Abstract
Our contemporary intellectual culture has seen a standoff between theism and secularism, with seemingly little possibility of productive dialogue. Many secularists, as William Greenway points out, deem spiritual reality to be ‘non-existent or nonsensical’ (p. 3), and they use the term ‘faith’ as a virtual synonym for unreasonable or irrational belief (p. 4). Greenway’s aims are, first, to ‘clear away conceptual obstacles to faith’, and second ‘to awaken readers to the reality and character of wholly reasonable faith … that empowers us, fills us with joy, and inspires loving action’ (p. 11).
The first part of the project follows familiar lines, making the standard (but still not widely enough appreciated) distinction between science and scientism (or ‘naturalism’). The former is the legitimate and vitally important enterprise of scientific enquiry, the latter the dogmatic – and unscientific – exclusion of the very possibility of a spiritual reality. Accommodating the spiritual, Greenway argues, need not require us to posit a separate immaterial realm; it is rather that an adequate description of reality requires us to use two separate, but incommensurable, vocabularies – the scientific vocabulary of natural causality and the human vocabulary of minds, reasons and free choice, or what Greenway calls ‘the poetic I’.
Because the activity of the ‘poetic I’ is part of our experience, it is reasonable to reject the restrictive naturalism that tries to exclude it. But duly acknowledging the sphere of the poetic I, argues Greenway, is still not yet the whole story about the human condition. One may, like Heidegger, recognize the sphere of the subjective self, or, like Richard Rorty, regard ‘self-creation’ as the key to authentic existence, but in the resulting picture ‘there is no space in ultimate reality for anything that is not either the blind product of [natural and social] forces or the results of autonomous choices of … poetic self-creators’ (p. 97). What is still left out of the picture is ‘the sphere of agape’, by which Greenway means the domain of objective moral reality.
Greenway’s guide in exploring this ‘third sphere’ is Emmanuel Levinas: in my encounters with other human beings in need and distress, I am ‘taken hostage by the face of the other’, as in the horrific account by Elie Wiesel of the boy with the face of a ‘sad-eyed angel’ who took half an hour to die on the gallows at Auschwitz. To renounce the God who was absent from Auschwitz would be (in Levinas’s words) to ‘finish the job of National Socialism’. We are called not to abandon faith, but to ‘a faith more difficult than before’ (p. 79).
This ‘more difficult’ faith is not a matter of doctrine and argument: there can, for Greenway, be no theodicy. To defend the reasonableness of faith is a matter of being ‘seized in and by love for all Faces’ (p. 144) – and creatures with faces include, for Greenway, not just humans but animals and even plants (an extension which, however well motivated, seems to me to risk robbing the concept of a ‘face’ of its content). Such love is ‘intensely personal’, but ‘not yet God as a person’ (p. 142); nor does it necessarily involve the afterlife, though in ‘desperate hope’ we may ‘grasp the slimmest of reeds’ (p. 149). But such theological doctrines, though ‘part of the Christian belief system’ are not ‘part of the essence of Christian faith’ (p. 155). In keeping with the Levinasian idea of the primacy of the moral over the metaphysical, Greenway concludes by putting flesh on the reasonable faith he defends through detailed reflection on key Gospel passages such as the Prodigal Son and the Good Samaritan. Overall this is a humane and philosophically sensitive account of a non-dogmatic path towards faith that need not involve any rejection of science.