Those who have had the benefit of a reasonably lengthy familiarity with the philosophy of religion, and more particularly with the God question, may be so kind to a speaker long in exile from philosophy and only recently returned, as to subscribe, initially at least, to the following rather enormous generalization: meaning and truth, which to most propositions are the twin forces by which they are maintained, turn out in the case of claims about God, to be the centrifugal forces by which they disintegrate. In simpler language, the greater the amount of intelligible meaning that can be given to the idea of God, the less grounds there would appear to be for assuming let alone asserting, that God exists, at least as a being distinguishable from all the things in this empirical world which are the source of the range of meanings available to us;

CARTESIAN PHILOSOPHY TODAY

The most common assessment of the legacy of Descartes is that he left us with a picture of mind–body dualism more clearly drawn and more deeply and widely influential than Plato had produced, or Plato's less sophisticated followers had managed in the centuries between. Two examples of such an assessment must suffice. The first is from a piece on neurophysiology by Peter Fenwick. ‘Descartes, in the seventeenth century, maintained that there are two radically different kinds of substance, the res extensa – the extended substance, that which has length, breadth and depth, and can therefore be measured and divided; and a thinking substance, the res cogitans, which is unextended and indivisible. The external world of which the human body is part belongs to the first category, while the internal world of the mind belongs to the second.’

Fenwick goes on from this general account of Descartes's legacy to a brief survey of the philosophies of mind that dominate the current scene. At one extreme he places Dennett's neurophilosophy: consciousness and subjective experience are just the functions of neural nets, and nothing is required to explain these except a detailed knowledge of neural nets. At the other extreme stands Nagel: subjective experience is not available to scientific method, as it is not in the third person and cannot be validated in the public domain.

However momentarily deluded one might be while in the powerful grip of nostalgia, it is never really possible to reinstate past forms effectively in present circumstances, and that is as true of philosophy as it is of any other form of life. Yet, as the search commences for new beginnings in contemporary thought that take with the fullest initial seriousness the material world and human flesh – if not indeed also the palpable devils – it is surely worth casting a quick look backwards to the origins of Western philosophy some two and a half millennia ago; to the so-called ‘physicists’ of Asia Minor with whom that philosophy is deemed to have begun. This is not simply because the appeal to antiquity which wielded such authority in the ancient world still today seems to play its role – notice the number of atheistic or agnostic humanists who appeal to Aristotle, or Confucius – but because growth in philosophical wisdom, like growth in other forms of knowledge, does reveal a certain cumulative aspect, despite all the quantum leaps, relatively successful or relatively failed, that regularly break the lines of smooth traditional developments.

Modern philosophy from its inception with Descartes has been characterised by a dominant interest in knowledge itself, in epistemology, phenomenology, semiology, linguistic analysis. An adequate theory of the nature of knowledge and of its role in the continuously creative fabric of reality must understand and explain the knower and the known, for it is by their interaction that knowledge is produced, if not constituted. This insight points towards pragmatism in general or the practicalist theory of knowledge. And it simultaneously suggests a moral dimension to all knowing (and a corresponding cognitivist–realist dimension to all moral valuing). This is certainly so in so far as some of the interactive agents involved are capable of some creativity, and hence some degree of freedom from strict determinacy. But such freedom from strict determinacy is precisely what the theory of emergence guarantees. Provided only that emergence is properly evidenced, as increasingly it appears to be, and that it is fully outlined and understood, so that it coincides with the key evolutionary concept of continuous mutual adaptation of individuals, of species, and of the different defined levels in the fabric of reality.

Emergence was defined above in terms of aspects or features which ‘emerge’ at certain levels of the continuous fabric of reality, and which then can be seen to exercise a non-derivative influence upon other levels.

It is not necessary to offer a critical survey of Christian theology in the modern era of Western history, not even as potted a survey as has been offered in Part One for Western philosophy. This is partly because the centrepiece of any theology, the concept of God, has continued to figure in such a variety of ways throughout the course of modern philosophy; and partly because there is a shorter route to our imminent goal. This is through a brief survey of the modern Christian theology of revelation, at the centre of which inevitably appears the alleged existence and nature of the divinity operative and revealed. For this final approach, apart from keeping the continuity with a concept which has become dominant in the analysis and argument at this point, enables the critique to come to more immediate grips with the prospects of the reaches of reason (logos) in conversation with a living faith; more immediate, that is to say, than if one had to work through a survey of the history of whole theologies in order to see how reason in its various modes – artistic, ethical, scientific–philosophical – appeared and operated within them.

The prologue to Part One ended with the prospect held out of wedding the best of what postmodernism has inherited and promoted to the best that current scientific questers after truth have found, so as to come to as clear a view as possible of the nature, function and truth value, in short, of the prospects of theology today; for that is the end goal of this essay.

