Finding Ultimate Reality - David Gooding & John Lennox

FI N D I N G U LTI M ATE
RE A L IT Y
THE QUEST FOR REALITY AND SIGNIFICANCE
Book 1 – BEING TRULY HUMAN:

The Limits of our Worth, Power, Freedom and Destiny
Book 2 – FINDING ULTIMATE REALITY:

In Search of the Best Answers to the Biggest Questions
Book 3 – QUESTIONING OUR KNOWLEDGE:

Can we Know What we Need to Know?
Book 4 – DOING WHAT’S RIGHT:

Whose System of Ethics is Good Enough?
Book 5 – CLAIMING TO ANSWER:

How One Person Became the Response to our Deepest Questions
Book 6 – SUFFERING LIFE’S PAIN:

Facing the Problems of Moral and Natural Evil
BOOK 2
FI N D I N G U LTI M ATE
RE A L IT Y
IN SEARCH OF THE BEST ANSWERS
TO THE BIGGEST QUESTIONS
DAV I D G O O D I N G
J O H N LEN N OX
Myrtlefield House
Belfast, Northern Ireland
David Gooding and John Lennox have asserted their right under the Copyright,
Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Authors of this work.
Finding Ultimate Reality: In Search of the Best Answers to the Biggest Questions
Book 2, The Quest for Reality and Significance
Copyright © Myrtlefield Trust, 2018
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in

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London, EC4A 1EN, UK.
All Scripture quotations, unless otherwise indicated, are taken from The Holy
Bible, English Standard Version, copyright © 2001 by Crossway Bibles, a division
of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. Scripture quotations marked NIV
are from the Holy Bible, New International Version® Anglicized, NIV® Copyright
© 1979, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.® Used by permission. All rights reserved
worldwide. Italics within Scripture quotations indicate emphasis added. Scripture
quotations marked (our trans.) are as translated by David Gooding. Foreign
language quotations marked (our trans.) are as translated by John Lennox.
Cover design: Frank Gutbrod.

Interior design and composition: Sharon VanLoozenoord.
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DEDICATED TO OUR YOUNGER FELLOW STUDENTS,
REMEMBERING THAT WE WERE ONCE STUDENTS—AND STILL ARE

CONTENTS
BOOK 2: FINDING ULTIMATE REALITY
IN SEARCH OF THE BEST ANSWERS TO THE BIGGEST QUESTIONS
Series Preface xi
Analytical Outline xv
Series Introduction 1
1 Indian Pantheistic Monism:

An Indian Search for Ultimate Reality 43
2 Greek Philosophy and Mysticism:

An Intellectual Search for Ultimate Reality 61
3 Naturalism and Atheism:

A Search for Ultimate Reality in Nature Alone 107
4 Christian Theism:
The Search for Ultimate Reality in God’s Self-revelation 125
Appendix: The Scientific Endeavour 145
Series Bibliography 181
Study Questions for Teachers and Students 213
Scripture Index 219
General Index 221

ILLUSTRATIONS
I.1. A Rose 5
I.2. The School of Athens by Raphael 10–11
I.3. On the Origin of Species (1859) by Charles Darwin 27
I.4. A Touchstone 32
I.5. An Apple 35
Ap.1. Benzene Molecule 148
Ap.2. Model T Ford Motor Car 165
Ap.3. Milky Way Galaxy 176–77

SERIES PREFACE
The average student has a problem—many problems in fact, but one

in particular. No longer a child, he or she is entering adult life and
facing the torrent of change that adult independence brings. It can be
exhilarating but sometimes also frightening to have to stand on one’s
own feet, to decide for oneself how to live, what career to follow, what
goals to aim at and what values and principles to adopt.
How are such decisions to be made? Clearly much thought is
needed and increasing knowledge and experience will help. But leave
these basic decisions too long and there is a danger of simply drift-
ing through life and missing out on the character-forming process of
thinking through one’s own worldview. For that is what is needed:
a coherent framework that will give to life a true perspective and
satisfying values and goals. To form such a worldview for oneself,
particularly at a time when society’s traditional ideas and values are
being radically questioned, can be a very daunting task for anyone,
not least university students. After all, worldviews are normally com-
posed of many elements drawn from, among other sources, science,
philosophy, literature, history and religion; and a student cannot be
expected to be an expert in any one of them, let alone in all of them
(indeed, is any one of us?).
Nevertheless we do not have to wait for the accumulated wis-
dom of life’s later years to see what life’s major issues are; and once
we grasp what they are, it is that much easier to make informed and
wise decisions of every kind. It is as a contribution to that end that
the authors offer this series of books to their younger fellow students.
We intend that each book will stand on its own while also contribut-
ing to the fuller picture provided by the whole series.
So we begin by laying out the issues at stake in an extended intro-
duction that overviews the fundamental questions to be asked, key
voices to be listened to, and why the meaning and nature of ultimate
reality matter to each one of us. For it is inevitable that each one of
us will, at some time and at some level, have to wrestle with the fun-
damental questions of our existence. Are we meant to be here, or is it
FINDING ULTIMATE REALITY
really by accident that we are? In what sense, if any, do we matter, or

are we simply rather insignificant specks inhabiting an insubstantial
corner of our galaxy? Is there a purpose in it all? And if indeed it does
matter, where would we find reliable answers to these questions?
In Book 1, Being Truly Human, we consider questions surround-
ing the value of humans. Besides thinking about human freedom
and the dangerous way it is often devalued, we consider the nature
and basis of morality and how other moralities compare with one
another. For any discussion of the freedom humans have to choose
raises the question of the power we wield over other humans and also
over nature, sometimes with disastrous consequences. What should
guide our use of power? What, if anything, should limit our choices,
and to what extent can our choices keep us from fulfilling our full
potential and destiny?
The realities of these issues bring before us another problem. It is
not the case that, having developed a worldview, life will unfold before
us automatically and with no new choices. Quite the opposite. All of
us from childhood onward are increasingly faced with the practical
necessity of making ethical decisions about right and wrong, fairness
and injustice, truth and falsity. Such decisions not only affect our in-
dividual relationships with people in our immediate circle: eventu-
ally they play their part in developing the social and moral tone of
each nation and, indeed, of the world. We need, therefore, all the help
we can get in learning how to make truly ethical decisions.
But ethical theory inevitably makes us ask what is the ultimate
authority behind ethics. Who or what has the authority to tell us: you
ought to do this, or you ought not to do that? If we cannot answer
that question satisfactorily, the ethical theory we are following lacks
a sufficiently solid and effective base. Ultimately, the answer to this
question unavoidably leads us to the wider philosophical question:
how are we related to the universe of which we form a part? What
is the nature of ultimate reality? Is there a creator who made us and
built into us our moral awareness, and requires us to live according
to his laws? Or, are human beings the product of mindless, amoral
forces that care nothing about ethics, so that as a human race we are
left to make up our own ethical rules as best we can, and try to get as
much general agreement to them as we can manage, either by per-
suasion or even, regretfully, by force?
xii
SERIES PREFACE
For this reason, we have devoted Book 2, Finding Ultimate Real-

ity, to a discussion of Ultimate Reality; and for comparison we have
selected views and beliefs drawn from various parts of the world and
from different centuries: the Indian philosophy of Shankara; the nat-
ural and moral philosophies of the ancient Greeks, with one exam-
ple of Greek mysticism; modern atheism and naturalism; and finally,
Christian theism.
The perusal of such widely differing views, however, naturally
provokes further questions: how can we know which of them, if any,
is true? And what is truth anyway? Is there such a thing as absolute
truth? And how should we recognise it, even if we encountered it?
That, of course, raises the fundamental question that affects not only
scientific and philosophical theories, but our day-to-day experience
as well: how do we know anything?
The part of philosophy that deals with these questions is known
as epistemology, and to it we devote Book 3, Questioning Our Knowl-
edge. Here we pay special attention to a theory that has found wide
popularity in recent times, namely, postmodernism. We pay close
attention to it, because if it were true (and we think it isn’t) it would
seriously affect not only ethics, but science and the interpretation of
literature.
When it comes to deciding what are the basic ethical principles
that all should universally follow we should observe that we are not
the first generation on earth to have thought about this question.
Book 4, Doing What’s Right, therefore, presents a selection of notable
but diverse ethical theories, so that we may profit from their insights
that are of permanent value; and, at the same time, discern what, if
any, are their weaknesses, or even fallacies.
But any serious consideration of humankind’s ethical behav-
iour will eventually raise another practical problem. As Aristotle ob-
served long ago, ethics can tell us what we ought to do; but by itself
it gives us no adequate power to do it. It is the indisputable fact that,
even when we know that something is ethically right and that it is
our duty to do it, we fail to do it; and contrariwise, when we know
something is wrong and should not be done, we nonetheless go and
do it. Why is that? Unless we can find an answer to this problem,
ethical theory—of whatever kind—will prove ultimately ineffective,
because it is impractical.
xiii
Therefore, it seemed to us that it would be seriously deficient

to deal with ethics simply as a philosophy that tells us what ethical
standards we ought to attain to in life. Our human plight is that, even
when we know that something is wrong, we go and do it anyway.
How can we overcome this universal weakness?
Jesus Christ, whose emphasis on ethical teaching is unmistaka-
ble, and in some respects unparalleled, nevertheless insisted that eth-
ical teaching is ineffective unless it is preceded by a spiritual rebirth
(see Gospel of John 3). But this brings us into the area of religion, and
many people find that difficult. What right has religion to talk about
ethics, they say, when religion has been the cause of so many wars,
and still leads to much violence? But the same is true of political phi-
losophies—and it does not stop us thinking about politics.
Then there are many religions, and they all claim to offer their
adherents help to fulfil their ethical duties. How can we know if they
are true, and that they offer real hope? It seems to us that, in order
to know whether the help a religion offers is real or not, one would
have to practise that religion and discover it by experience. We, the
authors of this book, are Christians, and we would regard it as im-
pertinent of us to try to describe what other religions mean to their
adherents. Therefore, in Book 5, Claiming to Answer, we confine our-
selves to stating why we think the claims of the Christian gospel are
valid, and the help it offers real.
However, talk of God raises an obvious and very poignant prob-
lem: how can there be a God who cares for justice, when, apparently,
he makes no attempt to put a stop to the injustices that ravage our
world? And how can it be thought that there is an all-loving, all-
powerful, and all-wise creator when so many people suffer such bad
things, inflicted on them not just by man’s cruelty but by natural
disasters and disease? These are certainly difficult questions. It is the
purpose of Book 6, Suffering Life’s Pain, to discuss these difficulties
and to consider possible solutions.
It only remains to point out that every section and subsection of
the book is provided with questions, both to help understanding of
the subject matter and to encourage the widest possible discussion
and debate.
David Gooding
John Lennox
xiv
ANALYTICAL OUTLINE
SERIES INTRODUCTION 1 CHAPTER 1. INDIAN PANTHEISTIC

MONISM: AN INDIAN SEARCH
The shaping of a worldview for a life full
FOR ULTIMATE REALITY 43
of choices 3
Historical introduction 45
Why we need a worldview 3
The difference between Brahman and
Asking the fundamental questions 9 Brahmā 48
First fundamental worldview
Shankara’s Advaita Vedanta philosophy 49
question: what lies behind the
observable universe? 12 An explanation 50
Second fundamental worldview Question 1 – Knowing this to be
question: how did our world come true 51
into existence, how has it developed, A difficulty with Shankara’s non-
and how has it come to be populated dualistic philosophy 53
with such an amazing variety Question 2 – Explaining the
of life? 13 particulars 54
Third fundamental worldview An appeal to science 56
question: what are human beings?
Where do their rationality and moral The danger of the fallacy
sense come from? what are their hopes of reductionism 57
for the future, and what, if anything, The supposed nature of Ultimate
happens to them after death? 14 Reality 58
The fundamental difference between Additional note: key promoters of Vedanta 59
the two groups of answers 15
Voices to be listened to 16
CHAPTER 2. GREEK PHILOSOPHY
The voice of intuition 17 AND MYSTICISM: AN INTELLECTUAL
The voice of science 18 SEARCH FOR ULTIMATE REALITY 61
The voice of philosophy 20 Ancient relevance 63
The voice of history 22 The chief significance of Greek philosophy 63
The voice of divine self-revelation 24
Precautionary observations 64
The meaning of reality 29
The search for what the world is made of 68
What is the nature of ultimate reality? 34
The search for how the universe works 69
Ourselves as individuals 34
The search for humanity’s purpose
Our status in the world 35
and goal 76
Our origin 36
Socrates (470–399 bc) 76
Our purpose 36
Humanity’s proper work and
Our search 38 virtue 77
Our aim 39 Socrates’ search for definitions 78
Socrates’ concept of ultimate The difficulties inherent in

reality 79 materialistic naturalism 110
Plato (c.428–347 bc) 80 The Ultimate Reality is energy 111
The question of motion 82 Another difficulty for materialistic
The form of ‘the Good’ 83 naturalism 113
Plato’s identification of ‘the Yet another difficulty for
Good’ 85 materialistic naturalism 113
Aristotle (384–322 bc) 86 Reactions to materialistic naturalism 114
Aristotle’s four causes 87 The Stoic concept of God 114

Aristotle’s idea of God 88 New naturalism’s concepts of
Aristotle’s theory of motion 89 God 117
Reflections on Aristotle’s concept The Cosmos takes the place of
of God 90 God 117
Ultimate Reality, or God, is a set of
Neoplatonic mysticism 92
very clever mathematical laws 118
Plotinus on reality 92 Davies’s own view 119
Plotinus’ argument for the On the origin of life 119
existence of the four levels of
reality 93 On the origin of the universe 120
The nature of ‘The One’ 93 On the possibility of divine
revelation 120
The relationship of ‘The One’ to
the universe 95 On a God who answers prayer 121
Plotinus’ mysticism 97 On the incarnation and
resurrection of Christ 121
Plotinus and the problem
of evil 100 A problem with intervention 121
Salvation according to Plotinus 101 The role of prejudice in the
decision whether to believe in God
Plotinus’ theory of re- or not 122
incarnation 102
Additional note: Neoplatonism’s long CHAPTER 4. CHRISTIAN THEISM:
reach 103 THE SEARCH FOR ULTIMATE REALITY
Islamic philosophers 103 IN GOD’S SELF-REVELATION 125
A Jewish Neoplatonic thinker 104 God is the ultimate reality and he can be
The influence of Plotinus’ mysticism known 127
on Christian thought 105 Obstacle 1: The essential limitation of
abstract human reasoning 127
CHAPTER 3. NATURALISM AND Obstacle 2: The incarnation has
ATHEISM: A SEARCH FOR ULTIMATE bridged a gulf that human reason by
REALITY IN NATURE ALONE 107 itself could never cross 127
Defining our terms 109
The difference between ‘being’ and
‘becoming’ (John 1:1–3) 130
Materialistic naturalism: ultimate reality is ‘The Word was with God and the
inanimate mindless matter 110 Word was God’ (John 1:1–2) 131
xvi
ANALYTICAL OUTLINE
God spoke at creation, and still APPENDIX. THE SCIENTIFIC

speaks through the created order ENDEAVOUR 145
(John 1:3–4) 133
The clear voice of science 147
God spoke all through earth’s
‘Dark Ages’ (John 1:5–9) 134 Scientific method 148
Through general revelation 134 Observation and

Through special revelation 134 experimentation 149
The preparatory function of the Data, patterns, relationships and

Law and the Prophets 135 hypotheses 149
The climax of the preparatory Induction 151
period 136 The role of deduction 154
God has spoken finally through Competing hypotheses can cover the
the incarnation of the Word (John same data 156
1:14–18) 136
Falsifiability 159
Ultimate Reality is personal 136
Repeatability and abduction 160
How we are related to Ultimate Reality 139
Explaining explanations 163
We are related to Ultimate Reality
Levels of explanation 163
as creatures to a Creator 139
God himself is our Creator 139
Reductionism 167
The human race is made in Basic operational presuppositions 169

the image and likeness of its Observation is dependent on
Creator 140 theory 172
We are created by God; we are Knowledge cannot be gained without
not emanations from God. God making certain assumptions to start
made the whole universe out of with 173
nothing 141
Gaining knowledge involves trusting
The relation of the universe to the our senses and other people 174
Son of God 142
Gaining scientific knowledge
We are related to God as subjects
involves belief in the rational
to a king 142
intelligibility of the universe 175
We are fallen creatures 143
Operating within the reigning
Arguments against Christian theism 143 paradigms 177
Epilogue 144 Further reading 179
xvii
FI N D I N G
U LT I M AT E R E A L I T Y
SERIES INTRODUCTION
Our worldview . . . includes our views,

however ill or well thought out, right or
wrong, about the hard yet fascinating
questions of existence and life: What am I
to make of the universe? Where did it come
from? Who am I? Where did I come from?
How do I know things? Do I have any
significance? Do I have any duty?
THE SHAPING OF A WORLDVIEW
FOR A LIFE FULL OF CHOICES
In this introductory section we are going to consider the need for

each one of us to construct his or her own worldview. We shall dis-
cuss what a worldview is and why it is necessary to form one; and we
shall enquire as to what voices we must listen to as we construct our
worldview. As we set out to examine how we understand the world,
we are also trying to discover whether we can know the ultimate truth
about reality. So each of the subjects in this series will bring us back
to the twin questions of what is real and why it matters whether we
know what is real. We will, therefore, need to ask as we conclude this
introductory section what we mean by ‘reality’ and then to ask: what
is the nature of ultimate reality? 1
WHY WE NEED A WORLDVIEW
There is a tendency in our modern world for education to become a

matter of increasing specialisation. The vast increase of knowledge
during the past century means that unless we specialise in this or that
topic it is very difficult to keep up with, and grasp the significance of,
the ever-increasing flood of new discoveries. In one sense this is to be
welcomed because it is the result of something that in itself is one of
the marvels of our modern world, namely, the fantastic progress of
science and technology.
But while that is so, it is good to remind ourselves that true edu-
cation has a much wider objective than this. If, for instance, we are to
understand the progress of our modern world, we must see it against
1 Please note this Introduction is the same for each book in the series, except for the final sec-
tion—Our Aim.
3
the background of the traditions we have inherited from the past and
that will mean that we need to have a good grasp of history.
Sometimes we forget that ancient philosophers faced and
thought deeply about the basic philosophical principles that underlie
all science and came up with answers from which we can still profit.
If we forget this, we might spend a lot of time and effort thinking
through the same problems and not coming up with as good answers
as they did.
Moreover, the role of education is surely to try and understand
how all the various fields of knowledge and experience in life fit to-
gether. To understand a grand painting one needs to see the picture
as a whole and understand the interrelationship of all its details and
not simply concentrate on one of its features.
Moreover, while we rightly insist on the objectivity of science we
must not forget that it is we who are doing the science. And therefore,
sooner or later, we must come to ask how we ourselves fit into the uni-
verse that we are studying. We must not allow ourselves to become
so engrossed in our material world and its related technologies that
we neglect our fellow human beings; for they, as we shall later see, are
more important than the rest of the universe put together.2 The study
of ourselves and our fellow human beings will, of course, take more
than a knowledge of science. It will involve the worlds of philosophy,
sociology, literature, art, music, history and much more besides.
Educationally, therefore, it is an important thing to remember—
and a thrilling thing to discover—the interrelation and the unity of
all knowledge. Take, for example, what it means to know what a rose
is: What is the truth about a rose?
To answer the question adequately, we shall have to consult a
whole array of people. First the scientists. We begin with the bota-
nists, who are constantly compiling and revising lists of all the known
plants and flowers in the world and then classifying them in terms of
families and groups. They help us to appreciate our rose by telling us
what family it belongs to and what are its distinctive features.
Next, the plant breeders and gardeners will inform us of the his-
tory of our particular rose, how it was bred from other kinds, and the
conditions under which its sort can best be cultivated.
2 Especially in Book 1 of this series, Being Truly Human.
4
SERIES INTRODUCTION
FIGURE I.1. A Rose.

In William Shakespeare’s play Romeo
and Juliet, the beloved dismisses the fact
that her lover is from the rival house of
Montague, invoking the beauty of one
of the best known and most favourite
flowers in the world: ‘What’s in a name?
that which we call a rose / By any other
name would smell as sweet’.
Reproduced with permission of ©iStock/OGphoto.
Then, the chemists, biochemists, biologists and geneticists will tell

us about the chemical and biochemical constituents of our rose and
the bewildering complexities of its cells, those micro-miniaturised
factories which embody mechanisms more complicated than any
built by human beings, and yet so tiny that we need highly special-
ised equipment to see them. They will tell us about the vast coded
database of genetic information which the cell factories use in order
to produce the building blocks of the rose. They will describe, among
a host of other things, the processes by which the rose lives: how it
photosynthesises sunlight into sugar-borne energy and the mecha-
nisms by which it is pollinated and propagated.
After that, the physicists and cosmologists will tell us that the
chemicals of which our rose is composed are made up of atoms
which themselves are built from various particles like electrons, pro-
tons and neutrons. They will give us their account of where the basic
material in the universe comes from and how it was formed. If we
ask how such knowledge helps us to understand roses, the cosmolo-
gists may well point out that our earth is the only planet in our solar
system that is able to grow roses! In that respect, as in a multitude of
other respects, our planet is very special—and that is surely some-
thing to be wondered at.
But when the botanists, plant breeders, gardeners, chemists, bio-
chemists, physicists and cosmologists have told us all they can, and
it is a great deal which would fill many volumes, even then many
of us will feel that they will scarcely have begun to tell us the truth
5
about roses. Indeed, they have not explained what perhaps most of
us would think is the most important thing about roses: the beauty
of their form, colour and fragrance.
Now here is a very significant thing: scientists can explain the as-
tonishing complexity of the mechanisms which lie behind our senses
of vision and smell that enable us to see roses and detect their scent.
But we don’t need to ask the scientists whether we ought to consider
roses beautiful or not: we can see and smell that for ourselves! We
perceive this by intuition. We just look at the rose and we can at once
see that it is beautiful. We do not need anyone to tell us that it is
beautiful. If anyone were so foolish as to suggest that because science
cannot measure beauty, therefore beauty does not exist, we should
simply say: ‘Don’t be silly.’
But the perception of beauty does not rest on our own intuition
alone. We could also consult the artists. With their highly developed
sense of colour, light and form, they will help us to perceive a depth
and intensity of beauty in a rose that otherwise we might miss. They
can educate our eyes.
Likewise, there are the poets. They, with their finely honed abil-
ity as word artists, will use imagery, metaphor, allusion, rhythm and
rhyme to help us formulate and articulate the feelings we experience
when we look at roses, feelings that otherwise might remain vague
and difficult to express.
Finally, if we wanted to pursue this matter of the beauty of a
rose deeper still, we could talk to the philosophers, especially experts
in aesthetics. For each of us, perceiving that a rose is beautiful is a
highly subjective experience, something that we see and feel at a deep
level inside ourselves. Nevertheless, when we show a rose to other
people, we expect them too to agree that it is beautiful. They usually
have no difficulty in doing so.
From this it would seem that, though the appreciation of beauty
is a highly subjective experience, yet we observe:
1. there are some objective criteria for deciding what is beauti-
ful and what is not;
2. there is in each person an inbuilt aesthetic sense, a capacity
for perceiving beauty; and
3. where some people cannot, or will not, see beauty, in, say,
6
SERIES INTRODUCTION
a rose, or will even prefer ugliness, it must be that their in-

ternal capacity for seeing beauty is defective or damaged in
some way, as, for instance, by colour blindness or defective
shape recognition, or through some psychological disorder
(like, for instance, people who revel in cruelty, rather than
in kindness).
Now by this time we may think that we have exhausted the truth
about roses; but of course we haven’t. We have thought about the
scientific explanation of roses. We have then considered the value we
place on them, their beauty and what they mean to us. But precisely
because they have meaning and value, they raise another group of
questions about the moral, ethical and eventually spiritual signifi-
cance of what we do with them. Consider, for instance, the following
situations:
First, a woman has used what little spare money she had to buy
some roses. She likes roses intensely and wants to keep them as long
as she can. But a poor neighbour of hers is sick, and she gets a strong
feeling that she ought to give at least some of these roses to her sick
neighbour. So now she has two conflicting instincts within her:
1. an instinct of self-interest: a strong desire to keep the roses
for herself, and
2. an instinctive sense of duty: she ought to love her neighbour
as herself, and therefore give her roses to her neighbour.
Questions arise. Where do these instincts come from? And how
shall she decide between them? Some might argue that her selfish
desire to keep the roses is simply the expression of the blind, but
powerful, basic driving force of evolution: self-propagation. But the
altruistic sense of duty to help her neighbour at the expense of loss
to herself—where does that come from? Why ought she to obey it?
She has a further problem: she must decide one way or the other. She
cannot wait for scientists or philosophers, or indeed anyone else, to
help her. She has to commit herself to some course of action. How
and on what grounds should she decide between the two competing
urges?
Second, a man likes roses, but he has no money to buy them.
He sees that he could steal roses from someone else’s garden in such
7
a way that he could be certain that he would never be found out.

Would it be wrong to steal them? If neither the owner of the roses,
nor the police, nor the courts would ever find out that he stole them,
why shouldn’t he steal them? Who has the right to say that it is wrong
to steal?
Third, a man repeatedly gives bunches of roses to a woman
whose husband is abroad on business. The suspicion is that he is giv-
ing her roses in order to tempt her to be disloyal to her husband. That
would be adultery. Is adultery wrong? Always wrong? Who has the
right to say so?
Now to answer questions like these in the first, second, and third
situations thoroughly and adequately we must ask and answer the
most fundamental questions that we can ask about roses (and indeed
about anything else).
Where do roses come from? We human beings did not create
them (and are still far from being able to create anything like them).
Is there a God who designed and created them? Is he their ultimate
owner, who has the right to lay down the rules as to how we should
use them?
Or did roses simply evolve out of eternally existing inorganic
matter, without any plan or purpose behind them, and without any
ultimate owner to lay down the rules as to how they ought to be used?
And if so, is the individual himself free to do what he likes, so long
as no one finds out?
So far, then, we have been answering the simple question ‘What
is the truth about a rose?’ and we have found that to answer it ad-
equately we have had to draw on, not one source of knowledge, like
science or literature, but on many. Even the consideration of roses
has led to deep and fundamental questions about the world beyond
the roses.
It is our answers to these questions which combine to shape the
framework into which we fit all of our knowledge of other things.
That framework, which consists of those ideas, conscious or uncon-
scious, which all of us have about the basic nature of the world and
of ourselves and of society, is called our worldview. It includes our
views, however ill or well thought out, right or wrong, about the hard
yet fascinating questions of existence and life: What am I to make of
the universe? Where did it come from? Who am I? Where did I come
8
SERIES INTRODUCTION
from? How do I know things? Do I

have any significance? Do I have any Our worldview is the big picture
duty? Our worldview is the big pic- into which we fit everything else. It
ture into which we fit everything else. is the lens through which we look
It is the lens through which we look to try to make sense of the world.
to try to make sense of the world.
ASKING THE FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS
‘He who will succeed’, said Aristotle, ‘must ask the right questions’;
and so, when it comes to forming a worldview, must we.
It is at least comforting to know that we are not the first people to
have asked such questions. Many others have done so in the past (and
continue to do so in the present). That means they have done some
of the work for us! In order to profit from their thinking and experi-
ence, it will be helpful for us to collect some of those fundamental
questions which have been and are on practically everybody’s list.
We shall then ask why these particular questions have been thought
to be important. After that we shall briefly survey some of the varied
answers that have been given, before we tackle the task of forming
our own answers. So let’s get down to compiling a list of ‘worldview
questions’. First of all there are questions about the universe in gen-
eral and about our home planet Earth in particular.
The Greeks were the first people in Europe to ask scientific ques-
tions about what the earth and the universe are made of, and how
they work. It would appear that they asked their questions for no
other reason than sheer intellectual curiosity. Their research was, as
we would nowadays describe it, disinterested. They were not at first
concerned with any technology that might result from it. Theirs was
pure, not applied, science. We pause to point out that it is still a very
healthy thing for any educational system to maintain a place for pure
science in its curriculum and to foster an attitude of intellectual cu-
riosity for its own sake.
But we cannot afford to limit ourselves to pure science (and even
less to technology, marvellous though it is). Centuries ago Socrates
perceived that. He was initially curious about the universe, but grad-
ually came to feel that studying how human beings ought to behave
9
10
SERIES INTRODUCTION
FIGURE I.2. The School of Athens by Raphael.

Italian Renaissance artist Raphael
likely painted the fresco Scuola
di Atene (The School of Athens),
representing Philosophy, between
1509 and 1511 for the Vatican.
Many interpreters believe the
hand gestures of the central fig-
ures, Plato and Aristotle, and the
books each is holding respec-
tively, Timaeus and Nicomachean
Ethics, indicate two approaches
to metaphysics. A number of other
great ancient Greek philoso-
phers are featured by Raphael in
this painting, including Socrates
(eighth figure to the left of Plato).
Reproduced from Wikimedia Commons.
11
was far more important than finding out what the moon was made
of. He therefore abandoned physics and immersed himself in moral
philosophy.
On the other hand, the leaders of the major philosophical schools
in ancient Greece came to see that you could not form an adequate
doctrine of human moral behaviour without understanding how hu-
man beings are related both to their cosmic environment and to the
powers and principles that control the universe. In this they were
surely right, which brings us to what was and still is the first funda-
mental question.3
First fundamental worldview question
What lies behind the observable universe? Physics has taught us that
things are not quite what they seem to be. A wooden table, which
looks solid, turns out to be composed of atoms bound together by
powerful forces which operate in the otherwise empty space between
them. Each atom turns out also to be mostly empty space and can be
modelled from one point of view as a nucleus surrounded by orbit-
ing electrons. The nucleus only occupies about one billionth of the
space of the atom. Split the nucleus and we find protons and neutrons.
They turn out to be composed of even stranger quarks and gluons.
Are these the basic building blocks of matter, or are there other even
more mysterious elementary building blocks to be found? That is one
of the exciting quests of modern physics. And even as the search goes
on, another question keeps nagging: what lies behind basic matter
anyway?
The answers that are given to this question fall roughly into two
groups: those that suggest that there is nothing ‘behind’ the basic
matter of the universe, and those that maintain that there certainly
is something.
Group A. There is nothing but matter. It is the prime reality, being

self-existent and eternal. It is not dependent on anything
or on anyone. It is blind and purposeless; nevertheless it
has within it the power to develop and organise itself—
3 See Book 4: Doing What’s Right.
12
SERIES INTRODUCTION
still blindly and purposelessly—into all the variety of mat-

ter and life that we see in the universe today. This is the
philosophy of materialism.
Group B. Behind matter, which had a beginning, stands some un-

created self-existent, creative Intelligence; or, as Jews and
Muslims would say, God; and Christians, the God and Fa-
ther of the Lord Jesus Christ. This God upholds the uni-
verse, interacts with it, but is not part of it. He is spirit, not
matter. The universe exists as an expression of his mind
and for the purpose of fulfilling his will. This is the phi-
losophy of theism.
Second fundamental worldview question
This leads us to our second fundamental worldview question, which

is in three parts: how did our world come into existence, how has it
developed, and how has it come to be populated with such an amazing
variety of life?
Again, answers to these questions tend to fall into two groups:
Group A. Inanimate matter itself, without any antecedent design or

purpose, formed into that conglomerate which became
the earth and then in some way (not yet observed or un-
derstood) as a result of its own inherent properties and
powers by spontaneous generation spawned life. The ini-
tial lowly life forms then gradually evolved into the pres-
ent vast variety of life through the natural processes of
mutation and natural selection, mechanisms likewise
without any design or purpose. There is, therefore, no ul-
timate rational purpose behind either the existence of the
universe, or of earth and its inhabitants.
Group B. The universe, the solar system and planet Earth have been
designed and precision engineered to make it possible for
life to exist on earth. The astonishing complexity of living
systems, and the awesome sophistication of their mecha-
nisms, point in the same direction.
13
It is not difficult to see what different implications the two radi-

cally different views have for human significance and behaviour.
Third fundamental worldview question
The third fundamental worldview question comes, again, as a set of

related questions with the answers commonly given to central ideas
falling into two groups: What are human beings? Where do their ration-
ality and moral sense come from? What are their hopes for the future,
and what, if anything, happens to them after death?
Group A. Human nature. Human beings are nothing but matter. They
have no spirit and their powers of rational thought have
arisen out of mindless matter by non-rational processes.
Morality. Man’s sense of morality and duty arise solely out
of social interactions between him and his fellow humans.
Human rights. Human beings have no inherent, natural
rights, but only those that are granted by society or the
government of the day.
Purpose in life. Man makes his own purpose.
The future. The utopia dreamed of and longed for will be
brought about, either by the irresistible outworking of the
forces inherent in matter and/or history; or, alternatively,
as human beings learn to direct and control the biological
processes of evolution itself.
Death and beyond. Death for each individual means total
extinction. Nothing survives.
Group B. Human nature. Human beings are created by God, in-

deed in the image of God (according, at least, to Judaism,
Christianity and Islam). Human beings’ powers of ration-
ality are derived from the divine ‘Logos’ through whom
they were created.
Morality. Their moral sense arises from certain ‘laws of
God’ implanted in them by their Creator.
14
SERIES INTRODUCTION
Human rights. They have certain inalienable rights which

all other human beings and governments must respect,
simply because they are creatures of God, created in God’s
image.
Purpose in life. Their main purpose in life is to enjoy fel-
lowship with God and to serve God, and likewise to serve
their fellow creatures for their Creator’s sake.
The future. The utopia they long for is not a dream, but a
sure hope based on the Creator’s plan for the redemption
of humankind and of the world.
Death and beyond. Death does not mean extinction. Hu-
man beings, after death, will be held accountable to God.
Their ultimate state will eventually be, either to be with
God in total fellowship in heaven; or to be excluded from
his presence.
These, very broadly speaking, are the questions that people have
asked through the whole of recorded history, and a brief survey of
some of the answers that have been, and still are, given to them.
The fundamental difference between the two groups of answers
Now it is obvious that the two groups of answers given above are dia-
metrically opposed; but we ought to pause here to make sure that we
have understood what exactly the nature and cause of the opposition
is. If we were not thinking carefully, we might jump to the conclusion
that the answers in the A-groups are those given by science, while the
answers in the B-groups are those given by religion. But that would
be a fundamental misunderstanding of the situation. It is true that
the majority of scientists today would agree with the answers given in
the A-groups; but there is a growing number of scientists who would
agree with the answers given in the B-groups. It is not therefore a con-
flict between science and religion. It is a difference in the basic phi-
losophies which determine the interpretation of the evidence which
science provides. Atheists will interpret that evidence in one way;
theists (or pantheists) will interpret it in another.
This is understandable. No scientist comes to the task of doing
15
research with a mind completely free of presuppositions. The atheist

does research on the presupposition that there is no God. That is his
basic philosophy, his worldview. He claims that he can explain every-
thing without God. He will sometimes say that he cannot imagine
what kind of scientific evidence there could possibly be for the exist-
ence of God; and not surprisingly he tends not to find any.
The theist, on the other hand, starts by believing in God and finds
in his scientific discoveries abundant—overwhelming, he would
say—evidence of God’s hand in the sophisti-
cated design and mechanisms of the universe.
We pick up ideas, It all comes down, then, to the impor-
beliefs and attitudes from tance of recognising what worldview we start
our family and society, with. Some of us, who have never yet thought
often without realising deeply about these things, may feel that we
that we have done so, have no worldview, and that we come to life’s
and without recognising questions in general, and science in particu-
how these largely lar, with a completely open mind. But that is
unconscious influences unlikely to be so. We pick up ideas, beliefs and
and presuppositions attitudes from our family and society, often
control our reactions to without realising that we have done so, and
the questions with which without recognising how these largely uncon-
life faces us. scious influences and presuppositions control
our reactions to the questions with which life
faces us. Hence the importance of consciously
thinking through our worldview and of adjusting it where necessary
to take account of the evidence available.
In that process, then, we certainly must listen to science and al-
low it to critique where necessary and to amend our presuppositions.
But to form an adequate worldview we shall need to listen to many
other voices as well.
VOICES TO BE LISTENED TO
So far, then, we have been surveying some worldview questions and

various answers that have been, and still are, given to them. Now we
must face these questions ourselves, and begin to come to our own
decisions about them.
16
SERIES INTRODUCTION
Our worldview must be our own, in the sense that we have per-
sonally thought it through and adopted it of our own free will. No
one has the right to impose his or her worldview on us by force. The
days are rightly gone when the church could force Galileo to deny
what science had plainly taught him. Gone, too, for the most part,
are the days when the State could force an atheistic worldview on
people on pain of prison and even death. Human rights demand that
people should be free to hold and to propagate by reasoned argument
whatever worldview they believe in—so long, of course, that their
view does not injure other people. We, the authors of this book, hold
a theistic worldview. But we shall not attempt to force our view down
anybody’s throat. We come from a tradition whose basic principle is
‘Let everyone be persuaded in his own mind.’
So we must all make up our own minds and form our own world-
view. In the process of doing so there are a number of voices that we
must listen to.
The voice of intuition
The first voice we must listen to is intuition. There are things in life
that we see and know, not as the result of lengthy philosophical rea-
soning, nor as a result of rigorous scientific experimentation, but by
direct, instinctive intuition. We ‘see’ that a rose is beautiful. We in-
stinctively ‘know’ that child abuse is wrong. A scientist can some-
times ‘see’ what the solution to a problem is going to be even before
he has worked out the scientific technique that will eventually provide
formal proof of it.
A few scientists and philosophers still try to persuade us that the
laws of cause and effect operating in the human brain are completely
deterministic so that our decisions are predetermined: real choice is
not possible. But, say what they will, we ourselves intuitively know
that we do have the ability to make a free choice, whether, say, to read
a book, or to go for a walk, whether to tell the truth or to tell a lie. We
know we are free to take either course of action, and everyone else
knows it too, and acts accordingly. This freedom is such a part of our
innate concept of human dignity and value that we (for the most part)
insist on being treated as responsible human beings and on treating
others as such. For that reason, if we commit a crime, the magistrate
17
will first enquire (a) if, when we committed the crime, we knew we
were doing wrong; and (b) whether or not we were acting under du-
ress. The answer to these questions will determine the verdict.
We must, therefore, give due attention to intuition, and not allow
ourselves to be persuaded by pseudo-intellectual arguments to deny
(or affirm) what we intuitively know to be true (or false).
On the other hand, intuition has its limits. It can be mistaken.
When ancient scientists first suggested that the world was a sphere,
even some otherwise great thinkers rejected the idea. They intui-
tively felt that it was absurd to think that there were human beings
on the opposite side of the earth to us, walking ‘upside-down’, their
feet pointed towards our feet (hence the term ‘antipodean’) and their
heads hanging perilously down into empty space! But intuition had
misled them. The scientists who believed in a spherical earth were
right, intuition was wrong.
The lesson is that we need both intuition and science, acting as
checks and balances, the one on the other.
The voice of science
Science speaks to our modern world with a very powerful and au-
thoritative voice. It can proudly point to a string of scintillating theo-
retical breakthroughs which have spawned an almost endless array of
technological spin-offs: from the invention of the light bulb to virtual-
reality environments; from the wheel to the moon-landing vehicle;
from the discovery of aspirin and antibiotics to the cracking of the
genetic code; from the vacuum cleaner to the smartphone; from the
abacus to the parallel computer; from the bicycle to the self-driving
car. The benefits that come from these achievements of science are
self-evident, and they both excite our admiration and give to science
an immense credibility.
Yet for many people the voice of science has a certain ambiva-
lence about it, for the achievements of science are not invariably used
for the good of humanity. Indeed, in the past century science has
produced the most hideously efficient weapons of destruction that
the world has ever seen. The laser that is used to restore vision to the
eye can be used to guide missiles with deadly efficiency. This devel-
opment has led in recent times to a strong anti-scientific reaction.
18
SERIES INTRODUCTION
This is understandable; but we need to guard against the obvious fal-

lacy of blaming science for the misuse made of its discoveries. The
blame for the devastation caused by the atomic bomb, for instance,
does not chiefly lie with the scientists who discovered the possibility
of atomic fission and fusion, but with the politicians who for rea-
sons of global conquest insisted on the discoveries being used for the
making of weapons of mass destruction.
Science, in itself, is morally neutral. Indeed, as scientists who are
Christians would say, it is a form of the worship of God through the
reverent study of his handiwork and is by all means to be encouraged.
It is for that reason that James Clerk Maxwell, the nineteenth-century
Scottish physicist who discovered the famous equations governing
electromagnetic waves which are now called after him, put the fol-
lowing quotation from the Hebrew Psalms above the door of the Cav-
endish Laboratory in Cambridge where it still stands: ‘The works of
the Lord are great, sought out of all them that have pleasure therein’
(Ps 111:2).
We must distinguish, of course, between science as a method of
investigation and individual scientists who actually do the investi-
gation. We must also distinguish between the facts which they es-
tablish beyond (reasonable) doubt and the tentative hypotheses and
theories which they construct on the basis of their
initial observations and experiments, and which
they use to guide their subsequent research. Scientists sometimes
These distinctions are important because sci- mistake their tentative
entists sometimes mistake their tentative theories theories for proven
for proven fact, and in their teaching of students fact, and in their
and in their public lectures promulgate as estab- teaching of students
lished fact what has never actually been proved. It and in their public
can also happen that scientists advance a tentative lectures promulgate
theory which catches the attention of the media as established fact
who then put it across to the public with so much what has never ac-
hype that the impression is given that the theory tually been proved.
has been established beyond question.
Then again, we need to remember the proper
limits of science. As we discovered when talking about the beauty of
roses, there are things which science, strictly so called, cannot and
should not be expected to explain.
19
Sometimes some scientists forget this, and damage the reputa-

tion of science by making wildly exaggerated claims for it. The fa-
mous mathematician and philosopher Bertrand Russell, for instance,
once wrote: ‘Whatever knowledge is attainable, must be attained by
scientific methods; and what science cannot discover, mankind can-
not know.’ 4 Nobel laureate Sir Peter Medawar had a saner and more
realistic view of science. He wrote:
There is no quicker way for a scientist to bring discredit upon
himself and on his profession than roundly to declare—particu-
larly when no declaration of any kind is called for—that science
knows or soon will know the answers to all questions worth ask-
ing, and that the questions that do not admit a scientific answer
are in some way nonquestions or ‘pseudoquestions’ that only
simpletons ask and only the gullible profess to be able to answer.5
Medawar says elsewhere: ‘The existence of a limit to science is,
however, made clear by its inability to answer childlike elementary
questions having to do with first and last things—questions such as
“How did everything begin?”; “What are we all here for?”; “What is
the point of living?” ’ He adds that it is to imaginative literature and
religion that we must turn for answers to such questions.6
However, when we have said all that should be said about the
limits of science, the voice of science is still one of the most impor-
tant voices to which we must listen in forming our worldview. We
cannot, of course, all be experts in science. But when the experts re-
port their findings to students in other disciplines or to the general
public, as they increasingly do, we all must listen to them; listen as
critically as we listen to experts in other fields. But we must listen.7
The voice of philosophy
The next voice we must listen to is the voice of philosophy. To some

people the very thought of philosophy is daunting; but actually any-
4 Russell, Religion and Science, 243.

