[LAST CFP] The Survival of God: Philosophy of Religion in the 21st Century - Portuguese Journal Philosophy

[Ricardo Barroso]

Revista Portuguesa de Filosofia

2025, Volume 81, No. 3

The Survival of God:
Philosophy of Religion in the 21^st Century

Manuel Porcel Moreno

Universidade Católica Portuguesa

João Carlos Onofre Pinto

Universidade Católica Portuguesa

Submission deadline: 31^st August 2025

In the middle of the 19^th century, the end of the religious phenomenon began to be predicted. It seemed that God and religion were destined to disappear from the world because they had ceased to fulfil their function in the new context. The advent of science and the supremacy of reason ‒ the bastions of modernity ‒ were intended to put an end to religious thought. But it was not until the end of the 19^th century that the religious phenomenon appeared to be annihilated or at least largely damaged by the masters of suspicion. The “death of God” proclaimed by the fool in the famous aphorism no. 125 of The Gay Science, in the parable of the madman with the lantern, was taken as a fait accompli and we had to start getting used to living without God. The theory of secularisation claimed that the religious had already been overcome by modernity. The exciting process of modern emancipation arouses in humanity the desire to come of age, to be self-sufficient, to prove to oneself ones full potential and how much it can achieve without the ‒ paralysing or alienating ‒ help of the divine. It is for this reason that the human claim to become the absolute protagonist of his present life, a witness of his past and solely responsible for his destiny arises. Some even claim that it is easy to live socially and politically without God.

However, it seems that the latter possibility is historically out of reach, since the problem of deity is always being reborn, as the crisis of the theory of secularisation and the attempts to constrain the human gaze to an exclusively scientific or aesthetic immanentist vision of reality demonstrate time and again today. Thus, the unexpected happened: the “death of God,” instead of being consummated, seems to have been transfigured into a resurrection. Hence the question of God has become one of the great problems of philosophy in the 21st century: the question of whether to eliminate him definitively or to recover him in a new form. There is basically no alternative: either God exists and can manifest himself, or he falls into oblivion.

Thanks to modern iconoclasm, the fixist and stultified images of “God” have been destroyed, but not the divine reality itself. The criticisms of the idea of “God” have not touched the real essence of God, but have only succeeded in shattering idolatrous or conceptual images of “God.” The great critics of the God-question ‒ Feuerbach, Stirner, Marx, Nietzsche, Freud ‒ have only done away with the historical and crystallised conceptualisations of their cultural epoch, without touching the true God. Thus, they have helped to purify the perception of God rather than to prove his death. The God of religions is not dead, but rather the cultural concretisations of the idea of “God.” Certainly, the announced death of God has not brought about the disappearance of God from the human horizon, but it has brought about a new unveiling or a new way of relating to the divine. We find ourselves in a new context that goes beyond theism and atheism, since reality is much more complex, diffuse, and changing.

In this monographic issue of the Revista Portuguesa de Filosofía, we intend to tackle in depth the very question of God. Not only because of the very nature of the Christian faith, but above all because of the philosophical and scientific mentality of our time, which on many occasions not only denies the existence of God, but also excludes the very question of God as meaningless. Thus, we propose the possibility of dealing with the problem of God from the different areas of philosophical knowledge, both from the continental and analytical philosophical tradition: metaphysics, phenomenology, hermeneutics, existentialism, positivism, theodicy, etc.

Possible topics are:

-       Current philosophical perspectives on the problem of God.

-       Theisms, atheisms, and neo-atheisms

-       Atheism and spirituality

-       The question of God and onto-theology

-       The (im)possible theodicy: God and the problem of evil

-       Scientific development and the existence of God

-       The reasonableness of God’s existence

-       The God of philosophers and the God of religions

-       Phenomenology of the absence and presence of God

-       God and the mystical experience

-       Images and language about God: narrative and imagination

-       The “death of God” and current theology

-       Thinking God after the “death of God”

-       God, Revelation, and hermeneutics

-       Deconstructing conceptions of God

Contributions of Asian religions to the actuality of God

 

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