© Roger M Tagg 2010
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This is an example of the once popular genre of "collected essays", quite common in philosophy and theology. The essays were not all written at one time, but they usually addressed some common theme or "drift". In this case the underlying question seems to be "what can we logically say about God and religious language?".
There is very much a Commonwealth influence in this collection - the authors include 2 from Australia (both from Adelaide) and 2 from New Zealand (with a third quoted). Could it be that these authors felt more free to say the unsayable?
The list of chapter titles is itself interesting. The chapters are:
| 1 Can Religion be Discussed? | 2 Metaphysics, Logic and Theology | 3 The existence of God |
| 4 Can God's Existence be Disproved? | 5 A Religious Way of Knowing | 6 Theology and Falsification |
| 7 Religion as the Inexpressible | 8 Divine Omnipotence and Human Freedom | 9 Creation |
| 10 Tertullian's Paradox | 11 The Perfect Good | 12 Demythologizing and the Problem of Validity |
| 13 Miracles | 14 Visions | 15 Death |
| Chapter | Page | Highlight |
|---|---|---|
| Preface | ix | The editors comment that they have moved beyond opposing the 'Logical Positivists', i.e. the Vienna Circle who held that "a proposition is "cognitively meaningful" only if there is a finite procedure for conclusively determining whether it is true or false" - which would reject all Theology as meaningless. |
| One editor is a Christian, the other not. Antony Flew was an atheist at the time, although a late convert to "minimalist Deism" (see Telegraph obituary). Alasdair MacIntyre later gained popularity as the Enlightenment-bashing author of 'After Virtue' (1981). | ||
| xi | The trigger for much of the material in this collection was a paper 'Gods' by John Wisdom (a Cambridge philosopher) in 1950. | |
| 1 - | 1-3 | AN Prior (from Canterbury, NZ) wrote this play-style essay in 1942. The 5 characters are 'Catholic', 'Modern Protestant', 'Barthian Protestant', 'Logician' and 'Psychoanalyst'. 'Catholic' believes that the work of the mediaeval 'schoolmen' has yet to be improved on. 'Modern Protestant' sees religion as a whole range of profound feelings. 'Barthian Protestant' (named after Karl Barth) regards as paramount the notion that we are all sinners, and need the grace of God to save us. Barth himself rejected the idea of combining philosophy and theology. 'Logician' points out that he can only contribute if the others tell him exactly what it is that they believe in. |
| 3 | 'Logician': "The real intellectual difficulty for the believer or would-be believer is not the problem of proof but the problem of meaning." | |
| 4-5 | It soon becomes an issue that the theologians tend to use language rather loosely and poetically, at the same time incorporating their basic assumptions. | |
| 6 | 'Psychoanalyst' points out that unbelievers too have problems in expressing meaning, and that it is a fact that many people do "believe" (in concepts that can't be clearly defined). | |
| 7 | He goes on to suggest that these believers are "really" talking about their parents (Freud's father complex), or their tribal forefathers. 'Barthian' says that one could give an adequate explanation of this urge to belief equally from the view that it is an illusion (e.g. Feuerbach, Freud) - or that it is the underlying reality regardless of human developments in logic, science etc. | |
| 8 | 'Logician' says it's OK to take 'leaps of faith' but not a good bet when the religious option contains so much that is meaningless. | |
| 9 | 'Barthian' says it is simple; God is just what we encounter in Jesus Christ, and that is way beyond what we as sinful men can put into words. | |
| 10 | He goes on to say that unbelief is inevitable, but God's grace to help our unbelief is irresistible (RT: I haven't myself received much such help in the last 50 years) | |
| 'Logician' wonders if he and 'Psychoanalyst' are saying that the religious roles are verging on madness by persisting with their illusions, but 'Psychoanalyst' reckons that we all suffer from illusions, and there is little point in trying to "cure" them. The proof will come when we encounter personal or general crises, when we may have to ditch some of our illusions in order to survive. | ||
| 11 | He regards 'Modernist's' view as "milk and water" religion, "using religious language to describe anything ... mysterious". | |
| And there are worse forms of insanity - he is thinking of Naziism and other extreme ideologies. With this in mind he refers to the "German church struggle" - relevant at the time of writing - between those supporting Hitler and objectors such as Martin Niemöller. | ||
| summary | It looks as if the answer to the question "can religion be discussed?" is "with greatest difficulty". To me, the message is that each proponent looks at things from their own discipline or "world model", and there is only limited overlap between these views. Anyhow, although it's an older paper, it's a great start. | |
| 2 - | 12 | JJC Smart (from Adelaide, Australia), in similar vein to chapter 1, offered a supposed dialogue between Black (who, Smart says, was based on a member of the Anglican 'Society of the Sacred Mission') and White (possibly Smart's own position). The issue was whether a theological college really needed to be teaching philosophy - not because it doesn't have its uses, but because it was nowadays accepted that philosophy could not (pace Anselm) prove the existence of God. |
| 13-14 | Whereas in the past philosophy might have been regarded as a "sort of super-science", it might have been justified that priests should not go out without it. But after Wittgenstein, Ryle and others, it is perhaps seen more as "the investigation of the logic of language" - which might be classed as just interesting and nice to know. | |
| 15-17 | White distinguishes "metaphysical questions" (ideologically significant, looks like something factual, but it is puzzling and hard to answer) - and "logical questions" (not necessarily about the physical world, but we have some idea how we can answer them). | |
| 17-18 | When a metaphysical question is clarified (presumably with the help of logic of language), it might be reduced to one that makes sense in some special science or area of study. The example given is whether "mind" (i.e. mental functions) can really be located in something material (i.e. specific areas of the brain). This might be reduced to something that a neurophysiologist could answer by experiment. So Black asks if, by analogy, there are any "metaphysical-cum-theological" questions that might be reduced to something theological. White offers the question "why should anything exist at all?". | |
| 18 | Black wonders if this is related to the cosmological argument for the existence of God. White agrees to some extent, but that this argument "cannot pass muster at all", because it rests on the idea of a "logically necessary being" (all other things being not logically necessary) which is self-contradictory. | |
| 19-20 | Whereas a philosopher might dismiss "why should anything exist at all?" as a silly or meaningless question, ordinary people might feel it is nevertheless important. Black suggests a better example might be "who is right about the Trinity, Arius or Athanasius?" (Arianism maintains that Christ was created by God and therefore not an "equal partner"). It seems that logic might resolve where in this argument one actually had to make a judgment, as the Bible contains statements that support both sides. | |
| 21 | As an example of a non-metaphysical theological question, White suggests that of the virgin birth, which is partly a matter of history - of course whether we believe it or not depends on our starting presuppositions. Black also mentions the RC doctrine of the Immaculate Conception - something for which there is no warrant in the Bible but which theologians subsequently deduced as logically necessary. | |
| 22 | Concepts like the virgin birth, crucifixion and resurrection are understandable - and more or less believable, but the trinity could be regarded as not clear enough conceptually for most people to make a judgment. Hence Black agrees "logic is the handmaid of theology". Another question might be "do we have free will?". | |
| 23 | Most philosophers' motives are not necessarily to help solve metaphysical disputes, though. As an example of mixed motives, White suggests his own concern with the question of why 'time' is asymmetrical (i.e. it only goes one way) whereas the 3 dimensions of space are not. | |
| 24 | White suggests that sometimes, metaphysics can be the servant of logic, in that if a logical argument leads to an absurd conclusion, then there must be something wrong with either the logic or the assumptions. | |
| 25-26 | Some theological questions are philosophical in nature. White quotes from a paper by Prof Mackie of Otago (NZ) which said that there are "first order evils" (e.g. pain, discomfort, distress) without which some "second order 'goods'" (e.g. sympathy, kindness, helpfulness) would not exist. But then we might have "second order evils" such as selfishness, unkindness and cruelty. (Black and White then suggest a third order 'good' of forgiveness and a third order evil of 'unforgiveness'.) However Mackie's point concerns free will. Could God not have made people so that they always freely chose the 'good'? In which case it wouldn't be free will any more. So maybe free will is not incompatible with determinism (RT: maybe it's just a matter of how we use those words). | |
