THE PROBLEM OF GOD IN MODERN THOUGHT

Philip Clayton's enviable reputation as a scholarly and readable explorer of the boundaries between disciplines is built on his earlier "Explanation from Physics to Philosophy" and his Templeton prize-winning "God and Contemporary Science". In "The Problem of God" Clayton employs a history of ideas approach to examining the adequacy of traditional metaphysical and theological assertions about God. His thesis is that " language about God represents a problem with a history that can be reconstructed and evaluated" and "that careful analysis, combined with thorough historical scholarship, can provide reasons for preferring some metaphysical and theological views over others". Such a preference does not amount to a convergence onto a single univocal dogmatism.

Clayton's case is that the early modern metaphysical accounts about God are sufficiently robust and sophisticated to warrant careful analysis as to their relative strengths and weaknesses as comprehensive and coherent theories. All-inclusive and relativistic arbitrariness is rejected in favour of evaluation: in his view, it is possible to justify comparative study. His criterion drawn from the philosophy of science, of "inference to the best explanation", results in a pluralistic metaphysics despite the traditional dissatisfaction of metaphysics with multiple outcomes: the goal has been to unify conceptual arrays by selecting the best theory from among competing alternatives. The aim of theistic metaphysics is to arrive at 'timeless truths' about the single and unique divine nature and not content itself with expressions of the multiple dispositions of human subjects.

After critically describing contending contemporary options - such as the metaphorical theologies of Janet Martin Soskice and Sallie McFague, among others - Clayton proceeds to look at models of God, which successfully formulated a full and coherent notion of the God whose existence is being asserted. He does so with a view to gaining a clear sense of what an adequate model of God should include. He contends that there are good reasons for being hesitant about ascribing literal status to language about God and yet " a theology of pure equivocation or indeterminate metaphysical reference might just as well be replaced by literature (with its greater evocative powers) or reduced to cultural anthropology". What form then might such theological language take? Positivist dismissal of theological discourse as meaningless is rightly relegated to the history of failed projects. He acknowledges, however, that the nature of God, the focus of the subject matter of this book, may be analogous to a Kantian "Thing-in-itself" and therefore in theistic metaphysics, even the most rationally perfect theory may fall short of its object (i.e. may be only partly true). That this may be so even in the pursuit of a theory of quantum gravity in physics must a fortiori be true of theories about God: by definition one can never know what lies beyond all possible human knowledge. Examining concepts such as infinity, or perfection or 'the unity of all that is' may point toward (something like) traditional metaphysics as an ideal, without ever being able to demonstrate that these ideas are actually components of true theories. He affirms that it is possible to engage in comparative judgments between competing explanations even where few views are completely discarded. He argues that it doesn't follow from the diversity of the competing claims in cultural and historical pluralism that "all is relative" in metaphysics. "For any presently contested claim, arguments may later be provided that decisively resolve it. For example, the formalisations of modal logic (the logic of possibility and necessity) have provided a means for resolving debates that formerly rested on intuitions". With such a caveat in mind, Clayton begins his competent evaluation of Descartes' "perfection of God" onto theology, through the metaphysics of Leibniz, and Kant. He brings in Spinoza's constructive theology and the criticisms of Fichte on the limits of divine personhood (the Atheism Debate) and the theology of freedom of Schelling and later Tillich in a thorough and accurate summary which takes up the largest section of the text. The result is a scholarly work of great interest to those who are well-grounded in metaphysical dispute. Those who thought that the problem of God in modern thought was, as ever, one of providing a convincing theodicy in the face of the world's evil must look elsewhere. Those who expected an investigation of the role of science in relation to the concept of God may, with great profit, read Clayton's "God and Contemporary Science". There are the usual excellent footnotes, a thorough bibliography and a very usable index. However, this book feels oddly incomplete: there is no final concluding chapter, which summarises in one place the cumulative arguments developed through the text. It may be that the editors felt that, at 516 pages, the Problem of God was simply too large. The book is the poorer for this omission.