This metaphilosophical article does not develop detailed arguments about topics standardly discussed in the philosophy of religion.¹ Rather, I will explore what we may call the philosophy of theology and religious studies, which can be characterized as a field within “the philosophy of the humanities” that in turn belongs to general philosophy of science and theory of inquiry (Pihlström, 2022). I will consider in what sense exactly theology and the study of religion, including the philosophy of religion as a branch of philosophy closely intertwined with them, represent humanistic research. I will thereby examine what kind of conceptually prior philosophical discussions need to take place in order for us to be able to hold informed views on the status of theology, religious studies, and the philosophy of religion as humanistic disciplines.²

I will begin with observations that are more or less self-evident (both in the academia and wider society today), emphasizing the non-ideological and nonconfessional status of theology and religious studies. My reflections toward the end of the essay, especially on realism and transcendental philosophy, are presumably more controversial. Of course, I am not claiming to settle this complex set of issues here, but I hope to enhance our self-understanding as philosophers of religion and philosophers of theology and religious studies, concluding that we cannot non-circularly argue against conceptions of the status of our discipline(s) that presuppose views on the issue of realism dramatically diverging from our own.

For most academic theologians it is self-evident that their “research objects” do not include God, deities, or any other religious entities. (In a broad sense, “religious entities” may denote objects, relations, and processes postulated within the framework of – at least realistically³ understood – religious language-use, such as God, divine beings generally, angels, immortal souls or spirits, resurrection bodies, grace or atonement, and analogous spiritual entities in various religious traditions, including non-Western ones.) While religious practitioners in some sense seek connections with such entities, theology, as a secular academic discipline, examines those (attempted) “connections” themselves, that is, human religious activity and thinking, rather than any superhuman or supernatural realities.⁴

Accordingly, theology is a humanistic or, more broadly, humanistic and social-scientific discipline.⁵ Academics at theological faculties and research institutions all over the world study and teach a wide range of topics that could easily be studied and taught in other academic contexts, especially at faculties of the humanities and social sciences. For example, church historians investigate the “same” history as other historians, though focusing on religions and churches, just as economic history examines the past developments in economy. Biblical studies, in turn, analyzes sacred writings and their historical contexts; their work does not differ in any principled way from critical research on other ancient texts and their historical contexts. Sociologists of religion, furthermore, practice empirical social science when examining the social nature of religious phenomena. Moreover, the disciplines of systematic theology are often indistinguishable from the history of ideas and philosophy: for example, dogmatics studies religious doctrines and their development from an analytic or historical perspective presupposing no commitment to the truth (or falsity) of any doctrine. Although some – presumably many – theologians are religious believers, their academic research and teaching in no way binds them to any religious denomination. Any branch of theology can be studied and taught by an atheist as well as by a believer.⁶

Contingent worldview backgrounds may have an influence on how researchers understand the deeper significance of their activities, including their potential societal impact, but such backgrounds arguably (in principle) play a role in all disciplines. It seems natural to expect that, independently of the researchers’ own religious or nonreligious worldviews, their shared goal is to advance our understanding of religions and religiosity as well as the preconditions enabling critical discussion of religion. Analogously, economists, as scholars, operate in a context of contingent economic-political ideas (or even “ideologies”), but their research need not be linked with any political views. Generally, it is hardly fruitful to classify fields of inquiry according to how close to or how far they are from “ideological” settings. Theology is not exceptional here. Like any other academic study, it is in principle independent of ideologies yet susceptible to their possible influence. An economist’s thinking can be influenced by whether they are inclined to support conservative or progressive policies; as a researcher, their job is to seek the truth regardless of such inclinations. Even in the sciences, for instance engineering or medicine, it can be asked to what extent research is vulnerable to, say, considerations emerging from industry or healthcare business. The fact that research is surrounded by diverging societal values is familiar to anyone with the barest understanding of science and scholarship in modern societies, and theology is in no way special in this regard. In all fields, researchers’ values outside the academia may influence the choice of research topics, for instance.

