My Top 20 Philosophy/Theology Books

My selection focuses in the main on works which exclude from their purview a particular focus on the exegesis of Biblical texts. The theory of interpretation is discussed in a number of them, however. I would rank them as doing the most to shape my thinking about philosophy and theology out of all the books I've read in the fields. I will compile a similar list of books dealing with the New Testament and early church in due course.

20. Denys Turner, Faith Seeking.
19. Richard Swinburne, Faith and Reason.
18. John Cottingham, The Spiritual Dimension.
17. W.D. Davies, Christian Engagements with Judaism.
16. Owen Chadwick, Hensley Henson: A Study in the Conflict between Church and State.
15. Herbert McCabe, Faith within Reason.
14. Olivier Clement, The Roots of Christian Mysticism.
13. Robert Morgan, The Nature of New Testament Theology.
12. John Macquarrie, A History of Twentieth Century Religious Thought.
11. John Barton and Robert Morgan, The Oxford Companion to Biblical Interpretation.
10. George Pattison, A short course in the Philosophy of Religion.
9. John M. Rist, Augustine: Ancient Thought Baptized.
8. Rowan Williams, On Christian Theology.
7. Keith Ward, God, Chance and Necessity.
6. Herbert McCabe, God Still Matters.
5. R.G. Collingwood, The Idea of History.
4. Ian Ker, Newman and the Fullness of Christianity.
3. Andrew Louth, Discerning the Mystery.
2. Blaise Pascal, Pensees.
1. Henri de Lubac, Paradoxes of Faith.

A Review of Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion

The book aims to put the 'scientific' boot into 'religion'. In this respect, its author knows he is doing nothing new. Since the 1800s, popular works have been written which have described how 'science' should render 'religious' beliefs and practices obsolete. Dawkins is in some ways a sophisticated contributor to this discourse - though this can be explained for the most part in terms of the competence of his rhetorical sleights of hand, whether intentional or not - and in a number of ways disappointing.

For a start, his thesis is not that science 'disproves' religion. That would be - according to his own criteria of judgement - something he could only show by publishing in a peer-reviewed scientific journal evidence to that effect. And Dawkins does not claim to possess such evidence. So, the author is careful throughout to avoid using scientific jargon to describe the project he's engaged in. Herein lies the book's rhetorical sophistication. It presents itself as the argument of a scientistic rationalist. But it does not attempt to root its assertions concerning the non-existence of God (it is 99.99% that he does not exist, we are told) in scientific proofs.

That leads to an interesting fact about the book. You're not reading science; you're reading philosophy (and, dare I say it, theology). Dawkins knows these aren't his fields. He's curiously damning about one of them ('theology') and doesn't really mention the other ('philosophy'). This is an important fact I've discussed elsewhere. Interestingly, all of the God Delusion's 'philosophers' are atheists or agnostics, whereas all of its 'theologians' are theists. This rhetorical tactic of separating people into 'philosophers' and 'non-philosophers' on the basis of their belief in God is hardly charitable. Especially when you consider how many of the greatest 'philosophers' the world's ever seen have been theists: Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, Augustine, Descartes, Leibniz, Berkeley, Kant, Hegel and, amongst modern day philosophers, e.g. Plantinga. The failure to explore the relationship between philosophy and theism in the book is baffling.

Now it's true that there are lots of atheistic philosophers too. Everyone knows about Bertrand Russell and David Hume. But the God question didn't just disappear when their arguments appeared - at least, not in the minds of very many of the world's best philosophers. Is this important fact considered by Dawkins?

No, not really...he's more interested in pursuing the unsophisticated arguments of unsophisticated theists (his highly questionable claim to have refuted the cosmological and ontological arguments for the existence of God apart). And that, for most people (including perhaps himself) will be satisfactory. Fundamentalist believers make easy targets for many people, and it hardly takes an Oxford professor to take a swipe at them for most people to believe they're pretty nuts. What you might expect from an Oxford professor, though, is a little more respect for and awareness of the nature and history of philosophical argumentation, especially if that's what he's engaging in.

