(a) Elucidate the personalistic and impersonalistic aspects of God. (10 marks) (b) Can religious beliefs be justified? Discuss…

(a) Personalistic and impersonalistic aspects of God

Personalistic (saguṇa) God is a being with mind, will and moral attributes: omniscient, omnipotent and good, who creates, judges, hears prayer and saves. This is the God of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, and of Indian theism: Rāmānuja's Nārāyaṇa with auspicious qualities (kalyāṇa-guṇas), and the Īśvara of Bhagavad Gītā worship. Its religious value is relation, love and devotion (bhakti), and it explains moral order and grace. Impersonalistic (nirguṇa) God is the Absolute without attributes, form or will, beyond thought and language: Śaṅkara's nirguṇa Brahman, pure being-consciousness-bliss; the Tao, Spinoza's God or Nature, Bradley's Absolute and Eckhart's Godhead. It is approached by knowledge (jñāna) and negation (neti neti). Contrast: person versus ground, worship versus realisation, a God who acts versus a reality that is. Some traditions join the two: Advaita treats Īśvara as Brahman seen through māyā, and Rāmānuja and the Bhakti poets (Kabir) hold both aspects. Problems: a personal God faces the problem of evil and anthropomorphism; an impersonal Absolute is hard to worship or relate to.

(b) Can religious beliefs be justified?

The question is whether belief in God needs evidence and argument. Clifford's evidentialism says it is wrong to believe on insufficient evidence; Hume and the positivists press similar objections. Responses: Natural theology and cumulative case: Swinburne uses probability reasoning to argue that cosmological, design and religious-experience evidence makes theism more probable than not. Reformed epistemology: Plantinga argues that belief in God can be properly basic, like belief in other minds or memory, and warranted if formed by properly functioning faculties (sensus divinitatis), without argument. Pragmatic: James's Will to Believe allows faith where the option is live, forced and momentous and the evidence cannot decide. Fideism: Kierkegaard and Tertullian treat faith as beyond reason; Wittgensteinians say religious belief is a form of life. Objections: the Great Pumpkin objection to proper basicness, the problem of evil, religious diversity, and the charge that experience cannot be checked independently. Judgment: strict evidentialism is itself unprovable, so religious belief can be rationally held if it is responsive to criticism, but no argument is conclusive; justification is partial and depends on the standard of rationality accepted.

(c) Religion and moral behaviour: an interactive relation

Religion influences morality by giving motive and sanction (reward and punishment, karma), moral ideals (compassion, ahimsa, the Commandments), community and ritual that reinforce norms (Durkheim), and a view of life's meaning. Studies show religious people are often more charitable towards their own group, though religion has also supported violence and discrimination. Morality influences religion too. Our moral sense tests religion: Plato's Euthyphro challenges divine command theory (is something good because God commands it, or does He command it because it is good?); reformers criticise sati, untouchability and slavery on moral grounds, and religious beliefs are revised accordingly. Kant held that morality is autonomous and that religion arises as the postulates of practical reason, God and immortality securing the highest good. Hence the relation is two-way: religion gives morality motivation and community, and morality purifies religion. Ethics can stand without religion, but religion without ethics is empty ritual. Example: Gandhi drew moral resources from religion while making truth and non-violence his tests of it.

(d) Wittgenstein on the non-cognitive nature of religious language

Against logical positivism, which called religious statements meaningless because unverifiable, the later Wittgenstein says meaning is use within a language-game rooted in a form of life. Religious language has its own grammar. In Lectures on Religious Belief he says that a believer in the Last Judgment is not putting forward a hypothesis that is probable on evidence: it is an "unshakeable" picture that regulates all his life. A believer and unbeliever are not contradicting each other, because they are playing different games. Statements such as "God exists" express commitment, attitude and way of life, not facts open to test. This is called non-cognitivism (or Wittgensteinian fideism, developed by Norman Malcolm and D. Z. Phillips). Its merit is to protect religion from scientific criticism and show its depth. Criticism: believers do take their statements as true of reality (Kai Nielsen); isolating religion from rational criticism makes it immune and may make it relativist; and Wittgenstein himself did not say religion is only expressive.

(e) Agnosticism: religion and God

Agnosticism, a word coined by T. H. Huxley in 1869, holds that whether God exists or not cannot be known from the evidence available, so judgment should be suspended. It differs from atheism, which denies God, and theism, which affirms. Roots go back to Protagoras and Hume; Kant limited knowledge to experience, and Herbert Spencer placed the Absolute in the Unknowable. Agnostics' view of religion and God. God's existence is neither affirmed nor denied, but the claims of religion to knowledge of God are rejected as unsupported. Some agnostics value religion for its moral, emotional and social worth, and as a response to mystery, without dogma; Huxley kept the ethics of Christianity but not its creed; others, like Russell, are critical of religion. Strong agnostics say it is unknowable in principle, weak agnostics that it is unknown at present. Criticism: theists say agnosticism is evasive, since one must live as though God exists or not; it can slide into practical atheism.