Reasonable Faith

This book of essays follows up John Haldane's earlier volume 'Faithful Reason' and falls into two parts, the first one reason, faith and God, and the second one reason, faith and the soul. Haldane is well-known as a Catholic philosopher of wide sympathies and vision, qualities which are apparent throughout these essays. Taking up the wager theme from Pascal, he uses this to discuss Nicholas Rescher's contributions to philosophy of religion which engage practically with the meaning of human existence, a topic studiously avoided by many contemporaries who shy away from practical applications of philosophy. In this same essay, Thomas Nagel is quoted as being uneasy that some of the most intelligent and well-informed people he knows our religious believers, while he positively hopes that there is no God. Rescher comments tellingly: 'Many people feel threatened by a belief that God might exist, because they feel that, were it so, God might not approve of them.' Another essay on the very idea of spiritual values discusses the contribution of the French scholar Pierre Hadot to our understanding of ancient schools of philosophy as a means of forming the soul. Haldane does not believe that spiritual formation should proceed independently of the truth of the accompanying metaphysical discourse. Rather, believers and materialists alike should ask themselves what follows from arriving at their own understanding of a fundamental view of reality.

There are two essays on death and immortality, one of which is entitled 'The examined death' and discusses the nature of human embodiment and arguments for an immaterial soul. While definitions of death necessarily refer to the cessation of bodily functions, it does not follow, as Haldane implies, that one cannot experience one's own death as an experience. This is exactly what is reported in NDEs. From a philosophical point of view, the question of who is experiencing is only a problem if one insists on an identity coterminous with physical embodiment. In another part of the essay, Haldane observes that the ancients defined the immaterial not as consciousness but as abstract thought. On this view, abstract thought might persist in a post mortem states. As is often the case, the difficulty arises with the notion of an immaterial self being disembodied, while the evidence suggests that there are different forms of body according to the constitution of that type of existence. It is here that human experience in these liminal states can help shed light on philosophical matters. But such is the modern aversion to dualism that these considerations are seldom mentioned. Having said this, the essay is no less stimulating on that account.