Finns Gud? Feministiska förhållningssätt till en omdebatterad fråga

Abstract

A much debated issue in contemporary philosophy of religion is the religious realism/anti-realism controversy. Is God metaphysically real and exists independently of human minds, or is God simply a human conceptual construction that fiIls a function for some people? How should we understand the relation between language and reality? It is suggested in the artide that a feminist approach to the debate could be made by way of either accepting or renouncing the dualistic presumptions of the debate. The presumptions are in short that everything we speak about is either existing or non-existing, in an absolute way, and that only existing things can matter enough to constitute grounds for making some kind of comparative truth-claims, that for instance are required for conducting feminist normative and critical arguments. It is argued that the most viable feminist strategy is rejecting these presumptions, granted that the feminist approach is aimed at securing the possibility of speaking about a common shared reality for the sake of enabling criticism of oppressive structures and situations in religious contexts and ideological systems, and at the same time facilitating reconstruction of oppressive constructions of religion.