الهیات تطبیقی
سال:1393 | دوره:5 | شماره:11 |تعداد مقالات:13

There is no doubt that religious knowledge, as part of human knowledge, could be a subject for epistemological researches and this is why a new discipline appeared called "religious epistemology". This branch of epistemology is in fact the result of application of epistemological approach to religious doctrines. Nowadays these issues are chiefly propounded by the philosophers of religion and often concern rationalism and fideism. Due to its general epistemic nature, religious knowledge is subjected to all general debates of epistemology. The peculiarities of this type of knowledge, nevertheless, have caused some particular issues to be propounded as to it beside the general and common issues and these new issues would have no application in other epistemic domain.

One of the longstanding questions in philosophy and theology is how to understand and analyze the meanings of attributes which are shared by God and human beings; whether these attributes are predicated to God in ordinary human sense or they have an alternative meaning? This question which initially concerned divine attributes but it gradually got expanded and came to be applied to all propositions of religion and thus different theories were developed about the language of religion. These theories are classified under two general categories: 1- meaningfulness of language of religion, 2- meaninglessness of language of religion.

Historical evidences suggest that human beings have been always in search of God in some form. Some believe that man is born with this divine sense. This ubiquitous quality of human beings is called primordial nature (fitrah). Many scholars have tried to demonstrate the existence of God through this shared quality of human individuals. In Islamic thought this latter intellectual effort has been designated as "argument from primordial nature" and in western theological and philosophical thought it is known as "argument from general consensus".