Dialogue between the chosen religion and philosophy of religion

The nature of the dialogue#

StandardAQA 7062/2 Section B: The dialogue between philosophy and religionDfE GCE Religious Studies subject content

The two-way dialogue

Fig. 1Philosophy challenges and clarifies Christian belief, while Christianity has shaped the philosophical tradition — a mutual engagement.

The 'dialogue' between Christianity and the philosophy of religion is genuinely two-way, and a strong answer resists reducing it to philosophy attacking religion. On one side, philosophy influences and challenges Christianity: the arguments for and against God's existence, the problem of evil, the debates about religious language and life after death all bear directly on Christian claims, forcing Christianity to clarify, defend or revise its beliefs. On the other side, Christianity has profoundly influenced philosophy: much of Western philosophy of religion (Augustine, Anselm, Aquinas) is itself the work of Christian thinkers reasoning about their faith, and Christian concepts (creation ex nihilo, the person, free will, the dignity of the individual) have shaped the philosophical tradition. The dialogue is thus a mutual engagement in which each side has drawn on and pressed the other for centuries.

The dialogue takes different forms depending on how Christianity conceives the relationship between faith and reason. Some Christian thinkers see reason and philosophy as the ally and servant of faith — 'faith seeking understanding' (fides quaerens intellectum, Anselm), in which reason clarifies, defends and deepens what is believed, and natural theology (reasoning to God from the world) prepares the way for revelation. Others see philosophy as a threat — a proud human wisdom that corrupts the purity of faith ('see to it that no one takes you captive through philosophy', Colossians; Tertullian's 'what has Athens to do with Jerusalem?') — and insist that Christian truth comes by revelation and faith, not by human reasoning. How much weight Christianity gives to philosophy therefore depends on its underlying theology of reason and revelation.

The stakes of the dialogue are high because it concerns whether Christian belief is rational. If the philosophical arguments for God succeed, or at least render belief reasonable, then Christianity can present itself as intellectually respectable, defensible in the public square of reason; if the arguments fail and the objections (evil, meaninglessness, the success of naturalism) prevail, Christianity appears intellectually indefensible, a matter of blind faith. This is why the dialogue matters not only to philosophers but to the credibility and mission of the religion itself, especially in a secular, sceptical culture that demands reasons.

A crucial evaluative question runs through the whole topic: is Christian faith helped or harmed by submitting itself to philosophical scrutiny? One view (natural theology, apologetics) holds that reason supports faith and that Christianity should welcome the dialogue, since a faith that cannot be defended rationally is not worth holding. The opposite view (fideism, Barth) holds that faith rests on revelation and is not established or overthrown by philosophy, so that submitting it to philosophical judgement is a category mistake that distorts faith into a hypothesis. Most of the specific debates in this topic — over the arguments for God, the problem of evil, religious language, and the New Atheism — are instances of this larger question, and a candidate who keeps the two-way, reason-versus-revelation framing in view can turn a descriptive answer into a genuine evaluation.

Worked example

Faith seeking understanding vs fideism

Contrast the view that reason supports faith with the view that faith does not need philosophy.

Faith seeking understanding
Anselm/Aquinas: reason clarifies and defends faith; natural theology reasons to God, preparing the way for revelation.
Fideism
Faith rests on revelation and God's self-disclosure, not on human argument; philosophy cannot establish or overthrow it (Tertullian, Barth).
The implication for the dialogue
The first welcomes philosophical scrutiny as strengthening faith; the second regards submitting faith to philosophy as a distortion.
Assess
Natural theology gains public credibility but risks making faith hostage to fallible arguments; fideism protects faith's integrity but risks appearing irrational.

Result: Whether the dialogue helps or harms Christianity depends on the prior view of faith and reason: 'faith seeking understanding' welcomes philosophy as an ally, while fideism protects faith from it — and each position pays a characteristic price.

Typical mistakes

Reducing the dialogue to 'philosophy disproves religion'; the relationship is mutual and includes Christianity's shaping of philosophy and its rational defence.
Ignoring the faith/reason spectrum (Aquinas' natural theology vs Barth's fideism), which frames the whole topic.

Active revision

Explain how the philosophy of religion both challenges and supports Christian belief. (Structured AO1 response)

Active recall

Recall the key points — then reveal.

