PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION RESEARCH (NAMAH-I HIKMAT)
Year:2023 | Volume:21 | Issue:2|Papers Count:12

Prayer and supplication to God, which is originally a religious concept, has always been a challenge for theologians and philosophers, especially philosophers of religion, from various philosophical, ethical, epistemological, and linguistic perspectives. Focusing on the concept of answered prayer, this article investigates one of its most important philosophical challenges, that is, explaining the compatibility of answered (effective) prayer with the divine attributes of immutability and impassibility by referring to the principles of Mullā Ṣadrā’s philosophy. There is considerable potential in this philosophical system for an innovative explanation which can be called the “Answering-by-Disclosure” Model (ADM) and is achieved through an analytical-descriptive method using library resources. In ADM, the divine immutability and impassibility in the process of answering prayers do not require God to change from potentiality to actuality, but is a kind of disclosure and differentiation of His hidden and undifferentiated attributes. In addition, the effect of the servants’ prayers on God’s decision has been explained in terms of their existential poverty and pure need, which play an important role in maintaining the existential distinction between the creator and the creature in its strongest meaning. Enjoying justified rational principles, presenting a model compatible with the common and conventional understanding of answering prayer, as well as providing an explanation appropriate to the divine realm are among the advantages of ADM in comparison to the models proposed by other Muslim and Christian theologians. Being endowed with a powerful philosophical explanation, it can be more resistant to the challenges proposed in the philosophy of religion.

Given that the ultimate goal of text interpretation is to understand the author’s intentions, one must consider how to justify the beliefs formed through this process. This paper argues that interpretation relies on explanatory inference. The traditional meaning of words alone cannot definitively determine the author’s intent; therefore, one must propose semantic hypotheses that can account for the textual evidence in order to grasp it. The interpretation that best aligns with this evidence is then regarded as the true meaning of the text. This implies that interpretation, much like the methodology of empirical sciences, is grounded in inferential reasoning. Consequently, both empirical sciences and the interpretation of sacred texts are founded on explanatory inferences drawn from available evidence. Furthermore, it is important to note that both domains, natural phenomena and religious texts, attribute their evidence to God from a religious perspective. Consequently, a faithful believer cannot prima facie give more validity to one domain than the other or favor one over the other, assuming an insurmountable conflict between the two.

Conciliationism is one of the famous approaches to the epistemic challenge of peer disagreement. However, this approach faces many problems, the most important of which is skepticism: an agent ought to suspend judgment about any belief over which she encounters peer disagreement. Ghazaleh Hojjati in “Conciliationist Approach to the Challenge of Religious Disagreement,” tried to answer this problem relying on the non-instrumental (or synchronic) reasons. In this article, I scrutinize and examine this answer proposed by Hajati. After comparing non-instrumental reasons in empirical sciences, on the one side, and in religion and philosophy, on the other side, I try to show that although in empirical sciences, non-instrumental reasons are independent and impartial, non-instrumental reasons in religious issues will probably be biased and non-independent. Nonetheless, a conciliationist asserts that the sides of disagreement are rational to keep their opinions only when using independent and impartial non-instrumental reasons. Hence, it seems that Hojjati’s response cannot refute the skepticism resulting from conciliationism in religious (or philosophical) debates.

Contemporary English physicist, Stephen Hawking, by authoring The Big Plan and introducing the M-theory, brought the long-running conflict between science and religion to a new level. Despite Hawking's claim of the ‘death of philosophy’, he has used some philosophical principles in his M-theory. This paper, using the descriptive-analytical method, seeks to evaluate these principles. The most important philosophical foundations on which M-theory is based are: (1) Scientism, as the most fundamental basis of M-theory; (2) Instrumentalism, ccording to which laws and theories are merely some instruments for predicting phenomena, lacking any physical reality; (3) Denial of causality, which has been inferred from the ‘uncertainty principle’ and the ‘principle of accident.’ After explaining these foundations, some significant objections have been directed to them, the most important of which are: scientism neglects the limitations of the empirical-experimental method and excludes other epistemological sources; instrumentalism, besides denying the scientific realism, results in accepting contradicting theories; Denial of causality, which is due to a misunderstanding of this philosophical concept, destroys any real connections between the objects in the world. Finally, it is concluded that these fundamental criticisms really challenge M-theory’s validity.

Feminist theology, mainly, is committed to dealing with theology to empower and liberate women. The theologian feminists have taken three approaches to traditional Christianity: revolutionary, reformist, and reconstructionist. Mary Daly, as a revolutionary feminist theologian, strongly criticizes traditional Christianity which, she believes, is based on unreformable sexism. She, using the method called transcendence, transcends the central Christian concepts and teachings such as God the Father, Christology, the Fall, and the Church, and expresses her main ideas in the form of post-Christian theology. In this article, by the method of text-oriented analytical interpretation, Daly's major ideas are explained and analyzed, including the concepts of goal, faith, freedom, ethics, and sisterhood, all of which can be actualized via ‘becoming of woman.’ To understand ‘becoming of woman’ from Daily's point of view, it must be understood in correspondence with God as Verb (the Verb of Verbs). God as Verb, as the ultimate reality, is Be-ing and is always dynamic. Similarly, women also have a type of be-ing that has the ability for existential participation and dynamic intuition in/of Be-ing, the result of which will be the actualization of the feminine Metabeing. The main reason for becoming of woman is women's inner aspiration for self-transcendence, which ends in a new unfolding of God called second appearance by Daly.

