J. L. Schellenberg

Only 6 years have passed since I last published a critical survey article on the divine hiddenness discussion. But more than 60 papers and books dealing with hiddenness themes have been published in that time. Not all can be addressed here. Moreover, to enable a reasonable treatment of those that will make an appearance, I shall break the present survey into two parts. I begin in this piece with recent work—including my own—on the argument descended from Schellenberg (), which started the discussion. Part 2, yet to come, will consider ways in which this area of inquiry has recently been enlarged beyond its original parameters.

Offered here is Part 2 of a two-part critical survey of recent work in philosophy on divine hiddenness. Part 1 surveyed recent development of the discussion initiated by my 1993 book on the subject. Here, I examine some related work that expands the scope of the hiddenness discussion. Some of the enlargements take further the discussion of Stephen Maitzen's work on the demographics of theism. Others introduce new hiddenness problems and ways of dealing with them. A third category of new work urges theological constraints, of one sort or another, on hiddenness reasoning, thus raising new methodological issues.

For various reasons, traditional theism has dominated philosophical discussions of religion in the west, but things are starting to change. Some today are advocating a focus on alternative detailed conceptions of the Divine. Others, such as John Hick, say we need an understanding of God that takes us entirely beyond detailed conceptions. This chapter argues that the first approach does not go far enough and that the second goes too far. The mediating position it defends would have us focus instead on a claim the author calls _ultimism_, which is much more general than theism and other detailed religious claims though entailed by them and not without significant content of its own. The chapter brings to bear both scientific and religious considerations in a defense of this alternative approach.

In this paper I explore and defend the idea that those who struggle intellectually in theistic religious practice can be given a good reason to persist in it by treating their continuing practice as a way of paying tribute to people and projects and personal relationships and indeed to the whole moral dimension of human life, expressing how important and profoundly significant these things are to them. This ‘tribute of faith’ is a gesture that one makes with one’s life—a moral gesture. The key thought is that the sayings and other doings of a religious life allow one to treat the world as one in which the things, such as projects and people, that are, for one, most deeply imbued with moral value will achieve fulfilment—a fulfillment that without the truth of religious claims they would often be denied.

In this paper, we aim to get clear about why renewal is needed in philosophy of religion and how to achieve it. We begin with a fundamental distinction between someone’s perspective in the field and the perspective of the field, arguing that any philosopher of religion is responsible to both. Then we identify eight problems that should prevent the status quo in philosophy from appearing acceptable to anyone who takes the perspective of the field, as well as seven practical suggestions which, if implemented, would help to solve these problems. The problems include such things as tribalism, ignorance about religion, and viewing issues exclusively in terms of what is religiously familiar; the mitigations such things as allowing non-Christians to join the Society of Christian Philosophers, broadening the education of philosophers of religion, and paying more attention to the deep history of religion.

Here I show how thinking of inquiry as immature can illuminate problems about metaphysical and scientific realism. I begin with the question whether human beings at the very beginning of systematic inquiry who held themselves to be thus situated, temporally speaking, and came to recognize their inability to prove or probabilify the truth of metaphysical realism would have been justified in believing or accepting metaphysical realism even so. Drawing on broadly Wittgensteinian ideas I defend an affirmative answer. Then I extrapolate from this result, arguing by analogy that acceptance of both metaphysical realism and scientific realism is justified for us today.

I seek to promote a fuller understanding of religious skepticism by defending five theses. These concern, respectively: its breadth, discussed in relation to theism on the one hand and naturalism on the other; why it should be distinguished from a general metaphysical skepticism; how it is supported by the consequences of recent cultural evolution, which at the same time enable new and stronger arguments for atheism; the relations it bears to non-doxastic religious faith; and, finally, its curious capacity in certain not uncommon circumstances to take the form of a soft irreligion that is widely approvable—even from a religious perspective.

"There is no attempt here to lay down as inviolable or to legislate certain ways of looking at things or ways of proceeding for philosophers of religion, only proposals for how to deal with a range of basic issues-proposals that I hope will ignite much fruitful discussion and which, in any case, I shall take as a basis for my own ongoing work in the field."-from the Preface Providing an original and systematic treatment of foundational issues in philosophy of religion, J. L. Schellenberg's new book addresses the structure of religious and irreligious belief, the varieties of religious skepticism, and the nature of religion itself. From the author's searching analysis of faith emerges a novel understanding of propositional faith as requiring the absence of belief. Schellenberg asks what the aims of the field should be, setting out a series of principles for carrying out some of the most important of these aims. His account of justification considers not only belief but also other responses to religious claims and distinguishes the justification of responses, propositions, and persons. Throughout Prolegomena to a Philosophy of Religion, Schellenberg is laying the groundwork for an elaboration of his own vision while at the same time suggesting how philosophers might rethink assumptions guiding most of today's work in analytic philosophy of religion.

In this provocative work, J. L. Schellenberg addresses those who, influenced by science, take a negative view of religion, thinking of it as outmoded if not decadent. He promotes the view that transcendently oriented religion is developmentally immature, showing the consilience of scientific thinking about deep time with his view. From this unique perspective, he responds to a number of influential cultural factors commonly thought to spell ill for religion, showing the changes – changes favorable to religion – that are now called for in how we understand them and their proper impact. Finally, he provides a defense for a new and attractive religious humanism that benefits from, rather than being hindered by, religious immaturity. In Schellenberg's view, religion can and should become a human project as monumental as science.

Distinguishing between the old atheism, the new atheism, and modest atheism, and also between belief and acceptance, and belief and acceptance tokens and types, I defend the disjunctive view that either modest atheistic belief or modest atheistic acceptance, construed as type, is today epistemically justified in the context of philosophical inquiry. Central to my defence is a deductive version of the hiddenness argument and an emphasis on the early stage of philosophical inquiry that we presently occupy.

The problem of Divine hiddenness, or the hiddenness problem, is more and more commonly being treated as independent of the problem of evil, and as rivalling the latter in significance. Are we in error if we acquiesce in these tendencies? Only a careful investigation into relations between the hiddenness problem and the problem of evil can help us see. Such an investigation is undertaken here. What we will find is that when certain knots threatening to hamper intellectual movement are unravelled, the hiddenness problem emerges as a contender in its own right—one that may generate serious difficulties for theism regardless of conclusions drawn concerning the force of the problem of evil.