Religious Knowledge Systems
We believe in...
In 325 Constantine the Great convened a number of Christian Scholars from around the Mediterranean to discuss Christianity. Before this meeting the term ‘Christianity’ referred to diverse groups with a multitude of different different belief systems. The goal of this council in Nicea was to unify the definition of ‘Christianity’. They produced a creed, the Nicene Creed, which contains a number of knowledge claims about God including, “We believe... in one Lord Jesus Christ, the only Son of God, begotten from the Father before all ages, God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God…”. Since then the the claims established at this council have been repeated at Catholic ceremonies around the world for over 1500 years, they have caused arguments and schisms, and have been discussed in major works of theology. This history forces us to ask the question, “how do the scholars, priests, and other participants in these debates know?”
RELIGION and the WAYS OF KNOWING
Faith
The famous Atheist Bertrand Russell was once asked what he would say in the afterlife if he were confronted by God. He responded with, “Not enough evidence God! Not enough evidence”. For many people who do not share Russell’s opinion, faith without evidence is the point. If one knew, for example, that God and heaven were real, then there would be no choice. Everyone would behave according to God’s rules. These people would argue that we need the lack of evidence in order to make this a meaningful test. Faith isn’t simply a way of knowing in Religious Knowledge systems, it is the necessary foundation for the value of Religious Knowledge.
Reason
Though reason is often viewed in popular culture as distinct from religion, there are plenty of arguments for God that depend on reason. Among the most well-known are Anselm of Canterbury's ontological argument for God, or Thomas Aquinas’s teleological arguments.
Philosophers of religion will call our attention to the design of the universe and the laws of physics. These rules and limits to the way matter behaves can allow those philosophers to deduce the existence of a designer. These “design arguments” for God depend on reason; they attempt to logically argue for the existence of a creator.
Many critics of religion will say that it is impossible to use deductive reasoning to prove the existence of God, but defenders of religion will counter that they do not need deductive reasoning; they can use inductive reasoning that proves the likelihood of God.
There are also logical paradoxes in the field of religion. Can an all powerful God create an object so heavy that he cannot lift it? (for example). These logical paradoxes may simply be a shortfall of our language, which I’ll discuss below.
Instinct
In the Oxford Short Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion Tim Bayne calls us “Homo religiosus” because of our instinctual impulse toward religion. Human cultures throughout time, he says, have “embraced religious ideas as readily as we engage in singing, dancing, and telling jokes”.
The anthropologist Stewart Guthrie notes that this proclivity to believe in the outside agency of a Godhead has and evolutionary advantage. Our minds are hard wired to assume that there is an agent causing any change in our environment, and this would be valuable to our ancestors since a noise in the darkness could be dangerous. If we default to thinking that the noise no agent, or a harmless agent, then we would not survive as well as if we default to assuming the noise is created by a conscious agent. We instinctively look perceive agents.
Imagination
The conception of God as a creator appears in many cultures and many religions. When trying to understand the creation of the universe, Theologians will often discuss the universe as the product of divine imagination in the same way the C.S. Lewis created Narnia. This highlights the role of the creative imagination in Religious Knowledge systems by attributing creating as the result of the divine imagination.
Sense Perception
Can people experience God through the senses? Plenty of people in history have claimed to have seen or heard God. Moses saw and heard God in the burning bush, but if we accept that God is omnipresent, then God is located spatially. A good way to understand the relationship of these religious experiences is similar to our understanding of numbers. We can see representations of numbers, but cannot actually see the concept of five, for example.
There are many religious groups that claim Religious Experience can come from the physical world and through our sensual experience. The Baroque art of the Catholic Reformation, for example, the path of the Diamond Raft in Buddhism, and the Karma or Bhakti paths in hinduism all have elements of this philosophy.
A good place to research the relationship of Sense Perception to Religious knowledge Systems is William James’s classic The Varieties of Religious Experience.
Language
Language obvious plays a huge role in Religious Knowledge Systems. The Bible begins with an act of creation through language, “God said, Let there be light”. The book of John begins by saying, “In the beginning there was the word, and that word was God”. But outside of these obvious examples of language working within Religious Knowledge systems, there are many philosophical arguments related to the use of language.
One, for example, is an argument about whether words have the same meaning when applied to God that they have when you’re discussing your friend Mehmet. Like, if I say, “God created the clouds” does the word “created” mean the same thing as when I say, “Mehmet created the clouds”? If Mehmet actually found a way to create clouds, he probably did so by controlling the humidity and temperature of the room, but God would (or could) create clouds from nothing; Mehmet could never do that. The term given to the belief that the word “created” has the same meaning when applied to both is “univocal”. The term given to the belief that the word has an different meaning when applied to God (like how the word ‘bass’ means something different when applied to my voice or my dinner) is “equivocal”. A compromise between the two is termed “analogical” which states that the words mean the same thing, but when applied to god they have an extended meaning.
Additionally, when I use a word like, “ship” I understand that I have a positive concept of the word. I have seen ships before, so I have a way to confirm my conceptual understanding of the term. If I have never seen a ship before, then, as the Jewish philosopher Maimonides points out, I would have to arrive at my understanding “via negativa”- by understanding a “ship” by what it is not. Maimonides uses this idea to explain the way the word “God” functions in language.
Memory
Because Religious Knowledge Systems have such a close relationship to ritual and tradition, shared memories play a large role within religious communities. Whether this is leaving a wine glass for Elijah during Passover, or a dervish laying a rug for Rumi, the memory of past participants links a Religious knower back to a tradition of faith.
Emotion
In W.K. Clifford’s famous essay, “The Ethics of Belief” he claims that it is unethical for anyone to hold a belief without evidence. The most famous criticism of this philosophy comes from William James in his essay “the Will to Believe” and it uses emotion, or “passions” as James calls it. He argues that belief can morally exist before evidence, and that emotion can play a role in building that belief.
Kierkegaard believed more deeply in the role emotion plays in faith and Religion. He felt that emotion was a necessary element of religious devotion. Passionate devotion fueled by love, fear, compassion and other emotions is much more valuable knowledge than the objective and disinterested weighting of evidence in Religion.
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