in the direction of the Cosmological argument for God’s existence. Aquinas, in his turn, has been hugely influential concerning more modern discussions relating to how religious believers talk about God and whether religious language holds any real meaning.
As you work your way through this book, you will be faced with technical terms that you may not have come across before, but you will find help with these in the definition boxes and in the glossary at the end of the book. Initially, you may find it difficult to understand what the philosophers are saying because their language is different from yours, but you will soon learn to understand what they mean. Perseverance will bring benefits. Do not give up!
We hope that you will find your journey into philosophy of religion interesting, stimulating and challenging. By the end of your study of philosophy of religion, we trust that you will have learned something about this subject and, perhaps, about yourself. Good luck!
It should be clear to you that the authors want you to enjoy reading this book and learning about philosophy of religion. We have designed it so that it will help you not just to pass the AS / A Level exam you are studying for, but to achieve the highest grade you are capable of. The chapters follow the structure of the AS and A Level specification very carefully and each chapter is designed to be relatively self-contained and to cover the knowledge and skills you will need to succeed in the Philosophy of Religion section of the course.
To this end, we have highlighted important terms in the margins. They are also included in a comprehensive Glossary at the end of the book. You should use these for consolidation of your learning and also for revision purposes, when you are preparing for your examination. The list of Further Reading at the end of each chapter will point in the direction of specific sources of information on individual topics – following these up will be an excellent way of extending your knowledge and understanding and also of exploring in further detail the topics that interest you.
The chapter summaries outline the key points that you need to know after studying each chapter and you can use these as revision checklists as you complete the work in each chapter. If you do not feel confident about everything outlined in the summary, you should read back through the chapter again to refresh your memory. At the end of each topic, some ‘thought points’ are included to help you revise the topic. You should attempt these as they will really help you practise for your exams and also give you an indication of how ready you are.
Each chapter also contains a number of exercises to get you thinking about the topic in question, and for you to talk through with your fellow students and your teacher. These are important, as you will consolidate your learning as you work through the chapters and debate some of the arguments and counter-arguments throughout the course. This practice really is the best way to learn about the topics and to work out your own opinions on the areas covered in the course.
There are a number of websites mentioned in the book and, while you should always proceed with caution when using resources from the internet, they can provide a valuable resource to further your knowledge and understanding of topics.
Welcome to your course in Philosophy of Religion for OCR. Philosophy of Religion is a flourishing field of study in schools and universities and contains a varied range of topics. Though there is considerable debate about the nature and scope of the subject, we may define it as ‘philosophical reflection on religious ideas’. Philosophical reflection involves the analysis of words and sifting of the evidence for arguments and claims. Underlying these debates are important issues about what reality is like and how much we can know about it. With this definition, we are implying that Philosophy of Religion is primarily about rational argument. For others, however, especially those who come to Philosophy of Religion from their own faith perspective, they may place less importance on logical arguments and more on their own personal experience of God in the ways in which they engage with other people and with the world.
As you will learn from this book, philosophy of religion has been studied and discussed for thousands of years across the world and in different cultures, from the Indus Valley civilization, Asia, China, Greece and Rome, worldwide through Christianity and Islam and into the modern world. During the last 100 years, there have been a number of interesting developments in the Philosophy of Religion that have stimulated philosophers to re-engage with the ancient debates and formulate answers that will satisfy 21st-century minds. Possibly the most significant development has been the Logical Positivist movement, which declared that all language, not just religious language, was only meaningful if it could be ‘verified’, or was able to be checked using empirical evidence. Philosophers of religion, such as John Hick and Alvin Plantinga, developed arguments attempting to justify the continuing value of religious language. In your course, you will be studying some of these ancient debates and their more recent developments.
One distinctive feature of this textbook lies in its attention to the history of ideas.
Ideas are not treated as though they float around in the abstract. They emerge from and give impetus to movements and periods of change. Technology such as the printing press at the time of the Protestant Reformation was to distribute ideas across Europe at a pace that had never been seen before. Just think that, a little over 100 years after Karl Marx’s death, one-third of the world’s population is living under the influence of his thought. Attention to the history of ideas, along with the analysis of primary texts, is central to the study of Philosophy at university. But even in A Level study, understanding how the biographies, times and ideas of key thinkers interact can bring Philosophy of Religion to life. So, you should keep in mind the flow of ideas and a sense that thinkers are often moved to write in opposition to influential movements or writers of their day. Kant, for example, wrote that Hume awoke him from his ‘dogmatic slumbers’. He was moved to justify his knowledge claims and to meet Hume’s scepticism. As you read through the chapters, try to situate thinkers in their periods and enquire into the changing times in which ideas emerge. Often it is the artists, poets, engineers and inventors who innovate change. The philosophers articulate new social, political, religious or cultural movements in language, and make these ideas more clearly understood. So, you should refer back to the timeline on page x as you read through this book and seek to build up a mental picture of when key thinkers were writing and how their context may have shaped their ideas or account for what they were reacting to.
