GOD EXISTS BUT GAWD DOES NOT: FROM EVIL TO NEW ATHEISM TO FINE-TUNING

With this most engaging title, David Ray Griffin, Emeritus Professor of Philosophy of Religion and Theology at Claremont, will draw many a reader into his engagement with arguments for theism and antitheism variously understood. Over all fourteen chapters and the postscript, the tutelary genius of A.N. Whitehead hovers, with Charles Hartshorne, Thomas Nagel, and John Cobb as attendant muses. The well-read reader will not be disappointed by either the extremely wide range of topics covered nor by the quality of their brief treatment by this able scholar. "God Exists but Gawd Does Not" feels like the fruit of a life-time of faith seeking understanding within process theology.

The first six chapters present arguments for the non-existence of "Gawd." The strongly-convincing anti-theistic case rests on the existence of evil, the case for scientific naturalism, evolution, consciousness, miracles, and immoral effects. The arguments are critically presented with a pleasing breadth of reference to Griffin's sources in the 'End-notes' section of each chapter. But who or what is this "Gawd"? Griffin distinguishes "Gawd", the omnipotent, impassable, immutable divine existent one finds in the philosophical theology of St. Thomas Aquinas, from "God." To these traditional attributes, Griffin adds another: "non-existent." Is the alternative to "Gawd," atheism?

Eight chapters are then devoted to making a cumulative case for the existence of "God," as understood in panentheism. These chapters begin with mathematics' evincing a reality other than that met in sensate empiricism. Frequent reference is here made to both the Platonist and Bencerraf problems' challenge to the naturalistic rejection of any relationship between mathematical forms (as actual entities), and the physical world, and their interaction with mind. Those challenges form much of the case against "Gawd." Kurt Gödel suggested the solution lay in the validity of non-sensory perception (also as in Middle Platonism), saying that he did not know of any reason why we should have "less confidence in this kind of perception, i.e. in mathematical intuition, than in sense perception." The late modern world-view, which argues forcefully against "Gawd," insists that non-sensory perception is impossible naturally because the material world we apprehend with our senses is all there is. Griffin points out that this is not a sufficient argument against "God."

Confidence in non-sense-derived experience is carried through Griffin's treatments of the reality of moral perception, logic, and the truths of rationality (non-contradiction, for example), truth itself, and (surprisingly) religious experience, followed by chapters on metaphysical, cosmological, and teleological order.

The eight chapters present again and again Whitehead's dictum "we must take the whole evidence into account," with Hartshorne's "what we have to be guided by in our decision-making, we should not pretend to reject theoretically." Some pages are almost a commentary on Whitehead citing him eight times.

In his Postscript, Griffin answers the big question, "So what? Why does it matter whether we believe in the non-existence of "Gawd," or that "God" exists"?

His very readable 2015 book, "Unprecedented: Can Civilisation Survive the CO2 Crisis?"gives a hint: the "over-riding threat of global warming or climate change" could mean that civilisation will be destroyed. Belief in an omnipotent "Gawd", especially among American Christians of an evangelical persuasion, leads to their complacency about the deleterious effects of human activity on climate or outright denial. "God Exists But Gawd Does Not" was written during the debates prior to the 2016 presidential election –many examples from these debates, and since the election, sadly illustrate Griffin's case.

Finally, Griffin tells us that his book supports what Rupert Sheldrake has called anatheism. This means "returning to a belief in God after passing through the purifying fires of atheism." The trajectory of the arguments in "God Exists" takes the reader through the weaknesses of "Gawd Exists", shows the intellectual inadequacy of atheism after the rejection of divine reality, and presents a third alternative. God exists, God as construed within panentheism. Belief in God may yet give an incentive to combat climate change and a hope that our efforts may find success.

I strongly recommend close study of Griffin's book. To appreciate his arguments does require a moderately sophisticated background in philosophical theology, preferably from a process theology perspective. Of course some of the material is far too compressed to be persuasive by itself (and persuasion, beyond mere information, is the object of "God Exists But Gawd Does Not.") The treatment of the physics and metaphysics of some forms of anthropic principle derived from the fine-tuning of constants and of the forces in nature is necessarily rather curtailed. And in a book of this length and complexity to be stopped only once by a grammatical error is remarkable these days. On page 282 of "God Exists but Gawd Does Not", a lapse in proof-reading created an enormity.