Faith,
Skepticism and Philosophical Understanding
By D. Z. Phillips (1967)
The
relation between religion and philosophical reflection needs to be reconsidered. For the most part, in recent philosophy of religion, philosophers,
believers, and non-believers alike, have been concerned with discovering
the grounds of religious belief. Philosophy, they claim, is concerned with reasons; it considers what
is to count as good evidence for a
belief. In the case of religious beliefs, the philosopher ought to enquire into the reasons anyone could have for believing in the
existence of God, for believing that
life is a gift from God, or for believing that an action is the will of God. Where can such reasons be
found? One class of reasons comes readily to mind. Religious believers, when
asked why they believe in God, may reply in a variety of ways. They may say, `I have had an experience of the
living God', `I believe on the Lord Jesus Christ', `God saved me while I was a sinner', or, `I just can't help
believing'. Philosophers have not
given such reasons very much attention.
The so-called trouble is not so much with the content of the replies as with the fact that the replies are made by believers. The answers come from within religion, they presuppose the framework of Faith,
and therefore cannot be treated as evidence
for religious belief. Many
philosophers who argue in this way seem to be searching
for evidence or reasons for religious beliefs external to belief itself. It is assumed that such evidence and reasons would, if found, constitute the grounds
of religious belief.
The philosophical assumption behind the
ignoring of religious testimony as begging the
question, and the search for external reasons for
believing in God, is that one could settle the question of
whether there is a God or not without referring to the
form of life of which belief in God is a fundamental
part. What would it be like for a philosopher to settle
the question of the existence of God? Could a philosopher
say that he believed that God exists and yet never pray
to Him, rebel against Him, lament the fact that he
could no longer pray, aspire to deepen his devotion, seek
His will, try to hide from Him, or fear and tremble before
Him? In short, could a man believe that God
exists without his life being touched at all by the belief? Norman Malcolm asks with
good reason, 'Would a belief that he exists, if it were completely non-affective, really be a belief that he exists? Would it be anything at all? What is "the form of life" into which it would enter? What difference would it make
whether anyone did or did not have this belief?1
Yet many
philosophers who search for the grounds of religious belief, claim, to their own satisfaction
at least, to understand what a purely
theoretical belief in the existence
of God would be. But the accounts these philosophers give of what
religious believers seem to be saying are
often at variance with what many believers say, at least, when they are
not philosophizing. Every student of
the philosophy of religion will have been struck by the amount of
talking at cross purposes within the subject. A philosopher may say that there
is no God, but a believer may reply, `You are
creating and then attacking a
fiction. The god whose existence you deny is not the God I believe in.' Another philosopher may say that religion is meaningless, but another
believer may reply, `You say that
when applied to God, words such as
"exists", "love", "will", etc., do not mean what
they signify in certain non-religious contexts. I agree. You conclude from this that religion is
meaningless, whereas the truth is that
you are failing to grasp the meaning
religion has.' Why is there this lack of contact between many philosophers and
religious believers? One reason is
that many philosophers who do not believe
that God exists assume that they know what it means to say that there is a God. Norman Kemp Smith made a penetrating analysis of this fact when
commenting on the widespread belief
among American philosophers in his
day of the uselessness of philosophy of religion.
... those who are of this way of
thinking, however they may have thrown over
the religious beliefs of the communities
in which they have been nurtured, still continue to be influenced by the phraseology of religious
devotion - a phraseology which, in its endeavour to be concrete and universally intelligible, is at little pains to guard against the
misunderstandings to which it may so
easily give rise. As they insist upon,
and even exaggerate, the merely literal meaning of this phraseology, the God
in whom they have ceased to believe
is a Being whom they picture in an utterly
anthropomorphic fashion.2
The distinction between religious
believers and atheistical
philosophers is not, of course, as clear-cut as I have suggested. It is all too evident in contemporary philosophy of religion that many philosophers who do believe in
God philosophize about religion in the way which Kemp Smith found to be true of philosophical nonbelievers. Here, one can say either that their
philosophy reflects their belief, in which case they believe in superstition but not in God, or, taking the more
charitable view, that they are
failing to give a good philosophical account of what they really believe.
