Royce rejected all the current arguments for God and immortality and
argues for the mysticism of internal experience. Eucken offers no
support to theologians; and Bergson does not seem to express a clear
belief in a personal god or personal immortality.
Coming to the more popular of contemporary philosophers one finds that,
just as the Greek philosophers reasoned outside the pale of the then
held beliefs which were theistic, so do these modern philosophers reach
conclusions that are outside the pale of organized religion of today.
George Santayana is a materialist and sceptic who, in his "Reason in
Religion," reveals his scepticism and frowns upon personal immortality.
"It is pathetic," he comments, "to observe how lowly are the motives
that religion, even the highest, attributes to the deity, and from what
a hard-pressed and bitter existence they have been drawn. To be given
the best morsel, to be remembered, to be praised, to be obeyed blindly
and punctiliously, these have been thought points of honor with the
gods, for which they would dispense favors and punishments on the most
exhorbitant scale.... The idea that religion contains a literal, not a
symbolic, representation of truth and life is simply an impossible idea.
Whoever entertains it has not come within the region of profitable
philosophizing on that subject."
Bertrand Russell, considered by some the keenest philosophical mind of
the present age, is an agnostic who maintains "The objections to
religion are of two sorts, intellectual and moral. The intellectual
objection is that there is no reason to suppose any religion true; the
moral objection is that religious precepts date from a time when men
were more cruel than they are now, and therefore tend to perpetuate
inhumanities which the moral conscience of the age would otherwise
outgrow."
The Italian philosopher Benedetto Croce is an atheist who states that
philosophy removes from religion all reason for existing. C. E. M. Joad
is a young English philosopher who repeatedly predicts the disappearance
in the near future of the present forms of theistic beliefs. M. C. Otto
holds to "An affirmative faith in the non-existence of God." William P.
Montague discards all organized religions for a "Promethean Religion."
John Dewey is a naturalistic philosopher who will have nothing to do
with supernatural causation and insists that all things be explained by
their place and function in the environment. His philosophy is permeated
with the secular ideal of control of the external world.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Elsewhere in the archive
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account