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Contemporary Critiques of Religion
KAI NIELSEN University of Calgary
MACMILLAN
© Kai Nielsen 1971 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without premission. First published 1971 by THE MACMILLAN PRESS LTD London and Basingstoke Associated companies in New York Toronto Dublin Melbourne Johannesburg and Madras SBN 333 06963 3 Printed in Great Britain by ROBERT MACLEHOSE AND CO LTD The University Press, Glasgow
Contents Preface
vii
1
INTRODUCTION
2
THE CHALLENGE OF EMPIRICISM
13
3
REBUTTALS AND RESPONSES: I
31
4
REBUTTALS AND RESPONSES: II
55
5 6
1
THE CHALLENGE OF CONCEPTUAL RELATIVISM
94
ON DINING WITH THE THEOLOGIAN
112
CONCLUSION
135
Notes
137
Select Bibliography
150
Index
161
V
Preface Though my intellectual debts are manifold, as the reading of this book will make evident, my own thinking concerning religion grew out of youthful perplexities over the religion that most of us in the West are introduced to as participants. Later the classical philosophers (Greek, medieval and modern) increased this perplexity and still later Feuerbach, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche gave it a new dimension. Finally linguistic philosophers, b o t h believers and sceptics, deepened the issues for me and enabled me to give my perplexities a more adequate formulation. I am indebted to the editor of this series, Professor J o h n Hick, for his criticisms of the manuscript, to Mr William Bean and to members of the department of philosophy at Brooklyn College for their criticisms of Chapter 5 and to the members (students and faculty alike) of the philosophy and religion departments of Rice University for their penetrating criticisms of an earlier version of my manuscript during the pleasant days of my visit to Rice. Lastly I would like to thank my wife for her frequent labour with and careful criticism of Contemporary Critiques of Religion. The errors and oversights that persist are my own responsibility and remain for me a source of intellectual disquietude. K.N. The University of Calgary, July 1970
vii
1 Introduction
i Many contemporary critiques of religion, and some countercritiques as well, assume, as Feuerbach, Marx and Freud do, that the materialists and sceptics of the eighteenth century had successfully made out the intellectual case against religion. That religious belief persists in spite of this, they argue, is due to profound human needs rooted in the social and/or psychological conditions of human living (1). I think these critics of religion are right. But whether I am right or wrong in such an assessment, to start by taking it as an assumption is surely a mistake in a fundamental critique of religion, for there are many able and sophisticated members of the intellectual community who do not believe that religion or even Christianity or Judaism is palpably false, unintelligible or incoherent. Rather they believe that belief has an intellectual ground to stand on — though indeed n o t only an intellectual ground — and that the standard critiques of religion inherited from the Enlightenment are themselves full of unjustified and indeed unjustifiable assumptions which can at least as rightly be claimed to be mythological as the claims of religion. It is to this prior intellectual issue that I shall turn. Indeed, such arguments in one form or another have gone on for centuries, though, as we shall see, there are some distinctive contemporary forms. But it is with such considerations that one should start (a) to have a meaningful dialogue between belief and unbelief, and (b) to start with wh