Rationality and Religious Belief ed. by C. F. Delaney (review)

328 BOOK REVIEWS Rationality and Religious Belief. Edited by C. F. DELANEY. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1979. Pp. 168. $4.95 paper. This volume gathers together eight original essays by well-known philosophers and philosophical theologians, concentrating on what remains a central problem in contemporary philosophy of religion-namely, the possibility (and character) of a universal standard of rationality and its relation to religious belief. The number and variety of the essays, as well as the quality of the contributors, make it impossible to do justice to the arguments advanced by each; so I will make some general comments and then focus on several of the essays. The purpose of the volume is, in the words of the editor, C. F. Delaney, to remind participants in the contemporary debate on rationality and religious belief that the question should be seen as being " as much about rationality as about religion " and " should address religion concretely as a human practice rather than abstractly as a system of propositions." The special merit of the book lies in its presentation of these reminders through a wide spectrum of approaches, ranging from technical analytical inquiries to what one might call more ' wholistic ' (e.g., more historically or ' existentially ' oriented) approaches. On the one hand, two of the essays are fine examples of detailed formal analyses: George Mavrodes discusses problems generated by the possibility of certain combinations of truth-value and rationality; G. E. M. Anscombe points to distinctions between' believing X that p ' (or ' believing someone ') and either ' believing in ' someone or ' believing what someone says.' Illustrating an approach that lies at the other end of the spectrum we find a sensitive and suggestive consideration by Langdon Gilkey of how issues of estrangement and the ontological structure of being and history are relevant to the problem of rationality and religious belief, as well as an exploration by Frederick Crosson of St. Augustine 's passage from the religious realm through the philosophical to the realm of faith. The remaining four essays in the volume seem to me to range between these two kinds of approach, and in order to limit the review I will comment in detail only on them. The first reminder the volume intends to offer-namely, that the question of rationality and religious belief is as much a question about the character of rationality as about the character of religious belief-is put forward most directly in the essays by John E. Smith and Alvin Plantin~a, who challenge in differing ways the idea that there is an unproblematical notion of " rationality " with respect to which religion can be judged. Smith's essay, "Faith, Belief and the Problem of Rationality in Religion," is an intriguing attempt to combine both a critique of 'Wittgensteinian fideism' and the suggestion (at first glance similar to claims made by Wittgensteinian fideists) that " legitimate comparisons " are only made " between systems of discourse of the same logical type " (57). Smith's summary critique of fideism BOOK REVIEWS 8~9 is not novel; more interesting is his claim that, while such a retreat to fideism is the unfortunate outcome of an unnecessary capitulation to a standard of rationality " derivative from science and common sense" (50), it is both necessary and possible to have a standard of rationality which is neither prejudicial to religion from the outset nor sui generis or internal to religion. (It is interesting to compare Smith's essay with D. Z. Phillips's similar attempt to find a criterion which is neither totally internal to religion nor totally external; cf. " Religious Belief and Language Games.") For Smith, the determination of a standard of rationality is, contrary to Wittgensteinian fideism, not something that each enterprise can do for itself -rather, it is an" inescapably philosophical, affair, which must be argued in philosophical terms" (57). This requires, however, the recovery of a notion of philosophy which is both " constructive " and has " cognitive reach " (and here the insights concerning experience and intelligibility suggested by process thought, existentialism, and American pragmatism point the way). Such a philosophy can provide a standard which is " appropriate to, and commensurate with, the nature of religious belief" (59); such a standard is...