There has been a very lively renewal of interest in religion of late, especially among intellectuals. The part which philosophers take in this is reflected in a number of popular discussions of religion by philosophers, in radio talks and symposia, conferences on the philosophy of religion, as well as in subtle contributions to learned journals. The reasons for this interest in religion are many, but prominent among them is the peculiar position of philosophy today. As is well known, the dominant strain in philosophy, in English–speaking countries at present, is a severely empiricist one, and this has as one of its most distinctive features the technique by which it is claimed to show that assertions which seem to be of a non–empirical character, other than strictly logical or mathematical ones, gain their apparent plausibility through linguistic confusions of various kinds, notably our proneness to hypostatize abstractions. This development in philosophy has led to concern with religion in a number of very different ways, of which the following seem to be the most important.

Today the questions most commonly asked by philosophical critics of religion, at least in this country, relate not to the truth or falsity of religious assertions but to their meaning. To be fair to the philosophers, however, we must of course realize that very few, if any, of those who have denied “meaningfulness” to religious statements were using “meaning” in other than a technical sense. They did not mean that the sentence “God loves us” conveys nothing at all, that it is like “schwarzibarshinee.”

“NATURAL theology” is generally used as the name of a study which seeks to “get at religious truth” by the use of man's reasoning powers, and not to expound revelation. But I want to limit its application to part of this field. By natural theology I mean here a study which seeks to “get at religious truth” by an empirical examination of things, and not by “pure reason.” It is a (would–be) “scientific” theology. An example of a natural theologian in this sense would be, I suppose, the author of any one of the Bridgewater Treatises, or Paley, or F. R. Tennant. Perhaps I might have called this kind of theology “empirical theology” (or “empiricist theology”); but I do not want to invent new terms more than I have to.

In a recent article In Mind, called A Religious Way of Knowing, Mr. C. B. Martin considers the claim made by some theologians to know the existence of God on the basis of direct experience of God. His paper is, he says, “an attempt to indicate how statements concerning a certain alleged religious way of knowing betray a logic extraordinarily like that of statements concerning introspective and subjective ways of knowing. It is not my wish (he continues) to go from a correct suggestion that the logic is very, very like to the incorrect suggestion that the logic is just like.”

The question I have asked, whether or not we can have a duty to believe in God, must be clearly distinguished from the question whether or not there is a God. It is possible to hold that there is a God and that I have a duty to believe that there is, but it is also possible to hold that there is a God, and I do not have a duty to believe that there is; that there is not a God, and I do not have a duty to believe there is; and that there is not a God, but I do have a duty to believe that there is. This last statement is somewhat implausible—though people have held that though there is not a God, we have a duty to produce belief that there is in others— and anyone making it would be showing thereby, if he believed it, that he himself had not done his duty. It should be noticed that any one trying to convince an atheist that he has a duty to believe in God must be trying to persuade him to accept this statement: that he, the atheist, has a duty to believe in God, although there is no God. That his belief that there is no God is false, if it is false, does not make the task any the more easy.

The eighth Congrès des Sociétés de Philosophic de Langue Française at Toulouse, which, I should perhaps explain, was the first gathering of its sort to which I have been, was just about as unlike a Joint Session as an English philosopher might well have imagined it to be. Many of the differences arose naturally from the simple facts that French philosophy is very unlike British and that philosophers in France are greeted with banquets, civic receptions, concerts and other hospitable entertainments when they meet together in congress. But there are other differences too. For one thing, the contributions are not only as a rule very different in content; they are also different in form. A general theme (a very general theme) is set with a certain number of sub–headings. Then anybody who wishes may submit a “communication,” having if possible at least some appearance of relevance to the titular theme–though if this is not possible, it doesn't seem to matter very much as it may be included all the same. Obviously enough, if some share of the available space and time is to be given to every philosopher who wants it, (and in France, where philosophy is a school subject, there are a very great number of philosophers), nobody is going to get very much. The result of all this is to be seen for this year in the Acts of the Congress L'Homme et son prochain (Presses Universitaires), where hardly any of the no less than 76 contributors has more than four pages to himself. (At the Congress itself, the author of each such communication was allocated 3/4 hour for exposition and discussion. The five addresses which were given at full length before the whole assembly meeting together, and which included one superb performance in the manner of a philosophic chansonnier, are not included in this volume, but are to be published separately.) In the circumstances it would have been wholly surprising if such Acts had turned out to be anything other than a mainly tedious assortment of mostly undistinguished fragments, which is not, I fear, likely to prove of much interest to any reader of this Survey; which is a pity, as it is not only the receptions and the outings that make this Congress worth attending.

The claims that Dr. F. H. George (Philosophy, April 1957, p. 168) makes on behalf of his machines are obscurely stated. Does he claim (1) that a machine has been made and has actually produced a kind of response which is incalculable, given the specification to which it has been built and also the prescribed conditions, what is put in for the particular performance in question? “Incalculable” does not mean that nobody has bothered to calculate, but that somebody has bothered, that the calculations show that the response in question is not among the calculated ones, that it is not chance or mechanical breakdown, but a specific response to something specific among the given conditions. If he could substantiate this claim, then I would reluctantly agree that some machines are cleverer and more thoughtful than I thought possible, and some men sillier and less thoughtful, for they deliberately design machines to do they know not what.