[^3] Of course...

[^3] Of course, Bultmann speaks here of interpreting texts, but the point applies generally to interpretation, and the quoted passage is immediately followed by a discussion of historical understanding. Bultmann argues that any understanding of texts or historical phenomena will rely on our presuppositions, but this is no threat to objectivity, since the result of the inquiry is not presupposed but left open.

Bultmann describes his conception of a religious hermeneutics as follows: .understanding reports of events as the act of God presupposes a preunderstanding of what in general can be called God's act-as distinct, say, from the acts of human beings or from natural events.. Unless our existence were moved (consciously or unconsciously) by the question about God., we would not be able to recognize God as God in any revelation.

There is an existential knowledge of God present and alive in human existence in the question about "happiness" or "salvation" or about the meaning of the world and of history, insofar as this is the question about the authenticity of our own existence.

[^4] For Bultmann, and, following him, for van Fraassen, the development of a religious hermeneutics is not a matter of how the world is to be described in theories or beliefs, but in the attitude with which we approach the world and how we relate to our experiences.[^5] Plantinga, on the other hand, questions the view of science developed in the works of Bultmann and van Fraassen, and in so doing, he offers an alternative religious hermeneutics (although he does not call it that).

According to Plantinga, objectifying inquiry, as described by Bultmann and van Fraassen, operates within the confines of methodological naturalism. Methodological naturalism is not ontological or philosophical naturalism. The latter holds that nature, the object of inquiry in the natural sciences, is all there is.

Methodological naturalism, on the other hand, is neutral about the question of supernatural existence, but maintains that in the practice of science, one should proceed as though there were no supernatural entities. This means that a scientific account of some phenomenon cannot appeal to such things as the will of God, divine attributes, or angels. There are a variety of ways that methodological naturalism can be elaborated.