What Is The Philosophy Of Religion And What Are The Difficulties And Possibilities Of Such A Study?

The philosophy of religion takes religious beliefs and asks how they are to be understood, if they make sense, and if they fit with the rest of our knowledge of the universe. Philosophy cannot show that a religion is either right or wrong. What it can do is; show that its beliefs are either logical or illogical, that its language is best understood literally or metaphorically, and the degree to which its beliefs are compatible with other beliefs that people might hold to be true.

Very few people suddenly convert to Christianity in the middle of their life. Unless of course they are finding it difficult to get on with life, so they want God to help them to get back on top of things. Richard Dawkins of Oxford thinks that children catch religion of their parents like some sort of virus! I too believe that it is when we are children and very impressionable we have religion forced upon us by our parents.

Of course, by philosophising on religion, some people find more reasons to believe in God. For example, Descartes would say that denying God's existence is like denying the fact that a triangle has three sides. Descartes argument comes in the fifth of his Meditations on First Philosophy. Here Descartes says that by the word 'God' we mean 'a supremely perfect being'. In addition, this definition of 'God', he continues, allows us to conclude that God really exists. Why? I hear you cry. Because, Descartes argues, existence is 'a certain perfection'. If God is by definition something supremely perfect and if existence is a perfection, it follows that God, by definition, exists and that to deny that this is so, is to contradict oneself. This is the ontological argument, in short it means that if God is the greatest thing imaginable, then he must exist. For if he did not you could think of some thin greater than God, something with all god's qualities, but which did actually exist. .

The most appealing argument of all to Christians is the Cosmological argument. This is the argument that everything has a cause, i.e. we often say that something exists because something else would not be there if the first thing did not exist. For example, beer would not exist unless somebody had made the beer. To break it down into a few easy sentences: Everything that's begins to exist has a cause for its existence. The universe begins to exist. Therefore, the universe must have a cause. That was the Kalam argument.

The third main argument for god existence is the teleological. It argues that the sense of purposeful design we see in nature suggests that the world has a designer, which is God.

In conclusion, you can see that there are a lot of interesting essays and books which have come from this subject. It is very interesting the way religion and science go head to head. As you can see, it is very difficult to prove anything through these arguments but it is still fascinating.

Sources:

An Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion by Brian Davies