Crucially, nurturing scientific objectivity in the sense of continuing to critically develop truth-directed methods and research practices – both in the humanities and in the sciences – is compatible with acknowledging the value-embeddedness of all research and does not require any imagined “value neutrality” (see, e.g., Raatikainen, 2006). Gods are not assumed to exist in theology any more than in any humanistic or scientific discipline, but a deeper understanding of why some people believe in God or gods is something we find academically and societally valuable.⁷

One apt, albeit limited, analogy for the practice of theology is provided by medicine (and of course medieval universities already had both medical and theological faculties). Clearly, the same biological, physiological, and chemical phenomena are explored in medicine as in the basic natural sciences (such as molecular biology). However, in medicine, inquiries into these phenomena take place in a context constituted by the aim of promoting health and the cure of illnesses. Likewise, theology and religious studies examine the same cultural and social phenomena, structures, and meanings as other humanistic and social-scientific disciplines do, placing them in a framework focusing on human beings as creatures practicing religion, using religious language, and living religious lives (or rejecting them). Of course, there are disanalogies, too: while medicine can be understood essentially as an applied science seeking to cure illnesses, theology is not primarily applied research, though there may be exceptions. The bulk of theological research is basic humanistic scholarship whose main aim is to explain and understand cultural, historical, and social phenomena related to religion and religiosity.⁸

A theologian might, “outside the academia,” utilize the results of basic research in an “applied” project aimed at promoting religious life or church activities. However, this is in principle just as contingent from the perspective of academic theology as, for example, a case in which a medical scientist runs a clinic, or (to give a “humanistic” example) a historian employs the results of their research by organizing tourist excursions to military-historical sites. The truth or falsity of the historian’s claims about what happened at those sites does not depend on what would make their war tourism business flourish. Very simply, interests external to research may influence what researchers consider important but not the truth-value of their theories.⁹

Consequently, it is not necessary to draw any philosophically significant division between theology and religious studies (or the “science of religions”). Both are humanistic and social-scientific fields belonging to the study of religion in a broad sense. Traditionally, the division of labor has been clear: theologians have studied their “own” religious tradition from the inside, while religious studies scholars, including scholars of “comparative religion,” have studied “other religions” and religiosity generally. However, this division is only historical and practical, not philosophically essential. Since the theologian need not be committed to any religious doctrine or tradition, nothing in their research needs to be “their own” – any more than cultural anthropologists should be able to share, “from within,” the ideas and practices of the way of life they study. Similar philosophical questions concerning the relationship between “internal” understanding and “external” (e.g., causal or functional) explanation apply equally to the “science of religion” and theology.¹⁰

Seeking truth about humanly created culture is not, of course, a search for “mind-independent” truth in the sense in which, say, physics pursues truth about mind-independent nature. Yet it is a search for objective truths independent of the search itself, targeting reality not constructed by the practices of inquiry. The ontology and epistemology of theology and religious studies can, then, be further explored within a general philosophy of the humanities: What exactly does it mean for the objects of historical and cultural studies to exist? Specifically, what does it mean to say that these objects are, according to serious academic research, “natural” (not supernatural)? Instead of pursuing these questions, my characterization of the humanistic character of theology and religious studies here only serves the metaphilosophical issue to be raised about the status of the philosophy of religion in relation to these disciplines.

As theology and religious studies investigate human culture and history (like any other humanistic disciplines), questions about God and other religious (“supernatural”) entities are not among their research questions, at least not “directly.” In this sense, they are broadly naturalistic fields of study presupposing a general scientific worldview; at least they are compatible with such a worldview and do not postulate any supernatural reality any more than other sciences do.¹¹ Theology and religious studies do not seek to resolve the question of God’s existence in one direction or another, but aim at explaining and understanding how beliefs about the existence or non-existence of God have developed and influenced culture and society, acknowledging that all these processes are fully natural and historically contingent.¹²

While this humanist and (at the same time) broadly naturalist character of theology and religious studies may today be taken for granted, there is one important exception: the philosophy of religion. More precisely, it must be investigated whether philosophy of religion is an exception. Our key question therefore concerns the status of this discipline, and hence philosophy generally, in relation to humanistic research.¹³

