P5.1 context to critique of relig

• agnosticism: the view that it is not possible to know whether God exists or not
• anti-theism: direct opposition to the belief in any deity
• atheism: the negation of theism, the denial of the existence of God
• memes: Dawkins’ name for beliefs, ideas and behaviours which spread within cultures, and are passed down the generations through texts, rituals, culture, etc.
• strong atheism: a form of atheism that explicitly denies the possibility of God or gods existing and offers justification for this position
• weak atheism: an implicit form of atheism entailing a lack of belief in God or gods, with no justification given
• ontological reduction: the idea that a complex system is just a sum of its parts, and that an account of it can be reduced to accounts of individual constituents
• Enlightenment


  • 1688 - 1789
  • Westphal + Hegel: shift from theology to philos of relig
  • Focus on understanding relig + belief, not understanding God
  • Led to deism
• Scholasticism


  •  Aquinas + Anselm: belief = combination of reason, revelation + relig exp
  • NML: moral law understood through reason + revealed in Bible
• Augustine's criticism of scholasticism


  • can’t trust human reason as flawed due to Fall - only revealed by God (@scholastics: Aquinas, Anselm)
• Deism


  • Can only know God through reason, not revelation
  • God is kernel of belief, revelation is removable husk
  • No revelation would mean universal relig based on reason, leading to moral unity + tolerance