John Cornwell and Michael McGhee, eds. Philosophers and God: At The Frontiers of Faith and Reason. New York: Continuum, 2009, xxvii + 258 Pps., $19.95.
John Cornwell is the director of the Science and Human Dimension Project at Jesus College, Cambridge, and Michael McGhee is Senior Fellow in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Liverpool. Together they have edited this volume in honor of Peter Lipton, which is in part a response to title released by Oxford University Press in 2007 entitled Philosophers Without Gods (ISBN: 978-0195173079). The present editors invited philosophers and theologians to reflect – non-polemically – on their attitudes towards religion; in a sense, one might say, the editors invited the contributors to self-examine their views on religion in a philosophical manner. The editors have succeeded in tying together disparate voices from humanist, agnostic, feminist, Buddhist, Jewish, Christian, and post-Christian philosophers. In what follows, select chapters will be highlighted in order to more fully review the import of this title.
To begin the volume, a post-humously published essay from Peter Lipton, entitled ‘Science and Religion: The Immersion Solution’, suggests how various works within philosophy of science might be applied within the philosophy of religion; notably, Lipton explores the relationship between science and religion from what he calls a personal edge. In so doing, Lipton makes clear that he takes an antirealist view of religious claims, one that distinguishes between the cognitive claims of the text and the beliefs about those claims; he suggests that the literal content in science – as well as religion – can be retained by immersion into the world of that theory. Similar in conclusion to Lipton, Stephen Clark follows and provides a chapter entitled ‘What Has Plotinus’ One to do with God’. Clark notably contends that believing in God is putting our in a certain way of seeing reality and then seeking to live-out that insight(s) In the fifth chapter, ‘Love and Reason’, Janet Martin Soskice reflects on her own religious experience and contends in part that divine transcendence is overcome by God’s movement toward humanity, and not vice-versa; one can detect intimations of Paul Ricoeur’s thinking within this essay.
The ninth chapter, ‘Agnosticism and Atheism’, is contributed by Anthony Kenny, and concludes that agnosticism is preferable –epistemically and morally – to atheism; strangely, however, Kenny himself claims that he is an atheist who is in respect of the traditional God of Judeo-Christian natural theology (his position, then, is somewhat unclear; is he claiming that being an agnostic is preferable to his own position?). In the eleventh chapter, ‘The God of the Prophet Jesus of Nazareth’, James P. Mackey argues that the problem of human evil can be overcome only by fidelity to the ideal manifest in Jesus’ own life: i.e., refusing to return evil for evil. Michael McGhee reflects on ‘How to be a Good Atheist’ in his essay (chapter 12), and in so doing offers a just assessment of religion by a secular humanist. Richard Norman, in ‘Secularism and Shared Values’ (chapter 14), contends that there should be no privileged place – per se – for religion(s) in the public life of society in the twenty-first century. Anthony O’Hear’s essay – ‘Religion in Public Life’ – follows, and agrees with the thrust of Norman’s essay: no one has a monopoly on wisdom, and thus no one should impose their particular views upon another individual.
In sum, this will be a valuable secondary text in Philosophy of Religion courses, as it works toward counteracting the recent series of books against theism, religion and the discipline of theology itself, by such notable names as Dawkins, Dennett, and Hitchens. It shows that one may be theologically literate, while not conflating religious belief with fundamentalism. Faith and reason are not in a static relationship, but are taken up in the development of each other.
Bradford McCall, Regent University, Virginia Beach, VA