God, Scepticism and Modernity by Kai Nielsen (review)

196 LETTERS IN CANADA 1989 continental assessments, Nietzsche and the Rhetoric of Nihilism will prove pleasant reading. (JAMES CROOKS) Kai Nielsen. God, Scepticism and Modernity University of Ottawa Philosophica Series 40. University of Ottawa Press. 252. $40.00 paper A thinker doing metaphilosophy, moral philosophy, philosophy of religion, and Marxism does not necessarily express one concern in all four areas. Nielsen does. In all, he explores our predicament in the withering philosophical tradition. As Enlightenment thinker he struggles with the demise in our culture of professional philosophy as the methodical integration of life through reason. As atheist he rejects faith in God as an alternative. · Nielsen concentrates his rejection of religion on the concept of God as incoherent. The core essays dialogue with Wittgensteinian fideists like Ilham Oilman, Norman Malcolm, D.Z. Phillips, and John Wisdom, or Christian revisionists like Richard B. Braithwaite, R.M. Hare, and Terence Penelhum. Nielsen entertains their arguments that Christianity is not a cognitive cosmology but a life form whose beliefs are not traditional truth claims. Written between 1973 and 1987, most essays stem from the 198os. The core dealing with fideism was composed in 1978-81. Nielsen's explorations are fair and generous to his opponents, are usually limited to a few specific points, and are contextualized by a particular issue. He argues flexibly; his position is mobile. Although he has not penetrated much beyond the surface in assessing Christianity outside of traditional contexts of orthodoxy and natural theology, that is not for lack of trying. The investigation has barely begun and more literature must appear before Christian faith as transcending ordinary belief systems can be evaluated. The chapters open with one on the incoherence of belief in God and follow with three examining natural theology's refutation ofincoherence. The next seven deal with a postmodern turn in philosophy of religion. Nielsen opens this set arguing with a refutation of religion that takes the fideist turn seriously. Given modern success in refuting natural theology, he wants to stick with the rationality of religious belief. Then he attacks fideist versions of Christianity by arguing that on their account religion and Christianity are too drastically revised. The next two chapters similarly attack revisionist Christian accounts. The final two chapters discuss incoherence again. The strength of these discussions with fideists and revisionists is that Nielsen takes them seriously; theirweakness is thathe does not take them seriously enough. He is not prepared to examine Christianity as HUMANITIES 197 altogether different from a conceptual system, apart from considering how that would differ from tradition. To preserve the strength of his charge of rational incoherence, he wants a framework where that charge sticks. Hence his favourite defence: if my opponents are right, atheists will be believers or secular humanism may be a religion; but they have redefined religion and now just articulate atheist beliefs in a Christian vocabulary. The promising dialogue between Nielsen and these Christians would take a leap forward if he would argue with them on their own ground. In all four earlier mentioned areas, Nielsen would advance discussion with, first, a sustaiped, coherent, wide-ranging analysis of his own position in the present situation and, second, an account of the relationship of this position to his own ultimate commitments. As it is, he powerfully opens new possibilities for a discussion between Christians and atheists in which antagonism may disappear to make room for learning and listening. The withering rational tradition which has so far set the tone is opening new horizons. (HENDRIK HART) Joseph C. McLelland. Prometheus Rebound: The Irony of Atheism Canadian Corporation for Studies in Religion, Editions SR vol. 10 Wilfrid Laurier University Press. xvi, 366. $15.95 paper In this work Joseph C. McLelland takes up both a historical and a philosophical project. His stated intention is to analyse the key historical figures and movements in Western thought influenced by the myth of Prometheus that illustrate what he calls postulatory atheism. That modem form ofatheism that pits Humanity against God, he argues, is but a recapitulation of the struggle of Prometheus against Zeus. Philosophically , as the title of the text indicates, McLelland sets out critically to assess that form of atheism and finds it...