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1. Introduction
In his 1985 book on philosophy and atheism, the Canadian thinker Kai Nielsen, a prolific writer on the subject, wonders why the philosophy of religion is ‘so boring’, and concludes that it must be ‘because the case for atheism is so strong that it is difficult to work up much enthusiasm for the topic.’2 Indeed, Nielsen even regards most of the contemporary arguments for atheism as little more than ‘mopping up operations after the Enlightenment’3 which, on the whole, add little to the socio-anthropological and socio-psychological accounts of religion provided by thinkers like Feuerbach, Marx and Freud, as any ‘reasonable person informed by modernity’ will readily acknowledge.4 On this view, the answer to Kant's question – ‘What may we hope?’ – does not gesture towards a resurrection and personal immortality, but instead to the death of religious discourse itself:
I think, and indeed hope, that God-talk, and religious discourse more generally, is, or at least should be, dying out in the West, or more generally in a world that has felt the force of a Weberian disenchantment of the world. This sense that religious convictions are no longer a live option is something which people who think of themselves as either modernists or post-modernists very often tend to have.5
A construal like this, which views religious belief as a phenomenon whose philosophical examination has been pretty much concluded, and which may therefore be handed over to the social scientist for general historiographic and anthropological archiving, certainly makes it hard to see what the philosopher of religion could have to contribute to the subject that, far from being ‘boring’, constituted a clarification of what is involved in the religious form of life, let alone one that could be recognized to be such, even by those who, unlike Nielsen, are religious believers.However, the latter are likely to object that Nielsen's indictment of religious discourse is itself the product of problematic assumptions about the nature of religious belief, on the one hand, and the requirements of philosophical inquiry, on the other. The claim that the case for atheism is ‘so strong’ as to make religious convictions passé, for example, seems to imply, not only that both attitudes or forms of life...