5 Medawar, Advice to a Young Scientist, 31.
6 Medawar, Limits of Science, 59–60.
7 Those who wish to study the topic further are directed to the Appendix in this book: ‘The
Scientific Endeavour’, and to the books by John Lennox noted there.
20
SERIES INTRODUCTION
one who seriously attempts to investigate the truth of any statement

is already thinking philosophically. Eminent philosopher Anthony
Kenny writes:
Philosophy is exciting because it is the broadest of all disci-
plines, exploring the basic concepts which run through all our
talking and thinking on any topic whatever. Moreover, it can
be undertaken without any special preliminary training or in-
struction; anyone can do philosophy who is willing to think
hard and follow a line of reasoning.8
Whether we realise it or not, the way we think and reason owes a
great deal to philosophy—we have already listened to its voice!
Philosophy has a number of very positive benefits to confer on
us. First and foremost is the shining example of men and women
who have refused to go through life unthinkingly adopting whatever
happened to be the majority view at the time. Socrates said that the
unexamined life is not worth living. These men and women were de-
termined to use all their intellectual powers to try to understand what
the universe was made of, how it worked, what man’s place in it was,
what the essence of human nature was, why we human beings so fre-
quently do wrong and so damage ourselves and society; what could
help us to avoid doing wrong; and what our chief goal in life should
be, our summum bonum (Latin for ‘chief good’). Their zeal to dis-
cover the truth and then to live by it should encourage—perhaps even
shame—us to follow their example.
Secondly, it was in their search for the truth that philosophers
from Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle onwards discovered the need for,
and the rules of, rigorous logical thinking. The benefit of this to hu-
manity is incalculable, in that it enables us to learn to think straight,
to expose the presuppositions that lie sometimes unnoticed behind
even our scientific experiments and theories, to unpick the assump-
tions that lurk in the formulation and expressions of our opinions, to
point to fallacies in our argumentation, to detect instances of circu-
lar reasoning, and so on.
However, philosophy, just like science, has its proper limits. It
cannot tell us what axioms or fundamental assumptions we should
8 Kenny, Brief History of Western Philosophy, xi.
21
adopt; but it can and will help us to see if the belief system which we
build on those axioms is logically consistent.
There is yet a third benefit to be gained from philosophy. The his-
tory of philosophy shows that, of all the many different philosophical
systems, or worldviews, that have been built up by rigorous philoso-
phers on the basis of human reasoning alone, none has proved con-
vincing to all other philosophers, let alone to the general public. None
has achieved permanence, a fact which can seem very frustrating.
But perhaps the frustration is not altogether bad in that it might lead
us to ask whether there could just be another source of information
without which human reason alone is by definition inadequate. And
if our very frustration with philosophy for having seemed at first to
promise so much satisfaction, and then in the end to have delivered
so little, disposes us to look around for that other source of informa-
tion, even our frustration could turn out to be a supreme benefit.
The voice of history
Yet another voice to which we must listen is the voice of history. We

are fortunate indeed to be living so far on in the course of human
history as we do. Already in the first century ad a simple form of jet
propulsion was described by Hero of Alexandria. But technology at
that time knew no means of harnessing that discovery to any worth-
while practical purpose. Eighteen hundred years were to pass before
scientists discovered a way of making jet engines powerful enough to
be fitted to aircraft.
When in the 1950s and 1960s scientists, working on the basis of
a discovery of Albert Einstein’s, argued that it would be possible to
make laser beams, and then actually made them, many people mock-
ingly said that lasers were a solution to a non-existent problem, be-
cause no one could think of a practical use to which they could be
put. History has proved the critics wrong and justified the pure sci-
entists (if pure science needs any justification!).
In other cases history has taught the opposite lesson. At one point
the phlogiston theory of combustion came to be almost universally
accepted. History eventually proved it wrong.
Fanatical religious sects (in spite, be it said, of the explicit prohi-
bition of the Bible) have from time to time predicted that the end of
22
SERIES INTRODUCTION
the world would take place at such-and-such a time in such-and-such

a place. History has invariably proved them wrong.
In the last century, the philosophical system known as logi-
cal positivism arose like a meteor and seemed set to dominate the
philosophical landscape, superseding all other systems. But history
discovered its fatal flaw, namely that it was based on a verification
principle which allowed only two kinds of meaningful statement: an-
alytic (a statement which is true by definition, that is a tautology like
‘a vixen is a female fox’), or synthetic (a statement which is capable of
verification by experiment, like ‘water is composed of hydrogen and
oxygen’). Thus all metaphysical statements were dismissed as mean-
ingless! But, as philosopher Karl Popper famously pointed out, the
Verification Principle itself is neither analytic nor synthetic and so is
meaningless! Logical positivism is therefore self-refuting. Professor
Nicholas Fotion, in his article on the topic in The Oxford Compan-
ion to Philosophy, says: ‘By the late 1960s it became obvious that the
movement had pretty much run its course.’ 9
Earlier still, Marx, basing himself on Hegel, applied his dialec-
tical materialism first to matter and then to history. He claimed to
have discovered a law in the workings of social and political history
that would irresistibly lead to the establishment of a utopia on earth;
and millions gave their lives to help forward this process. The verdict
has been that history seems not to know any such irresistible law.
History has also delivered a devastating verdict on the Nazi the-
ory of the supremacy of the Aryan races, which, it was promised,
would lead to a new world order.
History, then, is a very valuable, if sometimes very disconcerting,
adjudicator of our ideas and systems of thought. We should certainly
pay serious heed to its lessons and be grateful for them.
But there is another reason why we should listen to history. It in-
troduces us to the men and women who have proved to be world lead-
ers of thought and whose influence is still a live force among us today.
Among them, of course, is Jesus Christ. He was rejected, as we know,
by his contemporaries and executed. But, then, so was Socrates. Soc-
rates’ influence has lived on; but Christ’s influence has been and still
is infinitely greater than that of Socrates, or of any other world leader.
9 Fotion, ‘Logical Positivism’.
23
It would be very strange if we listened, as we do, to Socrates, Plato,

Aristotle, Hume, Kant, Marx and Einstein, and neglected or refused
to listen to Christ. The numerous (and some very early) manuscripts
of the New Testament make available to us
an authentic record of his teaching. Only ex-
History introduces us to treme prejudice would dismiss him without
the men and women first listening to what he says.
who have proved to be
world leaders of thought The voice of divine self-revelation
and whose influence is
still a live force among The final voice that claims the right to be
us today. . . . It would heard is a voice which runs persistently
be very strange if we through history and refuses to be silenced in
listened, as we do, to claiming that there is another source of in-
Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, formation beyond that which intuition, sci-
Hume, Kant, Marx and entific research and philosophical reasoning
Einstein, and neglected or can provide. That voice is the voice of divine
refused to listen to Christ. self-revelation. The claim is that the Creator,
whose existence and power can be intuitively
perceived through his created works, has not
otherwise remained silent and aloof. In the course of the centuries
he has spoken into our world through his prophets and supremely
through Jesus Christ.
Of course, atheists will say that for them this claim seems to be
the stuff of fairy tales; and atheistic scientists will object that there
is no scientific evidence for the existence of a creator (indeed, they
may well claim that assuming the existence of a creator destroys the
foundation of true scientific methodology—for more of that see this
book’s Appendix); and that, therefore, the idea that we could have
direct information from the creator himself is conceptually absurd.
This reaction is, of course, perfectly consistent with the basic as-
sumption of atheism.
However, apparent conceptual absurdity is not proof positive
that something is not possible, or even true. Remember what we no-
ticed earlier, that many leading thinkers, when they first encountered
the suggestion that the earth was not flat but spherical, rejected it out
of hand because of the conceptual absurdities to which they imag-
ined it led.
24
SERIES INTRODUCTION
In the second century ad a certain Lucian of Samosata decided

to debunk what he thought to be fanciful speculations of the early
scientists and the grotesque traveller’s tales of so-called explorers. He
wrote a book which, with his tongue in his cheek, he called Vera his-
toria (A True Story). In it he told how he had travelled through space
to the moon. He discovered that the moon-dwellers had a special
kind of mirror by means of which they could see what people were
doing on earth. They also possessed something like a well shaft by
means of which they could even hear what people on earth were say-
ing. His prose was sober enough, as if he were writing factual history.
But he expected his readers to see that the very conceptual absurdity
of what he claimed to have seen meant that these things were impos-
sible and would forever remain so.
Unknown to him, however, the forces and materials already
existed in nature, which, when mankind learned to harness them,
would send some astronauts into orbit round the moon, land others
on the moon, and make possible radio and television communica-
tion between the moon and the earth!
We should remember, too, that atomic radiation and radio fre-
quency emissions from distant galaxies were not invented by scien-
tists in recent decades. They were there all the time, though invisible
and undetected and not believed in nor even thought of for centuries;
but they were not discovered until comparatively recent times, when
brilliant scientists conceived the possibility that, against all popular
expectation, such phenomena might exist. They looked for them, and
found them.
Is it then, after all, so conceptually absurd to think that our hu-
man intellect and rationality come not from mindless matter through
the agency of impersonal unthinking forces, but from a higher per-
sonal intellect and reason?
An old, but still valid, analogy will help us at this point. If we ask
about a particular motor car: ‘Where did this motor car begin?’ one
answer would be: ‘It began on the production lines of such-and-such
a factory and was put together by humans and robots.’
Another, deeper-level, answer would be: ‘It had its beginning in
the mineral from which its constituent parts were made.’
But in the prime sense of beginning, the motor car, of which
this particular motor car is a specimen, had its beginning, not in the
25
factory, nor in its basic materials, but in something altogether dif-

ferent: in the intelligent mind of a person, that is, of its inventor. We
know this, of course, by history and by experience; but we also know
it intuitively: it is self-evidently true.
Millions of people likewise have felt, and still do feel, that what
Christ and his prophets say about the ‘beginning’ of our human ra-
tionality is similarly self-evidently true: ‘In the beginning was the
Logos, and the Logos was with God, and the Logos was God. . . . All
things were made by him . . .’ (John 1:1–2, our trans.). That is, at any
rate, a far more likely story than that our human intelligence and
rationality sprang originally out of mindless matter, by accidental
permutations, selected by unthinking nature.
Now the term ‘Logos’ means both rationality and the expression
of that rationality through intelligible communication. If that ra-
tional intelligence is God and personal, and we humans are endowed
by him with personhood and intelligence, then it is far from being ab-
surd to think that the divine Logos, whose very nature and function it
is to be the expression and communicator of that intelligence, should
communicate with us. On the contrary, to deny a priori the possibil-
ity of divine revelation and to shut one’s ears in advance to what Jesus
Christ has to say, before listening to his teaching to see if it is, or is
not, self-evidently true, is not the true scientific attitude, which is to
keep an open mind and explore any reasonable avenue to truth.10
Moreover, the fear that to assume the existence of a creator God
would undermine true scientific methodology is contradicted by
the sheer facts of history. Sir Francis Bacon (1561–1626), widely re-
garded as the father of the modern scientific method, believed that
God had revealed himself in two great Books, the Book of Nature
and the Book of God’s Word, the Bible. In his famous Advancement
of Learning (1605), Bacon wrote: ‘Let no man . . . think or maintain,
that a man can search too far, or be too well studied in the book of
God’s word, or in the book of God’s works; divinity or philosophy;
but rather let men endeavour an endless progress or proficience in
both.’ 11 It is this quotation which Charles Darwin chose to put at the
front of On the Origin of Species (1859).
10 For the fuller treatment of these questions and related topics, see Book 5 in this series,
Claiming to Answer.
11 Bacon, Advancement of Learning, 8.
26
SERIES INTRODUCTION
FIGURE I.3.
On the Origin of Species (1859)
by Charles Darwin.
One of the book epigraphs
Charles Darwin selected for
his magnum opus is from
Francis Bacon’s Advancement
of Learning (1605).
Reproduced from Dennis O’Neil.
Historians of science point out that it was this theistic ‘Two-

Book’ view which was largely responsible for the meteoric rise of
science beginning in the sixteenth century. C. S. Lewis refers to a
statement by one of the most eminent historians of all time, Sir Al-
fred North Whitehead, and says: ‘Professor Whitehead points out
that centuries of belief in a God who combined “the personal en-
ergy of Jehovah” with “the rationality of a Greek philosopher” first
produced that firm expectation of systematic order which rendered
possible the birth of modern science. Men became scientific because
they expected Law in Nature and they expected Law in Nature be-
cause they believed in a Legislator.’12 In other words, theism was the
cradle of science. Indeed, far from thinking that the idea of a creator
was conceptually absurd, most of the great leaders of science in that
period did believe in a creator.
Johannes Kepler 1571–1630 Celestial mechanics

Blaise Pascal 1623–62 Hydrostatics
Robert Boyle 1627–91 Chemistry, Gas dynamics
Isaac Newton 1642–1727 Mathematics, Optics, Dynamics
Michael Faraday 1791–1867 Magnetism
Charles Babbage 1791–1871 Computer science
Gregor Mendel 1822–84 Genetics
Louis Pasteur 1822–95 Bacteriology
Lord Kelvin 1824–1907 Thermodynamics
James Clerk Maxwell 1831–79 Electrodynamics, Thermodynamics
12 Lewis, Miracles, 110.
27
All of these famous men would have agreed with Einstein: ‘Sci-
ence without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.’13 His-
tory shows us very clearly, then, that far from belief in God being a
hindrance to science, it has provided one of the main impulses for its
development.
Still today there are many first-rate scientists who are believers in
God. For example, Professor William D. Phillips, Nobel laureate for
Physics 1997, is an active Christian, as is the world-famous botanist
and former Director of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew in London,
Sir Ghillean Prance, and so is the geneticist Francis S. Collins, who
was the Director of the National Institutes of Health in the United
States who gained recognition for his leadership of the international
Human Genome Project which culminated in 2003 with the comple-
tion of a finished sequence of human DNA.14
But with many people another objection arises: if one is not sure
that God even exists, would it not be unscientific to go looking for
evidence for God’s existence? Surely not. Take the late Professor Carl
Sagan and the Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence (the SETI pro-
ject), which he promoted. Sagan was a famous astronomer, but when
he began this search he had no hard-and-fast proven facts to go on.
He proceeded simply on the basis of a hypothesis. If intelligent life
has evolved on earth, then it would be possible, perhaps even likely,
that it would have developed on other suitable planets elsewhere in
the universe. He had no guarantee that it was so, or that he would
find it, even if it existed. But even so both he and NASA (the National
Aeronautics and Space Administration) thought it worth spending
great effort, time and considerable sums of money to employ radio
telescopes to listen to remote galaxies for evidence of intelligent life
elsewhere in the universe.
Why, then, should it be thought any less scientific to look for an
intelligent creator, especially when there is evidence that the universe
bears the imprint of his mind? The only valid excuse for not seeking
for God would be the possession of convincing evidence that God
does not, and could not, exist. No one has such proof.
But for many people divine revelation seems, nonetheless, an utter
13 Einstein, ‘Science and Religion’.

14 The list could go on, as any Internet search for ‘Christians in science’ will show.
28
SERIES INTRODUCTION
impossibility, for they have the impression that

science has outgrown the cradle in which it was The only valid excuse
born and somehow proved that there is no God for not seeking for
after all. For that reason, we examine in greater God would be the
detail in the Appendix to this book what science possession of con-
is, what it means to be truly scientific in outlook, vincing evidence that
what science has and has not proved, and some God does not, and
of the fallacious ways in which science is com- could not, exist. No
monly misunderstood. Here we must consider one has such proof.
even larger questions about reality.
THE MEANING OF REALITY
One of the central questions we are setting out to examine is: can we
know the ultimate truth about reality? Before we consider different
aspects of reality, we need to determine what we mean by ‘reality’.
For that purpose let’s start with the way we use the term in ordinary,
everyday language. After that we can move on to consider its use at
higher levels.
In everyday language the noun ‘reality’, the adjective ‘real’, and
the adverb ‘really’ have several different connotations according to
the contexts in which they are used. Let’s think about some examples.
First, in some situations the opposite of ‘real’ is ‘imaginary’ or ‘illu-
sory’. So, for instance, a thirsty traveller in the Sahara may see in the
distance what looks to him like an oasis with water and palm trees,
when in fact there is no oasis there at all. What he thinks he sees is
a mirage, an optical illusion. The oasis is not real, we say; it does not
actually exist.15 Similarly a patient, having been injected with power-
ful drugs in the course of a serious operation, may upon waking up
from the anaesthetic suffer hallucinations, and imagine she sees all
kinds of weird creatures stalking round her room. But if we say, as
we do, that these things which she imagines she sees, are not real, we
15 Mirages occur ‘when sharp differences in temperature and therefore in density develop be-
tween thin layers of air at and immediately above the ground. This causes light to be bent, or
refracted, as it travels through one layer to the next. . . . During the day, when a warm layer
occurs next to the ground, objects near the horizon often appear to be reflected in flat sur-
faces, such as beaches, deserts, roads and water. This produces the shimmering, floating im-
ages which are commonly observed on very hot days.’ Oxford Reference Encyclopaedia, 913.
29
mean that they do not in actual fact exist. We could argue, of course,
that something is going on in the patient’s brain, and she is experi-
encing impressions similar to those she would have received if the
weird creatures had been real. Her impressions, then, are real in the
sense that they exist in her brain; but they do not correspond with
the external reality that the patient supposes is creating these sense
impressions. The mechanisms of her brain are presenting her with a
false picture: the weird creatures do not exist. She is not seeing them.
They are not real. On the basis of examples like this (the traveller and
the patient) some philosophers have argued that none of us can ever
be sure that the sense impressions which we think we receive from
the external world are true representations of the external world, and
not illusions. We consider their arguments in detail in Book 3 in this
series, Questioning Our Knowledge, dealing with epistemology and
related matters.
To sum up so far, then: neither the traveller nor the patient was per-
ceiving external reality as it really was. But the reasons for their failure
were different: with the traveller it was an external illusion (possibly
reinforced by his thirst) that made him misread reality and imagine
there was a real oasis there, when there wasn’t. With the patient there
was nothing unusual in the appearance of her room to cause her dis-
ordered perception. The difficulty was altogether internal to her. The
drugs had distorted the perception mechanisms of her brain.
From these two examples we can learn some practical lessons:
1. It is important for us all to question from time to time
whether what we unthinkingly take to be reality is in fact
reality.
2. In cases like these it is external reality that has to be the
standard by which we judge whether our sense perceptions
are true or not.
3. Setting people free from their internal subjective misper-
ceptions will depend on getting them, by some means or
other, to face and perceive the external, objective reality.
Second, in other situations the opposite of ‘real’, in everyday lan-
guage, is ‘counterfeit’, ‘spurious’, ‘ fraudulent’. So if we describe a
piece of metal as being ‘real gold’, we mean that it is genuine gold,
and not something such as brass that looks like gold, but isn’t. The
30
SERIES INTRODUCTION
practical importance of being able to discern the difference between

what is real in this sense and what is spurious or counterfeit, can eas-
ily be illustrated.
Take coinage, for instance. In past centuries, when coins were
made (or supposed to be made) of real gold, or real silver, fraudsters
would often adulterate the coinage by mixing inferior metal with gold
or silver. Buyers or sellers, if they had no means of testing whether the
coins they were offered were genuine, and of full value, or not, could
easily be cheated.
Similarly, in our modern world counterfeiters print false bank
notes and surreptitiously get them into circulation. Eventually, when
the fraud is discovered, banks and traders refuse the spurious bank
notes, with the result that innocent people are left with worthless
pieces of paper.
Or, again, a dishonest jeweller might show a rich woman a neck-
lace made, according to him, of valuable gems; and the rich, but un-
suspecting, woman might pay a large price for it, only to discover
later on that the gems were not real: they were imitations, made of a
kind of glass called paste, or strass.
Conversely, an elderly woman might take her necklace, made
of real gems, to a jeweller and offer to sell it to him in order to get
some money to maintain herself in her old age. But the unscrupulous
jeweller might make out that the gems were not as valuable as she
thought: they were imitations, made of paste; and by this deceit he
would persuade the reluctant woman to sell him the necklace for a
much lesser price than it was worth.
Once more it will be instructive to study the underlying prin-
ciples at work in these examples, because later on, when we come
to study reality at a higher level, they could provide us with helpful
analogies and thought models.16
Notice, then, that these last three examples involve significantly
different principles from those that were operating in the two which
we studied earlier. The oasis and the weird creatures were not real,
because they did not actually exist in the external world. But the
spurious coins, the fraudulent bank notes, and the genuine and the
16 See especially in Book 2: Finding Ultimate Reality.
31
imitation gems, all existed in the external world. In that sense, there-
fore, they were all real, part of the external reality, actual pieces of
matter.
What, then, was the trouble with them? It was that the fraudsters
had claimed for the coins and the bank notes a value and a buying
power that they did not actually possess; and in the case of the two
necklaces the unscrupulous jewellers had on both occasions misrep-
resented the nature of the matter of which the gems were composed.
The question arises: how can people avoid being taken in by such
spurious claims and misrepresentations of matter? It is not difficult
to see how questions like this will become important when we come
to consider the matter of the universe and its properties.
In modern, as in ancient, times, to test whether an object is made
of pure gold or not, use is made of a black, fine-grained, siliceous
stone, called a touchstone. When pure gold is rubbed on this touch-
stone, it leaves behind on the stone streaks of a certain character;
whereas objects made of adulterated gold, or of some baser metal,
will leave behind streaks of a different character.
FIGURE I.4. A Touchstone.

First mentioned by Theophrastus (c.372–c.287 bc)
in his treatise On Stone, touchstones are tablets
of finely grained black stones used to assay or
estimate the proportion of gold or silver in a sample
of metal. Traces of gold can be seen on the stone.
Reproduced from Mauro Cateb/Flickr.
In the ancient world merchants would always carry a touchstone

with them; but even so it would require considerable knowledge and
expertise to interpret the test correctly. When it comes to bank notes
and gems, the imitations may be so cleverly made that only an expert
could tell the difference between the real thing and the false. In that
case non-experts, like ourselves, would have to depend on the judg-
ments of experts.
But what are we to do when the experts disagree? How do we de-
32
SERIES INTRODUCTION
cide which experts to trust? Is there any kind of touchstone that or-
dinary people can use on the experts themselves, or at least on their
interpretations?
There is one more situation worth investigating at this point be-
fore we begin our main study.
Third, when we are confronted with what purports to be an ac-
count of something that happened in the past and of the causes that
led to its happening, we rightly ask questions: ‘Did this event really
take place? Did it take place in the way that this account says it did?
Was the alleged cause the real cause?’ The difficulty with things that
happened in the past is that we cannot get them to repeat themselves
in the present, and watch them happening all over again in our labo-
ratories. We have therefore to search out and study what evidence is
available and then decide which interpretation of the evidence best
explains what actually happened.
This, of course, is no unusual situation to be in. Detectives, seek-
ing to solve a murder mystery and to discover the real criminal, are
constantly in this situation; and this is what historians and archaeol-
ogists and palaeontologists do all the time. But mistakes can be made
in handling and interpreting the evidence. For instance, in 1980
a man and his wife were camping in the Australian outback, when
a dingo (an Australian wild dog) suddenly attacked and killed their
little child. When, however, the police investigated the matter, they
did not believe the parents’ story; they alleged that the woman herself
had actually killed the child. The courts found her guilty and she was
duly sentenced. But new evidence was discovered that corroborated
the parents’ story, and proved that it really was a dingo that killed the
infant. The couple was not fully and finally exonerated until 2012.
Does this kind of case mean, then, that we cannot ever be certain
that any historical event really happened? Or that we can never be
sure as to its real causes? Of course not! It is beyond all doubt that, for
instance, Napoleon invaded Russia, and that Genghis Khan besieged
Beijing (then called Zhongdu). The question is, as we considered ear-
lier: what kind of evidence must we have in order to be sure that a
historical event really happened?
But enough of these preliminary exercises. It is time now to take
our first step towards answering the question: can we know the ulti-
mate truth about reality?
33
WHAT IS THE NATURE OF ULTIMATE REALITY?
We have thought about the meaning of reality in various practical

situations in daily life. Now we must begin to consider reality at the
higher levels of our own individual existence, and that of our fellow
human beings, and eventually that of the whole universe.
Ourselves as individuals
Let’s start with ourselves as individuals. We know we exist. We do

not have to engage in lengthy philosophical discussion before we can
be certain that we exist. We know it intuitively. Indeed, we cannot
logically deny it. If I were to claim ‘I do not exist’, I would, by stating
my claim, refute it. A non-existent person cannot make any claim. If
I didn’t exist, I couldn’t even say ‘I do not exist’, since I have to exist
in order to make the claim. I cannot, therefore, logically affirm my
own non-existence.17
There are other things too which we know about ourselves by
intuition.
First, we are self-conscious, that is, we are aware of ourselves as
separate individuals. I know I am not my brother, or my sister, or
my next-door neighbour. I was born of my parents; but I am not just
an extension of my father and mother. I am a separate individual, a
human being in my own right. My will is not a continuation of their
will, such that, if they will something, I automatically will the same
thing. My will is my own.
My will may be conditioned by many past experiences, most of
which have now passed into my subconscious memory. My will may
well be pressurised by many internal desires or fears, and by external
circumstances. But whatever philosophers of the determinist school
may say, we know in our heart of hearts that we have the power
of choice. Our wills, in that sense, are free. If they weren’t, no one
could ever be held to be guilty for doing wrong, or praised for doing
right.
Second, we are also intuitively aware of ourselves as persons, in-
trinsically different from, and superior to, non-personal things. It is
17 We call this law of logic the law of non-affirmability.
34
SERIES INTRODUCTION
not a question of size, but of mind and personality. A mountain may

be large, but it is mindless and impersonal. It is composed of non-
rational matter. We are aware of the mountain; it is not aware of us. It
is not aware of itself. It neither loves nor hates, neither anticipates nor
reflects, has no hopes nor fears. Non-rational though it is, if it became
a volcano, it might well destroy us, though we are rational beings.
Yet we should not conclude from the fact that simply because such
impersonal, non-rational matter is larger and more powerful that it
is therefore a higher form of existence than personal, rational human
beings. But it poignantly raises the question: what, then, is the status
of our human existence in this material world and universe?
Our status in the world
We know that we did not always exist. We can remember being little
children. We have watched ourselves growing up to full manhood
and womanhood. We have also observed that sooner or later people
die, and the unthinking earth, unknowingly, becomes their grave.
What then is the significance of the individual human person, and of
his or her comparatively short life on earth?
Some think that it is Mankind, the human race as a whole, that
is the significant phenomenon: the individual counts for very little.
On this view, the human race is like a great fruit tree. Each year it
produces a large crop of apples. All of them are more or less alike.
None is of any particular significance as an individual. Everyone is
FIGURE I.5. An Apple.

Apple trees take four to five years
to produce their first fruit, and it
takes the energy from 50 leaves to
produce one apple. Archaeologists
have found evidence that humans
have been enjoying apples since
before recorded history.
Reproduced with permission of ©iStock/ChrisBoswell.
35
destined for a very short life before, like the rest of the crop, it is
consumed and forgotten; and so makes room for next year’s crop.
The tree itself lives on, producing crops year after year, in a seemingly
endless cycle of birth, growth and disappearance. On this view
then, the tree is the permanent, significant phenomenon; any one
individual apple is of comparatively little value.
Our origin
But this view of the individual in relation to the race does not get us to
the root of our question; for the human race too did not always exist,
but had a beginning, and so did the universe itself. This, therefore,
only pushes the question one stage further back: to what ultimately
do the human race as a whole and the universe itself owe their exist-
ence? What is the Great Reality behind the non-rational matter of
the universe, and behind us rational, personal, individual members
of the human race?
Before we begin to survey the answers that have been given to
this question over the centuries, we should notice that though sci-
ence can point towards an answer, it cannot finally give us a complete
answer. That is not because there is something wrong with science;
the difficulty lies in the nature of things. The most widely accepted
scientific theory nowadays (but not the only one) is that the universe
came into being at the so-called Big Bang. But the theory tells us that
here we encounter a singularity, that is, a point at which the laws of
physics all break down. If that is true, it follows that science by itself
cannot give a scientific account of what lay before, and led to, the Big
Bang, and thus to the universe, and eventually to ourselves as indi-
vidual human beings.
Our purpose
The fact that science cannot answer these questions does not mean, of
course, that they are pseudo-questions and not worth asking. Adam
Schaff, the Polish Marxist philosopher, long ago observed:
What is the meaning of life? What is man’s place in the uni-
verse? It seems difficult to express oneself scientifically on such
36
SERIES INTRODUCTION
hazy topics. And yet if one should assert ten times over that
these are typical pseudo-problems, problems would remain.18
Yes, surely problems would remain; and they are life’s most im-
portant questions. Suppose by the help of science we could come to
know everything about every atom, every molecule, every cell, every
electrical current, every mechanism in our body and brain. How
much further forward should we be? We should now know what we
are made of, and how we work. But we should still not know what
we are made for.
Suppose for analogy’s sake we woke up one morning to find a
new, empty jeep parked outside our house, with our name written
on it, by some anonymous donor, specifying that it was for our use.
Scientists could describe every atom and molecule it was made of.
Engineers could explain how it worked, and that it was designed
for transporting people. It was obviously intended, therefore, to go
places. But where? Neither science as such, nor engineering as such,
could tell us where we were meant to drive the jeep to. Should we not
then need to discover who the anonymous donor was, and whether
the jeep was ours to do what we liked with, answerable to nobody: or
whether the jeep had been given to us on permanent loan by its maker
and owner with the expectation that we should consult the donor’s
intentions, follow the rules in the driver’s handbook, and in the end
be answerable to the donor for how we had used it?
That surely is the situation we find ourselves in
as human beings. We are equipped with a magnifi- Must we not ask
cent piece of physical and biological engineering, what our relationship
that is, our body and brain; and we are in the driv- is to whatever we
er’s seat, behind the steering wheel. But we did not owe our existence
make ourselves, nor the ‘machine’ we are in charge to? After all, what
of. Must we not ask what our relationship is to if it turned out to be
whatever we owe our existence to? After all, what if that we owe our
it turned out to be that we owe our existence not to existence not to an
an impersonal what but to a personal who? impersonal what but
To some the latter possibility is instinctively to a personal who?
unattractive if not frightening; they would prefer
18 Schaff, Philosophy of Man, 34 (emphasis added).
37
to think that they owe their existence to impersonal material, forces

and processes. But then that view induces in some who hold it its
own peculiar angst. Scientist Jacob Bronowski (1908–74) confessed to
a deep instinctive longing, not simply to exist, but to be a recognisa-
bly distinct individual, and not just one among millions of otherwise
undifferentiated human beings:
When I say that I want to be myself, I mean as the existentialist
does that I want to be free to be myself. This implies that I want
to be rid of constraints (inner as well as outward constraints)
in order to act in unexpected ways. Yet I do not mean that I
want to act either at random or unpredictably. It is not in these
senses that I want to be free, but in the sense that I want to be
allowed to be different from others. I want to follow my own
way—but I want it to be a way recognisably my own, and not
zig-zag. And I want people to recognise it: I want them to say,
‘How characteristic!’ 19
Yet at the same time he confessed that certain interpretations of
science roused in him a fear that undermined his confidence:
This is where the fulcrum of our fears lies: that man as a spe-
cies and we as thinking men, will be shown to be no more than
a machinery of atoms. We pay lip service to the vital life of
the amoeba and the cheese mite; but what we are defending is
the human claim to have a complex of will and thoughts and
emotions—to have a mind. . . .
The crisis of confidence . . . springs from each man’s wish to
be a mind and a person, in face of the nagging fear that he is a
mechanism. The central question I ask is this: Can man be both
a machine and a self? 20
Our search
And so we come back to our original question; but now we clearly

notice that it is a double question: not merely to what or to whom
19 Bronowski, Identity of Man, 14–5.

20 Bronowski, Identity of Man, 7–9.
38
SERIES INTRODUCTION
does humanity as a whole owe its existence, but what is the status of
the individual human being in relation to the race as a whole and to
the uncountable myriads of individual phenomena that go to make
up the universe? Or, we might ask it another way: what is our sig-
nificance within the reality in which we find ourselves? This is the
ultimate question hanging over every one of our lives, whether we
seek answers or we don’t. The answers we have for it will affect our
thinking in every significant area of life.
These, then, are not merely academic questions irrelevant to
practical living. They lie at the heart of life itself; and naturally in
the course of the centuries notable answers to them have been given,
many of which are held still today around the world.
If we are to try to understand something of the seriously held
views of our fellow human beings, we must try to understand their
views and the reasons for which they hold them. But just here we
must sound a warning that will be necessary to repeat again in the
course of these books: those who start out seriously enquiring for
truth will find that at however lowly a level they start, they will not be
logically able to resist asking what the Ultimate Truth about every-
thing is!
In the spirit of truthfulness and honesty, then, let us say directly
that we, the authors of this book, are Christians. We do not pretend
to be indifferent guides; we commend to you wholeheartedly the an-
swers we have discovered and will tell you why we think the claims
of the Christian gospel are valid, and the help it offers real. This does
not, however, preclude the possibility of our approaching other views
in a spirit of honesty and fairness. We hope that those who do not
share our views will approach them in the same spirit. We can ask
nothing more as we set out together on this quest—in search of real-
ity and significance.
OUR AIM
Our small contribution to this quest is set out in the 6 volumes of this
series. In this, the second book in the series, we propose to select four
broadly representative answers to the big questions about the reality
in which we find ourselves. They are representative in the sense that
39
each answer is, in part or whole, held in common by a number of

different philosophies and/or religions, and has been, and still is, be-
lieved by millions of people. Having considered the answers, we can
then ask which, if any of them, strikes us as likely to be true.
So let us state precisely the questions that we shall want to put to
these four representative philosophies/religions:
1. What is the Ultimate Reality?