Insufficient attention has been paid to the question of what kind of philosophical enquiry the concept of divine reality calls for. Many philosophers assume that everyone knows what it means to say that there is a God, and that the only outstanding question is whether there is a God. Similarly, it might be thought, everyone knows what it means to say that there are unicorns, although people may disagree over whether in fact there are any unicorns. If there were an analogy between the existence of God and the existence of unicorns, then coming to see that there is a God would be like coming to see that an additional being exists. `I know
what people are doing when they worship,' a philosopher might say. `They praise, they confess, they thank, and they ask for things. The only difference between myself
and religious believers is that I do not believe that there is a being who receives their worship.' The assumption, here, is that the meaning of worship is contingently related to the question whether there is a God or not. The assumption might be justified by saying that there need be no consequences of existential beliefs. Just as one can say, `There is a planet Mars, but I couldn't care less,' so one can say, `There is a God, but I
couldn't care less.' But what is one saying here when one says that there is a God? Despite the fact that one need
take no interest in the existence of a planet, an account could be given of the kind of difference the existence of the planet
makes, and of how one could find out
whether the planet exists or not. But
all this is foreign to the question whether there is a God. That is not something anyone could find out. It
has been far too readily assumed that the
dispute between the believer and the
unbeliever is over a matter of fact.
Philosophical reflection on the
reality of God then becomes the philosophical reflection appropriate to an assertion of a matter of fact. I have tried to show
that this is a misrepresentation of
the religious concept, and that
philosophy can claim justifiably to show what is meaningful in religion only if it is prepared to examine religious concepts in the contexts from which they derive their meaning.3
A failure to take account of the above context has led some philosophers to ask religious language to satisfy criteria of meaningfulness alien to it. They say that religion must be rational if it is to be intelligible. Certainly, the distinction between the rational and the irrational must be central in any account one gives of meaning. But this is not to say that there is a paradigm of
rationality to which all modes of discourse conform. A necessary prolegomenon
to the philosophy of religion, then, is to
show the diversity of criteria of rationality; to show that the distinction between the real and the unreal does not come to the same thing in every
context. If this were observed, one
would no longer wish to construe
God's reality as being that of an existent among existents, an object among objects.
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. The
Hebrew-Christian conception of God is not a conception of a being
among beings. Kierkegaard emphasized the point when he said bluntly, `God does not exist. He is eternal.' 4
The distinction between eternity and existence has been ignored by many philosophers of religion, and as a result they have
singled out particular religious beliefs for discussion, divorcing them from
the context of belief in God. Alasdair MacIntyre has pointed out the importance of recognizing the need, not simply to discuss specific religious utterances, but to ask why such utterances are called religious in the first place.
Those linguistic analysts who have turned their attention to theology have begun to examine in detail particular religious utterances and theological concepts. This examination of the logic of religious language has gone with
a great variety of religious attitudes on the part of the
philosophers concerned. Some have been sceptics, others believers. But what their enterprise has had in common is an examination of particular religious forms of speech and utterance, whether such examination has been presented as part of an argument for or as part of an argument against belief. What
such examinations may omit is a general consideration of what it
means to call a particular assertion or utterance
part of a religious belief as distinct from a moral code or
a scientific theory.5
In his more recent work in the philosophy of religion, MacIntyre has said that the above distinction buys a position at
the price of cmptiness,6 but I
think his earlier view is the correct
one. It stresses the artificiality of separating
the love, mercy, or forgiveness of God from His nature. One cannot understand what praising, confessing, thanking, or asking mean in worship apart
from belief in an eternal God. The
eternity of the Being addressed determines the meaning of all these activities. One implication of this fact is that philosophers
who do not see anything in belief in
God can no longer think of their
rejection as the denial of something with
which they are familiar. Discovering that belief in God is meaningful is not like establishing that something is the
case within a universe of discourse
with which we are already familiar.
On the contrary, it is to discover that there is a universe of discourse we had been unaware of. The flattering picture that the academic philosopher
may have of himself as possessing the key to reality has to be abandoned. The philosopher, like anyone else, may fail to understand what it means to believe in an
eternal God.
In saying that one must take account
of the concept of the eternal if one wishes to understand various religious activities, I realize that I am laying myself open to all kinds of misunderstandings. Some religious believers, when they have wanted to turn aside the philosopher's questions, have
said, `Finite understanding cannot understand the
eternal,' or something similar. This is not what I am
saying. There is a proper place to say such things, that God is the
inexpressible, for example, but that place
is within religious belief. These are religious
utterances whose meaning is seen in the role they play in the lives of believers. Sometimes, however, the utterances are used as a form of protectionism
against intellectual enquiry. They began as religious utterances, but end up as pseudo-epistemological theories.' When this happens, the philosopher's censure is deserved. In
saying that human understanding cannot fathom the eternal, the believer is
claiming that there is some higher order of things that
transcends all human discourse, that religion expresses
`the nature of things'. In saying this, the believer
falsifies the facts. Such a position involves upholding what John Anderson calls
`a hierarchical doctrine of reality'.
