Abstract
A philosophical theory of religion ought to meet four criteria: it should be extensionally accurate, neutral, phenomenological, and non-circular. I argue that none of the popular theories of religion meet all these criteria, and that, in particular, the extensional accuracy criterion and the non-circularity criterion can’t be met without sacrificing extensional accuracy. I conclude that, therefore, religions do not form a kind, and so, there is no such thing as religion.
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Notes
The question hasn’t entirely disappeared. Peter Clarke and Peter Byrne have written an excellent monograph surveying the problem and several proposed solutions in their Religion Defined and Explained (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1993).
Problems of Religious Diversity (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 2001), p xiv.
Griffiths, p 10.
Another way to put this is that the process of theorizing should include reflective equilibrium. For a discussion of reflective equilibrium and its merits, see John Rawls (1971).
See for example Augustine, The City of God, chapter 18; Cyprian, Idols are not Gods, chapters 6 and 7; Justin Martyr, First Apology, chapter 5; and Origen, Contra Celsum, book III, chapter 2.
The Future an Illusion (New York: Anchor Books, 1964).
‘Toward the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law: Introduction,’ in Writings of the Young Marx on Philosophy and Society (New York: Anchor Books, 1967).
Religion in Society: a Sociology of Religion, 6th ed. (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 2001) p 13.
New York: Harcourt Brace, 1997, 8–9.
Steve Clarke lays out some of this conceptual territory in “The Supernatural and the Miraculous,” Sophia 46 (2007), 277–285.
I am grateful to an anonymous referee for Sophia for making me be clear on this point.
Christianity and the Encounter of the World Religions (New York: Columbia University Press, 1963), 4.
John W. Harvey, trans., The Idea of the Holy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1958).
Richard Crouter, trans., On Religion: Speeches to its Cultured Despisers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
John Hick argues in An Interpretation of Religion (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989) that they really are the same Reality, but he must invoke a complicated Kantian two-worlds view to get that result. Our theory of religion had better not presuppose all of that.
Sections 66 and 67.
I do not specify any examples because my choices may be tendentious; but this serves to illustrate that further fruitful theorizing is possible.
References
Rawls, J. (1971). A theory of justice pp. 48–51. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Rowe, W. L. (1968). Religious symbols and God: a philosophical study of Tillich’s theology pp. 20–21. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Schick, T. (2000). Methodological naturalism vs. methodological realism. Philo, 3, 30–37.
Scott, E. (1998). Two kinds of materialism: keeping them separate makes faith and science compatible. Free Inquiry, 18, 20.
Wheat, L. F. (1970). Paul Tillich’s dialectical humanism: unmasking the God above God pp. 252–257. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
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Webb, M.O. An Eliminativist Theory of Religion. SOPHIA 48, 35–42 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-008-0084-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-008-0084-1