Can the Anti-Realist Capture the Distinctive Nature of Religious Belief?
A philosophical realist is one who, in general, holds the view that there are things in the world that exist independently of the mind, and are there whether or not we believe in them. This seems like a common-sensical view, for whether or not I believe that pink dolphins exist does not alter the fact that they do, and that they are right now, frolicking in the Amazon River. The existence of pink dolphins is a verifiable fact and one is warranted, indeed justified, in taking their existence to be true.
A religious realist, however, has a more difficult task of verifying the reality of God’s existence because of the metaphysical nature of such a claim. What constitutes reality in religious belief is a debate that has plagued realists and anti-realists in the history of philosophy. This argument is fundamentally an ontological one, for anti-realists would want to deny that such a metaphysical, supreme entity possibly, necessarily and actually exists. Even if God exists, the anti-realist construes that he must exist objectively, in the same sense as one might imagine the existence of unobservable subatomic particles, such as electrons and quarks.
Theistic belief in God, however, is missing the point about what religious belief is all about. This article reveals the nature of religious belief which…
