PRAGMATIC REALISM, RELIGIOUS TRUTH, AND ANTITHEODICY: ON VIEWING THE WORLD BY ACKNOWLEDGING THE OTHER, BY SAMI PIHLSTRÖM

Abstract

Reviewed by: Pragmatic Realism, Religious Truth, and Antitheodicy: On Viewing the World by Acknowledging the Other by Sami Pihlström Ulf Zackariasson Sami Pihlström Pragmatic Realism, Religious Truth, and Antitheodicy: On Viewing the World by Acknowledging the Other Helsinki: Helsinki University Press, 2020. xiv + 195 pages (with index) Within the philosophy of religion (as in most philosophical disciplines), there are several different views on what to consider the discipline’s most fundamental topic. The answer that you offer at the meta-level is often more important than the concrete answers you, in the next stage, offer to that question which you have identified as the question to attend to. The identification serves, namely, as a hermeneutical principle for understanding and addressing other topics within the discipline. As regards analytic (in a broad sense) Anglo-American philosophy of religion, there has, for a long time, been a general agreement that the fundamental topic that philosophers of religion should attend to is God’s existence. Hence the centrality of the theism/atheism divide. This has led to a strong focus on various forms of arguments for and against God’s existence, the possibility of using religious experiences as evidence for the existence of God, and so on. There are, of course, important historical explanations for why philosophy of religion in the West has been so prepossessed with the theism/atheism debate. What is important for present purposes is that the predominance of the theism/atheism divide has had substantial consequences for the ways philosophers of religion have approached both the realism debate and the problem of evil. When the realism/anti-realism/non-realism debates began to attract much attention in philosophy of science and other areas of philosophical inquiry, the most common response from both theism and atheism-leaning philosophers was to simply take for granted that genuine religious faith—whatever that is— must be metaphysically realist. Various forms of anti- or non-realism [End Page 620] were often simply dismissed by theists as covert forms of atheism, and by atheists as dishonest religious attempts to shield faith from critical scrutiny. The theodicy/antitheodicy debate suffered, in the heyday of the theism/atheism-debate’s dominance, a similar fate: just as theism needs metaphysical realism, it needs a theodicy to explain why the fact that the omnipotent and benevolent God seems so horrifyingly indifferent to human, animal and environmental suffering should not lead atheism. It was hard for both theists and atheists to take non-realist analyses of religious faith very seriously; thus it was also hard to fathom the point of a religious anti-theodicist outlook (although there are, of course several exceptions to these general trends). I have taken this detour because it helps set the stage for Pihlström’s Pragmatic Realism, Religious Truth, and Antitheodicy. Pihlström has, for some years now, sought to develop a pragmatic philosophy of religion which treats the theodicy/antitheodicy question as the fundamental topic and hence hermeneutical principle for understanding and addressing other topics within philosophy of religion, and this volume offers a rather brief yet rich illustration of the implications, and pragmatic promise, of such a philosophical reorientation. One of its bearing ideas, Pihlström insists, is that “the problem of evil and suffering is fundamentally a problem concerning the appropriate way(s) of seeing our place in the world, as finite and limited human beings” (ix). To acknowledge and refuse to instrumentalize or reduce others’ suffering is hence a sine qua non of any promising philosophical outlook. In other words, Pihlström’s research project can be seen as an attempt to view philosophy of religion from the perspective of an antitheodicist form of pragmatic realism. Pragmatists have a tense relationship to questions of realism, where different divides tend to arise between “classical pragmatism” versus “neo-pragmatism” or between adherents of the allegedly realist-leaning C.S. Peirce on the one hand, and the not-so-realist leaning William James and John Dewey (and the Putnam-Rorty debate moves in the same neighborhood). Whereas pragmatists tend to agree rather strongly where epistemology is concerned (that is, how to conduct inquiry), there is significantly less agreement on...