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The Bad News of the Gospel

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 March 2011

Christopher Miles Coope*
Affiliation:
University of Leeds

Abstract

This article discusses Elizabeth Anscombe's faith and her concept of faith, and the bearing of this on what it is for belief to be reasonable. Reasonableness requires that we make a rough distinction between what can and cannot be taken seriously. At the margin we will rightly be influenced by thinkers such as Anscombe who were well able to appreciate the philosophical consensus but were also prepared to disturb it. She disturbed it in a particular way: by asserting Christian teachings robustly inimical to peace of mind. However she rejected many traditional defences of these teachings as presupposing a faulty understanding of rationality. The article attempts to assess what a more adequate understanding might be.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 2011

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References

1 Mackinson, D.C., ‘The Paradox of the Preface’, Analysis, 1965CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2 For a representative example of such entanglements see Alvin Goldman's 2008 article ‘Reliablism’ in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy on the internet.

3 Pasteur used ‘can’ here. However, his remark is often quoted without it. We have here to do with a necessary condition, not just a matter of tendency.

4 On Certainty, Sec. 612. On one's eyes being already shut, see Philosophical Investigations, Part II, page 224.

6 Elizabeth Anscombe and Peter Geach were due to lecture at Wolfson College of which Sir Isaiah was President. See the amusing account by Samuel Guttenplan in Hardy, Henry (ed.) The Book of Isaiah, Oxford: The Boydell Press, 2009Google Scholar, 99.

7 Conversations on Ethics, Alex Voorhoeve, Oxford University Press, 2009, 197. Williams claims to have been influenced by her in this respect, ‘though, I am glad to say, I think she did not influence me in other ways!’. It is noteworthy that when Anscombe organised a protest against President Truman's honorary degree after the war, citing his responsibility for the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Williams refused to support her (‘I telephoned Bernard Williams who simply wasn't having any of it’, said Philippa Foot, Radio interview, see fn. 5).

8 Faith in a Hard Ground, Gormally, Luke and Geach, Mary, eds., Exeter: Imprint Academic, 2008Google Scholar. Page references to this volume. I am indebted to Luke Gormally and Mary Geach for their helpful comments on this paper.

9 Collected Philosophical Papers, three vols., Oxford: Blackwell, 1981Google Scholar, hereinafter Papers.

10 Review of Teichmann's, RogerThe Philosophy of Elizabeth Anscombe, Times Literary Supplement, April 2, 2010Google Scholar, 28.

11 ‘Intellectual Autobiography’ in Auxier, R. E. and Hahn, L. E., (eds.) The Philosophy of Michael Dummett, Chicago: Open Court, 2007Google Scholar, 9.

12 On atheism in analytical philosophy, see 153 and 66. Anscombe refers to ‘those who think they have no religion at all’ (57), rather suggesting perhaps that even these atheists have something of the kind. She seems to have regarded adherence to a scientistic philosophy as a kind of religion, a religion appealed to when making ‘scientific’ objections to the acceptability of witchcraft beliefs, Papers, Vol. 1, 125.

13 Converted, but from what? Mary Geach tells me that her mother's family ‘was not religious’. ‘Her family was officially Anglican, her father was an atheist, and it was clear that she had more respect for him than for her mother, though it was the latter who taught her Greek. [Anscombe] read Chesterton and Shaw and came down on the Catholic side’.

14 Told of Ayer's opinion, Dummett simply laughed and said that his illustrious predecessor had quite clutched the wrong end of the stick. Gerald Priestland, interviews with Ayer and Dummett, The Case Against God, London: Collins, 1985, 86–7Google Scholar).

15 The Tablet, 5 August 2010.

16 The Foundations of Mathematics, London: Routledge, 1931Google Scholar, 291. Ramsey was disagreeing with Russell. The cosmic statistics get ever more inflated, the latest theories apparently suggesting that other universes ‘are being created at the rate of trillions a microsecond’. (Vernon, Mark, Times Literary Supplement, April, 2, 2010Google Scholar, 8.)

17 I have used this honorific description with some reluctance. Anscombe once told her daughter Mary that she did not count herself a philosopher at all, rather objecting to the way mere dons would appropriate such a title.

