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If a single poetic line encapsulates the mythopoeic motive in Wallace Stevens’ Harmonium (1923) it is: ‘Death is the mother of beauty’.1 It is evidence that Stevens had adopted Nietzsche’s tragic view of nature — ‘death’ signals the dissolution of the gods and beauty is a form of aesthetic salvation. In other words, death consciousness is the primary breeder of a secular, redemptive aesthetic. The title to Stevens’ first poetry collection, Harmonium, is a significant clue to the intermediate perspective that Stevens upholds as a necessary substitute for the loss of belief in God. In referring to a musical instrument (a type of reed organ), Stevens invokes the theme of Dionysian folk wisdom, so underscoring the spiritual quest for harmony, the balanced interplay, between human artifice and an anarchic impulse that concords with a godless natural order. For various critics, ‘perspectivism’ is seen to be key to the collection, implying there is no fixed point of view regarding a suitable art form for imagining a chaotic, godless, natural world.2 For example, William W. Bevis argues that the arrangement of Harmonium consists of antitheses, contradictions and subtle deflections of points of view, implying the dominant idiom is premised on perspectivism.3 However, I argue that Stevens moves through various ‘demonstrations’ of aesthetic conceptions, in order to arrive at a suitable post-religious metaphysic.4

Historically many people (religious and non-religious) have believed in the existence of God. Or, if not God, they have believed in an Ultimate Reality of some sort that transcends the material universe. Even with the incredible advances of science and technology over the past few hundred years, there is still widespread belief in the existence of a transcendent reality. In fact, recent advances in science—most notably in physics and cosmology—have infused new life into this ancient topic. Traditional arguments for the existence of God have been rethought, and some of them have evolved from antiquated relics to contemporary defenses of the rationality of belief in God. In this chapter, two of these arguments will be explored. But it is not only arguments for the existence of God that have experienced revival; arguments against the reasonableness of belief in a transcendent reality, in particular the God of theism, are also on the rise. To one of these arguments—the argument from evil—an entire chapter in this book has been devoted. Two additional arguments will be examined in this chapter.

What does Fichte’s philosophy, especially in writings relating to the “atheism dispute [Atheismusstreit]” (1798–1800), actually say about the intellectual basis and philosophical tenability of theistic belief? Fichte found himself at odds with his own audience on exactly this issue,1 and puzzlement on this point persists to this day. In 1798, he published the chapter “On the Basis of Our Belief in a Divine Governance of the World.” This text’s derivation of pre-philosophical religious conviction from ineluctable acts of ideation, coupled with its identification of God with the moral world order, can give the impression (and prompted the objection) that Fichte philosophically accounts for belief in God in a way that proves to be completely corrosive of any genuinely theistic commitment. And his attempts to rebut that objection, especially in Book III of 1800’s The Vocation of Man (hereafter, “VM III”), depict and defend properly philosophical belief in a supreme being in a way that has perplexed and divided scholars right down to the present, and so seriously as to raise doubts about how well we have understood the essential content of his Jena-era transcendental idealism — from which, according to Fichte himself, The Vocation of Man does not radically depart.2

G.K. Chesterton describes original sin as “the only part of Christian theology which can really be proved.” He goes on to mock those who deny its existence while clinging to a belief in God: If it be true (as it certainly is) that a man can feel exquisite happiness in skinning a cat, then the religious philosopher can only draw one of two deductions. He must either deny the existence of God, as all atheists do; or he must deny the present union between God and man, as all Christians do. The new theologians seem to think it a highly rationalistic solution to deny the cat. (Chesterton 1908, Ch. II) Chesterton’s argument is straightforward: given the obvious reality of evil in human affairs, the reasonable conclusion must be either that there is no supreme good (such as God) or that man is somehow separated from it. He claims that the new theology of his day is confused, positing a perfect good but denying what would explain the manifest gap between our experience and that ideal. The two intellectually serious alternatives, he argues, are atheism on the one hand or a theism that acknowledges sin on the other.

