PHI3700, Philosophy of Religion, examines religious claims as claims — asking what they mean, whether they can be true, and what could count as evidence for or against them. It is not a course in religion, and it is not a course in religious belief; it is philosophy applied to a domain where the arguments have been refined over two and a half thousand years and where almost nothing is settled.
The University of West Florida lists the content: "problem of religious language. Arguments for atheism and existence of God. Phenomenology of religious experience. Problems of evil and nature of God. Theories of immortality." The University of Florida describes a course that "studies problems in philosophical theology, including the nature of God, arguments for God's existence, the problem of evil, and the relation between faith and reason, from both historical and contemporary perspectives."
The two descriptions agree on the core, and UWF's ordering is instructive: the problem of religious language comes first. Before asking whether "God exists" is true, a philosopher asks what the sentence means — whether religious terms are literal, analogical or symbolic, and whether religious claims are the kind of thing that can be true or false at all. The mid-twentieth-century verificationist challenge held that they are not, and a good course takes that seriously before moving on.
The course's method is what students most need to understand in advance. It is argument analysis, not belief formation. The question is never "what do you believe" but "does this argument work" — and the discipline requires reconstructing a position you reject in its strongest form before objecting to it. Believers and non-believers alike find this uncomfortable, and both usually report it as the most valuable thing they got from the course.
PHI3700 is offered at approximately 8 Florida institutions, all universities, and carries 3 credits with roughly 45 contact hours. It is a 3000-level course, normally an elective, and it draws philosophy majors alongside students from religious studies, pre-law and the sciences.
UWF's version "meets College-Level Communication Skills Requirement", meaning the written work is graded as writing as well as content.
PHI3700 is a 3000-level elective. For philosophy majors it satisfies a distribution requirement — typically metaphysics and epistemology, or value theory, depending on the department's scheme. It is a common elective for religious studies, pre-law, English and science students, and non-majors are usually a substantial share of the room.
UWF lists none. The University of Florida's requirement is instructive as a pattern: a prior philosophy course (any PHH, PHI, PHM or PHP number) with a minimum grade of C, or sophomore standing or higher — which in practice means the course is open to most students while signalling that some philosophical background helps.
No religious background is assumed or expected, in either direction. Students with none find the historical material unfamiliar but not inaccessible; students with a strong religious formation sometimes have to unlearn the habit of treating the arguments as settled.
Three credits, approximately 45 contact hours, no laboratory. Online and hybrid sections are common. Assessment is writing-driven: argumentative essays, article analyses, and often a longer research paper. Some sections include structured debate or oral defence, which suits the material well.
The reading is not voluminous but is dense. A twelve-page article by Plantinga or Rowe can take longer than a chapter of a textbook, because the argument must be reconstructed rather than absorbed. Read for the argument — conclusion, premises, where the inference does the work, what would have to be true for it to fail — rather than for information. Expect six to nine hours a week outside class.
This is the section that most affects whether a student has a good experience, and it is worth being direct.
This is not a course about whether God exists, and it will not tell you. It is a course about whether the arguments on each side succeed, which is a different and narrower question. A student hoping for confirmation — in either direction — will be disappointed, and a student hoping for a resolution will be more disappointed still.
It is not a religion course. It does not survey world religions, teach religious practice, or approach the material devotionally or anthropologically. Those are the province of religious studies, and students wanting them should take an REL-prefixed course instead.
It is not apologetics, in either direction. A serious course presents the strongest version of every position, including the ones the instructor rejects. Students should expect to encounter capable atheist arguments and capable theist arguments, and to be asked to reconstruct both charitably.
The discipline's central demand is the principle of charity: reconstruct the position you reject in the form its best defenders would recognise, then object to that. Attacking a weak version is a failure of method regardless of whether the conclusion is correct. Students on both sides find this genuinely difficult, and it is the most valuable thing the course teaches.
Personal beliefs are not assessed. Grades are for the quality of argument, and a paper defending a conclusion the instructor rejects, argued well, earns a high grade. Students occasionally worry about this; instructors are generally explicit that it is not a concern, and the standard is checkable — a well-reasoned paper is well-reasoned regardless of its conclusion.