18 It would have the kind of impressiveness mainly visible from the inside, like the stained glass in a church; Anscombe's own analogy in conversation with Hilary Putnam. See Putnam, , ‘Thoughts Addressed to an Analytical Thomist’, The Monist, 1977Google Scholar, 491.

19 There seems to be a two-way trouble here, in regard to both severity and mercy: ‘severity is held to be a myth; mercy they do not understand…’ (62).

20 ‘In the last analysis, it is ‘peace of mind’ that most Americans expect of religion.’ Thus reported Herberg, Will in his well-regarded study Protestant–Catholic – Jew (New York: Doubleday, 1955, 283)Google Scholar. And reassurance seemed to come quite easily. Herberg quoted a study which found that over 50 per cent were prepared to assert that they were following the rule of loving their neighbours as themselves ‘all the way’ (86). Peace of mind seems to be what is wanted on this side of the Atlantic too. A three minute slot on BBC radio is reserved every morning for ‘religion’, called Thought for the Day, and it happens to coincide with my breakfast. Only once have I heard anything calculated to cause disquiet. Naturally, the BBC received many complaints.

21 ‘I reject all religious belief’ says Timothy Williamson. ‘We should regulate our belief by the evidence … and not give way to wishful thinking’. It comes as a surprise to find that towards the end of a long and thoughtful interview, bringing out the originality of his work, and the care shown in it, Professor Williamson can appear to lend his name to this careless and unoriginal thought. We might note that the philosopher which Williamson claims most to admire, Saul Kripke, must suffer from this wishful defect, perhaps especially disgraceful in a philosopher, he being an observant Jew. (Studies in Logic, 2008, www.frchina.net/data/personArticle.php?id=7660)

22 The Last Word, New York: Oxford University Press, 1997Google Scholar, 130.

23 I talk of what is likely rather than inevitable. Christians, said Anscombe, should be glad that there is a cost, and not complain (191). The cost can be embraced. It is striking how much happiness and humour there can be in austere monastic environments. See Fermor, Patrick Leigh, A Time to Keep Silence, (London: John Murray, 1982)Google Scholar, 31, 39, 63.

24 The religion of Shirley Williams for example. It is unclear to me whether Bernard Williams was speaking in his own voice, or whether this was just what militant secularists were thought by him to suppose. Morality, (CambridgeUniversity Press), 1972Google Scholar, 94.

25 I do not want to be crass in relation to Julian of Norwich. But her words at least call for careful interpretation. Geach, Peter, at the end of his book Providence and Evil, (Cambridge University Press, 1977, 140149)Google Scholar attempts to show how, by thinking of time as dividing into alternative futures, all could eventually be well with the world even though those who are lost remain in their own dreadful company for ever. For Wittgenstein's remark about Origen, see Ludwig Wittgenstein, Personal Recollections, Rhees, Rush, ed., (Blackwell, 1981)Google Scholar, 175.

26 That God loves us unconditionally is repeatedly claimed by McCabe, Herbert in the collection Faith with Reason (London: Continuum, 2007, 34–5, 156, 167)Google Scholar. What is the best which can be said for this claim? ‘Unconditional’ might of course be used entirely devotionally: a piece of theological etiquette as Hobbes would have said. It has a good ring to it. But dissatisfied with that, let us attend to its content. The intention may be to rule out conditionality in a single respect. Thus a Christian will presumably want to say that God will receive us no matter what we have done if we will only repent and return to him. Here the ‘no matter’ expresses unconditionality, but the ‘if’ conditionality. It is this last I have wished to draw attention to. I might add here that our love for and allegiance to God is expected to be straightforwardly unconditional, and any thought we might have that our love meets this standard, Anscombe remarks, is likely to be self-deceptive (64).

27 ST I, Q 20, A. 4. Aquinas says that God loves things more the better (the more splendid?) they are, and angels are better than men. Moreover God did not assume a human nature because he loved man more, but because man's needs were greater.

28 Aquinas allows that we can be loved by God under one aspect – as a pebble is loved, say, but hated under another (ST I, Q. 20, A. 2, reply to Objection 4). I suspect that it is the hatred which should concern us. We should expect it to extend to a lot of us.

