Westphal's article

Exploring M Westphal's article - A companian to philosophy of religion

Pre-Kantian philosophy focused generally on two types of thinking: Deism and Scholasticism. Both focus on establishing God through human reason

Scholasticism - reason is in harmony with revelation, faith and authority and the teo can work together

Deism - argues that reason is completely distinct to revelation and attempts to seperate the two. Therefore, religion should be limited to reason and the 'revelation elements' should be discounted

Epistemology - the theory of knowledge

Ecclesiology - the study of churches

After the religious warfare and persecution, enlightenment thinkers did not reject religious belief, but sought to try and find a moral unity, through pure reason, as it was believed a non-violent religion could rest only on universality of reason. The problem was not to prove God's existence but to make religion the ally of morality rather than its enemy. The enlightenment was rooted in 3 motifs - a concern for reason of religion to be compeltely autonomous (seperate of) faith, a concern for religious tolerance, and an anti-ecclesiastical idea to deny the church political authority. 

Hume criticised the existence of God as it cannot be based on emperical evidence, and Kant studied the existence of morality, using logic rather than religion. This led to Nietzche suggesting tht religion should be criticised on the gorunds that it restrictc humanity from…