The God Confusion: Why nobody knows the answer to
the ultimate question
Gary Cox
Bloomsbury £12.99
Church Times Bookshop £11.70 (Use code
CT869 )
GARY COX is an honorary research fellow in Philosophy at
Birmingham, and has written a readable little book on philosophical
arguments for and against God. The tone is much more temperate than
that of some recent atheistic writers.
It sets out a clear definition of God, and examines most of the
main arguments for and against God. It is by a good philosopher,
and sets out very clearly the sorts of arguments you will hear in
the analytical philosophical tradition of most British
universities. If you want to know and think about those arguments,
this is a good book to help you to do so. The conclusion is that
God can be neither proved nor disproved; so the "most astute
philosophers" will be agnostic.
As a possibly not very astute philosophical theist, what I find
most questionable in the book is its assumption of the myth of
philosophical neutrality. Some form of the verification principle
is assumed, and classical metaphysics is characterised as
"confused, empty, and futile speculation".
All reasonable philosophers are supposed to agree with this -
despite the fact that Cox is a sympathetic writer on Sartre, who
did not agree with it at all! (Sartre did what many of us call
metaphysics under another name.)
I would want to look very carefully at the assumption of
evidentialism (that you must have good publicly available evidence
for all justifiable beliefs), and at the question whether
philosophy might have chosen a misleading direction in focusing on
"proofs and disproofs" of God in philosophy of religion. Such
proofs are rarely of great interest to real believers in God, and
they suggest that intelligent people can come to agreement on these
topics by agreed standards of reasoning.
But is evidentialism, roughly based on a Humean version of
common sense (as opposed to a Thomas Reid version, for instance),
really so obvious? Should you, for example, be agnostic about free
will just because you cannot prove its existence? Were Plato and
Aristotle confused, futile speculators, whose views are just
obsolete in our more enlightened age? Or might the thought that
there is just one form of commonly accepted rationality be an
illusion, as philosophers such as Alasdair MacIntyre have
argued?
In my view, there are deep philosophical questions that remain;
but readers will find here a very good example of clear, considered
thought in one (but only one) main tradition of analytical
philosophy.
Canon Ward is Emeritus Regius Professor of Divinity at
Oxford.