29 John W. O'Malley S.J., ‘The Style of Vatican II’, America, Feb 24, 2003.

30 An American abortion-supporting organisation calling itself ‘Catholics for Choice’ (formerly ‘Catholics for a Free Choice’) looks to conscience as a life-line. It has adopted the motto ‘In Good Conscience’, and chosen Conscience as a title for its magazine. It proclaims in its manifesto that the individual ‘must follow his or her conscience’. This last might sound innocent enough. But we should note that following can only have to do with what conscience dictates rather than permits. There is no such thing as following what conscience doesn't dictate; there is only the taking advantage of one's supposed good fortune. Obedience presupposes a command. One is not surprised however to see this selective emphasis on following. Following betokens heroism and self-congratulation: ‘Alas, I can do no other. How lucky you are not to be burdened’. Curiously, it looks as if Catholics for Choice are in the business of persuading themselves that they have no choice in the matter, being puppets of their opinion – they simply must have this abortion, or whatever.

31 Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, (London: Collins, 1985), 45–6Google Scholar.

32 As reported by Rhees, Drury. Rush, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Personal Recollections, (Blackwell, 1981)Google Scholar, 117. The difference here between Wittgenstein and Anscombe should not be over-stated. For something of a corrective see Wittgenstein's distinctly unpolytheistic diary entries written under fire during the First World War. (Ray Monk, Ludwig Wittgenstein, (London: Jonathan Cape), 138.)

33 In a later article, Anscombe wrote as if there were such a thing as ‘the religious attitude.’ It would not involve dancing around maypoles, sitting cross-legged or repeating nonsense syllables, which is perhaps what spirituality has come to mean. It would be manifested, minimally, in our having a respect for human life and a perception of human death as something awesome (in the old, un-American sense). This attitude – some might want to call it ‘humanism’ – would not necessarily be connected only with some one particular religious system, and might just be a preliminary, a seed from which more developed thoughts could grow. Human Life, Action and Ethics, (Exeter: Imprint Academic, 2005)Google Scholar, 270.

34 Anscombe, Human Life, Action and Ethics, 269.

35 On Brother Lawrence, see the letters and interviews published as The Practice of the Presence of God (and readily available on-line).

36 She adds: ‘unless it is to be found in Aristotle's denial that God issues laws to the world’.

37 Citing Eudemian Ethics, 1249b16–23, in Human Life, Action and Ethics, 62. See also Hard Ground 120, where the same thought is expressed less exiguously.

38 Anscombe is making the familiar distinction between counsel and command, and stressing that it is obedience to the commandments which is necessary. She should not be taken to be saying that it cannot be wrong to X unless X-ing is expressly forbidden in the Ten Commandments. Consider, to take just one example, her remarks on the ‘enormous gravity and heinousness’ of the practice of demanding money for baptism (244). The qualification ‘for the most part’ in the previous sentence of the main text was prompted by a contrast between the teaching about theft and adultery let us say (set by our circumstances) and the teaching about bowing down before strange gods (not perhaps set in this way).

39 ‘What I Believe’, in Why I Am Not a Christian, (London: Allen and Unwin, 1957)Google Scholar, 46.

40 Norman Malcolm caught the mood: ‘In our Western academic philosophy, religious belief is commonly … viewed with condescension and contempt … a refuge for those who, because of weakness of intellect or character, are unable to confront the stern realities of the world’, ‘The Groundlessness of Belief,’ in Thought and Knowledge, (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977)Google Scholar, 204. Of course there were exceptions – one thinks perhaps of Kurt Godel who seems to have puzzled his admirers by taking religion seriously. Malcolm (212–3) quotes a passage from Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil describing the ‘superior, almost good-natured merriment about religion’ common among the German scholars of his day. We find much the same sort of thing in sociology and anthropology, a matter vividly chronicled by Evans-Pritchard, E. E. in ‘Religion and the Anthropologists’, Essays in Social Anthropology, (London: Faber and Faber, 1962)Google Scholar.

41 I am speaking of course of a rather traditional Christianity. The penal harshness of Christianity in history, often rather superficially thought to be out of place in a religion which stresses the importance of love, does not simply reflect the penal harshness which then quite generally obtained, and which was perhaps needed in an already harsh world, though of course it does that, but is surely related to a belief, now discarded by so many Christians, in the momentousness of human choice.