... is to speak
on behalf of the principle of authority - and so again (whatever the actual power may be that is thus metaphysically bolstered up) to
support a low way of living. It is
low, in particular, because it is anti-intellectual, because it is necessarily
dogmatic. Some account can be given of
the relation of a particular `rule' or
way of behaving to a certain way of
life, but it can have no demonstrable relation to `the nature of things'. To say that something is required by the nature of things is just to say
that it is required - to say,
without reason, that it `is to be done';
and, as soon as any specification is attempted, the whole structure breaks
down. If, for example, we are told to do something because God commands us to do so, we can immediately ask why we should do what God commands - and any intelligible answer brings
us back to human relationships, to the struggle between opposing
movements."
I should like to make it quite clear that I agree with
Let
me begin by speaking of a distinction with which we are all familiar :
the distinction between mine and
yours.
The distinction is relevant to the
concept of justice. If I take what is yours, or if you take what is mine, justice is thereby transgressed against. Our
relationships with other people are
pervaded by a wide range of rights
and obligations, many of which serve to emphasize the distinction between mine and yours. But all human relationships are not like
this. In erotic love and in friendship, the
distinction between mine and yours
is broken down. The lovers or the friends may say, `All I have is his, and what is his is mine.' Kierkegaard says that the distinction between mine and yours has been transformed by a
relationship in which the key term is ours. Nevertheless, he goes on to show that the mine/yours
distinction is not completely transformed by such relationships,
since the ours now functions as a new mine for the partners in the relationships. The
distinguishing factor in the mine/yours
distinction is now the relation of
erotic love or friendship as opposed
to the self-love which prevailed previously. Mine and yours now
refer to those who are within and to
those who are outside the specific relationship.
Now, Christianity wishes to speak of a kind of love which is such that no man is excluded from it. It calls this love `love of one's neighbour'. What is more, it claims that this love is internally related to the love of God; that is, that without knowing what this love is, one cannot know what the love of God is either. An attempt to elucidate what is meant by love of the neighbour will therefore be an attempt to elucidate what is meant by the love of
God.
If one considers self-love in its simplest form - namely, as the
desire to possess the maximum of what one considers to
be good for oneself - it is
easy enough to imagine conditions in which such love
could be thwarted. War, famine, or some other natural
disaster might upset the normal conditions in which
rights and obligations operate. Even given such
conditions, the self-lover's ambitions may be thwarted by
the greater ingenuity of his competitors. Sooner or
later he may be forced to realize that the minimum rather
than the maximum is going to be his lot. Self-love
might be called temporal love in so far as it
depends on states of affairs contingently related to itself. If a man's life revolves
around self-love, it is obvious that he is forever dependent on the way things go, since it is the way things go that determines whether his self-love is satisfied or not.
It might be thought that erotic love and
friendship avoid the predicament of self-love
outlined above. The lovers or the friends may say to
one another, `Come what may, we still have each
other.' such reliance shows that this love too is temporal; it depends on certain states of affairs being realized. To begin with, the point of
such love depends on the existence of the other. Often, when the lovers or the friends
love each other very much, the death of the beloved can rob life of its meaning; for what is love without the beloved? Again, erotic love and friendship depend on the unchangeability of the beloved. But the beloved may change.
Friendship can cool, and love can fade. If the relationship
is such that it depended on reciprocation, then a change
in the beloved or in the friend may rob it of its point. So although erotic
love and friendship are far removed from self-love, they
too are forms of temporal love in so far as they are
dependent on how things go.
Temporal love, then, is marked by certain characteristics: it depends on how things go, it may change, and it may end in failure. Eternal love, it is said, is not dependent on how things go, it cannot
change, and it cannot suffer defeat. One must not think
that this contrast presents the believer with an
either/or. He is not asked to choose between loving God
on the one hand and loving the loved
one on the other. What he is asked to do is not to love the loved one in such a way
that the love of God becomes impossible. The death of the beloved must not rob life of its meaning,
since for the believer the meaning of
life is found in God. The believer
claims that there is a love that will not let one go whatever happens. This is the love of God, the independence of which from what happens is closely bound up with the point of calling it
eternal.
