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A Neglected Avenue in Contemporary Religious Apologetics

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 October 2008

Henry B. Veatch
Henry B. Veatch
Affiliation:
Chairman of the Department of Philosophy, Georgentown University, Washington
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Extract

‘Apologetics’ is hardly a word to be used without apology in the present dispensation. And to speak of anything like a neglected avenue or opportunity in religious apologetics might almost seem as if one were speaking of an opportunity in just such an enterprise as no self-respecting philosopher would nowadays wish even to be associated with. For all of their avoidance of the term, however, the thing designated by the term is something with which not a few philosophers of recent years have been not above dabbling in, albeit usually under other names and other labels. After all, religious language has now come to be recognized as not just a legitimate, but even a fashionable object of philosophic attention. And a concern with religious language has often brought with it a concern with religious attitudes, religious behaviour, religious argumentation — yes, even to the point of occasionally becoming a concern with the very religious realities themselves that religious language, religious attitudes, religious behaviour, and religious argument are presumably all about. True, religious realities in this sense are to today's garden of philosophy pretty much what the tree of knowledge once was to the garden of Eden. In fact, one even suspects that there could be a serpent about somewhere, for cases have been reported of an occasional philosopher Adam or philosopher Eve having yielded to temptation: a consideration of God-talk has been known to lead to cautious admissions that such talk might be cognitively meaningful; a consideration of God-experiences to the admission that such experiences under certain circumstances could be veridical; or, even more rarely, a consideration of proofs for God's existence to the gingerly admission that at least some of these proofs might just possibly be valid. Needless to say, though, such a yielding to temptation on the part of some few contemporary philosophers, while it may not have led to any manifest sewing together of fig-leaves, has certainly brought with it the danger, if not always the reality, of a supercilious expulsion from the glorious Eden of contemporary professional philosophy.

Type
Research Article
Information
Religious Studies , Volume 13 , Issue 1 , March 1977 , pp. 29 - 48
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1977

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References

page 1 note 1 As reported by Elmer, Paul More in an essay, ‘Disraeli and Conservatism’ in Aristocracy and Justice (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1915), p. 171.Google Scholar

page 1 note 1 I do not mean to imply that Sir Karl Popper himself has ever either enumerated or characterized the enterprises that belong on the far side of the line in quite the way we have chosen to do.

page 1 note 1 Quite possibly, the implied inference in this example might strike many as having more of an affinity with a teleological than with a cosmological type of argument.

page 1 note 1 This contrast I have attempted to work rather more carefully in ‘A Case for Transempirical and Supernaturalistic Knowledge Claims’ in Induction, Confirmation, and Method: Essays in Honor of Herbert Feigl (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1963), pp. 391–405.Google Scholar

page 1 note 1 New Essays in Philosophical Theology, ed. by Flew, and Macintyre, (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1955), pp. 96–9.Google Scholar

page 1 note 1 But how can one speak of ‘the evidence of faith’? it might be asked. Surely, this is one time when one has only to quote Scripture, albeit in the King James version, to answer the question: ‘Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen’ (Hebrews t 11:1). In other words whatever one may think of its reliability, a revelation is by its very definition a kind of evidencing.

page 1 note 1 Flew may even have gone further than this and regarded such assertions as being downright meaningless, on account of their being either impossibly or at any rate somewhat oddly falsifiable.

page 1 note 1 Bultmann, Rudolf, Jesus Christ and Mythology (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1958), p. 63.Google Scholar

page 1 note 2 This term is obviously unfortunate and misleading, for if one wishes to maintain that religion is an affair of belief rather than knowledge, then religion becomes non–cognitive by definition. How–ever in our use of the term ‘non–cognitive’ in this connection we wished only to point up the currently fashionable view that religion is not merely non-cognitive in the sense of involving mere beliefs as opposed to cognitions, but non–cognitive in the further sense that even the beliefs of the religious man cannot be factual beliefs or beliefs about reality, and that even if one's religious beliefs should turn out to be true, this would not be truth in the usual sense of a truth of fact or a truth about reality.

page 1 note 1 Flew, and MacIntyre, , op. cit. pp. 99–100.Google Scholar

page 1 note 1 Quoted from Time magazine, 5 August 1974.Google Scholar