Preface

I would like to take a brief moment to explain the origin, purpose, layout, and uses of this work. I first got involved in using Open Educational Resources (OER) all the way back in 2005 through the influence of numerous professors and other graduate students when I was in graduate school at Bowling Green State University (in Ohio, not Kentucky) and continued to use them six years later as a clinical assistant professor at Washington State University. This was before the materials we used were known as OER. Instead of a traditional textbook, in some of our courses we used a combination of works in the public domain and/or articles available to all students electronically through the school’s library. It took some effort to gather them and point students to them, but there was no loss in educational quality and the students were able to save money by not having to buy what could be very expensive textbooks. In fact, a majority of the material we used (and I still use) is present in many textbooks. Fast forward to today, and there are many OER works coming from many different sources: single-author works, works written by multiple authors, textbooks that are old enough the publishers don’t care about them anymore so the authors decided to release them into the public domain, edited collections of articles by authors willing to give their work away for free (as is the case with this volume), and works that are collections of classic texts that are old enough to be in the public domain (which make up the bulk of the OER textbooks I have created). I believe it is vital to approach all textbooks as learning tools, which means they should never be relied upon as the only method of conferring information and can even be inaccurate, assuming the inaccuracies are used as learning points. With this attitude, it follows that OER works, even if they are not as polished or perfect as traditional textbooks, are just as useful, of comparable quality, and are greatly more accessible due their free and electronic nature.

I have organized this textbook around the way I teach my introductory course in the philosophy of religion. Since I got to design this textbook and it’s for use in my own courses, it directly follows the order in which I teach the topics and each chapter makes up the reading assignment for about 1.5 hours of class time. In other words, I meet with students for thirty 1.5-hour sessions in a semester (hence there are 30 chapters in this work), and for the first meeting, we read and discuss chapter 1, for our second we cover chapter 2, then chapter 3, and so on. It leaves the guess work out of what we cover and when we cover it and keeps things very organized and streamlined. I tell you this now to give you some insight into the way I approach my classroom and time with my students. Since this is intended for an intro- level course, keeping things on track, moving, and organized in this way has proved to be very beneficial for my students.

I know that this work is the same quality as the classic and standard textbooks used in many introduction to the philosophy of religion courses, which includes a number of chapters on contemporary arguments about the nature and existence of God and religions. Having read through everything in this volume multiple times, I know that students will benefit from the great quality of the pieces contained within it. These works come to us for free from the donated time of numerous philosophers to whom I am greatly indebted and are acknowledged on the previous page. Because of their hard work, I know this textbook will be useful for anyone that is taking an introductory-level philosophy of religion class or is interested in learning more about the philosophy of religion. The articles, while sometimes challenging, are readable and accessible even to newcomers to philosophy. If you find this work useful, I humbly ask that you spread the good news to others about this work and other OERs. The more people use and create these materials, the better and more accessible education will become.