SINCE this book was first published, eleven years ago, the problem of evil has continued to be one of the most actively discussed topics within the philosophy of religion. I do not think that there have been any startlingly new or transforming contributions during this decade. There has however been a very useful clarification of the purely logical situation, in that Alvin Plantinga, Nelson Pike and others have shown that the claim of some philosophers that the reality of evil makes possible a strict logical disproof of God’s existence is mistaken: for it remains logically possible that an infinitely good and powerful deity permits evil for a good purpose. But this logical possibility having been established, the problem of evil, as it actually influences the rational and moral consciousness against belief in God, remains as challenging as ever.

It will be no surprise at the close of the present collection, to say that the majority of philosophers in our Anglo-American culture probably view Wittgenstein’s remark as itself bordering on madness. They are heirs to Hume’s devastating critique of religion in his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion and Kant’s demolition of the traditional proofs of the existence of God. Most philosophers do not pause to ask whether religious belief need take the form which lays it open to such critiques. If they do, it is usually to denounce as reductionist any suggested alternatives which do not conform to what philosophical theism says theism must be. In the wake of the philosophical critiques, the persistence of religious belief is explained, through the combined efforts of anthropology, sociology, psychology and psychoanalysis, as the survival of the primitive in us, despite our advanced culture. Political fundamentalism and the headline-catching suicides in sects apart, the net effect is the relegation of religion, by the philosophical intelligentsia, to a regrettable superstition on the margins of our culture. Many of our most well-known philosophers write of how belief in God is impossible for us, confidently appropriating the plural while safely ignoring those to whom their remarks do not apply.

So far, we have looked at what happens when religious belief is put at the mercy of some of our philosophical methods. Defences of and attacks on belief in God may become defences of and attacks on a philosophical chimera, a metaphysical belief which has little to do with a living faith. We have seen that one influential route by which this epistemic divide is created is the assumption that our epistemic practices are themselves a form of belief which presuppose a conception of reality independent of them. The question then arises of how, on the basis of these practices, we can ever be confident that we are in touch with reality. In the case of religion, this becomes the question of how we can ever get from the world to God. I have argued that the cosmological argument is a fatally flawed attempt at concept-formation, attempting by what Kierkegaard calls an infinite approximation to get to God. This is the God argued over, for and against, by the friends of Cleanthes in twentieth-century philosophy of religion. Despite claiming to be realists, philosophers in this tradition can give us only probabilities. They cannot get to grips with the sense of the claim that a transcendent God really dwells in our midst. Their empiricism can only yield philosophical realism. What we need in religion, as elsewhere, is realism without empiricism.

When Kierkegaard attacked what he called ‘ the monstrous illusion ‘, he had in mind a deep misunderstanding of what it is to be a Christian, which he thought to be pervasive in the Denmark of his day. People thought they could be Christians simply by being born into a Christian community, as though being born a Christian were just like being born a Dane. Nothing was to be asked of them personally. They did not have to come into contact with the spiritual reality which God is; nor have their lives turned around by it. Belief in God became dislocated, unconnected with matters of the spirit. Today, the view would be that the so-called cognitive element in belief makes perfectly good sense independent of any affective response of love or hatred of God. For Kierkegaard, this supposition is an illusion - a monstrous illusion. The illusion was compounded when intellectuals debated over this dislocated notion of belief as though it were the paradigm of faith. Debates about belief and atheism, the authenticity of religious experience, like the discussions of Dostoyevsky’s professors, became disputes in airless space, devoid of any real significance.

Descartes (1596–1650) was born at La Haye, a small town near to Tours in France. His father was prosperous, a magistrate and one of the lesser nobility. Descartes had private means throughout his life. His mother died a year after he was born and at the age of eight or ten (authorities differ) he was sent to the new Jesuit College of La Fleche at Anjou. He remained there until he was eighteen years old. The intellectual atmosphere at the school was relatively liberal, and even though he later said that all that he learned there was some mathematics, Descartes remained sympathetic to the Jesuits throughout his life. He was a Roman Catholic throughout his life and he remained a believer in a personal and benevolent God. His philosophy of knowledge depended on a belief in God and, though it is clear that he secretly rejected certain literal interpretations of the Scriptures — secretly because it would have been dangerous to reject them openly — there is little doubt that he truly believed that intuitive knowledge, given by God, was the most certain knowledgc. It was his absolute confidence that God was perfect, and therefore no deceiver, which led him to trust those ideas which, he perceived, clearly and distinctly to be true.