The object
of Christian love is the neighbour. But who
is the neighbour? The neighbour is every man. The obligation to love the neighbour does not depend on the particularity of the relationship, as in
the case of the love which exists between parents and children, lovers or friends. The neighbour is not loved
because of his being a parent, lover,
or friend, but simply because of his being. In relation to the agent, the love
takes the form of self-renunciation.
In this self-renunciation, man discovers
the Spirit of God. Consider how love of the neighbour exhibits the three characteristics I mentioned earlier:
independence of the way things go, unchangeability, and immunity from defeat. Kierkegaard brings out the contrast between love of one's
neighbour on the one hand, and erotic
love and friendship on the other, in
these terms.
The beloved can treat you in such a way that he is lost to you, and you can lose a friend, but whatever a neighbour does to you, you can never lose him. To be sure, you can also continue to love your beloved and your friend no matter how they treat you, but you cannot truthfully continue to call them beloved and friend when they,
sorry to say, have really changed. No change,
however, can take your neighbour from you, for it is not your neighbour who
holds you fast - it is your love which holds your
neighbour fast.10
For someone with eyes only for the prudential,
and common-sense considerations, the love which Kierkegaard is talking about seems to lead inevitably to
self-deception, and to a kind of
foolishness. On the contrary, Kierkegaard
argues, eternal love is precisely the only kind of love which can never deceive one. After a certain stage of unrequited love, no one could be blamed
for saying, `The lover has deceived
me.' It becomes intelligible and
justifiable to say this because the love in question does not have much point without some degree of reciprocation. At first sight it looks as if
the same conclusions apply to love of one's neighbour. But eternal love believes all things, and yet is never
deceived! Ordinarily speaking, we say
that only a fool believes all things;
only a man who ignores the odds could be so stupid. Yet, Christianity says that eternal love cannot be deceived, for if a believer is wrong about a man
but continues to love him, in what
sense is he deceived? True, one can
enumerate all the ways in which obvious deceptions have taken place: loans unreturned, promises broken, trusts betrayed, etc., but the
believer continues to love the
neighbour despite all this. Those who see
little in the love of the neighbour will say, especially if the believer is reduced to a state which many
would call ruin,
that the believer has lost all. On the contrary, Kierkegaard tells us, the believer, in the act of
self renunciation, possesses all; he
possesses love. To possess this love
is to possess God. Indeed, the only way in which the believer can be deceived is by ceasing to love. Ordinarily, when we say, `I shall show no more
love towards him,' we envisage the
loss as suffered by the person who is
the object of one's love. But if the believer says, `I shall love the neighbour no longer,' he is the victim of deception, since the loss of loving is
his loss too. Kierkegaard brings this
point out very clearly:
When someone says, `I have given up my love for this man,' he thinks that it is this
person who loses, this person who was the
object of his love. The speaker thinks
that he himself possesses his love in the same sense as when one who has supported another financially says, `I
have quit giving assistance to him.' In this
case the giver keeps for himself the money which the other previously received, he who is the loser, for the giver is certainly far from losing
by this financial shift. But it is
not like this with love; perhaps the one who was the object of love does
lose, but he who `has given up his love for this man' is the loser. Maybe he does not detect this himself; perhaps he does not detect that the language mocks him, for he
says explicitly, `I have given up my love.' But if he has given up his
love, he has then ceased to be loving. True enough, he adds `my love for this man', but this does not help when love is involved, although
in money matters one can manage
things this way without loss to oneself. The adjective loving does not apply to me when I have given up my love `for this man' - alas,
even though I perhaps imagined that he was the one who lost. It is the same with despairing over another
person; it is oneself who is in despair.11
In this way, Kierkegaard illustrates the truth that for the believer, love itself is the real object of the relationship between himself and another person. This love is the Spirit of God, and to possess it is to walk with God. Once this is realized, one can see how love and understanding are equated in Christianity. To know God is to love Him. There is no theoretical understanding of the reality of God.