Sources: GCE AS and A level subject content for religious studies (Department for Education)

Reason and revelation: can God be proved?#

AdvancedAQA 7062/2 Section B: The dialogue between philosophy and religionDfE GCE Religious Studies subject content

Natural and revealed theology

Fig. 2Natural theology reasons to God from the world; revealed theology receives God's self-disclosure — Aquinas unites them, Barth opposes them.

The relationship between reason and revelation is the deepest theme of the dialogue, and it centres on natural theology — the project of coming to know God by reason, from the natural world, without appeal to revelation. Thomas Aquinas is its great exponent: he held that reason can demonstrate the existence of God (the Five Ways) and establish some of God's attributes (his 'preambles of faith'), while other truths (the Trinity, the Incarnation) can be known only by revelation (the 'articles of faith'). For Aquinas, grace perfects nature and faith perfects reason: natural theology and revealed theology are complementary, and reason, though it cannot reach the saving mysteries, prepares the mind for them and defends the faith against objections. This confident marriage of faith and reason shaped Catholic theology (reaffirmed at the First Vatican Council, which taught that God can be known with certainty by the natural light of reason).

Karl Barth mounted the most forceful twentieth-century rejection of natural theology. Barth insisted that God is 'wholly other', utterly transcendent, and that sinful human reason, corrupted by the Fall, cannot climb up to God by its own efforts; any 'god' reached by human reasoning would be an idol, a human construction, not the living God. God can be known only where he graciously reveals himself — supremely in Jesus Christ, and through the word of scripture — so revelation is not the completion of natural theology but its contradiction. When his fellow theologian Emil Brunner allowed a limited natural theology (a 'point of contact' in humanity's being made in God's image), Barth replied with a furious pamphlet entitled simply 'Nein!' ('No!'). For Barth, the dialogue with philosophy must always be on faith's own terms, and the attempt to prove God by philosophy is not merely futile but faithless.

The specific question of whether God's existence can be proved gathers up the philosophy-of-religion arguments (the design, cosmological and ontological arguments and their critics). The dialogue plays out as follows: the natural theologian (Aquinas, Swinburne, Craig) argues that reason gives real support to belief in God, at least making it probable (the cumulative case), so Christianity is rationally defensible; the Barthian replies that faith neither needs nor benefits from such props, and that the arguments, even if they worked, would reach only a philosophers' abstraction ('the God of the philosophers', Pascal), not the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob encountered in worship and revelation. Both are Christian positions, and the tension between them — whether to meet the sceptic on the ground of reason or to witness to revelation — is a live one within the religion.

The evaluation should weigh the strengths of each. Natural theology's strength is that it engages the sceptic on shared rational ground and presents faith as reasonable, which is vital for apologetics and mission in a rational culture; its weakness is that it makes faith hostage to the fortunes of arguments that, as the earlier topics showed, fall short of proof, so that if the arguments fail, faith seems to fail with them. Barth's fideism's strength is that it protects the integrity and freedom of faith, honours God's transcendence, and locates faith where believers actually find it (in encounter and revelation, not in syllogisms); its weakness is that it can appear to insulate faith from all rational criticism, making it a fortress immune to evidence and unable to commend itself to the outsider (the charge of irrationalism). A defensible judgement often lies between: reason cannot prove God but can show faith to be reasonable and remove obstacles to it (a modest natural theology), while faith itself rests on revelation and experience rather than on proof — a position that takes the dialogue seriously without making faith a mere conclusion of argument.

Worked example

The 'God of the philosophers' objection

Assess Barth's claim that natural theology reaches only an idol, not the God of faith.

State the claim
Any god reached by human reasoning is a human construction — a first cause or designer — not the living, self-revealing God of the Bible ('the God of the philosophers, not of Abraham', Pascal).
The strength
The arguments do reach only an abstract designer/first cause, underdetermining the personal, triune God of Christian worship — the earlier topics confirmed this gap.
The natural theologian's reply
Aquinas/Swinburne: natural theology reaches the same God partially (existence, some attributes); revelation completes the picture, so it is a genuine, if incomplete, knowledge of the true God, not an idol.
Weigh
Barth is right that argument alone cannot deliver the God of faith, but wrong to call the philosophers' God an idol if it is the same God partially known; the two knowledges may be continuous.
Judgement
Natural theology reaches a real but incomplete knowledge of God that revelation completes; Barth's 'idol' charge overstates a genuine point about the gap between the philosophers' God and the God of worship.

