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Realism and Religion: Philosophical and Theological Perspectives

A collection of nine original essays, Realism and Religion brings philosophers and theologians together either to defend or critique a realist, cognitive understanding of religious beliefs and practice. The introduction by Andrew Moore and Michael Scott provides a good overview of their project. An interesting new proposal that they make is that non-cognitivism in religion receives some support from the 18th Century idealist, George Berkeley. While Berkeley is a clear cognitivist with respect to a great deal of Christian teaching, he also held that belief in the Trinity grace, and original sin are best thought of as stimulating and expressing practices such as love, gratitude, humility, and so on. ‘Berkeley envisages his non-cognitivism to extend only as far as those Christian doctrines of which we can form no distinct idea, and he takes it a little further than these examples’ (5). Moore and Scott rightly identify in Berkeley the thesis that a religious belief in, say, grace and the Trinity, has a motivational structure. They cite Berkeley: ‘Faith, I say, is not an indolent perception, but an operative persuasion of mind, which ever worketh some suitable action, disposition, or emotion in those who have it’ (6). But it is difficult to conclude, as Moore and Scott do, that Berkeley offers ‘a promising defense of non-cognitivism’ (6). If the belief that God is Triune does not conjure or correspond to a distinct idea, it does not follow that the belief is void of cognitive content; its content can be manifested in its referential use in the practices that the belief enjoins. For example, let’s say that the belief that God is Triune involves the commendation of a life of integrated love—persons should recognize our distinctiveness and yet creatively seek to live in a just harmonious society. If that analysis or translation is too weak, substitute your preferred ‘non-cognitive’ alternative. I suggest that there is a huge difference between the bare commendation of ethical practices, and a different claim: we live in a cosmos that is created by a being whose interior life we cannot directly capture in a distinct idea, but whose reality makes it fitting that we promote integrated love. There is a more significant gap between Berkeley and other non-cognitivists such as Don Cupitt or Richard Braithwaite than the editors acknowledge. In “Mystery, God and Constructivism” Gordon Kaufman offers a way in which atheists might acknowledge God, so long as by ‘God’ one means ‘cosmic