In Muhammad Husayn Tabatabai’s view, primordial nature or ‘fiṭrah’ appears to be the cornerstone for philosophical analyses related to the human being. In this paper, using a descriptive-analytical method, Tabatabai’s theory of fiṭrah has been explained, and some of its implications in terms of the meaning of life have been inferred. Then, its impact on the conceptual analysis of ‘meaning’ in the different theories of the meaning of life, especially ones that are based on ‘purpose’ and ‘value,’ is investigated. The result of this study shows that Tabatabai defines fiṭrah as the unique creation of each creature. Additionally, value and purpose are conceptual components of each other, that is, a human being who gives meaning to his/her life by a purpose, finds that purpose necessarily valuable, and on the other hand, by any valuable thing he/she is going to find meaning, inevitably considers it somehow as his/her purpose. Moreover, purpose and value cannot be conceptually analyzed without the theory of fiṭrah. This means, according to Tabatabai, every purpose and every valuable matter, regardless of their instances, are necessarily defined in accordance with human fiṭrah. This point indicates the importance and necessity of the ontological discussions about human fiṭrah, its requirements and its place in existence, for adopting a theory in the meaning of life.

Arthur Schopenhauer is usually considered as an atheist and nihilist philosopher. Although this view is not wrong, but overemphasizing it has led to the neglect of religious discussions in his philosophy. This essay will try to study the different aspects of Schopenhauer’s considerations on religion. To do this, after preliminary points, his view on the origins of religion is studied and it is revealed that Schopenhauer denies a supernatural origin for religion and seeks its roots in human boredom and his desire for immortality. We then examine the emergence of historical religions and clarify that, from his viewpoint, all religions are derived from two religions, Brahmanism and Buddhism, in a gradual process, and the more they benefit from these two, the more reasonable they are. In the discussion about the classification of great religions, we will see that Schopenhauer divides religions into optimistic and pessimistic, and the reason for his inclination towards Indian religions is their pessimism. The essay, then, considers the positive and negative aspects of religion from Schopenhauer's point of view. He regards things like fanaticism as the demerits of religion and things like consolation as the merits of religion. Finally, some criticisms against his views on religion, including the secularization of religion, are raised. The present essay shows that despite the incompatibility between Schopenhauer’s philosophy and religious doctrines, his philosophical system is, to some extent, influenced by Eastern religions and ascetic Christianity.

The theory of primordial nature (Fiṭrah) has been developed in the Islamic tradition based on Quranic, narrative, mystical, and philosophical foundations. Morteza Motahari, besides these foundations, exploits the potentials of modern sciences and philosophies and tries to propose a more comprehensive account of this theory than other Muslem thinkers. This paper, using text-oriented analytical interpretation, provides a new account of the theory of Fiṭrah based on Motahari’s perspectives, taking into accont the most imporatan objection directed to this theory and depending on Mulla Sadra’s psychology. The ontological, anthropological, epistemological, and methodological principles of this novel accont are as follows: 1. Innate (Fiṭrī) ontology is based on accepting truth, reality, the concrete world, the Origin and the Return. 2.Human beings face these realities and truths and access the with their cognitive and tendency-based dimension. 3.Human being is a unitary identity that is not separated from nature, instinct, and Fiṭrah. 4.Human being using his/her free will can move in the direction of instincts or Fiṭrī and creates an instinctive or Fiṭrī construct for him/herself. 5.According to Fiṭrah theory, both intellectual cognition and emotional tendencies represent reality. 6.According to innate epistemology, cognitive Fiṭrah and tendency-based Fiṭrah are two intertwined aspects of knowledge and have a kind of unity.7. In theory of Fiṭrah, the methods of syllogism, intuition, narration, and induction have been considered valid. 8. This theory is based on different methods that can gurantee objectivity concreteness. 9. This multifaceted method can more easily relate philosophy to sciences, so that the scientists can use philosophical theories.

Some philosophers do not accept the opinion that God answers petitionary prayer and therefore makes it effective, because effective prayer is not compatible with some of God's attributes such as Immutability, Perfect Goodness, Omnipotence, Omniscience, moral perfection, etc. This paper focuses on examining the metaphysical claim of the possibility of effective petitionary prayer. First, two arguments against the efficacy of petitionary prayer are presented and then criticized. These two arguments respectively presuppose that “God is Perfect Goodness,” and “God always wants to do what is good and is always able for that.” Criticizing the first argument, Michael Murray believes that there are outweighing goods that God can secure by making provision of certain other (lesser) goods depend on petitionary prayer, outweighing goods which in fact outweigh the good of providing the thing asked for unconditionally. Daniel and Frances Howard-Snyder defeat the second argument by asserting that (1) asking God to do something can change the moral status of His doing it, and (2) God’s bringing about a state of affairs in response to a petitionary prayer is sometimes better than the alternatives. Second, the paper deals with the third argument against the efficacy of petitionary prayer which is based on the proposition “God acts in accordance with expediency.” To respond to this objection, using the tripartite division of the relation between petitionary prayer and expediency proposed by Mohammad-Baqer Majlesi, it is shown that there is a third alternative in which the actualization of an expediency can be owing to a petitionary prayer. At the last part of the paper these points are elucidated: effective and actual petitionary prayer, as a casual factor, is beyond a mere language communication; petitionary prayer, according to its kind and level, provides a range of weak to strong reasons for God; and finally, petitionary prayer, besides providing a reason for God’s act, also affects the value and expediency of what is prayed for.

