Religious Realism and Non-Realism: Defining the Issue

Abstract

The debate between realist and non-realist understandings of religious language exposes the most fundamental of all issues in the philosophy of religion today. I say ‘today’ because although logically this issue is basic in a timeless sense, it has only come to be generally seen as an issue at all during the last hundred and fifty or so years — roughly since the pioneering work of Feuerbach — and has become sharply focused within the Western religious consciousness only during recent decades. Throughout the previous centuries, and indeed millennia, religious self-understanding has been implicitly or explicitly realist — perhaps the only significant exception being within one strand of what we now see to be the highly variegated Buddhist tradition. But today there are confident non-realist interpretations of Christianity and Judaism as well as Buddhism which make a wide appeal within our contemporary industrialised, science-oriented, de-supernaturalised Western societies.