(a) Is it one, as many philosophies and religions have maintained,
or many?
(b) Is it personal or impersonal?
(c) Is it the Creator of the universe, or is the creation of the uni-
verse the work of some lower power or process?
(d) Does it exist independently of the universe or is it part of the
stuff of the universe?
(e) Or is the universe itself the self-existent, self-contained, self-
sufficient Ultimate Reality?
2. How, and on what terms, are we related

to the Ultimate Reality?
If we owe our existence to the Ultimate Reality, we must in some
sense be its products. But in what sense?
(a) Are we, body, soul and spirit, created by the Ultimate Reality,
in the sense that the human race did not always exist, but be-
gan to exist when the Ultimate Reality deliberately created the
first human pair?
(b) Are we emanations from Ultimate Reality, like sunbeams that
continuously emanate from the sun, so that while we our-
selves are not the Ultimate Reality, we are of the same stuff as
the Ultimate Reality?
(c) Is the Ultimate Reality blind, mindless matter from which we
have, all unintended, evolved?
(d) Was there some vital force, or impersonal intelligence, inher-
ent in original matter, that has right from the start driven and
guided matter to evolve into us human beings?
40
SERIES INTRODUCTION
3. Have we any moral responsibility to Ultimate Reality?
4. Has Ultimate Reality taken the initiative to disclose

itself to us, or are we left to ourselves to discover it?
These then are the questions; and as we survey the various answers
that are given, we shall naturally be looking to see on what authority
they are based. The answers will be given by:
(a) Indian pantheistic monism
(b) Greek philosophy and mysticism
(c) Naturalism and atheistic materialism
(d) Christian theism
And now let’s begin.
41
CHAPTER 1
INDIAN PANTHEISTIC MONISM

AN INDIAN SEARCH FOR ULTIMATE REALITY
Believe me, my son, an invisible and subtle

essence is the Spirit of the whole universe.
That is Reality. That is Atman. thou art
that.
—The Chandogya Upanishad
HISTORICAL INTRODUCTION
We are about to study Indian pantheistic monism as interpreted by

the famous Indian philosopher Shankara,1 but first some necessary,
preliminary observations. In some languages the term ‘Hinduism’ is
used as if it were an adequate label to denote the religion believed and
practised by the people of India. But in this sense it is a misleading
label. In the first place there are other religions native to India: Bud-
dhism, Sikhism and Jainism.
In the second place, if we do use the term ‘Hinduism’ to refer
to Indian religion, then we should be aware that Hinduism is not
one homogeneous religion with a central creed laid down by some
religious authority, like the Magisterium in Roman Catholicism or
the Ecumenical Councils acknowledged by the Orthodox Churches.
There are many forms of Hindu religion, each concentrated on the
worship of its favoured god, gods or goddesses (there are traditionally
said to be 330 million gods, or 300 or 30—in other words it does not
matter how many), though some gods, like Krishna, are more widely
recognised than others.
In the nineteenth century, European scholars thought, and so do
many Indians still, that Indian civilisation began with the arrival in
India (c.1500 bc) of the Aryan tribes whose language, Sanskrit, is a
member of the Indo-European family of languages. It is also the lan-
guage in which the sacred books of Indian religion were originally
written.
However, in the early period of the twentieth century, British and
Indian archaeologists discovered the remains of several early cities in
what was then North India (now Pakistan), which have been dated
to around 2500–1800 bc. This culture, known now as the Indus or
Harappan Civilisation, had a developed religious system, elements of
1 Alternative spellings: Śangkara, Shangkara. In Sanskrit his system of philosophy is called

advaita, meaning ‘non-dualistic’.
45
which may well have intermingled with the later Aryan systems.2 In
addition it must be realised that Hinduism is an umbrella term cov-
ering not only a non-unified religion but also a whole way of life, a
richly variegated national culture built up of many elements.
Its sacred books fall into two groups:
1. The Vedas and the Upanishads. These are referred to as
Shruti (‘what is heard’) and are said to contain truths di-
vinely revealed to the early sages and later written down
between 1500 and 300 bc.
2. A collection of texts, said to be based upon revealed truth,
but of human composition. They are referred to as Smriti,
meaning ‘remembered’ or ‘handed’ down, i.e. they are re-
garded as tradition rather than revelation.
According to Kim Knott ‘Most Hindus accept the status and
authority of the Veda’, though he adds: ‘but very few have read it’.3
V. P. (Hemant) Kanitkar (a Hindu priest) and W. Owen Cole in their
book4 state that ‘When questioned about the beliefs which an ortho-
dox Hindu should hold, the reply tends to include:
• belief in one ultimate reality;
• belief in the authority of the Vedas (which includes the
Upanishads);
• belief in the principles of karma and samsara, and the even-
tual attainment of moksha; to these might often be added
the performance of dharma, right conduct, and the obser-
vance of caste duties.’ 5
In the course of the centuries, however, in addition to the cultic
side of Hindu religion, a more philosophical approach was devel-
oped; and the result has been the formation of six orthodox schools
of philosophy based on the Vedas.6 The six philosophical systems are:
2 See Knott, Hinduism, 5–9.

3 Hinduism, 15.
4 Hinduism, 183.
5 The technical terms used here will be explained in a moment.
6 Kanitkar and Cole (Hinduism, 184–5) state that all these systems can be traced back to
times bc. The unorthodox schools are the Carvakas, Buddhism and Jainism; they reject the
authority of the Vedas.
46
• Nyaya • Samkhya • Mimamsa

• Vaisheshika • Yoga • Vedanta
Of these six, the Vedanta system (Vedanta means the end of the
Vedas) is the one that particularly interests us in this chapter, be-
cause it is concerned with expounding what
the Vedic texts have to say on the topic of Ul-
timate Reality. One of Shankara’s
Within this system three scholars stand modern admirers claims
out, each with his own different interpreta- that he was ‘a towering
tion: Shankara (trad. ad 788–820), Ramanuja
7 mystic of the ninth
(trad. ad 1017–1137) and Madhva (thirteenth century AD whose word
century ad). We shall be studying Shankara’s carries the authority of
philosophy. Until comparatively recently he Augustine, Eckhart and
was thought to be the most influential of the Aquinas all in one’.
Indian philosophers, and still is by many. One
of his modern admirers claims that he was ‘a
towering mystic of the ninth century ad whose word carries the au-
thority of Augustine, Eckhart and Aquinas all in one’.8 The Encyclo-
paedia Britannica reads:
The most renowned philosopher of this school, and, indeed, of all
Hinduism was Śangkara. . . . The Śangkaran system has sounded
the keynote of intellectual Hinduism down to the present, but
later teachers founded sub-schools of Vedanta, which are perhaps
equally important. . . . Śangkara is also said to have founded the
four monasteries (maţha) at the four corners of India: Sringeri
in Karnataka, Badrīnāth in the Himalayas, Dwārkā in Gujarat,
and Puri in Orissa. The abbots of these monasteries control the
spiritual lives of many millions of devout Śaiva laymen through-
out India, and their establishments strive to maintain the philo-
sophical Hinduism of the strict Vedānta.9
Shankara’s philosophical system is known as ‘Advaita Vedant-
ism’: ‘vedantism’ because it is based on (his interpretation of) the
Veda; and ‘advaita’, which means ‘non-dualistic’, because he teaches
7 Also spelt Śaṅkara, or Śangkara.

8 Easwaran, Bhagavad Gita, 18.
9 15th edn, 1989, 603.
47
that the human soul, or self, and the Ultimate Reality, Brahman, are
one and the same thing—not two entities, but one.10
Here is a short glossary 11 giving the meaning of other Indian
technical terms that we shall encounter:
1. BRAHMAN [Brahman, from bṛh ‘grow, expand’: that
which expands, bursts into growth]. The Supreme Godhead,
beyond all distinctions or forms; Ultimate Reality.
2. BRAHMA [Brahmā]. The Creator; in the Upanishads,
a secondary deity of the Vedic pantheon. Not to be con-
fused with Brahman.
3. ATMAN [ātman, ‘self’]. Self; the innermost soul in every
creature, which is divine.
4. SAMSARA [saṃsāra] ‘That which is constantly chang-
ing’; the phenomenal world; the cycle of birth, death, and
rebirth.
5. MOKSHA [mok ṣa]. Liberation (from samsara, the cycle
of birth, death and rebirth).
6. KARMA [karma, ‘something done’]. Action, work, behav-
iour; also the consequences of action, spiritually and men-
tally, as well as physically.
The difference between Brahman and Brahmaˉ
To understand Hindu thought, it is of fundamental importance to dis-

tinguish between the terms Brahman and Brahmā. In non-Sanskrit
orthographies they often look almost the same; but in Sanskrit or-
thography they are totally different.
Brahman is a neuter noun and carries the connotation that the
godhead, the Supreme Reality underlying all life, the divine ground
of existence, is impersonal. But this Supreme Reality is not the Crea-
tor. The Creator is Brahmā (this noun is masculine), one of the Hindu
triad of major gods that proceeded from, but are less than, Brahman.
The other two are Vishnu, the Preserver, and Shiva, the Destroyer,
called ‘the auspicious one’. Vishnu is thought to have incarnated
himself from time to time, in animal form, in half animal and half
10 For Shankara’s work see Bādarāyana et al., The Vedānta Sūtras of Bādarāyana.
11 This glossary is taken from Easwaran, Upanishads, 337–44.
48
human form, and in human form, as in Rama and Krishna. All three
gods of the Triad are frequently spoken of as performing more or less
the same functions.
This idea that the Supreme Godhead is not the Creator, but that
the Creator is some lesser god, is not exclusive to Hinduism. It occurs
also in Greek thought. To see its significance, we should perhaps con-
trast it with the very different Hebrew, Christian
and Islamic doctrine of creation in which the one
and only God is himself the Creator and there This idea that the
are no other gods: cf. ‘I am the Lord, and there is Supreme Godhead
no other, besides me there is no God . . . I made is not the Creator,
the earth and created man on it; it was my hands but that the Creator is
that stretched out the heavens . . . For thus says some lesser god, is not
the Lord, who created the heavens . . . “I am the exclusive to Hinduism.
Lord, and there is no other”’ (Isa 45:5, 12, 18).
SHANKARA’S ADVAITA VEDANTA PHILOSOPHY
We come, then, to Shankara’s philosophy, looking for its answers to

our questions: What is the nature of the Ultimate Reality to which the
human race and we as individual men and women owe our existence?
And how are we related to that Ultimate Reality?
Put succinctly its answers are:
1. The inner Self of each individual human being, the Atman,
is essentially the same as Brahman, the Supreme Reality,
in the sense that they are not two different entities but one.
Atman is Brahman. The true inner Self in each person is
God. Each person can say ‘I am God’.
2. The myriad apparent individual phenomena in the uni-
verse, whether human, animal, vegetable, or mineral are
illusions. The only reality is Atman = Brahman.
3. The aim of every individual person is to realise his or her
true identity with the divine Self, which is Brahman. This
realisation can be achieved only by meditation (a form of
sophisticated psychological activity), if need be assisted by
the constant recitation of a mantra.
49
4. Those who manage to achieve this realisation of the identity

of the inner Self with Brahman, will, upon death, find their
sense of Self dissolved by complete immersion in the infi-
nite sea of pure consciousness that is Brahman.
5. Those who do not in this life achieve the realisation of
the identity of their inner Self with Brahman, or having
achieved it, do not live as they should, will have to undergo
reincarnation (or a series of reincarnations) in a material
body, to work off their karma, i.e. the ongoing effects of
their wrong behaviour, until at length they achieve moksha,
that is, liberation from the otherwise inevitable cycle
of birth, death and rebirth.12
An explanation
In saying that the Self, the Atman, in each individual person is Brah-
man, Shankara is not claiming that this Self in the individual person
is the sum total of Brahman. On the other hand, since Brahman is be-
lieved to be non-complex, and indivisible, one cannot speak of a part
of Brahman being present in one individual. Rather one must say that
the Self of the individual is like a drop of water in the Atlantic Ocean,
of the same essence as the ocean, and only logically, but not actually,
distinct from the undivided waters of the ocean itself.
One of the Upanishads contains a number of parables told by a
father to his son, Svetaketu, in order to teach him that Atman, the
Self, is Brahman. In one of them the father says to his son:
‘Bring me a fruit from this banyan tree.’
‘Here it is, father.’
‘Break it.’
‘It is broken, Sir.’
‘What do you see in it?’
‘Very small seeds, Sir.’
‘Break one of them, my son.’
‘It is broken, Sir.’
‘What do you see in it?’
‘Nothing at all, Sir.’
12 See Shvetashvatara Upanishad, 5.11–12, Easawaran (tr.), Upanishads, 131–2.
50
Then his father spoke to him: ‘My son, from the very essence in the
seed which you cannot see comes in truth this vast banyan tree.
‘Believe me, my son, an invisible and subtle essence is the Spirit
of the whole universe. That is Reality. That is Atman. thou art
that.’ 13
Shankara himself says:
In the same way as those parts of ethereal space which are lim-
ited by jars and water pots are not really different from the uni-
versal ethereal space . . . so this manifold world with its objects
of enjoyment, enjoyers and so on has no existence apart from
Brahman.14
What he means by the phrase ‘has no existence apart from Brah-
man’ he further illustrates by an analogy. Take a number of objects
made of clay, a pot, say, or a jar or a dish. We differentiate them and
use different words to denote these things that to us at first sight ap-
pear to be different. But in reality, he claims, they are not different:
they are all made of exactly the same substance, namely clay. In this
way the objects in this world, and the persons, are not different from
Brahman:
The individual soul and the highest Self differ in name only, it
being a settled matter that perfect knowledge has for its object
the absolute oneness of the two.15
Brahman, then, is Atman, the Self of every human being; and
therefore every human being is God.
Question 1 – Knowing this to be true
The question naturally arises, how can anyone know for certain that
all this is in fact so? The answer given is ‘by meditation’.16 But it is a
very special kind of meditation. We are told that it is not intellectual
study, nor intuition, nor imagination. It is not concentration on a
13 Chandogya Upanishad, 6.12, Mascarō (tr.), Upanishads, 117.

14 Shankara, Vedānta Sūtras, 2.1.14, Thibaut (tr.), 1:321.
15 Shankara, Vedānta Sūtras, 1.4.22, Thibaut (tr.), 282; cf. 2.3.43, Thibaut (tr.), 441.
16 Easwaran, Upanishads, 16–17.
51
topic, not even on the mind itself, for in the process the ‘I’ deliber-
ately withdraws awareness from the mind that it regards as a mere,
constantly changing, mechanism. It is said to be a concentration on
consciousness, as Easwaran explains:
When awareness has been consolidated even beyond the mind,
little remains except the awareness of the ‘I’. Concentration
is so profound that the mind-process has almost come to a
standstill. . . . gradually you become aware of the presence of
something vast, intimately your own but not at all the finite,
limited self you had been calling ‘I’. All that divides us from
the sea of infinite consciousness at this point is a thin envelope
of personal identity. That envelope cannot be removed by any
amount of will; the ‘I’ cannot erase itself. Yet, abruptly, it does
vanish. . . . the barrier of individuality disappears, dissolving
in a sea of pure, undifferentiated awareness. . . . What remains
when every trace of individuality is removed? We call it pure
being . . . The sages called it Brahman . . . the irreducible ground
of existence, the essence of every thing—of the earth and sun
and all creatures, of gods and human beings, of every power of
life. . . . this unitary awareness is also the ground of one’s own
being, the core of personality. This divine ground the Upani-
shads call simply Atman, ‘the Self’—spelled with a capital to
distinguish it from the individual personality. . . . In all per-
sons, all creatures, the Self is the innermost essence. And it is
identical with Brahman: our real Self is not different from the
ultimate Reality called God. This tremendous equation—‘the
Self is Brahman’—is the central discovery of the Upanishads.
Its most famous formulation is . . . : Tat tvam asi ‘You are That’.
‘That’ is . . . a Reality that cannot be described; and ‘you’, of
course, is not the petty, finite personality, but that pure con-
sciousness . . . the Self. . . . there is no time, no space, no causal-
ity. These are forms imposed by the mind, and the mind is still.
Nor is there awareness of any object; even the thought of ‘I’ has
dissolved. Yet awareness remains.17
17 Easwaran, Upanishads, 37–9.
52
A difficulty with Shankara’s non-dualistic philosophy

First, we must underline the warning that Easwaran himself gives,
that meditation of this kind is ‘dangerous territory. We know what
forces can buffet us in the dream world, and that is only the foothills
of the dark ranges of the mind.’ 18 His advice is that such meditation
should never be attempted without the guidance of an expert.
This very warning raises an immediate question. If there is a God
who created us and wants us to know him, how likely is it that he
would have made the process of getting to know him so difficult and
so dangerous, as to be beyond the abilities of most of his creatures?
If those who practise this kind of meditation must first withdraw
their awareness from all around them, from their minds, and ulti-
mately from their own identity, what guaran-
tee have they that the awareness they achieve
by this process is an awareness of God, and not If there is a God who
just the effect of probing the physical state of created us and wants
the deep brain? How do they know that it is us to know him, how
God that they are aware of, if they did not have likely is it that he would
some intellectual idea, before they started, of have made the process
what the God they were seeking might be like? of getting to know
And how can they assure us that what they him so difficult and so
have become aware of is God, since, according dangerous, as to be
to them, God is beyond all description? beyond the abilities of
They tell us that in the process of medi- most of his creatures?
tation they become aware of the presence of
something vast . . . the sea of infinite con-
sciousness, which they eventually discover is The Self. So at this point
they appear to be aware of an object; but when the ‘I’ dissolves in this
sea of undifferentiated awareness, they report that they are no longer
aware of any object. Even the thought of ‘I’ has dissolved. Then who
or what is it that becomes aware that this not only is ‘The Self’ but is
the core of their personality as it is of the personality of every crea-
ture? How could they be aware of the existence of other creatures, let
alone of the core of their personalities, if at the time they were not
aware of any object?
18 Upanishads, 31.
53
If ‘The Self’ is pure being, pure consciousness, and ‘The Self’ is

Brahman, then Brahman likewise is pure consciousness and aware
of no object. And if in this state The Self has lost all awareness of ‘I’,
then so must Brahman, the Supreme Reality, the godhead, be una-
ware of himself, and of all his creatures! But how can there be a pure
consciousness that is not conscious of anything?
They report that in this state of undifferentiated consciousness
they experience sat, Absolute Reality, and ananda, pure, limitless, un-
conditioned joy.19 But once again, we have to ask who or what is it that
experiences these things, in the total absence of self-consciousness?
Is the godhead no better than a baby of two months old that is not
yet self-conscious, but whose smile suggests it is having pleasant
sensations?
There appears to be, then, a very serious logical difficulty with
Shankara’s non-dualistic philosophy. R. C. Zaehner expresses it thus:
If the Absolute is conscious, it must also be conscious either of
itself or of something other than itself. But by definition noth-
ing but the Absolute truly exists. Therefore the Absolute must
be self-conscious. But if it is self-conscious, it must in some
sense have personality, which it is said to transcend. Moreover
self-consciousness is hardly conceivable without consciousness
of that which is not self.20
And, of course, if the Absolute is conscious of itself, there is here
a logical duality, and Shankara’s non-dualism contradicts itself.
Question 2 – Explaining the particulars
If the real Self in everyone and everything is one and the same Brahman,
how do we explain the myriad, individual, distinct, particular phe-
nomena in the universe? (And how do normal people have such strong
conviction that we are different from one another and from God?)
Shankara’s answer to the question is that all this apparent indi-
viduality is an illusion (maya). What he means by illusion is some-
thing like the impressions created by a skilful magician. Or take
19 Easwaran, Upanishads, 40.

20 Concise Encyclopedia of Living Faiths, 234.
54
another, often quoted, analogy: at a distance someone might think

he sees a snake; but on close inspection it turns out to be not a snake
but a rope. The rope itself exists; it is not an illusion, but its seem-
ing to be a snake was an illusion. So your friends, Natalie, Susan,
Jose and Alex, might look to you as if they were separate individuals.
But that is only an impression due on Brahman’s
side to his (its) skilful ‘magic’, and on your side
to your ignorance. In actual fact they are all of Non-dualists maintain
them Brahman, one undivided entity. that this belief in the
Non-dualists, however, maintain that this ultimate unreality of
belief in the ultimate unreality of individuals individuals does not
does not in any way devalue human personality. in any way devalue
Brahman is said to rejoice in the endless variety human personality.
of particular things that his (or, its) ‘magical’ art
produces.21 But the intrinsic value of the particu-
lar individual personality is seriously undermined when the goal of
meditation and of life itself is described thus:
The most important consequence of these beliefs: that a human
being can, within consciousness, reverse the process of crea-
tion which proceeded from singularity to diversity: not just re-
trace it, for example, in science or philosophy, but reverse it, so
that one withdraws from the world of change and follows what
St. Augustine called the ‘hidden footprint of unity’ that is there,
perhaps covered but never eradicated in our consciousness.22
Moreover, we are further warned that if we do not realise prop-
erly here on earth that our true Self (as distinct from our false self
which imagines that we are distinct, separate individual human be-
ings) is one entity with Brahman and with every other human being
and animal, then at death an undesirable consequence will follow.
Instead of finding release (moksha) from the cycle of birth, death and
rebirth (samsara), we shall have to suffer a further reincarnation in
another human body. And that will mean we shall once more have
the misleading and undesirable appearance of being a distinct, indi-
vidual human personality, or indeed some lesser thing.
21 Shvetashvatara Upanishad, 4.1–5, Easawaran (tr.), Upanishads, 126–7.

22 Nagler, ‘Reading the Upanishads’, 317.
55
Katha Upanishad says:

Come, I’ll tell you this secret and eternal
formulation of truth (brahman);
And what happens to the Self (ātman), Gautama,
when it encounters death.
Some enter a womb by which
an embodied self obtains a body.
Others pass into a stationary thing—
according to what they have done,
according to what they have learned.23
Some suggest that the phrase ‘a stationary thing’ refers to a plant

or a tree. Consider also these lines from Katha Upanishad: ‘Who sees
multiplicity, | But not the one indivisible Self, | Must wander on and
on from death to death’;24 and ‘If one fails to realise Brahman in this
life, | Before the physical sheath is shed, | He must again put on a
body | In the world of embodied creatures.’ 25
An appeal to science
Now modern followers of Shankara’s system claim that it agrees with
contemporary physics. Speaking of the ancient Hindu sages Eas-
waran says:
Penetrating below the senses, they found not a world of solid,
separate objects but a ceaseless process of change—matter com-
ing together, dissolving, and coming together again in a different
form. Below this flux of things with ‘name and form’, however,
they found something changeless: an infinite, indivisible reality
in which the transient data of the world cohere. They called this
reality Brahman: the Godhead, the divine ground of existence.
This analysis of the phenomenal world tallies well enough
with contemporary physics. A physicist would remind us that
the things we see ‘out there’ are not ultimately separate from
each other and from us; we perceive them as separate because
23 5.6–7, Olivelle, Early Upanishads, 397; alternative enumeration, Part 2.2.6–7.

24 4.10 (Easwaran, Upanishads, 85); alternative enumeration, Part 2.1.10.
25 6.4 (Easwaran, Upanishads, 90); alternative enumeration, Part 2.3.4.
56
of the limitations of our senses. If our eyes were sensitive to a

much finer spectrum, we might see the world as a continuous
field of matter and energy. Nothing in this picture resembles a
solid object in our usual sense of the word. ‘The external world
of physics’, wrote Sir Arthur Eddington, ‘has thus become a
world of shadows. In removing our illusions we remove the
substance, for indeed we have seen that substance is one of the
greatest of our illusions.’ Like the physicists, these ancient sages
were seeking an invariant. They found it in Brahman.26
The danger of the fallacy of reductionism

One of the fascinating goals of science is to find out the basic element
of which all the myriad individual objects in the universe are made.
At the moment the main candidate proposed is energy. But we must
not let this lead us into the trap of thinking that if we can explain what
a thing is made of, we then know what a thing is. For that is not so.
Take water, as an example. Knowing what water is made of, namely
two gases, hydrogen and oxygen, is far from telling us what water is.
Water has properties and functions and signifi-
cance that neither hydrogen nor oxygen has.
What a thing is, therefore, and what its func- What a thing is,
tion is, is much more important than what it is therefore, and what
made of. Take a silver teaspoon and a silver flute. its function is, is much
To say that the difference between them is illu- more important than
sory, and that the reality is that both are made of what it is made of.
silver, or indeed that they are simply part of a con-
tinuous field of matter and energy, is to ignore the
fact that it is the complexity imposed by the silversmith on the basic
silver that gives them their individual significance and value.
The continuous field of matter and energy, compared, say, with
the human cell, appears to be a comparatively simple thing. The hu-
man cell is not simple: it is astonishingly complex. If that is true of
the cell, what shall we say of a whole human being, consisting as it
26 Easwaran, Bhagavad Gita, 24–5.
57
does of ten trillion cells? To suggest that the marvellous complexity

of even the physical component of a human personality is adequately
described by saying that it is simply part, along with cabbages and
slime, of a continuous field of matter and energy, is to lose touch with
reality altogether. The random buzzing and crackling of electricity
wires on a frosty night is not basically one with a symphony by Tchai-
kovsky. Between them lies a gulf, impassable by mere energy and
matter, namely the input of the creative genius of a complex human
personality.
The supposed nature of Ultimate Reality

If the complexity of a human being is part of the glory of being hu-
man, the claim that Ultimate Reality is pure, undifferentiated, sim-
plex being, must at first sight seen strange. But it is perhaps easy to
see how Hindus of this persuasion come to assurance that their belief
about the nature of Ultimate Reality is true.
They come to it by ‘meditation’. They first with-
That they should then draw awareness from the mind, thus stripping
conclude that what they themselves of all ability to make distinctions.
become aware of by They then withdraw their awareness from all
this method is Brahman, reality around them, or within them, and even
the Ultimate Reality, is to from their own identity. It is not, perhaps, to be
anyone who believes in wondered at, that what they then report being
God as the transcendent aware of is pure undifferentiated conscious-
Creator, strange indeed. ness. What else could they be aware of by that
But it is not surprising, method?
in view of the Hindu That they should then conclude that what
concept of our relation they become aware of by this method is Brah-
to Brahman. man, the Ultimate Reality, is to anyone who
believes in God as the transcendent Creator,
strange indeed. But it is not surprising, in
view of the Hindu concept of our relation to Brahman. We are not
created by Brahman, in the strict sense of that term. We are emana-
tions from Brahman, like sunbeams emanating from the sun, and
therefore of the same stuff as the sun. Our being is not simply analo-
gously like God’s being in some respects (as in Judaism, Christianity
and Islam): our being is God’s being, the very same substance. We
are made out of God.
58
In the beginning was only Being,

One without a second.
Out of himself he brought forth the cosmos
And entered into everything in it.
There is nothing that does not come from him.
Of everything he is the inmost Self . . .
You are that, Shvetaketu; you are that.27
This, then, is classical Indian pantheistic non-dualism. Panthe-
ism of any kind is fraught with serious difficulties, as we shall see in
later chapters; but it is an idea that has been incorporated into many
philosophies. The ancient Stoics held a form of pantheism: according
to them the Intelligence that lay at the heart of the universe, a spark
of which was in every human being, was itself part of the stuff of
the universe. Similarly nowadays a number of leading scientists (as
we shall see in Ch. 3) begin to be attracted to this element in Hindu
thought. Compelled by advances in modern science to recognise that
there must be an intelligence behind the universe, they do not relish
the idea that this intelligence might be the transcendent Lord God
Almighty who created the world out of nothing. In that case, the only
alternative is something like the impersonal, all pervasive, Brahman
of Indian pantheistic non-dualism.
ADDITIONAL NOTE: KEY PROMOTERS OF VEDANTA
Other notable exponents of the Vedanta philosophy have been:

(a) in medieval times:
1. Ramanuja (trad. ad 1017–1137)
2. Madhva (thirteenth century ad)
27 Chandogya Upanishad, 6.2.2, 2.3, Easwaran trans.

The Upanishads often speak of other gods like Shiva, and Vishnu as creating the world,
along with Brahmā who is explicitly said to be the Creator. But these, themselves, are emana-
tions of Brahman and therefore can be spoken of as The Self, just as humans can claim to be
Brahman. There is felt to be a hierarchy in which some entities, like rocks, have less Brahman
in them than humans, and they in turn have less than the gods, and the gods less than the
Ultimate Reality.
59
(b) in more modern times:

1. Vivekananda Swami (1863–1902). He popularised
Shankara’s non-dualist philosophy in the West, in the
USA and in England (1893–96), as a result of which the
first Vedanta Society was founded in New York (1895).
2. A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami (1896–1977), who in 1966
founded the International Society for Krishna Con-
sciousness (ISKCON). Hare Krishna devotees are com-
mitted to spread awareness and love of the god Krishna
in the West as well as in India.
3. Sir Sarvepali Radhakrishnan (1888–1975). He was pro-
fessor of philosophy at Mysore (1918–21) and Calcutta
(1921–31; 1937–41), and the first Spalding Professor
of Eastern Religions and Ethics at Oxford University
(1936–52); a friend of Mahatma Gandhi; Indian am-
bassador to the Soviet Union; and President of India
(1962–67).
While they all embrace the Vedantic system of philosophy, they
do not all adhere to Shankara’s rigid non-dualism. Some embrace
dualism; some adopt worship, rather than pure intellectualism, or
mysticism, as their preferred approach to God. Some regard God as
personal. All are pantheists.
60
CHAPTER 2
GREEK PHILOSOPHY
AND MYSTICISM
AN INTELLECTUAL SEARCH FOR ULTIMATE REALITY
Thus mythology overreached itself and discredited

the very existence of a spiritual world. Science drew
the conclusion, not that the spiritual world had been
misconceived, but that there was no such thing:
nothing was real except tangible body composed
of atoms. . . . The Socratic philosophy is a reaction
against this materialistic drift of physical science.
—F. M. Cornford, Before and After Socrates
ANCIENT RELEVANCE
Still seeking answers to our questions about the nature of Ultimate

Reality, and how we are related to it, we now leave the East and jour-
ney to the West, from Indian pantheistic monism to Greek philoso-
phy and mysticism.1
Greek philosophy has proved to be one of the most important and
influential movements of thought in the history of Western civilisa-
tion. The movement is traditionally held to have begun with Thales
of Miletus in Ionia (c.600 bc). In the course of the following centuries
it eventually developed into a formal system of education with its
colleges and professors in various cities of the ancient world. As a pa-
gan system of organised education it came to an end in ad 529, for in
that year the emperor Justinian shut down the philosophical schools
in Athens—an early example of the tendency that religion has to use
political power to stifle freedom of thought. However, the influence
of Greek philosophy continues with us still in this twenty-first cen-
tury; for many of the questions that it raised are still debated not only
by professional philosophers but by educated people generally.
THE CHIEF SIGNIFICANCE OF GREEK PHILOSOPHY
Perhaps the most significant thing about it is, not so much the re-
sults it achieved, but the new approach it brought to the question
of man’s relation to Ultimate Reality. Abandoning mythological and
1 The ancient Greek word mystēs (from which ‘mysticism’ derives) was originally a religious
term. It denoted someone who had been initiated into one of the so-called ‘mystery’ religions.
Such initiates, after preparatory ceremonies, were said to witness manifestations of a god or
goddess or to learn secret, and supposedly powerful, names, spells and charms. Nowadays
the term is often applied to what is more accurately called ‘spiritism’ or ‘occultism’, in which
people claim that they can be put in touch with the spirits of the dead (see the biblical prohi-
bition of this practice in Isa 8:9–20). In this section, however, we shall be concerned not with
mysticism in either of these senses, but with the particular form of philosophical mysticism
advocated by the Neoplatonist Plotinus.
63
polytheistic interpretations of the origin, composition and workings

of the universe and of humankind, it determined to investigate these
things by observation and reason.
Faced with the multiplicity of life forms on the earth, the Greek
philosophers were no longer content to attribute life to the Sky-god
impregnating the Earth-goddess as the myths taught. They were not
prepared any more to regard thunder as the loud angry voice of Zeus,
the high god of the Greek pantheon. They set themselves to think
what stuff the universe was made of, by
what natural processes it had reached its
Abandoning mythological present state, what natural forces initi-
and polytheistic interpretations ated and maintained the perpetual mo-
of the origin, composition tion of the heavenly bodies, and the cycles
and workings of the universe of growth and decay, of birth, life and
and of humankind, Greek death; and what human beings were made
philosophy determined to of, and how they came about.
investigate these things by Then there came a second stage,
observation and reason. when people like Socrates were no longer
content to ask what the sun and moon
were made of: they wanted to know what
the human race was made for; what is the purpose of humanity’s ex-
istence; what supreme good should people aim at in life; what princi-
ples and laws should guide their behaviour. But here again it was no
longer a question of blindly accepting the traditional cultural norms
of contemporary society as though they automatically possessed di-
vine authority. Rather such questions as justice and truth and cour-
age and piety had to be thought through rationally.
It is, then, to Greek philosophy that we shall, in this chapter,
address our question: What is the nature of Ultimate Reality and
how are we related to it? But first we must make some precautionary
observations.
PRECAUTIONARY OBSERVATIONS
We have said that the early Greek philosophers abandoned the tradi-
tional mythological interpretations of the universe, and relied simply
upon observation and reason. But that does not mean that they all
64
GREEK PHILOSOPHY AND MYSTICISM
forthwith abandoned faith in, or worship of, the gods. It simply means
that when it came to their ‘scientific’ investigations, some of them—
particularly the Ionian philosophers—felt the gods to be irrelevant.
For example, Xenophanes (b. 570 bc) lampooned the anthropo-
morphic gods of mythology:
The Ethiopians say that their gods are snub-nosed and black,
the Thracians that theirs have light blue eyes and red hair.2
But if cattle and horses or lions had hands, or were able to draw
with their hands and do the works that men can do, horses
would draw the forms of the gods like horses, and cattle like
cattle, and they would make their bodies such as they each had
themselves.3
This lampoon is well known, and is often quoted nowadays to
support the contention that the very idea of God is a human inven-
tion. But that is unfair to Xenophanes who appears to have been al-
most a monotheist when he spoke of:
One god, greatest among gods and men, in no way similar to
mortals either in body or in thought.4
Always he remains in the same place, moving not at all; nor is
it fitting for him to go to different places at different times, but
without toil he shakes [or, ‘controls’] all things by the thought
of his mind.5
Nor did the majority of his fellow philosophers forthwith aban-
don all talk of God. Thales, the first of the Ionian philosophers, is
reported to have remarked: ‘everything is full of gods’. But here we
must be careful to understand precisely what he means, since the
word ‘god’ did not necessarily mean to the Greeks what it means to
us today. For instance, someone brought up in the Judaeo-Christian
tradition may well say ‘God is love’. He expects you to know what he
means by ‘God’, namely, the One True God, Creator of the universe;
and then he mentions one of God’s attributes, namely, love. But an
2 Fr. 16, Clement Strom. 7.22.1 (Kirk and Raven, 168).

5 Fr. 26 & 25, Simplicius, Phys. 23.11 & 23.20 (Kirk and Raven, 169).
65
ancient Greek, using his Greek word theos (god) is more likely to say
‘Love is theos’. What he means by that is that love is a wonderful,
mysterious, ‘divine’, power—but only one such power among many.
Nor did all these philosophers abandon every preconception that
stemmed from the earlier mythologies. Far from it. There are three
basic concepts from Greek mythology that recur time and time again
in many of even the more advanced philosophers. They are: (1) that
matter existed before the gods; (2) that some one or other of the gods
imposed order and form on the basic stuff of the universe, and in that
sense, but only in that sense, can be talked of as a creator; and (3) that
even this god, like all the others, arose out of original matter, and is
part of the stuff, or one of the forces, of the universe.
The mythologist Hesiod (c.700 bc), for example, in his poem The-
ogony (‘genealogy of the gods’) speaks of:
The august race of first-born gods, whom Earth
Bore to broad Heaven.6
And again:
Olympian Muses, tell
From the beginning which first came to be? 7
And the answer is given:
Chaos was first of all, but next appeared
Broad-bosomed Earth.8
And misty Tartarus, in a recess
Of broad-pathed earth, and Love [Eros], most beautiful
Of all the deathless gods.9
Commenting on Hesiod’s poem Professor Werner Jaeger wrote:
If we compare this Greek hypostasis of the world-creative Eros
with that of the Logos in the Hebrew account of creation, we
may observe a deep-lying difference in the outlook of the two
peoples. The Logos is a substantialization of an intellectual prop-
6 Theogony, ll. 44-46, Wender (tr.), 24.

