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238 - Faith and Reason |
Faith and Reason
By Anthony Kenny
New York, Columbia University Press, 1983. 94 Pp. $17.50.
Philosophy of religion is emerging from the cloud it has been under since WWII, especially in the English speaking world. Two books on the "existence of God" have appeared in the last two years, authored by Oxford dons. J. L. Mackie, Fellow of University College, gave us The Miracle of Theism in 1982, and now we have the Bampton Lectures delivered at Columbia University in 1982 by the Master of Balliol College. Mackie wrote as a "confessed atheist," and Kenny identified himself as a confessed agnostic. I should prefer the label of "reverent agnostic' His agnosticism stems from his skepticism about the "natural theology" of his upbringing.
I thought that belief in the existence of God was justified only if natural theology could be carried out successfully, that is, if the arguments in favor of the existence of God were or could be made sound.... I do not myself know of any argument for the existence of God which I find convincing; in all of them I think I find flaws. Equally I do not know of any argument against the existence of God which is totally convincing.... So that my own position on the existence of God is agnostic (pp. 84-85).
The author's stated purpose in his four lectures is "to offer an answer to the question: is faith rational?" The conclusion reached above is based on the first two lectures devoted to discussing the "nature of reason" and the last two lectures which analyze "faith."
In Lecture I, Kenny joins Alvin Plantinga (with whom he gave a class at Oxford in 1976 on this topic) in rejecting the "classical definition of rationality as the proportioning of one's belief to the evidence" (p. 24). Here he is engaged in opposition to philosophers from John Locke to W.V.O. Quine, asserting that some beliefs are "properly held without evidence" (p. 26), but whether belief in the existence of God is such a belief is open to question. This classical view of rationality, in Kenny's judgment, is self-refuting.
Lecture II concentrates on Kenny's attempt to formulate "a criterion for the rational acceptance of belief in general" (p. 26). Lectures III and IV apply the criterion thus worked out to the rationality of believing in God.
Lecture III applies the criteria established to "The Defensibility of Theism" which focuses on traditional natural theology arguments for the existence of God. Lecture IV uses the same criteria for examining the rationality of faith in divine revelation. The author's judgment, in Lecture IV, is:
Faith is not, as theologians have claimed, a virtue, but a vice, unless a number of conditions can be fulfilled. One of them is that the existence of God can be rationally justified outside faith. Secondly, whatever are the historical events which are pointed to as constituting the divine revelation must be indepen-
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239 - Faith and Reason |
dently established as historically certain with the degree of commitment which one can have in the pieces of historical knowledge of the kind I have mentioned (p. 84).
The epistemological criteria established in Lecture II are therefore crucial to the examination of the claims of natural theology (Lecture III) and revealed theology (Lecture IV).
The criteria are two-fold: what canon, rationally acceptable, can be constructed for "the belief in a proposition without evidence" (p. 26)? Second, what propositions can be rationally defensible as inferences from non-evidential propositions? Kenny states that belief in propositions (basic beliefs) without evidence is justified "if and only if " it is self evident or fundamental, evident to the senses or to memory, defensible by argument, inquiry, or performance (p. 27).
Lecture III asks the question whether the existence of God can be rationally believed, based on the criteria established. Here a challenge is presented to all defenders of natural theology. Lecture IV asks the question whether the existence of God can be rationally held, based on testimony purporting to be revealed by God. Here a challenge is presented to all fideists, Barthians, and those of similar persuasion.
The book, in my judgment, can be commended without reservation. The author does not know from his agnostic point of view when he looks [and listens] to his theist and atheist colleagues "whether to envy them or pity them... From my viewpoint they appear as credulous; from their viewpoint I appear as skeptical. Which of us is rational, I do not know. Whether this is my own tragedy, or part of the human condition, I do not know" (p. 88). These Bampton lectures should be required reading for all who think they do know.
ROBERT P. MONTGOMERY