1. Chapter 1: Religion Doubts about Religion Introducing Philosophy, 10th edition Robert C. Solomon, Kathleen Higgins, and Clancy Martin

2. Doubts about Religion Religion is said to be a matter of faith But it can be argued that dogmatic certainty is less than real faith Kierkegaard implies religious belief may necessitate doubt about one’s own faith; passionate commitment is required to confront the “objective uncertainty” of faith

3. Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s faith was shaken by the cruelty he witnessed in Tsarist Russia The brothers in his novel, The Brothers Karamazov, show two sides of his own experience: one devout, the other questioning the justification for a belief in God

4. Critics of Religion Karl Marx claimed humans invent religion to escape their intolerable social conditions Once we see this, we should reject religion as an escape We should turn instead to the correction of those intolerable conditions

5. Friedrich Nietzsche attacked religion in general, Christianity in particular Accused Christianity of being nothing other than rationalizations for impotence, an expression of everything contemptible in human nature

6. Sigmund Freud attacked religion from a psychoanalytic perspective He reduced the grand aspirations of religion to mere illusions, the illusions of an insecure child who has never properly grown up