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Religious Faith and Prometheus
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 January 2009
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Recent philosophy of religion, particularly neo-Wittgensteinian philosophy of religion, has reminded philosophers that there is more to religion than belief and, indeed, that there is more to religious belief than mere belief. D. Z. Phillips is among those who have made a contribution here. He has emphasized how religious belief is very different from the kind of belief that amounts to holding a hypothesis, even a God-hypothesis. However, perhaps because of his non-cognitivist tendencies, Phillips, unlike Kierkegaard to whom he often appeals, has failed to bring into relief another quintessential fact about belief in God, namely that it is for the believer an entered relationship with God. We do well to appreciate that belief in God is not identical with making a truth claim. But if the essential core of religious belief is construed as an attitudinal or affective response, as non-cognitivists tend to construe it, an important conceptual dimension of religious faith will all but be overlooked, as, paradoxically it seems it has been by the philosophical approach that strives to describe the religious ‘form of life’ in its own terms. In what follows I shall endeavour to bring into relief what I take to be an essential dimension of religious belief, one which presupposes that religious belief is an entered relationship for the believer. This I shall do by pursuing a contrast which, I think, at once clarifies and makes undeniable religious belief's essential nature as a relationship to God.
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References
1 One might think that Phillips would give an important place to the religious relationship to God, for he sees love and rebellion as forms of religious belief and each of these would seem to define, for the believer, a relationship to God. But he does not stress the status of love and rebellion as relationships; rather he seems to construe them as attitudes. (See ‘Faith, Scepticism and Religious Understanding’, reprinted in his Faith and Philosophical Enquiry (New York: Schocken Books, 1970), 31.)Google Scholar I suspect the reason Phillips hardly gives any attention to belief in God as a relationship is that if he were to do so he would have to allow that there is, for the believer, a Being to whom he has this faith relationship. And Phillips goes to great lengths to deny that God is an existent or that God can be said to exist.
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