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Realism and the Christian faith

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Notes

  1. The prime source for this way of thinking of realism is Michael Dummett. ‘Realism I characterize as the belief that statements of the disputed class possess an objective truth-value, independently of our means of knowing it; they are true or false in virtue of a reality existing independently of us’ (Truth and Other Enigmas. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978, p. 146). For other examples see Crispin Wright,Truth and Objectivity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992) and Simon Blackburn,Spreading the Word (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984). The present conception of realism is not exactly the same as that of any of these thinkers.

  2. New York: New American Library, 1958.

  3. With D. C. Macintosh and M. C. Otto (Chicago: Willett, Clark & Co., 1932).

  4. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1905.

  5. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1955.

  6. Systematic Theology, Vol. 1 (London: Nisbet & co., 1953), pp. 264–65. ‘The Religious Symbol’, inReligious Experience and Truth, ed. Sidney Hook (New York: New York University Press, 1961), p. 316.

  7. See ‘Theology and Symbolism’, inReligious Symbolism, ed. F. Ernest Johnson (New York: Harper & Bros., 1955) and ‘Religious Symbols and Our Knowledge of God’,Christian Scholar, Vol. 38, No. 3, 1955, as well as ‘The Religious Symbol’.

  8. An Interpretation of Religion (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989), p. 266. See also pp. 239, 246, 350.

  9. Ibid., p. 348.

  10. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1972.

  11. Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1981.

  12. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993.

  13. In Face of Mystery, pp. 60–61.

  14. The Theological Imagination, p. 37.

  15. Ibid., p. 38.

  16. Ibid., p. 53. In Face of Mystery, p. 8.

  17. The Theological Imagination, pp. 35–46.In Face of Mystery, pp. 56–59, 314–16.

  18. In Face of Mystery, p. 326.

  19. Ibid., p. 334.

  20. God the Problem, pp. 97–98.The Theological Imagination, p. 32.In Face of Mystery, pp. 307, ff.

  21. Hick,An Interpretation of Religion, pp. 248, 348, 351–53. Kaufman,God the Problem, pp. 99–107, 242 ff.The Theological Imagination, pp. 46–51.In Face of Mystery, pp. 15–16.

  22. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1957.

  23. For an influential presentation of this line see Richard Rorty,Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979).

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  24. God the Problem, pp. 85, 88, 96, 99;In Face of Mystery, pp. 60–63, 65–66.

  25. In Face of Mystery, p. 65.

  26. See, for example, Dummett, ‘What is a Theory of Meaning?’ II, inTruth and Meaning, ed. Gareth Evans & John McDowell (London: Oxford University Press, 1976);Frege:Philosophy of Language (London: Duckworth, 1973), Ch. 13; Hilary Putnam ‘Realism and Reason’ inMeaning and the Moral Sciences (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978);Reason, Truth, and History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), Ch. 3;Realism With a Human Face (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), Chs. 1, 2.

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  27. See, for example Charles Hartshorne,Man's Vision of God (New York: Harper & Row, 1941); Richard Swinburne,The Existence of God (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979); Alvin PlantingaThe Nature of Necessity (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), Ch. 10.

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  28. For discussion of this see Eleonore Stump and Thomas P. Flint, eds.,Hermes and Athena: Biblical Exegesis and Philosophical Theology (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1993).

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  29. William P. Alston,Perceiving God: The Epistemology of Religious Experience (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991)

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  30. It might be claimed that we can refer to God by virtue of an experience of God, and that this does not require the use of concepts. I myself have stressed experiential reference to God (Divine Nature and Human Language. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989, Ch. 5), but it seems clear that our ordinary ways of referring to God are shot through with concepts.

  31. Dynamics of Faith (New York: Harper & Bros., 1957), Ch. 1.

  32. Dynamics of Faith, p. 97;Systematic Theology, Vol. 1., pp. 16, 240; “Theology and Symbolism”, pp. 114–15; “Religious Symbols and our Knowledge of God”, p. 193.

  33. An Interpretation of Religion, pp. 234–36.

  34. Hick himself, in discussing whole hog nonrealists like Braithwaite and Phillips, charges that their religious message is bad news rather than good news for almost all people (An Interpretation of Religion, pp. 205–208).

  35. Note that this statement presupposes that we do act, and have dispositions to act, toward the Real, a presupposition that Hick explicitly embraces. ‘For we exist inescapably in relation to the Real, and in all that we do and undergo we are inevitably having to do with it in and through our neighbors and our world’ (An Interpretation of Religion, p. 248).

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  1. Department of Philosophy, Syracuse University, 13244-1170, Syracuse, NY, USA

    William P. Alston

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Alston, W.P. Realism and the Christian faith. Int J Philos Relig 38, 37–60 (1995). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01322947

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