The purpose of this paper is to argue that belief in God is an essential prerequisite of any coherent version of Christianity, and that the crisis of faith experienced today has no chance of being overcome unless and until God is placed once again at the forefront of the Church’s thinking and teaching. All other questions of belief are in the end of secondary and derivative importance. The primary theological task facing the Christian thinker is to determine whether or not it is reasonable to believe in God and what concepts of God can be reconciled with the rest of our religious and secular thinking.

I am neither competent nor inclined to follow Dr Mulhall into the labyrinths of Taylorian exegesis. His own discussion is so closely entwined with his interpretation of Taylor that I find it sometimes difficult to discern how far he is agreeing with Taylor and how far not. Rather than try to disentangle these threads I shall take up certain issues arising from Mulhall’s discussion and treat them largely independently, though distancing myself from time to time from certain emphases in Mulhall’s paper that I find disturbing, or at least misleading. The subject which we were invited to discuss in this symposium was ‘whether God is a social construct’. Mulhall’s main explicit points on this theme are as follows: Taylor’s position entails that ‘a theistic vocabulary (like any other) is a social construct’. Belief in God is inconceivable for anyone whose culture’s ‘webs of interlocution’ provide no appropriate vocabulary. It does not, however, follow that ‘the Being whose nature is elucidated and whose existence is proclaimed’ in such structures is dependent on them ‘for his nature or his existence’. He goes on: ‘We may be dependent on them for an understanding of that nature and existence — we may require them if our form of life is to be theistic, if we are to orient ourselves properly towards God; but He does not.’

One of the most dominant developments of various claims about God, at least in Western thought, has been the idea of an immutable God. In this chapter we will briefly survey the development in classical theism of the belief in God’s immutability. We will then discuss the reasons put forward by Charles Hartshorne, and by Latin American liberation theology for rejecting the concept of an immutable God. Throughout our presentation of classical theism and of the objections of these schools of thought our aim will be, given the focus of this exploration and the reflections in the earlier chapters, to inquire into the adequacy of this conceptuality in articulating our beliefs about God in the face of suffering.

At the beginning of the Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, David Hume addresses the relation between reason and justified belief in God. In the voice of Philo, he proposes as a central epistemic thesis that If we distrust human reason we have now no other principle to lead us into religion. [For, Hume warns] … sceptics in one age, dogmatists in another — whichever system best suits the purpose of these reverend gentlemen in giving them an ascendant over mankind — they are sure to make it their favorite principle and established tenet.1

John Hick has written extensively concerning the problem of evil.1 His writings on the problem are set within two general restraints. First, he holds constant the conception of God as omnipotent and perfectly good. Hick does not pursue the question of whether the facts about evil necessitate some drastic revision of our conception of God. In my discussion of his work, I shall accept this restraint. Secondly, Hick distinguishes the question of whether the existence of God is logically consistent with the facts about evil from the question of whether the facts about evil render belief in God unreasonable or irrational. It is the second of these questions that is the focus of Hick’s attention. Some philosophers hold that the facts about evil do not provide any rational grounds or evidence for disbelief in God. Thus, for them, the only serious problem is the question of logical consistency. I side with Hick on this issue. The proposition that a given man is seventy-five years old and has an arthritic knee is logically consistent with his winning the next Boston marathon. But surely the fact that he is seventy-five and has an arthritic knee gives us good rational grounds for believing that he won’t win the next Boston marathon. So too, although the free-will defence may establish that the facts about evil are logically consistent with the existence of God, there remains the serious problem of the extent to which the facts about evil render it unreasonable or irrational to believe in God.

The foremost representative of modern pessimism is Schopenhauer. (The word pessimism comes from the Latin pessimus, worst.) The world and all of life, according to him, have no value whatsoever; this world is the worst of all possible worlds. So saying, he placed himself in opposition to the view which Leibniz had formulated — that this is the best of all possible worlds. Opposing this optimism (from the Latin optimus, best) he proceeded to reject its philosophical foundation, the belief in God. Schopenhauer’s conviction that the world and life are evil is, in principle, atheism — the view that this world can not be the work of an omniscient and perfectly good God.

