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.
