God and the World of Signs: Trinity, Evolution, and the Metaphysical Semiotics of C. S. Peirce by Andrew Robinson (review)

Considering the range of disciplines addressed in Andrew Robinson's God and the World of Signs, its thesis is comparatively straightforward. This is that the triadic structure of reality described by the phenomenological categories of the American pragmatist philosopher C. S. Peirce (1839-1914) is most accurately characterized as "vestiges of the Trinity in creation." For those not well acquainted with Peirce's work, the three categories—Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness—refer to the elementary modes of relation in semiotic processes; respectively, they comprise all that is possible, actual, and intelligible in human experience. They also describe a continuously evolving universe, whose admixtures of chance, necessity, and mediation are made intelligible to human perceivers through objectively verifiable hypotheses. For Robinson, the evolutionary dimension of Peirce's categories represents the metaphysical "puzzle piece" necessary to connect contemporary understandings of biological evolution with the God of Patristic theology, as the categories both account for chance variation and retain a threefold structure that mirrors the persons of the Trinity. Robinson devotes much of the book to describing, in Peircian fashion, an astonishing network of hypotheses that render his thesis plausible, touching on Biblical hermeneutics, cosmology, and the place of teleological explanations in biological evolution, among much else. He concludes with an argument akin to Peirce's own "Neglected Argument for the Reality of God," holding that his thesis can ultimately only be accepted on aesthetic grounds, for the elegance with which it explains the meaning of a triune God in relation to human beings in an evolving world.

The work begins with an introduction to the semiotic and metaphysical aspects of Peirce's philosophy. Robinson explains how Peircian semiotics builds upon a fundamental triad of sign (that which stands for an object), object (that which the sign represents), and interpretant (the context for which the sign-object relation takes meaning) to describe the relation between mind and world. This semiotic triad is, in turn, described by way of three forms of relation: monadic Firstness, dyadic Secondness, and triadic Thirdness. Though these categories first arose in Peirce's work as logical principles, by the 1890's they had come to refer respectively to phenomenological modes of possibility, actuality, and mediation in human experience. The numerical nomenclature is intentionally vague, as the categories are to be specified in being understood as present in any natural process. Peirce's triads are complemented by a form of reasoning he called abduction, or guessing, which is how novel ideas arise through perceptual experience. Beliefs attained through abduction are to be verified by way of deductive extension and inductive testing. Robinson navigates these complex matters effectively, advancing his God-as-categories thesis to argue that the triune God may be expressed in terms of Father as Firstness, Son as Secondness, and Holy Spirit as Thirdness. Just as it bears mentioning that Peirce himself never expressed his categories in precisely these terms, neither do Robinson's citations of Peirce go against the broad currents of Peircean scholarship.

For Christian theologians inclined to accept these terms, God and the World of Signs will be of enormous value. Though Peirce's work is gradually gaining prominence among philosophical theologians, spurred on by such books as Michael Raposa's Pierce's Philosophy of Religion, Peter Ochs's Peirce, Pragmatism, and the Logic of Scripture, or Robert C. Neville's Realism in Religion, among others, this is the first comprehensively Trinitarian reading of Peirce as well as the most thorough exploration yet published of Peircian semiotics for science-and-religion research. Simply put, Robinson gives Peirce to Christian apologetics, asserting through Peirce's permeating—albeit esoteric—vocabulary a link between the Christian Trinity and the processes investigated by natural science. The work in this regard resembles that of such natural theologians as Philip Clayton or John Polkinghorne and would serve as an excellent companion piece to Polkinghorne's recently published...