66
erty or power of God the creator, who is stationed outside the

world and brings that world into existence by his own personal
fiat. The Greek gods are stationed inside the world; they are de-
scended from Heaven and Earth . . . they are generated by the
mighty power of Eros, who likewise belongs within the world
as an all-engendering primitive force. Thus they are already
subject to what we should call natural law. . . . When Hesiod’s
thought at last gives way to truly philosophical thinking, the Di-
vine is sought inside the world—not outside it, as in the Jewish–
Christian theology that develops out of the book of Genesis.10
It has been worth quoting Professor Jaeger at length because he
has put his finger on a basic issue that we shall meet again and again in
our study, an issue, in fact, that still divides the world’s philosophical
and religious systems even today, and that is what is meant by creation.
The Greek system taught that:
1. Matter has always existed and always will. It is eternal. In
its basic state it was formless, unorganised and boundless—
what the Greeks call chaos. But then some god or other arose
and imposed order on this pre-existent material, and turned
it into a well-ordered universe—what the Greeks call cosmos;
and this process is what the Greeks meant by creation.
2. The creator is part of an eternal system in which everything
in the universe emanates out of God, like sunbeams out of
the sun; and so, in some sense, everything is God.
3. God is somehow in the matter of the universe, actively en-
gaged in moving and developing matter to the best effect.
In contrast to ideas of this kind stands the ancient Hebrew tra-
dition, which has been inherited by Christianity and Islam. It was
already centuries old in the time of the Ionian philosophers. It taught
that
1. Matter is not eternal: the universe had a beginning; and
there is only one God, creator of all.
2. God existed before the universe, and is independent of it.
The universe is not an emanation out of God. God created
10 The Theology of the Early Greek Philosophers, 16–17.
67
it out of nothing, not out of himself, though he maintains it

and is guiding it to its destined goal.
With those preliminary remarks, then, we turn to study the ancient
Greek philosophers. Not all of them, of course, but representatives of
three main kinds. And we shall be looking to see what conclusions
they reached on the basis of their presuppositions and methods, in
regard to the questions we have asked: What is the nature of Ultimate
Reality, and how are we related to it?
THE SEARCH FOR WHAT THE WORLD IS MADE OF
The interesting thing is that right from the very start the Greek phi-
losophers appear to have assumed that the seemingly endless mul-
tiplicity of things must have stemmed from one primal substance,
unknowingly anticipating an aspect of modern scientific methodol-
ogy. They set themselves to discover this primal stuff—the archē as
they called it.
Naturally enough, the early thinkers did not all agree on what
the primal stuff was.
Thales (c. mid sixth century bc). For him the primal stuff was
water. Some scholars have suggested that this idea was prompted by
his observation that water could exist in three different forms: gas
(steam), liquid (water) and solid (ice). Others, with perhaps more
plausibility, suggest that he noticed that throughout nature moisture
is always connected with the processes by which seed germinates and
brings forth life. Thales held that the earth floated on water. He is fa-
mous for having been able to predict the eclipse which took place in
585 bc. (It would be worthwhile looking up this story in Herodotus,
The Histories, i.74.)
Anaximander (611–547/6 bc). For him the primal stuff was what
he called in Greek apeiron, that is, ‘indeterminate’, ‘without bounda-
ries’. Some scholars think he meant that this primal stuff had no ex-
ternal boundaries, and was therefore infinite in extent. Others hold
that he meant that the primal stuff contained in itself all those things
and states which now seem to be different, or even opposites—hot
and cold, moist and dry, etc.—but with no internal boundaries be-
68
tween them in a single indeterminate mixture. He believed that this

apeiron was the cause and maintainer of perpetual motion, and he
called it divine. In the course of this motion the apeiron split up into
pieces that then formed the universe, and beings of all kinds. He is
famous for his brilliant, new idea that the earth is not supported by
something concrete; it stays still because it is equidistant from every-
thing around it, and therefore is in equilibrium. ‘The earth is on high,
held up by nothing, but remaining on account of its similar distance
from all things.’ 11 This idea was radically new.
Anaximenes (active about the middle of the sixth century bc).
For him the primal stuff was air, the element necessary for breath-
ing, and therefore for life. He held that the earth was broad, flat and
shallow in depth, and was supported by air.
THE SEARCH FOR HOW THE UNIVERSE WORKS
Somewhat different was Heraclitus (about 40 years old c.500 bc), who
has become famous for his saying that ‘everything is in flux’. He de-
serves to be known rather for another, more important insight. The
unity he looked for behind the multiplicity of things
was not so much that of the primal stuff of the uni-
verse, as that of the one basic principle—the logos Heraclitus has
as he called it in Greek—which held it all together become famous
and made it work. He decided that the world in its for his saying that
working is held together by the interactive tension ‘everything is in
between opposites; and that these opposites con- flux’. He deserves
stantly turning into one another, like day and night, to be known rather
cannot exist separately. for another, more
To illustrate his theory he used the analogy of a important insight.
bow and its bowstring. The wood of the bow, drawn
into an arc by the bowstring, is all the while pulling
against the string in an attempt to return to its own original straight-
ness. The bowstring, stretched and held taut by the bow, is all the
while pulling in the opposite direction against the wood of the bow.
It is this interactive tension between the bow and the string, however,
11 Hippolytus Ref. i.6.3 in Kirk and Raven, Presocratic Philosophers, 134.
69
that keeps the two opposite forces working together and thus enables
the instrument to function. It is also the stretching of the bow by
the archer, and then its sudden relaxation that sends the arrow on
its way.
Heraclitus suggested that there were many such opposites-in-
tension at work in the universe, with one alternately giving way to
the other, and then the other to the one, so restoring the balance and
coherence of the forces of nature, and thus maintaining the general
harmony of the universe. He cited hot and cold, moist and dry, day
and night, up and down, etc. It was much like the principle of yin and
yang, the two opposing forces that by their complementary interac-
tion form and maintain the workings of the universe, according to
Eastern thought. Still today scientists talk of matter and anti-matter,
centripetal and centrifugal forces, gravity and anti-gravity.
Empedocles (c. middle of the fifth century bc) made the inno-
vative suggestion that there never was an original unity. There were
four basic substances in the universe—Fire, Air, Earth and Water.
Between them they filled the whole of space. But they were perpetu-
ally shifting, now coming together in different proportions, now sep-
arating. Empedocles, however, realised that he had to explain what
caused this motion. Motion is something that has to be accounted
for: it cannot be taken for granted. He came to the conclusion that
the power of love which draws human beings together, and the power
of hate that drives them apart, are in fact two forces that operate
throughout the universe, and affect matter as well as animate beings.
Anaxagoras (c.500/499–428/7 bc) went further. He proposed
that the source of movement was the single intellectual force of Mind.
When we read this we could easily forget that we are reading
the thoughts of a philosopher who lived two and a half millennia
ago. We could rather imagine that we are reading the recent sugges-
tions of some of the world’s leading modern scientists. The fantas-
tic fine-tuning of the universe and the irreducible complexity of the
cell make it virtually impossible for them to go on believing that the
whole universe, including human intellect and reason, have arisen by
mindless processes from mindless matter.
Of course, we have to ask how Anaxagoras conceived of this
‘Mind’. Was it part of the matter of the universe? Or was it a truly
incorporeal entity? G. S. Kirk and J. E. Raven comment:
70
Anaxagoras in fact is striving, as had several of his predeces-

sors, to imagine and describe a truly incorporeal entity. But as
with them, so still with him, the only criterion of reality is ex-
tension in space. Mind, like everything else, is corporeal, and
owes its power partly to its fineness, partly to the fact that it
alone, though present in the mixture, yet remains unmixed.12
Christians might be tempted to comment that Anaxagoras was,
to use a phrase of Paul’s, ‘feeling after God’ (Acts 17:27).
Different again from Heraclitus, Empedocles and Anaxagoras
was Parmenides (born c.515–510 bc). He took the search for the One
behind the Many to an extreme. He claimed that the universe is one
solid block in which no change or motion ever takes place. Any im-
pression of change or movement that we receive through our senses
is sheer illusion. In our understanding of the world and of the uni-
verse we must be guided solely by reason and not by our senses.
Such a theory seemed in its own day, as it still does today, to fly
in the face of common sense and reality. Consideration of the simple
fact that people are born, live, grow old and then die might serve to
convince anyone that change does in fact take place. And if our sense-
impressions are illusions, do not even our illusions change from time
to time? Nevertheless Parmenides’ theory brought to prominence a
question that has occupied philosophers ever since: the conflicting
claims of empiricism on the one hand and rationalism on the other.13
Parmenides was also the first to force upon the attention of his
contemporaries, and on philosophers ever since, the area in philoso-
phy which is labelled ontology. That is the study of what is meant by
saying that something exists.
To understand his thinking we should first be aware that the
Greek verb ‘to be’ can be used in two senses:
1. To state ‘existence’. So when the Greek of John 1:1 says ‘In
the beginning was the Word’, it means ‘In the beginning
the Word existed’.
2. To act as a copula: ‘Socrates is wise’ i.e. ‘Socrates = wise’.
12 The Presocratic Philosophers, 374.

13 We discuss the meaning of these terms in Book 3 of this series: Questioning Our Knowledge.
71
Parmenides, Greek speaker though he was, seems not to have

realised that the verb ‘to be’ had these two meanings. He thought it
always implied existence. For him, then, what exists has ‘Being’; what
does not exist must be regarded as ‘Non-Being’. Therefore to define
an absolute vacuum by saying that an absolute vacuum is a state in
which there is nothing at all, would have been for Parmenides both
linguistic and logical nonsense. To say such a vacuum is is to say that
it exists, ‘has Being’. But according to Parmenides such a vacuum
cannot exist, cannot have Being: it is Non-Being. A vacuum cannot
be anything.
The next stage in his argument was to appeal to an axiom funda-
mental to Greek thought: ‘out of nothing, nothing comes’. From this
he then deduced the following points:
1. ‘Being’ (whatever exists) is eternal, neither coming into be-
ing, nor ceasing to be. For had it not always existed, there
would have been a time when it was non-existent, ‘non-
being’, and from that ‘non-being’ nothing could ever have
come into existence, and the universe would not now exist.
Moreover, if Being could cease to exist, everything would
eventually become non-being and thereafter nothing could
ever come into being.
2. ‘Being’ is the same all the way through. Since every part of
reality has ‘Being’, the only way in which one part could dif-
fer from another would be in not being something that the
rest is. But not being does not exist. If you differ in ‘noth-
ing’, you do not differ at all.
3. ‘Being’ (what exists) cannot change or move. For the only
way Being could change or move would be by not being
what it was before, or by not being where it was before. But
there is no such thing as ‘not-being’. Not-being does not
exist.
Now after many centuries of analysis of language and logic we
can see the mistakes in Parmenides’ reasoning. To start with, the
verb ‘to be’ does not always imply existence. If we say ‘a unicorn is a
horse with a single horn protruding from its forehead’, we do not im-
ply by the verb ‘is’ that such an animal actually exists; we are merely
defining what the term ‘unicorn’ in fairy tales means.
72
Secondly Parmenides assumed that the term ‘being’ must always

be used univocally, that is, it always implies only one kind of being.
But that is not necessarily so. A chair does not have the same kind
of being (existence) as the carpenter who made it. The chair’s being
was manufactured by the carpenter; the carpenter’s being was not
manufactured by the chair. Similarly Christians would argue that
God’s Being and the universe’s being are not exactly the same kind
of being. The universe is dependent on God for
its being. There was a time when it did not exist;
it was created out of nothing and one day will If we say ‘a unicorn is
cease to exist. It is, as philosophers would say, a horse with a single
contingent being. God’s being is not dependent horn protruding from
on anything or anyone. It is not contingent. its forehead’, we do
But it has not been a waste of time studying not imply by the verb
Parmenides’ attempts at arguing philosophi- ‘is’ that such an animal
cally; for it can teach us how critical we have to actually exists; we are
be of the meanings of the words and terms we merely defining what
use when we try to argue. Nor should we under- the term ‘unicorn’ in
estimate the importance of the issues that Par- fairy tales means.
menides raised by his pioneer thinking. They are
still relevant to advanced physics and cosmol-
ogy, as Karl Popper has shown in his book The World of Parmenides.
In contrast to Parmenides, Leucippus (fl. c.440–435 bc) and
Democritus (born c.460–457 bc), the inventors of the atomic theory
of matter, could rightly be said to have been, not monists, but dual-
ists in the sense that they taught that two things exist eternally: void
(empty space) and atoms. They held, moreover, that the void did ac-
tually exist and that its existence was necessary for the movements
of the atoms (Parmenides held that there was no such thing as move-
ment). In addition they claimed that the void was infinite in extent,
and the atoms infinite in number. Both existed eternally. The atoms
were indestructible.
They do not appear to suggest how this infinite number of atoms
was originally set in motion. Taking it for granted that they were all
moving randomly in all directions, they then argued that by the laws
of dynamics the atoms would necessarily and irresistibly be drawn
into a vortex. In that process atoms would collide with other atoms,
rebound and collide again with still other atoms. Since, according to
73
them, the atoms were of different shapes, there would result multitu-
dinous conglomerations that for a while would stick together. Thus
evolved worlds and beings of all kinds, both human and animal.
These conglomerations would hold together by their interlocking
shapes, helped by the continual external bombardment by the other
atoms that surrounded them.
But eventually the atoms in the conglomerations would come
unstuck and would disperse. Then whatever these conglomerates had
been, whether universes, or individual human beings, or anything
else, they would cease to exist; and their component atoms, being
themselves indestructible, would go off and
become part of other conglomerates.
To have conceived of They were dualists, then, to this extent at
even their version of the least that they believed in both space and at-
atomic theory in those oms. Modern atomic theory, as we all know,
early centuries was, is very different from theirs. But to have con-
it must be said, brilliant, ceived of even their version of the atomic the-
all the more so because ory in those early centuries was, it must be said,
it was arrived at, not brilliant, all the more so because it was arrived
empirically through the at, not empirically through the senses—in
senses—in their day their day even their kind of atoms could not be
even their kind of atoms seen or individually touched—but by reason.
could not be seen or Yet in another sense they were monists,
individually touched— for their theory was unrelievedly materialistic:
but by reason. matter was everything. For them there was no
Mind behind the world’s, or man’s, existence,
not even with the limited function that Anax-
agoras gave to Mind of getting the original cosmic motion going.
There was, therefore, no purpose behind the human race’s existence.
All happened by a mixture of necessity and chance. The mindless
laws of physics (necessity) would remorselessly draw the atoms into a
vortex. Which atoms then collided with which might well be due to
chance. But the shape and size of the atoms would necessarily dictate
the formation of the conglomerations. (Similar arguments are still
used in connection with evolutionary theory.)
The human soul, moreover, was made of atoms, finer than other
atoms, but still nothing but matter, like all other atoms. At death
the atoms dispersed: nothing of the man or his personality survived.
74
Nowadays this bleak theory would be labelled physical monism.

Democritus’ younger contemporary, Plato, rigorously criticised
Democritus’ theory on the ground that it denied any purpose behind
the human race’s existence; and so have many since. The Cambridge
classicist F. M. Cornford summed it up well:
The essential feature of this Atomism is that it is a materialist
doctrine . . . in the sense that it declares that material substance,
tangible body, is not only real but the whole of reality. Every-
thing that exists or happens is to be explained in terms of these
bodily factors. The world is resolved into an invisible game of
billiards. The table is empty space. The balls are atoms; they col-
lide and pass on their motion from one to another. That is all:
nothing else is real. There are no players in this game. If three
balls happen to make a cannon, that is a mere stroke of luck—
necessary, not designed. The game consists entirely of flukes;
and there is no controlling intelligence behind.14
Then Cornford proceeds to offer his account of how Greek phi-
losophy came to ignore or deny the spiritual aspect of humans and of
the universe in this way (as indeed do many people still):
If the world has a spiritual aspect, man can only give an account
of it in terms of his own spirit and mind. At first he projected
elements of his own personality into external things. Then the
Greek imagination developed these elements into the complete
human personalities of anthropomorphic gods. Sooner or later
the Greek intelligence was bound to discover that such gods
do not exist. Thus mythology overreached itself and discredited
the very existence of a spiritual world. Science drew the conclu-
sion, not that the spiritual world had been misconceived, but
that there was no such thing: nothing was real except tangible
body composed of atoms. The result was a doctrine that phi-
losophers call materialism, and religious people call atheism.
The Socratic philosophy is a reaction against this materialistic
drift of physical science.15
14 Before and After Socrates, 24–5.

15 Before and After Socrates, 27.
75
THE SEARCH FOR HUMANITY’S PURPOSE AND GOAL
Socrates (470–399 BC )
It would be a mistake to suppose that all the Greek philosophers be-

fore Socrates were interested solely in the physical universe, and had
no concern for moral philosophy and theology; and equally and more
obviously wrong to suppose that from Socrates onward Greek philos-
ophers abandoned interest in the physical universe and concentrated
solely on moral philosophy and theology. But with Socrates a notice-
ably new emphasis entered Greek philosophy.
Socrates was at first interested in the new physical theories that
were being propounded, and was excited when he learned of Anax-
agoras’ suggestion that Mind was the first cause of the universe’s de-
velopment. Socrates thought this would mean that Mind must have
had some rational purpose in creating the universe, and that it would
have designed the universe in the best possible way to achieve that
purpose. Merely to explain, as Anaxagoras did, what the universe
was made of, and what caused its motion, still left unexplained what,
for Socrates, were the most important things requiring explanation:
1. What purpose was the universe created to fulfil?
2. Can it be shown that Mind has designed the universe in the
best possible way so as to fulfil that purpose?
3. What is the point and purpose of human existence?
We can easily understand Socrates’ dissatisfaction with Anax-
agoras. If you were called on to explain a telescope to someone who
had never seen one before, would you start by first explaining what it
was made of? Would it not be more sensible to point out first what it
was made for? And then to point out how skilfully it was engineered
in order to achieve the purpose for which it was made; and then what
theory of optics controlled the production of the lenses; and only fi-
nally, what the lenses and the casing were made of?
According to Plato, Socrates was sitting in prison when he made
his criticism of Anaxagoras.16 Socrates had been condemned to
death by the Athenian court and was awaiting execution. Some of
16 Phaedo 97c–99d.
76
his friends would gladly have supplied the money to bribe his way
out of prison. But he refused their offer, and that for two reasons.
First, he had taught others that as citizens of a state, if they could
not get the laws changed by democratic means, they ought to submit
to the laws of the state, and not act as anarchists. He would not now
disobey those laws himself, simply for his own advantage. Secondly,
he believed that god had appointed him to act as his fellow-citizens’
moral mentor, and he would not desert his god-given charge just to
save his life. Truth and justice, he held, were more important than
physical life.
If, then, someone asked ‘Why is Socrates sitting in prison, and not
trying to escape execution?’ it would be silly, Socrates maintained,
to answer in terms of what Socrates was made of: arms, legs, spine,
joints and muscles, and to point out that all those things were at this
moment bent in the right position for sitting. It was his mind—his
profoundly intellectual and moral mind—that controlled his body
and directed him to stay in prison. And it was Socrates’ belief that
mind in man, which is meant to control his body, must be akin to the
Mind that controls the universe.
Humanity’s proper work and virtue

Two words stand out in Socrates’ vocabulary, as being keys to his
thought: ‘work’ and ‘virtue’. Both need explanation.
Socrates argued that the proper work of a shoemaker, qua shoe-
maker, his ergon as the Greeks called it, was to make shoes; that of a
doctor was to heal sick people; that of a naval captain to navigate the
seas. ‘What, then,’ he asked, ‘was the proper work of man qua man?’
In other words, what was the chief purpose that men and women
were meant to aim at and achieve in life? His answer was ‘To perfect
that part of him that is eternal, and therefore most important, that
is, his soul’.
Some modern philosophers would dispute his analogy. ‘Shoe-
maker’ is, they say, a ‘functional’ word; and so is ‘doctor’, or ‘en-
gineer’ or ‘farmer’. It is legitimate, therefore, to enquire what is the
nature of the functions that these words imply. But ‘human being’,
they point out, is not a ‘functional’ word. It does not itself imply any
function. And that is true, if one argues simply on the basis of seman-
tics. But given Socrates’ presupposition that there is a Mind behind
77
the universe, then man’s function would be to fulfil the purpose for
which the Mind created him.
The Old Testament would here agree with Socrates. It says for in-
stance, that man was made in the image of God to act as God’s stew-
ard and manager of earth’s ecosystem (Gen 1).
This is a function and responsibility that peo-
The Old Testament ple of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries
would here agree with have woken up to, more perhaps than previous
Socrates. It says for generations; and they have become aware that
instance, that man was the proper discharge of this function raises pro-
made in the image of found moral questions. Is it morally right, for
God to act as God’s the sake of maximising profits, to destroy the
steward and manager fish stocks in the sea by overfishing? Is it just
of earth’s ecosystem. to pollute the rivers and oceans with poisonous
industrial discharges? Is it morally justifiable to
hunt rhinoceros almost to extinction in order
to get their horns for superstitious customers in wealthy countries?
Is it fair for one industrial nation to pollute the atmosphere, increase
global warming, and destroy the forest in neighbouring countries by
acid rain, or radiation fallout?
The second key word in Socrates’ thought was ‘virtue’ (Gk. aretē).
As Socrates used it, it did not denote moral virtue so much as the
quality of being good at something. So the aretē of a farmer was to
produce good crops. The aretē of a shoemaker was to be good at mak-
ing shoes. And to be good at that a shoemaker would have to have
precise knowledge about feet, their shape and action, and about the
component parts of a shoe, and how to fit a shoe comfortably to a
foot, so that the foot could function properly.
The human race’s aretē, then, was to be good at the proper devel-
opment of that part of him that distinguishes man from animal, that
is, his soul; and for that purpose he would need to have precise and
accurate knowledge about such things as justice, and courage, and
self-control, and piety, etc.
Socrates’ search for definitions

Socrates, therefore, set himself to find answers to such questions as:
What is justice? What is courage? What is temperance? He was not
looking simply for particular instances of those qualities, such as, this
78
or that act was courageous, or this law was more just than that one.
He was looking for definitions. (See, as a good example of this, his
questioning of Euthyphro in Plato’s dialogue of that name.)
This, in itself was a great contribution to clear thinking, to get
people to distinguish between properties of a thing, and definitions
of that thing. If, for instance, someone is asked to say what ice cream
is, and replies that ice cream is something which little boys like, what
he says is certainly true in itself; but it is not a definition of ice cream.
It is simply one of the properties that ice cream happens to have, an
‘accidental’ property, as we say. There are many other things that lit-
tle boys like, and the property of being liked by little boys, doesn’t
tell us what ice cream is in itself, nor distinguish it from other things
liked by small boys.
But in insisting on the search for definitions, Socrates was not
teaching logic for the sake of abstract reasoning. In his society, what
was held by some people to be just, was regarded by others as totally
unjust; and the conventional exercise of justice was often distorted.
It was Socrates’ contention that one cannot rightly decide whether a
particular law, or a particular business deal, is
just or not, if one does not know what justice is.
Socrates himself seems not to have discov- Socrates exposed
ered the definitions he was seeking for, though the fact that many of
in the process of searching for them in his con- his city’s conventional
versations with his fellow citizens he exposed ideas on such things
the fact that many of his city’s conventional as justice, were not
ideas on such things as justice were not ration- rationally thought
ally thought through, but seriously defective. through, but seriously
Calling attention to that was what in the end defective.
caused his death at the hands of the State.
Socrates’ concept of Ultimate Reality

Suppose, then, we put to Socrates our double question as to the na-
ture of Ultimate Reality and how we are related to it. His answer is
much debated by the experts. Socrates certainly believed that Mind,
not matter, was the Ultimate Reality behind the universe. If Plato’s
Apology and the early dialogues (as distinct from the later dialogues
in which Plato puts his own ideas in the mouth of Socrates) coupled
with Xenophon’s Memorabilia can be trusted, the historical Socrates
79
spoke of god or the gods indiscriminately as though he accepted the

traditional mythologies. On the other hand, there are places where
he seems to imply one supreme Creator God. For instance, he refers
in the singular to the Supreme Being as ‘he who created man from
the beginning’;17 and in another place he mentions, as distinct from
other gods, ‘he who coordinates and holds together the universe.’ 18
Was he a pantheist? It seems not. He certainly believed that mind
in humans that controls their bodies was akin to the Mind that con-
trols the universe; but he seems to have meant it analogously, and not
to assert strict identity between the two. Moreover, in the passage al-
ready quoted (iv.3.13), not only are the gods (however Socrates envis-
aged them) kind to men, but in particular ‘he who coordinates and
holds together the universe’ ceaselessly supplies the good and beau-
tiful contents of the universe for our use. That is language which, as
we have seen, the pantheist Shankara could never have used of Brah-
man, and which Plotinus could never use of the One.19
As to man’s relationship with God or the gods, Socrates certainly
held that it is a relationship of moral responsibility; and, without
dogmatising, he seems to have considered that, after death, man will
be judged according to his works.20
Whatever, then, Socrates’ exact answer to our double question
would have been, if we could have put it to him, we cannot doubt the
noble sincerity of a man who for conscience’s sake was prepared to
submit to execution by the State, and paid with his life for his insist-
ence on the search for the truth.
Plato (C.428–347 BC )
Plato was not only a philosopher and a fervent moralist but a literary
artist with a poet’s imaginative powers. His influence on subsequent
thought has been massive. We cannot here even begin to comment on
the vast range of his philosophical system. Our particular interest lies
in his answer to our double question: What is the nature of Ultimate
Reality and how are we related to it? To understand Plato’s answer we
17 Xenophon, Memorabilia, i.4.5.

18 Memorabilia, iv.3.13.
19 We shall think more about Plotinus’ thinking about the One in the following pages.
20 Plato, Apology 40e–41a.
80
must recall the teachings of earlier philosophers and mark how Plato
developed and modified them.
Heraclitus had taught that everything in the universe is continu-
ally changing and in a constant state of flux. If, then, one regards
reality as that which really exists, and then one has to admit that that
which really exists is constantly changing, it would follow that one
could not have complete and permanent knowledge of reality, but
only tentative impressions and opinions of it.
Parmenides had taught the opposite. Change, becoming, i.e. com-
ing into existence, perishing, i.e. passing out of existence, and move-
ment of any kind, were illusions, not real, mere appearances that
deceive our senses. Only intellect and reason could tell us the truth.
Reality, that is what really exists, is one solid undifferentiated whole,
eternally existing, unchanging, in which there is
no motion, no ‘becoming’, but only ‘Being’.
Plato’s reaction to these two sets of doctrines Particular instances
was to develop Socrates’ insistence on the differ- of, say, beauty can
ence between particular instances of a quality, like vary in duration and
beauty or justice, and the definition of that qual- extent; by contrast
ity. Particular instances of, say, beauty can vary in the definition of
duration and extent; by contrast the definition of beauty will be
beauty will be always the same. always the same.
In our changing world, such as Heraclitus saw
it, a particular example of, say, beauty can be mixed
in with other qualities. Beauty can be seen in a woman who is tall,
blonde, young, with long hair, or in a woman who is short, brunette,
middle-aged, and close-cropped. By contrast, the definition of beauty
must describe beauty itself apart from any other qualities.
In our changing and imperfect world various objects show vary-
ing degrees of beauty. But beauty itself, as truly defined, must admit
of no degrees.
Again in our changing world beauty can gradually increase and
then subsequently decay and perish. A plain child may develop into
a beautiful adult, and then in old age become ugly. Beauty itself, as
truly defined, must be unchanging and eternal.
Now there is no evidence to suggest that Socrates ever gave
thought to the question what kind of entities beauty itself, justice it-
self, courage itself, piety itself might be. He seemed to have looked on
81
them simply as definitions. But Plato came to think that they were
substantial entities—he called them ‘Forms’ or ‘Ideas’ 21 and he made
the following distinctions:
1. The Forms, Beauty itself, Justice itself, etc., exist, not in
our changing world but in an eternal, unchanging world
such as Parmenides imagined our world to be; and they are
themselves eternal and unchanging. They are ‘really real’.22
Particular things or acts are beautiful or just, as long as,
and to the extent that, they ‘share in’ the Form of Beauty or
the Form of Justice. Being part of this changing world, they
have some kind of reality but they are not ‘really real’, like
the Forms are.
2. Since the Forms and the world they exist in are eternal and
unchanging, we can arrive at true knowledge of them by
means of reason, after suitable education to awaken mem-
ory of the Forms that Plato believed the soul had seen be-
fore birth. But of particular things in this changing world,
we cannot have true knowledge, but only more or less tenta-
tive opinion.
The question of motion

Parmenides had denied that there was any such thing as motion. Plato
disagreed with him about that; and not only with him, but with the
professional itinerant lecturers of the time, called sophists. To un-
derstand the point at issue between Plato and the sophists we should
first understand that what the Greeks called kinēsis, that is, ‘motion’,
included not merely movement, like that of the sun and the stars, but
growth and development, such as those of an acorn into an oak tree.
The sophists held that the universe itself and all its most impor-
tant contents are the product of nature, nature being understood as
an inanimate mindless force. The world, the cycles of the sun, moon,
stars and seasons are all the results of chance movements of matter.
21 Hence the philosophical term ‘idealism’ as distinct from ‘realism’. Plato’s ‘Forms’ raise simi-
lar questions to those raised by the problem of ‘universals’ in modern philosophy. Wittgenstein
denied their existence; D. H. Armstrong argues for universals that play a role in scientific laws.
22 Some mathematicians, like Penrose of Oxford, still think that the great truths of mathemat-
ics exist independently of us. We discover them but do not invent them.
82
The human race’s activities in art, design, engineering and law are
secondary phenomena, not necessarily inherent in nature, and often
contrary to it. The gods are merely products of the human mind.
Plato countered those assertions by calling attention to move-
ment in the world and in the universe. Like Empedocles and Anax-
agoras, he felt that motion has to be accounted for;
it cannot just be taken for granted. Some things
communicate to other things the motion that they The sophists held
first receive from some other source. They, there- that the universe
fore, cannot be the original source of motion. That itself and all its most
original source must be something that can move important contents
other things but did not itself receive its motion are the product
from any other source. It has the source of motion of nature, nature
in itself. being understood
The only thing, Plato argued, that has the as an inanimate
source of motion in itself is what the Greeks called mindless force.
soul, or life-principle, psychē. Therefore, he went
on to argue, the human soul must come before the
body, and its powers of mind, morality and intelligent design before
the body’s merely material powers of strength and size. From this he
concluded that while there are evil powers at work in the world, the
Prime Mover and Subsequent Controller of the universe must like-
wise be an Intelligent, Moral World Soul infinitely superior to the
human soul. For how could the Prime Mover and Controller of the
universe be less intelligent than man?
The question naturally arises: how did Plato conceive of this World
Soul? To answer that, we must return to his theory of the Forms.
The Form of ‘the Good’

Having posited the existence of the Forms, Plato realised something
that they each had in common. Each of the different Forms—Justice
itself, Courage itself and so forth—could be said to be good. From this
he deduced that there must also exist a Form of the Good. If so, this
Form of the Good, could not be just one more Form along with the
other Forms. They were instances of goodness; the Form of the Good
was the source of their goodness; it therefore must be above them just
as the other Forms were above the instances of beauty, justice, cour-
age and so forth, which we encounter in this world.
83
What, then, was this Universal Good common to them all? We

notice, to start with, that the term the Good (Gk. to agathon) does
not denote moral goodness. It means rather what we should mean if
we were to ask: what is the good of physical exercise, or the good of
playing chess? What is the good of justice, of try-
ing to be courageous? The good of a thing is what
The good of a thing is makes us value it and long after it.
what makes us value To Plato, then, the knowledge of the Good
it and long after it. was the highest form of knowledge. ‘It’s no use’,
he writes, ‘possessing anything if you can’t get
any good out of it. Or do you think that there’s
any point in possessing anything if it’s no good? Is there any point in
having all other forms of knowledge without that of the good, and so
lacking knowledge about what is good and valuable?’ 23
The Good, therefore, is the end, the supreme object of all de-
sire and aspiration, the thing a human being lives for, would do any-
thing, or give anything, to get:
The Good, then, is the end of all endeavour, the object on which
every heart is set, whose existence it divines, though it finds it
difficult to grasp just what it is.24
In addition the Good is ‘the condition of knowledge, or that
which makes the world intelligible and the human mind intelligent’.25
The sun, Plato points out, is not itself sight; but without the light it
sheds, the human eye would not be able to see anything. So it is in
the light of the Good that the human intellect is able to make sense
of the intelligible world.26 And just as the sun is also visible, so the
Good is intelligible.27
Thirdly, according to Plato, the Good is the creating and sustain-
ing cause of the world.
The Good therefore may be said to be the source not only of the
intelligibility of the objects of knowledge, but also of their being
23 Republic 505b–c; Book 6, Lee (tr.), 304.

24 Republic 505e; Book 6, Lee (tr.), 304.
25 Nettleship, Republic of Plato, 218.
26 Republic 507c–509a (Book 6).
27 Republic 508b (Book 6).
84
and reality; yet it is not itself that reality, but is beyond it, and
superior to it in dignity and power.28
Finally, though the Good is the cause of knowledge and truth
and is itself known, yet it is something other than, and even more
splendid than, knowledge and truth.29
What, then, does Plato say that the Form of the Good is? He says
it is beyond Being; so obviously he is not thinking, like the early Ion-
ian philosophers, that it is some primal stuff of which the universe is
made. But by ‘beyond Being’, he may also mean that while one may
rightly ask what is the good of, say, justice or beauty, one cannot, with
any sense, ask what is the good of the Good. While the Good is the
reason why all else exists, the Good itself does not need any reason
for its existence. Uncaused itself, it is, as Aristotle will say, the Final
Cause of everything else. It is the Ultimate Reality.
Now the thought process by which Plato reached these conclu-
sions may seem to us moderns somewhat tortuous. But the question
he raises is still for us of the highest practical importance. If there
is some supreme good that we are meant to serve in life, that su-
preme good must have been the cause of our existence in the first
place. What then is the Good? All the major philosophical schools in
Greece—Platonists, Aristotelians, Stoics, Epicureans—all asked this
question, and gave their various answers. We should be wise to ask
the same questions ourselves.
What, then, was Plato’s answer?
Plato’s identification of ‘the Good’

Plato, then, has described in detail what he thought Ultimate Real-
ity was like. We notice that in calling it ‘the Good’ he has combined
the moral aspect of absolute good with the metaphysical concept of
the origin of all reality. But when it comes to identifying ‘the Good’,
Plato, it must be said, disappoints us. Let Professor W. K. C. Guthrie
explain:
Some have thought that the Good in the Republic is itself Plato’s
god, but so far as his words go there is no suggestion that it is
28 Republic 509b; Book 6, Lee (tr.).

29 Republic 508e–509a (Book 6).
85
personal, or anything but the final object of thought. Is it anach-

ronistic to suggest that, as in the philosophy of Plato’s greatest
pupil [i.e. Aristotle], ‘Mind and its object are the same’? I do not
know, nor, I believe, does anyone else. But that it is godlike or
divine is certain. So are all the Forms of which it is the chief, for
by turning his mind to them the philosopher ‘through his fa-
miliarity with the divine and orderly becomes himself orderly
and divine so far as a man may be’.30
Yet when in the Timaeus Plato comes to talk about the creator,
he does so in terms of the older mythologies. The creator is a kind of
master-craftsman who is not the omnipotent originator of the mate-
rial universe, but simply imposes order on a pre-existent chaos and
produces from it the best he can according to a pre-existent model.31
Aristotle (384–322 BC )
Aristotle was undoubtedly Plato’s most able student, and as a young

man he seemed to have accepted all Plato’s teachings. But his disposi-
tion was very different from Plato’s. He was much more of a scientist
than Plato ever was, and eventually he abandoned many of Plato’s
theories.
The starting point in his philosophy was not contemplation of
ideal Forms in some other realm; but the study of actual things in
this world that we know by our senses. His pioneer work in biology
was based on the systematic collection and study of specimens with
a view to understanding the function and interrelationship of their
constituent parts. His findings in biology remain, perhaps, the most
significant part of his work.
If he were going to study, say, dogs in order to arrive at a defini-
tion of what a dog is, he would start by collecting a number of actual
dogs, examining them all to see what essential features they all had
in common—as distinct from accidental features such as that one or
two of the dogs might have only three legs, because the fourth had
been bitten off in a dogfight. He would then proceed to establish a
definition of the species, dog, which could be used to decide whether
30 History of Greek Philosophy, 4:512.