42 See e.g. what is said generally to be held by scholars in The Jerome Bible Commentary, Brown, Raymond et al., eds., (London: Geoffrey Chapman, 1968)Google Scholar, 765ff.

43 ‘What I Believe’, 47. Russell should of course have said that his remains would rot. A human corpse is not a human being, as indeed Anscombe points out (66). Christians of course accept that one's remains will rot. Indeed they emphasise it: ‘Dust thou art…’.

44 Though astonishingly this is often lost sight of altogether. R. C. Zaehner, Spalding Professor of Eastern Religions at Oxford, and a Catholic convert, wrote ‘Death is God's gift to man, a gift we should accept, not in fear and trembling, but in joy, for we have the assurance, not only in Christianity but in all the great religions, that what we call death is nothing worse than…’ and so on, quoted approvingly by Cardinal Hume, Basil, in Searching for God, (Leominster: Gracewing 2002)Google Scholar, 168. Russell almost vindicated, one might say.

45 And suppose things aren't quite so bad as all that? Bernard Williams talked about the endless tedium of immortality. It would, he says, be intolerable (The MaKropulos Case’, Problems of the Self, Cambridge University Press, 1973Google Scholar, 82). Suppose then that those have cut themselves off from the company of God would indeed be left out in the cold, with just such tedium. The prospect might not sound terrifying, but endless tedium would amount to infinite awfulness.

46 I do not know whether this remained Anscombe's view. She returned to the topic of immaterialness in a later paper, ‘Analytical Philosophy and the Spirituality of Man’ (Human Life, Action and Ethics, 3–16) but this paper seems no more friendly to the idea of immaterial substances. The idea in particular that intellect has to be an immaterial substance is traced to the (misleading?) influence of Plato's theory of forms. On the problematic idea of immaterial substance, the status of separated human souls, and the baleful influence of Plato, see also the somewhat parallel discussion in Peter Geach, The Virtues, 58–61.

47 Goodman, Nelson, Fact, Fiction and Forecast, (London: The Athelone Press, 1954)Google Scholar, chs. 3 and 4. Peter Geach claims that it is only by trust in providence that we can be confident that nature will conform to our standards of rational expectation, The Virtues 54, and Truth and Hope, (University of Notre Dame Press, 2001), 3032Google Scholar.

48 This little book is still in print at a penny plus £13.

49 See Contraception and Natural Law’, New Blackfriars, 1965, 517–8Google Scholar.

50 It is, incidentally, remarkable that there has been such excitement at the prospect of the mildest form of ‘intelligent design’ being taught in our schools, when all the while the doctrine of transubstantiation, so much more an Offence to Reason, has been the untroubled teaching in quite a number of these schools for years.

51 The Virtues, 22–3, 29–30, 46, 85–6, 159, Providence and Evil, 112, 121–2, 142, 147. If everyone has a chance of being saved, and faith is necessary for this, and not everyone has a chance of knowing about God, believing God must be possible for someone who does not know of him, God I such a case being an unknown teacher. See also Truth and Hope, 45.

52 Contrast here Nicholas Lash, crisply putting the atheist in his place: ‘Dawkins defines faith as “belief without evidence”. Christianity does not.’ (Theology for Pilgrims, (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 2008), 7)Google Scholar.

53 There are a few suggestions in Peter Geach, The Virtues, 35–7. Naturally, we cannot presume, here elsewhere, that Anscombe would have said just the same as her distinguished husband. She was wedded to him but not necessarily to his opinions, as I once heard her say.

54 Some Dogmas of Religion, (London: Edward Arnold, 1906)Google Scholar, Sec. 242. I wonder whether the McTaggart test might not undermine the rationality of taking medical and legal advice where we cannot assume that the same advice would be given by all those who appear equally learned. There is also a difficulty wrapped up in the phrase ‘one's own enquiries’. One could not make enquiries at all if one had been perpetually on one's own, living in a desert and being fed by manna from heaven.

55 As related by Doyle, Conan, The History of Spiritualism, (London: Cassell, 1926), Vol. I, 200202Google Scholar. One of the those present made the definitive claim: ‘If you are not to believe the corroborative evidence of three unimpeached witnesses, there would be an end to all justice and courts of law’. And not just any old unimpeached witnesses we might add. Two of them were members of the House of Lords!

