Kızılkaya / Fıkıh Usulünde Sahabe Fetvasının Kaynaklık Değeri Cilt / Volume: • Sayı /Issue: • 2012

196
İnsan ve Toplum
This book contains eight separate essays from distinguished theologians and philoso-
phers and a general introduction into the realism/antirealism debate in the philoso-
phy of religion. The debate revolves around three key issues: the question of God’s 
independence from human constructions, the nature of religious truth, and our access 
to religious truth.  On the one hand, religious realists normally maintain that religious 
claims represent truths which are independent of the human mind and to which we 
have some means of epistemic access. They also often hold that at least some religious 
claims are actually true. On the other hand, religious antirealists present various con-
trary claims such as the assertions that religious claims are primarily expressive rather 
than truly representational; that religious truths are inaccessible to us; that religious 
truth is a matter of the satisfaction of internal standards of religious language (or ‘lan-
guage games’); that religious claims are systematically false. As the editors note in the 
preface, this debate has seen little sustained exploration compared to its counterpart 
in ethics and the philosophy of science, and that there is also yet no general consensus 
on how to approach the problem. This book is by no means an attempt to bring about 
such a consensus, but presents a firm basis upon which the debate can be advanced. 
The essays fall into two categories: Gordon Kaufman, Peter Lipton and Simon Blackburn 
provide the opening chapters and the context for the collection, while Alexander 
Bird, John Hare, Graham Oppy and Nick Trakakis, Merold Westphal, and John Webster 
explore topics that are central to the debate. A variety of different theoretical posi-
tions are expressed by the contributors, and each touches upon a different area. In the 
introduction, the editors list four critical problems raised in the collection that merit 
particular attention: (1) The appropriate paradigm(s) for pursuing the realism debate; 
(2) The possible lessons from comparable debates in science and ethics; (3) The ways 
in which religious realism is distinct from other kinds of realism; and (4) The relation-
ship between philosophy and theology. This is then followed by a discussion of the 
approaches to and arguments of the debate, concentrating on the cognitivist and 
non-cognitivist positions in philosophy and their relative strengths when applied to 
religious issues. Next, there is an examination of each of the following essays, marking 
out the main approaches of each contribution and the contrasting theses they express.
The first essay is written by G. D. Kaufman, who sets out to explore the interconnections 
and interdependence of ‘Mystery, God, and Constructivism’. Kaufman avoids analysis of 
the general problem of religion and realism, and instead provides a kind of case study 
of the problem as it appears in connection with some of the central claims of Christian 
Andrew Moore & Micheal Scott (Eds.), Realism and Religion: Philosophical and Theological Perspectives, 
Hampshire and Burlington: Ashgate, 2007, 172 p. 
Değerlendiren: Kayhan Ali*
*  Dokrora Öğrencisi, Sakarya Üniversitesi İlahiyat Fakültesi

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197
Değerlendirme / Review
faith concerning the ‘ultimate reality’. The first section of this essay articulates the natu-
ral reasons for awe and mystery that we as human beings experience when thinking 
about the universe and our place within it. This is then followed by an examination 
of the concept of God as an answer to that natural wonder, as well as the epistemic 
problems that we seem to face when seeking knowledge of Him. Kaufman identifies 
God primarily as an imaginative construction or symbol whose contents or meaning 
we are rather unable to verify. The findings of this examination are then applied to 
theology, which is thus identified as an imaginative and socio-cultural activity. Here 
Kaufman notes the changing notions humans have had of God’s nature, where a kind 
of reality-testing based on cultural and scientific developments can lead to new activity 
and shifts in theology. The next sections look at how such activity could be carried out 
and questions whether such activity is able to credibly maintain the traditional idea of 
God. Having identified certain aspects of our received concept of God to be difficult 
to maintain, Kaufman presents the central claim of his essay, and offers two substitute 
ideas (namely, serendipitous creativity and directional movements) in order to explain, 
or rather, correspond with modern and postmodern scientific and historical findings. 
In the second essay, Peter Lipton focuses on the cognitive tension between science and 
religion, giving special attention to the contradictions between some of the claims of 
current science and religious texts. Lipton takes note of two different approaches in the 
philosophy of science that may help to manage the tension, namely, adjusting content 
and adjusting attitude to facts. From these he chooses the second strategy in order to 
deal with the claims of religious texts. This leads to a consideration of Kuhn’s doctrine of 
multiple worlds and then the Immersion Solution as inspired by constructive empiricism 
from the philosophy of science. Throughout these discussions Lipton is concerned with 
three main things, maintaining a realist position about science, an antirealist position 
about religion, while preserving the literal content of religious and scientific claims. This 
is done, in part, to maintain the normative, that is, ethical contents of religion despite 
the notion that these are not observable or scientifically testable. Lipton’s ultimate 
claim in the essay is a resolution of the tension between science and religion inspired 
by empirical constructivism that entails substituting faith in supernatural entities and 
events with an acceptance of normative values that are to be found in religious texts.   
The fourth chapter contains Simon Blackburn’s contribution, which concerns the 
ontology and ontological nature of religious language. He begins with an account 
of approaches to ontology in theology and philosophy, looking more specifically at 
phenomenology and then, with more positive comment, the work of W. V. Quine, and 
David Lewis’s credo argument. He goes on to argue that the credo argument provides 
a good way to think about ontology in general, because it leads to a ‘deflation’ of truth 
claims that benefits from being immune to postmodernist scepticism this deflation 
makes truth not a matter of metaphysics, but rather locating, collecting, and general-
izing the claims of a theory. In the next two sections Blackburn presents an example 
of deflationism in action, specifically, by taking David Lewis’s realism about possible 
worlds as a test case. He then considers instances of discourse that may or may not 

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