| summary | White seems to have made his point, although probably the parts of philosophy to be included in theological training need to be focussed. | |
| 3 - | 28 | JJC Smart here expands, by reviving a public lecture he had given in 1951, why he was quite so dismissive in chapter 2 of the mediaeval arguments for the existence of God. He clearly states that he is not discussing whether God exists or not, just whether the arguments are valid. |
| 29 | He thinks the main danger to theism comes not from people like himself who deny the validity of the arguments, but from those who think that the concept of God is nonsensical to start with and therefore the question "does God exist?" is meaningless. (RT: maybe it depends mainly on what one takes "God" to mean.) | |
| 30-31 | He rehearses the basic rules of logic where if 2 premises p and q are both true, a conclusion r is deduced. He points out that it comes to the same thing to say that if r is not true (or we think it is absurd), then either p or q must be invalid. | |
| 32-35 | Smart first considers the Ontological argument (briefly stated, that "if we can conceive of the greatest possible being, then it must exist"). It was first put forward by Anselm (sometime Archbishop of Canterbury) and later - with variations - by Descartes and others. Smart's main objection is that "exists" is being used as a property, like "is loving" - when "existence" is not a property. In English, it's just a quirk of language; we ought instead to say "there exists a being with such and such properties". He also points out a flaw in Descartes version where he uses a geometrical triangle as an analogy. Descartes claims that one can deduce certain things about a triangle, but Smart shows that these deductions depend on certain axioms (e.g. like those about parallel lines). All his argument shows is what is consistent with the notations and definitions one decides to use. (RT: maybe it's the same with God.) | |
| 35-39 | Next comes the Cosmological argument. This says that, assuming something exists, then it must have a reason how it came about - so something must have happened to bring it into existence. The terminology used here is that it is contingent. However this leads us to (logically) go backwards in time to a point where something must have started it all, something that is therefore the "first cause" and is logically necessary - which, the argument goes on to say, must be God. This argument goes back to Plato and Aristotle, and in Islam, to Avicenna (Ibn-Sina) before being revived by St Thomas Aquinas (who didn't think much of the Ontological argument). Kant criticized the second part of the argument (that the logically necessary being must be God), but Smart agrees with the Thomists (followers of Aquinas) that his criticism wouldn't wash. Instead, his objection is that "necessary" isn't an attribute of beings, it's an attribute of propositions. If we ask "what's the proposition here, then?", then it's "that God exists" - which comes down to the same issue as in the Ontological argument. He says that a logically necessary thing has to follow from a set of assumptions, notations etc. "God exists" is an existential proposition, and an existential proposition cannot be a logically necessary one. | |
| 40 | God may still be "necessary" (e.g. to justify what religion takes the concept to be), in the same way as "the speed of light in a vacuum is a constant" is necessary to justify physics. "... we believe in the necessity of God's existence because we are Christians; we are not Christians because we believe in the necessity of God's existence." (RT: I suppose Buddhists don't have to take on this necessity.) | |
| 41 | Smart draws the analogy between "does God exist?" and "do electrons exist?". We get the concept of an electron from experiments, and find electrons useful things to talk about in physics discussions; however for non-scientists the question of whether or not they exist is of no interest. Similarly, within religious language, God is a useful concept, but outside religion the question "does God exist?" has little meaning | |
| 41-45 | Finally he addresses the Teleological argument, the one that says that the universe must have been designed by a great architect, which we call God. This rests on the assumption that there is so much order in nature that it can only be a product of a great mind. "Teleological" literally means "with a purpose, or an end in view". | |
| 42-43 | Two common objections to this are a) that the analogy between artificial objects like machines and natural objects like animals and plants is not a very good one, unless one denies any influence of evolutionary processes; and b) that it only argues for a designer or architect, and not a creator. Using the analogy, we do not create the materials for the artifacts we make; we only arrange them. | |
| 43-44 | Although the existence of a designing mind may strike us forcibly in some moods, in other moods we may only see shortages, hostility and evil, and could deduce from this an architect who doesn't care about the bad consequences of his design. Smart relates this to the theological question of how to square the presence of evil with the claim that God is both omnipotent and benevolent. | |
| 44-45 | Although the teleological argument, even if sound, only proves "the existence of a very great architect and not of an omnipotent or benevolent creator", it has held an emotional fascination for people over the centuries. Smart agrees with Kant, who also thought the argument shaky. "But in those who have the seeds of a genuinely religious attitude already within them, the facts to which the argument draws attention ... and which are enormously multiplied by the advance of theor-etical science ... have a powerful effect. But they only have this effect on the already religious mind ... which has the capability of feeling the religious type of awe." | |
| 45-46 | Smart feels the same could be said of the cosmological argument; as an argument it doesn't "pass muster", but "it does appeal to something deep seated in our natures". But he says he still wants to go on asking questions like "why should anything exist at all?", although he admits he doesn't know what sort of question it is. | |
| summary | This chapter is quite hard going, but he has done enough to suggest that we should not expect arguments like these 3 to convince us to become religious and to believe in God - in any case, not to believe in all the doctrines that the various theistic sects put out as requirements on us. Some inclination to a religious frame of mind seems a prior requirement. Maybe Flew and MacIntyre only found this for themselves later. Maybe I will too! | |
| 4 - | 47 | JN Findlay (Kings College, London) takes a different tack on the issue of whether God exists; he offers a (not stunningly watertight) argument why we might conclude that God does not exist. |
| 48-51 | He offers his definition of God as "the adequate object of religious attitudes, carefully explaining what he means by "religious attitudes" and "adequate". His "religious attitudes" are where we tend "to abase ourselves before some object, defer to it wholly, to devote ourselves to it with unquestioning enthusiasm, to bend the knee before it" - in other words pretty "full on". (RT: might one not have applied this to German support for Hitler?) "Adequate" would require that "the object referenced exceeds us very vastly, whether in power or wisdom or in other valued qualities". (RT: in Australian Rules football, Geelong fans used to refer to Gary Ablett senior as "God" - and his son Gary Ablett junior as "son of God") | |
| 51-52 | But Findlay says that over time, theologians and philosophers "have added new touches to the portrait of deity, pleading various theological necessities, but really concerned to make their object worthier of our worship". As a result, "our religious object should have an unsurpassable supremacy along all avenues" and that "there must be no alternative to an existence properly termed 'divine' ". | |
| 52-53 | "It would be quite unsatisfactory ... if an object merely happened to be wise, good, powerful and so forth." Otherwise the object might deserve respect but not worship. So "these qualities must be intrinsically incapable of belonging to anything except in so far as they belong primarily to the object of our worship. | |
| 54 | He then says "the modern mind feels not the faintest axiomatic force in principles which trace contingent things back to some necessarily existent source, nor does it find it hard to conceive that things should display various excellent qualities without deriving them from a source which manifests them supremely". So God isn't "inescapable", at least for many people. | |
| 55 | Findlay claims that one can't have it both ways, i.e. a) as what we can talk about in particular language conventions (RT: Wittgenstein's language games) and b) some inescapable truth independent of any language conventions. | |
| 55-56 | His argument suggests that we should "discredit generally such forms of religion as attach a uniquely sacred meaning to existent things, whether these things be men or acts or institutions or writings". | |
