God and the Philosophers [Hardcover]

Paul Edwards (Author), Timothy J. Madigan (Editor)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 2009

This witty and learned exploration of the many views of the nature and existence of God, as expressed by the major philosophers of the Western world from the medieval period to the present day, is the last work of noted philosopher Paul Edwards. In his unique tradermark style, laced with erudition and acerbic humour, Edwards addresses how the concept of God has changed over the centuries, in large part due to the analyses of such sceptical thinkers as David Hume, Thomas Paine, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Bertrand Russell. A long-time critic of theistic arguments, Edwards demonstrates a masterful understanding of the ways in which the scientific revolution of the 17th century, the Enlightenment of the 18th century, the evolutionary materialism of the 19th century, and the rise of analytic and existentialist philosophies in the 20th century prepared the way for the growing role of atheism in the 21st century. This work is a tour-de-force - a master storyteller's idiosyncratic evaluation of the views of dozens of Western thinkers on perennial topics in the philosophy of religion. Though not all of the philosophers discussed were non-believers or anti-religious, they can be considered to be - like Edwards himself - 'freethinkers'. They pursued the cause of knowledge wherever their thinking led them, often to iconoclastic positions. Editor Timothy Madigan, who gave Edwards thoughtful feedback over the years on various drafts of this work and complied it for publication after Edwards' death, has written an appreciative and informative introduction.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Edwards is a witty and knowledgeable museum guide touring the reader through a vast collection of the greatest works of philosophers- both obscure and renowned - Edwards is not content to simply tell the stories of the philosophers, although he provides historical details about their lives and the political/religious climate during their lifetime, Edwards adds his own humorous and sometimes acerbic commentary throughout the tour, either agreeing or disagreeing as his own views dictate, which takes this volume beyond simply a compilation of the works of great philosophers' past." --Sacramento Book Review, October 2008

Product Details

• Hardcover: 330 pages
• Publisher: Prometheus Books (January 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1591026180
• ISBN-13: 978-1591026181
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.3 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,390,906 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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3.0 out of 5 stars Götterdämmerung, October 3, 2009

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This review is from: God and the Philosophers (Hardcover)

Paul Edward's "God and the Philosophers" is a strange mix of philosophy, history, biography and autobiography. The project is seemingly straightforward: explore what various philosophers throughout the ages have thought about God. The end product is a more eccentric book: Edwards discusses a wide selection of thinkers (Strictly speaking not only philosophers but also personalities such as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Thomas Jefferson), starting for some reason with the Muslim savant Averroes and progressing more-or-less chronologically until the late twentieth century, with a cast of almost exclusively dead white male philosophers. The focus is sometimes flamboyant - Edwards discards of Kierkgaard in two short paragraphs - and rarely does he consider the arguments in any detail. Edwards also includes biographical data of his subjects and discussions of their views on questions like immortality and democracy. Then he finishes it off with personal anecdotes from his own life.

I have previously read Edwards' Heidegger's Confusions, a strong attack on the German obfuscationist philosopher. I have enjoyed that book, and considered the attack to be devastating. Heidegger's apologists felt Edwards was distorting Heidegger's position - yet they all failed to explain what it actually was.

Nonetheless, I must admit that I come out of "God and the Philosophers" with some apprehension regarding Edwards' reportage of his targets' position. Several times, I felt Edwards' presented his opponents views in a less-than-ideal fashion.

See for example, Edwards' critique of Richard Rorty (pp. 248-249). Rorty is skeptical about the capacity of humans to know the "truth" about anything. Edwards suggests that this opens the door to complete Relativism, and quotes, with approval, a discussion about Holocaust denier David Irving (see Lying About Hitler: History, Holocaust, and the David Irving Trial) which states: "If there's no truth, why not deny the holocaust?"

Edwards seems to imagine that this is a statement that Rorty would be dumbfounded against. But it is not difficult to imagine a Rorty-esque response to this argument. Rorty may very well have pointed out that the reason we denounce Holocaust denial is not primarily because it is untrue; Many people promote a host of false theories, in every brunch of human knowledge, whether astrology, biology or history, and face little fanfare. Holocaust deniers are denounced not because they are propagating a falsehood, but because the falsehood they are propagating is an affront to the suffering of Holocaust survivors and victims, an attempt to rehabilitate Hitler and Nazism, and a racist act in and of itself. Rorty could argue that these are reasons enough to denounce deniers, whether or not it is epistemologically possible to say that the Holocaust has "really" happened.

Is this an unanswerable argument? I doubt it. But it is not a feeble one, and the way Edwards ignores such a possible response does not harbour confidence regarding his treatment of philosophers with whom I am less familiar, such as Jean-Paul Sartre.

I also did not like Edwards' outlook, which is conceptual and a priori rather than Empirical. Edwards seems fairly uninterested in how things really work; Several times, his "philosophers" make factual claims that can be subjected to or at least illuminated by discoveries in the sciences, especially sociology and psychology. Yet Edwards cites none of this literature, or indeed any of the sciences beyond Newtonian physics and Darwin's evolution. If, like me, you think scholarship of any kind should be fact-heavy, you may find his approach disappointing.

I think Edwards' approach distorts the history of the thinkers he describes, especially regarding pre-Darwin thinkers like Voltaire and John Stewart Mill. Both Voltaire and Mill believed in god, ascribing their belief to some variation of the argument from design (the argument that such complex things as the eye or the wing must have been designed by God). While Edwards cite' Darwin's discovery of Natural Selection as a refutation of the design argument, most of his discussion is centred on criticism of the design argument from a purely philosophical point of view.

I think Edwards misses the point: yes, the argument-from-design has had its problems (so many of them, indeed, that leading Christian theologians such as John Henry Newman have rejected it even before Darwin - see Dawkins' GOD: Genes, Memes, and the Meaning of Life). But until Darwin, God offered the only plausible solution to the problem of apparent design. That is why Richard Dawkins wrote that Darwin's discovery allowed one to become an intellectually fulfilled atheist. The acceptance of God by pre-Darwinian thinkers was very plausible.

This, I think, is a symptom of Edwards' general problem - that he considers the arguments of the philosophers apart from the context of their times. It is not for no reason that atheism and agnosticism became more widespread in the 19th and 20th century; increasing discoveries in all fields of human knowledge - from biblical archaeology to geology - made the theistic argument less credible. The new atheists were not better philosophers - they responded to better evidence.

One might have told the story of God and the Philosophers as the story of mankind's absorption of new knowledge; As the frontiers of knowledge expanded, the old version of theism became untenable, and was soon replaced by either a form of skepticism or highly sophisticated and arguably vacuous form of theism, one that shed much of the mystical content of religion. And of course, much of the religious reaction to science was negative - the denial of scientific knowledge (most flamboyantly in the case of America's creationists) and the disparagement of intellectualism.

Edwards' book fails either as an exploration of the ideas various Philosophers had about divinity or as a study of the effects of scientific knowledge on philosophical-religious thinking. But it is also a very personal description by a quirky yet insightful thinker of the various influences in his life, both intellectual and biographical. Read as a form of intellectual auto-biography, filled with heroes to worship (especially Bertrand Russels) and villains to detest (a host, chiefly ofcourse Heidegger), 'God and the Philosophers' is witty, entertaining and sheds a great deal of light on its author's mind.