Now, of course postmodernism inherited a great deal that is good. The product of an eventual coming together of the two main streams of modern philosophy, the phenomenological and the ‘Marxist’, it inherited the best features, as well as the worst, of its parents. And as for that which postmodernism itself then distinctively promotes, there is also in this respect much that is good, and some that is bad. Indubitably the best example of the worst that postmodernism has distinctively produced is found in that scene from Derrida in which writing (like knowledge, and language, its bearer) is stranded between a ‘disappeared’ subject and a ‘disappeared’ reality. This left language as a play of signifiers amongst themselves, with a simple mutual negating, or what Sartre called nihilating, dominating the relationships between these ever dominant signifiers. So that meaning was permanently deconstructed, and truth infinitely postponed.

This essay on the nature, function and truth value of theology, and on the very prospects for theology in this very self-confidently proclaimed postmodernist era, is based upon two assumptions, and it makes use of a particular investigative hypothesis; and each of these had better be declared openly at the outset.

The first assumption concerns an intrinsic and essential link that binds theology to philosophy. This link can be explained and expressed from a variety of perspectives. From the perspective of the genesis of Western philosophy, explained as a move from mythos to logos, where logos named the rational investigation of the physis ton onton (the nature or dynamic centre of the things that are), theology was simply the name for that same rational investigation of all reality, at the point where it managed to meet the deepest entity that seemed to be the central source of all the moving universe. At that point, whenever and however it was thought to be reached, philosophy, without break in its nature or process, became the logos of theos; and by Plato's time had actually been named theology. From the perspective of those Fathers of Western Christian theology who borrowed not merely the method but so much of the content of this earlier Greek theology and put it at the service of the teaching of their own faith, we have this remark of Augustine about the Platonists: ‘change a few words and propositions and they might be Christians’.

‘“Mind” and “reality” have for too long been four-letter words in philosophy,’ complained the colourful Umberto Eco in a newspaper interview. ‘Serious philosophers were thus forced to engage in selfcontained, system-oriented approaches that had no need of these concepts. But’, he immediately went on to assure us, ‘a recent cognitive revolution is now changing things for the better.’ It is of course that latter prospect that this essay hopes to investigate; perhaps even to contribute in some small way to it. But it is necessary, before it can be made good, to gain further insight into the nature and extent of that loss. Mind and reality gone missing from recent philosophy? One is tempted to paraphrase Oscar Wilde: to lose one of this primordial pair, to lose one's mind, might be passed off as a tragedy of sorts; to lose both, to lose reality as well, must surely raise the charge of carelessness.

From the brief preceding investigation of the modern origins of contemporary philosophy the surviving features which came to comprise the current mind-scape, or rather mindless-scape, can be clearly seen. The attack by Marx upon such priority of mind in the account of reality as would, in his view of Hegel, reduce non-mental reality to at best a transient phase in the history of being, gradually gave rise amongst his self-proclaimed successors to the view of reality as an evolutionary, indeed historical, process without a subject.

The centrality of knowing how to knowing that or, more revealingly, the coincidence of knowing and valuing, of seeing and envisioning, led simultaneously to the cognitivist status of moral discourse, and to the sense of the universe as, in part at least, a moral enterprise. The recovery of the sense of formed (e)motion as the universal engine of evolving, ever creative being, and as the concomitant knowing, the mutual in-formation and continuous re-formation that binds all the entities in the universe together – this, then raised the question as to the full extent to which reality as a whole, as a universe, is a moral enterprise.

Traditional theological metaphysics in the West answered that latter question most fulsomely. A personal God creatively at work throughout the whole universe and all of its history, in cooperation of course with the other moral agents that we know of, made of it all a wholly moral enterprise. And the same theological metaphysics simultaneously secured the fullest objectivity of moral value. More recently, however, the educated observer of contemporary Anglophone moral philosophy, and particularly one who has in mind our current question concerning the extent to which reality as a whole is a moral enterprise, cannot but notice the following two features of that philosophy.

John Searle's latest book, Mind, Language and Society, is aptly subtitled Doing Philosophy in the Real World. It has been widely and well reviewed in philosophical reviews as a fine summation of his case against both reductivist materialism and the ‘Cartesian’ dualism which is at once its context and contradiction. Or, put more positively, it is received as a summary of possibly the best attempt currently available to solve the problem that has plagued modern science, ethics and philosophy, namely, the mind–brain or consciousness-and-the-physical problem. Philosophical reviews also laud him, and quite rightly, for persistently insisting on our massive experience to the effect that causality is not purely physical. It is economic, social, political and hence somehow mental, as the making of the world we inhabit increasingly illustrates. (An acknowledgement here of the role of the conscious communal creativity of humanity in the coming-to-be, or the gradual destruction, of the world; a role which loomed increasingly large in the argument of this essay.) And Searle is lauded further, and equally rightly, for his acid critique of those computer-program-type systems which are sometimes supposed to somehow accompany as epiphenomena the physical–chemical processes of the neural system – similarly and simultaneously in numerous discrete individuals?