This is, in a sense, a question about the relations of theology and philosophy. Few contemporary theologians see philosophy as a servant of theology (philosophia ancilla theologiae) – and some may even view it, in the spirit of W.V. Quine’s (e.g., 1992) radical naturalism, as a servant of science (philosophia ancilla scientiae) – but the philosophy of religion lies in the somewhat fuzzy borderlands of philosophy and theology. At many European universities, the philosophy of religion is found within a theological faculty (and often at a department of systematic theology), while in the Anglo-American world, it is common for philosophy of religion to be taught at philosophy departments, and nothing prevents – anywhere – those working in philosophy from specializing in the philosophy of religion. Trivially, philosophy of religion is, regardless of its institutional context, just philosophy. Again, as church history is just history focusing on churches and religions (and not “theological” historiography), philosophy of religion is philosophy asking questions about religion, including semantic questions about religious language and epistemological ones about the relations between faith and reason or religion and science. At the core of these issues there are questions about how the meanings of religious expressions should be understood and in what sense (if any) religious beliefs can be rationally acceptable and/or compatible with the scientific worldview. By asking its typical questions, the philosophy of religion examines, among other things, the referentiality of the concept of God – or different concepts of the divinity – and the arguments for and against beliefs in God’s existence.¹⁴

It is again self-evident that philosophy of religion in this sense can be practiced independently of religious commitments. Philosophers of religion can be expected to examine the preconditions of the intelligibility of religious language and the criteria for the epistemological scrutiny of religious beliefs. This examination takes place one step removed from religious thinking itself and also from a perspective diverging from theology proper. The fact that numerous philosophers of religion have de facto been ideologically positioned – some conservative Christians, others militant atheists – is again contingent, not essential with regard to the main aspirations and methods of the research field itself.¹⁵

However, one may claim that philosophy – and thus, a fortiori, the philosophy of religion – is not unequivocally a humanistic discipline, because the “research object” of philosophical inquiry is, in principle, the whole of reality or the world in general, whatever there is or may be. Therefore, philosophy arguably differs from all other fields of research by not being identifiable according to its research object(s).¹⁶ Like theology and religious studies, philosophy is, indisputably, a humanistic discipline (rather than a “laboratory science”) in a “practical” sense, that is, with regard to how the field is institutionally organized: its conferences, publications, and research projects resemble those of the other humanities. But it is not a humanistic discipline in the more fundamental sense that only human culture would be suitable as its research object.¹⁷

In philosophy (of religion), it is therefore possible – in contrast to theology and religious studies, or other humanistic disciplines – to explore metaphysical questions about what exists and what fundamental reality independent of culture is like. In the philosophy of religion, these questions traditionally concern the existence and attributes of God (and possibly other “religious entities”), as well as, at the meta-level, what is meant by the existence of such beings, although such meta-level questions more naturally (again) also fall within the scope of humanistic research. Metaphysical theorization on God’s attributes is intertwined with questions standardly posed in systematic theology concerning, for example, interpretations of the trinity or atonement and their history, but in the philosophy of religion these topics can, in principle, be studied – and, according to many philosophers of religion, should be studied – “directly” as questions about the world itself (as distinguished from our practices of speaking about or conceptualizing the world). While the theologian investigates, say, how interpretations of these and other doctrines have historically developed in diverging theological contexts and which interpretive possibilities may remain implicit in them, or how these interpretations have been or might be justified from different confessional viewpoints, the philosopher can (at least in principle try to) ask whether those conceptions of God are true and/or justified with regard to what reality itself is like independently of our conceptual schemes. The philosopher can also more cautiously ask what would follow from a certain doctrine’s being true.

The question of whether God exists is therefore philosophical, not theological. While theology does not deal with the existence of God, philosophy can examine this existence question along with everything else. Accordingly, it is plausible to construe atheism as a philosophical position (albeit usually based on the results of science), although radical atheists (e.g., Tuomela, 1985) may suggest, in the spirit of “scientific atheism,” that God’s non-existence could be a result of science, as the “bestexplaining” theories determine what ultimately exists.¹⁸

Philosophers can investigate the attributes traditionally attached to the Christian God, for example, by asking “truth-directed” questions not reducible to analyzing our conceptual scheme. Is the concept of omnipotence meaningful at all? Can any individual in the world fall under that concept? If God exists, are omnipotence, omniscience, and absolute goodness, as divine attributes, compatible with the fact that there seems to be gratuitous evil and suffering in the world (summarizing the basic formulation of the problem of evil, or the theodicy problem)?¹⁹ Is, furthermore, the doctrine of “divine simplicity” – roughly, the idea that God, having no proper parts,is identical with his attributes and thus the simplest possible being – true, or even intelligible? How, furthermore, should we approach the classical proofs of God’s existence?²⁰ And how should these questions be evaluated regarding the conflict between science and religion?