Can a world in which sadistic cruelty often has its way, in which selfish lovelessness is so rife, in which there are debilitating diseases, crippling accidents, bodily and mental decay, insanity, and all manner of natural disasters be regarded as the expression of infinite creative goodness? Certainly all this could never by itself lead anyone to believe in the existence of a limitlessly powerful God. And yet even in a world which contains these things innumerable men and women have believed and do believe in the reality of an infinite creative goodness, which they call God. The theodicy project starts at this point, with an already operating belief in God, embodied in human living, and attempts to show that this belief is not rendered irrational by the fact of evil. It attempts to explain how it is that the universe, assumed to be created and ultimately ruled by a limitlessly good and limitlessly powerful Being, is as it is, including all the pain and suffering and all the wickedness and folly that we find around us and within us. The theodicy project is thus an exercise in metaphysical construction, in the sense that it consists in the formation and criticism of large-scale hypotheses concerning the nature and process of the universe.

The attitude towards the existence of God varies within the Hindu religious tradition.1 This may not be entirely unexpected given the tolerance for doctrinal diversity for which the tradition is known. Thus of the six orthodox systems of Hindu philosophy only three address the question in some detail. These are the schools of thought known as Nyāya, Yoga and the theistic forms of Vedānta. Among these however the theistic forms of Vedānta assert the existence of God primarily on the basis of scriptural authority2 so that from a philosophical point of view it is the proofs for the existence of God as adduced in Nyāya and Yoga which assume primary importance.

How George Eliot lost her belief in God and lived unhappily ever after is a well-worn tale but one which never ceases to comfort the faithful. How the pious provincial girl refused one day to go to church, made herself Strauss-sick by translating over two agonised years his dissection of the beautiful Gospel stories into their compound of myth and legend, how she made matters worse by turning next to the rabidly anti-theological Feuerbach, and how she spent the rest of her life seeking for a replacement for the God she had come to find inconceivable: this has been the subject of much scholarship and reflection. Christians in her own time, such as the liberal Catholic Richard Simpson, marvelled that ‘the godless humanitarianism of Strauss and Feuerbach can be made to appear the living centre of all the popular religions’.1 More recently there have been quite savage attacks on her empty ‘Rhetoric of Enthusiasm’ and her ‘Ersatz Christianity’.2 Middlemarch has been called a ‘novel of religious yearning without religious object’, in which traditional religious language is applied to ordinary human experience as part of a ‘pseudo-religious philosophy’ which mistakes the profane for the sacred.3 My concern is not to judge George Eliot’s position (though I do give a clear indication of my own estimate of its emotional appeal) but to explore it more carefully.

A number of thinkers, including I. Trethowan, M. Pontifex and H. D. Lewis, and to some extent E. L. Mascall and A. Farrer, have canvassed the possibility of taking a putative metaphysical intuition or apprehension of the source of being as a valid basis for belief in God. To quote Lewis: ‘We seem to see that in the last resort the world just could not exist by some extraordinary chance or just happen… all that we encounter points to a Reality which is complete and self-contained and which is the ultimate ground or condition of all the conditioned, limited reality we find ourselves and the world around us to be.’1 We should, he urges, adopt Trethowan’s shrewd advice to go on looking ‘at what being stands for until it breaks into finite and infinite’. This ‘one leap of thought in which finite and infinite are equally present and which cannot be broken up into steps which we may negotiate one by one’ is the ground of our belief. The mistake of the traditional arguments, including the cosmological argument, is in ‘trying to break into a series of steps what is in fact one insight ’.2 The basis of belief is thus an apprehension of God and the world in the ‘cosmological relationship’ (Farrer), an ‘intuition’ of God (Lewis) or, as Mascall says, a ‘contuition’. The sense of contingency as it has been briefly delineated here becomes a sense of ‘contingency’ in an explicitly theological sense, that is to say, it deepens into a feeling of dependence, yet ‘not just a feeling… but a conviction or insight, a sense that something must be, a cognition in more technical terms’.3