Many very eminent scientists are theists - contrary to what Dawkins implies in his book - and he doesn't confront in the God Delusion the kinds of ideas they might seek to offer in opposition to his. Check out John Barrow, John Polkinghorne, Freeman Dyson or Arthur Peacocke. And as for the philosophers, you'll hardly hear a peep from Dawkins about Plato, Hume, Aquinas or Kant. And that seems rather a shame, because these are the guys many of the philosophical academy would turn to if they want to get serious about the history of theism and philosophical arguments for or against it.

Philosophy, however, can't and doesn't work like science. Atheism and 'Reason' won't be true bedfellows until it can. And it's worth emphasising that very many philosophers - including very many atheists - see no reason to believe the harmonisation of 'science' and 'philosophy' will ever happen. But why?!

Philosophical ideas constitute 'evidence' (one of Dawkins' favourite words) of a very peculiar kind. It's not easy to twist them into irrefutable proofs about the external world, as centuries of logicians have found out (often to their dismay). Words and ideas are very tricky customers. It's very difficult to know for sure what they can and can't tell us about what's true, what's real. How good a job can they do? To take a simple example: if there were a God (and how would we know for sure that he was there?), how much could words and arguments do to describe 'him' and how much would it be beyond their power to describe? Any answer to such a question relies on the individual insights of the person who answers. If a person makes the decision beforehand that 'God' cannot possibly be describable in language, then it's no surprise if the person doesn't end up believing in a God knowable only through words and arguments. If, on the other hand, one begins with the premise that a certain combination of words and arguments could 'prove' God's existence or character, then investigation into the presence of such a God could proceed. But the ground rules have to be established. That's what Dawkins (writing in his new role as a philosopher) fails to understand and it's one reason why his academic reviewers have been so unimpressed by his book.

Consider the following: someone decides that 'God' must be the character described with complete accuracy in the pages of the Bible OR just a big fantasy. You choose either one or the other, if those are the only options, don't you...But should these be the only two options? For centuries, Christians (and Jews) have opposed simple minded interpretations of the Bible and have fully admitted that it's riddled with problematic statements and self contradictory claims. It doesn't stop them believing in God. God is more than the Bible. The Bible is first and foremost an important historical record. Only once it is interpreted as history can it be used for the purposes of philosophy or theology. But these sensible, considered positions aren't addressed by modern anti-religion polemicists such as Dawkins. And the failure to address them makes the God Delusion inadequate as a work of philosophy. And since it is not 'science' either, what is it?

Well, it's certainly a crowd pleaser. Witness the statements of applause in the dustjacket of the book. But is 'truth' being conveyed to the crowd in a 'reasonable' way which handles the 'evidence' fairly? Hardly. If it were, the book would be in a top scientific journal. Whole areas of philosophy would have become no-go areas. The great religious institutions (all of which pay attention to the findings of science, at least in their modern incarnations, despite Dawkins' suspicions) would have closed down. And yet none of this has happened.

The best conclusion to draw is that the God Delusion fails in its most basic ambitions - to show that all ideas of 'God' should be considered as species of 'delusion' - but nevertheless succeeds as an entertaining but extended rant, whose chief value is in undermining naive kinds of theism (the kinds, the author insists, which persist amongst almost all 'religious' people). For those who continue to seek God, however, the 'God Delusion' will not offer an insurmountable barrier. Dawkins himself sees the attractions of Jesus. 'Atheists for Jesus', he advocates. Well, if Jesus was God or the son of God (whatever we take these words to mean), he's clearly not far away from 'getting God' after all. His real truck is with unthinking, dishonest fundamentalism. This is something he has in common with many of the world's most religious people. The real 'delusion' is that of the insufficiently thoughtful.

A Sermon I gave [4]

If we accept that to be human is, whether we like it or not, to have ‘gods’ – whether they are microscopes or electrons or chromosomes, as in the case of the scientistic fundamentalists I have been describing – or football players, popstars or film actors, as in the case of many of the rest of us, it’s worth entering seriously into the business of thinking about the kind of God or gods we in our heart of hearts really want to have. And here, I think, the Christian Gospel offers us some vital insights. Crucially, it insists that the thing about most so-called gods is that they are dead. Not dead in some bare physical sense: David Beckham is very much alive and well, of course, as are many of the other gods of stage and screen whose lives we are tempted to mould ours around, both in terms of the money we apportion to them and in terms of our efforts to look and be more like them. But they are certainly dead nonetheless, and it is important to appreciate how this is so. They are dead, I think, because what they offer to their devotees is so often offered only in exchange for some reward: it is a form of pay packet, in other words, or some other form of gratification for an ailing sense of self esteem.