In short, in the philosophy of religion, as in philosophy generally, one may ask questions about reality itself, including its fundamental ontological nature – not merely about our “conceptual schemes” but about how they “mirror” the transcendent “ready-made” world outside them, to employ metaphors popular in late analytic philosophy (cf., e.g., Rorty, 1979; Putnam, 1990). Neither theology nor religious studies, nor any other field of humanistic research, explicitly takes a stand on such metaphysical issues or epistemological ones dependent on them. As these questions concern the world as it is independently of us, especially the relationship between human concepts, language, thought, and practices and the cosmos outside them (or “culture” and “nature”), they are not restricted to culture or history, as “humanistic” research questions are. Analogously, general metaphysics (metaphysica generalis) examines, for example, the existence of universals and modalities (“in the world,” not merely within our schemes), and the relationships between basic ontological categories, not merely the history or different interpretations of such notions. The philosophy of religion (in its metaphysical dimensions) has sometimes been classified under “rational theology,” and thus as part of special metaphysics (metaphysica specialis), which hopes to theorize about “religious entities” and for which it is relevant to address questions about ontological categories belonging to general metaphysics.

Moreover, at the intersection of the philosophy of religion and general metaphysics, we find a range of fundamental philosophical problems, such as the freedom of the will and the mind-body problem, which are of considerable importance for understanding and evaluating religious beliefs. As far as such problems are, again, taken to concern reality itself, studying them is not a purely humanistic project but an inquiry into the ontological structure of the world.²¹ The nature of such philosophical issues and their relations to explicitly theological questions is understood in (approximately) this way in, for example, “analytic theology,” which applies the concepts and methods of analytic philosophy to (e.g., Christian) theological concepts, doctrines, and problems (see, e.g., Vainio, 2020).²²

Insofar as the philosophy of religion (within general philosophy) and especially metaphysics examine questions about reality, including God’s existence, they are not strictly speaking humanistic disciplines but directed at “reality in general” and thus not limited by their objects of research. While theology, among the humanities, explores our “conceptual order,” philosophy (at least metaphysics) hopes to delineate the “order of being.”²³ However, taking such inquiry into a mind-independent reality to be so much as possible presupposes a non-trivial philosophical account of the relations our language-use, thought, and conceptualization bear to the world. What is presupposed is, roughly, metaphysical realism.²⁴ Thus, the above-discussed division of labor between theology and religious studies (conceived as humanistic disciplines), on the one hand, and philosophy of religion (conceived as “not simply a humanistic discipline,” because it pursues truth about independent reality), on the other hand, presupposes a metaphysically realist conception of reality and truth.²⁵

Analogously to the “levels” of scientific realism distinguished by philosophers of science (e.g., Niiniluoto, 1999; cf. Pihlström, 2020; 2022), the problem of realism arises (at least) at the levels of theology, religious studies, and the philosophy of religion. First, religious realism (or realism about religion) addresses the relationship between religious language itself and the reality it purportedly refers to: the question of realism here is whether there is such a “religious reality” and whether religious discourse is “truth-apt.” According to the realist, there is an independent reality of “religious entities” out there – or if there are no such entities, their non-existence is independent of our schemes and practices. God either exists or does not exist, and our using the concept of God does not settle this ontological question. A religious antirealist, in contrast, denies the ontological independence of religious reality, defending, for example, some form of constructivism or relativism according to which the existence or non-existence of religious entities depends on our language-use, practices, schemes, perspectives, or traditions.²⁶

The theological (as distinguished from religious) realism discussion takes a step onto a critical meta-level and no longer directly considers the way religious discourse relates to reality, any more than the mind-independence or language-independence of God’s existence (or non-existence). This, of course, is because theology, as noted, does not study the existence or non-existence of God. The issue of theological realism is therefore similar to questions about the ontological status of research objects of other secular humanistic disciplines and about the truth-aptness of humanistic discourses. For example, historical theological research can be analyzed in relation to this realism discussion, considering in what sense historical reality “exists” independently of historians’ interpretations based on their value-laden “selections” of historical facts.²⁷ The problem of theological realism does not, then, differ from the problem of realism regarding religious studies.²⁸ If theology were understood as confessional, then the relevant question of realism should be distinguished from the realism issues concerning both religious studies and religious discourse, though.

