I would like to enter a debate which is centuries old and seems, for the most part, to admit of no satisfactory conclusion. The debate is between what is nowadays sometimes called ‘theological relativism’ and ‘(minimal) orthodoxy’. I am not at all happy about these terms (which, in this instance, are John J. Shepherd’s) because the issue being debated is, in some degree, to determine what ‘orthodoxy’ is; and hence, calling oneself ‘minimally orthodox’ seems to be a method of scoring points before the contest has started (that is, if orthodoxy is thought to be desirable). On the other hand, ‘theological relativism’ seems, if one looks at the work of exponents of this school, to admit of degrees of relativity. So we have a relative relativism. All this means that just who is being denominated by such labels might prove elusive of description or, at least, amenable to misrepresentation. For these reasons I shall not use these terms henceforth.

The debate centres on the issue of what (if anything) is essential to the Christian faith. Shepherd argues that ‘behind the bewildering diversity of forms of faith there is an essential continuing substance of Christian teaching which can, by and large, be traced back to Jesus’. This ‘enduring gospel’ consists of propositions about God’s nature and his actions, and about Jesus’ words and deeds. Professor Wiles, on the other hand, argues ‘that there is nothing intrinsically more secure in a knowledge of God which claims to rest on ‘certain historical events’ whose historicity is regarded as essential [than in] a knowledge of God which claims to rest on a more general historical experience (including that to which Scripture bears witness) but which does not treat any particular events within that broad spectrum as essential.’ (CHR, p. 12).

The Religious Experience Research Unit in Oxford embodies a brave and ambitious project devised by Sir Alister Hardy, to turn theology into a science comparable with other modem sciences. As a biologist, Sir Alister is convinced that “religion” is a side of man’s experience which can no longer be neglected by empirical science. He believes that there are scientific, as well as philosophical, grounds for attacking materialistic monism (DF p. 23); and he considers such an attack necessary, for otherwise “civilization may yet cut its throat with Occam’s razor if it does not realize in time that materialism is ignoring a large part of the data of experience” (DF p. 228). In his Gifford Lectures of 1963-5, the second series of which make up The Divine Flame now happily made available to us again in the RERU re-issue, and in The Biology of God, he indicates what form this attack might take, and it is a powerful and many-fronted attack. Sir Alister’s own professional contribution, as a biologist, is essentially to be found in his evolutionary theory, in which he alleges that a purely mechanistic doctrine is untrue to the evidence. This means that the claim that religion and everything that might be meant by “spirituality” have been demolished by evolution is far from proven. The attack is furthered by evidence from a wide range of sciences, including psychology, neurology, social anthropology, and Sir Alister is particularly concerned to draw our attention to the claims of parapsychology. Obviously a lot of work remains to be done in all these fields, but a strong case can be made for saying that ideological scientism of the old school is not nearly as well grounded scientifically as some people would like to think.

Richard Swinburne’s new book “is concerned solely with the central core of theistic belief, that God exists, that there is a God. It is not concerned primarily with whether this belief is true or with whether \ye can know it to be true, but with the prior question of what it means and whether it is coherent.” (p. 1) The discussion begins with a general analysis (Chapters 4-6) of the way in which talk of God is to be understood, whether it is analogical, propositional and so forth. There then follows (Chapters 7-15) a consideration of what Swinburne takes to be involved in the claim that there is a God. Swinburne concludes that theism may be coherent, but that a certain understanding of divine attributes is necessary to sustain this conclusion. In particular, God’s eternity cannot be equated with timelessness, and both ‘omnipotent’ and ‘omniscient’ need to be understood in more narrow a fashion than is sometimes the case. Swinburne also maintains that the coherence of theism may only be properly affirmed where there is good, inductive evidence for the truth of theism. There is no direct proof of coherence. Consequently, “those theists who claim to believe that there is a God ‘by faith’, in a sense of the latter expression which entails that they do not have good inductive grounds for this belief, will, if I am right, have to face the consequence that they do not have good grounds for believing that the claim which they make is a coherent or logicallly possible one.” (p. 296)

So much for the overall argument of the book. What about the cogency of its details? It seems to me that Swinburne’s whole discussion is spoiled by a fundamental error of approach, a pervasive wrong move. On this I shall comment presently.

The Trojans heeded too late the warning to beware of Greeks bearing gifts and admitted into their city a wooden horse full of Greek commandos. One had to be even more circumspect about Greek gods bearing gifts and the legendary Midas should have known better when he asked them for the gift of the “Golden Touch”. Yet when he touched his leaden goblet and saw the dull grey change to bright yellow he thought that his cup was overflowing. As indeed it was, until the wine touched his lips. Then the purple liquid congealed into solid gold. He stretched out a fatherly hand to pat his daughter’s head and withdrew it a fraction of a second too late; she froze there — a golden statue. For some people money is everything; for Midas everything was money.

The Synoptics recount the story of another gentleman with similar values: