Deleting Theology: Examining a Curious Historiographical Phenomenon (Part 2)
I. Positively Wrong
We write the history we want to continue. … So contemporary historians described earlier philosopher’s projects in terms they wished to share.
—Susan Neiman, The Problem of Evil in Modern Thought[1]
—Susan Neiman, The Problem of Evil in Modern Thought[1]
The movement known as Logical Positivism died a mercifully decisive death in the mid-twentieth century. In fact, John Passmore humorously reflects that logical positivism is about “as dead as a philosophical movement ever becomes.”[2] And this obituary was old news even in 1967, the year it was published.[3] Logical positivism had been languishing for some time. When the adherents of the Vienna and Berlin circles largely transplanted to America after the Nazi Party took power in 1933, their roots were unsuited to the soil of this new world. In its original European context, logical positivism bloomed as a powerful revolutionary force, tightly interwoven with other local revolutionary flora spanning the arts, the sciences, politics, and society, while its own ambitions aimed at nothing less than a total refashioning of humanity. Logical positivism saw itself as no mere philosophy, but as, in the grandest sense of the term, generating a worldview (weltaunschauung) that would lead a scientific humanity into the future.
Once in America, however, much of this had to be culled for the transplant to be successful. Its revolutionary politics for example, especially its Marxism, was quickly pruned off to make logical positivism look more like a variety of the prevalent commonsense empiricisms and pragmatisms on offer in its new home. This recasting of itself in an Americanized, scientific image not only allowed an eventual refuge from the paranoid gaze of rampant McCarthyism, but it also through this self-presentation gained a steady stream of funding from the National Science Foundation and several other grant bodies. In fact, however, this strategy ultimately backfired. As Michael Friedman puts it, this pruning was too successful, as logical positivism began to be “identified with a rather simpleminded version of radical empiricism.”[4] More importantly, no longer confronted by their specifically European rivals such as Husserlian phenomenology, Marburg neo-Kantianism, or the existentialism of Martin Heidegger, logical positivism lost much of its perceived grandness. Just so, it was domesticated in the historical memory of the philosophical community as merely another sub-species of philosophy of science in the gardens of the American academy.[5]
In the immediate wake of its death a variety of post-positivist philosophies (indeed, explicitly anti-positivist) entered the vacuum without skipping a beat, associated with names like W.V. Quine, Thomas S. Kuhn, and Michael Polanyi.[6] In theology,[7] in 1967—the same year we noted above that John Passmore was reflecting on just how dead logical positivism was—Alvin Plantinga began his lengthy career with the publication of God and Other Minds.The demise of logical positivism is identified by Nicholas Wolterstorff (himself no minor figure in the Christian philosophical movement) as a key condition, along with the rise of meta-epistemology, to the success of the crusade spawned by Plantinga, Richard Swinburne, and many others.[8] Likewise, The Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology opens with the assertion: “The collapse of positivism and its attendant verificationist principle of meaning was undoubtedly the most important philosophical event of the twentieth century.”[9] With Plantinga winning the 2017 Templeton prize, there is a confirmation of what many already knew: Christian philosophy is currently enjoying what can only be described as a golden age. Moreover, it is largely agreed that Alvin Plantinga is the man almost singularly responsible for starting the movement. Mimicking the famous mid-century Time Magazine cover with bold-faced red letters on an all black background, in 2008 Christianity Today ran an article titled “God Is Not Dead Yet”[10] (the “yet” somewhat awkwardly accompanies the manifesto headline a bit like one might imagine the sound of a deflating balloon compliments a wedding toast, butc’est la vie).
Written by William Lane Craig—a man who has himself played no small role in the Christian philosophical crusade by giving new life to the Kalaam cosmological argument[11]—the article singles out Alvin Plantinga as the movement’s forerunner. Specifically, the beginning is pinpointed with the publication of Plantinga’s book God and Other Minds in 1967. Others have named Plantinga as the leader of the rebellion as well.[12] And it isn’t just the true believers. Atheist philosopher Quentin Smith identifies God and Other Minds as a watershed. “[God] returned to life in the late 1960’s” writes Smith in what amounts to a sounding of the alarm, “and is now alive and well in his last academic stronghold, philosophy departments.”[13]
Bertrand Russellwrote in his seminal book A History of Western Philosophy that philosophy had made definite progress on questions such as the (non-)existence of God. Specifically referring to the ontological argument, he remarks: “I think that it may be said that as a result of analysis of the concept ‘existence’ modern logic has proven this argument invalid.”[15] The agnostic Anthony Kenny, in the final pages of his magisterial A New History of Western Philosophy (fittingly titled as something of a rejoinder to Russell, no doubt), remarked some time later: “Plantinga’s reinstatement of the [ontological] argument, using logical techniques more modern than any available to Russell, serves as a salutary warning of the danger that awaits any historian of logic who declares a philosophical issue definitively closed.”[16] Thus Time, though in decidedly less lurid terms than their question regarding God’s potential demise, admitted that it seemed “God is making a comeback.” Even more remarkable, they continue, this comeback appears to fill its ranks with academic philosophers rather than the average pew sitter, or even the theologians.[17]
