Can religion be understood philosophically?

Abstract

The question whether religion can be understood philosophically might seem to deserve as an answer a self-evident Yes. And that, for two reasons. First, it is in the nature of philosophical concepts, unlike the concepts of the physical or human sciences, that they can be applied to any entity whatsoever; they are not regional. Concepts that do not have that universal range of applicability are not philosophical concepts. Second, there already exists a discipline called philosophy of religion which, in more recent developments, is clearly distinguishable from philosophical theology. Nonetheless, the question is worth raising because religious phenomena are different enough from the other ones that philosophy studies to suggest the possibility that they may present special difficulties. The phenomena of the physical world and human society, including the historical and sociological as well as the individual aspects of them, are all in one way or another subsumable under the ideas of the self and the world. They all fit in one way or another under the overarching ideas of freedom and causality. Religious phenomena are different. While they have human and cosmic dimensions to them, involving aspects of the human self as well as the appearances of the world, their intention is not exhausted by these human and cosmic aspects. In the end, they cannot be fully understood by reference just to the ideas of the self and the world, in whatever combination of freedom and causality, but must be referred as well to the idea of God or to the idea of the unconditioned, that which both is and is not anything or nothing. But is it possible to make anything intelligible under the idea of God instead of under the ideas of the self and the world? Can a philosophy of religion find concepts that do not refer matters to subjectivity in its freedom or to objectivity in its causal ordering but to a third idea which is neither of the two?