Result: Barth rightly notes that the arguments reach only an abstract deity far short of the God of Christian faith, but the natural theologian can reply that this is an incomplete knowledge of the same God, completed by revelation — so reason and revelation are best seen as complementary rather than opposed.

Typical mistakes

Presenting the reason/revelation debate as Christianity vs atheism; it is a debate within Christianity (Aquinas vs Barth) about how faith relates to reason.
Ignoring that even successful arguments reach only a philosophers' God, which the Barthian says is not the God of faith.

Active revision

'The existence of God cannot be proved, and Christian faith does not need it to be.' Assess this view. (Extended essay)

Active recall

Recall the key points — then reveal.

Sources: GCE AS and A level subject content for religious studies (Department for Education)

The problem of evil as a challenge to faith#

AdvancedAQA 7062/2 Section B: The dialogue between philosophy and religionDfE GCE Religious Studies subject content

The problem of evil in the dialogue

Fig. 3The philosophical challenge of evil meets Christian responses both philosophical (theodicy) and theological (the cross, hope).

The problem of evil (studied philosophically earlier) is, in the dialogue, the single most powerful philosophical challenge to Christian faith, and how Christianity responds to it is a test of the whole relationship between faith and philosophy. The challenge presses Christianity precisely because Christianity affirms, more strongly than most religions, that God is both omnipotent and perfectly loving (indeed that 'God is love'), which is exactly what makes the existence of terrible suffering so acute a difficulty. The dialogue thus forces Christianity to give an account of itself: to show either that its beliefs are consistent with the evil we observe, or to revise those beliefs, or to hold them as a mystery within faith.

Christianity responds to the challenge in several ways, drawing on the theodicies examined earlier but also on distinctively theological resources. The Augustinian and Irenaean/Hick theodicies (free will, soul-making) are Christian responses that engage the philosophical problem on its own terms, arguing that a good God may permit evil for the greater goods of freedom and moral growth, completed in the eschaton. But Christianity also offers responses philosophy alone does not: the theology of the cross, in which God in Christ does not explain suffering from a distance but enters into it and suffers with and for humanity (the 'crucified God', Moltmann), so that the answer to evil is not a theory but a divine solidarity and a promise of final redemption; and the appeal to eschatological hope, the resurrection and the promise that God will 'wipe away every tear', in which evil is finally defeated rather than justified. These responses locate the answer in the Christian narrative rather than in a philosophical proof.

The dialogue reveals a genuine tension in how Christianity should respond. One approach meets the philosophical challenge philosophically — constructing theodicies that aim to show the logical consistency and even the probability of theism given evil (Plantinga, Swinburne, Hick); this keeps faith in rational conversation but risks the objection that the theodicies are inadequate (gratuitous suffering) and that justifying appalling evil is itself morally troubling (D. Z. Phillips, and the 'anti-theodicy' movement, which argues that the very project of theodicy trivialises suffering). The other approach, closer to Barth and to much pastoral practice, holds that faith does not have a philosophical 'answer' to evil, but responds with lament, protest (the book of Job, the psalms of lament), solidarity and hope, trusting God without claiming to understand — a response that may be more faithful and more honest, but that concedes the philosophical challenge cannot be met on its own ground.

The evaluation should assess whether the problem of evil undermines Christian faith. On one hand, it is the strongest philosophical case against Christianity's God, and the theodicies, as the earlier topic concluded, blunt but do not remove the evidential problem of gratuitous suffering; so for the outsider weighing Christianity as a hypothesis, evil is a serious mark against it. On the other hand, Christianity's distinctive resources — the suffering God of the cross and the hope of final redemption — arguably respond to evil not by explaining it away but by promising its defeat and by locating God within it, which many believers find more adequate to the reality of suffering than any theodicy. Whether this is a profound answer or an evasion of the philosophical question is the evaluative crux. A defensible judgement is that the problem of evil does not disprove Christian faith (the logical problem is answerable) but does set the limit on how far philosophy can render that faith probable, so that Christian belief in the face of evil finally rests on trust and hope grounded in revelation and experience, not on a philosophical solution — which returns the dialogue to the reason/revelation question.

