Brendan Sweetman

Evolution, Chance, and God looks at the relationship between religion and evolution from a philosophical perspective. This relationship is fascinating, complex and often very controversial, involving myriad issues that are difficult to keep separate from each other. Evolution, Chance, and God introduces the reader to the main themes of this debate and to the theory of evolution, while arguing for a particular viewpoint, namely that evolution and religion are compatible, and that, contrary to the views of some influential thinkers, there is no chance operating in the theory of evolution, a conclusion that has great significance for teleology. One of the main aims of this book is not simply to critique one influential contemporary view that evolution and religion are incompatible, but to explore specific ways of how we might understand their compatibility, as well as the implications of evolution for religious belief. This involves an exploration of how and why God might have created by means of evolution, and what the consequences in particular are for the status of human beings in creation, and for issues such as free will, the objectivity of morality, and the problem of evil. By probing how the theory of evolution and religion could be reconciled, Sweetman says that we can address more deeply key foundational questions concerning chance, design, suffering and morality, and God's way of acting in and through creation.

This unique textbook--the first to offer balanced, comprehensive coverage of all major perspectives on the rational justification of religious belief--includes twenty-four key papers by some of the world's leading philosophers of religion. Arranged in six sections, each representing a major approach to religious epistemology, the book begins with papers by noted atheists, setting the stage for the main theistic responses--Wittgensteinian Fideism, Reformed epistemology, natural theology, prudential accounts of religious beliefs, and rational belief based in religious experience--in each case offering a representative sample of papers by leading exponents, a critical paper, and a substantial bibliography. A comprehensive introductory essay and ample cross-references help students to contrast and evaluate the different approaches, while the overall arrangement encourages them to assess the full range of philosophical positions on the issue. Carefully selected to provide both a comprehensive overview of current work and a series of modern perspectives on many classic sources--Swinburne's detailed discussion of Hume's critique of the design argument, for example, as well as an entire section evaluating and extending Pascal's famous Wager--the essays also provide a uniquely readable survey that will be useful in a wide range of undergraduate and graduate courses in philosophy of religion and epistemology.

This paper is a critical reflection and response to the religious fideism of D. Z. Phillips, and especially to recent attempts to defend this fideism. Over the course of his career, Phillips argued for a number of interesting but quite dramatic theses about religious belief, including the claim that what is sometimes called the propositional nature of religious belief is frequently misunderstood by philosophers, and that this misunderstanding involves a distortion of what religious believers are doing when they say they believe in God and engage in various religious practices. This paper explores these and other claims in the light of recent interesting attempts to defend them, especially in the work of Patrick Horn. I elaborate the distinction between the propositional and expressive dimensions of religious belief, and argue that Horn does not succeed in rescuing Phillips’s view from a number of serious philosophical objections, including the objection that theirs is a metaphorical interpretation of religion. I suggest also that Horn’s and Phillips’s fideistic versions of religious belief and religious phenomena may involve an element of self-deception, and would likely lead to people giving up their religious beliefs, or at least to their beliefs playing a decreasing role in their everyday lives.

This is a study of Marcel's valuable and unique contribution to contemporary epistemology, which originated out of his existentialist critique of traditional Cartesian philosophy. Marcel argues that Descartes conceives the self as a discrete entity, distinct from the body, which "looks out" upon the external world, and apprehends it by means of clear and distinct ideas, ideas which can be understood without reference to the world. This view motivated Descartes's epistemological project, and the project of the tradition that followed. The existentialist critique, therefore, if successful, would be important. ;My aim is: to explicate and defend Marcel's understanding of the human subject as the basis for a critique of Cartesianism; and to establish that Marcel's view has radical implications for some central problems of traditional philosophy. ;In the first half of the study, I consider Marcel's view of the subject: the nature of human embodiment; the distinction between the realm of mystery , and the realm of problems ; and the ontological priority of the former over the latter. I explain and defend Marcel's claim that the individual subject's ideas always involve a body and a world which partly constitute their particular character. Marcel concludes from this that the "objective knowledge" of Cartesianism, including scientific knowledge, is founded on abstractions from the level of "being-in-a-situation" where we actually live, and must be understood in terms of this "situated involvement", not vice versa. ;The remainder of the study considers the implications of this conclusion for the traditional problems of: skepticism ; internal/external relations; necessary connections; identity; and the existence of God. ;Marcel's approach is unique because he avoids, unlike Heidegger , the problematic conclusion that mental content is not necessary at the ontologically basic level. He also avoids the conclusion that human understanding is merely interpretative, for he rejects the view that concepts are holistic. In short, he is one of the only philosophers to successfully attack atomism while at the same time avoiding monism