Perhaps the most picturesque example of the ultimate fall from grace of logical positivism would be in the figure of Antony Flew. One of the most publically notable members of logical positivism, Flew’s essay “Theology and Falsification,” was originally presented at the Socratic Club at Oxford University—which was at the time being overseen by none other than C.S. Lewis, one of Christianity’s most prolific twentieth-century defenders[18]—and would prove to be one of the logical positivism’s manifesto documents. Despite this, in 2004 at 81-years of age, one of Anglophone philosophy’s most reputed atheists came out, and declared that he believed in God. Internet rumors began as early as 2001. Was Flew moving towards Deism? Theism? Even worse, Christianity? Flew went on public record, denying each of these.[19]
Yet, perhaps the clearest view regarding the changing of his mind comes not from Flew’s explicit statements, but implicitly from the rest of his body of work. This in turn reflects our general investigation here regarding how positivism affected the historiography of theology and philosophy. In particular his review of David Conway’s The Rediscovery of Wisdom, in which Conway argues we all should revive the God of Aristotle: the self-thinking thought, of logos, of philo(love), of sophia (wisdom).[20] In the 20th century, many (most?) had wistfully thought of Aristotle as a sort of pagan, a secularist who magnified the natural world at the expense of the supernatural (let us all put aside for the moment that the binary of nature and supernature did not really emerge until the 13thcentury). This was no doubt in part due to the ridiculous “Christianity killed the advance of Greek science” narratives, proposed by Carl Sagan and others. Yet, The Rediscovery of Wisdom “left Flew shaken.”[21] It offered a philosophical vision of God that came like a bolt from supposedly metaphysically clear skies. In 2004 Antony Flew admitted to Gary Habermas—a man instrumental in advancing the revival of mid-twentieth century debates regarding the historical demonstrability of Christ’s resurrection,[22] and against whom Flew debated several times in print[23]—that he had become a deist. “Above all,” says Flew in his now infamous 2008 book, There Is A God, “I was persuaded by the philosopher David Conway’s argument for God’s existence.”[24]
[1]Susan Neiman, Evil in Modern Thought: An Alternative History of Philosophy (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2002), 291.
[2]John Passmore, “Logical Positivism,” in Paul Edwards, ed., The Encyclopedia of Philosophy(New York: Macmillan, 1967), 5:52-57.
[3]This anecdote taken from Robert K. Garcia and Nathan L. King, “Introduction,” in Nathan L. King and Robert K. Garcia eds., Is Goodness Without God Good Enough?: A Debate on Faith, Secularism, and Ethics (Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, INC., 2009), 21n19.
[4]Michael Friedman, Reconsidering Logical Positivism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), xiv.
[5]Ibid., xiii-xiv.
[6]For this story see John H. Zammito, A Nice Derangement of Epistemes: Post-Positivism in the Study of Science from Quine to Latour (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 1-15.
[7]Though entirely outside the scope of this paper, it is not insignificant that “Divine Christology” and New Testament studies on the resurrection also took off around this time. See, e.g. Chris Tilling, Paul’s Divine Christology (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2012), esp. 15-63.
[8]Nicholas Wolterstorff, “How Philosophical Theology Became Possible Within the Analytic Tradition of Philosophy,” in Oliver D. Crisp and Michael C. Rea, Analytic Theology: New Essays in the Philosophy of Theology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 155-171.
[9]William Lane Craig and J.P. Moreland, The Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell Publishing, 2012), ix.
[10]William Lane Craig, “God is Not Dead Yet: How Current Philosophers Argue for His Existence,” Christianity Today, (July 3, 2008): 22.
[11]William Lane Craig, The Kalaam Cosmological Argument (Eugene: Wipf and Stock, 2000).
[12]Kelly James Clark, “Introduction: The Letter of Confession,” in Kelly James Clark, ed., Philosophers Who Believe: The Spiritual Journey’s of Eleven Leading Thinkers (Downer’s Grove: Inter Varsity Press, 1993), 8.
[13]Quentin Smith, “The Metaphilosophy of Naturalism,” Philo 4 no. 2 (2005): 195-215.
[14]Alister McGrath, The Twilight of Atheism: The Rise and Fall of Disbelief in the Modern World (New York: Double Day, 2004), 189ff.
[15]Bertrand Russell, A History of Western Philosophy (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1967), 752.
[16]Anthony Kenny, A New History of Western Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 996.
[17]“Modernizing the Case for God,” Time 115, no. 14 (April 7, 1980): 65-68.
[18]Alister McGrath, C.S. Lewis—A Life: Eccentric Genius, Reluctant Prophet (Illinois: Tyndale House Publishing, (2016), 250-258.
[19]Nathan Schneider, God In Proof: The Story of a Search From The Ancients To The Internet (California: University of California Press, 2013), 150.
[20]Ibid.
[21]Ibid.
[22]Cf. Michael R. Licona, The Resurrection of Jesus: A New Historiographical Approach (Illinois: InterVarsity Press, 2010), 19: “Gary Habermas is a professional philosopher noted for his specialty in the historicity of the resurrection of Jesus. … Habermas has compiled a massive bibliography consisting of approximately 3,400 scholarly journal articles and books written in English, German, and French between 1975 through the present, all on the subject of the historicity of Jesus’ resurrection.”
[23]Gary R. Habermas and Antony G.N. Flew, Resurrected?: An Atheist and Theist Dialogue(Maryland: Rowland and Littlefield Publishers INC., 2005).
[24]Antony Flew, There Is A God: How The World’s Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind (New York: Harper One, 2008), 91. It is nevertheless curious that, although it is not by Gary Habermas, Flew allowed an appendix written by no less prestigious scholar than N.T. Wright on the resurrection of Jesus to accompany this book (185-215).
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