The radical thing about the Christian God is that he is not motivated by these things – he doesn’t need a paypacket and his self-esteem does not need to be bolstered. And gods who need paypackets or bolstered self esteem aren’t, I would suggest, in spite of appearances, particularly powerful or even interesting gods. It’s not that such gods are wholly bad or evil or conceited: that’s not it. It’s just that what they really are is human, all too human, just like us: which, to be clear, is not to say wholly bad or evil or conceited but just enough of each to make worshipping them a morally dubious activity, curiously similar in character, I would wager, to worshipping oneself or one’s own sense of ‘Reasoning’. And even if these ‘human’ gods can be very good at singing a song or bending a football over a wall, they’re still not – in the big scheme of things – worth climbing trees to see.

For they would let you look at them for a while but sooner or later would demand a pay packet or some words of eulogy to enhance their deficient senses of self esteem. They might, it is true, tell you that you’re worth a million dollars and that you ought to think more of yourself – even deserve to do so – just like they think they do; I’m thinking here of the Gok Wans and Trinny and Susannahs of this world – people who despite the best assurances and their brash and confident public exteriors nonetheless exude – at least in the eyes of the more perceptive media commentators – a real and nagging lack of self esteem. If some of us find ourselves being taken on board by the message of self fulfilment and self realisation of a Gok or a Trinny, do we really find the gospel they offer, upon reflection, a satisfactory one?

Would Trinny advise us to hold off on the expensive hand bags and necklaces and embrace us in a new light for having sold half our goods to the poor, as Jesus does in the story of Zacchaeus? Would Gok advise us to seek out the needy – as opposed to the local John Lewis – in our search for a renewed sense of life’s meaning?

Even if Gok and Trinny profess to care about the decisions we might make in the absence of their involvement (and here, I think, we can reasonably doubt their sincerity), there is no reason to suppose that the decision to do things such as these – which play no discernible part in their self improving teachings – would be regarded as anything other than at best strange, at worst stupid. For Trinny and Gok, giving your money and attention to them and to designer shoemakers and store managers, rather than to the poor, the outcast, the sick and the spiritually weak and vulnerable is how best to reach a satisfactory sense of self love.

The gospel these celebrity gods most usually preach is the Gospel of the cultivation of self, without reference to or emphasis on the importance of the cultivation of others. That this gospel stands in ideological contradistinction to the Christian gospel is so obvious as to be hardly worth saying. But it can nonetheless never be said enough that the Christian gospel’s leading idea is that the most pressing concern of humans is the love of God and the love of neighbour. And the love of self, insofar as it is important, is important only insofar as these other loves are in view. The kind of self love, then, which separates itself off from the business of loving God and of loving one’s neighbour on this view radically misses the mark. As, for that matter, does the kind of neighbour love which separates itself off from the business of loving God. For it is only through attempting to love our neighbours and attempting to love God at the same time in our innermost being that we can experience the love of God for us.

The God of Jesus Christ exemplifies this divine love, which takes the form of the gift of salvation to those who don’t have it. This gift is not an empty one: it is above all a gift of freedom from dead gods and an introduction to life with a living one through his forgiveness and our repentance, and the interchange of these in the life of the church. God’s gift is an invitation to experience and participate in a creative energy which works remorselessly and creatively in and through people – not for its own gain, but gratuitously, for their sake. It can be a guide as we proceed in the difficult, challenging and uncomfortable directions it leads us in, directions which defy even our most earnest attempts to impose regimes of ‘order’ on what is going on. And in the context of the gratuitous relationships which it opens up, we begin to discover that we are known and loved in ways we previously had not thought to know and love ourselves. For God comes to our houses while we are tax collectors and sinners, before we have begun to understand what his love is really like and before we have begun our attempts to exemplify it in our lives.

And as the third chapter of the book of Revelation, my other text this evening, asserts in the plainest possible terms, when he comes to our houses, God says: ‘Here I am! I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in and eat with him, and he with me’. As for dead gods, they don’t knock. They are themselves, like us, the unwilling subjects of this true God’s saving action: for like us, they are unwilling to open the door to let in true love, as opposed to the merely self gratifying and misguided love which they can find already inside their houses. The tragic pedicament of these gods is that they and their followers have not yet found outside the love and life which Zacchaeus, the tax collector who wanted to see and know the truth and who climbed his tree and opened his door, found there.
Amen.