| 56 | He finishes by admitting the possibility of an "atheistic religious attitude" (i.e. towards things "not of this world") without demanding that there should be something actual at the limit. (RT: I guess Buddhists would agree.) | |
| 56-67 | GE Hughes (Wellington, NZ) offers a critique longer than the original article - and it's hard going. First he questions Findlay's use of the words "contemporary" and "modern", since there are also neo-Thomists (RT: including the "later" MacIntyre?). He then questions whether the (now agreed) points about existential and necessary propositions can legitimately be extended beyond their use in discourse about contingent things (in other words, applying them to talk about God is presumptuous) - this seems to be his main issue. Next, on Findlay's use of "inescapable", he suggests there are 2 different possible meanings: a) self-evident (3 sub-forms, (i) self-evident in itself, (ii) self-evident to certain human beings and (iii) self-evident to human reason at its best); and b) entailed by other propositions "which we have sound evidence for believing to be true". He illustrates this by the difference between Anselm and Aquinas. He finishes by suggesting that there are other possible arguments for the non-existence of God (RT: the one he gives as an example I found mind-numbing.) | |
| 67-71 | ACA Rainer (Newcastle upon Tyne) first questions ambiguities in meaning of the words "necessity" and "necessary". He claims that "God's necessary existence and the assertion of his necessary possession of the properties of a Perfect Being", although contingent, are "verifiable in relation to moral and mystical experience". He then says that "if the term 'God' is really insignificant, Findlay's earlier description of the religious attitude should be translated into emotive or projectional terms. There is a discrepancy between his psychological and philosophical analyses of religion". In a footnote, he says "All that the believer claims is that belief in God, like belief in the existence of other persons, is a reasonable faith, not a necessary truth". His final remark is that he feels that "the experience of moral and spiritual 'commitment' " should not be left out of the discussion. (RT: this would surely need more explanation.) | |
| 71-75 | Findlay replies that he recognizes that it is impossible to prove or disprove anything where the premises are themselves subject to question and ambiguousness. He explains that his thoughts date back to 1932 when studying Kant, he wondered how anything that was hypothetical could ever be an adequate object for our religious attitudes. He admits that if someone doesn't feel any need "to say that God exists in some necessary and inescapable manner" (he instances Russell and Broad, which Rainer had quoted), then his argument doesn't matter. Nor would it wash with Rainer who implied that "one might come to perceive the necessity of God's existence in some higher mystical state". | |
| 73-74 | He thinks that "really modern philosophers" might put his own 'atheistic religious attitude' into the same category as Hughes' and Rainer's. The difference is just that he himself thinks so highly of certain ideals that it is "unworthy to identify them with anything existent". Rainer's God will only be different by "an addition of 'brackets'". "An atheist might admit ... a 'god-ward trend' in things ... as if there were a God." That's not much different from Plato or Plotinus. | |
| 74-75 | Findlay describes himself a "by temperament a Protestant" which he defines as having the conviction "that it isn't essential in order to be a sound or 'saved' person, that one should pay deference to institutions, persons, books, ceremonies and so forth". (RT: this sounds like me to a 'T', but it doesn't sound like Calvin or Bible literalists.) He adds that there is nothing wrong with these things, as long as they aren't regarded as essential. | |
| 75 | He thinks it is "hard to be a theist without falling into idolatry, with all its attendant evils of intolerance and persecution". He feels this is particularly true in Christianity "where the Divine is identified with a particular historical person". | |
| 5 - | 76-77 | CB Martin (Adelaide) here reflects on what two other authors have written about knowledge of God, and raises some questions that arise from what they said. J Baillie rejected logical argument as the way God is known; it's only through a personal revelation (and specifically of Father, Son and Holy Spirit, i.e. exclusively Christian). HH Farmer similarly says that it has to be through personal encounter with Him in the person of Christ; and that any 'arguments' like the cosmological one can only be confirmatory at best. |
| 78-79 | If someone is then to tell of their personal encounter and deduce that God exists, Martin wonders how one can justify the deduction from the basic psychological experience (at least, I suppose, to another person's satisfaction). | |
| 80 | He says that a theologian would discourage any detailed naturalistic description of the experience, as it might be then easier to dismiss as being an experience of God - he thinks that many theologians seem to regard knowing God as a separate 'sixth' sense - hence the chapter title. He points out that one needs to use metaphors for this sense, like 'seeing', or 'hearing' the voice of conscience. | |
| 81-85 | He then questions the way the authors use the analogy between the statement "you don't know what the experience of God is until you have had it" and statements like "you don't know what the colour blue is until you have seen it". Are they both limited to the psychological level, or are they detecting some reality? Or does the analogy break down at some point? Martin considers the possibilities of doing tests, or of referring to the testimony of others. | |
| 86 | In the face of failing the tests, or denial by the other people, the person experiencing may preserve his confidence, but at the cost of reducing his experience to the psychological. | |
| 87 | In the case of God, he says "it has been said that religious experience carries its own guarantee" (RT: sounds circular to me). | |
| 88-91 | Martin then analyses the effect of putting the words "I seem to" before any claim of religious experience. It brings difficulties because "seem to" implies that the person recognizes some pattern from previous experience - which might be difficult in a first such experience. So how do we come to learn such a pattern? An analogy (far fetched?) is trying to explain sadness to someone in a society where everyone has always been happy. | |
| 91-93 | Next, he takes the original statements of his 2 authors but replaces "God" and "religion" by "beauty" and "aesthetics". Martin suggests that we can probably be taught, or learn, to appreciate beauty. So he wonders, can clergymen do the equivalent of art critics or teachers? And what if they themselves have never had a religious experience? | |
| 93-94 | Farmer suggested that in art, like religion, there is "something of the same sense of an 'infinite beyond' disclosing itself through, yet transcending, what is contemplated and enjoyed." He therefore didn't like Santayana's epigram "religions are better or worse, never true or false" (RT: I do quite like it). He felt that art is "seeking to grasp an ideal world which in spite of its ideality is real" and that in religion, the reality interest is even more important. | |
| 94 | He gives a list of "difficult" example assertions where he says that the logic is intricate. | |
| 95 | He concludes that a) the analogy with seeing the colour blue is not a good one; b) the analogy with art needs more thinking about; and C) that tests or checking procedures can't be expected to work with religious statements. He leaves as unaddressed the question of "the connection between what the believer expects from immortality and his religious belief". | |
| summary | This essay wanders a bit, but the target is clearly to relate a) theologians' rejection of logical argument as a way of knowing God with b) the language and analogies that they are nevertheless forced to use to explain their claim of 'knowing' to anyone else. He claims no more than to say that religious statements are "very like" aesthetic, subjective or introspective ones. | |
| 6 - | 96 | This chapter consists of a short challenge by Antony Flew, two critiques from Oxford dons, a response from Flew, and a much longer reflection by another Oxford don. It seems that there were originally more contributions to this debate, which occurred in the pages of the Oxford periodical 'University'. Flew's challenge is that, if one makes an assertion that is to be meaningful, there ought to be a set of conditions under which it could be deemed false. Otherwise, he claims, the person making the assumption may be forced to continually reduce his assertion by agreeing to limitations on what he said, possibly ending up with something very weak, or just a personal feeling (RT: this links with the previous chapter). |
| 96-97 | He starts off with a parable (from J Wisdom, a Cambridge philosopher) about 2 explorers who find a clearing in the jungle with lots of flowers but also weeds. One explorer asserts that a gardener must tend the plot, but the other disagrees. So they set up watches, an electric fence and patrol it with bloodhounds. They don't catch a gardener, but the believer persists, saying that the gardener must be invisible and undetectable. But then, how does that differ from an imaginary gardener, or no gardener at all? | |
| 97-99 | He then considers some of the "theological utterances" that one often hears, like "God has a plan", "God created the world", "God loves us as a father loves his children". If they are used seriously, can one take them literally? He asks, in relation to the last example, what would the speaker say to a parent of a child who was dying of inoperable cancer of the throat? Flew suggests the speaker might qualify the statement, e.g. it's not just love as we humans know it. At what stage might we say that the statement was reduced to meaninglessness, or even bring doubt as to whether the statement was true at all. | |
| 99 | So his parting question was, what sort of thing would have to occur to constitute a disproof of the love - or existence - of God? | |
| 99-100 | RM Hare of Balliol, Oxford introduces a different parable - of a person who has a phobia (he calls it a blik) that all dons want to murder him, and nothing will convince him otherwise. | |
| 101 | He then quotes Hume who said words to the effect that "our whole commerce with the world depends upon our blik about the world; and that differences between bliks about the world cannot be settled by observation of what happens in the world". | |
| He says that Flew is targeting religious statements as if they were claiming to be explanations, whereas they are really just their bliks (RT: I would say, "underlying models of reality"). | ||
| 102 | He suggests that Punjabis who are Sikhs are different sorts of people from those who are Moslems. | |
| 103 | He also suggests that Flew's explorers are more detached from the garden than his don-fearing nut is from his life as he sees it - and also than religious speakers are from their idea of what is most important. | |
| 103-4 | Basil Mitchell of Keble, Oxford addresses Flew's point somewhat better by admitting that the problem of evil is thought by many to be a strong argument against the claim that God loves mankind. He adds a parable about a stranger in a wartime resistance situation, who often helps the resistance, but sometimes appears to be helping the occupying enemy. Should the resistance fighter abandon his belief in the stranger, or just say "nevertheless, he is on our side"? | |
| 105 | Someone who in face of a disaster just says "it is God's will" is being very bland (RT: and not helpful to many of the sufferers). "He will only be regarded as sane and reasonable if he experiences in himself the full force of the conflict" (RT: between faith and doubt, I suppose - like Job?) | |
| Non-falsifiable statements like "God loves men" and "the stranger is on our side" can be treated in 3 different ways: 1) as provisional hypotheses (discardable in the face of contrary evidence); 2) as significant articles of faith; 3) as vacuous reassurances. A Christian can't take route 1, and ought to avoid the slippery slope onto route 3. (RT: This suggests one needs to be committed first, which leaves the question of how one becomes committed.) | ||
| 106-7 | In his response, Flew accepts Mitchell's point that a theologian would not in fact resort to "a thousand qualifications" when challenged (as the believing explorer was challenged). As regards his Stranger parable, he says that - if the stranger is meant to represent God - he must, by his omnipotence and omniscience, be an accessory before, during and after the fact of every human misdeed and every non-moral defect in the universe. | |
| 107-8 | Regarding Hare's bliks, he thinks that's a misguided and unorthodox analogy for religious belief. Also, he does think that many religious utterances are offered as assertions. | |
| 108 | In his parting shot, he likens some religious utterances, especially in the face of the problem of evil, to George Orwell's doublethink (in his book '1984'). | |
| 109 | IM Crombie (Wadham, Oxford) later wrote a paper arising from the above discussion - of 21 pages, compared with Flew's original 4 and a total of 13 for all the previous contributions. Basically, he is opposed to Flew's "falsification" argument. It's hard going, but there are one or two good points. | |
| 110-11 | He first clears the logical air by dividing statements about God into subject (i.e. God) and predicate (what is said about Him). | |
| 111 | He then gives an analogy for three sources of Christian belief: 1) the 'logical mother' of undifferentiated theism - i.e. why we might believe in any god (e.g. contingency, moral experience, beauty and order of nature - but such experiences are open to alternative explanations) (5 pages); 2) the 'logical father' - i.e. the interpretation of certain objects and events as manifestations of the divine (e.g. history of Israel, life and death of Christ, evolution of the Church - again, we may or may not accept these as divine revelations); and the "nursemaid" or "extra-parental care" that is provided by religious activity. | |
| 113 | When talking about "theistic interpretations", although they are expressed in quasi-argument form, they are not arguments in the ordinary sense and cannot be validated; and people find themselves saying things that they cannot literally mean. (RT: what, then, is the average person meant to conclude?) | |
| 118-22 | He says that the notion of a parable is the essential clue to interpretation of religious utterances. He gives some examples where interpretation seems simple, but others where it is complicated (RT: and perhaps contentious?). | |
| 123 | "In other words, there must exist within a man's mind the contrast between the contingent and the necessary ... if anything is to be a revelation of God." (RT: I would say, that is too hard for 99% of us.) | |
| 124-5 | "... our need is, not to know what God is like, but to enter into relation with him ..." (RT: also too hard). | |
| "Could anything count decisively against it (i.e. the assertion that God is merciful)? Yes, suffering which was utterly, eternally and irredeemably pointless." But we can't design an experiment to test this, because we can't see the whole picture (he includes in this, "what shall happen hereafter"). | ||
| 125-7 | Crombie conducts a complex argument for why he feels that the demand for verification or falsification, for releigious statements, is not legitimate | |
| 128 | "Theology is not a science; it is a sort of enlightened ignorance." | |
| 128-9 | He doesn't think he has any answer to the objection "if being loved by God is what we experience all the time, then it is not like being loved by man; it is like being let down right and left". All he can say is that the Christian has 3 lines of retreat: 1) "he looks for the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come"; 2) "he claims that he sees in Christ the verification, and to some extent the specification, of the divine love"; 3) the promise 'I will not fail thee nor forsake thee' is, if rightly understood, confirmed (in the religious life of others) | |
| 129-30 | Option 3 above should not be interpreted as giving immunity from bodily - or even spiritual - suffering. | |
| 130 | The promise is really that if one changes to seeking life after death, and abdicates the control over one's destiny ("self-sovereignty claimed by Adam"), it will be possible to continue. (RT: I suggest most people find it possible to continue, and lead a good life, without all that.) | |
| He claims that the problems of religion have to be solved within a religious context (RT: sounds like a tactic to disqualify outsiders or external influences). "Seen as a whole religion makes rough sense" (RT: this seems to be increasingly doubtful for many people). | ||
| summary | The point of the chapter is a good one, and the discussion enlightening. But if Crombie's paper was a sermon, most of the congregation would have nodded off. | |
| 7 - | 131-2 | Thomas McPherson (Bangor) analyses what some of the apparently absurd statements of religious belief actually mean (e.g. "Three in One and One in Three") - or are they in fact nonsense? |
| 132 | He contrasts direct quotes from the Bible with statements constructed later by theologians. | |
| 133 | Both believers and non-believers might have a worry with these statements; one way round is to keep silent, assume there's a truth there, but that it is inexpressible. (RT: the early Wittgenstein suggested the same if no tests or means of verification or falsification can be offered.) McP points out, though, that tests for one sort of nonsense may not be applicable to other sorts. | |
| 134 | Theologians dismiss the positivist view (like Wittgenstein's but stricter), but this is probably too hasty. | |
| 135 | He quotes Rudolf Otto who says that "what is most distinctive in religion cannot be put into words" and is "not capable of being conceptualised". Otto talks about the feeling of "creatureliness" and consciousness of the "Numinous" or "Wholly Other". | |
| 136 | The best one can do in explaining the holy is to tell about feelings which, although different, remind people of similar, more describable feelings. | |
| 137-9 | Wittgenstein said we can ask about how the world is, but not why or "that it is". He concluded scepticism about religion is senseless, because no questions could resolve it either way. He would therefore suggest keeping quiet - but Otto thought that people still want to ask "why". | |
| 141 | "Positivists may be the enemies of theology, but the friends of religion." | |
| (footnote) Martin Buber said similar things (i.e. "it's inexpressible") about his idea of the "I-Thou" relation. | ||
| 142 | McP distinguishes "non-sense" from nonsense. The positivist way helps to pinpoint the "worry" (see above) because it shows a way out of it (RT: looks as if it just identifies what has to be inexpressible). | |
| 143 | He thinks positivism should accommodate to theology, not vice versa (RT: theologians' wishful thinking, like Crombie's point on page 130?). | |
| summary | I'm not sure he really answered the original question. Just to say that the essential truth is inexpressible doesn't help the non-believer much. | |
| 8 - | 144 | Flew returns to his point on p106-7 about God (if omnipotent and omniscient) being complicit in all human evil. In this paper he moves on to whether the concept that humans have free will answers the problem. |
| St Augustine's version of the paradox was "either God cannot abolish evil or he will not. If he can't he is not omnipotent; if he won't he is not all good". JS Mill took a similar line, and so did JL Mackie of Otago (NZ) at the same time as Flew. | ||
| 145-6 | Those using the "free will" argument first exclude any claim of omnipotence to do the logically impossible. Then humans are given free will to do good or sin. Additionally, certain good things (e.g. forgiveness) presuppose some bad act to forgive. | |
| 146-7 | Counters to this are: 1) not all evils are due to human wickedness; 2) the effects of evil aren't allocated fairly - "the worst consequences of a Hitler fall not on him or other conspicuously guilty men but on their victims"; 3) a God who allows quite so much evil, even to justify "2nd order good", can't really be called good; 4) a God who justifies suffering as character-forming is demoted to human-like cause and effect. | |
| 148 | The Christian might counter that God pities and shares the suffering of his creatures (RT: doesn't sound like much consolation). | |
| Flew criticizes CS Lewis ('Problem of Pain') for claiming one can't sum misery (he claimed "the addition of a million fellow-sufferers adds no pain"). | ||
| 149 | Another sceptic's challenge is "why didn't God make people so that they always choose to do right?" (RT: this wouldn't eliminate natural disasters.) | |
| 150 | A human's choice might be free, but also predictable (given the circumstances, and the state of his body or mind). | |
| 151 | RC doctrine is that God has foreknowledge (of what a person will choose). From here on the essay gets rather rambling. | |
| 159 | We ought to put higher-order 'goods' like forgiveness and fortitude higher up the scale of values than first-order goods like "the simple satisfaction of gardening". | |
| 161-2 | "Predestinationism makes out that all of us, all the time, whether we know it or not, ... have no choice ...". In other words, God is the Great Hypnotist. | |
| Where does that leave personal responsibility? Do people willingly put themselves under the hypnotist's power? What if a gang boss forces a sidekick to "do a job"? What about someone who sets a booby trap? (RT: local news is full of people who claim they weren't responsible because of the drink, drugs, anger etc.) | ||
| 163 | Flew: "All the bitter words which have ever been written against the wickedness of the God of predestinationism - especially when he is thought of as filling Hell with all but the elect - are amply justified". | |
| 164 | Maybe Calvin fully saw the (grim) implications of omnipotence. CS Lewis seems little better. | |
| 166 | How then can God justifiably punish any person? | |
| 166-7 | How can it be maintained that all our good actions are only by God's grace, yet all our bad actions are due to our free will? | |
| 167 | The model of "the Great Father and his (mainly prodigal) sons" is attractive but doesn't square with omnipotence. | |
| summary | The main points are good, but many of the arguments are difficult to follow. There needed to be some indentation and better numbering. | |
| 9 - | 170 | This is a transcript of a BBC Third Programme discussion about Creation, between Flew and D MacKinnon of Aberdeen. DM is a Christian, but neither of the 2 hold that the creation story in the Bible is literally true. |
| 171-2 | It's interesting how it differs from other ancient creation myths (they mention the Babylonian one). The Genesis version however emphasizes "nothing but God". | |
| A "myth" is more than legend or fiction - it may point to some truth. Even Rousseau's 'social contract', it is argued, arises from some old myths. | ||
| 173 | Brunner suggests we humans are only guests and borrowers, not owners with rights. We should not hold creatures cheap (Aquinas), and wasting natural resources is irreverent to our Host. | |
| Elements of Genesis creation are: 1) absolute dependence on God; 2) rejection of fundamental dualism; 3) that certain conduct and attitudes are appropriate; and possibly 4) that the world had a beginning. | ||
| 174 | Aquinas wrote before science and metaphysics were separated. A Thomist would say that there is a kind of fundamental understanding of our "creaturely lot" independent of the movement of empirical discovery (i.e. both before and after science and the enlightenment). | |
| 175 | When talking about creation, either we should borrow words from familiar transactions of experience, or we should say nothing at all (see chapter 8). | |
| The New Testament treatment of creation was partly aimed at warding off fears of malignant forces (RT: I suppose the Gentiles had missed out on the OT). | ||
| 175-6 | So, what religious talk has to be is a "picture" - not a "Hebrew Fred Hoyle" of cosmology. | |
| 176-7 | Having debunked the evil spirits may have eased the path for scientists (ref M Foster, R Collingwood). But neither AF nor DM agreed with their "Principle of the Uniformity of Nature" or "Law of Causality". The latter is more like the label of a problem than a solution. (RT: sounds like a "model" to me). | |
| 178 | It could also be said that Christian theology is the grandmother of Bolshevism (or rather, of scientific humanism). In the same vein, the intellectual children of Rousseau aren't the liberal democracies, they are more like Mussolini or Ataturk. | |
| 179 | Atheists like Flew are maybe also the intellectual children of believers in creation. | |
| 'Cosmic watchmaker' is at best a partial model - it doesn't necessarily start with God (RT: and it doesn't cover continuing maintenance). | ||
| 180-1 | All this discussion is for the sophisticated - many believers in God are unsophisticated. So one has to resort to analogies, and these can get reduced by qualification (see chapter 6). With too many analogies, one can finish up with doublespeak. But how can one set any limits on the use of analogies? | |
| 182 | There needs to be some base to "set the analogical ball rolling". God may be the target, but not the starting point. DM: "The infinite God isn't an artist: that is anthropomorphism." | |
| 183 | "Can forms of words help men to launch out into the 'sea of Being' (alias the 'Unseen')?" What made the writers of the Gospels and Epistles "adventure into language as they did was more perhaps the riddle of a life led and a death died than any sort of arguments". | |
| 184 | AF: Religious talk is in a less secure position (than scientific or even ethical talk); it's a sort of "apocrypha in the book of language". | |
| 185 | Why? Because 1) only some people find it necessary to use it; 2) it often sounds like failed science or fraudulent ethics. | |
| "The only satisfactory and perhaps sufficient justification for ... trying to say things which it seems cannot be said lies in Christ". (Final point of agreement!) | ||
| summary | It's not a bad attempt to involve educated (but non-theologian and non-philosopher) Third Programme listeners! | |
| 10 - | 187 | Bernard Williams (New Coll, Oxford) gives his 2d-worth for this collection, based on his analysis of Tertullian's paradox, which loosely stated says "because it is absurd, it is to be believed ... it is certain, because it is impossible". The reference is to the incarnation of Christ ("that the Son of God was born"). |
| 188 | His hypothesis is that "Christian belief must involve at least one statement which is about God and the world (my italics), and that this statement must be partly incomprehensible". | |
| 191 | He points out the value of using paradoxes - not just for effect, but because, "against a suitable background of other beliefs or a way of life", it can tell us something. | |
| 193 | Religious language isn't just used for statements, but also commands, prayers, expressions of trust, promises, reprimands etc. | |
| 195-6 | It isn't necessarily a professional language; "one who speaks scientifically is at least an amateur scientist, but one who speaks religiously is not necessarily a theologian, even an amateur one". (RT: that's me, I'm an amateur theologian!) | |
| 199 | "While the language of botany is language about plants, not all language about plants is botanical" (e.g. from poets); "but one cannot speak non-religiously about God". | |
| 200-1 | Some religious statements "are not purely about God, but about human affairs as well". Example: "God makes the crops fail to punish the people for their wickedness". But a statement like has, over time, become unjustifiable. Making it doesn't disprove religion, but it means that "if religious language is used to give certain sorts of explanation, it clashes with a more effective explanation and tends to be eliminated." | |
| 202 | "If all talk about God were talk only about God, and all talk about the world only about the world, how could it be that God was the God of the Christian believer, who is a toiler in the world of men?" The result of such a clear dividing line would be "like the gods of Epicurus, 'far remote and cut off from our affairs' ". This does seem a danger for religion today. | |
| 203 | On the Incarnation, there must be "an intersection of religious and non-religious language" - hence the paradox, because the bit about God has to say that God is eternal, perfect and beyond our understanding, but birth is a temporal event and within our understanding | |
| 206 | "If we cannot say 'God sent the drought to punish the people' we must say that God does not intervene in the operations of natural law; if we say this, are we to say that God's power is limited or that he himself is willing not to intervene?" "And if we say that God was incarnated, are we to say that he changed?" | |
| 207-8 | "... there is not much hope for an independent logical analysis of religious language" - but by the same token, "if one task of theology is such an analysis, theology is committed to making itself coherent, and coherent not only with itself, but outside as well" - which must be an impossible task. | |
| 208-9 | Is the only answer that one must have faith? Is that faith in a person, a statement, or a course of action? "Lenin asked the Bolsheviks before the Revolution to have faith in him ... although murder and misery was involved" in doing what he said had to be done. But at least the Bolsheviks knew clearly what they were believing in; it is another thing "to ask someone by faith to believe something that he does not properly understand". | |
| 209 | "... certain religious beliefs must be inherently mysterious and remain so, and that it is the part of faith to accept them. My difficulty is that, if belief is incomprehensible and necessarily so, one cannot see what is being accepted, on faith or otherwise." | |
| 210 | F Godet said (in translation) "the Gospel is not an intellectual system, but a salvation" | |
| "... what one chooses, when one chooses to believe, is to live in a certain way" - in which the religious statements play a part - but the beliefs must be there. | ||
| "Religious observances stand for nothing ... unless there are also behind them some beliefs about God, some statements about him" - otherwise it would just be "the unknown God". | ||
| 210-11 | These statements need to be "not just in terms of other statements about God, but in terms of the life of men". | |
| 211 | What, after all this, is the difference between belief and unbelief? But it's more a matter of "what it is that the believer believes and the other does not believe; but this we cannot properly do". So what's the difference between orthodoxy and heresy? After all, Tertullian himself became a heretic. | |
| summary | This essay is very well written; he writes as a sympathetic unbeliever. He manages to avoid resorting to too many difficult arguments and hard-to-grasp concepts. | |
| 11 - | 212 | CB Martin (Adelaide) introduces some potential analogies for talk about God, and "tries to show an inherent contradiction in the notion of God's perfect nature". |
| He gives a quote from G Galloway, part of which reads "The God who is ethical Ground of the world guarantees the validity and persistence of ethical values". | ||
| 213-4 | He considers 3 examples, A, B and C. In A, Mary: "What ought we to do about Mother? ... there just doesn't seem any way to decide ... how I wish Father were still alive. He would know. Jane: "Somehow he always seemed to know what was right". Mary "... except towards the end when he began to fail so fast". In B, Mary says "Even though father is gone, I feel that I have to do what is right just because that is what he wants .. and if I didn't know he was somehow there I don't think anything would matter". In C, Betty says "But I don't see why I ought to do this and not that", to which Mother replies "Because Father says so - that's why". | |
| 215-8 | He then relates these cases to their theological equivalent. In case A, Martin says that in the human example, justification depends on the success and failure in the past; but with God (defined as perfect) then that can't count. In case B, the deceased father seems more infallible then when he was alive. However the human father's advice might be contradictory (e.g. lying to protect someone's feelings) - or it might turn out that father kept a diary relating a string of evil exploits. | |
| 219 | There is a circularity in the 2 statements "The good is defined in terms of God's will" and "God's will (as perfect) is defined in terms of the good". (RT: but there's no problem if you just define God as the spirit of Good, is there?). Martin's suggestion is that one needs the additional statement "The Word was made Flesh". | |
| 220-1 | He says that Aquinas's view of omnipotence (i.e. it doesn't cover contradictory things) is clearer than anything from Protestants (he quotes HH Farmer). | |
| 221-4 | He moves to a different case where Mary and James discuss a mutual friend John, when James says of John "It his nature to be kind". Mary points out that this doesn't mean that he might not go against his nature in some dealings (e.g. he might beat his wife). The natural response for James would be to agree, but an alternative would be to say that it is unconceivable, and it wouldn't be the real John - or, that it might appear bad, but that it was really a kind act (e.g. being cruel to be kind, disciplining children). This alternative could perhaps be labelled "logically vacuous". But James might reply "you don't seem to be aware of the possibility of a man having unlimited faith in a friend". This could be likened to theological talk about Christ. | |
| 225 | Martin concludes that James may be saying two things at the same time, as might be the case with the religious parallels. "The contradiction is that Christ can be conceived to have been other than he was, that is, not good; yet as God it is inconceivable that he should have been not good." | |
| 226 | But he wonders if the contradiction can be resolved by "the theological device of the dual nature of Christ". He asks, then, "What does this divine nature add?". | |
| summary | The examples are easy to follow, and I'm not surprised that the theological talk gets one into contradictions. But does it matter? | |
| 12 - | 227 | RW Hepburn of Aberdeen is essentially offering here a critique of Bultmann's attempts at demythologizing religious talk, as they appear in 'Kerygma and Myth'. |
| 228 | He feels that "Bultmann's methods and terminology tend to insulate his claims against the possibility of verification and falsification ... through ambiguities and confusions in crucial terms, which effectively prevent the question of validity being raised ..." | |
| 229 | Under 'The Definition of Myth', Bultmann's original definition says "Mythology is the use of imagery to express the other worldly in terms of this world and the divine in terms of human life ...". Later he says that all utterance about God is analogical. Hepburn claims that then, demythologizing would not be possible. Bultmann chooses not to describe the expression "act of God" as mythological, because "mythological thought regards the divine activity ... as an interference with the course of nature". But his original definition would include analogies, pictorial images etc under 'myth'. | |
| 230 | Hepburn asks "Are New testament myths Jewish and Gnostic in origin or in essence?" | |
| 230-4 | Under "The Flight from the Evidential", Hepburn accuses Bultmann of not properly facing "negative evidential arguments" against Christianity, and twisting them to support his modified theological view. Examples given concern the virgin birth and Christ's pre-existence, and the Ascension. | |
| 233 | "Doubtless a Christian ought not to see a miracle as a a divine conjuring trick ..." | |
| 234 | "For he (Bultmann) is as anxious to escape the level of the verifiable as the logical positivists were to remain within it ..." | |
| " ... at what point legitimate interpretation fades into fancilful and irresponsible refashioning of the past is often a hard question. He says that "the assurance of Bultmann that the demythologized, existentialist account of the New Testament proclamation does not distort that proclamation" is uncertain. | ||
| 235-6 | Under "Fact and Language", Hepburn says that the question whether or not something is mythical cannot be settled by someone acting in the role of "translator". Bultmann several times claims that something cannot have happened as narrated (e.g. Christ rising into the air on Ascension Day). Hepburn also points out that "the Cross" is used in two ways: a) in the actual crucifixion and b) as the meaning for the Christian life. | |
| 236 | "What is 'crude' about the sacrifice theory (e.g. Jeptha's daughter) is not its mythological nature, but its moral indequacy." The story of Iphigenia is also mentioned. | |
| 236-8 | Under "Myth and Oblique Language" Hepburn suggests Bultmann is distinguishing 'metaphor' from 'myth' as being "as near literal as makes no difference". He says that metaphor is still part of "oblique" language. | |
