554 - Revelation Through Reason

Revelation Through Reason
By Errol E. Harris
160 pp. New Haven, Yale University Press, 1958. $4.00.

This volume contains a recent series of Terry Lectures delivered by a South African philosopher now teaching in this country, Errol E. Harris, who is known as the author of a major -work published five years ago, Nature, Mind and Modern Science.

Professor Harris's main theme in these lectures is the lack of any basis for the conflicts which have been supposed to exist between science and religion. He seeks to establish his view of the matter by two arguments of very different kinds.

In his first chapter Harris rules out any possibility of conflict between science and religion by the simple expedient of re-defining the latter. "Religion," he says, "is the name for one's total conscious attitude toward life, as it is formed and enlightened by rational awareness and knowledge" (p. 23). It follows from this definition that all who possess a considered attitude to life are ipso facto religious; and this group certainly includes the great majority of the world's scientists. Indeed, Harris says, "the only real atheist is the total skeptic, who alone would be devoid of religion. But the total skeptic could consistently entertain no belief, he could perform no deliberately chosen action and could not live any kind of intelligible life" (pp. 27-28). In fact, on Harris's definition, atheists are individuals who are or ought to be in mental asylums. But this reassuring conclusion is reached at the cost of over-extending the religious category to such a degree that it no longer marks any significant distinction. That someone is religious becomes a trivial fact, instead of refer-ring to a faith which is both momentous and disputable. Such a procedure conceals rather than solves the problem of the relation between science and religion.

Behind Harris's a priori method lies the following argument. "Re-

555 - Revelation Through Reason

ligion seeks to reveal the truth, and so do science and philosophy; and the truth is all-inclusive and ultimately one. There are not two different truths, that of science and that of religion, both covering the same ground. Both claim our total allegiance, both penetrate every detail of our lives; it must surely follow that they are both the same" (pp. 22-23). But the inference here is an invalid one. From the premise that two sets of beliefs each claim our total allegiance and cover every detail of our life, it does not follow that they are identical and that therefore there cannot be any conflict between them. Instead of being identical they might on the contrary be rivals. Buddhism and Christianity, or Bahai and Theosophy, are each all-embracing and all-demanding, but they are clearly not identical. And neither, without radical redefinition, are religion and science.

In chapter four Harris contends-surprisingly, in view of the argument of his first chapter-that there is positive support for theism in the findings of the special sciences. He sees mind at work throughout nature, revealing its presence in the behavior of living cells and even of electrons. In the evolutionary process Mind has gradually advanced to the degree of integration and self-consciousness which it exhibits in man. This development justifies us in extrapolating to a future perfection of Mind, which is logically prior though temporally posterior to the processes of nature, and which is Harris's God. "We have reached a conception of God as a perfect and self-sufficient personality, which is the culmination and consummation of an evolutionary process, in which it manifests itself, and through which it develops its own internal structure and integral complexity; and this evolutionary process is itself the world of nature to which we belong and which science investigates" (p. 94).

The argument, reminiscent in some ways of the evolutionary "holism" of the philosopher-statesman Jan C. Smuts, and in some ways of the "nisus toward deity" propounded by Samuel Alexander, is expressed (as is everything else in these chapters) with admirable clarity. Although the book concludes by seeking to harness this evolutionary theism to Christianity and to the solution of the problem of evil, it seems frankly impossible to reconcile a philosophy in which God is thought of as having not yet come to exist, with the Biblical consciousness of God as an actually existing Being. Whether Professor Harris would regard this as a commendation or a discommendation of his views, the God of which he speaks is a philosophical construction, not the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and the God and Father of the Lord Jesus Christ.

John Hick
Princeton Theological Seminary
Princeton, New Jersey