31 Timaeus 29e–34.
86
a particular animal that you subsequently encountered was a dog, or

a leopard.
But in Aristotle’s thinking this did not mean that there existed in
some separate, intelligible world the Form of Dog, Dog itself, as Plato
might have said. The form of dog existed in each actual dog here on
earth. The form could logically be distinguished from the matter of
which the dog was composed, but practically it was inseparable from
the matter; just as the form of a shuttle is inseparable from the wood
of which it is made.
Aristotle’s four causes

Aristotle analysed man-made things under four headings: their Mate-
rial Cause, their Efficient Cause, their Formal Cause, and their Final
Cause. Take a weaver’s shuttle as an example.
1. Its Material Cause was the material it was made of.
2. Its Efficient Cause was the carpenter who made it.
3. Its Formal Cause was the shape and function he had in
mind when he set about making it.
4. Its Final Cause was the purpose it was meant to serve,
namely, to produce cloth.
To explain, therefore, what a shuttle was, it was utterly insuffi-
cient to analyse what it was made of; you must discover and describe
the purpose which it was made for. Its final purpose, though not
achieved until the end of the process, was responsible for the form it
was given, and indeed for its being made at all. The end purpose de-
termined the beginning. We call this the telic view of things.
Aristotle also applied this analysis to living things, human beings
included, though in these cases the terms had to be modified. Aris-
totle did not believe in a creator, at least not in the Judaeo-Christian
sense of the term. To Aristotle both the forms of all living things and
the matter they were composed of were eternal. Therefore, instead of
the ‘efficient cause’, it would be better to talk of the ‘moving cause’,
for reasons we shall see in a moment.
Then in addition to the four causes, he made great use of the con-
cepts ‘potential’ and ‘actual’.
Take an acorn. Its final cause is the fully-grown oak tree into
which it will develop. The acorn is not yet an actual oak tree, but it is
87
a potential oak tree. What is more, it already has within it the ‘form’
of an oak tree that will control its development so that it eventually
develops into an oak tree, and not into, say, a silver birch or a palm
tree. And the moving cause is the life that is in it, moving it along
towards the fully-grown oak tree that it unconsciously aspires to be.
Aristotle noticed that in living things the form is contributed
to the seed by a fully-grown and mature specimen of the species.
It requires an oak tree to produce an acorn and to contribute to the
acorn the ‘form’ that will eventually de-
velop the acorn into an oak tree. The
One cannot help observing chicken has to supply the egg with its in-
how close Aristotle came to herent chicken form within it; adult hu-
the modern theory according man beings have to produce the human
to which the information embryo with its inherent human form.
necessary for developing a The human embryo is therefore already
human being from embryo, a potential human being, since it already
through birth, to adulthood contains the ‘form’ of a human being;
and beyond, is carried by the and this ‘form’ will develop the embryo
chemicals of the genes; and eventually into an actual, mature hu-
while the original chemicals man being. What is more the ‘form’ will
perish, the information remains be passed on and persist through many
constant and is passed on to subsequent generations. One cannot help
subsequent generations. observing how close Aristotle came to
the modern theory according to which
the information necessary for developing
a human being from embryo, through birth, to adulthood and be-
yond, is carried by the chemicals of the genes; and while the original
chemicals perish, the information remains constant and is passed on
to subsequent generations.
Aristotle’s idea of God

Like many other pagan philosophers Aristotle rejected the idea of a
creator who created the universe out of nothing. He held that mat-
ter and the natural forms of everything are eternal. There never was
a beginning; there never will be an end. Birth–life–death–and the
succession of the generations is an endless cycle. Given the eternality
of matter and the eternal activity of natural forms, one might have
thought that Aristotle would have felt no need in his system for a god
88
of any sort. But he did; and it will be interesting to see why, and what
kind of a Being he imagined God to be.
Aristotle’s theory of motion

Like Plato and Anaxagoras before him Aristotle believed that the
phenomenon of motion in the universe had to be accounted for; it
could not be taken for granted. Since he thought that the universe was
eternal, without beginning and without end, he supposed that mo-
tion within the universe was similarly without beginning and without
end. Circular motion was, in his view, the optimum form of motion,
since it could be said to have no beginning or end, and could main-
tain itself eternally.
Yet a question remained. What was the powerhouse within the
system that produced and maintained the motion?
In addition, he regarded the cycle of birth, growth and death in
this terrestrial world to be a form of movement. The form of the oak
tree within the acorn would give the acorn an unconscious ‘aspira-
tion’ to develop into an oak tree, and the human form in an embryo
would give it its aspiration to develop into a mature adult. But what
was it that made it work, and kept the process going?
Aristotle, therefore, had to decide and describe the source of
movement within the universe. He argued that the source of move-
ment must by definition (of the idea of source) be something that
owes its own movement to nothing else, but at the same time moves
everything else: hence the term he used, ‘the Unmoved Mover’. The
next question was: How, and by what kind of mechanism did this Un-
moved Mover exert its power over all other things?
At this point in his theory Aristotle introduced the idea of Mind
(Gk. nous). In human beings, he thought, mind was a part of the hu-
man soul. Yet mind, he felt, was so much the superior part of the soul,
that it was (in the Greek sense) divine, akin to the nature of god, and
could possibly survive the death of the body and of the rest of the soul.
He concluded that if the Unmoved Mover was, as it must be, ut-
ter perfection, the highest thing in the universe, it must be perfect
Mind. Yet, to be perfect, it must not be in a potential state, it must be
pure actuality, not potential Being but actual Being.
Then again, for this divine Mind to be perfect it must be engaged
in the highest kind of mental activity; and Aristotle had no doubt
89
what kind of thinking that was. The thinking of, say, a builder is not
an end in itself: its goal is the building of houses. The thinking of a
politician is not an end in itself. It does not manufacture anything;
but it has as its goal the ordering and governing of society. But genu-
ine theoretical thinking is an end in itself. It is not aimed at produc-
ing, or managing, anything. It is engaged in thinking for its own
sake. It is the highest kind of happiness (see the final chapters of his
Nicomachean Ethics). It was the kind of thinking that Aristotle him-
self enjoyed most.
Aristotle concluded therefore that the divine Mind, the Un-
moved Mover, is eternally engaged in the highest kind of thinking.
But thinking about what?
He (or it) could not be engaged in creating things, for that in-
volved a lower kind of thinking, and meant beginning with mere po-
tential and proceeding to actuality. Nor could he be concerned with,
or care about, things in this world, not even about human beings,
because they were all in the process of moving from potential to ac-
tuality, through birth, maturity, and then to old age and death. The
Unmoved Mover, Aristotle concluded, was pure thought, thinking
about itself, thinking about thinking; ‘for’, said Aristotle, ‘the activ-
ity of mind is life’.
If then, the divine Unmoved Mover is not interested in the uni-
verse of men and things, how does he move anything? Aristotle an-
swers that the sheer activity of his pure thought exerts a powerful
attractive power that instigates and maintains motion in the rest of
the universe. It is, as some have said, like a beautiful woman whose
beauty attracts many admirers to aspire after her, while she herself is
not interested in any of them.
Reflections on Aristotle’s concept of God

F. M. Cornford
It has always seemed to me unfortunate that the word ‘God’
(which is, after all, a religious word) should have been retained
by philosophers as the name for a factor in their systems that
no one could possibly regard as an object of worship, far less of
love. In the Middle Ages, the subtlety of scholastic rationalism
was strained to the utmost in the attempt to reconcile Aristo-
tle’s God with the God proclaimed in the Gospels. . . . The plain
90
truth is that the Being described as the object of the world’s

desire, the goal of aspiration, has ceased to be an object that
could excite anything recognisable as desire. When the God of
feeling is rationalised into a logical abstraction, the feeling itself
dwindles and fades.32
Marjorie Grene
Aristotle’s God is finite through and through, wholly determi-
nate Being, pure thought and the purest object of thought, de-
limited sharply from all other beings, the point of reference for
our knowledge of them as beings but not, most emphatically
not, the source of their existence as Father or creator. Aristo-
tle’s God cannot love the world; he can be no more than the
self-sufficient object of its love, the self-contained being which
other beings imitate. How can such a being be said to live? I do
not know.33
W. K. C. Guthrie
The conclusion is that the only possible object of the eternal
thought of God is himself. . . . There is no way by which he could
include in his thought the creatures of the physical world. . . .
Thus all possibility of divine providence is excluded. God can-
not care for the world: he is not even aware of it. . . . God does
not go out to the world, but the world cannot help going out to
him. . . . ‘He moves as the object of desire.’ . . . Since the world
was never created but is coeval with time itself, no initial act
of creation in time is called for, and the last consideration is
removed which could cause God to display even a momentary
interest in the world.34
After this there is no need to point out the difference between
the God of Aristotle and the God made known by Jesus Christ, who
notices the fall of a sparrow (Matt 10:29), who numbers the hairs of
our head (Matt 10:30), and who ‘so loved the world that he gave his
only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have
eternal life’ (John 3:16).
32 Before and After Socrates, 102–5.

33 A Portrait of Aristotle, 246–7.
34 The Greek Philosophers from Thales to Aristotle, 129–31.
91
NEOPLATONIC MYSTICISM
We now leave Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, and travel through the
centuries to Plotinus (ad 204/5–270), the founder of so-called Neo-
platonism. On the way we can afford, for our present purposes, to
bypass the Stoics and the Epicureans. Both of these systems of phi-
losophy were forms of monistic materialism. True, the Stoics believed
that there was Reason behind the universe; but that Reason was part
of the stuff of the universe (though a very refined form of stuff like
fire), and it was immanent in everything. Stoics were panentheists.
Epicureans, for their part, adopted the atomism of Leucippus and
Democritus (see above); they were virtual atheists.
We pass on, then, to Plotinus. He was the last of the great Greek
philosophers, and in him we meet something that we, in this study
of Greek philosophy, have not so far encountered, namely a vigorous
intellectualism, equal or even excelling that of the previous Greek
philosophers, yet coupled with a kind of religious mysticism.35 His
writings are known as The Enneads.36
Plotinus on reality
If we put our double question to Plotinus as to the nature of Ultimate

Reality, and how we are related to it, he will reply that there are four
levels of reality:
1. The Ultimate, Supreme Reality, which he calls ‘the One’ and
also ‘the Good’. Below the One there is:
2. Mind, at the first remove from the One; and therefore in some
sense less real than the One, but nonetheless part of Reality. Below
Mind there is:
3. The World Soul, again less real than Mind but still part of
Reality.
Then below these three comes:
4. Matter. But this is so far from the One, which is the perfection
of being, that it is almost non-being, verging on formless chaos; and
it is evil.
35 There were of course elements of mysticism in some earlier philosophical writings.
36 There has recently been a rising tide of interest in the professional study of Plotinus with the ef-
fect that older interpretations are being challenged. See e.g. O’Meara, Plotinus; Gerson, Plotinus.
92
Plotinus’ argument for the existence

of the four levels of reality
Let’s start by remembering Aristotle. He pointed out that the ‘form’ of
a chair is more important than the material it is made of. It is the form,
chair, which is the cause of the shape that is given to the material.
Plotinus argues that it is Soul that forms, organises, directs and
controls the matter of our bodies, and of all bodies of every kind.
Soul is not in the matter: the matter is taken up by Soul. Matter,
therefore, is dependent on the kind of being above it in the hierarchy,
namely Soul.
But from where did Soul get the necessary wisdom to know how to
organise and govern matter aright? The answer is from the next stage
above it, that is Mind; for Mind contained all the Platonic Forms, on
the pattern of which Soul created and governed matter.
But then again, since Mind contains all the Forms and they are
the topic of its thinking, Mind is not truly One: it is composite. It is
made up of a subject (the thinker) and an object (the Forms).
Now it was axiomatic in Greek thought that anything that is com-
posite must depend on something that itself is simple, that is, non-
composite. Therefore, Plotinus argued, above even the World-Mind
there must exist a Being which is an absolute, non-composite, through
and through undifferentiable, simple entity, ‘The One’, which cannot
be said to think even about itself; for if it did it would form a duality
of thinker and object.
The answer, then, to the question of how Plotinus came to believe
in these hierarchical orders of Reality is, simply by the use of his
reason. His concept of God, however, was different from Aristotle’s,
for whom Mind, (Gk. nous), the Ultimate Reality, was pure thought,
thinking about itself.
What then was the One like, according to Plotinus?
The nature of the One

According to Plotinus, the only way that we can know anything about
the nature of the One is through the effects it has on the rest of the
universe. What it is like in itself, about that we can say nothing. It is
completely ineffable. If, for instance, for convenience of expression,
we say the One is good, all we are, or should be, saying is that in our
93
experience ‘The One’ is good for us; we are not thereby saying any-
thing about ‘The One’ itself.
But in spite of that Plotinus identifies ‘the One’ with the Platonic
Form of the Good (see above on Plato), which provokes from Profes-
sor Anthony Kenny the comment: ‘In a way which remains mysteri-
ous, The One is identical with the Platonic Idea of the Good. As The
One, it is the basis of all reality; as the Good, it is the standard of all
value; but it is itself beyond being and beyond goodness.’ 37
Here is a sample of Plotinus’ own exposition of the nature of
‘The One’:
How then do we ourselves speak about it? We do indeed say
something about it, but we certainly do not speak it, and we
have neither knowledge nor thought of it. . . . But we have it in
such a way that we speak about it, but we do not speak it. For we
say what it is not, but we do not say what it is; so that we speak
about it from what comes after it.38
Christians will feel a certain sympathy for Plotinus in his diffi-
culty. He is coming to the question of Ultimate Reality, that is, God,
by means of pure, unaided reason. He can therefore deduce certain
things about the One ‘from what comes after it’, that is, from observ-
ing the effects of God’s power seen in creation. The New Testament
says the same thing: ‘For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal
power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the
creation of the world, in the things that have been made’ (Rom 1:20).
But when it comes to saying what God himself is like, all Plotinus can
do, on the basis of his unaided reason without the light of revelation,
is to resort to what has come to be called ‘negative theology’, that is,
to say not what God is, but what he is not: he is not this, he is not that.
In this Plotinus is in the same position as exponents of Shanka-
ra’s non-dualist Hindu philosophy who when asked to give a precise
definition of Brahman reply ‘Neti, neti’, i.e. (He is) not this, not that.
It is not, then, in any disdainful spirit, but simply as stating the
sheer fact of the matter, that the Christian Apostle Paul remarks:
‘the world did not know God through wisdom [i.e. philosophy]’
(1 Cor 1:21). The living God is not the end product of a chain of syl-
37 A Brief History of Western Philosophy, 97.
38 Enneads, v.3.14.1–8.
94
logistic reasoning, nor the solution of a mathematical equation. God

is a person. If we are to know what he is like as a person, we can
know it only through his self-revelation. ‘No
one knows the Father,’ says Christ, ‘except the
Son and anyone to whom the Son chooses to He is coming to the
reveal him’ (Matt 11:27). ‘No one has ever seen question of Ultimate
God,’ comments John, ‘but the one and only Reality, that is, God, by
Son, who is himself God and is in the clos- means of pure, unaided
est relationship with the Father, has made him reason. He can therefore
known’ (John 1:18 niv). deduce certain things
But Plotinus had decided that the One about the One ‘from
must be an absolute non-dualistic unity. There- what comes after it’, that
fore nothing could be predicated of him. Not is, from observing the
only could one not say of him that he thinks effects of God’s power
about the world, or about human beings, be- seen in creation.
cause that would imply a duality (subject and
object) in his thinking; one could not even say
he thinks about himself, because that too would imply a duality, the
thinker and what he is thinking about. All therefore that Plotinus can
do is to say what the One is not.
Plotinus was, in fact, trying to make reason do what reason was
never meant to do. C. S. Lewis put it this way:
When it becomes clear that you cannot find out by reasoning
that the cat is in the linen cupboard, it is Reason herself who
whispers ‘Go and look. This is not my job: it is a matter for the
senses.’ So here. The materials for correcting our abstract con-
ception of God cannot be supplied by Reason: she will be the
first to tell you to go and try experience—‘Oh, taste and see!’
[scil. ‘that the Lord is good’, Ps 34:5].39
The relationship of the One to the universe

The One, according to Plotinus, is the source of everything; but how it
manages to be so, and what kind of relationship that sets up between
itself and all the rest requires some explanation.
Put briefly, Plotinus’ scheme is that the One, as the source of the
existence of everything else, is the direct source of Mind, the second
39 Miracles, 144–5.
95
stage of the hierarchy of existence. Mind, being one stage of existence

below the One, is not, like the One, an absolute unity, but a duality.
It contains, and constantly thinks about, the Forms that will become
the patterns according to which all other things are formed. Even
so, Mind does not produce all the other things directly. As a result
of the power of Mind’s contemplation of the One and of the Forms,
the World Soul comes into existence; and then it in turn creates and
orders everything else.
What Plotinus is seeking to preserve by this sophisticated, but
hyper-artificial, theory is the absolute non-duality of the One. His
theory must not allow the One even to think about things below itself
in the hierarchy; for even thinking would imply, as we have seen, a
duality in the One.
How, then, and by what process, does the One cause Mind—and
through Mind everything else—to come into existence? Plotinus
confesses he has a problem here,40 and uses the best metaphor he can
think of to describe the process:
It must be a circumradiation—produced from the Supreme but
from the Supreme unaltering—and may be compared to the
brilliant light encircling the sun and ceaselessly generated from
that unchanging substance.41
In other words, the process is not creation as, say, in the Bible’s
sense of that term, but—to use another of Plotinus’ own metaphors—
an overflowing, or emanation, of energy from the One that leaves the
One undiminished.42
It would be unfair to push Plotinus’ metaphor too far. He main-
tains that the One does not begrudge this outflowing of creative en-
ergy from itself. On the other hand, the process seems to be just as
automatic as is the emanation of sunshine from the sun. What is more,
Plotinus explicitly says that the One has no interest in its ‘products’:
Not that God has any need of His derivatives: He ignores all that
produced realm, never necessary to Him, and remains identi-
40 Enneads, v.1.6.
41 Enneads, v.1.6 (MacKenna).
42 Plotinus imagined that the sun is not in any way diminished by its vast output of energy.
Nowadays we know this to be untrue.
96
cally what He was before He brought it into being. So too, had the
secondary never existed, He would have been unconcerned.43
Or again:
It is not that the Supreme reaches out to us seeking our com-
munion: we reach towards the Supreme.44
Once more this contrasts vividly with the God revealed in Christ,
who became man that he might ‘seek and save the lost’ (Luke 19:10),
and of whom it is said ‘This is love: not that we loved God, but that he
loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins’ (1 John
4:10). R. T. Wallis’s comment on Plotinus’ exposition of the motives
of the One is apposite: ‘not even here is the One said to love anything
other than itself’.45
Plotinus’ mysticism
It would be wrong to suggest that Plotinus’ mysticism formed a large

part of his philosophical system; nor does he anywhere offer it as a
logical proof of the truth of his system. On the other hand he does
seem to regard it as the full-flowering and the reward of all his intel-
lectual striving to discover what the One is really like. In this mystical
experience he claims to achieve direct vision of the One.
Our curiosity is naturally aroused, for hitherto he has consist-
ently asserted that the One is unknowable, and that nothing can
properly be said about what the One is like in itself. How, then, will
he get to know any more about the One by seeing it, since by his own
definition the One remains eternally unknowable?
Here is his account of the vision:
We no longer see the Supreme as an external.46
We pause here because Plotinus is making a notable point. Be-
cause, according to him, man’s soul is an emanation, via various
agents (Mind and the World Soul), from the One itself, man’s soul is
43 Enneads, v.3.12.40–49 (MacKenna, 404).

44 Enneads, vi.6.9.8 (MacKenna, 545).
45 Neoplatonism, 64.
46 Enneads, vi.7.36 (MacKenna, 505).
97
akin in substance to the One, and since his intellect comes via Mind
from the One itself, his intellect, too, is akin to the One. Therefore, as
Plotinus points out elsewhere, to turn to the One is actually to turn
inwards and upwards to yourself. This is what we found Hindu phi-
losophy saying: a man’s own true Self is Brahman.
To look to God, then, according to this theory, is to look, not out-
side of oneself but to something within oneself. This stands in vivid
contrast to the Bible, which exhorts its followers: ‘Seek the things
that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. Set
your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth’
(Col 3:1–2), or again ‘Looking to Jesus’ (Heb 12:2).
Anyone, not already convinced of Plotinus’ philosophy, might
very well wonder how one could be sure that what one eventually
saw, by this method, would be anything more than, say, an electrical
discharge in the depths of one’s brain.
But to continue with the quotation from Plotinus:
we are near now, the next is That and it is close at hand, radiant
above the Intellectual.
Here, we put aside all learning . . . the quester holds knowledge
still of the ground he rests on, but, suddenly, swept beyond it all
by the very crest of the wave of Intellect surging beneath, he is
lifted and sees, never knowing how; the vision floods the eyes
with light, but it is not a light showing some other object, the
light is itself the vision. No longer is there something seen and
light to show it, no longer Intellect and object of Intellection;
this is the very radiance that brought both Intellect and Intel-
lectual object into being. . . . With This he [the viewer] himself
becomes identical.47
We notice three elements in this experience:
1. To achieve it Plotinus had to put aside, or leave behind, all his
learning.
2. He saw nothing but light. There was no voice, no message from
the One, no communication of itself, no hint that the One was even
aware of Plotinus.
47 Enneads, vi.7.36 (MacKenna, 505).
98
3. In observing this light he became—but only temporarily—

identical with it.
Again, it is interesting to notice that all three of these items bear
striking similarity to the mystical experiences claimed by devotees of
Shankara’s philosophy (see Ch. 1).48
To grasp the distinctive nature of Plotinus’ mystical vision, we
could begin by comparing it with the visions of God reported by var-
ious people in the Bible. In biblical visions the person involved invar-
iably hears a voice proclaiming the name and character of God, thus
communicating in understandable language some feature or other
of what God is like, or of what he is going to do. The person experi-
encing the vision, therefore, has not to leave his intellect behind, or
empty his mind of rational, cognitive thought.
The experience of Saul of Tarsus is a case in point. He saw a light
above the brightness of the sun, but in addition he heard a voice
speaking to him, identifying the author of the
light as ‘Jesus whom you are persecuting’, and
then commissioning Saul to spread the gospel Another feature of
of Christ (Acts 26:13–18). 49
biblical visions, as
Another feature of biblical visions, as dis- distinct from those of
tinct from those of Plotinus and Hindu mysti- Plotinus and Hindu
cism, is this: never in any biblical vision is the mysticism, is this: never
human participant said to find himself becom- in any biblical vision is
ing merged with God or Christ. the human participant
It would be unreasonable to doubt that said to find himself
Plotinus saw what he describes himself as see- becoming merged
ing, or to doubt his motives in reporting it. It with God or Christ.
is also understandable that both Plotinus and
Shankara should seek some more satisfying ex-
perience of Ultimate Reality than what bare reason could provide.
Their ‘God’, however, was an abstract idea constructed by their in-
tellects. Again an outsider might wonder why they would welcome
being merged with the ‘God’ they had defined by their reason. The
One, Plotinus has already told us, was not interested in any of its
products—and that would include Plotinus himself—and would
48 Plotinus at one stage in life went with the Roman emperor to visit the East. But the visit was
aborted. There is no positive evidence that he got his mystical ideas from Hinduism.
49 See also Gen 15; Exod 3,34; Isa 6; Ezek 1–2; Luke 9:28–36; Acts 10; 2 Cor 12:1–4; Rev 1.
99
not have cared if Plotinus had never existed; could not think of any
object, not even of itself; and would never have taken any notice of
Plotinus even were he merged with the One.
Plotinus’ ‘God’ had never hitherto spoken to Plotinus and never
would to all eternity. An abstract idea, of course, cannot speak. Only
the living God, creator of the human heart as well as of their intel-
lect, could do that. Perhaps, the Spanish philosopher, Don Miguel de
Unamuno, was not too severe when, having spoken of the God of the
Old Testament, he remarked:
Subsequently reason—that is, philosophy—took possession of
this God . . . and tended to define him and convert him into
an idea. For to define a thing is to idealize it, a process which
necessitates the abstraction from it of its incommensurable or
irrational element, its vital essence. Thus the God of feeling, the
divinity felt as a unique person and consciousness external to
us, although at the same time enveloping and sustaining us,
was converted into the idea of God.
The logical, rational God . . . the Supreme Being of theological
philosophy . . . is nothing but an idea of God, a dead thing.50
Plotinus and the problem of evil
The problem of evil is a problem that any philosophy or religion that

believes in an almighty, all-loving, and all-wise creator has to face
and try to answer.51 But Plotinus has a very severe difficulty in trying
to deal with this problem in terms of his system, and that for the fol-
lowing reasons:
Matter is evil, says Plotinus, in the sense that it actually exists as
an evil entity.52 It is evil because, in Plotinus’ scheme, it is formless,
without boundary, without intelligent order. Compared with Mind
and World Soul it is at the farthest remove from the One; and if the
One is the sum total of Goodness, matter is at the other extreme, and
is Absolute Evil.
At this stage, Plotinus is talking of what we may call metaphys-
50 The Tragic Sense of Life, 183.
51 We examine this question later in this series in Book 6 – Suffering Life’s Pain.
52 See Enneads, i.8 throughout.
100
ical evil like the material chaos that in Greek thought existed eter-
nally before God imposed order on it.
But even at this level Plotinus had a problem, because according to
his scheme matter emanated from the One; not directly, but through
the agency of Mind and then of Soul, Matter was created by the One.
How then could the Absolute Good create the Absolute Evil?
Matter is also the cause of moral evil. This comes about because
when the human soul gets too involved with matter it gets enslaved
and corrupted by the evil of matter, and forgets the One.
The New Testament likewise warns us that if we allow the attrac-
tive things of life to make our hearts forget God, then this is sinful.
But that is not because these things are material and matter itself is
evil. According to the New Testament matter is not evil in itself. But
in Plotinus matter is evil in itself, and yet, as we have seen, emanates
from the One.
Moreover, the Bible teaches that both matter and humans, like
the rest of the universe, were created out of nothing, not out of God
himself. They are not emanations out of God, like sunbeams are em-
anations from the sun and therefore of the same substance as the
sun. But in Plotinus, the soul of man is part of the World Soul (as in
Hinduism) and an emanation out of God himself. How could such a
soul emanating from God be overcome by evil matter which likewise
has ultimately emanated from God?
Plotinus never really comes to grips with this problem. It is a
problem that haunts all versions of pantheism.
Salvation according to Plotinus

Salvation is achieved simply by turning away from excessive absorp-
tion with material things, by moral living, and pre-eminently by
developing one’s intellectual powers, and thus ascending to a con-
templation of the World Soul, and Mind, and ultimately to become
merged with the One.
Salvation, then, is by moral, and above all intellectual, discipline.
Forgiveness from a personal God has, by definition, no place in the
process. The One, we remember, is not concerned with human be-
ings. But if salvation depends on the development of such a massive
intellect as Plotinus had, how realistic would it be as a way of salva-
tion for the average man and woman?
101
But, then, Plotinus belonged to an intellectual elite. Here in his

own words is how he looked upon the ‘lower classes’:
The life which is merely human is two-fold, the one being mind-
ful of virtue and partaking of a certain good; but the other per-
taining to the general populace, and to artificers who minister
to the necessities of more worthy men.53
Plotinus’ theory of reincarnation

What happens, then, to sinners? They will, according to Plotinus, be
punished. How? To answer this question Plotinus, like Pythagoras
and Plato, teaches the reincarnation and the transmigration of souls.
That means, for example, that a man who rapes a woman in this
life, will not simply be reincarnated as a man. His soul will migrate
into the body of a woman, and will then suffer being raped himself.
It is not an accident that makes a man a slave; no one is a pris-
oner by chance; every bodily outrage has its due cause. The man
once did what he now suffers. A man that murders his mother
will become a woman and be murdered by a son; a man that
wrongs a woman will become a woman, to be wronged.54
Once more this is very similar to what many forms of modern (as
well as ancient) Hindu philosophy teach (see Ch. 1). If it were true, it
would mean that a girl who is raped, does not suffer it by chance: she
deserved to be raped because as a man in a previous incarnation she
raped some other woman. A child who is murdered, deserved to be
killed because in a previous incarnation it murdered someone else.
Slave labour is justified because the people who are now enslaved,
enslaved others in a previous life. It is a baseless, hideously cruel and
unjust doctrine.
Nowadays a growing number of people seem to find the idea of
reincarnation attractive for one reason or another. It is important,
therefore, to understand what the moral implications of this ancient
myth are.
53 Enneads, ii.9.9.
54 Enneads, iii.2.13 (MacKenna).
102
ADDITIONAL NOTE: NEOPLATONISM’S LONG REACH
Neoplatonism subsequently exercised considerable influence on Is-

lamic, Jewish and Christian thinkers particularly in the early centu-
ries up until the Middle Ages, and in some cases beyond.
Islamic philosophers
The early Islamic philosophers were indebted to Plato and above all to
Aristotle. But they also knew and studied a work entitled Theology of
Aristotle. It was not in fact by Aristotle: it was Porphyry’s paraphrase
of Plotinus’ Enneads. From this work some of the early Islamic phi-
losophers took over markedly Neoplatonic ideas: (1) Plotinus’ typical
approach to the knowledge of God by so-called ‘negative theology’ (as
distinct from faith in divine revelation); and (2) his theory of emana-
tion rather than creation out of nothing (which latter was, and still is,
the orthodox Islamic doctrine. We may cite just two examples.
Al-Kindī (died c.866–73) is generally regarded as the first Is-
lamic philosopher; he commissioned a translation of the Greek phi-
losophers into Arabic. Of him Felix Klein Franke says:
According to al-Kindī, the philosopher is unable to make any
positive statement concerning God. All he is able to state is in
the negative: that ‘He is no element, no genus, no species, no
individual person, no part (of something), no attribute, no con-
tingent accident.’ Thus al-Kindī’s philosophy leads to a negative
theology, i.e. where God is described only in negative terms. In
this he followed Plotinus.55
Similarly, Al-Fārābī (c.870–950), embraced the emanational cos-
mology of Neoplatonism, even though, in his case, he was aware that the
so-called Theology of Aristotle, was not Aristotle’s work but stemmed
originally from Plotinus. Following Th.-A. Druart,56 Deborah L. Black
writes:
al-Fārābī personally upheld the emanational cosmology cen-
tral to Neoplatonism, even while he recognised that it was not
55 Klein-Franke, ‘Al-Kindī’, 168.

56 ‘Al-Fārābī and Emanationism.’
103
Aristotelian. Emanation was, in short, adopted to fill in the la-

cuna that al-Fārābī felt had been left by Aristotle’s failure to
complete his account of the part of metaphysics that comprises
theology or divine science. . . .
Viewed from this perspective, al-Fārābī’s emanational theo-
ries form an integral part of his contribution to the discussion
within Islamic philosophy of the nature and scope of meta-
physics in relation to natural philosophy. . . .
The major doctrine of Neoplatonic metaphysics known to al-
Fārābī, the theory of emanation, has as its focal point divine
beings and their causal links to the sublunar world. . . .
It is God’s intellectual activity which, in al-Fārābī’s scheme,
underlies God’s role as the creator of the universe. As a result
of his self-contemplation, there is an overflow or emanation
(fayḍ ) from God of a second intellect. This second intellect, like
God, is characterized by the activity of self-contemplation; but
it must, in addition to this, contemplate God himself. By virtue
of its thinking of God, it generates yet a third intellect; and by
virtue of its self-contemplation, it generates the celestial sphere
that corresponds to it, the first heaven.57
The similarities between this and Plotinus’ philosophical sys-
tem are obvious. Equally important would be the differences be-
tween them.58
A Jewish Neoplatonic thinker
Solomon ibn Gabirol (c.1022–c.1058), otherwise known as Avicebron,

is most famous for his poetry. His poem ‘Keter Malkhut’, ‘The Crown
of the Kingdom’, or ‘Royal Crown’ (the title is taken from the book
of Esther 2:17), is to this day included in the Sephardic liturgy on
the Day of Atonement. But he is generally regarded as the father of
57 Black, ‘Al-Fārābī’, 187, 188, 189.

58 For a discussion of these similarities and differences, and of the place and significance of
emanational theories in the thought of later Islamic philosophers and for an assessment of
the relation between Islamic philosophy and Islamic faith in the medieval period, see Charles
Genequand, ‘Metaphysics’.
104
Jewish Neoplatonic thought in Spain (he was born in Malaga, lived in

Saragossa and died in Valencia); and his attempt to explain the rela-
tionship between the unity of God and the multiplicity of the universe
is certainly derived from the Neoplatonic idea of emanation, though
with some modification. In Plotinus all originally emanated from the
One automatically, or even fatalistically; but ibn Gabirol maintained
that this emanation was activated by God himself. He posited two
aspects of God’s will: one he identified with God himself, but the
other he seems to have regarded as a functional entity separate from
God. God then allowed the Will (in this second sense) to emanate
from himself through his wisdom, and hence ultimately to produce
the universe.
The influence of Plotinus’ mysticism on Christian thought
Christianity was already two hundred years old by the time of Ploti-
nus. His successors, Porphyry and Proclus, were energetically hostile
to Christianity. Of the Neoplatonist schools, the Athenian school was
the most avowedly pagan. In the late fifth, or early sixth, century a
member of that school (apparently) wrote a work
entitled Mystical Theology in which he tried to
combine his pagan doctrines and negative theol- The Cloud of Unknow-
ogy with the positive declaration of God by Christ. ing continues to foster
He published this work pseudonymously, making in various countries
out that it came from the pen of the Apostle Paul’s the practice of Plotinus’
Athenian convert, Dionysius the Areopagite (see pagan mysticism as
Acts 17). Strangely enough, it was later received though it were Christian.
into some sections of the Christian church as
though it were truly Christian. Subsequently it
was translated into Latin by the Irish scholar, John Scotus Eriugena
(c.810–c.877). In the late fourteenth century it was translated into a
modified English version by the anonymous author of The Cloud of
Unknowing; and this work in turn59 continues to foster in various
countries the practice of Plotinus’ pagan mysticism as though it were
Christian.60
59 Translated into modern English by Clifton Wolters.

60 See R. T. Wallis, Neoplatonism, 160–1.
105
CHAPTER 3
NATURALISM AND ATHEISM

A SEARCH FOR ULTIMATE REALITY IN NATURE ALONE
Our obligation to survive is owed, not

just to ourselves, but also to the Cosmos,
ancient and vast, from which we spring.
—Carl Sagan, Cosmos
DEFINING OUR TERMS
Naturalism, as interpreted by the majority of those who hold it, as-

serts that Nature is all there is: there is nothing supernatural, nothing
outside Nature. The late Carl Sagan expressed this worldview con-
cisely: ‘The COSMOS is all that is, or ever was, or ever will be.’ 1 John
H. Randall states it more robustly:
naturalism finds itself in thoroughgoing opposition to all forms
of thought which assert the existence of a supernatural or trans-
cendent Realm of Being, and which make knowledge of that
realm of fundamental importance to human living.2
Atheism, by its very name, positively asserts what this form of
naturalism implies: there is no God.
It might seem obvious, therefore, what answers these twin phi-
losophies of naturalism and atheism will give to our double question
as to the nature of Ultimate Reality and how we are related to it. But
in actual fact the answers that we get nowadays are not all of them so
clear-cut as they would have been a few decades ago.
Atheism, of course, true to its name, will unvaryingly assert that
there is no God of any kind. So will most forms of naturalism. But
in recent times other versions of naturalism have sprung up which
are prepared to envisage a ‘God’ of some kind. Only, this ‘God’ is not
outside, or above, Nature, but inside it. It may be superhuman, but it
is not supernatural. It is part of Nature’s processes. It is not personal.3
We must, therefore, proceed to discuss the various nuances that are
to be found in modern naturalism.
1 Cosmos, 20.
2 ‘The Nature of Naturalism’, 358.
3 In saying this we are not referring to the New Age Movement with its Earth goddess and
its supposed planetary influences, and occult practices; for these are but a recrudescence of
ancient pagan superstitions, and in some cases, demonism. We are talking about scientific and
philosophical worldviews.
109
MATERIALISTIC NATURALISM: ULTIMATE REALITY

IS INANIMATE MINDLESS MATTER
Those who hold this view do so for two main reasons among others.
First, they feel that there is no valid evidence for the existence of a
supernatural or transcendent realm, and that in the absence of such
evidence they are entitled to hold, as a fallback position, the view that
Nature is all there is.4
The second major reason that atheists give for not believing in
the existence of God is the prevalence of evil and suffering in the
world. If there is an all-loving, all-powerful, all-wise creator, they say,
why do so many people suffer such bad things? Why did God allow
evil in the first place? And why does he not put an end to it?
This, we admit, is a genuine problem, which weighs heavily with
many people, and not just with atheists. It is too large to be dealt with
here; but we shall devote the last book in this series to it.5
The difficulties inherent in materialistic naturalism
Materialistic naturalism, however, itself involves severe difficulties.