Now, it is natural to view the problem of realism about “first-order” religious discourse and its purported referentiality as primarily a problem in the philosophy of religion. In contrast, “second-order” questions about the referentiality and truth-aptness of theories in theology and religious studies (viz., their purportedly designating “real” cultural and historical “objects”) belong to the philosophy of the humanities. However, philosophical discourse on religion seeking to refer to God – i.e., the existence or non-existence of God or, respectively, other “religious entities” – in non-religious contexts (i.e., within academic philosophy of religion, instead of either “first-order” use of religious language or “second-order” theological interpretations of such language-use) still remains beyond the analysis provided here. According to realist philosophers of religion, referentiality and truth-aptness apply to philosophical discourse on God, and it is meaningful (and, according to some, necessary) to strive for real-world reference in philosophizing about religion, whereas critics of (metaphysical) realism challenge this view.

Here the problem of realism can be seen as a meta-level problem about which some position must be taken insofar as we hope to settle in what sense the philosophy of religion can study “reality itself” (as distinguished from studying our conceptual schemes). When considering this problem, we specifically need to ask in what sense “God” and other expressions belonging to religious (and possibly theological) language can be used neutrally within the philosophy of religion, in which language is not used religiously. Wittgensteinian criticism, according to which, say, the proofs of God’s existence or theodicy arguments fail to speak of God in a religiously meaningful sense, misconstruing the “grammar” of religious language, also immediately emerges here.²⁹

Crucially, realism cannot be simply accepted as “given” any more in the study of religion than elsewhere. On the contrary, as we know, it is one of the key philosophical problems concerning such study. If the nature of the philosophy of religion itself is – instead of assuming metaphysical realism – characterized in terms of, for example, Kantian critical philosophy or pragmatism (cf. Pihlström, 2021; 2023), it is not at all obvious that philosophers of religion, any more than scholars in theology and religious studies, can unproblematically deal with “reality itself” (independent of our conceptualizations), including God. Understood along “Kantian” lines (in a broad sense), the philosophy of religion primarily studies human language and thought, after all. It should not and cannot make claims about the existence or non-existence of God (interpreted as a metaphysical issue concerning “ready-made” transcendent reality), although many of its practitioners constantly try to do so, but only about the meanings such questions take in our schemes, discourses, and practices. The philosophy of religion therefore investigates our thoughts and descriptions of the existence or non-existence of God, not the existence of God itself. As Kant himself emphasized, we cannot know anything about God’s existence (or non-existence); the question cannot be resolved by the speculative use of reason. It is not a scientific or even a theoretical philosophical question, although for Kant it can be approached by the practical use of reason, through ethics. If the nature of the philosophy of religion (and philosophy generally) is accounted for in a broadly Kantian way, investigating the fundamental metaphysical nature of reality independent of the categorial structure of our thought is not a meaningful project.

In earlier work (e.g., Pihlström, 2020; 2023), I have interpreted the pragmatist tradition – in the philosophy of religion and more inclusively – as an essentially Kantian critical undertaking in its effort to understand our human structuring of reality taking place through practice-embedded conceptual categorization. Likewise, Wittgensteinian philosophy of religion can be redescribed (pace many of its representatives) as a quasi-Kantian project elucidating the meanings of religious language, instead of studying the metaphysical nature of reality. The unifying feature of these different yet analogous approaches is that for them the philosophy of religion is, at least partly, (in Kantian terms) transcendental. Its core is the analysis of the necessary (practice-and form-of-life-embedded) preconditions for the possibility of thought and meaning. The philosophy of religion – or philosophy generally – cannot have any transcendent object beyond the boundaries of our language, residing in an allegedly “supernatural” realm. To engage in transcendental investigation is to analyze the conditions and limits of human reality.

