Read part 1: Stephen Law on the allegiance of philosophy in the battle between science and religion.
Read part 3: Law argues that Milbank's defence of religion is little more than pseudo-profundity.
Read part 4: Milbank argues that, when it comes to metaphysics, paradox is inevitable.
As so often in the case of debates instigated by the ‘new atheists’, Stephen Law’s piece has to be interrogated first at the level of what he supposes religious belief to be about and only secondarily at the level of whether it is reasonable to hold it.
On the first count, Law assumes that the religious beliefs of ordinary people are much on the same level as credulous beliefs in fortune-telling, clairvoyance, spiritualism and the like. Without wishing in any way to prejudge issues concerning the paranormal and the occult, I would nevertheless submit that most believers manifestly do not think of their beliefs in this way. They implicitly or explicitly suppose that there is a distinction between religion and ‘magic’. The latter involves belief in either extraordinary and somewhat manipulable natural forces within the world as we know it, or else in practical benefits resulting from the manipulation of hidden spiritual powers or even God himself. By contrast, religious believers, however far they may allow that, in a God-created universe, there are powers not generally known to us (angels and demons etc) are primarily and overwhelmingly focussed upon the super-natural in the technical and not populist sense: that is to say with God himself, who alone stands beyond nature, because he has brought it into being. This supernatural God may be worshipped and experienced but not manipulated, since his omnipotence is not constrained by his creatures in any way whatsoever. Naturally, this non-manipulability includes the truth that he cannot be subject to verification or falsification in a ‘scientific’ sense, which is finally concerned with empirically observable items.
This is for two main reasons: first, God, if he is truly God, is clearly not one other item within the world – instead he is ‘everything’ just because he is the ‘source of everything’ and nothing lies outside his omnipresence. Such a statement need not be construed as simple pantheism if it is thought that every ‘thing’ within ‘everything’ has the character of a ‘gift’ arising from a mysterious beyond. Thus Christian orthodoxy, like modes of Judaism and much of Islam in effect affirms that God is paradoxically at once ‘all’ and yet beyond the ‘all’ considered as a mere sum.
Issue 43, 12th January 2016
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