| 238-9 | He instances Crombie's contribution in chapter 6 as saying that even "God loves us" is a parable or oblique utterance. "We accept one parable about God, rather than another, on the authority, primarily, of Jesus Christ." | |
| 239 | Tillich said to Hepburn that "without one direct proposition the oblique language, despite its internal coherence, would have no anchor in reality ...". The one direct proposition is "God is Being - itself" - which Hepburn relates to Crombie's "undifferentiated theism". | |
| 240-2 | Finally, Hepburn asks if "Existentialist modes of thought, as Bultmann adopts them, help or hinder the fashioning of a theology whose logical structure reveals itself through its presentation and terminology?" He says it is an advance on Schleiermacher's "descriptive and emotive" language, and can be compared with the advances by Wisdom and Austin over the logical positivists. | |
| 240 | Hepburn says it is hard for existentialist language to escape from subjectivism | |
| 241 | Also, existentialist thought gives "almost unlimited hospitality" to the paradoxical. It also adopts the language of drama, which makes cogent argumentation difficult. | |
| Bultmann wrote "It is not for us to question the credentials of the 'word of preaching'; it is we who are questioned. Alluring, but evades a question such as on what grounds one should follow the New Testament, rather than, say ,the Koran. | ||
| 242 | "So long as it (existentialist language) provides the means of expressing what without its terms would be inexpressible, theologians can do nothing but respect it; but it is time to protest when it proceeds arbitrarily to impose limits on critical examination, whether of doctrine or document. | |
| In their quest for good religious language, philosophers and theologians "must resist equally the artificial truncation of language on dogmatic positivist lines, and any language ... which is given to the multiplication of metaphysical or theological entities beyond necessity, and from crying 'mystery' where there is not always mystery but sometimes only muddle". | ||
| summary | Bultmann is obviously a popular Aunt Sally for theologians. However to his credit, he had a go, and one feels as an outsider that too many theologians have been happy to sit back and justify the language that they have been using since Aquinas, St Augustine etc, without taking account of more recent patterns of thought among ordinary people. Ordinary people may be wrong, but the old language is not engaging them. | |
| 13 - | 243 | This chapter is a critique, by Patrick Nowell-Smith of Trinity Oxford, of a 1950 journal article by Arnold Lunn (skiing pioneer and Catholic convert) justifying a "supernatural" interpretation of miracles against "modernist" questioning. |
| On the first page, he uses the word 'Euhemerizing' to mean the practice of rationalizing myths in materialist terms, e.g. that gods were once just historical figures. Definitions found on the Net suggest that writers who use this word are sometimes implying that those who peddle the myths do so for secular motives. | ||
| 244 | PNS presents Lunn's argument as follows: "a) a miracle is defined as 'an event above or contrary to or exceeding nature which is explicable only as a direct act of God'; b) miracles certainly occur (there is plenty of evidence for them, if only people will bother to investigate it instead of rejecting miracles out of hand); c) miracles are 'evidence provided by God to demonstrate the existence of a divine order'; and d) therefore we must believe that reality is not 'co-terminous with the natural order' ...". In other words, it's an "argument for the existence of God from miracles", one that not so many theologians would stake their money on. | |
| 245 | Preliminary objection 1: what about the miracles of other religions? Have we any right to deny them? If not, shouldn't we accept not only Allah, but also the Greek and Hindu pantheons? | |
| 245-6 | Preliminary objection 2: by bringing God into the definition assumes an explanation, which isn't justified (RT: or, since many claimed miracles could have other explanations, his part a) disqualifies them as miracles). | |
| 246-8 | PNS refutes Lunn's use of "supernatural", saying that some phenomena in the past were later seen as explainable by science because new concepts - as well as theories - become used. One cannot say that there may never be a scientific explanation for something just because we can't explain it in current concepts. | |
| 247 | (RT: The word 'Zetesis' just means more thorough investigation - I can't see why he didn't say so.) | |
| 248-51 | He says that "contrary to" in a) is untenable when Lunn also says that "God does not violate natural law". He goes on to say that laws arise from induction from observations. We could equally note the instances of God's supposed interventions and postulate laws about these. | |
| 250 | (RT: he uses - as an example of a vacuous explanation - the Latin phrase virtus dormitiva, meaning "by virtue of a faculty" or "just because it can". The reference is to something said by Moličre's doctor (RT: in 'Le Malade Imaginaire') who, when asked "how does opium induce sleep", uses this reply. He also quotes Francis Bacon - with a misprint, it should read "tamquam virgo intacta, nihil parit" - I am not totally clear on what this means, but presumably similar.) | |
| He points out a flaw in Lunn's interpretation of the discovery of Neptune (which orthodoxy and Hegel had said was a priori impossible). Leverrier didn't discover Neptune because he he argued against the "closed planetary system" assumption, but because he detected aberrations in the orbits of other planets. | ||
| 251 | "What I reject is the theory of science which makes it possible to claim that any phenomenon is essentially inexplicable, the leap to 'supernatural agencies', and the view that such agencies explain the phenomena." | |
| 251-2 | "It we can detect any order in God's interventions it should be possible to extrapolate in the usual way and to predict when and how a miracle will occur." This is no different to what science would do. Hence we are back at a virtus dormitiva explanation. | |
| 253 | PNS finally challenges Lunn to "consider the meaning of the word 'explanation' " in the light of the above remarks. He says "The supernatural is either so different from the natural that we are unable to investigate it at all, or it is not". If it isn't different, what's the big deal? If it is, it can't be an "explanation of the unusual". | |
| summary | I suppose Lunn was trying to strike a blow for "traditional" and simplistic interpretation of miracles; but there were clearly holes in his argument. Many people seem to want to believe in miracles, and presume that if one prays for them they will happen. But in common usage the word nowadays usually means just "an unexpected fortunate outcome". | |
| 14 - | 254 | Alasdair MacIntyre himself took on the topic of Visions (in which he also includes Voices). He aimed to defend 3 theses: "1) that no experience less than visions and voices could provide evidence for religious beliefs; 2) that visions and voices could not in principle provide evidence of the existence of invisible and supernatural beings; 3) even if this were not so, ... insuperable difficulties must arise" "over the claims made in connection with any particular vision or voice". |
| 254-5 | He distinguishes cases "where the experience is of a feeling-state or of a mental image" from those where something is seen, either as part of the ordinary world of things and people or external to it (e.g. archangels). He also distinguishes hallucinations, which he characterizes as a discrepancy with normal behaviour. | |
| 256 | He argues that an experience of the purely mental kind "cannot yield us any information about anything other than the experience". Any evidence of the divine would have to come before the experience for it to be interpreted as a religious experience. | |
| It's the same with use of religious language to explain religious experiences. How can he know that it was God (as defined in creeds etc) that "was manifested in his feeling-state". (RT: AM commits the sin of failing to define an unfamiliar word by using the German word Bewusstseinslage, a psychological term meaning a state of awareness. Maybe he just wanted to show off that he could spell it.) | ||
| He says that one of the crudest difficulties of orthodox theism is as follows: "If God is infinite, how can he be manifest in any particular object or experience ... but to take the divine out of the finite is to remove it from the entire world of human experience" hence, "the inexorable demands of religiously adequate language seem to make of experience of God a notion that is a contradiction in terms". | ||
| 257 | In visions, however, we are confronted by a messenger, not God. | |
| 257-8 | "We do, constantly, infer the as yet unseen or the no longer seen from what we now see." But to be able to do this, we have some rule of inference. Even if an angel could unerringly tell us the winner of the Derby, we could not infer any invisible realities about the source of the angel's knowledge. Hume argued that "from past traces of design in the Universe we can perhaps infer future traces of design, but not an unseen designer". | |
