Abstract

The article was inspired by chapters 6–7 of Ryszard Kleszcz’s book Logika, metafilozofia, wszechmoc. Siedem studiów filozoficznych (Logic, Metaphilosophy, Omnipotence. Seven Philosophical Studies) published in Polish in 2021. These chapters concern this part of metaphysics, which in the terminology inspired by scholastic distinctions was referred to as the philosophy of God, and is now placed within the framework of philosophical theology or philosophy of religion. I focus on three questions: 1) How to distinguish research in the philosophy of religion from research in the sciences of religion? 2) Can the limiting of research, typical of a large number of philosophers of religion, to monotheism in the world’s largest religions, and more specifically to Christianity, be convincingly justified without revealing their religious beliefs? 3) Is classical theism the correct articulation of the Christian meaning of the word “God”. In reply to the first question, I argue that a philosopher of religion is one who directly or indirectly takes a positive or negative stand on the cognitive character, especially truthfulness (Kleszcz would prefer to say “justification”) of religious beliefs or experiences. My reply to the second question, unlike Kleszcz’s, is negative: the philosopher’s disclosure of his own attitude to religion does not betray the ideal of objectivity; on the contrary, it promotes fairness in relation to the readers, and eliminates a certain kind of theoretical hypocrisy found in supporters of a philosophy practiced in a supposedly neutral way towards their own beliefs. My answer to the third question is also negative. What we need today is a less conservative philosophy of religion, bolder in its claims, than the one proposed by Ryszard Kleszcz—namely, one that imitates the way of practicing philosophy by the old masters, e.g. by St. Thomas Aquinas, consisting in the search for the rational foundations of Christianity, and not one that recognizes the results of the old masters’ findings, for example, on the nature of God, as fundamentally final and corrigible only in minor details.