Believers do not achieve their religious beliefs through argumentation and debate

To many religionists, the fact that the arguments for divine existence invite a  hung jury is no great concern. The postmodern version claims that religious faith constitutes its own paradigm and that canons of evidence and argument can only operate within paradigms, never upon them - basically meaning that faith determines what is relevant to truth and what is not.

There are many models for saying that evidence and argument have little or nothing to do with what one ultimately believes to be true.

• Bryan Wilson is an insightful and respected sociologist of religion. Even he, in 1982, warned of mass breakdown in morality in the West if the religious underpinnings of moral propriety were forgotten.
• “As Wilson (1982: 52) concludes, 'Unless the basic virtues are serviced, unless men are given a sense of psychic reassurance that transcends the confines of the social system, we may see a time when, for one reason or another, the system itself fails to work...' [...] Wilson (1982: 86) describes how secularization resulted in the breakdown of morality in Western societies: 'When in the West, religion waned, when the rationalistic forces inherent in Puritanism acquired autonomy of their religious origins, so the sense of moral propriety also waned - albeit somewhat later, as a cultural lag. Following the decline of religion [... and the resultant] process of moral breakdown [... we should have] genuine concern about the role of morality in contemporary culture' (Wilson 1982: 87)”
• Bryan Wilson (1982) Being discussed in "Key Thinkers in the Sociology of Religion" Richard K. Fenn (2009) [Book Review]

• The practice of philosophy, especially in the analytic tradition, places emphasis on precision of terms and clarity of concepts and ideas. Religious language is often vague, imprecise, and couched in mystery. In the twentieth century this linguistic imprecision was challenged by philosophers who used a principle of verifiability to reject as meaningless all non-empirical claims. For these logical positivists, only the tautologies of mathematics and logic, along with statements containing empirical observations or inferences, were taken to be meaningful. Many religious statements, including those about God, are neither tautological nor empirically verifiable. So a number of religious claims, such as “Yahweh is compassionate” or “Atman is Brahman,” were considered by the positivists to be cognitively meaningless. When logical positivism became prominent mid-century, philosophy of religion as a discipline became suspect.

• There are many who say the real reason that Christians object to skeptics' reasoning about God is that the conclusions of reason differ very sharply from Christian beliefs, and so they wish to downplay the role of thinking. It is absolutely vital to the Christian faith to have the word “mystery” and other synonyms available to serve as blank checks to wish away all ways in which faith clashes with reality. What could hold together an obviously false belief more securely than a justification for believing even in the teeth of the realisation that Christian beliefs do not hold together? As Mark Twain put it, “faith is believing what you know ain't so.”

• While theology may take God's existence as absolutely necessary on the basis of authority, faith, or revelation, many philosophers-and some theologians-have thought it possible to demonstrate by reason that there must be a God

• An initial broad distinction is between thinking of faith as a state and thinking of it as an act, action or activity. Faith may be a state one is in, or comes to be in; it may also essentially involve something one does. An adequate account of faith, perhaps, needs to encompass both. Certainly, Christians understand faith both as a gift of God and also as requiring a human response of assent and trust, so that people's faith is something with respect to which they are both receptive and active.

• "Ultimately, however, conflict lies not in objective reality, but in people's heads. Truth is simple one argument - perhaps a good one, perhaps not - for dealing with the difference. The difference itself exists because it exists in their thinking."  -- Martin Luther

The postmodern version of this to the effect that evidence is always internal to a perspective, worldview, or paradigm.  At the core, facts are made in the context of one's stance on the world, never found.

Admission - not possible to know anything at all

In order to ask what can be known in religious contexts, and especially what can be known about the existence of god(s), we need to be clear about what it is to know anything at all.  Although it is possible, some say, that we don't know anything at all, we will assume otherwise in order to get at the more precise question, "can we know anything about God, using the common standards for knowledge that we actually employ for everyday affairs?  Though there may be no way to disprove radical scepticism, there is certainly no good reason to believe it is true.  In the meantime, there are practical reasons to assume that it is not.

There are differences between what we know, what we believe and what we disbelieve.