| 258-60 | AM then turns to visions of the Virgin Mary (BVM). How did the person know it was the BVM? Presumably she looked like the paintings or statues in some places. Even religious authorities are suspicious about such visions and ask if maybe they were wiles of the devil (RT: e.g. with Joan of Arc.) It is obviously difficult to "find a ground for asserting that any given vision is indeed a vision of the BVM". | |
| 260 | Just as in the previous chapter, AM points out that if visions are used as evidence for religion, we can finish up with rival ontologies. From visions of the BVM, Catholics construct Mariology; but from visions of Krishna Hindus construct a conflicting model. He notes "it is almost always Roman Catholics who have visions of the Virgin and almost always Hindus who have visions of Krishna, and extraordinarily rarely, if ever, vice versa". | |
| "If valid ground for religious belief is to be found, it must be found elsewhere. Equally, if there is to be a valid place in religion for visionary experience, it must be understood other than as evidence for belief." | ||
| summary | Visions, like miracles, are something that some people want to believe. MacIntyre has shown why an "argument from visions" is no more convincing than an "argument from miracles". | |
| 15 - | 261 | The last chapter is appropriately on Death, and consists of two parts, one by DM MacKinnon of Aberdeen, and one by Antony Flew himself. |
| 262 | MacKinnon, wonders whether, in talk about surviving death or immortality, we really understand what the "I" we refer to means, or indeed what we are talking about. | |
| 263-4 | Is death just a clinical phenomenon, "or have we anything to learn from poetry, from the language of religion and so on"? Is it just that we don't want to accept that the clinician has said all that can be said about death? He can see no other way but that we should show "a readiness to take the strain of such a widening". | |
| 265 | "How does one confer on grief the dignity of validity" - or, "the violence of the disturbance"? There's an "anguish of the spirit" that can't be ignored. | |
| 265-6 | Actually, Christian theology talks more about resurrection than immortality. | |
| 266 | "There is no other proof possible that a seriousness in life is justified than is found in living. One cannot by any magic escape the conditions of humanity, (or) assume the absolute perspective of God." It seems that MacKinnon, despite his attempts to find a wider understanding, has come back to this. | |
| 267 | Flew starts by quoting J Butler. "Whether we are to live in a future state, as it is the most important question which can possibly be asked, so it is the most intelligible one which can be expressed in language." Flew seems to go along with this. | |
| In this way, we can understand the Islamic warriors who expect to go straight into the arms of black-eyed houris, or the slum mother who refuses abortion because her priest warns her of eternal punishment for a mortal sin. | ||
| 267-71 | Flew's main objection to this "world to come" is that it is almost impossible to relate the "I" that we are now to whatever is bodily resurrected in the last judgment, whether we talk about our "soul", "reconstituting" our body or whatever. He argues that the "I" will cease to exist. | |
| 269 | He suggests (in roundabout fashion) that MacKinnon's view is wishful thinking, to "console the grief of the bereaved: not by some general assurance that all will be well ... but by its particular implication that one day they may both be reunited in a world to come". | |
| He also claims that "name words" always refer to physical objects (in this case humans), who do not survive physical dissolution (cremation or rotting). | ||
| 270 | If the "soul" is a "sufficiently elusive and insubstantial to be a plausible candidate for survival after dissolution", how much of a concern will that be? The same goes for "astral" bodies which detach themselves after death. Flew likens this to "an exceptionally drastic case of amputation". | |
| 271 | He suggests that the only possible solution lies in "private experiences", i.e. of the departed person, which might be grouped. But it would still be far-fetched to equate this group of experiences with a person who was once alive. | |
| 272 | He quotes Wittgenstein: "Our life is endless as the visual field is without limit (RT: i.e., it isn't). Death is not an event in life. Death is not lived through." Flew goes on: "When we are dead nothing is experienced, not even emptiness: for there is no one to experience" (RT: i.e. do the experiencing). Wittgenstein again: "For each of us 'the world in death does not change, but ceases'". | |
| summary | All the apologists' arguments that I have read on this topic seem very laboured to me. In the Phillips book, the author of the chapter on death criticizes Flew's view, but I found it almost impossible to follow him. I find it hard not to interpret the doctrine of "Resurrection of the Body", whether in Christianity or Islam, as a cynical ploy to put fear of Hellfire into ordinary people, with the intention of keeping them bound to follow their rules, hence maintaining the authority of the oligarchies in power. At least Communist states and totalitarian regimes don't try that - they lock you up (and maybe physically mistreat or kill you) in this world. |
A couple of coincidences surround my reading of this book. Firstly, Antony Flew died in April 2010, just a few months before I discovered this book sitting in a bookshelf of the bedroom I occupied when visiting a cousin in London in July. The book had belonged to my uncle Ernest N Goodridge (late father of my cousin) who was a Methodist minister. When I started trying to write down my own thoughts about God and religion (in the 1960s) it was this uncle to whom I showed my drafts. Flew was also an alumnus of the same 'prep' school that I attended (St Faith's, Cambridge).
Interestingly, both Flew and MacIntyre had later conversions, though of very different types. MacIntyre became a Roman Catholic before he wrote 'After Virtue' and a host of other books. Flew in his last few years moved to a sort of "minimalist Deism" - not to any orthodox form of religion. See his Wikipedia page, where in a December 2004 interview he apparently said: "I'm thinking of a God very different from the God of the Christian and far and away from the God of Islam, because both are depicted as omnipotent Oriental despots, cosmic Saddam Husseins". His conversion seems to have come about from a consideration of "scientific teleology" triggered by our understanding of DNA.
Teleology seems to be a big factor for MacIntyre too. Prior to his editing this book, his only notable publication was 'Marxism - an Interpretation' in 1953. Although from a Christian background, Wikipedia described him then as being "a relatively influential analytic philosopher of a Marxist bent".
Maybe the views expressed in the essays are typical of their time and of the "pre-conversion" positions of the editors. However I found the book valuable because it showed the emergence of the realization that more and more people have become able to grasp at least some of the conceptual issues involved in religion, and are no longer satisfied by simple appeals to "holy writ" or to inspired oratory or "kerygma". It is interesting to compare this collection with the 1967 one edited by DZ Phillips of Swansea (see my highlights of this).
When looking at how things have turned out since this book appeared (e.g. post Robinson, Spong and the popularity among some of the charismatic, evangelical style of Christianity - not to mention the resurgence of fundamentalist militant Islam), one realizes that this book shows just how inadequate even some of the best philosophical and theological minds were in recognizing the gap between themselves and their public. On one side, scientific/secular materialism has (rightly or wrongly) continued to make inroads on the hold of religion in modern societies; while at the other end some people have yearned for something more, and opted for sects that offer greater certainty of message. In Christianity, believers seem to have more of a relationship with Christ than they do with "God the Father". In Islam, those who have taken the fundamentalist route seem to do so often for political reasons, i.e. as a revolt against the hold of western hegemony. Yet the arguments put forward by some of the contributors to this book are far too complex for 99% of people (educated or not) to understand, and seem over-concerned with doctrinal issues - or maintenance of credibility of what has been said in the past - all rather irrelevant to what concerns people most today.
In this respect, an angle not really explored in the book is how (and whether) religion can relate to the need for stable and sustainable societies. In the past, religion provided a mechanism for enforcing moral and ethical behaviour, either by being associated with the state or through the threat of everlasting punishment in an afterlife. If religion becomes less relevant, one wonders what can take its place? Are we still relying on the vestiges of our religious inheritance? Can other "isms" like Communism or the Social Contract fill the gap? I guess this question led Alasdair MacIntyre to write 'After Value'. Certainly, the Enlightenment did not provide a solution based on Reason alone.
Index to more highlights of interesting books
Some of these links may be under construction – or re-construction.
This version updated on 21st January 2011
If you have constructive suggestions or comments, please contact the author rogertag@tpg.com.au .