As a transcendental study, the philosophy of religion can still significantly contribute to clarifying the epistemic status of theology and religious studies in yielding empirical knowledge about religiosity. It can also present critical views on how (or whether) we can, in our scientific, scholarly, or philosophical discussions of religion, meaningfully use expressions apparently belonging to religious language, that is, whether we may, when speaking about God non-religiously, nevertheless maintain a critical vocabulary relevant to religious language-use.³⁰ Nor is transcendental philosophy in this extended meta-level sense restricted to the aprioristic methodology of orthodox Kantianism.

Thus, qua transcendental inquirers, philosophers of religion avoiding metaphysical realism and speculations about transcendent reality do engage in humanistic research, after all. Their project is not directly “about” the world itself (viz., not about any metaphysical structure of reality independent of us) but “about” the structure of our thinking about and inquiring into the world, and thus about the structure of our conceptual categorizations and their preconditions, including not only contextually necessary categorial structures of the world “for us” but also their context-bound historical variability and relativity. Transcendental philosophy in this sense – especially when rearticulated through pragmatism or Wittgensteinianism – is historically relativized and pragmatically “naturalized.”³¹ Philosophy of religion developed along these quasi-Kantian lines can even draw from the lessons of Quinean naturalized epistemology – albeit non-reductively interpreted, without simply reducing philosophical (conceptual, transcendental) “second-order” questions to empirical theological (or “first-order” religious) ones. Moreover, there is no reason why pragmatic transcendental philosophy of religion could not take seriously interdisciplinary empirical inquiries into real-life religious phenomena and their historical development.

From this critical transcendental perspective, mainstream analytic philosophy of religion (and analytic theology) remains largely based on metaphysical realism, engaging in an ultimately illusory endeavor, nurturing (in Kantian terms) the transcendental illusion of the conceptual and epistemic availability of ontologically independent transcendent reality.³² In metaphysically realist, especially evidentialist, philosophy of religion it is typically assumed that philosophical arguments may target the question of God’s existence, evaluating the epistemological credentials of theism and atheism, speaking of the same real world whose physical structure is studied by the sciences. For Kantians, such philosophy reaching out for transcendent reality and claiming to assess the justification of our beliefs about it remains uncritical. What is needed is a critique of reason: philosophical reflection on religion must “first” critically analyze the necessary conditions for the possibility (Möglichkeitsbedingungen) of religious thought and language-use, instead of (illusorily) presupposing that the transcendent objects of such thought and language-use could be “directly” discussed without analyzing those conditions.³³

Kantian philosophy of religion admits that in humanist research on religion – theology and religious studies – empirical realism prevails: we are aiming at objective knowledge about reality, just as in other disciplines studying culture, history, and society. This realism only needs to be placed in the context of transcendental idealism, or its pragmatist or Wittgensteinian variants. A transcendental philosopher may even interpret religious language itself according to empirical realism – as truth-apt and capable of referring to “religious entities” analogously to the way scientific language can refer (or fail to refer) to theoretical entities – while insisting that the transcendental framework within which such entities are among the potential objects of our linguistic, conceptual, and cognitive activities is humanly constructed.³⁴ One may thus maintain realism about both religious and scientific or scholarly (e.g., theological) discourses, interpreting them as purportedly referring to the world, but this requires honoring Kant’s signature idea of the entanglement of transcendental idealism and empirical realism. Questions arising only at a transcendental level have to be taken into account when considering the relations between the different levels of realism in the study of religion. If they are uncritically ignored, we cannot even begin to understand how religious, theological, and philosophical language-uses in diverging ways seek to hook onto the world.

In order to justify the claim that philosophers of religion can legitimately speak about transcendence (in a metaphysically-realistic sense), one would have to first settle the issue concerning the relation between any human conceptual categorizations and the (allegedly) conceptualization-independent world. This is, arguably, a transcendental issue that cannot be resolved by presupposing (metaphysical) realism. Thus, transcendental reflection on the legitimacy of our commitment(s) to realism carries enormous critical potential applicable to the assessment of contemporary orthodoxies in the philosophy of religion. In particular, the key Kantian distinction between the transcendental and the transcendent must be duly drawn. If my considerations are on the right track, tackling the question of whether the philosophy of religion is a humanistic discipline or a study of the (largely non-human) world “in itself” thus presupposes examining the problem of realism.