There are some things that we would say we "know"

• Some are "factual"
• Too often, we allow inertia to control our actions.
• 'Because that's the way things are' is not a valid reason.
• Whenever you say 'I had no choice', you're lying.
• It is possible to have an honest and even pleasant relationship with someone you do not like.
• Loving someone or something heart and soul does not necessarily make it good for you, or them, or it.
• Everyone has at least one story worth hearing
• Some are "normative"
• We should fight to free slaves when necessary, even when doing so is illegal.
• Pain is intrinsically bad—we ought not cause pain without a good reason to do so.

There are some things that we believe, but might not say we "know"

• The relation between desires and oughts (reasons) thus has the following structure: 
• 1. I want x to be the case.  2. Y is an appropriate means to x  
• Thus, I ought to choose y. 

There are some things that others believe (or even claim to know) that we don't believe and hence, don't know (and don't believe they know either)

• Average people think the road to riches is paved with formal education. Rich people believe in acquiring specific knowledge.
• In most cases, servant-hood was more like a live-in employee, temporarily embedded within the employer’s household. Even today, teams trade sports players to another team that has an owner, and these players belong to a franchise. This language hardly suggests slavery, but rather a formal contractual agreement to be fulfilled

Whether one claims to know, to believe,or to disbelieve a proposition should be a function of the presence or absence (of the right kind, of sufficient quality, and in sufficient quantity) to underwrite the claim that the proposition is true. At a minimum, knowledge is "justified true belief."

To better understand this definition of knowledge, let's go through each of the three elements.

First is that the statement must be true. I can't claim to know that Elvis Presley is alive, for example, if he is in fact dead. Knowledge goes beyond my personal feelings on the matter and involves the truth of things as they actually are. Some critics of this definition of knowledge question whether truth is always necessary in our claim to know something. For example, based on the available evidence of the time, scientists in the middle ages claimed to know that the earth was flat. Even though we understand now that it isn't, at the time they had knowledge of something that was false. Didn't they? In response, it may have been reasonable for scientists back then to believe the world was flat, but they really didn't know that it was. Their knowledge claims were premature in spite of how strong their convictions were. This is a trap that we fall into all the time. While talking with someone I may say insistently, "I know that Joe's car is blue!" When it turns out that Joe's car is in fact red, I have to apologize for overstating my conviction. Truth, then, is an indispensable component of knowledge.

Second, I must believe the statement in order to know it. For example, it's true that Elvis Presley is dead, and there is enormous evidence to back this up. But if I still believe that he is alive, I couldn't sincerely say that I know that he is dead. Part of the concept of knowledge involves our personal belief convictions about some fact, irrespective of what the truth of the matter is. Critics of this definition of knowledge sometimes think that belief isn't always required for our claims to know something. For example, I might say "I know I'm growing old, but I don't believe it!" In this case, I have knowledge of a particular fact without believing that fact. In response, if I say the previous sentence, what I actually mean is that I'm not capable of imagining myself getting old or I haven't yet emotionally accepted that fact. I just make my point more dramatically by saying "I don't believe it!" Instead I really do believe it, but I don't like it.

Third, I must be justified in believing the statement insofar as there must be good evidence in support of it. Suppose that I randomly pick a card out of a deck without seeing it. I believe it is the Queen of Hearts, and it actually is that card. In this case I couldn't claim to know that I've picked the Queen of Hearts; I've only made a lucky guess. Critics question whether evidence is really needed for knowledge. For example, a store owner might say "I know that my employees are stealing from me, but I can't prove it!" Here the store owner has knowledge of a particular fact without any evidence for it. In response, the store owner is really saying that he strongly believes that his employees are stealing from him, but doesn't have enough evidence to press charges. Evidence, then, is indeed an integral part of knowledge.

The big questions about evidence are --

"What kind(s)?"
"How good?"
"How much?"

Are the procedures used to discover what is so in contested and weighty puzzles appropriate for everyday domestic puzzles or would that be overkill?

The techniques of critical reasoning are not techniques for generating beliefs or cleverly presenting arguments.They are not techniques that tell you how to move from premises you now accept to conclusions you haven’t yet considered.They are techniques for evaluating some beliefs in the light of others. By contrast,the detective in fiction is often depicted as “deducing”unexpected conclusions from a set of clues.Critical reasoning does not operate in this way.It is a procedure for judging beliefs,not for generating them.This can be seen as a task akin to editing a written text after it has been produced in first-draft form by yourself or others. So the answer would be yes - same procedure.

