Philosophy of Religion

Catalog description

Historically and cross-culturally, philosophy tends to emerge as an effort to understand religion. Whether or not one is a believer, religion can be viewed as a "stress test" of the concepts we bring to our understanding of the mundane world. Can we know that there is an infinite being behind mundane reality? What can we comprehend about such a being? Is morality prior to or subject to that being's will? Can such a being be innocent of our wrong-doing? If there is such a being, are we responsible for anything? All of those questions depend as much on what we mean by possibility, freedom and responsibility as they do on the truth of religion. In this class, we fearlessly confront those questions and, in the Carnegie Mellon spirit, we relate each philosophical reading to relevant issues in science and logic. Since the philosophy of religion literature focuses primarily on a Judeo-Christian context, the class begins with a short survey of the religious contexts of ancient Greece, Hinduism, and Budhism to provide points of reference from which to question Judeo-Christian presuppositions.