Are philosophers of history—or, are some philosophers of history—sufficiently interested in questions of the details of historical research? This is intended as a real as well as a rhetorical question. I may simply have failed to find discussions that are available; but in the material I have been able to consider there is little treatment of matters of preliminary detail, and this seems to me a neglect that needs to be remedied.

Too many theologies beg the question about the nature of religion by building metaphysically substantive assumptions into its description. Typically these assumptions are: the object of religious devotion must be both absolute and personal, final causality must be true, and there must be a cosmic conservation of value. Theological naturalism, exemplified in the thought of Henry Nelson Wieman, articulates an entirely formal, yet not substantively empty, conception of religion which does not beg these questions and which is consequently more descriptively (...) adequate to the nature of religion. It cannot therefore be assumed, without begging the question, that religious adequacy requires the metaphysical falsity of philosophical naturalism. (shrink)