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The Predicament of Belief: Science, Philosophy, and Faith

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If you like to think about your religious faith, this is the book for you. For many, it will be a difficult read because it contains philosophical and theological concepts that are difficult to understand and are not always fully explained within the text itself. Does faith seem impossible in a scientific age? This book takes this question and deals with it forthrightly. Question that you may have had about your faith but were afraid to ask and no one else was talking about are explored in this book. If you are willing to be opened minded and stretch your mind, I highly recommend this book.

I sympathize very much with Philip Clayton's and Steven Knapp's goal to get religion out of the churches into real modern life - and to reconciliate it with the scientific world view. Clayton is not only theologist, but also an important philosopher. An important influence upon Clayton's thinking is the late English theologist and biochemist Arthur Peacocke's attempt to build a bridge between christian faith and science, called Emergentism-Naturalism-Panentheism. Naturalism means explainig the world as an orderly whole of its own, without need of transcendent "support" oder supernatural intervention. Emergentism is about the natural evolution of the world that is a real evolution, without reducing everything to its building blocks or beginnings - that is, an evolution where at times real novel features of the world "emerge", most importantly life and consciousness. Clayton's contribution to the emergentist scientific world view is his most important accomplishment as a philosopher.

Panentheism is the view that everything is in God. The Christian version of it, that Philip Clayton as a theologian defends, is problematic, because it attempts to bring the naturalistic-emergentist world view together with the Christian doctrine of theism, a doctrine invented by the so-called Church Fathers, some philosophers roughly from the second and third century AD, canonized at the First Council of Nicaea in 325 AD as the natural philosophy inspired by God. Theism says that God is outside of and essentially different from the world. How can this fit together with the world being inside of God? By supposing that God is an infinite being who "one day" has freely decided to build inside of Him a finite world (nature, universe) which he permeates completely, but which, at the same time, he still transcends infinitely. Some modern spiritual people might wonder what the separation of God and the world is good for in the first place, and why we should add it to a "pure panentheism" that sees in God simply the allencompassing, loving order of things - the world itself, as a whole, as "opposed" to the things and individuals inside the world. I think there isn't any philosphical need for complicating the idea of panentheism by adding theism to it (while this surely helps solving some problems of suffering and guilt). It's mostly a question of tradition and also creed.

Anyway - Clayton and Knapp have written a wonderful (and wonderfully respectful and polite) critique of supernatural, chauvinistic, all-to-churchly traditions and tendencies in Christianity, giving at the same time a loving and passionate testimony of faith. I don't agree with some ideas concerning the importance of Jesus as the only person ever completely devoted to God's will (which I think neither he nor anyone else can be), and an end-of-the-world that might be the beginning of an "eternal life" in community with God. Certainly every religion and spirituality needs some kind of redemption and salvation. But can there be a natural notion of resurrection and eternal life? I doubt it. While disagreeing with Clayton and Knapp in these points, I think their theology is as close to a real modern theology as theism can get.

The authors present the most serious obstacles to traditional Christian belief: 1) science, 2) problem of neglect/evil, 3) religious pluralism, 4) uniqueness of Jesus, and 5) resurrection of Jesus. Then, after laying out the most salient reasons for doubt, they go on to propose possible solutions--solutions which sometimes, though not always, involve significant reinterpretation of more traditional Christian claims and understandings.

I especially like the way they proceed from the more general claims, for which strong reasons for belief can be adduced, and then use these well supported general claims as a springboard for moving into the less secure realm of more particular claims.

Intelligent people from Mainline Protestant groups will be especially interested in this book, along with free thinkers from other traditions (Catholic, Orthodox, Evangelicals). Leaders within all traditions should read this book.

The book would probably appeal to evangelicals more if the authors could have found some stronger solution for the sovereignty of God. As it is, they adopt a "not even once" non-interference solution to the problem of neglect/evil, and this tends to reduce God's sovereignty almost to the vanishing point. I think they could have used the "not-even-once" solution to the matter of why God doesn't set aside the autonomy of creation for the purpose of reducing this-worldly suffering, while still allowing God to exercise sovereignty for other purposes. The autonomy of creation could be still be preserved despite God's (relatively rare) sovereign acts if those acts were mostly limited to particular people group(s) at crucial moments in history (and unrelated to any arbitrary reduction of this-worldy suffering).

At any rate, as long as you're not too worried about the loss of divine sovereignty, or as long as you have your own solution to the problem of neglect/evil, you will probably find this book useful and thought-provoking.