56 John D. Godsey, ed., ‘Karl Barth's Table Talk,’ a record of Barth's bi-weekly English-speaking Colloquium, 1953–6 (Scottish Journal of Theology, Occasional Papers, No 10, 1963, 5960Google Scholar). Barth says that he is here opposing Calvin. Compare: ‘If there were evidence, this would in fact destroy the whole business’ – Wittgenstein's reported view, in opposition to an unfortunate Fr. O'Hara (Barrett, Cyril, ed., Lectures and Conversations, (Oxford: Blackwell 1966)Google Scholar, 56).

57 ‘If Materialism is true, all our thoughts are produced by purely material antecedents. These are quite blind, and are just as likely to produce falsehood as truth. We have thus no reason for believing any of our conclusions – including the truth of Materialism…’. ‘Introduction to the Study of Philosophy’, Sec. IV, Para. 11, Philosophical Studies, (London: Edward Arnold, 1934)Google Scholar 193. Anscombe later acknowledged that there was more depth to this problem about the grounds and causes of belief than she had allowed for in her very early essay (Papers, Vol. 2, x).

58 She had apparently been reading Russell. Russell wrote ‘But as the premise is contingent, the conclusion must also be contingent’ (The Philosophy of Leibniz, 2nd ed., 1937, London: Allen and Unwin (1937), 175)Google Scholar. It is not at all clear what he could have been on about. What he says is plainly not a truth about mere validity: p entails p or not p. Perhaps however it was intended as a remark about proof, asserted on the basis that the premise of a proof has to be more certain than the conclusion, combined with the supposition that contingent propositions are somehow always less certain than necessary ones. In any case must the conclusion here be necessary? Anscombe, criticising Lessing, writes that ‘the assumption that anything believable about God must be ‘a necessary truth of reason’ is worse than doubtful; it is incoherent. It possibly derives from Leibnizian notions of ‘necessary being’, which I hope we can regard as exploded…’ (23).

59 Why Anselm's Proof in the Proslogion Is Not an Ontological Argument’, Thoreau Quarterly, 1985Google Scholar. For Anscombe's remark about her inability to determine whether the argument was a proof, see Russelm or Anselm’, Philosophical Quarterly, 1993Google Scholar, 500. Anscombe seems to reject the common idea that we prove the existence of God by talking about ‘design’ – about the way the ingredients of the world were put together: ‘making out of nothing’ is not the putting together of ingredients (75). (On the other hand, beings with intellect, if produced, have to be produced by beings with intellect. Human Life, Action and Ethics, 37–8.)

60 It is not that the indifferent historian cannot be over-sceptical in these matters. Accepted canons of evidence can simply represent prejudice. As Peter Geach has argued, criticising one such canon: It is quite irrational to correct the record that a prophecy was made and then was fulfilled by saying that the story of the prophecy's having been delivered must have been composed after the event’. (Truth and Hope 2001, 7980, italics in text.)Google Scholar

61 We should not be misled, Anscombe remarks, by references to ‘the Jews’ as a body hostile to Christ in our English translations of the New Testament. Such references, she says, only make sense if we adopt the alternative translation ‘Judaeans,’ meaning the authorities of the main people living in Judaea (259–260).

62 The matter is discussed in several places in Dummett's, Michael collection The Seas of Language, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993)Google Scholar, indexed under ‘testimony’.

63 For this, and the point about witnesses, see ‘Hume and Julius Caesar’, Papers, Vol.1, 92, 88.

64 The primitive sense of ‘word’ is ‘thing said’ – something propositional. See Anscombe, , ‘A Theory of Language?’, in Block, Irving, (ed.), Perspectives on the Philosophy of Wittgenstein, (Blackwell, 1981), 152–3Google Scholar.

65 This is just a passing reference. For a longer discussion of ‘connatural knowledge’ see Anscombe's article ‘Knowledge and Reverence for Human Life’ in Human Life, Action and Ethics, 59–66.

66 See also ‘Modern Moral Philosophy’, Papers, Vol. 3, p. 39, – a passage showing (if showing were necessary) that a rejection of consequentialism, in Anscombe's sense, does not leave us with an ethic consisting of nothing but simple-to-apply rules.