It was noted earlier that, in Conrad’s novels, literal religion offers little spiritual sustenance to his characters, and, accordingly, very few of them can give a definite answer to any question of faith. Thus, when Razumov asks Haldin about his belief in God (UWE, 23) and later enquires of Sophia Antonovna, firstly whether she is ‘a materialist’ (UWE, 251) and then (in contrast) whether she believes in ‘the actual devil’ (UWE, 281), the answer he receives in each case is equivocal. When questioned about hell and eternal punishment by her father, Flora de Barral can only make a vague and inarticulate reply (C, 394); asked about his belief by Heyst, Morrison’s response, despite his admission of prayers, is similarly indirect (V, 14); and M. George completely evades the accusations of ‘scoffing and irreverence,’ brought by the fanatical Villarel (AG, 251). For the most part, therefore, the certainties of belief or disbelief are not held by the inhabitants of Conrad’s fiction; even the sceptical Martin Decoud will not admit the charges of being ‘godless — a materialist’ and a ‘victim of this faithless age’ (N, 198). In the few cases where faith is proclaimed (such as Whalley), the claim is rigorously tested and the nature of the belief shown to be illusory. Thus, with this source of comfort apparently inadequate or unavailing, many of Conrad’s characters are forced to look elsewhere for their spiritual fulfilment, and the figurative use of religious language indicates these new objects of devotion. The chief engineer in Nostromo speaks truly when he refers to ‘the spiritual value which everyone discovers in his own form of activity’ (N, 318), and Martin Decoud is no less perceptive when he says of the materialists in Charles Gould’s salon, ‘Those gentlemen talk about their gods’ (N, 199).

Hume’s critique of religion includes not only the traditional arguments for rational theism and the supposed authenticating marks of revelation but also the causes of religion in human nature and its effects in society. The effects of religion upon society are the concern of Hume the historian and moralist rather than Hume the philosopher. But an adequate account of the causes of religious belief, though not itself philosophy, is an essential complement to his philosophical thinking about religion. If, as Hume seems to conclude, the arguments of natural religion are bad or establish only a hesitant and highly attenuated conclusion, and if the authenticity of revelation is suspect, then an appeal will almost inevitably be made by the believer to the argument from general consent: why is it that religious belief is and always has been so very prevalent? The argument, as J. S. Mill observes, ‘admonishes us to look out for and weigh the reasons on which this conviction of mankind or of wise men was founded’. The short and conciliatory answer—that belief in god is a natural belief—is, as I have shown, not adopted by Hume and not adopted for the very good reason that belief in god does not satisfy the conditions for a natural belief.

Hume’s total rejection of the a priori arguments for god’s existence, his damaging critique of the design arguments, his use of the problem of evil to question the probability of god having moral attributes, the doubts which he sheds on the meaning and comprehensibility of the language of ‘divinity and school metaphysics’ all these lead to the question: If there are no good and sufficient grounds for a reasoned belief in god, why is the belief so widely held? A number of distinct answers to this question are discussed by Hume.

If belief in god can be shown to be an essential natural belief, then something will have been established which is both of enormous importance in understanding Hume’s philosophy of religion as a whole, and of enormous general importance in justifying what could be used as a basis for theistic religion. My contention is that belief in god is not a natural belief. I shall first attempt to establish this by contrast with the opposite thesis urged by R. J. Butler. In doing so I shall argue that for Hume belief in god is a vestigial rational belief which has no religious significance. In the second part of the chapter I shall argue that the propensity to believe in god, which we are half inclined to regard as a natural belief, comes in main part from our feeling (reported in Cleanthes’ ‘irregular’ design argument) that cosmic order originates in an intelligent agent.