Before we begin the journey, however, there are some important technical terms in Philosophy of Religion that are widely used in discussion of the topics you have to study and which you are expected to know and understand. It is worth giving some information about them here so that you will be able to recognize their meaning when you encounter them in individual contexts throughout the book.
One of the important topics you will cover in your course concerns arguments for the existence of God, but arguments will be central in discussion of any idea in any of the topics you will study. Before you look at those, it is important that you are aware of how the word ‘argument’ is used in philosophical debate. Many arguments have been proposed throughout the ages in attempts to persuade or prove that God exists or that God does not exist. The word ‘argument’ has several meanings. It can mean a synopsis of a longer piece of work – you summarize its ‘argument’. More commonly, it can mean a disagreement you might have with someone else. You might think that it was a ‘good’ argument, or a ‘bad’ one, depending on whether you ‘won’ it or not. You might have lost your temper, shouted, lied, said hurtful things about the other person or forced your view on them. As you might guess, this is not the sense in which a philosophical argument would proceed. An argument in the philosophical or logical sense is about producing reasons in favour of your point of view and reasons against that of your opponent.
Philosophical arguments are made up of reasoning that is set out clearly in various steps. For instance, if I were to argue that it would be a bad idea to pour marmalade into my car engine, my reasoning would involve my knowledge of the detrimental effect of marmalade on sophisticated machinery. The steps of the argument would be:
Certainly, this is a silly example, and philosophical arguments tend to be much more sophisticated and complex, as you will see.
In philosophy, there are two kinds of argument – deductive and inductive. Deductive arguments can either be valid or invalid. ‘Valid’ is a term used to show that the argument is logically consistent. Deductive arguments are thought to be valid if and only if the conclusion follows automatically from the premises, and the premises imply no other possible conclusion. Consider the following simple example:
All Scotsmen wear kilts
Donald is a Scotsman
Therefore, Donald wears a kilt.
If we put this argument into a symbolic form, it becomes:
All Ps are Q
R is a P
Therefore R is a Q.
It does not matter what is substituted for P, Q and R. The result will always be a valid argument. If the premises are also factually correct (sound), the conclusion is 100 per cent certain. This is called a proof. Philosophers of religion who have searched to find a ‘proof’ of the existence of God must have a logically valid argument as well as sound premises. This is an extremely difficult task – some would say an impossible one – as a proof is a rare thing.
Inductive arguments are different. To begin with, the truth of the premises of an inductive argument do not entail the truth of the conclusion, but instead they create a greater or lesser probability that the conclusion is true. Inductive argument is the sort of reasoning that a detective would use to gather evidence in solving a crime.
The following is an example of inductive reasoning:
Now, these four premises do not provide us with 100 per cent certainty that the conclusion ‘Ronnie is guilty’ is true.
Notice that the conclusion does not follow automatically from the premises. The premises could all be true, yet the conclusion false. For example:
You may decide, on balance, that it is more probable that Ronnie is guilty. Perhaps you may feel that realistically the weight of evidence outweighs the possibility of him being innocent. Whatever decision you come to, you are, in this case, using inductive reasoning. Notice, however, that none of this evidence makes his guilt or innocence 100 per cent certain. Strictly speaking, inductive arguments cannot provide us with proof, nor can they be described as valid or invalid. Inductive arguments are simply stronger or weaker depending on how well they provide evidence for their conclusion.
Thomas Aquinas introduces the two kinds of argument in relation to God’s existence: ‘Demonstration [of God’s existence] can be made in two ways: One is through the cause, and is called a priori … The other is called a demonstration a posteriori’ (Summa Theologica, 1, 2, 2).
This is a Latin phrase and means ‘from what comes before’. It refers to knowledge that is not dependent on sense experience. For instance, ‘a triangle has three sides’. This is obviously a sentence that does not need to be checked by looking for evidence. It is a tautology and therefore true by definition.
In terms of the Philosophy of Religion, it is particularly linked with the Ontological argument for God’s existence (see chapter 5 pages 84–8). The term has a long history in philosophical discussion, from its use by Euclid in his book Elements in c.300 BCE, through several philosophers in the Middle Ages – such as Albert of Saxony in the fourteenth century – to Kant in the eighteenth century. Since Kant’s time, it has been used widely.
This is another Latin term, meaning ‘from what comes after’, and is also a way of thinking. A posteriori knowledge is dependent on sense experience and is usually called empirical knowledge. If I were to say ‘it is raining today’, anyone listening would be able to check whether this was correct by looking at the sky. We can make observations like this by using our senses and this is the normal way that almost everyone operates. We can make judgements on the basis of sense experience and these judgements may be factually correct or incorrect. The difficulty with a posteriori arguments is that conclusions based on them may change. For instance, at one time, the statement ‘the earth is flat’ would have been correct, but it is not today. Another difficulty with it is that we can never be sure that what we perceive with our senses is the same as what someone else perceives. This is particularly noticeable with perception of colour, where I may see a wall as red, while someone else may see it as a different shade of red or even pink. In this sense, then, a posteriori arguments can only ever be partially persuasive, never wholly convincing. There will always be some level of doubt in such an argument. This will be especially important to remember when we look at the Teleological and Cosmological arguments for God’s existence.