Video Transcript: Lesson 1

Greetings and welcome to philosophy of religion. Philosophy may be for some of you, a word that sounds pretty daunting, but I assure you that although the  issues that we deal with are profound, you'll be able to get a good grasp of them fairly easily. I've been doing this for a long time, and mostly I taught freshmen.  And as everybody knows, the difference between a college a high school senior  and a college freshman is a few weeks at the beach. College freshmen can get  this. You can it's also something that's very important. People need to reflect on  their faith. People who already are Christian and want to become Christian  leaders need to reflect on what you might call the credentials of the faith. How  do we know God is real? And that will be the main subject of this. Course, it will  be different from most Philosophy of Religion courses, as they are taught in  North America. Most of them concentrate almost solely on the proofs of God's  existence, the arguments that have as a conclusion God exists, or it's more  probable that God exists, and then God doesn't. That kind of thing. We will look  at some of those proofs, so that you will know what how they go, and I will show  you, I think, why they don't work. I don't think any of the proofs for God's  existence work, and that it doesn't make any difference at all, because that's not  how anybody knows God. God's reality is not a hypothesis. It's not a guess we  make to fill an explanatory gap. It's not like a theory in physics or in psychology  or any other field. God's reality is an experience report. People believe in God  because they experience God because they know and walk and live with God.  And what we need to parse this out and show how that works and why the  proofs are unnecessary and so on. And for people who don't already profess  Christian faith, this is also important. If you're willing to give belief in God a fair  shake, then at least listen to what the real grounds for that belief turn out to be I  think you may be surprised, and it may actually be fun. Of course, that's a  relative term, isn't it? People have fun a lot of different ways and philosophy  people, people in philosophy, philosophers are famous for finding fun to be  discussing some abstruse topic. But this isn't going to be abstruse. This is going  to be very concrete and real has to do with whether God's real or not, and  there's probably nothing more important than that. So why don't we begin? Let's  begin by talking about what philosophy is, and then we'll look at what a religious  belief is, in order to ask, what's the relation between these two things, I  remember, this was put very vividly my first day in graduate school, I'm walking  down the hall and I see my name Clouser over a door. I thought was very  curious. I don't run into that name often, so I went over and opened the door and peeked in, and there's a fella sitting in there with his feet up on the desk, reading newspaper. And he says, This is private office. I said, oh, excuse me. I saw my  name over the door and wondered what was going on. He said, Oh, that's your  name too. Come in. Have a cup of coffee. Sit down. Tell me why you came to  graduate school here. So I said, Well, I'm interested in the philosophy of religion. And he said, here at Harvard, we teach philosophy and we teach religion. It's up 

to you, if you see any connection. So let's start with what philosophy is, what a  religious belief is, and the connection that I see, which I think is extremely  important and very clear start, what is philosophy? When I used to introduce this to my freshman students, I always did something like this. I said, we have all  kinds of Sciences. We have mathematics and we have physics. And we have  biology, we have psychology, we have logic and we have linguistics, and great  many more fields, economics, law, ethics, each one of these is a study. There  are experts in it, who get degrees in it, who offer courses in it. So what's left for  philosophy to study? If these. Represent the home ground, the topic, the field,  subject matter of these disciplines. What's the subject matter for philosophy?  And usually, my freshman students puzzled over that one, but eventually, almost always, somebody came up with a suggestion. Is philosophy about how they all  relate. And I would say, you get the gold star. Exactly one well known American  philosopher put it this way. And I like this quote now. I'll repeat it later on in the  course, philosophy is about how all things, in the widest sense of things, hang  together. In the widest sense of hang together. So it's about how all these  disciplines hang together. How do they all relate? Another way to put this is to  think of this of these disciplines, and why don't I write some more of them up  here so you see what I'm talking about. I'm talking about sociology and  economics and aesthetics, ethics, and finally, there's theology. What do you  mean? How do they all hang together? Well, one very old way of looking at all  this goes like this. It views all these as though they are the beads on a necklace. And philosophy wants to know, what is the string? What hangs them all  together? And the oldest positions taken in philosophy all use the same kind of  answer. They all selected some one or two of these beads and said, these aren't beads at all, these are the string. So a materialist in philosophy, for example, is  someone who believes that the physical is what gives rise to everything else.  There are some kind of realities that are purely physical, and they generate  everything else that exists, physical or not. So the physical is not just a bead on  the string. It's the string. It's what hangs all the rest together, because it  generates, it produces all the rest, as many as they'll concede exist. That's one  way to do it. It's the way most theories have been done, and it's a way that I'm  later going to say is not a good idea for reasons that I think are very powerful  and very important. This is one side of philosophy. There are two sorts of  theories that deal with how all the disciplines hang together. One is a theory of  reality and a general theory. Whoops. Try that. Maybe I need another. Try  another pen here, general theory of reality. In other words, we're thinking of this  as these are all different sides of the reality that we experience, reality as we  experience, has things in it that are just physical, things that are alive. It has in it  sensations and emotions. It has logical thought and so on. But the general  theory says these are all specific sides to the reality that we experience. We  want to know the general the what hangs it all together, what's true of them all? 