Worked example

Theodicy or anti-theodicy?

Assess whether Christianity should respond to evil with theodicy or with lament and solidarity.

The theodicy approach
Construct free-will and soul-making theodicies to show theism is consistent with, and not improbable given, evil — meeting philosophy on its ground.
The anti-theodicy objection
Phillips and others argue that justifying appalling suffering (e.g. by the good it produces) trivialises it and is morally offensive; theodicy 'defends' God at the victim's expense.
The theological alternative
Respond with lament (Job, the psalms), protest, the suffering God of the cross, and hope in final redemption — trusting without a full explanation.
Weigh
Theodicy keeps faith rational but risks callousness and inadequacy; lament/solidarity is more honest to suffering but concedes philosophy has no complete answer.
Judgement
A defensible Christian response combines a modest theodicy (to show consistency) with the theology of the cross and hope (to respond to suffering), conceding that evil is finally met by trust, not proof.

Result: Christianity is best served by a modest theodicy that secures logical consistency together with the theology of the suffering God and eschatological hope; the anti-theodicy critique rightly warns that theodicy alone can trivialise suffering, so faith's final response to evil is trust and hope grounded in revelation rather than a philosophical solution.

Typical mistakes

Simply repeating the theodicies without addressing how the dialogue changes the question (Christianity's distinctively theological responses: the cross, hope, lament).
Concluding that evil 'disproves' Christianity; the logical problem is answerable, and Christianity has non-philosophical resources, so the verdict must be proportioned.

Active revision

'The problem of evil makes Christian belief in a loving God untenable.' Discuss. (Extended essay)

Active recall

Recall the key points — then reveal.

Sources: GCE AS and A level subject content for religious studies (Department for Education)

Religious language and the coherence of belief#

AdvancedAQA 7062/2 Section B: The dialogue between philosophy and religionDfE GCE Religious Studies subject content

Philosophical challenges to Christian belief

Fig. 4Philosophy challenges Christianity over God's existence, the problem of evil, the meaningfulness of religious language, and the coherence of key doctrines.

The philosophy of religious language (studied earlier) challenges Christianity at a fundamental level: if the verificationists and falsificationists are right that talk of God is meaningless, then Christianity's central claims ('God is love', 'God became man', 'Christ is risen') say nothing at all, and the whole edifice is not false but empty. This is a more radical challenge than the problem of evil, which at least grants that Christian claims are meaningful and might be true. Christianity must therefore give an account of how its language about the transcendent God can be meaningful, and its responses (analogy, symbol, the via negativa, and the appeal to the language games of faith) are its engagement with this challenge.

Christianity's responses draw on its own long tradition of reflection on God-talk. The doctrine of analogy (Aquinas) allows Christians to speak truly but non-literally of God, so that calling God 'good' or 'father' is neither univocal (reducing God to the human) nor equivocal (meaningless) but analogical. The tradition of symbol (Tillich) and sacrament allows Christian language and ritual to point to and participate in a reality beyond literal description. The via negativa preserves God's transcendence by insisting on the inadequacy of all human language. And the Wittgensteinian view (D. Z. Phillips) that religious language is meaningful within the form of life of faith allows Christianity to reply that the verificationist demand imports alien (scientific) criteria of meaning. These are the resources by which Christianity claims its language is meaningful without being reducible to literal, verifiable description.

A related challenge concerns the coherence of specific Christian doctrines, several of which philosophy presses as internally problematic. Can an eternal, immutable God become incarnate in time (the Incarnation)? Can one being be three persons (the Trinity)? Can a decayed body be raised (the resurrection), and would the raised person be the same person (the personal-identity problem studied earlier, and Hick's replica theory)? Is God's omnipotence coherent (can God make a stone too heavy to lift?), and are the divine attributes mutually compatible (can God be both immutable and personally responsive; both omniscient and the creator of free beings)? These are philosophical challenges to the coherence of the Christian concept of God, and Christianity responds by refining its concepts (e.g. distinguishing senses of omnipotence, developing the two-natures Christology of Chalcedon, defending the coherence of resurrection).