67 There seems an opening here for a truly radical critique. There must be error theorists out there who will insist that propositions attributing rationality, being evaluative, are always false. And fictionalists on hand to rescue the day by suggesting that we just have to pretend.

68 In his book Reason and Argument Geach claimed to have made constant use of Quine's ‘excellent’ book on a similar theme (The Web of Belief, co-authored with Joseph Ullian). I do not suggest of course that there was complete agreement.

69 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), 83. Anscombe's lecture was given in 1957. I am assuming that Kenny is taking into account that the evidence (if we are to talk of evidence) might be scattered and circumstantial and perhaps difficult to articulate.

70 We are here concerned only with a loss of confidence in what seemed to be supporting arguments. But there is also the case where there is an encounter with appearances or arguments to the contrary. In Anscombe's rather surprising view, when a Catholic gives up his faith, it ‘strongly appearing’ to him ‘untrue or unreasonable’, what he does ‘must be’ gravely wrong, and is not excused by his thoughts about the importance of truth (101–2). Someone might suppose that since religious faith involves trusting God, abandoning faith must involve the absurdity of coming to distrust a communication from someone who both knows and cannot lie. But of course the distrust would presumably infect the thought that the communication actually came from such a source, and this distrust might seem very natural. So why must the change of mind be open to criticism? We must remember here the place of testimony in our lives which Anscombe, as we have seen, so wished to underline. We might imagine a ten year old who has grown up in a simple family as a Catholic, who suddenly finds himself orphaned and adopted by a kindly but impressively unreligious philosopher. One could hardly say that any subsequent appearance of unreasonableness in what he had formerly believed must be put down to some prior fault on the child's part, an earlier failure to enquire let us say. His former belief might be put beyond the range of what it is reasonable to consider. Or are we to say that God would not let such a thing happen? As Anscombe herself says in another context: we should be chary of arguments about what God wouldn't do (38). I note that Aquinas insists that God would reveal, directly or indirectly, what was necessary for salvation to a child raised in the forest by wolves (De Veritate, Q. 14, A. 11, Obj. 1 and reply) and something analogous might be said here.

71 Letter to the Editor, The Human World, November 1972, 42.

72 What is right about the image of rational belief as resting on these foundations? There are legitimate architectural comparisons. An admission in court causes a case to collapse, rather as the removal of certain props causes the building to collapse. Peter Geach remarks how certain concessions, offered perhaps by uncautious Christians, serve to undermine Christianity – about tradition (Providence and Evil, 85) and Biblical criticism and scepticism about what Christ said (The Virtues, 68–69).

73 E. g., our knowledge of our intentional actions, and of the causes of some bodily movements, and (usually) our knowledge of the position of our limbs. Intention, (Blackwell, 1958), Sec 8.

74 Quine's image of the web, or ‘field of force whose boundary conditions are experience’, comes from ‘Two Dogmas of Empiricism’, From a Logical Point of View, (Harvard University Press, 1953)Google Scholar, 42. For the idea of testimony as ‘vicarious observation’ see Quine, and Ullian, , The Web of Belief, (New York: Random House, 2nd edn, 1978), 50–1Google Scholar.

75 Secular Philosophy and the Religious Temperament, internet version, 2005, http://records.viu.ca/www/ipp/pdf/2.pdf, 23.

76 However, in The Web of Belief (79) certain adjustments are said to indicate ‘madness’. I think that this must be a popular usage, meaning an unusual eccentricity, rather than anything of professional interest to a psychiatrist indicating an inability to think well.

77 The phrase ‘vague scheme of priorities’ comes from Quine's Methods of Logic, (London: Routledge, 3rd edn. 1974)Google Scholar, 2.

78 Oxford University Press' volume Faith and Reason, dubbed a ‘reader’, displays on its front cover a photograph of people plunging off a diving board, more appropriate I would have thought for a book on marriage.

79 The Pursuit of Truth, (Harvard University Press, rev. edn., 1992)Google Scholar, 98.

80 Mental Reality, Cambridge, (Mass: MIT Press, 2nd edn., 2009)Google Scholar, 105.

81 Gerald Priestland, op. cit., 188–9. There is surely something curiously Kantian in this attitude to Christian belief.

82 Faith and Reason, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983)Google Scholar, 1.