Religion and Philosophy
This page is one of the explanatory pages for my website, http://www.CardinalKnowledge.org. The website is a work in progress, and each and every part of it is open for discussion. The comments to these explanatory pages are where this discussion is to take place.
The intersection of philosophy and religion is the most complex of the interactions between the four cardinal directions of knowledge, with many degrees of mixing, and intricate mutual influences. In many cases, most notable being probably Buddhism, it is very difficult to even draw a boundary between the two. The distinction that I use, that the philosophical statements are arrived to by logic while religions statements are believed without questioning, only helps with clear-cut, cardinal, cases. When philosophical literature is supposed to provoke personal revelation while the mind is struggling with alogical koans, it is no longer philosophy, but not yet a religion, it is a synthesis of the two.
Examining religious statements, one can often find some that are based in part in logic, due to its great convincing power. One could say every major religion necessarily creates its own philosophy as a part of its dogma, using the pure religious statements as the axioms, and deriving logical conclusions from them. Thus the adherents of a religion who have faith in the founding tenets, such as the Scripture or another revelation, can use their reasoning to apply their religious knowledge to new problems without direct instruction of a priest, essentially exercising religious philosophy.
In addition, philosophy is the ever so popular tool of the religious apologists, who can use it to dispel the questions arising in the minds of believers or to mislead the minds of unprepared skeptics into self-doubt. Christianity in particular has been aggressively developing this kind of religious philosophy since the time of Thomas Aquinas and continues now, with the modern concepts of Creationism and Intelligent Design.
I’ve picked a few major religious philosophers who, I think, left significant impact on the entire civilization: Nagarjuna, Averroës, Thomas Aquinas, and Vivekananda.