Beautiful words from Henri De Lubac

‘Among philosophers there are some who do not want to see the problems of existence: witness a whole genealogical tree of rationalists. There are some who simply declare such problems to be already solved; such is the whole spiritual family that has a so-called ‘mystical’ tendency. Then there are some who do not want to have any solutions for them; such are many agnostics and also numerous existentialists who make this decision as a matter of principle. There are some who want to solve these problems only with the tools of reason. And there are some who, out of sheer despair of reason, blithely impute to it what they take to be faith. Finally, there are some who see and admit that what is involved here is more than just great problems. With them reason can do its proper work; but from the bottom of their hearts the cry always explodes: ‘I stretch out my arms to my deliverer’.

I don't think he wrote anything which strikes home as truly as this passage from his Paradoxes of Faith. The sense of stretching one's arms out to one's deliverer from the bottom of one's heart is the sense which, for me above all, captures the essence of the Christian yearning for God which needs to be seen at the root of - and in spite of - all attempts at philosophical or anti-theological 'systematizing'.

Schopenhaurian Pessimism

I sometimes wonder how other people cope with bouts of depressing Schopenhaurian pessimism. It’s not easy to bring this sort of stuff up in casual conversation. It’s even less easy to experience. But for my own therapeutic purposes, I’m going to point here to a few fundamentals of the condition I’m referring to. In the first place, I identified it with Schopenhauer because he was both a cosmic pessimist and a man who had high regard for the ‘will’, which I would narrow here to simply ‘my human will’. Like many Christian theologians and mystics – including, I’d venture, both Jesus himself and St. Paul – Schopenhauer came to the verdict that individual wills need to realise their true position within a wider totality of (cosmic) Will. Not an easy thing to do, we can safely say, if even Jesus found himself struggling to do it – recall his diligent praying and conversation with God before his renewed assurance to carry out his purpose (‘not my will, but thine’) was attained. Whereas the Will of Jesus’ father had as its end goodness/good – we must surely think so?! – the Will of Schopenhauer’s universe is a malevolent beast which runs ‘the show’ without recourse to any higher principle than the perpetration of evil, pure and cynical. Or at least that’s the rather scary conclusion I understand the old fellow to have come to. An interesting thing about this picture is that it links a – or even the – central analytical category of academic psychology, the Will, with a theological disposition. Of course, many philosophers have done precisely this, and in other ways, but it’s worth noting all the same that Schopenhauer makes this connection because he makes it more directly than most (as, of course, did Nietzsche).

The sense that it is appropriate to join Schopenhauer arises, I think, from the sense that Christianity’s own ways of coping with the questions at stake are found wanting by comparison. The sense, for example, that St. Paul’s realisation of his wretchedness, of the sorry and profound limitedness of his own will-power, does something apart from testify to us of our persistent and unending failure to live up to (or even fully to recognise) what we know to be true and good. What this wretchedness can instead speak of, perhaps, is a worldview which would find even unChristian Manichaeism optimistic: a dark, dark, evil place in which souls are interred, and in which they are blind even to the extent that they cannot so much as recognise what is truly good in order to feel deficient in relation to it. Whereas Paul can feel himself at least to ‘know’ good, albeit somewhat inexactly, any such knowledge in the Schopenhaurian universe would be mere delusion: true ‘goodness’ is not just unattainable, as Paul felt it to be: it is non-existent. In the darkness which instead predominates, all that is is evil, or, at least, we cannot be sure that it is not. In this world, it is St. Paul’s mistaken sense of truth, and not just his anguish, which testifies to his fraught, failed humanness which exists only in the context of gloom, gloom, gloom.

What might speak to us in this darkness to communicate the presence of truth, of good or goodness, of beauty and love, in such a way that we can feel confident to identify them? Schopenhauer answers ‘nothing’, as does the depressing pessimism I have named after him. Christianity answers ‘the body of Christ’ in its relation to his people, the people of ‘Israel’. And in reality, this answer ought to be recognised, I think, as something of a ‘shot in the dark’ – and I mean here the important double sense of this phrase, in its denoting a ‘shot of light’ as well as its more usual meaning of ‘a high stakes gamble’. This ‘shot’ is, perhaps, something – and, it might be admitted – something precious indeed in an often dismal, cruel, arbitrary world.