If the Kantian perspective sketched above is plausible, then (but only then) the philosophy of religion can be considered an essentially humanistic endeavor, along with philosophy generally – and, of course, theology. If, however, metaphysical realism is correct, and if thus Kantianism, pragmatism, and Wittgensteinianism are all (in this respect) wrong, then the kind of metaphysics practiced within the philosophy of religion reaching out for transcendent reality remains possible.³⁵ Then, and only then, philosophers of religion can try to settle the question of God’s existence (or, epistemologically, specify the truth-directed criteria for rational beliefs about that question). In any event, whatever the fate of that question may be in this respect, it is not a theological question. The degree to which God’s existence can be the topic of any rational investigation is itself a question requiring a serious examination of the problem of realism, intertwining the philosophy of religion and the philosophy of theology and religious studies.

One of my main points in this paper is that this issue of realism itself is a transcendental question concerning the relationship of human language and concepts (thinking, meanings, categories, etc.) to the world. In a Kantian context, even examining this meta-level question is impossible unless we adopt the perspective of critical philosophy. What Kant called transcendental realism (metaphysical realism) is fundamentally illusory, also leading serious philosophy of religion astray.³⁶

If our dialectical situation is interpreted along these lines, a realist analytic philosopher of religion defending, say, evidentialist theism or reformed epistemology and a pragmatist or a Wittgensteinian philosopher criticizing those views do not necessarily directly disagree on any “first-order” issue. They disagree in a profound way on what the philosophy of religion is really about and under what conditions a philosophical discussion of religion is genuinely possible. They may also disagree about how humanistic approaches to religion in the philosophy of religion and in theology or religious studies are related to each other. The question of whether the philosophy of religion should start from metaphysical realism or Kantian critical philosophy (including its pragmatist or Wittgensteinian variants) is not a neutral metalevel question that could be resolved independently of these philosophical premises themselves. Attempts to answer this meta-question already presuppose some considered position in the philosophical discussion itself; the realism issue can hardly be settled on a neutral argumentative area without already adopting a position on how it is, or was, settled.

My examination of theology, religious studies, and philosophy of religion in this article might, I hope, thus also shed light on the general nature of the realism debate and its place in philosophy. The resources of transcendental argumentation, for example, in criticizing realistic God-discourse remain to be – transcendentally – debated; such discussions should be of relevance to non-Kantians, too. Analogously, the question of whether philosophy of religion is a humanistic discipline is itself a “humanistic” question about interpreting a specific cultural area. We cannot escape the humanities even when trying to step over their boundaries to talk about a world independent of human beings. Strictly speaking, “all sciences are human sciences,” as Joseph Margolis (e.g., 1995; 2012) repeatedly pointed out, because all research relies on human values and meanings structuring the world insofar as it is an object of inquiry.³⁷

It may be argued against the transcendental approach that if a Kantian (in our broad sense) claims that we can only study the structure of human thought, conceptual schemes, or language (rather than reality’s “own” categorial structure), they already assume that such things as thought, schemes, and language are real. They will then already have presented metaphysical statements about what exists (see, e.g., Loux, 2002). However, this response merely restates metaphysical realism without offering an independent argument against its critic. A Kantian (or a pragmatist) can in turn respond that concepts and language themselves do depend on conceptualization and linguistic categorization. It makes little sense to reach beyond them trying to discover the sense in which language and concepts are “real.” Yet, from a metaphysically realist standpoint, this answer presupposes Kantianism, failing to show that the realist’s understanding of science, language, and metaphysics is incorrect. At an extreme, Kantianism can even lead to radical antirealism or linguistic idealism, according to which “it’s just language all the way down” and “il n’y a pas de hors-texte.” Then the question arises whether a Kantian (or, again, pragmatist) approach can consistently offer, even with qualifications, an empirically realist interpretation of theological and humanistic research.