The evaluation should assess how well Christianity meets these challenges and whether meeting them costs too much. On the meaningfulness challenge, Christianity arguably wins: the verification principle is self-refuting, and analogy and symbol give a defensible account of how finite language can speak of God, so the charge that Christian language is meaningless fails — though at the cost, on the non-cognitive readings (Tillich, Phillips), of conceding that Christian claims are not straightforwardly factual, which many believers reject. On the coherence challenges, Christianity's refinements (analogical God-talk, the two natures of Christ, the technical Trinity) largely avoid formal contradiction, but at the cost of increasing appeal to mystery, which the critic reads as 'death by a thousand qualifications' and the believer as appropriate humility before the transcendent. A defensible judgement is that philosophy does not show Christian language to be meaningless or its doctrines to be flatly incoherent, but it does show that they can be defended only by using language analogically and by accepting a significant element of mystery — which is a genuine result of the dialogue, strengthening Christianity against the charge of nonsense while chastening any claim to full rational comprehension of God.

Worked example

Meeting the meaninglessness charge

Assess how well Christianity answers the charge that its language about God is meaningless.

State the charge
Verificationism/falsificationism: 'God is love' is neither analytic nor empirically testable, so it is literally meaningless.
Defeat the principle
The verification principle is self-refuting (it fails its own test), so it cannot rule Christian language meaningless.
Give a positive account
Analogy (Aquinas) and symbol (Tillich) show how finite language can speak truly but non-literally of the transcendent; language games (Phillips) locate meaning in the form of life.
Note the cost
On non-cognitive accounts (Tillich, Phillips) Christian claims become non-factual expressions, which most believers reject; analogy keeps them factual but non-literal.
Judgement
Christianity defeats the meaninglessness charge, best via analogy (meaningful and factual, if non-literal), but must accept that God-talk is analogical and mysterious, not plain literal description.

Result: Christianity successfully rebuts the charge that its language is meaningless — the verification principle collapses, and analogy gives a defensible account of meaningful God-talk — but only by accepting that such language is analogical and mysterious rather than literal, which is a genuine and defensible outcome of the dialogue.

Typical mistakes

Treating the meaningfulness challenge as the same as the truth challenge; the positivist claim is that Christian language says nothing, which is more radical.
Claiming the Trinity/Incarnation are simply 'proved coherent'; the defences avoid formal contradiction largely by appeal to analogy and mystery.

Active revision

'Philosophy shows that Christian language about God is meaningful but mysterious.' Assess this view. (Extended essay)

Active recall

Recall the key points — then reveal.

Sources: GCE AS and A level subject content for religious studies (Department for Education)

Secularism, the New Atheism and the Christian response#

AdvancedAQA 7062/2 Section B: The dialogue between philosophy and religionDfE GCE Religious Studies subject content

The New Atheism and the Christian response

Fig. 5Dawkins argues God is a failed hypothesis explained away by evolution; Christian thinkers reply that God is not a hypothesis and evolution leaves the deeper questions open.

The New Atheism — associated with Richard Dawkins (The God Delusion), Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris and Daniel Dennett — is the most prominent contemporary philosophical and cultural challenge to Christianity, and the dialogue with it is a specification focus. The New Atheists argue that belief in God is not merely false but irrational and harmful: that the traditional arguments for God fail; that Darwinian evolution explains the appearance of design without a designer (Dawkins' central scientific claim); that religion is a delusion, even a 'virus of the mind' (a meme) that propagates without regard to truth; and that religion is a force for evil, responsible for conflict, intolerance and the suppression of reason ('religion poisons everything', Hitchens). Dawkins frames the existence of God as a scientific hypothesis ('the God hypothesis') that fails, and argues that the universe is better explained without God.

Christianity responds to the New Atheism on several fronts, and a strong answer marshals these. Philosophically, Christian thinkers (Alister McGrath, Keith Ward, John Lennox, Plantinga) argue that the New Atheists misunderstand the traditional arguments and the concept of God: God is not a 'hypothesis' or a complex designed object within the universe (so Dawkins' 'who designed the designer?' misfires — God is defined as uncreated and non-physical), evolution addresses biological complexity but not the deeper questions of why there is a law-governed, life-permitting universe at all, and the fine-tuning of the cosmic constants is untouched by Darwin. Historically, Christians point out that the 'religion causes all wars' claim is simplistic (the great atheist regimes of the twentieth century were not less violent), and that Christianity has been a major source of hospitals, universities, human rights and the abolition of slavery. Theologically, they argue that Dawkins attacks a crude, literalist caricature of faith and ignores sophisticated theology.

