Relation to the world· Philosophy of religion
Conflict
Axis: Faith and reason — How do faith and reason relate to each other: agreement, conflict, or indifference?
Faith and reason stand in opposition: believing without sufficient evidence means abandoning the demands of rationality. Critical examination of religious beliefs leads to rejecting them or, at the very least, suspending them.
Movements 1
The Enlightenmentexplicit
On religion the current makes common front even where it diverges about God: reason, not revelation or the Church, is judge in the last instance. Many hold revealed religion to be incompatible with it, mixed with superstition and fanaticism: it is the « Infamous Thing » that would « crush ». Others substitute for it a natural religion, or , attuned to reason: a clockmaker God without miracles or clergy. From this primacy follow the cardinal demand of and the separation of the civil from the religious: shows that no one can be compelled to believe, and that salvation is no concern of the State.
Voltaire, Treatise on Tolerance · Locke, A Letter Concerning Toleration
Philosophers 3
Camusexplicit
The reason that has acknowledged incurs a debt of lucidity: it cannot, without contradicting itself, turn its own failure to find meaning into proof of a hidden meaning. This is Camus's objection to the religious thinkers of existence, and : they describe the absurd admirably, then deify it, erecting reason's scandal into a reason to believe. This leap out of the evidence is an abdication, not a solution. Faith and reason therefore stand here in open conflict: the former eases the anguish only by conjuring away what the latter has seen, and only a reason that consents to its own limits, without filling them by , stays honest.
The Myth of Sisyphus (1942), "Philosophical Suicide"
Show inferred positions (2)
Schopenhauerinferable
Religion is the 'metaphysics of the people': true under the veil of allegory, false taken literally, it says in images what philosophy thinks in concepts. Faith and knowledge cannot honestly lodge in one and the same head, but the metaphysical need that feeds them both is ineradicable.
Parerga and Paralipomena, vol. II, 'On Religion: A Dialogue'
Humeinferable
Hume sets religious belief against the : no religion grounded in reason holds up, faith always exceeding the available evidence (hence the ironic fideist twist when he concludes that only a continued miracle, faith itself, makes one believe Christianity). Religious belief thus belongs to another register than knowledge, and where it claims to demonstrate (natural theology) it conflicts with rigorous reason.
Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, sect. X, conclusion (on faith) · Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, part XII