I am not pretending to resolve this dialectic. The problem remains open and the discussion must go on; this openness is, indeed, central to my argument. The transcendental question about the necessary (albeit practice-embedded) preconditions for the possibility of realist discourse on religion (or the world) simply cannot be ignored – not in philosophy generally, and especially not when exploring the relations between religious practices, theological research, and critical philosophy of religion reflecting on those relations.³⁸ However, this metaphilosophical openness should not lead to skepticism denying that we can rationally discuss philosophical problems.

These reflections in the end lead to the necessity of embracing humanism (“transcendental humanism”) – which, of course, is not a necessity in the sense that human life, practices, or conceptual schemes would be claimed to be anything other than contingent. We are, rather, speaking of a contextual necessity (cf. Pihlström, 2020; 2021; 2023). In order to decide whether philosophy of religion – or theology – is thoroughly or essentially “humanistic,” we must engage in the realism debate critically investigating whether the world (in any sense meaningfully available to us) is necessarily a humanly conceptualized world “for us” or a world “in itself” independently of conceptualization. This engagement is a critical humanist inquiry into our practices of conceptualizing the world and their conditions of possibility (and an inquiry that, I am afraid, will never reach any consensus). It is a transcendental inquiry, not in Kant’s original sense, but in a pragmatically reinterpreted sense fully aware of the historical contingency of any such conditions, yet enabling a critical reflection on the role of disciplinary practices (in, e.g., theology or philosophy) as constitutive of scholarly endeavors in the discipline.

My discussion might be summarized as a loose transcendental argument. Understanding theology, religious studies, and the philosophy of religion as humanistic disciplines primarily studying language, culture, concepts, and history is a necessary precondition for these fields to be able to engage in their constitutive tasks. If we assumed that philosophy or theology speaks directly about transcendent reality, a world in which God and other religious entities exist or fail to exist independently of us, the realism issue challenging this would remain unsettled (and unsettling). Philosophical attempts to make sense of religion, theology, and religious studies are constitutively committed to articulating and rearticulating what kind of realism is achievable, and needed, in these areas.

I have suggested that philosophy (of religion) is, irreducibly, a humanistic inquiry, because it must first (not chronologically but conceptually “first”) deal with “second-order” transcendental questions concerning our practices of world-categorization and their relation to the world they are (purportedly) about.³⁹ We may, at the meta-level, disagree about what needs to be done first: whether to start from Kantian critical questions concerning second-order legitimacy or whether to assume that our first-order inquiries can access a mind-independent world. The tension between these different starting points is so fundamental that it cannot be resolved on neutral ground (without presupposing either Kantian critical philosophy in a broad sense or something like metaphysical realism). Locating this tension is, I think, the main “result” of my metaphilosophical discussion. For the Kantian, the very disagreement itself demonstrates the irreducibly transcendental character of our investigation; this is why I am tempted to label my main argument “transcendental.”

Nothing I have said compromises the thoroughly normative character of the philosophy of religion. However, the normativity of philosophical inquiry can be conceptualized differently depending on whether it pertains to how we ought to think about the world (“itself”) or to how we ought to think about our thinking about the world. Either way, the normativity of philosophy differs from the possible normativity of theology and religious studies.⁴⁰ Even deep disagreements within (meta) philosophy between realism and its alternatives do not affect these differences.

Finally, although my reflections have largely, albeit implicitly, been based on pragmatism, I imagine that a critic inspired by Richard Rorty’s radical pragmatism would see my proposal as merely another effort of traditional philosophy to organize the areas of thought into a systematic whole, in contrast to which philosophy (in Rorty’s view) should become “edifying conversation.”⁴¹ I have above analyzed the relations between different humanistic disciplines. This work is traditionally philosophical, especially when guided by transcendental reflection. Yet, Rorty’s criticism must be taken seriously – but so must the fact that even his criticism itself is only possible within something like transcendental humanism. An edifying cultural exchange on the nature of philosophy that Rorty hoped to develop (and which in his visions leaves traditional systematic philosophy behind) can be continued by means of pragmatic transcendental arguments, which, though fallible, do categorize and (re)structure the world and our practices of world-engagement.