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  • Mark Johnston's Naturalistic Account of God and Nature, Life and Death
  • Wesley J. Wildman (bio)
Saving God: Religion after Idolatry. Mark Johnston . Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2009. 198 pp. $24.95 cloth;
Surviving Death. Mark Johnston . Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2009. 393 pp. $35.00 cloth.

At last someone has called a spade a spade. To think God is literally a personal being is idolatry. And when you are dead you live on not in any otherworldly place but in the goodness you offer to the world. Sadly—and I really mean this as a condemnation of theologians—this plain-speaking, spade-calling truth teller professionally identifies as a philosopher and is not recognized as a theologian. A sizeable minority of theologians agrees with this brash thinker on God and life after death, of course; not all theologians are supernaturalists. But the widespread commitment among theologians to support ecclesiastical institutions and to nurture the faith of religious believers prevents most professional theologians from coming right out and saying what they think. So this sizeable minority of antisupernaturalist theologians obfuscates, in a sociologically predictable but thoroughly annoying way, making it difficult even for seasoned readers of theological gobbledygook to figure out precisely what they think.

At times all of this theological indirection among the just-won't-come-out-and-say-it-plainly antisupernaturalist theological crowd, with its feints and fakery, its deflections and distractions, seems slightly sinister—what, after all, is the point of such evasions, if not condescension and self-protection? It is easy to sympathize with their plight: it is not easy being a commonsense antisuper-naturalist theologian in a game still dominated by the conceptual contortions of fantastic supernaturalist gymnasts. But the fact that it takes an outsider to tell the truth about the antisupernaturalist theologians' world is nauseating. I for one am glad that Mark Johnston has spoken his mind—clearly, if not simply.

I. Background

Johnston is the Walter Cerf Professor of Philosophy at Princeton University. Prior to writing the two books under review here, he was best known for subtle [End Page 180] philosophical arguments in ontology. His 1983 Princeton University doctoral dissertation with philosophical logician Saul Kripke and metaphysician David Lewis was entitled Particulars and Persistence. These two words correspond to difficult and interlinked questions in ontology and philosophy of logic, and their conjunction in Johnston's dissertation title bears a fascinating resemblance to the words of Kripke's famous 1980 book, Naming and Necessity.

It's the way it often goes for creative philosophers: they first immerse themselves in the thought world of one or two great exemplars and then, properly oriented to the challenging landscape, launch into their own way of trekking through it. I doubt that Kripke or Lewis expected their student to lurch in the direction of philosophical theology. Johnston himself seems determined to apologize for even breathing the word "God" in the Hempel Lectures that gave rise to Surviving Death. He seems genuinely bemused to be writing about the eternal verities.

In his dissertation and many of his essays, Johnston exhibits a commonsense attitude to philosophical problems. Rather than solving problems in extreme ways on the grounds that no more sensible solution is perfect, he takes the world more or less as it is and accepts that philosophy should closely match the world's messiness—a thoroughly Wittgensteinian instinct that he shares with his mentor Kripke. He prefers to make metaphysics serve biology than theology. In his forthcoming book on perception and reality, tentatively titled The Manifest, Johnston argues that there is no philosophical disaster involved in admitting that the world is more or less what it appears to be in our everyday experience, despite all we have learned about biology, neurology, and microphysics. Johnston is a commonsense philosopher who decisively shifts the burden of proof for outlandishly counterintuitive ideas onto the shoulders of those who think they need to propose them.

The dissertation also shows Johnston hard at work defending a naturalistic type of hylomorphism as the proper account of living beings. Against materialism, but also against supernaturalism, he argues that living things should be understood as the totality of their matter...

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