449 - Intimations of Divinity

Intimations of Divinity
By David Platt
New York, Peter Lang, 1989. 248 pp. $35.95.

David Platt, Professor of Philosophy at Wilson College, has written a helpful and engaging book about the possibilities for grounding religious belief in experience. Proceeding with both philosophical caution and deeply felt religious concern, Platt tries to make a case for empirical theism: religious beliefs gain existential relevance and some measure of epistemological support by way of an experience of divinity. Although clearly philosophically informed-Platt appeals to the dipolar theism of Hartshorne and Whitehead and to the works of Martin Heidegger and the American philosophers Peirce and James in filling out his account of the givenness of divinity-the book is refreshingly non-technical. Any college- educated person with a desire to reflect upon the experiential roots of religious faith stands to benefit a great deal from reading it.

The effectiveness of Platt's argument does not lie in its logical rigor-the book as a whole is rather short on sustained analysis and there is little running argument, the chapters for the most part being previously published journal articles. Nor does its effectiveness lie in innovation-even the author admits that much of what he says is not new. Its strengths lie rather in the sensible and moderate character of the argument, the clarity of its carefully drawn distinctions, and the sensitivity of its phenomenological descriptions.

Thus, the author eschews the extremes of psychological reductionism and positivistic narrow-mindedness, both of which would completely discount experience of divinity, at the same time as he avoids any naive moves from phenomenological description of religious experiences to ontological claims. He respects both the ambiguity of experienceexperience is subject to multiple interpretations-and the mystery of existence-existence is a given rather than a matter for rational explanation-but without making either an absolute obstacle to an experiential grounding of religious belief.

Neither revealed truths nor a priori proofs, the author claims, can make up for a lack of religious experience. Without a groundwork of living experience, revealed religion may appear "irrelevant, doctrinaire and arbitrary" to many people, and supposed proofs of God's existence mere exercises in "verbal sophistry." Proofs of God's existence are religiously inadequate because they conclude to an abstract principle rather than a concrete entity and philosophically suspect because they suppose an illicit move from concept to reality. "Proofs cannot work at all," Platt argues, "unless one is already confronted by the concrete being, in which case a proof is superfluous."

On the other hand, an experiential basis for religious belief is no more than a basis for belief. First of all, experience of divinity requires the sort of rational supplementation that proofs supply. Indeed, once they are

450 - Intimations of Divinity

understood to presuppose some sort of experience of God, proofs for God's existence "help fill out the content of an empirical theology": they explicate the nature of God's being, the unique and awe-inspiring status of the divinity that experience discloses. Second, while claims about an actually existing entity must be empirically grounded, there can be no experiential proof for the divine existence or nature. Experience, as Platt likes to remind us, provides no more than intimations of divinity: "simple indications from human experience that a divine element might be present." The weak epistemic force of claims to know God experientially is what the term intimation is meant to suggest. Because experience lends itself to multiple interpretations, one cannot be sure whether religious experience represents a divine disclosure or a psychological projection, or, if the former, whether the divinity disclosed should be rendered in theistic or non-theistic terms. Furthermore, although religious experience is widespread, claims made on this basis lack the public character of intersubjective testability, which assumptions of an objective referent for one's experiences usually require. These qualifications aside, Platt argues that it is proper, nevertheless, to talk of a genuine givenness of divinity in experience. Experience of God may require an interpretive moment and it may have a weaker epistemic force than other empirical encounters with less problematic objects, but it may still warrant the claim of a direct, non-inferential awareness of divinity. However ambiguous the disclosure, Platt concludes that the givenness of God in experience cannot be ruled out. A more positive assurance on these matters requires something more than experience; it requires faith.

Finally, on the purely descriptive level the book provides, in the tradition of William James, a very interesting phenomenological description of types of religious experience. Using Peirce's notions of Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness, Platt claims that the divinity of religious experience is more like a concrete entity than an abstract principle and, among concrete entities, more like a person than a thing. He captures, with remarkable sensitivity given the limitations of such Peircean categories, the character of the interrupted intensity of mystical encounters, on the one hand, and the gentle pervasiveness of an experience of being held in God's "everlasting arms," on the other. The book closes with a wonderfully clear, yet nuanced, treatment of Heidegger's notion of dwelling, as a means for getting at what Platt understands by experiential intimation. In Platt's hands, the notion permits a highly evocative, even poignant, description of the complexities and ambiguities of human experience, a fitting end for a book that attempts to respect those aspects of experience while meeting a philosopher's demands for intelligibility.

Kathryn E. Tanner
Yale University
New Haven, Connecticut