Gareth on Substack

Great post, Ben. To fit this in with next week, Hegel’s dialectic of Faith and Enlightenment is pretty central to the Phenomenology of Spirit. The bottom line is that Enlightenment turns out to be completely correct that all the propositional claims of Faith are wrong but that accepting this allows Faith to understand itself better. It is a contingent product of a historical process and a terrible theory of the natural world, but once it comes to grip with that it can actually be truer to itself. While I completely agree with you that anti-all PKG arguments are sound, I wonder if it is a good meta-philosophical strategy to put those arguments at the centre of philosophy of religion, rather than to think about the tradition of (say) Spinoza-Kant-Hegel-James of coming to terms with what religion might rationally mean once we accept that such a being makes no sense, that all religious texts are products of the politics of a long ago class society and that modern science is a better guide to how causal reality works. I would dispute that the all-PKG fellow is particularly like the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. He was clearly a very personal god but not all powerful, all knowing and definitely not universally benevolent. The all-PKG person was surely a much later invention, basically an idealization of what Persian or Roman Emperors claimed to be. Contemporary religious communities have to be understood materially as sources of goods that neither the state nor the market are good at providing. They don’t seem super invested in medieval theology, which is based in a very different political economy, but unfortunately do seem invested in patriarchal gender relations and