Religion cannot reveal (as truth) anything in a way that we can have a high degree of certainty that it is religious truth. If it could there would not be so many different and contradictory religious ideas.
Religion doesn't tell us anything that philosophy can't. I'll stand by what I said.
(What you said before was "religion
cannot reveal any truths that science or philosophical inquiry can't"; which is technically a distinct proposition from what you've just said;
i.e. that religion
doesn't tell us such things - emphasis mine in both cases. But let's leave that aside for the moment.)
Yet there are many different and contradictory philosophical ideas, which by your reasoning would tend to indicate that philosophy cannot reveal anything in a way that we can have a high degree of certainty that it is philosophical truth. And in fact, I think it is probably accurate to say that much of what philosophy proposes is proposed in a way such that the degree of certainty is necessarily higher than what might be possible for religion and religious truth.
Let's take a set of religious beliefs as an example - the Nicene Creed, let's say, which I hope you will agree cannot all be arrived at philosophically.
X is a Christian who holds these beliefs as a result of religion (his religious tradition, his reading of the Gospels, perhaps a mystical experience, some combination thereof, or what have you).
X experiences his beliefs as a certainty (by which I mean here simply that he holds them very confidently indeed). Let us further hypothesize that, as it happens, the beliefs expressed in the Nicene Creed are in fact true (a logical possibility). Now we have a case of
X holding with great confidence a set of actually true beliefs, under circumstances where it is difficult to argue that there is not a connection between the truth of the beliefs and the means by which
X has come to hold them. I take this to be a logically possible example of a non-philosophical truth being revealed to someone by religion.
Ergo, it would seem that the proposition "religion
cannot tell anyone anything true that philosophy can't" is false, and the proposition "religion
does not tell anyone anything true that philosophy can't" is possibly false and possibly true.
AkuManiMani said:
I would argue that when a religion or religious institution makes a claim of supposed objective fact the claim is not religious in nature but steps into the domain of science.
I would propose to refine that by noting that the domain of science does not extend to all propositions (claims) that something is an objective fact (
i.e., that it is true and that its truth is independent of someone's belief that it is true). Many metaphysical propositions, including many theological propositions (
e.g. "there is no god but Allah") are claims of supposed objective fact, but that does not mean they are questions with which science is concerned. Nor is science concerned with all propositions of fact (or even all
explanatory propositions!) with respect to the natural universe; for example, science does not address final causation (or even non-material efficient causation).
Now, some people have noted that certain religions - perhaps most - do make at least some physical/historical claims that arguably fall (at least in principle) within the realm of science. These constitute a counterexample against NOMA as an absolute rule rather than a general one. I think NOMA essentially embodies a cautionary insight into the dangers of committing category error with respect to science or religion, and is useful in this respect.
Yet on the topic of such counterexamples, note that in some religions they are markedly few. Take traditional (that is, non-fundamentalist) Christianity, for which we might use Catholicism as an adequate stand-in. There really are very few dogmatic tenets (propositions the religion requires the faithful to hold as true) that even potentially cross "magisterial borders" in Catholicism, and these are remarkably unchanged over time. Turning again to the Nicene Creed, we can see that it is plausible to suggest that science might theoretically be concerned with the proposition that Christ was "born of the Virgin Mary and became man", that he "died and was buried", and that "on the third day he rose again" - but that's about it. (This is one reason why the God of traditional Christianity has never really been a "God of the Gaps", but that's another subject.) It's admittedly a little hard to foresee their future empirical falsification, however.
These few (albeit theologically significant) propositions are arguably the only place where the NOMA scheme breaks down with regard to that particular religion. The writer John Updike expressed this in part of his poem "Seven Stanzas at Easter":
Make no mistake: if He rose at all
it was His body
if the cells' dissolution did not reverse, the molecules
reknit, the amino acids rekindle,
the Church will fall.
Oh yes, the emperors fine new clothes.