Ninth International Conference on Religion & Spirituality in Society

Abstract

Criticisms of certain doctrines in Philosophical Theology frequently rest on premises to the effect that the doctrine is in conflict with the sacred scriptures of its own religious tradition. I show that, to make sense of such arguments, we need some non-arbitrary criterion telling us, when two aspects of a religious tradition come into conflict, which aspect to prefer over the other, and why it makes sense to jettison one in favor of that other, rather than abandon the religion altogether. I take as a case study the doctrine of the Trinity and the Christian Bible and illustrate the problems for these kinds of arguments by showing that the sorts of criteria usually hinted at in the literature on the Trinity either fail to distinguish between the Bible and the doctrine of the Trinity at all, or would actually lead us prefer the doctrine of the Trinity over the Bible. I conclude that such scripture-based arguments will in many cases fail to non-question-beggingly support the conclusion they are intended to, and in some cases actually support the opposite conclusion from what they are intended to. Generalizing, I argue that we must approach religious traditions in a more wholistic way, rather than attempting to reduce a religious tradition to a mere text.