Can unlimited power and wisdom be limited by stubbornness?

Knowing what ethical monotheists mean by "God" is a necessary condition for asking why they say that The One exists and whether anyone is in a position to know whether they are right or wrong.

Theism - belief in the existence of a god or gods, especially belief in one god as creator of the universe, intervening in it and sustaining a personal relation to his creatures.

• Polytheism - the belief in or worship of more than one god.
• Monotheism - the doctrine or belief that there is only one God.

Monotheism has been an arena of high theological development with the result that many of the dimensions of this view of God have been very precisely articulated, parsed and re-parsed. There is nothing that can limit what a completely non-contingent being can do and/or know.

Ethical monotheism incorporates all the dimensions of general monotheism and adds one important further characteristic, namely, that the divine is "without moral flaw." How could the sole source of all that is be simultaneously omnipotent omniscient, without moral flaw, and interested in us and the world be the way it is -- beset by host of all too familiar "slings and arrows of outrageous fortune"?

It is generally held that no more than one being can be "all powerful, all knowing and all good" -- thus, ethical monotheists tend to believe that all other worshippers are following after "false gods," at best, or are "idolaters," at worst. Even if there an be no more than one such being, however, it is not clear to everyone that there is one at all.

The word "God" - used 85% of the time non-seriously

Many (but not all) religions and the people who subscribe to them, affirm the existence of one or more "gods."  The belief in the supernatural may, however, include very specific beliefs about the existence or occurrence of one or more particular supernatural beings that are in some sense, "supreme" beings (that is, not just "superior" to nature, animals or humans).

In the contexts in which it seriously occurs, "god" generally designates some force, entity, being or process that is affirmed as a proper object of human worship. To "worship" some X is to venerate it, address prayers and praise to it, be obedient to it, hold it in awe and as a target for ritual practice, and so on.

Although those who worship some X would seem, by their practice, to imply that it deserves their veneration and so on, there remains an important question to the outsider -- "Does the target of their worship actually deserve it?"  All would agree, however, that anyone who worships something that does not deserve it worships a "false" god.

The affirmation that some X or other is a proper object of worship ( and is, hence, to be called "god") has been articulated in many ways --

• Animism - All the objects and phenomena have a soul. Worship of the ancestors , superstitions, magic 
• Polytheism - Believes in several gods who act on the world 
• Pantheism - Aims its worship at any and all things (either distributively or collectively), seeing them all as inhabited by spirits or beings of the sort that animism singles out. 
• Henotheism - Belief in or worship of one deity without denying the existence of other deities. 
• Dualism/bitheism - is the belief that two separate, complementary forces or deities exist (light/dark, wet/dry and so on). 
• Deism - Believes in a creative God, first cause, who does not intervene in human business

If you don't believe in God, can you say, "Oh my God?"

Sociology is intriguing, valuable and important

Just as there are many notions of what philosophy is, and many notions of what religion is, there are also many notions of what philosophy of religion is.

There are many valuable enterprises that philosophy of religion might be but isn't.  Unlike apologetics which are always committed in advance, philosophy of religion, like all philosophy, requires suspending judgment on how the arguments will turn out.

It is not comparative religion and it is not psychology.  Psychology of religion looks at religion from a historical or genealogical perspective, not from a consideration of the coherence or truth of their beliefs.

It is not history of religion.  History of religion does attempt to explain as well as describe, but it is concerned with how people believe and act, not with whether their beliefs and actions are "correct."

It is not theology, and it is not religious philosophy.  Those are much closer to apologetics then to philosophy of religion.

There are a few not-very-valuable enterprises that philosophy of religion might be but isn't so we are going to leave our direction to one central question and it is an epistemological one -- Is religious knowledge possible?

The sort of religion we might do in philosophy with, contra "multiculturalism and diversity," is a narrow perspective called "ethical monotheism."  The religions that have been most important historically in the world in which we live are Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, all examples of ethical monotheism.