Religion and Philosophy

This is a particular problem for me, because my own entry into philosophy (entirely fortuitous, as anyone's), rather than just knowing about the history of philosophy, is Levinas. I believe it is completely impossible (though some think you can, and maybe even he did at one stage of his work) to separate his philosophical from his religious writings. When I had given this up, I thought about it negatively and naively, and their inseparability meant that he was susceptible to the same Nietzschean critique as Kant, but now I think that I am entirely wrong about that, because it puts the meaning of God in Levinas in completely the wrong place conceptually and historically.

The History of God

You imagine writing a history of God. Not a history of religion, nor even a mythical person (if you can speak like that), but of a philosophical concept. You see this history as the story of a disappearance. The more philosophical, the more rational, the concept of God becomes, the more God actually vanishes to become finally nothing more than a thin vapour and then nothing. The truth of the philosophical concept of God is atheism. You think then that Nietzsche's famous 'Death of God' is not outside this history but its proper culmination. And yet, after all this, when this history comes to an end, something remains. It is this remainder that interests you. Nonetheless, it still seems absurd that anyone would write about this now. What possible reason would there be to write a philosophy of religion today? Your only reply is that it is in the face of the question of God that you feel the most stupid and inadequate. Your own atheism is a paltry thing in comparison.