THIS is the fourth book by Raymond Tallis to be reviewed in the Church Times. Given his status as a prominent member of the British Humanist Association, this may need some justification.
The fact is that Tallis addresses key topics in such a way that we can ask ourselves whether he is a Humanist who is not far from the Kingdom of God, or an atheist parking his tanks on the theist’s lawn with adversarial intent.
Whether focusing on the phenomenon of time, the natural sciences, anthropology, epistemology, or free will and determinism, he tantalisingly entertains notions of wonder, mystery, and transcendence, all the while disputing any proposed grounds for belief in God.
A medical practitioner by profession, he is widely admired as something of a polymath, with an extraordinary grasp of myriad complex disciplines, which he describes, evaluates, and deploys with admirable clarity.
The subtitle of this latest book is classic Tallis. He deploys his typical analytic dexterity to establishing the reality of free will in opposition to all advocates for materialist reductionism — but it is “an impossible reality”. By this he means that “natural science, and the simplified metaphysics we take from it, are incomplete accounts of the world and, importantly, of human life,” and “to assert the undeniable reality of human agency is not, however, to deny its mystery.”
This open-ended conclusion certainly qualifies Tallis to be called as a witness in support of the possibility of God’s existence, even if he himself believes that, when it comes to explaining such mysteries, “no-one has the beginning of an answer.”
The extent to which, as human beings, we have free will is hotly contested. Determinists argue that free will is an illusion. It is this claim that Tallis sets himself to challenge. He argues that “in a deterministic natural world there is still room for the exercise of freedom.” Indeed, we can discover and exploit the laws or, as he prefers, habits of nature, and principles of causality, only because we are free to observe them from outside — a key point in his argument. Mysterious though this is, it confirms what most people instinctively believe, i.e. that we are not totally subservient to the laws and causal mechanisms of the natural world.
Deconstruction of the determinists’ emphasis on laws and causality is followed by chapters on “what real actions look like” as free rather than determined, and the consequent implications for human agency. Here, the part played by “propositional attitudes” such as beliefs, reasons, and intentions is of particular interest to those with room for religion in the explication of freedom. The emphasis on “possibilities” in this context underlines the “impossible reality” of non-physically determined futures surely capable of accommodating metaphysical expectations, even if Tallis thinks that they amount to nothing.
A final chapter acknowledges and defines the limits of freedom without prejudice to the overall cogency of the central argument, which is lucidly accessible to the non-specialist, but with a series of appendices provided for those disposed to delve deeper.
The Rt Revd Dr John Saxbee is a former Bishop of Lincoln.
Freedom: An impossible reality
Raymond Tallis
Agenda Publishing £25
(978-1-78821-378-3)