La filosofia della religione tra nuovi atei e nuovi teisti

In the essay, I first consider the recent debate between the so-called ‘new atheists’, such as Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Quentin Smith, and the ‘new theists’, that is, thinkers (such as William Lane Craig e Robert Koons) who welcome supernatural explanations o natural phenomena and support the ‘intelligent design theory’ or some its variations. I then argue that both the new atheists and the new theists share an approach that I call ‘meta-naturalism’. Subsequently, given that the works of the new atheists and of the new theists are usually regarded as belonging to (the discipline of) the philosophy of religion, I thereby question this assumption. I argue that only an approach to the philosophy of religion that considers the discipline as concerned with the truth of falsity of the propositional content of religious claims and notion can consider these works as belonging to (the discipline of) the philosophy of religion. I submit that, if one follows a different approach – that approach which stems from the Kantian and post-Kantian tradition of the nineteenth and twentieth century – the philosophy of religion comes to be considered as that discipline which is concerned not with the propositional content of religious claims, but only with their regulative and symbolic value. I conclude by considering the theoretical and practical benefits of the latter approach to the philosophy of religion.