Rawls' naturalism that has been the leading view in political philosophy for the last fifty years, contends that religion - together with metaphysics and substantial conceptions of the good - should play no role in public discourse, since public reason should be neutral. This paper discusses one of the assumptions of this view: the naturalistic assumption that religions are matter of faith, in the sense that their contents are not natural and thereby are inaccessible by reason. The essay argues that current naturalistic accounts of value attempted to explain normative constraints on agents by progressively relaxing the strictness of naturalistic requirements, up to the point of seeking theistic solutions. However, appeals to God are also problematic, since it is questionable that a relevant notion of God is conceivable at all: if God is wholly other, He cannot matter for our choices and if He is a being among natural beings He cannot explain our normative constraints. This essay sketches an account of transcendence, which vindicates the conceivability of a notion of God suitable for the explanation of value. The proposal rests on the possibility of transcendental arguments based on analogy and suggests that religion can be open to rational scrutiny and thereby contribute to public reason.
