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RELIGION: MODERNIZING THE CASE FOR GOD

Monday, Apr. 07, 1980
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Philosophers refurbish the tools of reason to sharpen arguments for theism

God? Wasn't he chased out of heaven by Marx, banished to the unconscious by
Freud and announced by Nietzsche to be deceased? Did not Darwin drive him out of
the empirical world? Well, not entirely. In a quiet revolution in thought and
argument that hardly anyone could have foreseen only two decades ago, God is
making a comeback. Most intriguingly, this is happening not among theologians or
ordinary believers—most of whom never accepted for a moment that he was in any
serious trouble—but in the crisp, intellectual circles of academic philosophers,
where the consensus had long banished the Almighty from fruitful discourse.

Now it is more respectable among philosophers than it has been for a generation
to talk about the possibility of God's existence. The shift is most striking in
the Anglo-American academies of thought, where strict forms of empiricism have
reigned. "What science cannot tell us, mankind cannot know," declared Bertrand
Russell. And A.J. Ayer, on behalf of logical positivism, decreed that "all
utterances about the nature of God are nonsensical." The accepted wisdom was
that the only, valid statements were those verifiable through the senses.

Today even atheistic philosophers agree that Ayer's rigid rule is inadequate to
deal with human experience. Meanwhile, science, his model for learning, has
become less presumptuous and ambitious, its theorizing about cosmic astronomy
closer to theology, its promise as savior and absolute explainer of the world
somewhat tarnished. In the era of quarks, black holes, physics can seem as
baffling as foreign policy in the age of the Ayatullah. Philosophers of science,
such as Thomas Kuhn of Princeton, have applied relativism, formerly employed
against religion, to scientific knowledge. Cornell President Frank Rhodes, a
geologist, once observed that "the qualities that [scientists] measure may have
as little relation to the world itself as a telephone number has to its
subscriber."

Broad cultural forces are also at work.

Says Douglas Hall, a theologian at Montreal's McGill University: "The experiment
with secularism finally proved to be too much for the human psyche to cope with,
both in the Marxist world and our world. If you begin to doubt that there is
some meaning in the process of history, then you get frightened of your own
secularity, and you return to religion."

Though still a distinct minority in secular universities, some philosophers are
not only willing to talk about God but to believe in him. In the U.S., 300 of
them belong to the Society for Christian Philosophy. Some scholars are attacking
atheism and reviving and refining arguments for theism that have been largely
unfashionable since the Enlightenment, using modern techniques of analytic
philosophy and symbolic logic that were once used to discredit belief.

A generation ago, atheistic empiricists like Harvard's Willard V. Quine were
influential simply because "they were the brightest people," says Philosophy
Professor Roderick Chisholm of Brown University, adding that now the "brightest
people include theists, using a kind of tough-minded intellectualism" that was
often lacking on their side of the debate.

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