IB Philosophy 5. Philosophy of Religion Key Definitions

Aesthetic experience: a distinctive mode of perception in which a subject attends to an object for its sensory, formal, and expressive qualities, valued for their own sake rather than for instrumental purposes.

Analogy in Aquinas's philosophy of religious language holds that terms applied to God are neither purely literal (univocal) nor purely metaphorical (equivocal) but bear a proportional resemblance to their ordinary meaning. This doctrine allows theists to make meaningful claims about divine attributes such as goodness and wisdom while respecting the infinite qualitative difference between Creator and creation.

Consciousness: the state of subjective awareness in which an individual experiences thoughts, sensations, and perceptions with a first-person, qualitative character: the 'what it is like' quality of mental life.

The cosmological argument is an a posteriori proof for God's existence that reasons from the observable fact that the universe exists and requires a cause to the conclusion that there must be a necessary, uncaused first cause. Versions by Aquinas, Leibniz, and the Islamic kalam tradition differ in detail but share the core claim that an infinite regress of contingent causes is impossible or explanatorily unsatisfying.

The epistemic value of religious experience concerns whether such experiences provide genuine knowledge about the existence and nature of God, or whether they can be fully explained by psychological, neurological, or social factors without invoking a divine cause.

Eschatological verification: John Hick's proposal that religious statements are verifiable in principle because they will be confirmed or disconfirmed by post-mortem experience; this accepts the verificationist requirement of testability while arguing that the test occurs after death rather than during life.

Ineffability is a characteristic of religious (especially mystical) experience identified by William James, referring to the quality of being beyond adequate verbal expression.

Karma is the principle, found across Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain traditions, that every intentional action produces moral consequences that shape an agent's future experiences, either in this life or in subsequent rebirths. In the philosophy of religion, the doctrine functions as both a theodicy and a moral framework, explaining suffering as the fruit of past actions while grounding ethical responsibility in cosmic causal order.

A language game is Wittgenstein's term for a distinct form of linguistic activity governed by its own internal rules and purposes, reflecting his argument that language is used in many different ways (describing, commanding, praying, joking), each with its own criteria for meaning.

Monotheism is the belief that there exists only one supreme, all-powerful God, a position central to the Abrahamic traditions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. The concept raises distinctive philosophical questions about how a single being can possess attributes such as omnipotence, omniscience, and perfect goodness without internal contradiction.

Natural theology is the attempt to establish truths about God's existence and attributes through reason and observation of the natural world, without relying on divine revelation or scripture.

Nyaya is a classical school of Indian philosophy that places logic and rigorous epistemological analysis at the centre of philosophical inquiry, recognising four valid means of knowledge: perception, inference, comparison, and testimony. The Nyaya tradition developed a sophisticated theistic argument contending that the orderly operation of karma and the structure of the universe require an omniscient, eternal God as their ultimate coordinator.

Omnipotence is the divine attribute of unlimited power, traditionally defined as God's ability to do anything that is logically possible. Whether omnipotence extends to logically contradictory acts (such as creating a stone too heavy for God to lift) is the central puzzle of the omnipotence paradox.

The omnipotence paradox refers to a family of logical puzzles (such as "Can God create a stone so heavy that God cannot lift it?") that challenge the coherence of unlimited divine power as a concept.

Omniscience is the divine attribute of possessing complete and perfect knowledge of all truths, encompassing past, present, and future events. The concept generates philosophical puzzles about whether divine foreknowledge is compatible with genuine human free will, since an infallibly known future appears to leave no room for agents to do otherwise.

The ontological argument is an a priori proof for the existence of God that proceeds from the concept of God alone, without relying on empirical observation. Descartes' version in Meditation V argues that because God possesses all perfections and existence is a perfection, God necessarily exists.

Pantheism is the view that God and the universe are identical, associated with Spinoza's Deus sive Natura ("God or Nature"), and denying a personal, transcendent God separate from the natural world.

Polytheism is the belief in multiple gods, each with distinct roles, powers, and attributes, characteristic of ancient Greek, Hindu, and Norse religious traditions. In the philosophy of religion, polytheism poses a challenge to arguments that assume a single necessary being and raises questions about the coherence of dividing divine perfections among several deities.

Problem of evil: the argument that the existence of evil and suffering in the world is incompatible with (or makes improbable) the existence of an omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent God.

Projection theory is the view, associated with Feuerbach, Freud, and Marx, that the concept of God is a human creation projected outward rather than a response to an independently existing divine reality. Feuerbach argued that theology is unconscious anthropology, with believers attributing their own idealised qualities to a fictitious being, while Freud interpreted religion as wish-fulfilment rooted in childhood dependence.

Religious experience: any experience in which a person believes they have encountered the divine, the sacred, or a transcendent reality; types include mystical experiences, near-death experiences, prayer, visions, and moments of profound awe or transformation.

Religious language: the words, statements, and linguistic forms used to express beliefs about God, the sacred, and the transcendent.

Philosophy of religion asks whether religious language is literal, symbolic, metaphorical, analogical, or mythological, and whether it can convey genuine knowledge.

Religious pluralism: the view that no single religion has a monopoly on truth and that the major world religions are different culturally conditioned responses to the same ultimate divine reality; most closely associated with John Hick.

Scientific realism is the view that science aims to produce true descriptions of the world, and that the entities posited by successful scientific theories (such as electrons and genes) genuinely exist.