Because it holds that the Ultimate Reality is matter, it is obliged also
to hold that matter has always existed eternally; for if matter had a
beginning, it could no longer be considered Ultimate Reality. Instead,
we should have to ask where it came from, and who or what created it;
in other words, to what Ultimate Reality did matter owe its existence.
The first difficulty, then, with this view is raised by the majority
modern theory that the matter of the universe did have a beginning,
at the so-called Big Bang.6
The second difficulty with this version of naturalism is even
more severe: it subverts the status and validity of human reason, and,
therefore, the validity of its own arguments by which it tries to sup-
port its theory. Let’s see how that is.
4 See, by contrast, the cumulative evidence that there is a Creator God behind the universe,
as discussed in the books God’s Undertaker and Gunning for God, both by John Lennox.
5 Book 6: Suffering Life’s Pain.
6 For a critique of the view that quantum cosmology has proved that in theory at least, sci-
ence will one day be able to explain how the universe came to exist out of nothing without any
supernatural Creator, see John Lennox’s Gunning for God, Ch. 4 – ‘Designer Universe?’.
110
Since naturalism holds that there is no creator, it must accept the

only alternative explanation of how things began, that is, some form
of materialistic evolution. It teaches that matter, from which every-
thing evolved, was itself mindless; and that mind did not, and could
not, exist until mindless matter mindlessly evolved it.
Worse still, naturalism holds that mind, having evolved from
mindless matter, remains essentially material in that it is composed
of, and involves nothing but, impersonal, mindless matter and elec-
trochemical, physical processes. If that is so, what validity could
possibly be ascribed to thoughts produced by such substances and
processes, or even to the supposedly rational arguments that the pro-
ponents of naturalism use to support their position?
In this context, then, we may set out the case against materialis-
tic naturalism in the following propositions:
1. It is absurd to claim that human rationality owes its exist-
ence to non-rational matter.
2. It is absurd to claim that human rationality was mindlessly
produced by non-rational matter by non-rational processes.
3. It is absurd to claim that human rationality is a function of
mindless matter.
4. It is absurd to claim that the creative source of mind is less
rational than mind itself is.
5. It is absurd to claim that rationality and logic were pro-
duced by small, purposeless, evolutionary permutations,
each one of which was unintentional and accidental.
But not all versions of naturalism are so crassly materialistic. So
let’s consider another slightly more nuanced version.
The Ultimate Reality is energy
According to Nobel Laureate physicist Richard Feynman, ‘It is im-

portant to realise that in physics today, we have no knowledge of
what energy is.’ 7 On the other hand, according to our school text-
books, Einstein’s equation, E = mc2, allows us to think that mass
and energy are related. Could we not then appeal to the First Law of
7 Six Easy Pieces, 71.
111
Thermodynamics—‘energy can be neither created nor destroyed’—

and argue, as many atheists do, that energy, if not matter, is eternal:
no god was needed to create it, no god can destroy it; it is self-existent
and eternal, and therefore Ultimate Reality?
Well, we could, but the argument would not be logically water-
tight. The First Law is formulated on the basis of scientific observa-
tions of how the universe, as presently constituted, works.8
Heat is measured in calories of energy, and these calories can mi-
grate from one object to another, can be converted into mechanical
work, or be stored. But no calorie of energy goes out of existence. It
simply changes form.
If this, then, is what the First Law is stating, it could equally well
be expressed in a less misleading way: ‘the amount of actual energy
in the universe remains constant’. Put this
way it is talking of the conservation of en-
When the First Law, as ergy, and not about where the energy came
presently phrased, asserts from in the first place.
that energy can be neither When, therefore, the First Law, as pres-
created nor destroyed, it ently phrased, asserts that energy can be
is merely denying that we neither created nor destroyed, it is merely
human beings or any other denying that we human beings or any other
systems, activities, or events systems, activities, or events within the uni-
within the universe can verse can create or destroy energy. It would
create or destroy energy. be logically gratuitous, however, to deduce
from this that energy was not, and did not
need to be, created by God in the first place,
and maintained by him thereafter for as long as he pleased. It would
be on a par with the mistaken idea of the earliest Greek philosophers,
that motion within the universe can just be assumed to be eternal,
and does not require an initiating source, such as Anaxagoras’s Mind
or Aristotle’s Unmoved Mover (see Ch. 2).
8 See Russell and Adebiyi, Classical Thermodynamics, 5: ‘As stated earlier, the only basis of
thermodynamics is the observation of the physical world and the experimental measurements
related to the observation. No other theoretical proof exists for thermodynamics. Thus, if a
case were observed in nature that was contrary to what is implied by an existing law of thermo-
dynamics, the law would be declared invalid.’
112
Another difficulty for materialistic naturalism
Some modern scientists have come to see that there is something

more fundamental in the universe than matter or energy, and that
is the laws of physics. The well-known physicist Paul Davies puts it
this way:
An atheist will argue that the world is thoroughly rational and
logical at every step: there is a causal or explanatory chain for
everything, which we can trace either backwards in time to the
Big Bang or down to the ultimate laws of physics. But if you ask,
‘Why the Big Bang?’ or ‘Why those laws?’ you’ll be told, ‘Well,
there is no reason’. In other words, the laws of physics exist rea-
sonlessly. Having argued that the world is thoroughly rational at
all points, the atheist says it is ultimately founded in absurdity.
My point of view is that the world is rational all the way down
to the lowest level—which is beyond the domain of science.
There is a reason why things are as they are: the universe is not
just arbitrary and absurd. Physics can tell us about the phenom-
ena of the world, but asking ‘Why those laws?’ is the domain of
metaphysics, and at that point I would part company with the
atheist.9
Yet another difficulty for materialistic naturalism
This time the difficulty is information; and once more we shall let
Professor Davies tell us about it:
there is not the slightest shred of scientific evidence that life is
anything other than a stupendously improbable accident. It’s of-
ten said that life is written into the laws of physics; well, it’s not—
any more than houses or television sets are. It is consistent with
those laws, but they alone will not explain how it came to exist.
For a hundred years the debate has been dominated by chem-
ists, who think it’s like baking a cake: if you know the recipe,
you can just mix the ingredients, simmer for a million years,
9 From an interview by David Wilkinson published in Third Way, ‘Found in space?’, 18–19.
113
add a pinch of salt, and life emerges. I don’t think that is ever
going to be the explanation, because life is not about stuff, about
magic matter; it’s about a very special type of information pro-
cessing system. And the whole subjects of information theory
and complexity theory are very much in their infancy.10
Now this is refreshingly different from fashionable materialis-
tic naturalism. The rationality behind the basic laws of physics, the
genes as carriers of the coded information necessary for the produc-
tion of life, and the astonishing complexity of the biochemical ma-
chinery within each cell which is self-evidently designed to achieve
a foreseen end—all this constitutes severe difficulties for supporters
of that form of naturalism which declares mindless matter to be the
Ultimate Reality.
But it also constitutes grave difficulty for those who wish on the
one hand to recognise the evident intelligence behind the universe
and yet on the other hand to retain naturalism’s basic contention that
neither the universe nor life within the universe was created by the
direct action of a personal creator.
Presently we shall investigate examples of this particular diffi-
culty, one from the ancient world and two others from the modern.
But for the moment let us pause and ask ourselves some questions.
REACTIONS TO MATERIALISTIC NATURALISM
The Stoic concept of God
Stoicism was founded by Zeno of Citium (334–262 bc). Its influence,

particularly on Roman thinkers like Cicero and Seneca, and through
them on the Enlightenment, and thus on the modern world, has been
large and persistent.
Stoicism stood at the opposite extreme from the materialistic
philosophy of the atomists, Leucippus and Democritus (see Ch. 2).
These latter had taught that the universe was composed of an infi-
nite number of tiny, unsplittable pieces of matter, moving eternally
through infinite space. There was nothing else. No mind created the
10 Wilkinson, ‘Found in space?’, 20.
114
atoms for they were eternal. No mind initiated their movement; no

mind controlled it. Each human being, body and soul, was but a tem-
porary conglomeration of material atoms. In
a word, atomists were thoroughgoing believers
in materialistic naturalism. Stoics rejected this mind-
Stoics rejected this mindless, materialistic less, materialistic system
system altogether as being totally unreason- altogether as being
able. They insisted that the universe is every- totally unreasonable.
where permeated by reason, which they called They insisted that the
by the Greek word logos. Logos is related to universe is everywhere
the verb legein, ‘to speak’, but it covers a wide permeated by reason,
range of meaning. It means, of course, ‘speech’ which they called by the
or ‘expression’; but it can also mean ‘the expla- Greek word ‘logos’.
nation of a thing’, or ‘the formula of its consti-
tution’, or ‘the statement of its purpose’. It can
be used of ‘an architect’s plan of a house’ indicating the point and
purpose of its design. It can also refer to an army general’s ‘plan of
campaign’, showing what ultimate goal the general had in mind right
from the outset, and the method he chose to achieve that goal.
Logos, then, so the Stoics held, permeated the whole of Nature.11
Interestingly enough, the Stoics said that this Logos was God.
Now, the New Testament uses this same word Logos as a title of the
Son of God in relation to the creation of the universe:
In the beginning was the Word [Logos], and the Word was with
God, and the Word was God. . . . All things were made through
him, and without him was not any thing made that was made.
(John 1:1–3)
But having noticed the similarity, we should at once notice the
crucial difference between the Stoic concept of God, and the New
Testament’s teaching. God, in the Bible, is personal, and though he
made the universe, and constantly upholds it, and is omnipresent
throughout it, he is not part of the universe, and certainly not em-
bodied in its matter.
But according to Stoicism, there were two ultimate principles in
the universe: God and matter. God is active; matter is passive. But
11 See Sandbach, The Stoics, 72–3.
115
God and matter are always conjoined. God, who is Logos, is in every-
thing in the world, both in matter and in man. God is spoken of as
breath (Gk. pneuma), but this breath likewise is always embodied in
matter. In that sense the whole universe can be called God, or Cos-
mic Nature, since in Stoic thought, Nature and God refer to the same
thing. Hence Professor A. A. Long can write:
They were convinced that the universe is amenable to rational
explanation, and is itself a rationally organised structure. The
faculty in man which enables him to think, to plan and to
speak—which the Stoics called logos—is literally embodied in
the universe at large. The individual human being at the es-
sence of his nature shares a property which belongs to Nature in
the cosmic sense. And because cosmic Nature embraces all that
there is, the human individual is a part of the world in a pre-
cise and integral sense. Cosmic events and human actions are
therefore not happenings of two quite different orders: in the
last analysis they are both alike consequences of one thing—
logos. To put it another way, cosmic Nature or God (the terms
refer to the same thing in Stoicism) and man are related to each
other at the heart of their being as rational agents.12
In the end, then, Stoicism reduced everything to Nature. Nature,
or Logos, or God—it did not matter which term you used—was in
everything, in matter and in man. Man’s ideal, therefore, was to live
according to Nature (Gk. physis), that is, according to the Cosmic
Reason. But whether an individual cooperated with this Cosmic Rea-
son or not, Cosmic Reason was ultimately in control. Therefore the
evil behaviour of wicked men had to be regarded as part of the all-
controlling rational Logos. It meant also, for instance, that if you saw
a man abusing a child, or a dictator gassing six million Jews, it was a
reasonable thing to do to attempt to stop the outrage. But if you failed
to stop it, it would be unreasonable to grieve over it. You had to ac-
cept that this outrage, too, was ultimately the work of Cosmic Logos,
that is, God.
The Stoics, then, as we have said, reduced everything to Nature—
rational Nature, not materialistic Nature, but in the end simply all-
12 Hellenistic Philosophy, 108.
116
embracing Nature. Whether, therefore, their philosophy should be

called naturalism, or not, is a debatable point. Normally it is said to
be a form of panentheism (i.e. the view, not that everything is God,
but that God is in everything). But it certainly suffered from this
glaring moral problem: it made God, not only the source of, but the
active agent in, moral evil.
New naturalism’s concepts of God
The Cosmos takes the place of God

Carl Sagan (1934–96) was a thoroughgoing adherent of naturalism.
He admitted that ‘the neurochemistry of the brain is astonishingly
busy, the circuitry of a machine more won-
derful than any devised by humans’.13 Nev-
ertheless he insisted that humans emerged The ocean calls. Some
by a powerful but random process.14 No God, part of our being knows
then, as we deduce from his assertion, which this is from where we
we quoted earlier: ‘The Cosmos is all that is came. We long to return.
or ever was or ever will be’.15 Yet, interestingly These aspirations are
enough, the way he talks of the Cosmos and not, I think, irreverent,
of our relationship to it suggests that in his although they may trouble
system of thought, the cosmos acts as a sub- whatever gods may be.
stitute for God. —Carl Sagan, Cosmos
Christians, for instance, will say of God
‘Thou hast made us for thyself, nor can our
hearts find rest until they rest in thee.’ 16 Carl Sagan apparently rec-
ognises the existence of this instinct in the human heart; but accord-
ing to him the creator from which we came and to which we long to
return is the ocean!
The ocean calls. Some part of our being knows this is from where
we came. We long to return. These aspirations are not, I think,
irreverent, although they may trouble whatever gods may be.17
13 Cosmos, 305.
14 Cosmos, 309.
15 Cosmos, 20.
16 Augustine of Hippo, Confessions, i.1.
17 Cosmos, 20.
117
Christians maintain that as creatures of a personal Creator, we

have an undeniable duty of gratitude and thankfulness to him, and
likewise a moral responsibility towards him (Rom 1:21; 14:11–12).
Carl Sagan similarly owns that humans have a moral responsibility
to their creator, but for him the creator is the cosmos:
Our obligation to survive is owed, not just to ourselves, but also
to the Cosmos, ancient and vast, from which we spring.18
But how can humanity have any moral obligation to an impersonal
system, when, in addition, humanity itself is supposed to be merely
the product of a long series of impersonal biological accidents? 19
We can only conclude that it is very difficult to eradicate from
the human heart its instinctive awareness that we owe a duty of grati-
tude and of moral obligation to the living personal God, our Creator;
and so, naturalists like Sagan, unwilling to recognise him, transfer
these aspirations to a surrogate god, the Cosmos. As the New Testa-
ment puts it, ‘they worship and serve the created thing, rather than
the Creator’ (Rom 1:25).
Ultimate Reality, or God, is a set

of very clever mathematical laws
For our second example of new naturalism’s concept of God we re-
vert to Paul Davies and the interview that he gave, and from which
we quoted earlier.20 We cite him because he is known worldwide as a
scientist and has written a stream of books informing the educated
public of the ongoing scientific debate.
In 1983 he published a book that he entitled God and the New
Physics; and in the interview to which we refer he explains his rea-
sons for giving it this title:
I make no bones about the fact that I was being deliberately
mischievous. I wrote it at a time when most people felt that sci-
ence was totally hostile to religion. By saying that science actu-
ally can lead us to God, I think I made a lot of people sit up and
take notice.
18 Cosmos, 374, in ‘Cosmos’ the capital letter is his.

19 Sagan, Cosmic Connection, 52.
20 Wilkinson, ‘Found in space?’, 17–21.
118
In the interview he confesses that he is uneasy with the term

‘God’; 21 nonetheless throughout the interview he frequently refers to
his views about God. Moreover, another of his many books is enti-
tled The Mind of God; and the last sentence of this book, referring to
our existence as human beings on this planet, declares: ‘We are truly
meant to be here.’ From this, one might easily conclude that Ultimate
Reality, according to Davies, must be at least personal. For how could
an impersonal anything mean us to be here?
Davies’s own basic position, to which his research has led him, is
that ‘the world is rational all the way down to the lowest level—which
is beyond the domain of science’, down to, in fact, ‘the domain of
metaphysics’.22 If, then, at this ‘lowest’ level there is something ra-
tional that is responsible for, or the source of, the rationality of the
world all the way ‘up’ to the level of human intelligence, most people
would find it easy to suppose that that something rational was God.
What else could it be?
But Davies has a difficulty. His science has convinced him that the
world is rational from its lowest level all the way up to intelligent hu-
man beings. But he is a Darwinian evolutionist,23 and for naturalistic
Darwinists it is normally a non-negotiable article of faith that no mind,
and certainly no divine mind, was involved in the process of evolution
either from inorganic to organic matter or from the emergence of the
lowliest form of life to the body and mind of Homo sapiens.
Davies’s own view

What, then, according to Davies is the Ultimate Reality that brought
the universe into existence? Here are some of his statements:
On the origin of life

It’s often said that life is written into the laws of physics; well,
it’s not.24
there is not the slightest shred of scientific evidence that life is
anything other than a stupendously improbable accident.25
23 See his book The Fifth Miracle, 89.
119
I’m assuming that God did not intervene to make life. I don’t
want that.26
To that extent, life and mind are written into the underlying
laws of physics: the tendency for them to emerge is there at the
beginning.27
On the origin of the universe

I want to be very clear. I’ve long disliked the idea of God as a
cosmic magician, a sort of super being who existed before the
universe and then waved a magic wand and brought it into
being—and from time to time intervenes by moving atoms
around.28
On the possibility of divine revelation
It’s very hard to see how God could be any sort of a being who
could bring about a revelation without coming back to moving
atoms around. I mean if someone’s going to implant a thought
in your mind that would not be there otherwise, they have got
to move atoms around.29
There is something very odd about this. We grant, of course, that
if we implant a thought in a friend’s mind—as we very frequently
do—it has the effect that in so doing we ‘move atoms around in our
friend’s head’. But if we are allowed to do this, and can do it without
breaking the laws of physics, why can’t God be allowed to do it? Even
Davies’s ‘God’ was responsible for creating atoms in the first place
and for their ceaseless movements throughout the universe. Why
must God be forbidden to implant thoughts in people’s mind because
it would involve moving a few atoms around?

28 Wilkinson, ‘Found in space?’, 18. This is, of course, a grotesque caricature of the Bible’s ac-
count of creation. The Bible says that God created the world by his Word, thus supplying the
information necessary for the formation of life, which information, we now know, is carried
by the genes.
120
On a God who answers prayer

at no point would I want a miracle-working Deity who inter-
venes to fix things. 30
I just don’t like the idea that there are electromagnetic forces
and nuclear forces and gravitation and oh, then there’s God
from time to time.31
On the incarnation and resurrection of Christ

The Incarnation means God intervenes in history by taking on
human flesh, not as an inevitable process but as a free act.32
the Resurrection . . . to my mind is a miracle.33
A problem with intervention

What Davies means is that if the incarnation had happened as the
inevitable result of the laws of physics and biochemistry, he could
believe it. But he cannot allow God to bypass the laws of physics and
biochemistry and do a miracle such as the incarnation and the resur-
rection. God, apparently, must not intervene in our world unless he
submits to the laws of physics and chemistry which he himself made,
and those especially which humans have so far discovered.
From all this it would appear that, for all his talk about ‘God’,
and about a rationality that goes beyond science, Paul Davies is a
thoroughgoing believer in naturalism. Nature is everything. He just
doesn’t like, to use his own phrase, ‘a Super-Natural God’, particu-
larly one who could intervene in our world.
Then what exactly is his concept of ‘God’, or of Ultimate Reality?
Here are a few more quotations:
And so my God is a rather abstract God . . . a timeless being, a
being outside of time, a being that will explain space and time,
and therefore cannot be part of them . . . a rather remote being,
who is unlikely to appeal to those who are seeking for some

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personal salvation. . . . The phrase ‘intellectual input’ comes to

mind . . . ‘something clever’.34
There’s no need to invoke anything supernatural in the origins
of the universe or of life. I have never liked the idea of divine
tinkering: for me it is much more inspiring to believe that a
set of mathematical laws can be so clever as to bring all these
things into being.35
So Ultimate Reality, according to Davies, is a set of clever math-
ematical laws! This is astonishing. In the world I live in, the simple
law of arithmetic, 1 + 1 = 2, by itself never brought anything into be-
ing, and certainly never put any money into my bank account. If I
first put £1000 into the bank, and later another £1000 into the bank,
the laws of arithmetic will then rationally explain how it is that I
now have £2000 in my account. But if I never put any money in to
the bank myself, and simply leave it to the laws of arithmetic to bring
money into being in my bank account, I shall remain permanently
bankrupt. The world of non-supernatural naturalism in which clever
mathematical laws all by themselves bring a whole universe into be-
ing and life itself into the bargain, is more like science fiction than
science. The intelligence that formed the real world must have be-
longed to a supernatural personal agent, namely God.
THE ROLE OF PREJUDICE IN THE DECISION

WHETHER TO BELIEVE IN GOD OR NOT
It is perfectly true that many people want there to be a God, because,

they believe, he satisfies their needs. To that extent their belief may
be said to be prejudiced. But unbelief in God can be prejudiced too;
and it is healthy to recognise that fact.
It is noticeable, for instance, in the interview with Professor
Davies cited above, that much of what he says about what God can-
not be and cannot do is governed by what Davies himself doesn’t like.

35 From another interview reported by Clive Cookson, ‘Scientist Who Glimpsed God’, 20.
122
Thomas Nagel, Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at New York Uni-

versity, expresses his prejudice even more strongly and more explicitly:
In speaking of the fear of religion, I don’t mean to refer to the
entirely reasonable hostility toward certain established reli-
gions . . . in virtue of their objectionable moral doctrines, so-
cial policies, and political influence. Nor am I referring to the
association of many religious beliefs with superstition and the
acceptance of evident empirical falsehoods. I am talking about
something much deeper—namely, the fear of religion itself. . . .
I want atheism to be true and am made uneasy by the fact that
some of the most intelligent and well-informed people I know
are religious believers. It isn’t just that I don’t believe in God
and, naturally, hope that I’m right in my belief. It’s that I hope
there is no God! I don’t want there to be a God; I don’t want the
universe to be like that.36
On the other hand, the most vigorous intellectualism cannot al-
ways entirely suppress the heart’s deeper longings for God. For all his
anti-Christian agnosticism Bertrand Russell once wrote:
Even when one feels nearest to other people, something in one
seems obstinately to belong to God and to refuse to enter into
any earthly communion—at least that is how I should express
it if I thought there was a God. It is odd, isn’t it? I care passion-
ately for this world, and many things and people in it, and yet
. . . what is it all? There must be something more important, one
feels, though I don’t believe there is.37
36 The Last Word, 130.

37 Autobiography, 320 (ellipsis in original).
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CHAPTER 4
CHRISTIAN THEISM
THE SEARCH FOR ULTIMATE REALITY IN GOD’S SELF-REVELATION
Long ago, at many times and in many ways,

God spoke to our fathers by the prophets, but
in these last days he has spoken to us by his
Son, whom he appointed the heir of all things,
through whom also he created the world.
—Hebrews 1:1–2
GOD IS THE ULTIMATE REALITY AND HE CAN BE KNOWN
Central to Christian theism is its proclamation that God is the Ulti-

mate Reality and he can be known. God has not left it to our unaided
human reason to work out what Ultimate Reality might be like. God
has himself taken the initiative to make himself known to us. He has
done so in many ways:
(a) through creation;
(b) through the voice of conscience;
(c) through history, especially through the Old Testament
prophets;
(d) but supremely by himself becoming man in the person
of Jesus Christ.
By this divine act of self-communication God has transcended
two obstacles in the way of our getting to know him:
Obstacle 1: The essential limitation of abstract human reasoning
At its best, abstract human reasoning can only produce an idea of God.
Now, in any subject an idea of a thing is always substantially less than
the thing itself. An idea of a thing is only a mental concept; the thing
itself is the reality. So an idea of God, arrived at by abstract philosophi-
cal reasoning, is a very different thing from the living God himself in
active self-revelation through the word and person of the incarnate
Son of God and through the illumination of the Spirit of God.
Obstacle 2: The incarnation has bridged a gulf that human

reason by itself could never cross
Critics of Christianity have often called attention to this gulf. If God

is the transcendent Lord, they argue, the Altogether Other, how could
human concepts and language ever cross the gulf between our world,
127
which we know by experience, and God and his world, which is alto-
gether different? The language Christianity uses to talk of God, they
say, is all metaphorical and analogical. But those metaphors and anal-
ogies are not valid. They are based on experience of this world; and we
have no rational ground for supposing that they can tell us anything
about the realities of God and that other world—even if such exist.
The gulf between the two worlds is conceptually and linguistically
uncrossable. So runs the criticism.
Christian theism admits the gulf but asserts that, by the incar-
nation, God has himself crossed the gulf, and entered our time and
space. Not only has he spoken to us in human language, but he has
himself become man without ceasing to be
God. In his self-communication he of course
Unless God had first uses metaphors and analogies drawn from our
revealed himself to us, world in order to facilitate our understanding.
we would have nothing But those metaphors and analogies are valid,
to use our intellects on. since he came from the other side of the gulf
It is with the knowledge and knows that world, and knows what meta-
of God as it is in phors can reliably be used to describe it (John
science: God had first 3:12–13; 6:62; 8:14, 23, 26; 16:28).
to create the universe Now when we point to the inadequacy of
before the human unaided human reason to decide what God is
intellect could study it. like, we are not implying that reason has no
place in our knowing and understanding of
God. The Bible itself commands us to love the
Lord our God with all our mind as well as with our heart (see Mark
12:30). ‘In your thinking be mature’, says 1 Corinthians 14:20. But
unless God had first revealed himself to us, we would have nothing
to use our intellects on. It is with the knowledge of God as it is in sci-
ence: God had first to create the universe before the human intellect
could study it.
Here to start with, then, is a key passage in the New Testament
that declares not only that God does communicate himself to hu-
manity, but that it is part of his very nature to do so. Let’s first read it
through and then study its main features:
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God,
and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All
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CHRISTIAN THEISM
things were made through him, and without him was not any
thing made that was made. In him was life, and the life was the
light of men. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness
has not overcome it.
There was a man sent from God, whose name was John. He
came as a witness, to bear witness about the light, that all might
believe through him. He was not the light, but came to bear
witness about the light.
The true light, which enlightens everyone, was coming
into the world. He was in the world, and the world was made
through him, yet the world did not know him. He came to his
own, and his own people did not receive him. But to all who
did receive him, who believed in his name, he gave the right to
become children of God, who were born, not of blood nor of the
will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God.
And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we
have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father,
full of grace and truth. (John bore witness about him, and cried
out, ‘This was he of whom I said, “He who comes after me ranks
before me, because he was before me.”’) And from his fullness
we have all received, grace upon grace. For the law was given
through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. No
one has ever seen God; the only God, who is at the Father’s side,
he has made him known. . . . The next day he saw Jesus coming
towards him, and said, ‘Behold, the Lamb of God, who takes
away the sin of the world!’ (John 1:1–18; 29)
This passage makes a number of assertions. Let’s first list them
and then comment on the detail of the passage.
1. God exists. He is eternal, uncreated and distinct from the
contingent, created universe.
2. God speaks. It is part of his essential nature to speak and to
communicate himself.
3. The creation of the universe was by the Word of God, and is
an expression of his mind.
4. Humanity’s original rejection of God’s word resulted in a
universal darkness. Yet God continued to speak, and his
light to shine.
129
5. God’s supreme self-revelation has been through the incar-

nation of the Word, and through Christ’s sacrificial death.
6. The incarnation of the Word of God gives insight into the
inner relationships of the triunity that is the one God.
The difference between ‘being’

and ‘becoming’ (John 1:1–3)
Here we meet the New Testament’s comment on a subject that had
long exercised the Greek philosophers, that is, the important differ-
ence between ‘being’ and ‘becoming’, or ‘coming to be’ (see the sec-
tions on Heraclitus, Parmenides, Leucippus, Democritus, and Plato,
in Ch. 2). In a world of constant change and becoming, some argued,
there can be no fixed, complete, unchanging knowledge of anything.
Are there, then, asked Plato, no eternal, unchanging truths and values
on which we can build our lives and guide them through this chang-
ing world? As if in answer to this question, the passage from John’s
Gospel points to the eternal being that lies behind our individual
‘coming-to-be’.
Three times in verse 1 and once in verse 2 the verb ‘to be’ (Gk.
einai) is used of the Word. Deliberately so, for it denotes his eternal,
timeless, Being that had no beginning.
In verse 3, by contrast, the other verb, ‘to become’, ‘to begin to
be’, ‘to come into existence’ (Gk. gignesthai), is used of the creation of
all things. It tells us that matter did not exist eternally as the Greeks
thought. It had a beginning.
Now return to verse 1 and notice how pre-
The universe, then, is cise the language is. ‘In the beginning’—that is,
not part of the very the beginning of the universe—‘the Word was’,
being of God, eternally not ‘began to be’ or ‘came into existence’, for the
emanating from him, as Word had no beginning. He already was, with a
Plotinus thought, and, being that was eternal; and it was through him,
like God, eternal itself. the eternally pre-existent Word, that the time-
Matter is not eternal. It bound universe, by contrast, eventually came
had a beginning. Unlike into existence.
God, there was a time The universe, then, is not part of the very
when it did not exist. being of God, eternally emanating from him, as
Plotinus thought, and, like God, eternal itself.
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CHRISTIAN THEISM
Matter is not eternal. It had a beginning. Unlike God, there was a time
when it did not exist.
‘The Word was with God and

the Word was God’ (John 1:1–2)
Here we meet again the Greek word Logos, which we encountered when
we studied Stoic philosophy (see Ch. 3). Its basic meaning (though it
has many connotations) is ‘word’, not in the sense of an individual
word—the Greek for that would be rhēma—but speech, expression,
communication.
Two things are here said about this Word:
1. ‘The Word was with God’

This is said twice, once in verse 1 and then again in verse 2, and on
both occasions in connection with the Beginning. Verse 1 says ‘In the
beginning the Word [already] was and the Word was with God’, thus
enjoying eternal existence equally with God. Verse 2 says ‘He was
in the beginning with God.’ It thus indicates that not only eternally,
but at creation, the Word was with God, participating so completely
with God in the creation of the universe that nothing in all the vast
universe was created without him, as verse 3 goes on to explain. In
other words, it was not the case that God made some things by the
Word, and other things by some other agent. All came into existence
through the Word.
The preposition in Greek is pros (and not the more usual syn or
meta). Normally in the New Testament this preposition is used in the
sense ‘with’ only when it applies to persons, when one person is in
some kind of relationship with another person.1
Here in these two verses it indicates that the Word was a person
in eternal fellowship and intimate relationship with God. Now nor-
mally if we say that one person is with another person, it implies that
each of the two persons is distinct from the other. To say, then, that
the Word was with God, implies that the Word was, and is, in some
1 Cf. ‘Are not his sisters here with us?’ (Mark 6:3); ‘Day after day I was with you’ (Mark 14:49);
‘at home with the Lord’ (2 Cor 5:8); ‘I would have been glad to keep him with me’ (Phlm 13);
‘the eternal life, which was with the Father’ (1 John 1:2).
131
sense, distinct from God. That is certainly true; but it is immediately

followed in the biblical text by another statement about the Word:
2. ‘And the Word was God’

What this phrase tells us is that the Word was not only with God, but
was nothing less than God himself. What can this mean? How can
the Word be said to be ‘with God’, and so distinct from God, and yet
at the same time be said to be nothing less than God? Is the Apostle
John saying that there were originally two Gods? Certainly not! John
was not a pagan Greek polytheist. John was a strict, Jewish, monothe-
ist for whom polytheism was a denial of Judaism’s basic tenet: ‘The
Lord our God is one Lord’ (Deut 6:4 esv mg).
Some have argued that the word for ‘God’ (Gk. theos), though a
noun, is being used in this sentence as an adjective: The Word was
‘God-like’, or ‘divine’. But if John had intended to say that, he had
a word at his disposal that meant exactly that
(Gk. theios), and he could have used it to make
We must concentrate his meaning clear. He didn’t use it, because he
on the significance that did not want to say that Christ was God-like.
the statement, ‘the Word He intended to say that the Word was noth-
was God’, carries for ing less than God. We know that, because—to
God’s revelation of take one example—John tells us that he was
himself to humankind. present when Thomas addressed Christ as ‘My
It means that the very Lord and my God’, and Christ neither rebuked
nature of God is to nor restrained him (John 20:28).
speak, to communicate, Here, then, we have an early insight into
to make himself known. the fact that God, though One, is not simplex
as Plotinus thought, but a triunity of distinct
persons; and of that we shall talk presently.
But for the moment we must concentrate on the significance that the
statement, ‘The Word was God’, carries for God’s revelation of him-
self to humankind. It means that the very nature of God is to speak,
to communicate, to make himself known. It is not that God is silent,
and occasionally gets some lesser being to make some announce-
ment about him. The true God is the God who speaks. When the
Word speaks, it is God who is speaking, for the Word is God.
It is this feature in God which according to the Bible distin-
guishes him from man-made idols, whether those idols are material
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CHRISTIAN THEISM
statues, or merely human concepts of God: Their idols have mouths,

but they don’t speak (see e.g. Ps 115:5). It also stands in vivid contrast
to those philosophies that depict Ultimate Reality as not being con-
cerned to speak to humankind. The fact is that the Word has spoken,
and the Word is God.
God spoke at creation, and still speaks

through the created order (John 1:3–4)
All things came into existence through the Word, says verse 3. Gen-
esis 1, with its repeated ‘and God said’ at each stage in the process of
creation, emphasises the same point. Says Psalm 33:6, 9:
By the word of the Lord the heavens were made,
and by the breath of his mouth all their host
. . . for he spoke, and it came to be;
he commanded, and it stood firm.
The New Testament repeats the observation:
By faith we understand that the universe was created by the
word of God, so that what is seen was not made out of things
that are visible. (Heb 11:3)
Hebrews 1:2–3 adds that God, who created the universe through
the Word, now maintains it through that same Word. He upholds all
things by the word of his power.
This consistent emphasis throughout the Bible on the fact that
the universe was created by the Word of God, has special resonance
for us who in the past several decades have become aware that the
physical substances in the human cell act as a code that carries the
‘information’ necessary for the production and reproduction of life
(see Appendix).2
But the very existence of created life in our world carries another
message. It acts as light, says our passage (John 1:4), inviting us, indeed
compelling us, to ask where it came from. If we are walking along a
dark country road at night and suddenly a beam of light crosses our
path, we instinctively ask where it comes from. If someone suggested
it didn’t come from any source, it just came from nowhere, we should
2 See Appendix: The Scientific Endeavour, p. 169.
133
dismiss the suggestion as nonsense. Light has to have a source, and

so does life.
What then was life’s source? Our passage answers: ‘In him [i.e.
in the Word] was life, and the life was the light of men’ (1:4). He, the
Word, was the source of all created life. So if we, as human beings,
would make sense of our life, and discover what is the point and pur-
pose of it, and what is its goal, we must trace it back to its source, God
the Word, and learn to live in his light and according to his purpose
in creating us.
God spoke all through earth’s

‘dark ages’ (John 1:5–9)
Through general revelation

‘The light shines in darkness’, says John 1:5. What darkness? Ac-
cording to Genesis 3 (see also Rom 5:12–21) the fall of humankind
came about not through any lack of evidence for God’s existence, nor
through some crude sin like murder or unnatural vice, but through
rejection of God’s word and an attempt to achieve moral and intellec-
tual independence of God. It resulted in centuries of darkness (Acts
17:11–23; Rom 1:21–22; Eph 4:17–18).
In saying so, the Bible is not denying or despising the progress
that the early human race made in music and metalwork (Gen 4:21–
22), or the brilliance of subsequent civilisations like those of Egypt,
Babylon, Persia, Greece and Rome. But as regards knowledge of God
the nations at large fell into the darkness of polytheism and idolatry
with their resultant superstitions, fear and religious slavery. Never-
theless God continued to speak: (1) through the constancy of seed-
time and harvest, and the repeated ‘miracle’ of the provision of daily
bread (humans still cannot manufacture a kernel of wheat); see Acts
14:16–17); (2) through the majesty of the heavens with their stars and
galaxies (Ps 19:1); (3) through the voice of conscience reacting to the
law of God written on the human heart (Rom 2:1–15). And, of course,
he still speaks to our modern world through these same means.
Through special revelation

But God had in mind to reveal himself more directly than through
general revelation, namely, by the incarnation of the Word, the Son
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CHRISTIAN THEISM
of God, the God-man. Necessarily that involved centuries of prepara-

tion so that when this revelation was eventually made, its significance
would be unmistakable. The world’s idea of God was everywhere per-
verted by polytheism. How then could the claim of Christ to be the
Son of God have been rightly understood, if
even the nation in which he was born, like
all the others, believed in numerous gods The world’s idea of God
and goddesses, with endless supposed sons was everywhere perverted
and daughters? Or if it had believed in a by polytheism. How then
succession of avatars of one among thou- could the claim of Christ to
sands of gods, as Hinduism still does? be the Son of God have
God’s preparation for the incarnation, been rightly understood, if
therefore, took the form first of the rais- even the nation in which he
ing up, the training, and, where necessary was born, like all the others,
the severe discipline, of one nation, Israel, believed in numerous
so that this nation would eventually stand gods and goddesses, with
clear of all the polytheism of the other na- endless supposed sons
tions in its uncompromising witness to the and daughters?
One True God. Such monotheism, so his-
tory shows us, was virtually unique in the
ancient world. It took centuries to establish it without compromise,
for Israel often lapsed into the polytheism of the surrounding nations
(witness the Old Testament prophets). But the necessary objective
was finally achieved. When the Word became flesh, the nation into
which he was born was strictly and uniquely monotheistic.
The preparatory function of the Law and the Prophets

In addition the law, given by God to Israel at Sinai through Moses,
proclaimed God’s character, his holiness and righteousness, and set
the standards of behaviour he demanded from men. Then came the
long line of Hebrew prophets. They were unique: there is nothing in
the ancient world to match their denunciation of merely external,
formal religion unaccompanied by true morality, and their powerful
call for social, religious and political reformation. If people had not
developed awareness of God’s holiness, and of the seriousness of per-
sonal, social, religious and political sin, it would have made no sense
for the Son of God to come and to offer himself as a sacrifice for the
sins of the world.
135
The climax of the preparatory period

Eventually the preparatory period was over, and there came the last
and the greatest of the Old Testament prophets (Matt 11:11), John the
Baptist, as Christ’s precursor, to prepare the way of the Lord and to
introduce Christ to the people (see Isa 40:3–5; John 1:6–8, 19–28).
God has spoken finally through the

incarnation of the Word (John 1:14–18)
Our passage puts it thus:
And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have
seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of
grace and truth. . . . No one has ever seen God; the only God, who
is at the Father’s side, he has made him known. (John 1:14, 17–18)
Commenting on this climax of God’s self-revelation the New

Testament elsewhere says:
Long ago, at many times and in many ways, God spoke to our fa-
thers by the prophets, but in these last days he has spoken to us by
his Son, whom he appointed the heir of all things, through whom
also he created the world. He is the radiance of the glory of God
and the exact imprint of his nature, and he upholds the universe
by the word of his power. After making purification for sins, he
sat down at the right hand of the Majesty on high. (Heb 1:1–3)
Ultimate Reality is personal

Even in Old Testament times God’s self-revelation made it clear that he
is personal. He is not only spoken of as God: he has a name, expressive of
his character. To Moses at the burning bush (Exod 3:13–14) he declared
that name to be ‘I AM THAT I AM’, indicating his self-existent, eternal,
unchanging being. Later God proclaimed the name of the Lord thus:
Yahweh, Yahweh, a God full of compassion and gracious, slow
to anger and plenteous in mercy and truth; keeping mercy for
thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin; and
that will by no means clear the guilty. (Exod 34:5–7 own trans.)
and these are all personal qualities and activities.