What are they all sides of? And there's another way that This yields a general  theory, and that's a general theory of knowledge. I hope you can read my  handwriting. I've been told it's pretty bad. In fact, I've been told if it was just a  little worse, I could have qualified as an MD. You know what that stands for,  don't you? Which would be natural anyway, General Theory of Knowledge says  these are not only different sides to reality, they're different kinds of knowledge.  There's mathematical knowledge, knowledge in physics and biology,  psychology, logic, linguistics, sociology and so on. Well, how would we  characterize knowledge itself, of which these are all? Different types. So again,  it's the what hangs it all together. Now in this course, we're not going to take  undertake just to do this or just to do this. This course is a little more specific. It's about whether we can know God is real. So it's about theory of reality, but it's  not about the whole, taken as a whole, but with specific reference to God. Is  God real? And it's going to concentrate on this side of things, the theory of  knowledge, because it's going to ask, How can we know? And of course, one  answer is, we can. One very popular answer is, nobody can really know that  kind of thing that's just too abstract. It's an idea people came up with, and we  have no way of telling whether any of those religious ideas are right, and  including whether God's real. It won't surprise you to hear that I'm going to  disagree with that very strongly what we're what we want to do here is first we  see the nature of the study, what philosophy is about, how it purchase things,  how it looks, for what lies underneath the surface. And we're going to do this  with respect to God. Then we're going to do it with respect to really whether  God's real, and do it with respect to how we can know so with in the connection  with the second one, how we know we're going to talk about what A religious  belief is, what a religious belief is, and it's probably not the way you've ever  phrased this to yourself. But before we try to talk about philosophy concerning  religious beliefs, the belief in God in particular, we ought to be able to identify a  religious belief when we see one. How would you know when you look at any  particular belief, whether it's religious or not, for example, suppose we take  sample belief. Next Friday's payday. Here's another. There was an ice age about 13,000 years ago. Here's another. Last winter was unusually warm, and here's  another one, plus two, plus three, plus four, equals 10. Any of those sound like  religious beliefs to you? Probably not, but one of them was definitely a religious  belief to a very important group of thinkers in the ancient world. I'm talking about Pythagoras and his followers. Do you remember that from geometry class, the  Pythagorean theorem for Pythagoras and his followers, the statement that's  religious is one plus two plus three plus four makes ten. Excuse me while I  erase the board. Here, we need more room. So as you can see, we have all the  best, latest equipment. Now, why do the Pythagoreans think that a statement  like one plus two plus three plus four equals 10 had to do with anything,  anything to do with religion? Well, it's because they believed that the most 

fundamental reality you ready for this, the most fundamental reality was  numbers. Everything is really made of numbers, something like the way you and I think of atoms as constituting physical things. They thought numbers were  what made everything. Constituted everything. Everything is some combination  of numbers. And they had a figure, a geometric figure, that they called tetractys , funny name, but it was looked like this. So you have 1, 2, 3, 4, any way you look at it, and it comes out to 10. And here's something you probably weren't told in  math class, they not only believed that everything were numbers, but they  believed that that made numbers divine, and they worshiped them. They actually prayed to them. Here's here's one of the there's their prayer to the number 10 to  this tetractys , this figure, Bless us divine number, thou that generates gods and  men HOLY, HOLY tetractys thou that containest the root and source of eternally  flowing creation. For divine number begins with a profound the pure unity that's  the number one, until it becomes to the until it comes to the holy four, and then it begets, the mother of all, the all encompassing, the all bounding, the firstborn,  the never slurping, never tiring. Holy 10, the key holder of all. Now, if that isn't  weird enough, we have to reflect on the fact that you and I believe that one plus  two plus three plus four equals 10 also. But for us, it's not a religious belief. So  the question is, what makes it religious for them and not for us? And why is it  that that is religious for them but not last winter was unusually far warm, and  next Friday will be payday. What is it that makes a belief religious? A religious  belief. And when, when we return, we'll take a little break, and you think about  this stuff, digest it, tidy up your notes, maybe rerun it, and we'll take a break, and we'll come back and we'll talk about kinds of definitions and how we're going to  try to go about defining religious belief.