© 2013 The Editors of The Philosophical QuarterlyMary Warnock's book is an attempt to address in a short space a large theme: ‘some aspects of the role of religion, and therefore the idea of God, in the twenty‐first century, as it relates to legislation and politics’. Along the way she raises many subsidiary themes, including the historical influence of religion on the law, the tension between religion and liberalism, the difficulty of providing a philosophical foundation for secularist ethics, and the problems of pluralism and relativism that have pervaded such discussions. Her approach to these timely but complex topics is through the lens of various pieces of legislation that came through the British Parliament over the past 40 years or so, including in the House of Lords, of which she was a member for more than twenty years. In particular, she discusses legislation relating to abortion, research...

French existentialist philosopher Gabriel Marcel is one of the most influential thinkers of the twentieth century. The central themes of his philosophy, which are developed with a blend of realism, concreteness, and common sense, continue to be relevant for the plight of humanity in the twentieth-first century. Marcel's thought emphasizes: the attempt to safeguard the dignity and integrity of the human person by emphasizing the inadequacy of the materialistic life and the unavoidable human need for transcendence; the inability of philosophy to capture the profundity and depth of key human experiences, and so the need to find a deeper kind of reflection; the importance of the experience of inter-subjectivity, which Marcel believes is at the root of human fulfillment, and which also finds expression in the transcendent dimension of human experience, a dimension that cannot be denied without loss, and that often gives meaning to our most profound experiences. Marcel is also one of the few contemporary thinkers who manages to do justice to the subjectivity and individuality of the human person, while avoiding the relativism and skepticism that has tended to accompany these notions, and that has plagued contemporary philosophy after Heidegger. He makes an unwavering effort to challenge the moral relativism and spiritual nihilism of his French rival, Jean-Paul Sartre, and of other representative existentialist philosophers. All of Marcel's important ideas are introduced here, ranging from his unique conception of philosophy; to his original approach to epistemology and the nature of knowledge; to his view on the nature of the human person, including the idea of being-in-a-situation and the importance of the "context" that the subject lives in for the subject's ideas and experiences; to his approach to religious themes, including the issues of the rationality of religious belief, the question of God's existence, and our longing for the transcendent; and his "concrete approaches" of fidelity, hope, love and faith. There are also selections in which he discusses some of his misgivings about the direction of contemporary culture, especially the effects of technology. Brendan Sweetman is Professor of Philosophy at Rockhurst University, Kansas City, MO. He has published over seventy articles and reviews. He is president of the Gabriel Marcel Society.

This article examines Gabriel Marcel’s unique approach to the existence of God, and its implications for traditional philosophy of religion. After some preliminary remarks about the realm of “problems” (which would include the “rational”), and about the question of whether Marcel thinks God’s existence admits of a rational argument, Part I explains his account of how the individual subject can arrive at an affirmation of God through experiences of fidelity and promise-making. Part II proposes a way in which Marcel’s own philosophical and phenomenological approach could be regarded as a type of argument for the existence of God. The last section suggests that Marcel’s approach offers an advance upon the views of William Alston and John Hick concerning the analysis of religious experience.

James A.K. Smith has argued that postmodernism and religious belief can have a positive relationship. I argue against his views in this paper. I begin with a brief overview of what I take postmodernists to be saying, before examining Jean-Francois Lyotard's views on language-games, legitimation, and universal reason, concepts to which he appeals to support his claim that we should have incredulity toward metanarratives. I next look at how Smith appeals to Lyotard's ideas to argue that the biblical metanarrative escapes the postmodernist critique. I argue that Smith fails to show how religion would escape the postmodernist critique, because he fails to provide an analysis of what "religious faith" means. I illustrate that on any of the standard meanings of this phrase, his argument faces serious objections. I show that the epistemological and moral relativism of postmodernism means that not only is the postmodernist critique itself problematic, but it is not possible for religious belief to welcome this critique and retain its integrity, especially in the political realm.