TrueSciPhi

Podcast Profile: Philosophy of Religion

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8 episodes
2012
Median: 41 minutes
Collection: Philosophy

Description (podcaster-provided):

Themes and summary (AI-generated based on podcaster-provided show and episode descriptions):

This podcast presents an academic lecture series on the philosophy of religion, focusing on major philosophical questions and arguments associated with Western monotheistic traditions—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Across the lectures, it examines what it means to speak coherently about God by analyzing divine attributes and how they are categorized, including discussion of essential properties traditionally taken to define God’s nature and other properties treated as contingent or “accidental.”

The series then turns to classic arguments offered in support of God’s existence, treating several of the best-known families of argument in philosophical theology. These include a range of a priori and a posteriori approaches, with attention to forms of the cosmological and ontological arguments, as well as teleological reasoning commonly grouped under the design argument. It also considers evidential and experiential lines of support, including appeals to religious experience and to reports of miracles, and the philosophical issues involved in evaluating them.

Alongside these theistic arguments, the podcast addresses prominent challenges to belief, most notably the problem of evil as an argument against the existence of an all-powerful, all-knowing, and perfectly good God. The concluding material explores the nature of faith and pragmatic reasoning about belief, including the kind of decision-theoretic approach associated with Pascal’s Wager.

Overall, the content is structured as a guided introduction to central debates in contemporary and historical philosophy of religion, presented in a systematic progression typical of a university course.