Month/Year of Graduation

5-2026

Degree Name

Bachelor of Arts (B.A.)

Department

Philosophy

First Advisor

Bharat Ranganathan, Ph.D

Abstract

This paper argues that religion is the intelligible, structured response to distinct pressures arising from within human experience itself. Drawing on Schleiermacher, Otto, Kant, and Becker, the paper traces religion's emergence through four phases. The first establishes that religious feeling is pre-conceptual and categorically distinct from ordinary emotion. The second works through Otto's correction of Schleiermacher: the genuinely religious encounter is not dependence intensified but the numinous. The third shows that Kant, arriving from an entirely different direction, reaches the same destination: practical reason diagnoses a radical evil the will cannot correct alone, demanding an ethical commonwealth that mirrors what affective experience had already been pressing toward. The fourth adds existential dread of mortality as a second affective dimension, explaining both the urgency and diversity of religious traditions across cultures. Together, these pressures converge on a single truth: the human being is constitutively insufficient, and religion is what that insufficiency produces when confronted. The paper does not argue for the existence of God or the truth of any particular tradition, but that religion answers to features irreducibly real in human experience.

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