Philosophical Theology at the End of the Century

Abstract

Many writers have commented on the revival of philosophical theology that began in analytic circles in the 1960s. Those of us who received our training in the 50s were reacting to two things. First, our predecessors’ preoccupation with the question of religious discourse’s meaningfulness. While not necessarily disagreeing with Basil Mitchell’s, say, or John Hick’s responses to Antony Flew’s charge of ‘death by a thousand qualifications’, most of us lost interest in the debate. Second, a conviction that Hume’s and Kant’s vaunted critiques of natural theology didn’t withstand careful scrutiny. On the positive side, developments in modal logic, probability theory, and so on, offered tools for introducing a new clarity and rigour to traditional disputes. Alvin Plantinga’s work on the ontological argument, or Richard Swinburne’s use of Bayesian techniques to formulate his cumulative argument for God’s existence, are paradigmatic examples.