Proving God.

Peter Byrne, The Moral Interpretation of Religion. Reason and Religion Series. Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1998. 187pp. $26.00 (paper).

Professor of philosophy at King's College in London, Byrne provides a critical analysis of various efforts to demonstrate the existence of God based upon the phenomena of the moral life. He treats sympathetically Kant's effort to present God's existence as a necessary postulate of practical reason. He judges more skeptically the attempts of contemporary British philosophers, in particular Iris Murdoch and D. Z. Phillips, to provide a religious framework for the moral enterprise.

In his normative judgments on philosophies that attempt to demonstrate God's existence by a moral path, Byrne argues that any successful effort in this area must possess two attributes. First, it must involve some kind of realism. It must demonstrate the actual or at least the possible existence of a divine being who exists independently of our minds. Second, it must address convincingly the problem of evil. It must provide a compelling reason for moral struggle, given the spectacle of excessive suffering by creatures in a world allegedly created by an omniscient and omnipotent God.

At the outset Byrne criticizes traditional theistic arguments for God's existence. Faithful to Kant, he dismisses these proofs as incoherent. References to a being who allegedly exists outside of time and space, let alone deductions of the attributes of this being, are incapable of proof, since our proofs rest on empirical evidence inscribed within time and space.

Byrne takes particular aim at "divine command" arguments, which interpret good and evil as projections of the divine will. However, the author devotes little attention to other traditional ways of relating the moral enterprise to God's existence. There is no discussion of "natural law" efforts to relate the goodness intrinsic in things to the reason, rather than the will, of God. Similarly there is no study of the efforts of modern philosophers, such as Newman and Blondel, to demonstrate the existence of God based upon the dynamic activity of human moral faculties, such as conscience and will. This dismissal of moral arguments presented by the Christian theological tradition pounces on the weakest, most voluntarist--and hence arbitrary--strains of that tradition.

For Byrne, Kant's efforts to articulate the link between the moral enterprise and God's existence remain more valuable than Kant's critics allege. Kant's designation of God as "a postulate of practical reason" provides a minimalist realist account of God's existence. God emerges as the source and guarantor of the moral order we experience in our recognition and submission to the categorical imperatives of duty. Although not provable, God's existence is possible and, given the details of our moral life, belief in God is more than comprehensible. Further, Kant's vision of moral perfection provides a clear response to the challenge of evil, inasmuch as the upright agent must pursue moral duties to help the suffering that contradict the agent's immediate interests and gratifications.

Byrne's adherence to Kant is not uncritical. When Kant claims that practical reason necessarily leads to a belief in God, Bryne argues that the master has overstepped the evidence provided by moral experience. For Bryne, Kant has only shown a possible, not necessary, belief in God generated by our experience of moral order and by our perfectionistic struggle to overcome evil. Thus diluted, Kant's practical evocation of God perfectly matches Byrne's agnosticism, never content to deny God's existence (or to reduce God to an internal sentiment) but never content to affirm the personal God of traditional theism.

In his treatment of Murdoch and Phillips, Bryne does not deny the religious interest of their accounts of morality, but he finds that these subjectivist accounts of the interface between religion and morality fail to provide a realist affirmation of God's even possible existence. Murdoch demonstrates how moral decision rests upon the agent's vision. And this vision, often paralleled with mystical insight, has a richly religious aura. But Murdoch's Good, despite some vaguely divine attributes, is without causal power and does not even seem to exist independently of thought. Similarly, Phillips demonstrates how religious belief bridges the alleged gap between fact and value in moral deliberation. Religious conviction and practice shows the moral agent what are the morally relevant facts in a given situation. But religion here remains internal to the mind and to the community of similar minds. Since Phillips abandons any metaphysical grounding for God and confines religious concerns to a principle of moral disce rnment, the question of an extramental God is abandoned.

An erudite critique of modern efforts to demonstrate God in the light of moral experience, Bryne's work remains bound by the Enlightenment reduction of religion to a moral compass. Byrne concludes that the modern efforts to construct a "moral faith" leave the reasonable inquirer with the agnostic's choice: "It is natural and inevitable that the stance of religion, so characterised, can be seen in one of two ways: as a monstrous piece of wishful thinking arising out of a failure to appreciate that the human self is located in a truly independent reality; or as a justified, absolutely necessary commitment to the only hope which can keep human moral endeavour alive" (168). In considering the possible Kantian God, both skepticism and fideism find ample justification. But for those of us who find the act of faith rational, as well as free, this Hobson's choice is hardly the only alternative.

JOHN J. CONLEY, S.J., teaches in the Department of Philosophy, Fordham University.