Introducing Philosophy of Religion: Textbook
Resources
Objectives
After working through the following chapters in the textbook, you should be able to:
Chapter 1: Religion and the Philosophy of Religion
- Describe what is generally meant by the terms ‘philosophy’, ‘religion’, and ‘philosophy of religion’
- Access an extensive philosophy of religion timeline
- Explain religious realism and non-realism and note prominent adherents of each.
Chapter 2: Religious Diversity and Pluralism
- Describe several central elements of five major world religions
- Explain six different philosophical approaches to religious diversity
- Clarify five fundamental criteria for evaluating religious systems
- Expound on some important reasons for manifesting religious tolerance with respect to the various traditions.
Chapter 3: Conceptions of Ultimate Reality
- Elucidate some major differences between Eastern and Western views of Ultimate Reality
- Provide a concise summary of Hindu Absolutism and Buddhist Metaphysics
- Present five attributes of the traditional concept of the God of theism and some challenges to them.
Chapter 4: Cosmological Arguments for God's Existence
- Explicate three cosmological arguments for God's existence and describe support for and objections to each of them
- State scientific evidences for and against the claim that the universe began to exist
- Concisely explain the cosmological argument for atheism.
Chapter 5: Teleological Arguments for God's Existence
- Explain three teleological arguments for God's existence and describe support for and objections to each of them
- Expound on scientific findings which relate to alleged fine-tuning of the universe
- Describe the intelligent design movement and arguments for and against irreducible complexity.
Chapter 6: Ontological Arguments for God's Existence
- Explain two ontological arguments for God's existence: one classic and one contemporary
- Summarize several main objections and replies to each of these two arguments.
Chapter 7: Problems of Evil
- Classify various kinds of evil
- Explicate the logical, evidential, and existential problems of evil and responses to them
- Describe three major theodicies and some central objections to them.
Chapter 8: Science, Faith and Reason
- Explain three primary relationships between religion and science
- Differentiate between rational validation and non-evidential views of religious justification
- Understand the meaning of classical foundationalism, a reason for rejecting it, and the role of properly basic beliefs in a more recent version of foundationalism found in Reformed epistemology.
Chapter 9: Religious Experience
- Delineate three general features common to religious experience
- Distinguish three general categories of religious experience
- Provide reasons for and against the use of religious experience as justification for religious beliefs
- Describe two scientific explanations for religious experience.
Chapter 10: The Self, Death and the Afterlife
- Explain four major conceptions of the self from the East and the West as well as arguments for and against them
- Describe the doctrines of reincarnation and karma and their significance to two Eastern religious traditions
- Expound on four arguments in favor of immortality and three arguments against it.