Philosophy of religion and the mirror of nature: Rorty's challenge to analytic philosophy of religion

Abstract

G.E. Michalson, Jr. has recently argued that theologians and historians of religion need to take seriously contemporary philosophical debates about such issues as the analytic/synthetic distinction and that between necessary and contingent truths.1 He has persuasively shown that attending to the work of philosophers like Quine, Sellars and Rorty may lead us to question one of our most fundamental assumptions about the relationship between faith and historical knowledge, namely, that the necessary (or absolute) truths of faith cannot rest on the contingent truths of historical research. In this paper, I want to extend Michalson' s analysis and to argue that taking these philosophers seriously leads, not merely to a reassessment of the relationship between faith and history, but to review of a whole philosophical discipline, analytic philosophy of religion. What I wish to argue is that the recent work of Richard Rorty in particular has significant consequences for this discipline, and that analytic philosophers of religion neglect Rorty at their peril. For his own part, Rorty believes that accepting the work of Quine and Sellars leads one to question the very notion of "analytic" philosophy and he attempts to show how their arguments undermine much contemporary work in the field. He does not, however, discuss analytic philosophy of religion in his work, and that is what I would like to do here. What I am going to do in this paper then, is to examine the work of one contemporary philosopher of religion, Richard Swinburne, in the light of Rorty's critique of contemporary analytic philosophy. What I hope to show is that Swinburne's programme is wholly incompatible with the epistemological behaviorism that Rorty endorses in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature,2 and in the Consequences of Pragmatism.3 The matter is, I think, as straightforward as this: if Rorty is right, if we ought to be pragmatists in our thinking about truth and knowledge, then Swinburne's approach to religious belief and knowledge, and by extension the approach of most analytic philosophers of religion, is radically misguided. To see why this is the case will be the objective of this paper.