By: Nick Santangelo

Could philosophy ever operate as a sort of replacement for religion? Philosopher G.W.F. Hegel once wrote that both religion and philosophy place the spirit or mind higher than nature and that both are closely tied to the practical and ethical.

In his visit to the College of Liberal Arts' (CLA) Center for the Humanities at Temple University (CHAT) last Friday, Professor Dean Moyar of John Hopkins University explored philosophy's complex relationship with religion. Dr. Moyar, a guest of the Philosophy Department, reviewed the topic through a Hegelian lens, the basis for a paper he recently authored.

According to Dr. Moyar, Hegel found "that philosophy, in a sense, depends on religion." Essentially, Hegel saw religion as having served as something of a gateway to religion. He wondered then: must philosophy decline if religion declines? It's a timely question to ask given religion's deterioration in much of the modern western world. This, of course, wasn't the case in Hegel's time, when it was dangerous to self-identify as an atheist.

"It can look like Hegel is questioning if philosophy can replace religion," said Dr. Moyar, "only paying lip service to religion for fear of being branded an atheist."

Hegel often expressed Christian views and had a major influence on 19th and 20th-century theology. But after Hegel's 1770 passing, his followers were split on whether he was an atheist or a pantheist, said Dr. Moyar. Hegel saw religious believers of God and atheistic followers of science as being diametrically opposed, completely unable to come together in any way.

He was drawn to demonstrations of God's existence and the ontological proof of it. This did not mean he defined Jesus' crucifixion and resurrection as literally true, however, but rather as being the true moment that God entered people's lives. God, he believed, extracted from the finite that which is essential.

"I therefore suppose that we should call what Hegel did evaluative thinking," said Dr. Moyar.

Because both religion and philosophy display ethical actuality, the two, in Hegel's telling, had to be closely related. But since philosophy dealt with form and thought rather than representation, Hegel suggested that it could maybe do the job better than religion could.

we should call what Hegel did evaluative thinking

Specifically, Hegel took issue with the Catholic Church. He believed it wasn't possible to ethically judge religious versus worldly value while also saying that priests had more access to the divine than the common man did. It was a problem that, in his view, Protestantism solved by removing this hierarchy.

The philosopher also looked back on philosophy's historical relationship with other religions. Specifically, Dr. Moyar argued that Hegel believed Plato found philosophy to be in direct opposition to religion simply because the polytheism of his day did not match up with philosophy. Religions like Christianity, however, allow room for philosophy to exist. It's for this reason that that religion may have had to come first in order to bring reason into the world and give birth to philosophy, contended Dr. Moyar.

This, however, returned the professor to the question of whether or not philosophy can fill the void left by religion's fading. To Dr. Moyar, the two should be more complimentary of one another. For them to do so effectively, religion must reform itself.

"It's not up to philosophy to decide what a church must do to become defined as reformed," he said. "We need reformed religion, and it's philosophy's task to support reformed religion, not to define what it is."

Despite arguments some might make to the contrary, then, aligning philosophy with religion can be a productive exercise.

"The idea is not to collapse the two practices," concluded Dr. Moyar, "but to realize that they each can, in their own way, realize the same truths."