Experience, Inference and God by John J. Shepherd (review)

488 BOOK REVIEWS Experience, Inference and God. By JoHN J. SHEPHERD. New York: Barnes and Noble, 1975. The tide of authors attempting to construct various kinds of viable natural theologies continues to swell, John Shepherd's work being the latest in line. Though, as he states in the Preface, he originally began to " carry out a sort of mopping-up operation on such remnants of the rational defences of Christian belief in God as were left," the resulting book represents a positive and constructive about-face. Shepherd commences by rejecting both a refusal to consider inferential approaches to God's existence and appeals to self-authenticating religious experience as establishing it. Yet for him religious experience is not entirely without merit as a basis for inferential justification of theism, for it not only provides contact with our emotional experience, but allows for the possibility of a connection between the inferred being, which would otherwise be religiously void, and the God of religion. However, the experience he wants to focus on, contingency, is not uniquely a religious experience . His own interest is in the experience of contingency in the sense of a "capacity to arouse a sense of ontological shock." (p. 16) Shepherd feels that this sense of contingency, which can be experienced by theist and non-theist alike, implies or is the same as the contingency usually involved in traditional cosmological arguments, viz. lack of ontological selfsufficiency , though proof of this crucial inference is left to a later chapter. The experience of contingency involves asking world-contingency questions such as " Why is there or why does there continue to be a world at all? " Much of the second chapter is devoted to disposing of some common objections to the legitimacy of such questions. Before developing his own argument, Shepherd considers two competing approaches from contingency to the existence of God. He rejects a metaphysical intuitionism which contends that we intuit or feel a dependency which is itself revelatory of the reality of God (a "cosmological relationship ") on the grounds that contrary claims are made on the same basis of self-authenticating experience. Whereas the first approach rejects any inferential use of the feeling of dependency, the second uses it to construct what Shepherd calls the " hard " or deductive cosmological approach. He criticizes two aspects of the traditional or Thomistic argument: its move from a necessary being to a personal, spiritual God (the God of religion) and its notion of a necessary being whose essence is to exist, i.e. whose existence is in some sense (unknown to man) logically necessary. In contrast to these Shepherd constructs a " soft " or " abductive " argument from contingency. He contends that, though a tenseless sense of contingency (Why does the world exist?) does not occasion ontological. BOOK REVIEWS 489 puzzlement, the tensed sense (Why does the world continue to exist?) does. As such, this sense of contingency requests (as opposed to compels) some sort of explanation for the world's continuance. He rejects historical causal, natural causal and purposive kinds of explanation as not being apropos, and instead opts for a non-natural explanation modeled on the creativity of a spiritual self. That is, if we assume the model of human creativity and apply it to a Cosmos-Explaining Being (CEB), he argues that we can fruitfully provide what the sense of contingency requests, namely, a terminal, non-natural explanation of the continued existence of the world. Taken by itself, it might seem that the notion of a CEB is a religiously sterile concept. However, Shepherd goes on to argue that the CEB is religiously significant, i. e., that he can be identified with the God of religion . He does this by contending that he is the Creator of the world, that he is worthy of worship because he created a world that provides the possibility of happiness and thus is good, and that he would want to reveal himself. But which revelation-claim provides true knowledge of God? In searching for an influential figure of religious history who can act as a spokesman of God's revelation, we find in Jesus, who uniquely addressed God as "Abba," one with authority "rooted in an intense...