Religious fictionalism

Abstract

Religious fictionalism is the theory that it is morally and intellectually legitimate to affirm religious sentences and to engage in public and private religious practices, without believing the content of religious claims. This article discusses the main features of fictionalism, contrasts hermeneutic, and revolutionary kinds of fictionalism and explores possible historical and recent examples of religious fictionalism. Such examples are found in recent theories of faith, pragmatic approaches to religion, and mystical traditions in religious theology.

Conceptions of Supreme Deity

“…This approach has some affinity to the approach that would have it that it is only in an analogical or metaphorical sense that supreme deity is good. (For more on fictionalist approaches to deity and religion, see, for example, Harrison (2010), Jones (2010), Le Poidevin (2019, and Scott and Malcolm (2018).) Some theists suppose that at least some attributes of supreme deity that have intrinsic characterisation are readily accessible to us, and admit of discussion in straightforwardly literal terms.…”

Atheistic modal realism

“…Vice versa for ‘God has no son’. Actual religious discourse involves silent modal operators (Scott and Malcolm (2018)). These are set in place by linguistic conventions adopted in religious contexts (Lewis (1969)).…”

Teleological Fictionalism in Biology:

“…Michael Ruse (2000) further defends the practical value of this metaphor of biological teleology, arguing that it has heuristic and predictive value in evolutionary biology. Given that contemporary philosophers sometimes characterize fictionalism as the idea that statements in a given domain are metaphorical (e.g., Toon, 2016; see also Eklund, 2019;Scott & Malcolm, 2018), it would be reasonable to construe these metaphorical views of teleology as something akin to fictionalism. 7 The aim of this paper, then, is to reframe and defend some of their core insights within a standard contemporary fictionalist framework, as well as with various empirical findings available today.…”