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God and Philosophy
By Antony Flew
208 pp. London, Hutchinson, 1966. Paper, 12/6d.

For a number of years now Antony Flew has been carrying on an ambivalent love-hate relationship with the faith of his fathers. In a number of justly celebrated and widely discussed articles he has attacked most of the central tenets of Christianity. But although he rejects the Christian religion, he cannot keep away from it. However often he professes to slay the mythical dragon, he is always drawn back to attack it again-suspecting, it would seem, that it was not dead after all. This combined fascination and hostility gives Flew a remarkably sharp eye for weaknesses in the Christian case, and those whose business it is to uphold that case will do well to ponder carefully his criticisms.

In this new book Flew covers more systematically ground previously explored in his articles-variously alleged incoherences in the concept of God; the invalidity of arguments for divine existence; the impossibility of a valid inference from religious experience to a transcendent divine object of that experience; the question, what difference it would make if there were no God; the problem of evil and the flaws in the freewill defense; and the irrationality of faith as firm belief in something for which there is no correspondingly firm evidence. As elsewhere, Flew writes clearly, pungently, and frequently indulges (one feels that "indulges" is the right word for an activity that he so manifestly enjoys!) in vigorous polemical sword work.

The broad strategy of Flew's book is to rule out natural theology, in the sense of a philosophical establishing of religious beliefs, and then, having left revelation as their only possible foundation, to remove that foundation. He is conscious, as was David Hume before him, that the first part of this program is not unacceptable to many theologians. The orthodox of Hume's day stood ready, as do the neo-orthodox of today, to applaud an onslaught upon the pretensions of reason to be able to compel theistic belief. And so Flew pursues the traditional arguments of natural theology, dealing trenchantly with the design, cosmological, and moral proofs and providing useful discussions of such notions as explanation, order, and purpose. In all this Flew writes in the manner and from the point of view of a latter-day Hume.

It is in the second part of Flew's program, where he turns from natural theology to revelation and religious experience, that one has to take issue

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with him. Natural theology has not fundamentally changed its nature since the eighteenth century, and it is still proper to contend against it, as Flew does, in essentially the manner of Hume. But Christian concepts of revelation, on the other hand, have changed fundamentally since the eighteenth century, and flume's type of attack is no longer relevant. It would have been more interesting both to Flew and to his readers if he had centered the latter part of his book upon contemporary alternatives to the position that he attacks.

The older conception, which even many Roman Catholic theologians have now tacitly abandoned, was that revelation consists in doctrinal propositions which God has revealed, through church or Bible, and which we are to believe by faith. The contemporary heilsgechichtliche view is that revelation consists in God's self-revealing actions within human history; and that religious doctrines are human, fallible, and reformable constructions in which the believing community has tried to state some of the implications of the divine acts. Faith is the experiencing of the divine acts as divine acts rather than as the purely human or natural events which they also are. Thus the epistemological burden is thrown upon religious experience, the experience of God's presence in and through the events of our own lives and of world history.

In discussing the cognitive claims of religious experience Flew persists, as do several of his fellow-critics, in misconstruing the position that he is attacking. He thinks that such theologians as H. H. Farmer and John Baillie (whom he selects as his targets), when they wrote about our "experience of God" and the "sense of the presence of God," were offering an argument from religious experience to God as its cause. Flew even takes them to be claiming that "the doctrine of the Trinity can be known on the basis of a quasi-personal confrontation with its supposed object" (p. 141). But any such reading of Baillie and Farmer is, I venture to say, not only a misreading but a rather egregious one. What they, and a growing number of others, have been saying is that the ultimate basis for theistic belief lies in a distinctively religious experiencing of life which is such that the religious man cannot help believing in the reality of God. In the paradigm instances, he is as vividly conscious of the presence and activity of God as of the material world. And the right question to ask is not that posed by Flew, namely, Do the religious man's reports of his religious experience constitute sufficient reason for someone else, who does not share that experience, to believe in God? The right question is whether it is rational for the religious man himself, given that his religious experience is coherent, persistent and compelling, to affirm the reality of God. What is in question is not the rationality of an inference from certain psychological events to God as their cause; for the religious

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man no more infers the existence of God than we infer the existence of the visible world around us. What is in question is the rationality of the one who has the religious experiences. If we regard him as a rational person we must acknowledge that he is rational in believing what, given his experiences, he cannot help believing.

Although this kind of approach has yet to be fully worked out and formally presented, it is being widely canvassed in discussions and represents one of the growing edges of philosophical theology today. Flew's critical mind would be of the utmost value in the exploration of its possibilities and difficulties, and one can only regret that in the present book he has not investigated this contemporary development. Nevertheless his book is highly valuable and could provide an excellent basis for study in seminaries and departments of religion. It is to be hoped that it (and indeed the whole Philosophy at Work series of which it is a part) will become readily available in the United States.

John Hick
Cambridge University
Cambridge, England