NTT Journal for Theology and the Study of Religion - Volume 46, Issue 1, 1992

Both the English deist Toland (1720) and the German oriental scholar Reimarus (ca. 1750) rejected the historicity of the miracles narrated in the Old Testament. But they had different views on the way the miracle stories in the Old Testament originated. Toland ascribed the origin of these stories to the misinterpretation of natural events by the biblical authors and the readers of the Bible. Reimarus went so far as to accuse the historical Moses of playing tricks upon the Hebrews in order to make them believe that God manifested himself to them in miracles.

In the time just before and after World War II, sociology of religion was mixed up with ecclesial interests, but in the sixties the field emancipated as an independent academic discipline. Since that time, various sociological approaches paid attention to manifest and hidden religious phenomena in society as such. In the last decade, however, the interest for religion has been diminished and consequently also the interest for sociology of religion decreased. Sociologists of religion now pay attention to items as New Forms of Religion, New Age, Civil Religion and Religion in Social Action. Sociology of Religion is more or less moving in the direction of Sociology of Culture.

There are two sorts of knowledge: intellectual knowledge (knowledge of true propositions) and experiential knowledge (knowledge of how certain experiences feel). Experiential knowledge cannot be reduced to intellectual knowledge. This has important consequences for the doctrine of divine omniscience: if God cannot undergo experiences and is intellectually omniscient only, there is some knowledge He does not possess. This is not a minor restriction on God’s omniscience, and makes a satisfactory solution of the problem of evil virtually impossible. Therefore it is argued that God must be able to undergo experiences and must be experientially as well as intellectually omniscient.

The classical question whether nature can serve as a normative argument in ethics or not, is gaining more and more actuality in face of current evolutions in bio-technology and ecology. Analysing the concept of nature, the author concludes however, that it represents a rich, but very polyvalent metaphysical notion. For that reason nature cannot play the role that normative ethics sometimes assigns to it, in presenting it as a source of evil or a criterion of the good. This, in order to supply a clear opposite vis-à-vis human moral ambiguity. Nature deserves a normative function somehow: it teaches us the formal necessity, but also the limits of ethics. However, especially when nature is confronting us with its most powerful features, morality appears to be a specific human phenomenon.