In trying to ascertain whether we can know that God exists or have reasonable grounds for believing that God exists or know or reasonably believe that there is a religiously adequate concept of God sufficiently intelligible or unproblematic to make belief in God a reasonable option, it is important to ask what we can make of the claim frequently made by religious people that they have experience of the presence of God. The claim is often made that the concept of God cannot be incoherent or utterly problematic and that it cannot be that we cannot reasonably believe in God because there is direct experience of God, and indeed for religious argumentation to come to anything there must be such experience.1

IN residing, some years ago, at an American State University, one of the things that most impressed me was the prevalence, alike among the students and among members of the Staff, of the view that belief in God is no longer possible for any really enlightened mind. This point of view was naively militant in the student-body; among members of the Staff, with comparatively rare exceptions, it seemed to be assumed as a matter of course. That such a way of thinking should be thus widespread in America is not, indeed, surprising. It owes much of its strength to the yet wider currency of the Fundamentalist counter-position; each creates a field highly favourable to the other. This sceptical way of thinking finds, however, notable representatives in every university and in every age; and in our European universities—at least until the past decade—there has probably been more of it than there has ever been at any time in the past. You may recall the passage in the Encyclical Letter of the Archbishops and Bishops in session at the Lambeth Conference: ‘We are aware of the extent to which the very thought of God seems to be passing away from the minds and hearts of many even in nominally Christian nations.’

In this paper I intend to discuss whether belief in God’s foreknowledge of the future is compatible with belief in the freedom of human actions. Before stating the problem in further detail, I must make clear which problems I do not intend to consider. I shall not discuss whether there is a God, nor whether it is the case that some human actions are free. I shall not try to show that an action which is causally determined is not free, nor that God knows the future free actions of men. It might be thought, indeed that this last at least needs no proving: surely, if there is a God at all, He knows all that is to come; a God who did not know the future would not be a real God. But this is not so. It is indeed the case that any God worthy of the name knows everything that there is to be known; but it does not follow from this alone that He knows the future free actions of men. For many philosophers have maintained, and some do maintain, that statements about as yet undecided free actions, such as the statement “The United States will declare war on China”, are as yet neither true nor false.

Common as it may be to define religion by reference to belief in God, gods, etc. (a procedure which runs up against troubles in any case in regard to, for example, Theravada Buddhism), there may be merit in looking at the Focus or Foci of religious activity through the medium of the mythic, that is, in a context where such entities are acting, not just so to say quietly existing. It is also useful to achieve as much clarity as is at present possible on the nature of the mythic in view of the many debates about the functions, existential, social, and so forth of myths. To some extent my procedure will be prescriptive, that is, defining myth in a manner suiting my argument.

In recent years philosophical criticism of theism has tended to take the form of an attempt to show that it is logically inconsistent, or in some other way logically incoherent through failing some legitimate test of significance or intelligibility. If that could be shown there would be no room for an examination of the rational case for theism of the sort I want to undertake. Not only could there be no good reason for belief in God; there would be no possibility of its being even a matter of faith. The subject has accumulated a considerable literature [1], and the present treatment will inevitably be summary and selective. But it would be wrong to evade the challenge altogether and; in meeting it, we are likely to encounter considerations which will be of importance in the later argument.

The point of the comparison between such procedures as those of history and critical exegesis and those of theology was to suggest that theology is not alone in relying on arguments which have force but cannot be regarded as demonstrations or as based on strict probabilities. If there are such cumulative arguments, theological reasoning would certainly seem to make use of them. Thus I. M. Crombie, in his paper ‘Theology and Falsification’, discusses what he calls ‘theistic interpretations of our experience’ [1]. Those who so interpret need not be so inexpert in logic as to suppose that there is anything of the nature of a deductive or inductive argument which leads from a premiss asserting the existence of the area of experience in question to a conclusion expressing belief in God…. All that is necessary is that he [the theist] should be honestly convinced that, in interpreting them [his experiences], as he does, theistically, he is in some sense facing them more honestly, bringing out more of what they contain or involve than could be done by interpreting them in any other way. The one interpretation is preferred to the other, not because the latter is thought to be refutable on paper, but because it is judged to be unconvincing in the light of familiarity with the facts. There is a partial parallel to this in historical judgment. Where you and I differ in our interpretation of a series of events, there is nothing outside the events in question which can over-rule either of us, so that each man must accept the interpretation which seems, on fair and critical scrutiny, the most convincing to him.

Iadmire the strategic plan of Alston’s paper, and also the skill and thoroughness of his execution. I think his main results are entirely sound. I agree with his conclusion that even if it is a fact that ‘reason-irrelevant’ factors are sufficient to produce a belief in God’s existence, this could have little or no tendency to show that the belief is false, or probably false, or unworthy of serious acceptance.