Reflections upon Religion - This book is intended to be a useful philosophy of religion textbook for undergraduate students who major in science and engineering. Unlike other philosophy of religion books, this book often combines traditional topics in philosophy of religion with scientific theories, such as evolutionary theory and the Big Bang theory. For this reason, science and engineering majors will be more excited to discuss traditional topics in philosophy of religion. I do not expect that the readers of this book will be philosophy majors. As a consequence, philosophical jargons are kept to a minimum. In case I inevitably use one, I define it and offer examples to illustrate it. As a result of reading this book, students will increase their ability to think critically and creatively about God and religion. Demonstration is the best way to help them increase such an ability. In this spirit, I criticize distinguished thinkers’ views about God and religion, and defend alternatives to them. I sometimes develop new topics about God and religion so that readers can be engaged in new debates about them. Such debates will cast new light on them. There are study questions at the end of each chapter. They are intended to stimulate readers to think for themselves about God and religion and to go beyond what I said in the book. I thank the University of Maryland and UNIST for the chance to teach philosophy of religion courses. I could not write this book without my teaching experiences at those universities. Finally, I thank Professor John Park in Department of Philosophy at California State University - Sacramento for useful comments on an earlier draft of this book.

저자 : Seungbae Park.Ph.D. Seungbae Park is a philosophy professor at Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology in the Republic of Korea. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Arizona in 2001, specializing in philosophy of science under the guidance of Professor Richard Healey. He taught at the University of Arizona, the University of Maryland, and POSTECH, before coming to his current institution in 2009. He published about 80 papers in SCI-level international journals. Most of them are in philosophy of science, and some of them are in philosophy of religion and ethics. He also published a book titled Embracing Scientific Realism in Spring in 2022 and Induction, Science, and Morality in Springer in 2025. As an anonymous referee, he reviewed book manuscripts for Springer, Routledge, and Cambridge University Press, and reviewed article manuscripts for Journal of Philosophy, Philosophy of Science, The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, Synthese, Social Epistemology, and Journal of Ethics.

Preface 1. Basic Terms 2. The Attributes of God 3. Design, Miracles, and Religious Experiences 4. The Ontological Argument 5. The Problem of Divine Elusiveness 6. The Origin of the Universe 7. The Problems of Divine Location and Age 8. The Problem of Divine Foreknowledge 9. The Problem of Evil 10. The Argument from Other Minds 11. Religious Beliefs and Truths 12. Ethics of Beliefs 13. Life after Death & Pascal’s Wager 14. The Problem of Divine Evaluation 15. The Problems of Heaven-Dwellers and Hell-Dwellers 16. Religious Language 17. The Conflicts between Science and Religion 18. Evolutionary Theory 19. The Origin of Religion 20. The Cognitive and Religious Hypotheses 21. Why Disbelieve in God? 22. Why Dogmatic? Why Proselytize? 23. Religious Self-Sacrifices 24. Religious Rituals 25. Religious Euphoria 26. The Impact of Religion on Morality 27. Religious Wars 28. Ego-Expanders in Religion 29. Religious Revolutions 30. Is Philosophy of Religion Useful to Religion?