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References
Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press (Collection Philosophica, 40), 1989.
Faith After Foundationalism, (London: Routledge, 1988). Here, Phillips addresses not only traditional Christian apologetics, but that of those inspired by so-called “Reformed epistemology” (such as Alvin Plantinga and Nicholas Wolterstorff).
God, Scepticism and Modernity, p. 17.
Phillips’s work is well known. Besides that cited earlier, noteReligion without Explanation (Oxford: Blackwell, 1976),Belief, Change and Forms of Life (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press International, 1986),Faith and Philosophical Enquiry (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970). See also Dilman’s “Wisdom’s Philosophy of Religion I” and “Wisdom’s Philosophy of Religion II” inCanadian Journal of Philosophy, Vol. V, No. 4 (1975), pp. 473–496; 497–522.
For example, Phillips explicitly denies that there can be a “neutral rational justification of religion”. See hisBelief, Change and Forms of Life (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press International, 1986), p. 4.
See also the putative cosmological argument given atRomans 1∶20. “For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead.”
Belief, Change and Forms of Life, (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press International, 1986), p. 81.
Belief, Change and Forms of Life, (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press International, 1986), p. 14.
It is, perhaps, revealing that much of the debate on the nature and meaning of religious beliefs, focuses on the more general claims like “God exists” and “God is transcendent”, and rarely (if ever) on such utterances as “Jesus is the Messiah”.
Religion Without Explanation, p. 181. Similarly, Phillips considers the example of parents praying for their child lost in a wreck. Is this, he asks, a blunder or a genuine religious activity? “Do the parents believe that all true prayers for the recovery of children lead to that recovery?” If, he says, one answers “yes”, beliefs like these become “testable hypotheses”. But, Phillips continues, “perhaps the activities have a different meaning… The parents may be making their desires known to God, wanting the situation which has occasioned them to be met in Him… The beliefs involved are not testable hypotheses, but ways of reacting to and meeting such situations. They areexpressions of faith and trust (emphasis ours).Faith and Philosophical Enquiry, pp. 101–102.
Thus, Phillips understands Jesus’s utterance that a man must be prepared to leave his father and mother and follow him, not as meaning “that children should forsake their parents. What Jesus was trying to show… is that for the believer the death of a loved one must not make life meaningless.”Faith and Philosophical Enquiry, pp. 99–100.
“Faith, Skepticism and Religious Understanding,” inReligion and Understanding, ed. D.Z. Phillips (New York: The Macmillan Co., 1967), p. 65. See alsoBelief, Change and Forms of Life, pp. 63 and 69.
In “Wisdom’s Philosophy of Religion,” (p. 473) Dilman argues that “[b]elievers do speak of their beliefs as true and this makes perfectly good sense”. But his reader soon discovers that, in saying a belief is true, Dilman means that it is a “measure” or a “means of assessment” (op. cit., p. 485), but not something that itself corresponds to such a measure.
This is no caricature of Phillips’s view. He writes, for example, that: “Coming to see that there is a God is not like coming to see that an additional being exists. If it were, there would be an extension of one’s knowledge of facts, but no extension of one’s understanding. Coming to see that there is a God involves seeing a new meaning in one’s life and being given a new understanding.” See “Faith, Skepticism and Religious Understanding”, p. 68.
See his contribution to the “ Theology and Falsification” debate (inNew Essays in Philosophical Theology, ed. A. Flew and A. MacIntyre, London: SCM Press, 1955). See also John Hick’s notion of eschatological verification in “Theology and Verification,” inTheology Today, XVII, 1 (1960).
SeeProcess and Reality (New York: The Free Press, 1978), p. 9.
God, Scepticism and Modernity, p. 32.
God, Scepticism and Modernity, p. 8.
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Earlier versions of this paper were read to the Departments of Philosophy at the University of New Brunswick and at Saint Francis Xavier University and to the Canadian Societh for the Study of Religion at Queen’s University, Kingston. The authors wish to thank the participants for their comments.
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Sweet, W., O’Connell, C. Empiricism, fideism and the nature of religious belief. SOPH 31, 1–15 (1992). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02772483
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02772483