If one were to investigate the underpinnings of religious studies, or, in other words, to undertake a sort of meta-religious studies (a study which would be twice removed from the actual subject matter of the discipline) one would find that the main contemporary criticisms, by both lay students of religion and the academic community at large, have been primarily twofold. The first stock objection, possibly somewhat more popular twenty years ago, was that ‘religious studies’ was simply not to be considered an autonomous academic discipline worthy of recognition as an independent ‘department’ in a university curriculum. In short, the pejorative implications were clear in the behind-the-back finger-pointing which was conjoined with whispers of ‘interdisciplinary’. The second major criticism of the ‘discipline’ of religious studies has been a polymorphous diversity of twists on the old theme – ‘Oh my God, they are practising what they preach’. The impetus of this criticism is in large measure, the fear, by various sectors for various reasons, that the student of religion is somehow ‘doing’ (as opposed to simply studying) religion and, what's more, doing it inside the hallowed halls of the university.

Much contemporary philosophy of religion is preoccupied with highly general problems about the nature of religious belief and of religious language, rather than with how to interpret, in detail, specific religious beliefs or forms of religious discourse. Among the matters of dispute there seem to be two of overriding importance. The first concerns the relation between religious beliefs and experience and centres on the question, what sorts of experience are relevant to the acceptance or rejection of religious beliefs. The second concerns whether or not religious beliefs have an explanatory function. Discussion of both these themes in relation to theistic belief is still largely dominated by conceptions of God and of his relation to the world which have been developed by natural theologians, particularly, though not exclusively, those who have worked within traditions significantly influenced by Thomas Aquinas. Thus the idea that religious beliefs have an explanatory function is commonly associated with the view that they present answers to questions raised by those alleged traits or features of the world which have been the concern of natural theologians and which have been described by means of concepts of ‘contingency’, ‘purposiveness’, ‘order’, and ‘design’. Consequently, the sort of experience often held to be relevant to the acceptance or rejection of theistic belief is that which is relevant to the application of these problematic concepts.

Nearly three decades have passed since Antony Flew first issued his now famous falsification challenge: ‘What would have to occur or to have occurred to constitute for you a disproof of the love of, or of the existence of, God?’ The purpose of the question is to challenge the sophisticated believer to describe a state of affairs in which a basic putative theistic assertion like ‘God exists’ would be false. If the believer admits that he cannot provide such a description then, Flew would argue, he is admitting that at least his putative theistic assertion is compatible with every state of affairs; consequently it is factually meaningless. The reason for this is that every factually significant assertion must deny that some describable state of affairs obtains. To illustrate, just as when we draw a circle we simultaneously draw in and draw out two particular areas, so when we state a fact we simultaneously deny a fact(s). Here is the difficulty, Flew would say, in which the sophisticated believer puts himself when he uses putative theistic assertions: factually he denies nothing, hence factually he asserts nothing.

In the introduction to his account of the debate concerning religion between Cleanthes, Philo and Demea, Pamphilus remarks that ‘reasonable men may be allowed to differ where no one can reasonably be positive’. Pamphilus goes on to suggest that natural theology is an area that abounds with issues about which ‘no one can reasonably be positive’. Assuming that the beliefs of reasonable men are themselves reasonable, Pamphilus can be interpreted as holding that

(P) If no one is reasonably positive that the proposition p is true or that it is false, a man might reasonably believe that p or might reasonably believe that not p.

While many philosophical theists have maintained (correctly or not) that there are data accessible to sense-perception – e.g., the ‘orderly processes of nature’, loving and benevolent human actions – which constitute evidence for the existence of God, it seems unproblematic that there could not conceivably occur sense-perceptions of God. Rather, the properties being God and being sense-perceivable are incompatible, i.e., are such that it is inconceivable for there to exist something which coexemplifies them. This being so, it is nothing short of a necessary truth that if God exists, he is unobservable. In what follows, I shall often express this point in the language of necessity de re by noting that being unobservable is a property that God has essentially; for those at home with ‘possible-world’ semantics, this amounts to the claim that being unobservable is a property that God exemplifies at every possible-world at which he exists. One might reasonably account for this, of course, in terms of God's incorporeality; for it seems unproblemetic that being incorporeal is also a property that God has essentially, and that the function ‘X is incorporeal’ entails the function ‘X is unobservable’. Hence, since ‘If God exists, he is incorporeal’ expresses a necessary truth, it should be intuitively clear that the proposition expressed by ‘If God exists, he is unobservable’ is also a necessary truth.

Of the whole field of religious studies, one area of consistent interest and activity has been the study of myth; and if any one area has represented the wide variety of approaches scholars of religion have utilized, it is this one. Students of language and literature (e.g. F. Max Müller and J. Campbell), psychology (e.g. S. Freud and C. Jung), sociology (e.g. E. Durkheim and P. Berger), social anthropology (e.g. B. Malinowski, V. Turner and C. Levi-Strauss) as well as religion (e.g. M. Eliade and G. La Rue) have all offered interpretations of myth. An investigation of these various approaches to understanding myth seems to point to the conclusion that the history of the study of myth is a history of reductionism. That is, the heritage transmitted to scholars who would attempt to understand the nature and function of myth within a single discipline is one which most often limits the essential nature or function of myth to that discipline's underlying assumptions alone. Hence, myth is usually linked either to the social or the psychological dimension of human experience exclusively. However, even those theories of myth which combine social and psychological methods and assumptions have usually resulted in truncated conclusions which give pause to those of us who seek their application.

In probably the earliest Upanisad text, one learns that at the beginning of the world there was only Ātman in the form of a person. Discovering that only he existed, he declared ‘I am’. After losing his fear of being alone, he found that he did not have pleasure because of his solitary condition. Thereupon, he divided himself and became a man and a woman. When the two beings copulated other beings and forms of life were produced. Thus the original universal principle is androgynous. By knowing itself, it became all that there is in the universe. The philosophical implication of this myth is that he who knows that he is Brahman becomes the All. It is unclear, however, whether or not the author of this section of the text means to imply that the one who knows becomes androgynous.