Michael Anthony Sells (1949) is a professor at the University of Chicago's School of Theology and one of the eminent scholars in the field of mysticism. He believes that Muslim mystics have been influenced by intellectual-philosophical, cultural-poetic, ḥadīth-Quranic, and theological traditions in explaining their mystical experiences. In “bewildered tongue” (1989), Sells tries to highlight five examples of the language worlds related to these traditions and shows the similarity of the Sufis’ language with their traditional-religious backgrounds, especially in terms of mystical union and passing away (Fanāʾ). These language worlds are as follows: poetry of pre-Islamic Arabia; theological (Kalam) terminology; ḥadīth and Qur'anic language regarding ascent through the heavenly spheres to the divine throne (Miʿrāj); ḥadīth of superogatory devotions (al-nawāfil) and the Sufi "bewildered dialogues" of union in which distinctions between subject and object, speaker and hearer, begin to melt, and finally, the later philosophical language of Ibn Arabi (mystical dialectic) to explain the mystical unity. This paper, using a descriptive-analytical method, first explains the ideas of Sells in his aforementioned work and then evaluates them. Regarding the research material, his work has failed to cover some important ḥadīths and Quranic verses, and from a formal perspective, besides referring to some weak manuscripts, some of his translations are not precise. Nevertheless, the author’s comparative approach to Abrahamic religions and his profound knowledge of Arabic literature and poetry of pre-Islamic Arabia are among the positive features of the work, which have greatly helped Sells in explaining the language of mystical experience in Islam.

According to Hartle and Hawking’s ‘no-boundary proposal,’ at the beginning of the universe, the time dimension behaves like the spatial dimensions. This removes the initial singularity of the universe. Hawking argues that this model has important implications against theism, because in this model, (1) the universe did not have an initial creation point, (2) the appearance of the universe from ‘nothing’ is explained naturally, and (3) there is no need to appeal to God to set the initial conditions of the universe. Hence, the ‘no-boundary’ universe does not need a creator. In this paper, firstly, we review four classes of fundamental objections against the scientific reliability of the model and Hawking’s interpretation of it: (a) It is based on quantum gravity, for which there is no reliable theory yet. (b) There are several empirical and theoretical challenges against this proposal. (c) Considering the imaginary time and the Euclidean universe as objective facts about the universe (and not just mathematical tools) is not scientifically justified. And (d) theologically, the dependency of the universe on its creator is not confined to its initial instant, so removing it does not remove the need for the creator. Then, we show that even if ignore these sorts of objections and go along with Hawking on these issues, the model has no implications supporting his claims against the theism. Because (1) in this model, the universe still has a beginning; (2) this model does not describe the ‘appearance from absolute nothing’ in its precise meaning; and (3) the model itself is just a contingent proposal about the initial conditions of the universe and allows a variety of different possibilities about the energy-momentum contents of the universe. So, the model seems to have no important theological implications at all.

Richard Swinburne discusses ‘Propositional Revelation’ in his book Revelation: From Metaphor to Analogy. In his view, propositional revelation is genuine and true only if (1) it consists of truthful propositions about important religious facts, (2) it is accompanied by a miracle, (3) it constitutes an institution such as the Church as the authoritative interpreter of the revelation, and (4) the interpretations of this institution regarding the contents of the revelation are not false or implausible. Swinburne believes that Christian revelation meets all four criteria in the best way and therefore is the only authentic religious revelation. , the resurrection is the great miracle of Jesus; Secondly, Jesus established the church by appointing 12 apostles to spread his teachings; Thirdly, if we distinguish between non-historical content and historical form of revelation and different genres of the Bible, the content of Christian revelation and the interpretations of the church from this revelation contain no false claims. In criticizing Swinburne's perspective, we have argued that firstly, according to McLean, Swinburne lacks a historical-hermeneutical approach. Despite claiming a supra-historical position, he focuses on the Christian perspective to define the standards of authentic revelation and tries to prove the truth of Christian revelation with circular reasons, and ultimately attempts to impose the hegemonic discourse of Christianity on all other religions. Secondly, adhering to the distinction between proposition and statement, or form and content, is a conservative method to make the Bible unfalsifiable, which has also been applied to other mythical texts. Thirdly, the confirmation of the testimony of the narrators of Jesus' miracles is not reasonable, and Swinburne does not provide a convincing answer to Hume's criticism of the narration of miracles.