The best therapy I can think of for the Schopenhaurian affliction is of the simplest sort. It is to take an ever higher view of all in the universe which we can feel passionately to be beautiful, true, good, just and right. The key thing here is that the degree of our passion must depend upon the extent to which these characteristics can be thought truly to lie together in any given belief or practice. Which, I suppose, means I am saying that something will be all the more ‘just’ only if it is all the more true, all the more good, all the more right, all the more beautiful. And I am saying the same by extension of all of the concepts just mentioned in their relations to one another. The concepts are best regarded as working together, rather than in isolation, I think. The idea here is that they might serve mutually to strengthen one another and to move towards a harmony of relations, so that we have no justice which is not right and true and good. What ‘justice’ would it be if it were not these, after all?

It is, in any case, to the extent that these phenomena can be thought to strengthen one another in an ever progressing unity that they can (perhaps) more effectively combat the threat of Schopenhaurian affliction, when it comes around – and it will continue to come around, I suspect, until their unification is full and complete. If, moreover, true love is characterised by the total and complete and full unity of these phenomena, then it is right for the Christian to speak of his longing for the eventual, complete realisation of true love. And he must be emboldened to hope for the truth of his gospel – namely, that this true love has already been made known to him as a ‘shot in the dark’, during the course of its being made complete. And this, finally, brings me back to something I said right at the beginning: that it is not easy talking with other people about one’s bouts of Schopenhaurian pessimism. I think, though, that when it seems appropriate, it is necessary to try. For pessimism struggles to remain pessimistic, perhaps, if it can open itself in communication. For if communication in its very nature implies the presumption that the apprehension of greater truths is possible through its agency, then one can perhaps hope that along with the greater truths it might yield may come also greater justice, greater beauty and greater good. One can only but hope. I wonder what Schopenhauer would say.

Dawkinsian Philosophy

Richard Dawkins is a scientist, a scientist who is better qualified than any 'theologian' - so he says - to unlock 'the truth' about the universe. When it comes to 'philosophers', as opposed to 'theologians', he's not quite so dismissive. The views of 'philosophers' are deferred to in Dawkins' recent book, The God Delusion - for example, the (atheistic) philosophers A.C. Grayling and Daniel Dennett. These are authorities whose arguments Dawkins feels he can rely upon. Richard Swinburne, for example, is classed as a 'theologian' and criticised as a representative of 'theology', as is Keith Ward, and, from the more distant past, Thomas Aquinas, St. Anselm and others.

Dawkinsian 'philosophers' have to be atheists, and his 'theologians' have to be theists. There have certainly been many theistic philosophers, however, and it's pretty clear (at least to me) that many of the 'theologians' Dawkins scorns are in fact as 'philosophical' as the atheists he calls 'philosophers'. Meanwhile, there have been many atheistic theologians. What, after all, is 'theology'? A minimal definition would be that it is 'God-talk' or 'reasoning about God' and is done by theists and atheists alike. So, according to this definition, Dawkins is a theologian too, although, perhaps, he is a theologian who disagrees with the views of other theologians who hold different opinions. What's certain is that most theologians try to be 'philosophical' - and claim to be thinking 'philosophically' in their theology to greater or lesser extents.

The rhetorical tactic of dressing wolves in sheep's clothing - deferring to people whose arguments are deemed attractive as 'philosophers' and dismissing those whose arguments are deemed unattractive as 'theologians' - is not obviously a charitable one. And I do believe it is a consciously adopted rhetorical tactic. It shows Dawkins neglecting the 'principle of charity' in argument - and this isn't the only example of his doing so. How, though, does flouting this principle, which might be thought to constitute an important building block in any 'Reasoned Discourse' (a nice idea and his own darling), contribute to the advancement of his own case in rational terms? It surely doesn't (unless the sophists had it right), but it certainly makes for a decent put-down - and, hence, for a decent claim to power over those who can't detect the spin in his rhetoric. I have to say, in fairness to Dawkins, that I'd rather inhabit a world in which his argumentative assumptions - rather than those of young earth creationists - call the rhetorical shots. Still, it'd be nice if neither were being deployed: a hollow dream, I know.