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Stephen J McKinney, Is Religious Education Possible? By Michael Hand, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 45, Issue 1, February 2011, Pages 163–165, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9752.2011.00784.x
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London, Continuum, 2006. Pp. vii+160,Hbk. $65.00.
This book focuses on the question: is non-confessional religious education a logically coherent idea? This has arisen because of the philosophical dispute about the relationship between religious understanding and religious belief. If religious understanding necessarily presupposes religious belief then non-confessional religious education is logically incoherent. Michael Hand’s aim is to refute this by demonstrating that non-confessional religious education is a possibility because religious understanding does not necessarily presuppose religious belief. His method is to begin, in Chapter 1, by examining the debate that was initiated by Hirst in the 1960s and continued through the writing of thinkers such as Marples, Attfield and Gardner. According to Hand, all of these thinkers assume rather than argue the premise (1)—that religion is a logically unique form of knowledge. Their engagement is rather with the second premise (2)—the claim that understanding a logically unique form of knowledge involves holding certain propositions of that form of knowledge to be true or false. Hand proceeds to subject these premises to scrutiny, arguing that the debate is underpinned by presuppositions of how religion can be classified as a form of knowledge which leads him to an extended discussion on understanding forms of knowledge. In Chapter 2, Hand addresses premise (2) and begins, as in Chapter 1, with a critique of Hirst’s thinking—continuing the discussion with reference to Pring, Wilson, Austin and Strawson. Hand reviews the various attempts by Hirst to provide a list of forms of knowledge and the various criticisms (e.g. Pring) of these attempts. Hand explains that ‘forms of knowledge are the categories of a logical taxonomy’ (p. 46). He argues that if religious propositions were to be an autonomous epistemological class, ‘they would have to refer to and describe non-material public referents, observed or apprehended by non-sensory means’ (p. 55). The question of the status of religious propositions becomes the subject of Chapters 3 and 4 (his critique of premise (1)) where he discusses the views of Wittgenstein, Philips, Hudson, Brent and Leahy and Laura. Hand continues to dispute that there is a religious form of knowledge and proposes that religious propositions do not constitute an autonomous epistemological class, but can be distributed over the familiar epistemological classes of mental and material propositions. His argument states that religious propositions are about the existence, nature and actions of divine persons and, therefore, do not differ, in epistemological type, from ordinary propositions about human persons. In Chapter 5, Hand undertakes a deeper examination of mental and material propositions, which leads him into a discussion of the autonomy of mental propositions and, for such a short book, an extended discussion of the problem of other minds.
