"If Christianity is the truth, then all the philosophy written about it is false.”

Genia Schönbaumsfeld is a radical voice in contemporary philosophy of religion, unafraid to confront the conceptual illusions that shape modern secular and religious discourse. A leading expert on Wittgenstein and Kierkegaard, she dismantles the idea that belief in God can be treated like a scientific hypothesis. For Schönbaumsfeld, faith is not about empirical claims but a “passionate commitment” that reshapes how we live and judge life itself.

In The Illusion of Doubt, A Confusion of the Spheres, and her ongoing European Research Council project The Ethics of Doubt, she argues that many contemporary debate, from conspiracy theory to militant atheism, misunderstand the nature of belief, confusing language with metaphysics. Her work urges us to question the assumptions behind what we call “truth” and “evidence,” reminding us that some forms of meaning can’t be captured by observation alone.

“A sharply argued contribution to the philosophical effort to understand religious language.” — Review of Metaphysics, on A Confusion of the Spheres