Revelation and the Loss of Authority

So far, we have looked at what happens when religious belief is put at the mercy of some of our philosophical methods. Defences of and attacks on belief in God may become defences of and attacks on a philosophical chimera, a metaphysical belief which has little to do with a living faith. We have seen that one influential route by which this epistemic divide is created is the assumption that our epistemic practices are themselves a form of belief which presuppose a conception of reality independent of them. The question then arises of how, on the basis of these practices, we can ever be confident that we are in touch with reality. In the case of religion, this becomes the question of how we can ever get from the world to God. I have argued that the cosmological argument is a fatally flawed attempt at concept-formation, attempting by what Kierkegaard calls an infinite approximation to get to God. This is the God argued over, for and against, by the friends of Cleanthes in twentieth-century philosophy of religion. Despite claiming to be realists, philosophers in this tradition can give us only probabilities. They cannot get to grips with the sense of the claim that a transcendent God really dwells in our midst. Their empiricism can only yield philosophical realism. What we need in religion, as elsewhere, is realism without empiricism. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.