If anyone thinks he is a Christian
and yet is indifferent towards his being a
Christian, then he really is not one
at all. What would we think of a man who affirmed that he was in love and also that it was a matter of indifference to him ?12
`But, so far,' the non-believer might complain, `you have simply concealed the advantage entailed in religion, namely, God's love for the sinner. Is not this the reason
for love of the neighbour? Unless one loves the
neighbour, God will not love one.' There is truth in this unless, but not as conceived in the above objection. The love of the neighbour is not the means whereby
a further end is realized - namely,
one's own forgiveness. On the contrary, there
is an internal relation between forgiving
another and being forgiven oneself. I cannot hope to emulate Kierkegaard's analysis of this religious truth, so I must ask the reader to forgive a final
quotation of two passages where his
analysis is particularly forceful:
When we say,
`Love saves from death,' there is straightway a reduplication in
thought: the lover saves another human being
from death, and in entirely the same
or yet in a different sense he saves himself
from death. This he does at the same time; it is one and the same; he does not save the other at one moment and at another save himself, but in the moment he saves the other he saves himself from
death. Only love never thinks about
the latter, about saving oneself, about acquiring confidence itself; the
lover in love thinks only about giving
confidence and saving another from
death. But the lover is not thereby forgotten.
No, he who in love forgets himself, forgets his sufferings in order to think of another's, forgets all his wretchedness in order to think of another's, forgets what he himself loses in order lovingly to
consider another's loss, forgets his
advantage in order lovingly to look
after another's advantage : truly, such a person is not forgotten. There is one who thinks of him, God in heaven; or love thinks of him. God is love, and when a human being because of love
forgets himself, how then should God
forget him! No, while the lover
forgets himself and thinks of the other person, God thinks of the lover. The self-lover is busy; he shouts and complains and insists on his rights
in order to make sure he is not
forgotten - and yet he is forgotten. But the lover, who forgets himself, is remembered by love. There is one who thinks of
him, and in this way it comes about
that the lover gets what he gives.13
And again :
`Forgive, and you will also be forgiven.' Meanwhile, one might nevertheless manage to understand these words in such a way that he imagined it possible to
receive forgiveness without his
forgiving. Truly this is a misunderstanding.
Christianity's view is: forgiveness is forgiveness:
your forgiveness is your forgiveness; your
forgiveness of another is your own forgiveness : the forgiveness which you give you receive, not
contrariwise that you give the
forgiveness which you receive. It is
as if Christianity would say: pray to God humbly and believing in your forgiveness, for he really is compassionate in such a way as no human being is; but if you will test how it is with respect to the
forgiveness, then observe
yourself. If honestly before God you
wholeheartedly forgive your enemy (but remember
that if you do, God sees it), then you dare
hope also for your forgiveness,
for it is one and the same. God
forgives you neither more nor less nor otherwise than as you forgive
your trespassers. It is only an illusion to
imagine that one himself has forgiveness, although one is slack in forgiving
others. 14
My purpose in discussing the Christian
concept of love was to show how coming to see the
possibility of such love amounts to the same thing as
coming to see the possibility of belief in God. As I said
earlier, to know God is to love Him,
and the understanding which such knowledge brings is the understanding of love.
Belief, understanding, and love can all be
equated with each other in this context. There are,
however, certain objections which can be made against this
conclusion. Before ending, I want to consider one of
the strongest of these made recently by Alasdair MacIntyre:
And if the
believer wishes to he can always claim that we
can only disagree with him because we do not understand him. But the implications of this defence
of belief are more fatal to it than
any attack could be. 15
One of the fatal implications of identifying understanding and believing, according to Maclntyre,
is that one can no longer give an intelligible
account of a rejection of religious belief. MacIntyre says that the Protestant who
claims that grace is necessary before one can possess religious understanding
is soon convicted of paradox.
For the Protestant will elsewhere deny
what is entailed by his position, namely that
nobody ever rejects Christianity (since anyone who
thinks he has
rejected it must have lacked saving grace and so did not understand Christianity and so in fact rejected something else)."
Does MacIntyre's point hold for
any identification of understanding and believing? I
suggest not. To begin with, there is a perfectly natural
use of the word rejection which is connected with the
inability of the person who rejects to make any sense of
what is rejected. I can see no objection to saying that the man
who says that religion means nothing to him rejects the
claims of religion on his life. Apparently, when Oscar Wilde
was accused of blasphemy during his trial, he replied
`Sir, blasphemy is a word I never use.' Wilde is rejecting a certain way of talking. Similarly, the man who says, `Religion is mumbo jumbo as far as I am concerned,' is making a
wholesale rejection of a way of
talking or a way of life. That way of
talking and that way of life mean nothing to him, but this does not mean that he cannot reject them.
On the other hand, I agree with MacIntyre
that there are difficulties involved in the view I wish to maintain if the rejection of religion in question is not the
rejection of the meaningless, but
rebellion against God. Camus says of
the rebel:
The rebel defies more than he denies.