The course discusses questions that matter enormously to many people — the existence of God, the meaning of suffering, what happens at death — and it discusses them analytically. Students who hold strong religious commitments sometimes find having them examined as arguments uncomfortable, and students who hold strong non-religious commitments sometimes find the same on the other side. Both reactions are normal and both are worth sitting with; that discomfort is generally where the learning is.
The problem of evil in particular is discussed abstractly but concerns real suffering, and students who have experienced serious loss occasionally find it difficult. Campus counselling exists and using it is ordinary; the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline (call or text 988) is available statewide.
PHI3700 is a 3000-level SCNS course: the number is recognised statewide, but upper-division credit is not covered by the A.A. transfer guarantee and applicability inside a major is the receiving department's decision. It is generally not available before transfer from a Florida College System A.A. — the lower-division path is PHI2010 (introduction to philosophy) and PHI2600/PHI2630 (ethics), which transfer cleanly as common prerequisites. Since it is normally an elective, it transfers as elective credit with little friction.
The PHI prefix is philosophy. Relevant numbers: PHI2010 (introduction) and PHI2600/PHI2630 (ethics) at the lower division; PHI3700 (philosophy of religion); PHI3640 (environmental ethics); PHI3670 (ethics, upper division); PHI3130-range logic; PHI3300-range epistemology; PHI4xxx advanced topics. Adjacent prefixes: PHH for history of philosophy, PHM for social and political philosophy, PHP for individual philosophers.
⚠ The distinction that matters here is PHI versus REL. REL-prefixed courses are religious studies — the academic study of religions as historical, textual and social phenomena — and they are a different discipline with different methods. REL courses do not substitute for PHI3700 in a philosophy major, and PHI3700 does not substitute for a religious studies requirement. Students choosing an elective should be clear which they want: philosophy of religion asks whether religious claims are true; religious studies asks what religions are and do.
Philosophy of religion is a domain where AI tools produce plausible output easily and where plausible output is precisely not what the discipline wants.
Where AI helps. Models are useful for explaining a difficult argument a second way — the modal ontological argument and Plantinga's free will defence are two that reliably need it — for summarising an article before a proper reading, for generating objections to test your own position, and for helping structure an essay. Used as an interlocutor rather than a source, a model can be a genuinely productive sparring partner: "what would Rowe say to this?" is a good question to put to it, provided you then check the answer.
Where AI fails. Models produce balanced summaries rather than arguments, and this course grades arguments. They flatten the disagreement into an even-handed overview when the philosophical work is showing why one position is better supported. They fabricate citations and misattribute positions — a real hazard in a field where the evidence is what a named philosopher argued, and where "Plantinga holds that..." is a checkable claim. And they are weak at the discipline's core operation: locating the exact premise at which an argument fails, as distinct from noting that it has been criticised.
There is also a subtler failure worth naming. Models are trained to be inoffensive on contested topics, which produces exactly the studied neutrality that a philosophy paper must not have. The discipline requires taking a position and defending it. A paper that surveys the arguments and concludes that reasonable people disagree is a weak paper, however fluently written.
The assessment reality. Instructors read a great deal of student philosophical writing and generated prose is generally recognisable — fluent, balanced, and arguing for nothing in particular. The papers that earn good grades take a position, engage the strongest objection, and concede what they must; that is currently beyond what generation produces, and it is what the course exists to teach.
A genuinely relevant contemporary topic. Some questions in this course have acquired new instances worth examining: whether a system that produces religious language understands it bears on the philosophy of religious language; the cognitive science of religion's naturalistic explanations of belief formation raise the same genetic-fallacy question that arises about machine-generated belief-like outputs; and the personal identity material in the immortality section connects to questions about continuity, substrate and what makes a person the same person over time. These are legitimate paper topics and they are demanding ones, because the temptation to substitute novelty for argument is strong.
Academic integrity. Policies vary and are often strict where the course carries a writing designation. Read the syllabus, and note the self-interested argument: the skill this course builds — arguing carefully with people who do not share your premises — is the one that transfers, and it is not acquired by delegation.
Generated September 5, 2026 · Updated September 5, 2026