Problems with the Philosophy of Religion
             The philosophy of religion is an examination of the meaning and justification of religious claims. Claims about how the world is, often embodied in creeds, are more typical of Western religions - Christianity, Judaism, and Islam - than of Eastern religions such as Buddhism, Hinduism, and Confucianism, which tend to concentrate much more on the practice of a way of life than on a theoretical system by means of which (among other things) to justify that practice. Hence Western religions have proved a more natural target for the philosophy of religion. The central claim of Western religions is the existence of God; and the two major problems here are: Can a coherent account be given of what it means to say that there is a God, and, if it can, are there good reasons to show that there is or that there is not such a God?
             God is said to be personal, bodiless, omnipresent, creator and sustainer of any universe there may be, perfectly free, omnipotent, omniscient, perfectly good, and a source of moral obligation, and to have these properties eternally and necessarily. It has been a major concern of the philosophy of religion to investigate whether a coherent account can be given of each of these properties, and whether they can be combined in a logically consistent way, so that the claim that there is a God is intelligible and coherent. For example, does God's being a source of moral obligation mean that he could command us to torture children, and that it would become our duty to do so if he so commanded?
             In order to explain what it means to say that there is a God and to make other religious claims, theists use ordinary words such as 'personal', 'creator', 'free', 'good', etc., which we first learn to use from seeing them applied to mundane objects and states; or technical terms such as 'omnipotent', defined ultimately in terms of ordinary words. The question then arises: Do these words have di...