But the supreme evidence that God is personal is, of course, the
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CHRISTIAN THEISM
fact that the Word, who was eternally with God and was God, has
not only talked to us about God, but has himself become man, and
thus fully expressed God in human form and human terms, without
ceasing to be God. ‘Whoever has seen me’, he declared, ‘has seen the
Father’ (John 14:9).
Moreover, since the one who became man was eternally with
God and was God, yet spoke also of the Father, and the Spirit of God,
his incarnation has given us genuine insight into the nature of God.
Christian theism does not believe in three Gods. It proclaims as vig-
orously as Judaism and Islam do, that there is only one God (1 Tim
2:5). But that one God is not simplex.
Relying simply on their human concept of ultimate perfection,
Greek philosophers could not conceive of Ultimate Reality being any
thing other than an absolute, simplex, Oneness; so much so that both
Aristotle and Plotinus argued that the One could not think of any-
one or anything outside of Itself—for that would imply a duality: the
Thinker and the thing thought. Mere reason pushed Plotinus even
further: he argued that the One could not even think about Itself—for
that same reason: it would imply the same duality: the Thinker and
the Thing thought (see Ch. 2). Reason thus concluded that Ultimate
Reality was something that had less powers than human beings have!
The Godhead revealed to us through the incarnation of the
Word, then, is a triunity of Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Not three
Gods, but three centres of relationship within the One God. It has
been customary, in Christian theology, to speak of these three rela-
tionships as three persons. But in this context ‘three persons’ does
not mean ‘three separate people’. Yet each centre of relationship is
distinct, and thus the Godhead is a divine fellowship.
God is love, says the Bible. He not only loves his creatures, but
long before any creatures existed, the Godhead was a fellowship of
love. Moreover, when it comes to God’s attitude and activities to-
wards us his creatures, the Bible makes it clear that each person in
the Godhead is involved in what is nonetheless the distinctive work
of the other two.3
3 Christian theologians refer to this phenomenon as the ‘Coinherence of the Trinity’, the
technical term for which is the Greek word perichōrēsis. Examples are: The miracles that the
Son did were done by him (John 5:35); yet he could also say that it was the Father abiding in
him that did the miracles (John 14:10). What the Son speaks to his churches (Rev 2:1) is what
the Spirit speaks to the churches (Rev 2:11).
137
Some people think that all talk about the Trinity is idealistic
nonsense. But it is interesting to notice that in a completely different
sphere scientists who investigate the quantum behaviour of particles
report that at this level particles can no longer be understood as iso-
lated, unrelated, individual things. They appear to sustain ongoing
relationships with one another in an interconnected continuous field,
witness quantum entanglement. We are not saying, of course, that
the persons of the Trinity are like particles in a quantum field. The
Holy Trinity is unique, and cannot be compared with anything else,
except in the vaguest of senses. But what we are
saying is that if matter at the quantum level be-
We cannot, and shall haves in this mysterious and counter-intuitive
never, know everything way, it is not to be wondered at if the facts that
about God. In his God has revealed to us about the interrelation-
infinity, he will always ships of the persons of the Trinity very soon
go beyond our full exceed our ability to visualise them or to under-
understanding. But we stand them fully.
can know a great deal We cannot, and shall never, know every-
about him. thing about God. In his infinity, he will always
go beyond our full understanding. But we can
know a great deal about him. Moreover, what
he has made known to us about the persons of the Trinity, is of fun-
damental practical importance for us in the process of getting to
know God personally. We may map out that process in three parts:
1. God the Father. He is the one who is to be known, and it is the
Son of God who has made him known (John 1:18; 17:26).
2. God the Son. As the Word he is the message, the full declara-
tion of God, told out not only in words, but by his virgin birth, life,
works, death, burial and resurrection.
3. God the Holy Spirit. He is not the message. He has never been
incarnated in human form, nor was he ever crucified for us. He is not
the subject matter of the gospel. On the other hand we are not left to
our own unaided powers to perceive the truth of the message, to un-
derstand it, to receive it and to be transformed by it. According to the
New Testament it is the ministry of God, the Holy Spirit to convict
the world of sin (John 16:8–9); to convince them of Christ’s resurrec-
tion (Acts 2); to glorify Christ so that people’s hearts and faith are
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CHRISTIAN THEISM
drawn out to him (John 16:14–15); to effect within them that spiritual
renewal that Christ spoke of as being born from above (John 3); to
pour out God’s love in the hearts of those who receive Christ (Rom
5:5); to empower them to develop, bit by bit, a truly Christian style
of living (Rom 8:1–17); to make it possible for them to explore even
more fully the deep things of God (1 Cor 2:1–12); to be with them and
in them (John 14:17); to guide their prayers and deepest longings and
aspirations (Rom 8:26–27); and thus to be for them their foretaste
and guarantee of their eventual eternal inheritance (Eph 1:13–14).
Knowledge of God, then, according to Christian theism, cer-
tainly involves the reception and understanding of much informa-
tion. But it is not just a matter of assimilating facts. The ever-present
danger with theology is that it can tend to objectivise the knowledge
of God so that it becomes nothing more than a system of abstract
truths. It is the work of the living, personal, Holy Spirit of God to
maintain the process of getting to know God as an ever-deepening
personal relationship between the creature and the Creator.
HOW WE ARE RELATED TO ULTIMATE REALITY
Hitherto we have concentrated on the first half of our double ques-

tion: What is the nature of Ultimate Reality? Now we must answer
the second half: How are we related to it?
We are related to Ultimate Reality as creatures to a Creator
In that connection we should notice a number of points:
God himself is our Creator

In Plato’s thought the creator, or the Demiurge, as he is called, is not
the Ultimate Reality; and when he makes the universe by imposing
order on pre-existent chaotic matter, he does so according to the pre-
existent eternal Forms (see Ch. 2).
In Shankara’s system of philosophy the Ultimate Reality, Brah-
man, is not the Creator; creation is the work of a lesser deity, Brahmā
(see Ch. 1).
139
Similarly in Neoplatonism the Ultimate Reality, the One, is not

the creator. The creator is the third entity in the hierarchy, the World
Soul (see Ch. 2).
In all three systems the matter that the world, and our bodies,
are made of is regarded as either an illusion, or of no real value, if not
positively evil. In all three philosophies humanity’s ideal goal is to es-
cape from his material body and from the world of matter.
In vivid contrast the Bible teaches that God himself, the Ultimate
Reality, created the universe and humankind. Far from our bodies
being undesirable or evil, God himself made our bodies, male and
female, and pronounced them very good (Gen 1:31). Far from being
something that we should aim to escape from, the Christian gospel
declares, as we have seen, that the second person of the Trinity, the
Word of God, eventually took a real human body; and in resurrec-
tion he was not a disembodied spirit, but had a body of flesh and
bones (Luke 24:34–43). Finally, when redemption is complete, the re-
deemed will have bodies like Christ’s glorified body (Phil 3:21). God’s
material creation, then, is not an unfortunate, regrettable thing, and
certainly not evil. It is God’s own handiwork, and therefore good.
The human race is made in the

image and likeness of its Creator
This refers, first, to the status and function of man and woman in the
world. They were to be God’s representatives and stewards over the
earth’s ecosystem.
Secondly, it refers to the moral and spiritual nature of men and
women, conscious of God and of his moral standards. And though
that image has been in part defaced by human sinfulness and turn-
ing away from God, it remains the basis of the dignity and essential
value of each individual human being (Gen 1:26–27; 9:6; Jas 3:9).
We are created by God; we are not emanations from God.

God made the whole universe out of nothing
Stoic panentheism taught that God is in everything. Indian philoso-
phy and Greek Neoplatonism teach that everything, humankind in-
cluded, emanates from God like sunbeams from out of the sun. If that
were so, we should each be able to regard ourselves as being, in some
sense, God. Indian philosophy’s famous dictum ‘Tat tvam asi’, ‘thou
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CHRISTIAN THEISM
art that’, asserts this very thing, that a human’s inner self is God,
part of God’s very substance (see Ch. 1).
If that were true, it would have some strange implications. It
would mean that part of us, at least, existed eternally even before we
were born, and never had a beginning. It would also mean that our
ignorance and evil behaviour would be attributable to God.
Sri Ramakrishna, a pantheist, spelled out the implications of em-
anational pantheism when he remarked:
God alone is, and it is He who has become this universe. . . . ‘As
the snake, I bite, as the healer I cure.’ God is the ignorant man
and God is the enlightened man. God as the ignorant man re-
mains deluded. Again, He as the guru gives enlightenment to
God in the ignorant.4
On this basis one could presumably say that God in Adolf Hitler
was a diabolical fiend, and God in the Jews whom Hitler gassed was
gassed by God.
The Bible denies this outright. God had occasion to remark at
one point in history: ‘The Egyptians are man, and not God’ (Isa 31:3);
and that is true of all of us. God alone has immortality, says the Bible
(1 Tim 6:16). The idea that matter is an emanation from God’s own
substance and is indestructible, coupled with the twin idea that ‘soul’
has existed eternally without beginning, is the reason why in ema-
national thought history just goes round in endless circles—birth,
life, death, reincarnation, life, death, rebirth—and never reaches any
goal. By contrast the Bible teaches that the progress of history is lin-
ear; one day it will reach its destined goal.
According to the Bible, then, the universe is not an emanation
from God, and neither are we. God created the universe out of noth-
ing. As C. S. Lewis put it: ‘He is so brim-full of existence that He can
give existence away, can cause things to be, and to be really other
than Himself, can make it untrue to say that He is everything.’ 5
The relation of the universe to the Son of God

The Christian Apostle Paul explained it this way:
4 See Isherwood, Vedanta for Modern Man, 246.

5 Miracles, 141.
141
For by him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, vis-
ible and invisible . . . all things were created through him and
for him. And he is before all things, and in him all things hold
together. (Col 1:16–17)
The universe had its beginning, then, in the Son of God, as, say, a
hospital can be said to have had its beginning in the mind of the per-
son, or persons, who first thought it up and in the mind of the archi-
tect. But the hospital was not built out of the ‘stuff’ of the architect,
nor the universe out of the substance of God.
The Son of God was also the agent in the creation of the universe.
What is more, he is the goal for which it was created; and he holds the
universe together until it reaches its designed goal.
We are related to God as subjects to a king

God not only set the physical laws by which we exist: he has also set
the moral and spiritual laws according to which we are commanded
to behave. And he will call us to account and be our judge. Christ
summed up those laws under two heads:
1. ‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with
all your soul and with all your mind’;
2. ‘You shall love your neighbour as yourself’ (Matt 22:35–40).
On the other hand God did not make us as robots.
God has placed us in a world that combines fixed physical laws
with a great deal of openness and freedom. It matters what we do. We
can have real effects on our world and our fellow humans. We can
explore nature and develop its potentials wisely and well; or we can
abuse the ecosystem. This reminds us that life is worth living—but
that it is a serious and responsible business.
We are fallen creatures

The tragic state our world is in, for which humankind is largely re-
sponsible, is undeniable evidence that we human beings are sinful
and blameworthy. God does not excuse our sin; but he foresaw our
failure, and estrangement from him, and offers himself in Christ as
our personal Redeemer. Moreover, the redemption God has initiated
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CHRISTIAN THEISM
will eventually involve the restoration of the whole of creation (Rom

8:18–25).
ARGUMENTS AGAINST CHRISTIAN THEISM
Several metaphysical arguments are raised against Christian theism.

Prominent among them is the fact that it involves miracles: the virgin
birth, the resurrection and the ascension of Christ, and the whole idea
that Jesus somehow ‘came down from heaven’, and is simultaneously
God and man. No scientifically educated person, it is claimed, could
bring himself to accept miracles like this.
Secondly stands the moral charge that all religion in general, and
Christianity in particular, have been the cause of social discrimina-
tion, wars and massacres all down the centuries.
Perhaps the most powerful argument against Christianity, how-
ever, is the problem of evil and pain. How can there be an all-loving,
all-powerful, all-knowing God, when gross evil is allowed to persist
unchecked, and natural disasters, plagues and illnesses torment and
destroy so many innocent people? If God exists, and he does not care
about these things, then he must be some kind of a monster.
These are genuine problems. Certainly they are too big to be an-
swered in a few sentences at this point. We shall endeavour to answer
them at length in Book 5 of this series—Claiming to Answer: How
One Person Became the Response to our Deepest Questions.
EPILOGUE
Now that we have reached the end of this discussion of physical and
metaphysical concerns, a question naturally arises: Which, if any, of
these systems of thought that we have covered seems likely to be any-
where near the truth?
That in turn raises a second question: How could we know which,
if any, was true?
And that raises a third question: How can we know the truth about
anything?
143
The branch of philosophy that deals with this problem is called

epistemology. But we will not try to cover that subject now; it de-
serves its own book. And that is precisely what we have given it in the
third book in this series—Questioning Our Knowledge, which asks
whether we can know what we need to know.
144
APPENDIX:
THE SCIENTIFIC ENDEAVOUR
The doing of successful science follows

no set of cosy rules. It is as complex as
the human personalities that are involved
in doing it.
THE CLEAR VOICE OF SCIENCE
Science rightly has the power to fire the imagination. Who could read
the story of how Francis Crick and James D. Watson unravelled the
double helix structure of DNA without entering at least a little into
the almost unbearable joy that they experienced at this discovery?
Who could watch an operation to repair someone’s eye with a del-
icately controlled laser beam without a sense of wonder at human
creativity and invention? Who could see pictures from space show-
ing astronauts floating weightless in the cabin of the International
Space Station or watch them repair the Hubble telescope against the
background of the almost tangible blackness of space without a feel-
ing akin to awe? Science has a right to our respect and to our active
encouragement. Getting young people into science and giving them
the training and facilities to develop their intellectual potential is a
clear priority for any nation. It would be an incalculable loss if the
scientific instinct were in any way stifled by philosophical, economic
or political considerations.
But since one of the most powerful and influential voices to
which we want to listen is the voice of science, it will be very impor-
tant for us, whether we are scientists or not, to have some idea of what
science is and what the scientific method is before we try to evaluate
what science says to us on any particular issue. Our aim, therefore,
first of all is to remind ourselves of some of the basic principles of
scientific thinking, some of which we may already know. Following
this, we shall think about the nature of scientific explanation and
we shall examine some of the assumptions that underlie scientific
activity—basic beliefs without which science cannot be done.
Then what is science? It tends to be one of those things that we
all know what it means until we come to try to define it. And then
we find that precise definition eludes us. The difficulty arises because
we use the word in different ways. First of all, science is used as short-
hand for:
147
1. sciences—areas of knowledge like physics, chemistry,

biology, etc.;
2. scientists—the people who work in these areas;
3. scientific method—the way in which scientists do
their work.
Often, however, the word science is used in expressions like ‘Sci-
ence says . . .’, or ‘Science has demonstrated . . .’, as if science were
a conscious being of great authority and knowledge. This usage,
though understandable, can be misleading. The fact is that, strictly
speaking, there is no such thing as ‘science’ in this sense. Science
does not say, demonstrate, know or discover anything—scientists do.
Of course, scientists often agree, but it is increasingly recognised that
science, being a very human endeavour, is very much more complex
than is often thought and there is considerable debate about what
constitutes scientific method.
SCIENTIFIC METHOD
It is now generally agreed among philosophers of science that there is

no one ‘scientific method’, so it is easier to speak of the kind of thing
that doing science involves than to give a precise definition of science.
FIGURE Ap.1. Benzene Molecule.

In 1929 crystallographer
Kathleen Lonsdale confirmed
Benzene Kekulé’s earlier theory about
the flat, cyclic nature of ben-
zene, an important milestone
in organic chemistry.
Reproduced with permission of © iStock/

hromatos.
148
APPENDIX: THE SCIENTIFIC ENDEAVOUR
Certainly observation and experimentation have primary roles to

play, as well as do the reasoning processes that lead scientists to their
conclusions. However, a glance at the history of science will show that
there is much more to it than this. We find, for example, that inex-
plicable hunches have played a considerable role. Even dreams have
had their place! The chemist Friedrich August Kekulé was studying
the structure of benzene and dreamed about a snake that grabbed its
own tail, thus forming itself into a ring. As a result he was led to the
idea that benzene might be like the snake. He had a look and found
that benzene indeed contained a closed ring of six carbon atoms! The
doing of successful science follows no set of cosy rules. It is as complex
as the human personalities that are involved in doing it.
Observation and experimentation
It is generally agreed that a revolution in scientific thinking took

place in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Up to then one main
method of thinking about the nature of the universe was to appeal
to authority. For example, in the fourth century bc Aristotle had ar-
gued from philosophical principles that the only perfect motion was
circular. Thus, if you wanted to know how the planets moved, then,
since according to Aristotle they inhabited the realm of perfection
beyond the orbit of the moon, they must move in circles. In a radical
departure from this approach, scientists like Galileo insisted that the
best way to find out how the planets moved was to take his telescope
and go and have a look! And through that telescope he saw things like
the moons of Jupiter which, according to the Aristotelian system, did
not exist. Galileo comes to embody for many people the true spirit of
scientific enquiry: the freedom to do full justice to observation and
experimentation, even if it meant seriously modifying or even aban-
doning the theories that he had previously held. That freedom should
be retained and jealously guarded by us all.
Data, patterns, relationships and hypotheses
In summary form, the most widespread view, often attributed to

Francis Bacon and John Stuart Mill, is that the scientific method
consists of:
149
1. the collection of data (facts, about which there can be no

dispute) by means of observation and experiment, neither
of them influenced by presuppositions or prejudices;
2. the derivation of hypotheses from the data by looking for
patterns or relationships between the data and then making
an inductive generalisation;
3. the testing of the hypotheses by deducing predictions from
them and then constructing and doing experiments de-
signed to check if those predictions are true;
4. the discarding of hypotheses that are not supported by the
experimental data and the building up of the theory by
adding confirmed hypotheses.
Scientists collect data, experimental observations and measure-
ments that they record. As examples of data, think of a set of blood
pressure measurements of your class just before and just after a school
examination, or of the rock samples collected by astronauts from the
surface of the moon.
There are, however, many other things that are equally real to us,
but which scarcely can count as data in the scientific sense: our sub-
jective experience of a sunset, or of friendship and love, or of dreams.
With dreams, of course, heart rate, brain activity and eye movement
can be observed by scientists as they monitor people who are asleep
and dreaming, but their subjective experience of the dream itself
cannot be measured. Thus we see that the scientific method has cer-
tain built-in limits. It cannot capture the whole of reality.
Scientists are in the business of looking for relationships and pat-
terns in their data and they try to infer some kind of hypothesis or
theory to account for those patterns. Initially the hypothesis may be
an intelligent or inspired guess that strikes the scientists from their
experience as being a possible way of accounting for what they have
observed. For example, a scientist might suggest the (very reasonable)
hypothesis that the blood pressure measurements in your class can
be accounted for by the fact that examinations cause stress in most
people! To test the hypothesis a scientist will then work out what he
or she would expect to find if the hypothesis were true and then will
proceed to devise an experiment or a series of experiments to check if
such is indeed the case. If the experiments fail to confirm expectation,
150
the hypothesis may be modified or discarded in favour of another

and the process repeated. Once a hypothesis has been successfully
tested by repeated experimentation then it is dignified by being called
a theory.1
It is now generally agreed by scientists themselves and philoso-
phers of science that our account so far of what the scientific method
is, is not only highly idealised but also flawed. In particular, contrary
to what is asserted about observation and experimentation above, it
is now widely accepted that no scientist, however honest and careful,
can come to his or her work in a completely impartial way, without
presuppositions and assumptions. This fact will be of importance for
our understanding of science’s contribution to our worldview. It is
easier, however, to consider that topic after we have first had a look at
some of the logical concepts and procedures that underlie scientific
argumentation and proof.
Induction
Induction is probably the most important logical process that scientists

use in the formulation of laws and theories.2 It is also a process that is
familiar to all of us from a very early age whether we are scientists or
not, though we may well not have been aware of it. When we as young
children first see a crow we notice it is black. For all we know, the next
crow we see may well be white or yellow. But after observing crows day
after day, there comes a point at which our feeling that any other crow
we see is going to be black is so strong that we would be prepared to
say that all crows are black. We have taken what is called an inductive
step based on our own data—we have seen, say, 435 crows—to make a
universal statement about all crows. Induction, then, is the process of
1 The terms hypothesis and theory are in fact almost indistinguishable, the only difference in
normal usage being that a hypothesis is sometimes regarded as more tentative than a theory.
2 Note for mathematicians: the process of induction described above is not the same as the
principle of mathematical induction by which (typically) the truth of a statement P(n) is estab-
lished for all positive integers n from two propositions:
(1) P(1) is true;
(2) for any positive integer k, we can prove that the truth of P(k+1) follows from the truth
of P(k).
The key difference is that (2) describes an infinite set of hypotheses, one for each positive
integer, whereas in philosophical induction we are generalising from a finite set of hypotheses.
151
generalising from a finite set of data to a universal or general statement.

A famous example of the use of induction in science is the deri-
vation of Mendel’s laws of heredity. Gregor Mendel and his assistants
made a number of observations of the frequency
of occurrence of particular characteristics in each
Induction, then, of several generations of peas, like whether seeds
is the process of were wrinkled or smooth, or plants were tall or
generalising from short, and then made an inductive generalisation
a finite set of data from those observations to formulate the laws that
to a universal or now bear his name.
general statement. But, as may well have occurred to you, there is
a problem with induction. To illustrate this, let’s
turn our minds to swans rather than the crows we
thought about just now. Suppose that from childhood every swan
you have seen was white. You might well conclude (by induction)
that all swans are white. But then one day you are shown a picture
of an Australian black swan and discover that your conclusion was
false. This illustrates what the problem with induction is. How can
you ever really know that you have made enough observations to
draw a universal conclusion from a limited set of observations?
But please notice what the discovery of the black swan has done.
It has proved wrong the statement that all swans are white, but it has
not proved wrong the modified statement that if you see a swan in
Europe, the high probability is that the swan will be white.
Let’s look at another example of induction, this time from chem-
istry.
Particular observations:
Time Date Substance Litmus test result

0905 2015-08-14 sulphuric acid turned red
1435 2015-09-17 citric acid turned red
1045 2015-09-18 hydrochloric acid turned red
1900 2015-10-20 sulphuric acid turned red
Universal or general statement (law): litmus paper turns red

when dipped in acid.
This law, based on induction from the finite set of particular ob-
servations that are made of particular acids at particular times in
152
particular places, is claimed to hold for all acids at all times in all
places. The problem with induction is, how can we be sure that such a
general statement is valid, when, in the very nature of things, we can
only make a finite number of observations of litmus paper turning
red on the application of acid? The story of the black swan makes us
aware of the difficulty.
Well, we cannot be absolutely sure, it is true. But every time we
do the experiment and find it works, our confidence in the litmus
test is increased to the extent that if we dipped some paper in a liquid
and found it did not go red we would be likely to conclude, not that
the litmus test did not work, but that either the paper we had was
not litmus paper or the liquid was not acid! Of course it is true that
underlying our confidence is the assumption that nature behaves in
a uniform way, that if I repeat an experiment tomorrow under the
same conditions as I did it today, I will get the same results.
Let’s take another example that Bertrand Russell used to illus-
trate the problem of induction in a more complex situation: Bertrand
Russell’s inductivist turkey. A turkey observes that on its first day at
the turkey farm it was fed at 9 a.m. For two months it collects obser-
vations and notes that even if it chooses days at random, it is fed at
9 a.m. It finally concludes by induction that it always will be fed at 9
a.m. It therefore gets an awful shock on Christmas Eve when, instead
of being fed, it is taken out and killed for Christmas dinner!
So how can we know for certain that we have made enough ob-
servations in an experiment? How many times do we have to check
that particular metals expand on heating to conclude that all metals
expand on heating? How do we avoid the inductivist turkey shock?
Of course we can see that the problem with the turkey is that it did
not have (indeed could not have) the wider experience of the tur-
key farmer who could replace the turkey’s incorrect inductivist con-
clusion with a more complicated correct one: namely the law that
each turkey will experience a sequence of days of feeding followed
by execution!
The point of what we are saying here is not to undermine science
by suggesting that induction is useless, nor that science in itself can-
not lead us to any firm conclusions. It simply teaches us to recognise
the limits of any one method and to found our conclusions, wherever
possible, on a combination of them.
153
The role of deduction
Once a law has been formulated by induction, we can test the valid-
ity of the law by using it to make predictions. For example, assuming
Mendel’s laws to be true, we can deduce from them a prediction as to
what the relative frequency of occurrence, say, of blue eyes in differ-
ent generations of a family, should be. When we find by direct obser-
vation that the occurrence of blue eyes is what we predicted it to be,
our observations are said to confirm the theory, al-
though this sort of confirmation can never amount
Deduction plays to total certainty. Thus deduction plays an impor-
an important role tant role in the confirmation of induction.
in the confirmation It may be that what we have said about induc-
of induction. tion has given the impression that scientific work
always starts by looking at data and reasoning to
some inductive hypothesis that accounts for those
data. However, in reality, scientific method tends to be somewhat
more complicated than this. Frequently, scientists start by deciding
what kind of data they are looking for. That is, they already have in
their mind some hypothesis or theory they want to test, and they
look for data that will confirm that theory. In this situation deduc-
tion will play a dominant role.
For example, as we mentioned above regarding observation and
experimentation, in the ancient world, Greek philosophers supposed
as a hypothesis that the planets must move in circular orbits around
the earth, since, for them, the circle was the perfect shape. They then
deduced what their hypothesis should lead them to observe in the
heavens. When their observations did not appear to confirm their
original hypothesis completely, they modified it. They did this by re-
placing the original hypothesis by one in which other circular mo-
tions are imposed on top of the original one (epicycles, they were
called). They then used this more complicated hypothesis from which
to deduce their predictions. This theory of epicycles dominated as-
tronomy for a long time, and was overturned and replaced by the
revolutionary suggestions of Copernicus and Kepler.
Kepler’s work in turn again illustrates the deductive method. Us-
ing the observations the astronomer Tycho Brahe had made avail-
able, Kepler tried to work out the shape that the orbit of Mars traced
154
against the background of ‘fixed’ stars. He did not get anywhere un-
til he hit on an idea that was prompted by geometrical work he had
done on the ellipse. That idea was to suppose as a hypothesis that the
orbit of Mars was an ellipse, then to use mathematical calculations to
deduce what should be observed on the basis of that hypothesis, and
finally to compare those predictions with the actual observations.
The validity of the elliptical orbit hypothesis would then be judged by
how closely the predictions fit the observations.
This method of inference is called the deductive or hypothetico-
deductive method of reasoning: deducing predictions from a hy-
pothesis, and then comparing them with actual observations.
Since deduction is such an important procedure it is worth con-
sidering it briefly. Deduction is a logical process by which an asser-
tion we want to prove (the conclusion) is logically deduced from
things we already accept (the premises). Here is an example of logical
deduction, usually called a syllogism:
P1: All dogs have four legs.
P2: Fido is a dog.
C: Fido has four legs.
Here statements P1 and P2 are the premises and C is the conclu-

sion. If P1 and P2 are true then C is true. Or to put it another way, to
have P1 and P2 true and C false, would involve a logical contradic-
tion. This is the essence of a logically valid deduction.
Let’s now look at an example of a logically invalid deduction:
P1: Many dogs have a long tail.
P2: Albert is a dog.
C: Albert has a long tail.
Here statement C does not necessarily follow from P1 and P2. It

is clearly possible for P1 and P2 to be true and yet for C to be false.
It all appears to be so simple that there is danger of your switch-
ing off. But don’t do that quite yet or you might miss something very
important. And that is that deductive logic cannot establish the truth
of any of the statements involved in the procedure. All that the logic
can tell us (but this much is very important!) is that if the premises
are true and the argument is logically valid, then the conclusion is
true. In order to get this clear let us look at a final example:
155
P1: All planets have a buried ocean.

P2: Mercury is a planet.
C: Mercury has a buried ocean.
This is a logically valid argument even though statement P1 and

statement C are (so far as we know) false. The argument says only that
if P1 and P2 were true, then C should be true, which is perfectly valid.
This sort of thing may seem strange to us at first,
but it can help us grasp that logic can only criticise
Logic has to do with the argument and check whether it is valid or not.
the way in which It cannot tell us whether any or all of the premises
some statements are or conclusion are true. Logic has to do with the way
derived from others, in which some statements are derived from others,
not with the truth of not with the truth of those statements.
those statements. We should also note that deductive inference
plays a central role in pure mathematics where
theories are constructed by means of making de-
ductions from explicitly given axioms, as in Euclidean geometry. The
results (or theorems, as they are usually called) are said to be true if
there is a logically valid chain of deductions deriving them from the
axioms. Such deductive proofs give a certainty (granted the consist-
ency of the axioms) that is not attainable in the inductive sciences.
In practice induction and deduction are usually both involved
in establishing scientific theories. We referred above to Kepler’s use
of deduction in deriving his theory that Mars moved in an ellipse
round the sun. However, he first thought of the ellipse (rather than,
say, the parabola or the hyperbola) because the observations of Brahe
led Kepler to believe the orbit of Mars was roughly egg-shaped. The
egg shape was initially conjectured as a result of induction from as-
tronomical observations.
Competing hypotheses can cover the same data
But here we should notice that when it comes to interpreting the data
we have collected, different hypotheses can be constructed to cover
that data. We have two illustrations of this.
Illustration from astronomy. Under the role of deduction above
we discussed two hypotheses from ancient astronomy that were put
156
forward to explain the motion of the planets. Successive refinements

of the epicyclic model appeared to cover the data at the expense of
greater and greater complication in that more and more circles were
necessary. Kepler’s proposal, by contrast, covered the data by the
simple device of replacing the complex array of circles by one sin-
gle ellipse, which simplified the whole business enormously. Now,
if we knew nothing of gravity and the deduction of elliptical orbits
that can be made from it by means of Newton’s laws, how would we
choose between the two explanations?
At this point, scientists might well invoke the principle sometimes
called ‘Occam’s razor’, after William of Occam. This is the belief that
simpler explanations of natural phenomena are more likely to be cor-
rect than more complex ones. More precisely, the idea is that if we
have two or more competing hypotheses covering the same data, we
should choose the one that involves the least number of assumptions
or complications. The metaphorical use of the word ‘razor’ comes
from this cutting or shaving down to the smallest possible number
of assumptions. Occam’s razor has proved very useful but we should
observe that it is a philosophical preference, and
it is not something that you can prove to be true
in every case, so it needs to be used with care. The principle
Illustration from physics. Another illustra- sometimes called
tion of the way in which different hypotheses ‘Occam’s razor’, after
can account for the same data is given by a com- William of Occam
mon exercise in school physics. We are given a . . . is the belief that
spring, a series of weights and a ruler and asked simpler explanations of
to plot a graph of the length of the spring against natural phenomena
the weight hanging on the end of it. We end up are more likely to be
with a series, say, of 10 points on the paper that correct than more
look as if they might (with a bit of imagina- complex ones.
tion!) lie on a straight line. We take an inductive
step and draw a straight line that goes through
most of the points and we claim that there is a linear relationship
between the length of spring and the tension it is put under by the
weights (Hooke’s law). But then we reflect that there is an infinite
number of curves that can be drawn through our ten points. Chang-
ing the curve would change the relation between spring length and
tension. Why not choose one of those other curves in preference to
157
the straight line? That is, in the situation just described, there are
many different hypotheses that cover the same set of data. How do
you choose between them?
Application of Occam’s razor would lead to choosing the most el-
egant or economical solution—a straight line is simpler than a com-
plicated curve. We could also repeat the experiment with 100 points,
200 points, etc. The results would build up our confidence that the
straight line was the correct answer. When we build up evidence in
this way, we say that we have cumulative evidence for the validity of
our hypothesis.
So far we have been looking at various methods employed by sci-
entists and have seen that none of them yields 100% certainty, ex-
cept in deductive proofs in mathematics where the certainty is that
particular conclusions follow from particular axioms. However, we
would emphasise once more that this does not mean that the scien-
tific enterprise is about to collapse! Far from it. What we mean by
‘not giving 100% certainty’ can be interpreted as saying that there is
a small probability that a particular result or theory is false. But that
does not mean that we cannot have confidence in the theory.
Indeed there are some situations, as in the litmus-paper test for
acid where there has been 100% success in the past. Now whereas this
does not formally guarantee 100% success in the future, scientists
will say that it is a fact that litmus paper turns red on being dipped
in acid. By a ‘fact’, they mean, as palaeontologist Stephen Jay Gould
has delightfully put it, ‘confirmed to such a degree that it would be
perverse to withhold provisional assent to it’.3
On other occasions we are prepared to trust our lives to the find-
ings of science and technology even though we know we do not have
100% certainty. For example, before we travel by train, we know that
it is theoretically possible for something to go wrong, maybe for the
brakes or signalling to fail and cause the train to crash. But we also
know from the statistics of rail travel that the probability of such an
event is very small indeed (though it is not zero—trains have from
time to time crashed). Since the probability of a crash is so small, most
of us who travel by train do so without even thinking about the risk.
On the other hand we must not assume that we can accept all
3 Gould, ‘Evolution as Fact and Theory’, 119.
158
proposed hypotheses arrived at by scientific method as absolute fact

without testing them.
One of the criteria of testing is called falsifiability.
Falsifiability
Karl Popper put the emphasis not on the verifiability of a hypothesis

but on its falsifiability. It is unfortunate that Popper’s terminology can
be a real source of confusion, since the adjective ‘falsifiable’ does not
mean ‘will turn out to be false’! The confusion is even worse when
one realises, on the other hand, that the verb ‘to falsify’ means ‘to
demonstrate that something is false’! The term ‘falsifiable’ has in fact
a technical meaning. A hypothesis is said to be falsifiable if you can
think of a logically possible set of observations that would be incon-
sistent with it.
It is, of course, much easier to falsify a universal statement than
to verify it. As an illustration, take one of our earlier examples. The
statement ‘All swans are white’ is, from the very
start, falsifiable. One would only have to discover
one swan that was black and that would falsify it. The term ‘falsifiable’
And since we know that black swans do exist, the has in fact a
statement has long since been falsified. technical meaning:
However, there can be problems. Most scien- a hypothesis is said
tific activity is much more complex than dealing to be falsifiable if
with claims like ‘All swans are white’! you can think of a
For example, in the nineteenth century obser- logically possible
vations of the planet Uranus appeared to indicate set of observations
that its motion was inconsistent with predictions that would be
made on the basis of Newton’s laws. Therefore, it inconsistent with it.
appeared to threaten to demonstrate Newton’s
laws to be false. However, instead of immedi-
ately saying that Newton’s laws had been falsified, it was suggested
by French mathematician Urbain Le Verrier and English astronomer
John Couch Adams (unknown to each other) that there might be
a hitherto undetected planet in the neighbourhood of Uranus that
would account for its apparently anomalous behaviour. As a result
another scientist, German astronomer Johann Galle, was prompted
to look for a new planet and discovered the planet Neptune.
159
It would, therefore, have been incorrect to regard the behaviour of

Uranus as falsifying Newton’s laws. The problem was ignorance of the
initial conditions—there was a planet missing in the configuration be-
ing studied. In other words, some of the crucial data was missing. This
story demonstrates one of the problems inherent in Popper’s approach.
When observation does not fit theory, it could be that the theory is
false, but it could equally well be that the theory is correct but the data
is incomplete or even false, or that some of the auxiliary assumptions
are incorrect. How can you judge what is the correct picture?
Most scientists in fact feel that Popper’s ideas are far too pessimis-
tic and his methodology too counter-intuitive. Their experience and
intuition tell them that their scientific methods in fact enable them
to get a better and better understanding of the universe, that they are
in this sense getting a tighter grip on reality. One benefit of Popper’s
approach, however, is its insistence that scientific theories be testable.
Repeatability and abduction
The scientific activity we have been thinking of so far is characterised

by repeatability. That is, we have considered situations where scientists
are looking for universally valid laws that cover repeatable phenom-
ena, laws which, like Newton’s laws of motion, may be experimentally
tested again and again. Sciences of this sort are often called inductive
or nomological sciences (Gk. nomos = law) and between them they
cover most of science.
However there are major areas of scientific enquiry where re-
peatability is not possible, notably study of the origin of the universe
and the origin and development of life.
Now of course we do not mean to imply that science has nothing
to say about phenomena that are non-repeatable. On the contrary, if
one is to judge by the amount of literature published, particularly,
but not only, at the popular level, the origin of the universe and of
life, for example, are among the most interesting subjects by far that
science addresses.
But precisely because of the importance of such non-repeatable
phenomena, it is vital to see that the way in which they are accessible
to science is not the same in general as the way in which repeatable
phenomena are. For theories about both kinds of phenomena tend to
160
be presented to the public in the powerful name of science as though

they had an equal claim to be accepted. Thus there is a real danger
that the public ascribes the same authority and validity to conjec-
tures about non-repeatable events that are not capable of experimen-
tal verification as it does to those theories that have been confirmed
by repeated experiment.
Physical chemist and philosopher Michael Polanyi points out that
the study of how something originates is usually very different from
the study of how it operates, although, of course, clues to how some-
thing originated may well be found in how it operates. It is one thing
to investigate something repeatable in the labora-
tory, such as dissecting a frog to see how its nervous
system functions, but it is an altogether different How the universe
thing to study something non-repeatable, such as works is one thing,
how frogs came to exist in the first place. And, on yet how it came
the large scale, how the universe works is one thing, to be may be
yet how it came to be may be quite another. quite another.
The most striking difference between the study
of non-repeatable and repeatable phenomena is that
the method of induction is no longer applicable, since we no longer
have a sequence of observations or experiments to induce from, nor
any repetition in the future to predict about! The principal method
that applies to non-repeatable phenomena is abduction.
Although this term, introduced by logician Charles Peirce in the
nineteenth century, may be unfamiliar, the underlying idea is very
familiar. For abduction is what every good detective does in order to
clear up a murder mystery! With the murder mystery a certain event
has happened. No one doubts that it has happened. The question is:
who or what was the cause of it happening? And often in the search
for causes of an event that has already happened, abduction is the
only method available.
As an example of abductive inference, think of the following:
Data: Ivan’s car went over the cliff edge and he was killed.
Inference: If the car brakes had failed, then the car would
have gone over the cliff.
Abductive conclusion: There is reason to suppose that the

brakes failed.
161
However, an alternative suggests itself (especially to avid readers

of detective stories): if someone had pushed Ivan’s car over the cliff,
the result would have been the same! It would be fallacious and very
foolish to assume that just because we had thought of one explana-
tion of the circumstances, that it was the only one.
The basic idea of abduction is given by the following scheme:
Data: A is observed.
Inference: If B were true then A would follow.
Abductive conclusion: There is reason to
suppose B may be true.
Of course, there may well be another hypothesis, C, of which we

could say: if C were true A would follow. Indeed, there may be many
candidates for C.
The detective in our story has a procedure for considering them
one by one. He may first consider the chance hypothesis, B, that the
brakes failed. He may then consider the hypothesis C that it was no
chance event, but deliberately designed by a murderer who pushed the
car over the cliff. Or the detective may consider an even more sophisti-
cated hypothesis, D, combining both chance and design, that someone
who wanted to kill Ivan had tampered with the brakes of the car so that
they would fail somewhere, and they happened to fail on the clifftop!
Inference to the best explanation. Our detective story illustrates
how the process of abduction throws up plausible hypotheses and
forces upon us the question as to which of the hypotheses best fits the
data. In order to decide that question, the hypotheses are compared
for their explanatory power: how much of the data do they cover,
does the theory make coherent sense, is it consistent with other areas
of our knowledge, etc.?
In order to answer these further questions, deduction will of-
ten be used. For example, if B in the detective story is true, then we
would expect an investigation of the brakes of the wrecked car to
reveal worn or broken parts. If C is true we would deduce that the
brakes might well be found in perfect order, whereas if D were the
case, we might expect to find marks of deliberate damage to the hy-
draulic braking system. If we found such marks then D would imme-
diately be regarded as the best of the competing explanations given
so far, since it has a greater explanatory power than the others.
162
Thus, abduction together with the subsequent comparison of

competing hypotheses may be regarded as an ‘inference to the best
explanation’. This is the essence not only of detective and legal work
but also of the work of the historian. Both detective and historian
have to infer the best possible explanation from the available data
after the events in which they are interested have occurred.
For more on the application of abduction in the natural sciences,
particularly in cosmology and biology, see the books by John Lennox
noted at the end of this Appendix. Here we need to consider a few
more of the general issues related to the scientific endeavour.
EXPLAINING EXPLANATIONS
Levels of explanation
Science explains. This, for many people encapsulates the power and
the fascination of science. Science enables us to understand what we
did not understand before and, by giving us understanding, it gives
us power over nature. But what do we mean by saying that ‘science
explains’?
In informal language we take an explanation of something to be
adequate when the person to whom the explanation is given under-
stands plainly what he or she did not understand before. However,
we must try to be more precise about what we mean by the process
of ‘explanation’, since it has different aspects that are often confused.
An illustration can help us. We have considered a similar idea in rela-
tion to roses. Let’s now take further examples.
Suppose Aunt Olga has baked a beautiful cake. She displays it
to a gathering of the world’s top scientists and we ask them for an
explanation of the cake. The nutrition scientists will tell us about the
number of calories in the cake and its nutritional effect; the biochem-
ists will inform us about the structure of the proteins, fats, etc. in the
cake and what it is that causes them to hold together; the chemists
will enumerate the elements involved and describe their bonding;
the physicists will be able to analyse the cake in terms of fundamen-
tal particles; and the mathematicians will offer us a set of beauti-
ful equations to describe the behaviour of those particles. Suppose,
163
then, that these experts have given us an exhaustive description of

the cake, each in terms of his or her scientific discipline. Can we say
that the cake is now completely explained? We have certainly been
given a description of how the cake was made and how its various
constituent elements relate to each other. But suppose we now ask the
assembled group of experts why the cake was made. We notice the
grin on Aunt Olga’s face. She knows the answer since, after all, she
made the cake! But if she does not reveal the answer by telling us, it
is clear that no amount of scientific analysis will give us the answer.
Thus, although science can answer ‘how’ questions in terms of
causes and mechanisms, it cannot answer ‘why’ questions, questions
of purpose and intention—teleological questions, as they are some-
times called (Gk. telos = end or goal).
However, it would be nonsensical to suggest that Aunt Olga’s an-
swer to the teleological question, that she made the cake for Sam’s
birthday, say, contradicted the scientific analysis of the cake! No. The
two kinds of answer are clearly logically compatible.
And yet exactly the same confusion of categories is evidenced
when atheists argue that there is no longer need to bring in God and
the supernatural to explain the workings of
nature, since we now have a scientific explana-
Although science can tion for them. As a result, the general public has
answer ‘how’ questions come to think that belief in a creator belongs to
in terms of causes a primitive and unsophisticated stage of human
and mechanisms, it thinking and has been rendered both unneces-
cannot answer ‘why’ sary and impossible by science.
questions, questions of But there is an obvious fallacy here. Think of
purpose and intention. a Ford motor car. It is conceivable that a primi-
tive person who was seeing one for the first time
and who did not understand the principles of
an internal combustion engine, might imagine that there was a god
(Mr Ford) inside the engine, making it go. He might further imagine
that when the engine ran sweetly that was because Mr Ford inside
the engine liked him, and when it refused to go that was because Mr
Ford did not like him. Of course, if eventually this primitive person
became civilised, learned engineering, and took the engine to pieces,
he would discover that there was no Mr Ford inside the engine, and
that he did not need to introduce Mr Ford as an explanation for the
164
working of the engine. His grasp of the impersonal principles of in-

ternal combustion would be altogether enough to explain how the
engine worked. So far, so good. But if he then decided that his under-
standing of the principles of the internal combustion engine made it
impossible to believe in the existence of a Mr Ford who designed the
engine, this would be patently false!
FIGURE Ap.2. Model T Ford Motor Car.

