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Debate

Round Table Debate: Religion versus Philosophy?

Does religion need philosophy? Or vice versa? Are they rival ways of seeing the world? What do faith and reason have to say to each other? In the dying days of the old millennium, Philosophy Now and the organisation Philosophy For All gathered four distinguished thinkers in front of a large audience in a London bookstore to debate this most millennial of questions.

The panel consisted of John Brooke, the newly-appointed Professor of Science and Religion at Oxford University, Antony Flew, Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the University of Reading, Douglas Hedley, Lecturer in Philosophy of Religion at Cambridge University, and Janet Radcliffe Richards, Reader in Bioethics at University College London. The Chair was Anja Steinbauer, President of Philosophy For All.

AS More than a hundred years ago, Nietzsche declared that God was dead. God had been something like a guarantor of an absolute order, a structure of the world in which the human being could be meaningfully included. Philosophers, however, of whom Nietzsche was one, believed that we could make sense of the totality of existence, of the meaning of our lives, by virtue of being rational beings, and without resorting to revelation.

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