Philosophy and religion

The distinguishing marks of formal philosophy that I have so far identified are marks of intellectual inquiry in a literate culture. Like all such intellectual inquiry, it involves systematic, abstract, general theorizing, with a concern to think critically and consistently, some­times in the company of thinkers long dead.

I have argued that evidence and reasons are central to this sys­tematic enterprise, even if they are not sufficient to pick one con­ceptual scheme as the only correct one. Even as the Azande became literate, they might have developed a style of thought with the marks of literate intellectual life while still having a conceptual scheme different from ours.

But the development of literacy would almost certainly have one other important consequence for them, which it has had for the Western intellectual tradition. It would lead to an intellectual divi­sion of labor. Just as, in industrialized societies, there has been an increasing specialization of material production—think how many different skills go into the design, the making, the distribution and the sale of a car—so there are many different skills, trainings and institutions involved in the production and transmission of ideas. Even within, say, physics, there are not only many subdivisions of subject matter—astronomy, particle physics, condensed-matter the- ory—but also many jobs within each of the fields—laboratory tech­nicians, theorists, experimentalists, teachers, textbook authors, and so on.

One of the ways in which our high degree of intellectual division of labor shows up is in comparison, once more, with the intellectual life of the Azande. They did not have this substantial proliferation of kinds of theoretical knowledge. Though they did have what Evans­Pritchard called “witch-doctors,” any adult male could conduct an oracle or perform magic or hunt, because most people shared the same concepts and beliefs. Any senior person in Zande society would be a source of information about their beliefs about gods, spirits, witchcraft, oracles, and magic.

In the Western tradition, by contrast, many of our central intel­lectual projects are carried out by specialists. Questions about God—which, if there is a God, are as important as any questions could be for us—are studied in our culture by a variety of different sorts of experts. Though metaphysics, for example, addresses theo­logical questions, as we have seen, it shares that task with theology and with other kinds of Western religious thought. Similarly, theo­ries of the ultimate constitution of nature are central to any folk phi­losophy; once more, though metaphysics and the philosophy of sci­ence address these questions, they share them with the natural sciences.

But, unlike Zande religion, Western religions—Christianity and Judaism—are deeply bound up with writing, and without writing, physics would be impossible.

It is easy enough to point to one thing that distinguishes formal philosophy from Western religion as a whole. Religion involves not only theories about how the world is and should be, but also specific rituals—the Jewish seder, the Catholic Mass, the Protestant Lord's Supper—and practices such as prayer. These are all practices a philosopher could engage in; but in doing so, he or she would not be acting as a philosopher but as a believer.

But there is, of course, a reason why it is so natural to think of philosophy and religion together, a reason that is connected with what I said at the beginning of this chapter. All religions—even those, like Buddhism, that believe neither in God nor in systematic theory—are associated with a view of human life, of our place in the world, and of how we ought to live. And such a connected set of views is often called a “philosophy of life.” The philosophy of life of a modern woman or man is, in effect, the folk philosophy of a liter­ate culture.

The questions formal philosophers ask are relevant to these issues; studying formal philosophy can change your philosophy of life. For a literate intellectual, it is natural to think systematically about these questions. But if one is also religious, that systematic thought will involve not only the sorts of philosophical question I have raised in this book but questions of theology also. It is impor­tant, therefore, to distinguish philosophy from theology, the critical intellectual activity that is a part—but only a part—of modern reli­gion, as, indeed, it was only a part of the religion of the European Middle Ages.

One crucial difference between philosophy and most theology is that, in philosophy, we do not usually presuppose the truth of any particular religious claims.

Though there are, then, some ways of distinguishing most theol­ogy from most philosophy of religion, they have not so much to do with subject matter as with issues that have, in the end, to do with the way in which philosophy and theology have been institutionalized as professions. Philosophy of religion addresses religion with the training of philosophers. That means, in part, that it uses the same tools of logic and semantics, the same concepts of epistemology and ethics, that philosophers use outside the philosophy of religion. Christian theology, on the other hand, is closely bound both to tradi­tions of interpreting a central text, the Bible, and to the experience of the Christian church in history. Jewish religious writing is similarly tied to the Torah and to other texts and rooted, similarly, in Judaism's history. Islam, too, draws on a tradition of texts, judgments, and inter­pretations. But because the central questions of theology are cru­cially relevant to the central questions of human life, it should not be a surprise that philosophers and theologians often come to ask the same questions. Someone who cares—as, surely, we should—about whether religious claims are true may want to follow both these routes to a deeper understanding of religion.

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