Is There A God?

Many Commonweal readers will remember a time when caring about philosophy seemed an integral part of being a Catholic. With a robust confidence in human reason, Catholics looked to the study of philosophy for answers to many of the most important questions of the age. Authors like Jacques Maritain and Etienne Gilson were crucial in shaping the intellectual lives of many Catholics earlier in this century.

Before the 1960s, it was philosophy - rather than theology - that provided the organizing principles and theoretical foundations for Catholic higher education in this country. It was philosophy that established the freedom of the will, the immortality of the soul the basic principles of a natural moral law, even the existence of God. Philosophy was thought to provide reasonable foundations for the assent and obedience of faith. It also provided many Catholics with a coherent way of thinking and talking about life in a secular and pluralistic society. At a time when theology was thought to be primarily the concern and prerogative of the clergy, Christian philosophy became the ordinary framework of self-understanding for many educated lay Catholics.

All this changed suddenly in the years after the Second Vatican Council. The whole edifice of neoscholasticism seemed to collapse overnight. The postponed questions of a century-and-a-half - questions about human subjectivity, historical consciousness, religious pluralism, the role of experience, and the ideals of democracy - broke over the walls of Catholicism like a tidal wave. Theology entered an exciting period of rediscovery and controversy, reaching a new and surprisingly large audience, while philosophy in the Catholic world, on the other hand, became increasingly technical, specialized, and diversified.

During these years, the philosophy departments of Catholic colleges and universities welcomed, among others, existentialists, phenomenologists, pragmatists, Hegelians, critical Marxists, Wittgensteinians, Whiteheadians, and transcendental Thomists, all of whom continued to address large issues, but mostly for small, professional audiences. At state schools and most other private universities, in the meantime, philosophy departments were dominated by an Anglo-American analytic tradition which had grown increasingly positivist and either bored by religious faith or openly hostile toward it. At most of these places, the "philosophy of religion," if it was taught at all, was taught as a debunking of the meaning and credibility of traditional religious talk.

Given this situation, Catholics gradually lost their confidence in academic philosophy as an aid in understanding their faith and its prospects in the contemporary world. The mood of most American and Western European philosophy was increasingly secular. While some Catholic theologians continued a dialogue with major figures of Continental thought - Martin Heidegger, Paul Ricoeur, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Jurgen Habermas, Jacques Derrida - few paid much attention to developments in the analytic tradition. And Catholics more generally tended to lose interest in this conversation: whether about language analysis, hermeneutic theory, the fading specter of Marxism, the complexities of deconstruction and postmodernism, or the rise of neopragmatism.

Nevertheless, in the last twenty years, there has been a unexpected revival of interest in the philosophy of religion. Some of this remains detached and distant from its subject matter - curious, ironic, and amused. But interest has also been growing in the subject among some scholars who take religion seriously and treat it with respect. Even among analytic philosophers, some of whom are themselves Christians, thoughtful attention is, here and there, being turned again to questions about religious belief, experience, and practice, including questions about the existence of God. This still remains a minority viewpoint - many representatives of the mainstream analytic school still cannot bring themselves to believe in human "consciousness," much less in an infinite, eternal personal being. Nevertheless, these developments have somewhat changed the fortunes of philosophy of religion in analytic circles. Many Catholics would be glad to hear the news.

Among these Christian analytic philosophers, Richard Swinburne - since 1985 a professor at the University of Oxford - has been a distinguished, prolific, and influential figure. Swinburne is fully at home in theoretical science and analytic philosophy. He loves argument. He believes in the possibility of purely rational "foundations" for thought. He defends Cartesian dualism. He believes that most Continental philosophy - Hegel, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger - is characterized by "a certain" sloppiness of argument, a tendency to draw big, vague general pictures of the universe, without spelling them out very precisely or justifying them very thoroughly...." He thinks of all this as "a kind of philosophy nearer to literature than to science." He decided as a young man to use the tools of clarity and rigor to make Christian theology "intellectually respectable again."

His recent book, Is There a God?, is a condensed version of his earlier study, The Existence of God (1979). In this work, intended for a wider audience, Swinburne argues against the popular conviction that religious belief is "entirely nonrational" and that the existence of God is, as he puts it, "intellectually, a lost cause." He insists, rather, that science and reason actually provide good grounds for belief in God. In a series of brief, well-focused chapters, he first establishes the meaning and coherence of the idea of God, then establishes appropriate criteria for adequate theories and their justification. Finally, using these criteria, he advances several arguments for positing the existence of God based on various phenomena that seem to him to require such an explanation. Included also is a summary discussion of why God allows evil, a subject Swinburne intends to return to in a future book on Providence.

