Philosophy of religion in Hilmi Ziya Ülken

This study aims to identify the opinions of Hilmi Ziya Ülken who built up a fundamental base in sociology, psychology anthropology, and is one of the cornerstones in the mentioned area in the modern Turkish Republic. His opinions were determined in terms of fundamental topics of philosophy of religion such as; being, God, God-universe relation, God-man relation. In introduction part, Ülken?s basic ideas, philosophical mentality and his philosophical methods were treated in terms of his philosophy of religion. Thus, it was recorded that Ülken is a philosopher who established his own system and reflected his ideas consistently through this system. In the first part, Ülken?s conception of man and Creator was examined. It was found that he discussed the concrete being and refused to threat the abstract being. Additionaly, he claimed that being cannot be thought without existence or vice versa and the impossibility of knowing the absolutely infinite being. In the second part, Ülken?s ideas of creation and the nature of creation were investigated in God-universe context. Here, it was noticed that Ülken explained creation in terms of dictums and treated the nature of creation in terms of crisis, rhythm, existence and evolution. In the third part, God-man relation was examined. He discussed the task with consciousness of phenomenology. He actually describes the development of human consciousness and the emergent of values such as knowledge, art, morals, religion and so on and he explains time and liberty in terms of phenomenological consciousness. In the fourth part, the nature of religion, existence of God and faith were discussed. It was found that Ülken advocated religion area not as information area but faith area. Additionaly, Ülken claimed that man grasps the spiritual existence of God through virtual intuition and the efforts of denying or proving the spiritual existence of God are in vain. As a result, Ülken proposed a new original system based on strong basis. In his system he divides philosophy, religion and science into different areas and claimed that these cannot be connected to one another to establish one of them. But he also discussed that true philosophy, true science and true religion assist each other.