Originally, at least, he does not deny God, he simply
talks to Him as an equal. But it is not a polite
dialogue. It is a polemic animated by the desire to
conquer."
But if the rebel knows God and yet defies Him, how can one say that to know God is to love Him?
Clearly, some kind of modification of
my thesis is called for. I
agree. But what is not called for is a denial of the ' identification of belief and
understanding in religion. ; The
fact of rebellion makes one think otherwise because ; of a false and unnecessary assimilation of `I believe in ' God' to `I believe in John'. Belief in
God has a wider range of application than belief in
another person. This. point has been made very clearly by
Norman Malcolm:
Belief in a person primarily connotes
trust or faith: but this is not so of belief in God. A
man could properly be said to believe in God whose
chief attitude towards God was fear. ('A sword is sent upon you, and who may turn it back?')
But if you were enormously afraid of another human being
you could not be said to believe in him. At least
you would not believe in him in so far as you were afraid of him: whereas the
fear of God is one form of belief in Him.
I am suggesting that belief-in has a wider meaning when God is the object of it than when a human being is. Belief in God encompasses not only trust but also awe, dread, dismay, resentment, and perhaps even hatred. Belief in God will involve some affective state or attitude, having God as its object, and those attitudes
could vary from reverential love to rebellious rejection."
I should still want to argue, however,
that the love of God is the primary form of belief in God if only because the intelligibility of all the other attitudes
Malcolm mentions is logically
dependent on it. The rebel must see
the kind of relationship God asks of the believer before he can reject and defy it. He sees the
story from the inside, but it is not a
story that captivates him. The love of
God is active in his life, but in him it evokes
hatred. To say that he does not believe
in God is absurd, for whom does he hate if not God?
Similar difficulties to those mentioned by MacIntyre might be thought to arise in
giving an account of seeking for God. If one must believe
before one can know God, how can one know that it is God
one is seeking for? The answer to this difficulty has been
given by Pascal: `Comfort yourself,
you would not seek me if you had not found me.' One
must not think of belief in God as an all-or-nothing
affair. Whether the love of God means anything in a
man's 'life can be assessed, not simply by his attainments,
but also by his aspirations. So even if a man does not
actually love God, his understanding of what it means
to love God can be shown by his aspirations towards such
love.
On the other hand, it would be a mistake to conclude that in the absence of religious attainments only religious aspirations could be the sign that religion held some meaning for a person. We have seen already in the case of the rebel that belief in God need not entail a worshipful attitude on the part of the believer. Neither need the believer aspire to attain love of God. On the contrary, he may want
to flee from it. Instead of feeling sad because
he spurns God's love, he may hate the fact that he cannot rid his life of God. If someone were to say to him, `You do not
believe in God', he might reply, `How can
you say that when God will not leave me alone?'
What, then, are our conclusions? The assertion that to know God is to love Him is false if it is taken to imply that everyone who believes in God loves Him. What it stresses, quite correctly, is that there is no theoretical knowledge
of God. As Malcolm said, `belief in God involves
some affective state or attitude'. I think that love of God is fundamental in religion, since all other attitudes can be explained by reference to it. I
believe that Kierkegaard says
somewhere that in relation to God there are only lovers - happy
or unhappy - but lovers.
The unhappy or unruly lover has an understanding of what it means to believe in God as well as the happy
lover. The man who construes religious belief
as a theoretical affair distorts it. Kierkegaard emphasizes that there is no understanding of religion without passion. And when the
philosopher understands that, his understanding of religion is incompatible with scepticism.
References
1. `Is it a Religious Belief that "God
Exists"?' in Faith and the Philosophers, ed.
John Hick,
2. `Is Divine
Existence Credible?' in Religion and Understanding, ed. D. Z. Phillips, Blackwell, 1967, 105-6.
3. See
pages 1-5 of the previous chapter.
4. Concluding Unscientific Postscript, 296.
5. `The Logical Status of Religious Belief', in Metaphysical Beliefs, ed. A. MacIntyre,
6. See `Is Understanding Religion
Compatible with Believing?' in Faith and the Philosophers, ed. John Hick,
7. See ch. V.
8. Art and Morality', Australasian
Journal of Psychology and Philosophy, XIX (December, 1941), 256-7.
9. Anyone acquainted with Kierkegaard's Works of Love will recognize
in what follows how dependent I am on the second part of that work.
10. Op. cit., 76.
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