God in the Age of Science?: A Critique of Religious Reason

"Theology is basically a warped form of philosophy. I’ll get in trouble for saying it, but it’s a fact. Theology is the kind of philosophy that’s applied to a non-existent object. So they use all the tools of philosophy. If you read sophisticated theology there’s even Bayesian analysis and mathematical logic in there. So it looks like philosophy but it all applies to a meaningless question involving a non-existent being. Philipse is a philosopher so he’s well equipped to deal with this. In particular, he goes after Richard Swinburne , who is probably the greatest living philosopher of religion and is a theist. “Theology is a warped form of philosophy.” Philipse looks at the so-called philosophical academic arguments for God and just rips them apart. He’s really smart, he knows the game and he applies the methods of philosophy to questions like the problem of evil. Why is there moral evil in the world? Why is there non-moral evil, like earthquakes and tsunamis? How do theologians answer this? Here are the answers and here’s what’s wrong with them. That’s one of the many things he does. He shows that religion is not only irrational but it’s incoherent. In the first part of the book he shows how people’s concept of God is so incoherent that he could basically stop the book right there and conclude there’s nothing to talk about. People can’t even define God. And to a large extent he’s right. I found the book hard slogging, as you probably did too, but, at the end, when the dust has settled, I don’t think any sophisticated defence of religious arguments remains credible. You have to realize what people like me — who are going after theology because of its scientific and logical problems — face. It’s always the same argument, which is, “You haven’t dealt with the most sophisticated forms of belief, the most sophisticated theology! You have to read Swinburne, you have to read Karen Armstrong, you have to read David Bentley Hart!” So, for the past two-and-a-half years, that’s what I did. And one of the most rarefied of all the sophisticated theologians is Swinburne, so if you can take his arguments apart then nothing much is really left standing. He’s the sine qua non of theologians. But Philipse also goes after others — Alvin Plantinga, who is one of America’s most respected religious philosophers. In a way I see Philipse as the spiritual — if I can use that word — heir of Walter Kaufmann, who was a philosopher at Princeton and wrote much more accessibly. He was an atheist philosopher, but he wrote several great books on why theology is a useless endeavor. I wanted to recommend one of those, but he was going after theology as a whole, and my brief was to talk about religion and science… These guys are not dumb, most of them. They are PhDs with smart brains. It’s just a shame that they apply all that brainpower to rationalizing their emotional commitments. They could have been scientists or archaeologists or even writers. Somebody that actually contributes something. To me, even a great novel is a much more worthwhile accomplishment than anything theological, because theology pretends it’s about reality whereas in novels you suspend disbelief from the very beginning. You get immersed in a world which you know is fictional but from which you can still get emotional satisfaction. With religion you’re immersed in a world which is supposed to be real."