The dialogue also concerns secularism and secularisation more broadly (studied in the previous topic): the decline of religious practice and authority in Western societies, and the privatisation of belief. Christianity responds variously — by cultural engagement and apologetics (seeking to show faith is reasonable and relevant), by reasserting a distinct identity against the surrounding culture, and by pointing to the persistence and global growth of Christianity as evidence that the secularisation thesis is not the whole story. The New Atheism can be seen as one expression of an aggressive secularism, and the vigour of the Christian response (a flourishing apologetics literature) suggests the dialogue is far from one-sided.

The evaluation should assess whether the New Atheism succeeds in undermining Christian belief. On one hand, it draws real force from the genuine failure of the arguments to prove God, from the explanatory success of science, and from the problem of evil and religious violence; for many, it articulates why belief seems no longer credible. On the other hand, its philosophical case is widely judged (even by some atheist philosophers, e.g. Michael Ruse, Thomas Nagel) to be crude: it attacks caricatures, treats God as a scientific object, commits the 'who designed the designer?' error, and overstates religion's harms while ignoring naturalism's own difficulties (the origin of the universe, of consciousness, of objective morality). A defensible judgement is that the New Atheism has not refuted Christianity — its central arguments are answerable and its concept of God is a straw man — but that it expresses a real cultural shift and a genuine intellectual challenge to which Christianity must, and does, respond; the dialogue leaves Christian belief contested but rationally defensible, which returns us to the topic's central question of whether faith is helped or harmed by philosophical scrutiny. On balance, the dialogue arguably strengthens a thoughtful Christianity by forcing it to clarify and defend its beliefs, even as it makes naive or literalist faith harder to sustain.

Worked example

The 'who designed the designer?' objection

Assess Dawkins' argument that positing God as designer only raises the question of who designed God.

State Dawkins' argument
A designer capable of creating a complex universe must be at least as complex, so positing God explains nothing and only pushes the question back: who designed the designer?
The concept-of-God reply
Classical theism defines God as uncreated, non-physical, and simple (not composed of parts), so God is not a complex designed object needing a designer — Dawkins attacks a different, anthropomorphic 'god'.
The explanatory reply
Explanations need not themselves be explained to be good (we accept fundamental physical laws as brute); God is offered as the necessary being that terminates the regress the cosmological argument identifies.
The atheist rejoinder
The atheist can reply that the universe itself may be the brute fact (Russell), so God adds an unnecessary step — a genuine standoff about where explanation stops.
Judgement
Dawkins' objection misfires against classical theism's uncreated, simple God, though the deeper dispute about whether God or the universe is the ultimate brute fact remains open.

Result: Dawkins' 'who designed the designer?' objection fails against the classical concept of God as uncreated and non-composite, though it points to the real and unresolved question of whether God or the universe is the ultimate terminus of explanation — so it wounds a caricature, not classical Christian theism.

Typical mistakes

Presenting Dawkins' case uncritically; the 'who designed the designer?' objection misfires against a God defined as uncreated and non-physical.
Reducing the response to 'atheists are wrong' without the substantive replies (category error, fine-tuning, the historical and moral record).

Active revision

'The New Atheism has shown that Christian belief is irrational.' Evaluate this claim. (Extended essay)

Active recall

Recall the key points — then reveal.

Sources: GCE AS and A level subject content for religious studies (Department for Education)

Key points

Faith seeking understanding vs fideism

Key points

The 'God of the philosophers' objection

Key points

Theodicy or anti-theodicy?

Key points

Meeting the meaninglessness charge

Key points

The 'who designed the designer?' objection

Sources

Dialogue between the chosen religion and philosophy of religion

Key points

Faith seeking understanding vs fideism

Key points

The 'God of the philosophers' objection

Key points

Theodicy or anti-theodicy?

Key points

Meeting the meaninglessness charge

Key points

The 'who designed the designer?' objection

Sources