The core of his argument is a theory of explanation summarized in his second chapter. There he recounts how various investigators - scientists, historians, and detectives - move from observed data to theories that account for the data using certain criteria to conclude that a particular theory is most likely to be true. "Using these same criteria," he says, "we find that the view that there is a God explains everything we observe, not just some narrow range of data. It explains the fact that there is a universe at all, that scientific laws operate within it, that it contains conscious animals and humans with very complex intricately organized bodies, that we have abundant opportunities for developing ourselves and the world, as well as the more particular data that humans report miracles and have religious experiences....The very same criteria which scientists use to reach their own theories lead us to move beyond those theories to a creator God who sustains everything in existence."

It is not possible, here, to examine these arguments in detail. They involve a crossing over into the contested and recently somewhat pacified territory between theology and natural science. They invite us back to a way of thinking and talking about God which prescinds from what may be known through particular traditions understood as revelatory and adheres simply to available evidence and the rules of rational argument. American Catholics, who have inherited a strong confidence in philosophy, might well welcome such an invitation. Certainly American Catholic intellectual life has suffered from the loss of this confidence.

Of course, the parameters of rational plausibility in the minds of analytic philosophers (and theoretical physicists) are sometimes difficult for the rest of us to gauge or assess. Swinburne reconstructs the truth claims of Christian faith in ways that he means to seem reasonable, but one well may wonder, to whom? These arguments make sense within some general agreement about reality and how to talk about it, but such an agreement is getting harder to imagine. It is hard for me to see how positing the existence of an infinite, eternal, omniscient, and omnipotent person can ever be called a simple hypothesis that explains anything, much less everything. To me it seems strange, extravagant, unnerving. It is hard for me to see how God can be discussed at all without reference to mystery, awe, or the hard, harrowing work of love, or how the word "God" can be given all these particular meanings - or even any meaning - outside specific traditions of religious practice, experience, and symbolism. And it is very hard for me to understand how questions like "Why is there anything rather than nothing?" can be asked from the perspective of a detached observer.

"The conclusion of this book," Swinburne writes, "is that the existence, orderliness, and fine-tunedness of the world; the existence of conscious humans within it with providential opportunities for molding themselves, each other, and the world; some historical evidence of miracles in connection with human needs and prayers, particularly in connection with the foundation of Christianity, topped off finally by the apparent experience by millions of his presence, all make it significantly more probable than not that there is a God."

I doubt that many atheists or agnostics will find these arguments compelling. But even for many believers today, the possibility of true and compelling speech about God has come to seem more complicated, ambiguous, and circuitous than Swinburne's argument allows. Can we imagine the relationship between words and things in such a straightforward and confident way? Can the step to the reality of immortal souls or the existence of an infinite person ever really be so neatly calculated? Can God-talk really be evaluated without reference to the communities of discourse bearing these traditions and learning its sense and relevance from their struggles, suffering, and longing?

In fact, philosophical reflection on the meaning and truth of religion is moving in several different directions at the present time. It is again an exciting and exacting discipline. Many are advocating a more comparative approach to the philosophy of religion at long last, insisting that examples must be drawn from many different world views - Taoist, Buddhist, Hindu, Jewish, Christian, Islamic, and others. Many are insisting that speech about God must always be tied more closely to the interpretation of sacred texts and images, to the formation of certain kinds of character, and to particular traditions of communal religious practice. Many believe that authentic speech about God must always have a mystagogical dimension - must be a speaking which itself leads to repentance, illumination, gratitude: to an experience of God. And others would insist that the God worshiped by Jews, Christians, and Muslims can be spoken of truthfully only in conjunction with the struggles of the poor and victims of injustice to change the circumstances of their lives and to envision a future with hope. Others will question the force of any arguments of the kind Swinburne puts forward in the radically pluralistic, ambiguous, postmodern situation of our own culture.

For all that, there is much that is moving and admirable in this elegantly stated and thoughtful book, which gives voice in these complex times to a confident and serene experience of Christian faith deeply in harmony with scientific investigation, wide learning, and rigorous argument. Even those who find this way of arguing about God not fully persuasive can admire the beauty and integrity of this experience.

Robert J. Egan, S.J., a frequent contributor to Commonweal, teaches theology and spirituality at Saint Michael's Institute and Gonzaga University in Spokane, Washington.