Introducing the world’s first moving
assembly line in 1913, Ford Motor
Company built more than 15 million
Model Ts from 1908 until 1927.
Reproduced with permission of ©iStock/Peter Mah.
It is likewise a confusion of categories to suppose that our under-

standing of the impersonal principles according to which the uni-
verse works makes it either unnecessary or impossible to believe in
the existence of a personal creator who designed, made and upholds
the great engine that is the universe. In other words, we should not
confuse the mechanisms by which the universe works with its Cause.
Every one of us knows how to distinguish between the consciously
willed movement of an arm for a purpose and an involuntary spas-
modic movement of an arm induced by accidental contact with an
electric current.
Michael Poole, Visiting Research Fellow, Science and Religion, at
King’s College London, in his published debate on science and reli-
gion with Richard Dawkins, puts it this way:
There is no logical conflict between reason-giving explanations
which concern mechanisms, and reason-giving explanations
which concern the plans and purposes of an agent, human or
divine. This is a logical point, not a matter of whether one does
or does not happen to believe in God oneself.4
4 Poole, ‘Critique of Aspects of the Philosophy and Theology of Richard Dawkins’, 49.
165
One of the authors, in a debate with Richard Dawkins, noted

how his opponent was confusing the categories of mechanism and
agency:
When Isaac Newton, for example, discovered his law of gravity
and wrote down the equations of motion, he didn’t say, ‘Mar-
vellous, I now understand it. I’ve got a mechanism therefore I
don’t need God.’ In fact it was the exact opposite. It was because
he understood the complexity of sophistication of the math-
ematical description of the universe that his praise for God was
increased. And I would like to suggest, Richard, that some-
where down in this you’re making a category mistake, because
you’re confusing mechanism with agency. We have a mecha-
nism that does XYZ, therefore there’s no need for an agent. I
would suggest that the sophistication of the mechanism, and
science rejoices in finding such mechanisms, is evidence for the
sheer wonder of the creative genius of God.5
In spite of the clarity of the logic expressed in these counter-
points, a famous statement made by the French mathematician
Laplace is constantly misappropriated to support atheism. On being
asked by Napoleon where God fitted in to his mathematical work,
Laplace replied: ‘Sir, I have no need of that hypothesis.’ Of course,
God did not appear in Laplace’s mathematical description of how
things work, just as Mr Ford would not appear in a scientific descrip-
tion of the laws of internal combustion. But what does that prove?
Such an argument can no more be used to prove that God does not
exist than it can be used to prove that Mr Ford does not exist.
To sum up, then, it is important to be aware of the danger of con-
fusing different levels of explanation and of thinking that one level of
explanation tells the whole story.
This leads us at once to consider the related question of reduc-
tionism.
5 Lennox’s response to Dawkins’s first thesis ‘Faith is blind; science is evidence-based’, ‘The
God Delusion Debate’, hosted by Fixed Point Foundation, University of Alabama at Bir-
mingham, filmed and broadcast live 3 October 2007, http://fixed-point.org/index.php/video/
35-full-length/164-the-dawkins-lennox-debate. Transcript provided courtesy of ProTorah,
http://www.protorah.com/god-delusion-debate-dawkins-lennox-transcript/.
166
Reductionism
In order to study something, especially if it is complex, scientists often

split it up into separate parts or aspects and thus ‘reduce’ it to simpler
components that are individually easier to investigate. This kind of re-
ductionism, often called methodological or structural reductionism,
is part of the normal process of science and has proved very useful.
It is, however, very important to bear in mind that there may well be,
and usually is, more to a given whole than simply what we obtain by
adding up all that we have learned from the parts. Studying all the
parts of a watch separately will never enable you to grasp how the
complete watch works as an integrated whole.
Besides methodological reductionism there are two further types
of reductionism, epistemological and ontological. Epistemological re-
ductionism is the view that higher level sciences can be explained
without remainder by the sciences at a lower level. That is, chemistry
is explained by physics; biochemistry by chemistry; biology by bio-
chemistry; psychology by biology; sociology by brain science; and
theology by sociology. As Francis Crick puts it: ‘The ultimate aim of
the modern development in biology is in fact to explain all biology
in terms of physics and chemistry.’ 6 The former
Charles Simonyi Professor of the Public Under-
standing of Science at Oxford, Richard Dawkins, The ultimate goal
holds the same view: ‘My task is to explain ele- of reductionism is to
phants, and the world of complex things, in terms reduce all human
of the simple things that physicists either under- behaviour, our
stand, or are working on.’ The ultimate goal of re-
7
likes and dislikes,
ductionism is to reduce all human behaviour, our the entire mental
likes and dislikes, the entire mental landscape of landscape of our
our lives, to physics. lives, to physics.
However, both the viability and the plausibility
of this programme are open to serious question.
The outstanding Russian psychologist Leo Vygotsky (1896–1934) was
critical of certain aspects of this reductionist philosophy as applied
to psychology. He pointed out that such reductionism often conflicts
6 Crick, Of Molecules and Men, 10.

7 Dawkins, Blind Watchmaker, 15.
167
with the goal of preserving all the basic features of a phenomenon

or event that one wishes to explain. For example, one can reduce
water (H2O) into H and O. However, hydrogen burns and oxygen is
necessary for burning, whereas water has neither of these properties,
but has many others that are not possessed by either hydrogen or
oxygen. Thus, Vygotsky’s view was that reductionism can only be
done up to certain limits. Karl Popper says: ‘There is almost always
an unresolved residue left by even the most successful attempts at
reduction.’ 8
Furthermore, Michael Polanyi argues the intrinsic implausibility
of expecting epistemological reductionism to work in every circum-
stance.9 Think of the various levels of process involved in building an
office building with bricks. First of all there is the process of extract-
ing the raw materials out of which the bricks have to be made. Then
there are the successively higher levels of making the bricks, they do
not make themselves; bricklaying, the bricks do not self-assemble;
designing the building, it does not design itself; and planning the
town in which the building is to be built, it does not organise itself.
Each level has its own rules. The laws of physics and chemistry gov-
ern the raw material of the bricks; technology prescribes the art of
brick making; architecture teaches the builders, and the architects
are controlled by the town planners. Each level is controlled by the
level above, but the reverse is not true. The laws of a higher level can-
not be derived from the laws of a lower level (although, of course
what can be done at a higher level will depend on the lower levels:
for example, if the bricks are not strong there will be a limit on the
height of a building that can be safely built with them).
Consider the page you are reading just now. It consists of paper
imprinted with ink or, in the case of an electronic version, text ren-
dered digitally. It is obvious that the physics and chemistry of ink and
paper can never, even in principle, tell you anything about the sig-
nificance of the shapes of the letters on the page. And this is nothing
to do with the fact that physics and chemistry are not yet sufficiently
advanced to deal with this question. Even if we allow these sciences
another 1,000 years of development, we can see that it will make no
8 Popper, ‘Scientific Reduction.’

9 Polanyi, Tacit Dimension.
168
difference, because the shapes of those letters demand a totally new

and higher level of explanation than that of which physics and chem-
istry are capable. In fact, explanation can only be given in terms of
the concepts of language and authorship—the communication of a
message by a person. The ink and paper are carriers of the message,
but the message certainly does not emerge automatically from them.
Furthermore, when it comes to language itself, there is again a se-
quence of levels—you cannot derive a vocabulary from phonetics, or
the grammar of a language from its vocabulary, etc.
As is well known, the genetic material DNA carries information.
We shall describe this later on in some detail, but the basic idea is sim-
ply this. DNA, a substance found in every living cell, can be looked
at as a long tape on which there is a string of letters written in a four-
letter chemical language. The sequence of letters contains coded in-
structions (information) that the cell uses to make proteins. Physical
biochemist and theologian Arthur Peacocke writes: ‘In no way can
the concept of “information”, the concept of conveying a message, be
articulated in terms of the concepts of physics and chemistry, even
though the latter can be shown to explain how the molecular ma-
chinery (DNA, RNA and protein) operates to carry information.’ 10
In each of the situations we have described above, we have a se-
ries of levels, each one higher than the previous one. What happens
on a higher level is not completely derivable from what happens on
the level beneath it, but requires another level of explanation.
In this kind of situation it is sometimes said that the higher level
phenomena ‘emerge’ from the lower level. Unfortunately, however,
the word ‘emerge’ is easily misunderstood to mean that the higher
level properties emerge automatically from the lower level proper-
ties. This is clearly false in general, as we showed by considering brick
making and writing on paper. Yet notwithstanding the fact that both
writing on paper and DNA have in common the fact that they encode
a ‘message’, those scientists committed to materialistic philosophy
insist that the information carrying properties of DNA must have
emerged automatically out of mindless matter. For if, as materialism
insists, matter and energy are all that there is, then it logically follows
10 Peacocke, Experiment of Life, 54.
169
that they must possess the inherent potential to organise themselves

in such a way that eventually all the complex molecules necessary for
life, including DNA, will emerge.11
There is a third type of reductionism, called ontological reduc-
tionism, which is frequently encountered in statements like the fol-
lowing: The universe is nothing but a collection of atoms in motion,
human beings are ‘machines for propagating DNA, and the propaga-
tion of DNA is a self-sustaining process. It is every living object’s sole
reason for living’.12
Words such as ‘nothing but’, ‘sole’ or ‘simply’ are the telltale sign
of (ontological) reductionist thinking. If we remove these words we
are usually left with something unobjectionable. The universe cer-
tainly is a collection of atoms and human beings do propagate DNA.
The question is, is there nothing more to it than that? Are we go-
ing to say with Francis Crick, who won the Nobel Prize jointly with
James D. Watson for his discovery of the double helix structure of
DNA: ‘ “You”, your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your
ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no
more than the behaviour of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their
associated molecules’? 13
What shall we say of human love and fear, of concepts like beauty
and truth? Are they meaningless?
Ontological reductionism, carried to its logical conclusion, would
ask us to believe that a Rembrandt painting is nothing but molecules
of paint scattered on canvas. Physicist and theologian John Polking-
horne’s reaction is clear:
There is more to the world than physics can ever express.
One of the fundamental experiences of the scientific life is
that of wonder at the beautiful structure of the world. It is the
pay-off for all the weary hours of labour involved in the pursuit
of research. Yet in the world described by science where would
that wonder find its lodging? Or our experiences of beauty? Of
moral obligation? Of the presence of God? These seem to me
11 Whether matter and energy do have this capacity is another matter that is discussed in the
books noted at the end of this appendix.
12 Dawkins, Growing Up in the Universe (study guide), 21.
13 Crick, Astonishing Hypothesis, 3.
170
to be quite as fundamental as anything we could measure in

the laboratory. A worldview that does not take them adequately
into account is woefully incomplete.14
The most devastating criticism of ontological reductionism is that
it is self-destructive. Polkinghorne describes its programme as ulti-
mately suicidal:
For, not only does it relegate our experiences of beauty, moral
obligation, and religious encounter to the epiphenomenal
scrapheap. It also destroys rationality. Thought is replaced by
electrochemical neural events. Two such events cannot con-
front each other in rational discourse. They are neither right
nor wrong. They simply happen. . . . The very assertions of the
reductionist himself are nothing but blips in the neural net-
work of his brain. The world of rational discourse dissolves into
the absurd chatter of firing synapses. Quite frankly, that cannot
be right and none of us believes it to be so.15
BASIC OPERATIONAL PRESUPPOSITIONS
So far we have been concentrating on the scientific method and have

seen that this is a much more complex (and, for that reason, a much
more interesting) topic than may first appear.
As promised earlier, we must now consider
the implications of the fact that scientists, be- The widespread idea
ing human like the rest of us, do not come to that any scientist,
any situation with their mind completely clear if only he or she tries
of preconceived ideas. The widespread idea that to be impartial, can
any scientist, if only he or she tries to be im- be a completely
partial, can be a completely dispassionate ob- dispassionate ob-
server in any but the most trivial of situations, server in any but the
is a fallacy, as has been pointed out repeatedly by most trivial of situa-
philosophers of science and by scientists them- tions, is a fallacy.
selves. At the very least scientists must already
14 Polkinghorne, One World, 72–3.

15 Polkinghorne, One World, 92–3.
171
have formed some idea or theory about the nature of what they are
about to study.
Observation is dependent on theory
It is simply not possible to make observations and do experiments

without any presuppositions. Consider, for example, the fact that sci-
ence, by its very nature, has to be selective. It would clearly be impos-
sible to take every aspect of any given object of study into account.
Scientists must therefore choose what variables are likely to be impor-
tant and what are not. For example, physicists do not think of taking
into account the colour of billiard balls when they are conducting a
laboratory investigation of the application of Newton’s laws to mo-
tion: but the shape of the balls is very important—cubical balls would
not be much use! In making such choices, scientists are inevitably
guided by already formed ideas and theories about what the impor-
tant factors are likely to be. The problem is that such ideas may some-
times be wrong and cause scientists to miss vital aspects of a problem
to such an extent that they draw false conclusions. A famous story
about the physicist Heinrich Hertz illustrates this.
Maxwell’s electromagnetic theory predicted that radio and light
waves would be propagated with the same velocity. Hertz designed
an experiment to check this and found that the velocities were differ-
ent. His mistake, only discovered after his death, was that he did not
think that the shape of his laboratory could have any influence on the
results of his experiment. Unfortunately for him, it did. Radio waves
were reflected from the walls and distorted his results.
The validity of his observations depended on the (preconceived)
theory that the shape of the laboratory was irrelevant to his experiment.
The fact that this preconception was false invalidated his conclusions.
This story also points up another difficulty. How does one decide
in this kind of situation whether it is the theory or the experiment
that is at fault, whether one should trust the results of the experiment
and abandon the theory and look for a better one, or whether one
should keep on having faith in the theory and try to discover what
was wrong with the experiment? There is no easy answer to this ques-
tion. A great deal will depend on the experience and judgment of the
scientists involved, and, inevitably, mistakes can and will be made.
172
Knowledge cannot be gained without

making certain assumptions to start with
Scientists not only inevitably have preconceived ideas about particu-

lar situations, as illustrated by the story about Hertz, but their science
is done within a framework of general assumptions about science
as such. World-famous Harvard geneticist Richard Lewontin writes:
‘Scientists, like other intellectuals, come to their work with a world
view, a set of preconceptions that provides the framework for their
analysis of the world.’16
And those preconceptions can significantly affect scientists’ re-
search methods as well as their results and interpretations of those
results, as we shall see.
We would emphasise, however, that the fact that scientists have
presuppositions is not to be deprecated. That would, in fact be a non-
sensical attitude to adopt. For the voice of logic reminds us that we
cannot get to know anything if we are not prepared to presuppose
something. Let’s unpack this idea by thinking about a common at-
titude. ‘I am not prepared to take anything for granted’, says some-
one, ‘I will only accept something if you prove it to me.’ Sounds
reasonable—but it isn’t. For if this is your view then you will never
accept or know anything! For suppose I want you to accept some
proposition A. You will only accept it if I prove it to you. But I shall
have to prove it to you on the basis of some other proposition B. You
will only accept B if I prove it to you. I shall have to prove B to you
on the basis of C. And so it will go on forever in what is called an in-
finite regress—that is, if you insist on taking nothing for granted in
the first place!
We must all start somewhere with things we take as self-evident,
basic assumptions that are not proved on the basis of something else.
They are often called axioms.17 Whatever axioms we adopt, we then
proceed to try to make sense of the world by building on those
16 Lewontin, Dialectical Biologist, 267.

17 It should be borne in mind, however, that the axioms which appear in various branches of
pure mathematics, for example, the theory of numbers or the theory of groups, do not appear
out of nowhere. They usually arise from the attempt to encapsulate and formalise years, some-
times centuries, of mathematical research, into a so-called ‘axiomatic system’.
173
axioms. This is true, not only at the worldview level but also in all of
our individual disciplines. We retain those axioms that prove useful
in the sense that they lead to theories which show a better ‘fit’ with
nature and experience, and we abandon or modify those which do
not fit so well. One thing is absolutely clear: none of us can avoid
starting with assumptions.
Gaining knowledge involves trusting

our senses and other people
There are essentially two sources from which we accumulate knowl-

edge:
1. directly by our own ‘hands-on’ experience, for example,
by accidentally putting our finger in boiling water, we
learn that boiling water scalds;
2. we learn all kinds of things from sources external to
ourselves, for example, teachers, books, parents, the
media, etc.
In doing so we all constantly exercise faith. We intuitively trust
our senses, even though we know they deceive us on times. For exam-
ple, in extremely cold weather, if we put our hand on a metal handrail
outside, the rail may feel hot to our touch.
We have faith, too, in our minds to interpret our senses, though
here again we know that our minds can be deceived.
We also normally believe what other people tell us—teachers,
parents, friends, etc. Sometimes we check what we learn from them
because, without insulting them, we realise that even friends can
be mistaken, and other people may set out to deceive us. However,
much more often than not, we accept things on authority—if only
because no one has time to check everything! In technical matters
we trust our textbooks. We have faith in what (other) scientists have
done. And it is, of course, reasonable so to do, though those experts
themselves would teach us to be critical and not just to accept eve-
rything on their say-so. They would remind us also that the fact that
a statement appears in print in a book, does not make it automati-
cally true!
174
Gaining scientific knowledge involves belief

in the rational intelligibility of the universe
We all take so much for granted the fact that we can use human rea-
son as a probe to investigate the universe that we can fail to see that
this is really something to be wondered at. For once we begin to think
about the intelligibility of the universe, our minds demand an expla-
nation. But where can we find one? Science cannot give it to us, for
the very simple reason that science has to assume the rational intel-
ligibility of the universe in order to get started. Einstein himself, in
the same article we quoted earlier, makes this very clear in saying that
the scientist’s belief in the rational intelligibility of the universe goes
beyond science and is in its very nature essentially religious:
Science can only be created by those who are thoroughly im-
bued with the aspiration toward truth and understanding. This
source of feeling, however, springs from the sphere of religion.
To this there also belongs the faith in the possibility that the
regulations valid for the world of existence are rational, that is,
comprehensible to reason. I cannot conceive of a genuine scien-
tist without that profound faith.18
Einstein saw no reason to be embarrassed by the fact that sci-
ence involves at its root belief in something that science itself cannot
justify.
Allied to belief in the rational intelligibility of the universe is
the belief that patterns and law-like behaviour are to be expected in
nature. The Greeks expressed this by using the word cosmos which
means ‘ordered’. It is this underlying expectation of order that lies be-
hind the confidence with which scientists use the inductive method.
Scientists speak of their belief in the uniformity of nature—the idea
that the order in nature and the laws that describe it are valid at all
times and in all parts of the universe.
Many theists from the Jewish, Islamic or Christian tradition
would want to modify this concept of the uniformity of nature by
adding their conviction that God the Creator has built regularities
18 Einstein, Out of My Later Years, 26.
175
FIGURE Ap.3. Milky Way Galaxy.
The Milky Way galaxy is visible from earth on clear nights
away from urban areas. Appearing as a cloud in the night
sky, our galaxy’s spiral bands of dust and glowing nebulae
consist of billions of stars as seen from the inside.
Reproduced with permission of © iStock/Viktar.
into the working of the universe so that in general we can speak

of uniformity—the norms to which nature normally operates. But
because God is the Creator, he is not a prisoner of those regularities
but can vary them by causing things to happen that do not fit into the
regular pattern.
Here, again, commitment to the uniformity of nature is a mat-
ter of belief. Science cannot prove to us that nature is uniform, since
we must assume the uniformity of nature in order to do science.
Otherwise we would have no confidence that, if we repeat an experi-
ment under the same conditions as it was done before, we shall get
the same result. Were it so, our school textbooks would be useless.
But surely, we might say, the uniformity of nature is highly probable
since assuming it has led to such stunning scientific advance. How-
ever, as C. S. Lewis has observed: ‘Can we say that Uniformity is at
any rate very probable? Unfortunately not. We have just seen that all
probabilities depend on it. Unless Nature is uniform, nothing is ei-
ther probable or improbable.’ 19
19 Lewis, Miracles, 163.
176
Operating within the reigning paradigms
Thomas Kuhn in his famous book The Structure of Scientific Revo-

lutions (1962) pictured science as preceding through the following
stages: pre-science, normal science, crisis revolution, new normal sci-
ence, new crisis, and so on. Pre-science is the diverse and disorgan-
ised activity characterised by much disagreement that precedes the
emergence of a new science that gradually becomes structured when
a scientific community adheres to a paradigm. The paradigm is a web
of assumptions and theories that are more or less agreed upon and
are like the steelwork around which the scientific edifice is erected.
Well-known examples are the paradigms of Copernican astronomy,
Newtonian mechanics and evolutionary biology.
Normal science is then practised within the paradigm. It sets the
standards for legitimate research. The normal scientist uses the para-
digm to probe nature. He or she does not (often) look critically at
the paradigm itself, because it commands so much agreement, much
as we look down the light of a torch to illuminate an object, rather
than look critically at the light of the torch itself. For this reason the
177
paradigm will be very resistant to attempts to demonstrate that it is

false. When anomalies, difficulties and apparent falsifications turn
up, the normal scientists will hope to be able to accommodate them
preferably within the paradigm or by making fine adjustments to the
paradigm. However, if the difficulties can no longer be resolved and
keep on piling up, a crisis situation develops, which leads to a scien-
tific revolution involving the emergence of a new paradigm that then
gains the ground to such an extent that the older paradigm is even-
tually completely abandoned. The essence of such a paradigm shift
is the replacing of an old paradigm by a new one, not the refining of
the old one by the new. The best known example of a major paradigm
shift is the transition from Aristotelian geocentric (earth-centred)
astronomy to Copernican heliocentric (sun-centred) astronomy in
the sixteenth century.
Although Kuhn’s work is open to criticism at various points, he
has certainly made scientists aware of a number of issues that are im-
portant for our understanding of how science works:
1. the central role that metaphysical ideas play in the develop-
ment of scientific theories;
2. the high resistance that paradigms show to attempts to
prove them false;
3. the fact that science is subject to human frailty.
The second of these points has both a positive and a negative
outworking. It means that a good paradigm will not be overturned
automatically by the first experimental result or observation that ap-
pears to speak against it. On the other hand, it means that a para-
digm which eventually proves to be inadequate or false, may take a
long time to die and impede scientific progress by constraining sci-
entists within its mesh and not giving them the freedom they need to
explore radically new ideas that would yield real scientific advance.
It is important to realise that paradigms themselves are often in-
fluenced at a very deep level by worldview considerations. We saw
earlier that there are essentially two fundamental worldviews, the
materialistic and the theistic. It seems to be the case in science that
there is sometimes a tacit understanding that only paradigms which
are based on materialism are admissible as scientific. Richard Dawk-
ins, for example, says, ‘the kind of explanation we come up with must
178
not contradict the laws of physics. Indeed it will make use of the laws
of physics, and nothing more than the laws of physics.’ 20 It is the
words ‘nothing more than’ that show that Dawkins is only prepared
to accept reductionist, materialistic explanations.
Further reading
Books by John Lennox:
God and Stephen Hawking: Whose Design Is It Anyway? (Lion, 2011)
God’s Undertaker: Has Science Buried God? (Lion, 2009)
Gunning for God: A Critique of the New Atheism (Lion, 2011)
Miracles: Is Belief in the Supernatural Irrational? VeriTalks Vol. 2. (The Veritas
Forum, 2013)
Seven Days That Divide the World (Zondervan, 2011)
20 Dawkins, Blind Watchmaker, 24.
179
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STUDY QUESTIONS FOR TEACHERS AND STUDENTS
CHAPTER 1. INDIAN PANTHEISTIC MONISM

Historical introduction
1.1 When would you say Indian civilisation began?
1.2 What is meant by saying that Sanskrit is a member of the Indo-European
family of languages? Can you name any other members of this family?
Is your language among them?
1.3 What basic beliefs would an orthodox Hindu be expected to hold?
1.4 What is the difference in meaning between ‘Brahman’ and ‘Brahmā’?
1.5 What is the meaning of the terms ‘Atman’, ‘Samsara’ and ‘Moksha’?
1.6 What is the difference between what Hinduism teaches about the Creator
and what Judaism, Christianity and Islam teach?
1.7 What are the Vedas and the Upanishads? Why are they referred to
as Shrutī?
1.8 Why is Shankara’s philosophical system known as ‘Advaita Vedantism’?
Shankara’s Advaita Vedanta philosophy
1.9 What, according to Shankara, is Ultimate Reality? What is it like?
How are we related to it?
1.10 What are the different implications of these two claims:
(a) the universe and all that is in it are emanations out of God himself;
(b) the universe and all that is in it were created by God out of nothing.
1.11 The existence of evil is an insoluble problem for pantheism. Why is that?
1.12 Common sense tells us that the individuality of our friends is real and
valuable. Why does Shankara say that their individuality is an illusion?
And what does he mean by it?
1.13 What is meant by the famous Hindu phrases: ‘Atman is Brahman’ and ‘thou
art that’?
1.14 According to Shankara what undesirable penalty is imposed on those
who continue to imagine they are distinct individuals?
1.15 ‘What a thing is and what its function is, is much more important
than what it is made of.’ Comment, and illustrate your answer with
examples.
1.16 Is it likely, do you think, that the Creator is less complex than we are?
CHAPTER 2. GREEK PHILOSOPHY AND MYSTICISM

The chief significance of Greek philosophy and precautionary observations
2.1 What was new in the approach of the Ionian philosophers to the under-
standing of the universe?
2.2 What was Socrates’ special interest? How did he propose to decide moral
questions such as what is life for, and how should we behave?
2.3 The Ionian philosophers in their attempt to understand the universe set
aside the old mythologies of the gods. Does that mean they were all atheists?
2.4 What do you understand to be the difference between the terms ‘emanation’
and ‘creation’?
2.5 What is meant by saying that the Greek gods are stationed inside the world,
not outside it as in Jewish, Christian and Islamic theology?
The search for what the world is made of and for how it works
2.6 What according to Thales, Anaximander, Anaximenes and Empedocles was
the primal stuff of the universe?
2.7 What would you say was Anaximander’s most brilliant conjecture?
2.8 What was Heraclitus trying to illustrate by using the analogy of a bow and
bowstring?
2.9 Empedocles’ use of the terms ‘love’ and ‘hate’ to describe physical forces at
work in the universe may seem crude to us. Do they bear any resemblance to
the way physical forces are described nowadays?
2.10 How many centuries passed by after Empedocles before Newton was able to
describe the force of gravity mathematically?
2.11 What was remarkably new about Anaxagoras’ theory?
2.12 Can you spot the fallacies in Parmenides’ arguments?
2.13 Describe some of the differences between the atomic theory of Leucippus
and Democritus and modern atomic theory.
2.14 What is the main point of Cornford’s critique of Leucippus and Democritus’
atomic theory? Is it fair?
The search for humanity’s purpose and goal
2.15 What was the new emphasis that Socrates brought into ancient Greek
philosophy?
2.16 Why was Socrates disappointed with Anaxagoras’ theory? And why did he
hold that theories like that of Anaxagoras’ could never adequately explain
why Socrates remained sitting in prison and did not attempt to escape?
2.17 Do you agree with Socrates that there is a purpose behind human existence?
What would you say is humanity’s chief function?
2.18 State in your own words the difference between a description of a thing and
a definition of that thing.
2.19 Why is it important to be able to define what justice is?
2.20 Would you agree with Socrates that there are some things in life more im-
portant than life itself?
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2.21 The sophists said that there was no Mind behind the universe. Plato argued
that there must be Mind behind the universe. What would you say?
2.22 What do you think justice is? And how should we decide what it is? Is it:
(a) a standard that each one of us decides for himself or herself?
(b) a standard that is set by the majority of the people in a nation?
(c) a standard that should be set by some international body like the United
Nations?
(d) a standard that exists independently of what individuals or nations
think, but to which the whole world should submit?
2.23 Is there one Chief Good that we should all seek in life? If so, what is it? Aris-
totle said it was happiness. Epicureans said it was pleasure. Stoics said it was
‘to live according to reason’. Christians say it is to serve God and to enjoy
him forever. What do you say?
2.24 List and explain the meaning of Aristotle’s Four Causes.
2.25 Consider a telescope:
If the Material Cause is the material(s) it is made of;
If the Efficient Cause is the manufacturer;
If the Formal Cause is its design, shape and the arrangement of its lenses,
What is its Final Cause?
2.26 Is it true that the Final Cause had to be in the mind of the maker before the
telescope began to be made? Would that be true of the universe as well?
2.27 Explain the meaning of the terms ‘potential’ and ‘actual’ in Aristotle’s
philosophy.
2.28 Is a human embryo already a human being? And ought it to be treated
as such?
2.29 Socrates, Plato and Aristotle all considered that there must be a Mind behind
the universe. Were they right?
2.30 What criticisms have been made of Aristotle’s concept of God? Are they fair?
Neoplatonic mysticism
2.31 What is meant by describing Plotinus’ philosophy as ‘negative theology’?
2.32 What, according to Plotinus, is the attitude of the One to human beings?
2.33 Why is reason, by itself, inadequate to discover what God is like?
2.34 In what respects is Plotinus’ philosophy similar to Hinduism?
2.35 Plotinus gained no knowledge of what God is like by his mysticism. Discuss.
2.36 What are the moral implications of Plotinus’ doctrine of reincarnation?
CHAPTER 3. NATURALISM AND ATHEISM

Materialistic naturalism: ‘Ultimate Reality is inanimate mindless matter’
3.1 What does the term ‘Nature’ mean to you? How much would you include
in it?
3.2 How would you define naturalism?
215
3.3 What is the difference between evidence that suggests that something may
be true and proof that something is true?
3.4 Would you agree that materialistic naturalism is an article of faith? Or do
you think that it can be proved that there is no supernatural realm? And if
so, how?
3.5 If mindless matter is the Ultimate Reality, how, do you think, did human
reason come to be? Do you think that your mind is composed of nothing
but mindless matter?
3.6 In a class or group study setting, debate the propositions set out against
materialistic naturalism on page 111.
3.7 What does Prof. Davies mean by ‘information theory’ and ‘complexity
theory’?
3.8 Where do you think the basic laws of physics come from originally? It has
taken great intelligence to discover and understand them; and it takes highly
sophisticated mathematics to express them. Do you agree with Prof. Davies
that they must have come from some intelligent source? Or do you find it
easier to suppose that they simply exist apart from reason?
Reactions to materialistic naturalism
3.9 Who were the Stoics? What attitude did they take to the atomic theory
of Leucippus and Democritus, and why?
3.10 What are some of the meanings of the Greek word logos?
3.11 What was the Stoic concept of God?
3.12 What does the New Testament mean by calling Jesus the Logos (John 1:1–3)?
How is this different from what the Stoics meant by logos?
3.13 The Stoic ideal was that human beings should live ‘according to Nature’.
What did they mean by that?
3.14 What moral difficulty is entailed in the Stoic idea that God is in everything?
3.15 ‘For Carl Sagan the Cosmos is a surrogate god’: What does this mean?
Do you agree?
3.16 What makes Prof. Davies describe life as a stupendously improbable
accident?
3.17 What is it about God that Prof. Davies doesn’t like? And why? What kind
of a God does he believe in?
3.18 Mathematical laws can help us to understand how the world works. Why
is it difficult to think that they could have created the world?
3.19 When it comes to whether we believe in God or not, to what extent are we
influenced by our personal likes and dislikes?
CHAPTER 4. CHRISTIAN THEISM

God is the Ultimate Reality and he can be known
4.1 When the Bible says, ‘In the beginning was the Word’, what is meant by
‘the Word’?
4.2 Did the Word ever have a beginning?
216
4.3 According to the Bible, by what means was the universe made, and by what
means is it maintained?
4.4 What is meant by saying ‘In him was life, and the life was the light of men’
(John 1:4)?
4.5 In what various ways did God speak to the human race before the coming
of Christ?
4.6 Read from the Old Testament Isaiah 53. Discover when it was written. How
accurately, in your opinion, did it predict what happened to Jesus?
4.7 What evidence do the Old and New Testaments give that God is personal?
4.8 Do Christians believe in three Gods?
4.9 Jesus was certainly a man. Did he himself claim to be God as well?
4.10 What does the New Testament say is the significance of Christ’s death on the
cross?
4.11 According to the Bible, why do we need the Holy Spirit? What does he do
for us?
How we are related to Ultimate Reality
4.12 What is different between the Bible’s view of creation, and the other views
that we have covered in this section?
4.13 What is the Bible’s attitude to matter and to the human body?
4.14 What does the Bible mean by saying that man and woman were made in the
image of God? How should that affect our attitude to people?
4.15 What are the implications of saying that human beings are emanations
from God?
4.16 Sum up in your own words what Colossians 1:16–17 says about the relation
of the Son of God to creation.
4.17 Which two commandments did Christ describe as the greatest of all?
4.18 What is meant by saying that we are not robots? Is it true?
4.19 Most people consider themselves to be rational human beings. How then
would you account for the tragic mess that the world is in?
4.20 Do you think that everything in the universe is determined? Or would you
agree that it has a large degree of freedom and openness? Do you feel that
you are free to choose? If so, is that feeling true to the fact?
4.21 ‘Life is worth living.’ Discuss.

Scientific method
A.1 In what different ways have you heard the word ‘science’ used? How would
you define it?
A.2 How is induction understood as part of our everyday experience and also
of the scientific endeavour?
A.3 In what ways does deduction differ from induction, and what role does each
play in scientific experiments?
217
A.4 Do you find the idea of ‘falsifiability’ appealing, or unsatisfactory? Why?

A.5 How does abduction differ from both induction and deduction, and what
is the relationship among the three?
Explaining explanations
A.6 How many levels of explanation can you think of to explain a cake, in terms
of how was it made, what was it made from, and why was it made? What can
scientists tell us? What can ‘Aunt Olga’ tell us?
A.7 In what ways is reductionism helpful in scientific research, and in what ways
could it be limiting, or even detrimental, to scientific research?
A.8 How do you react to physicist and theologian John Polkinghorne’s statement
that reductionism relegates ‘our experiences of beauty, moral obligation,
and religious encounter to the epiphenomenal scrapheap. It also destroys
rationality’?
The basic operational presuppositions of the scientific endeavour
A.9 What is meant by the statement ‘Observation is dependent on theory’?
A.10 What are some of the axioms upon which your thinking about scientific
knowledge rests?
A.11 What does trust have to do with gaining knowledge?
A.12 What does belief have to do with gaining knowledge?
A.13 According to physicist and philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn, how do
new scientific paradigms emerge?
218
SCRIPTURE INDEX
OLD TESTAMENT 11:11 136 10 99 n. 49

11:27 95 14:16–17 134
Genesis 22:35–40 142 17:11–23 134
book 67 17:27 71
Mark
1 78 , 133 26:13–18 99
6:3 131 n. 1
1:26–27 140
12:30 128 Romans
1:31 140
14:49 131 n. 1 1:20
3 134 94
4:21–22 134 Luke 1:21–22 134
9:6 140 9:28–36 99 n. 49 1:21 118
15 99 n. 49 19:10 97 1:25 118
24:34–43 140 2:1–15 134
Exodus 5:5 139
3 99 n. 49 John
5:12–21 134
3:13–14 136 1:1–18 128–9
8:1–17 139
34 99 n. 49 1:1–3 130–1
8:18–25 142–3
34:5–7 136–7 1:1–2 131–3
8:26–27 139
1:1 71
Deuteronomy 14:11–12 118
1:3–4 133–4
6:4 132
1:5–9 134–6 1 Corinthians
Psalms 1:6–8 136 1:21 94
19:1 134 1:14–18 136 2:1–12 139
33:6 133 1:18 95, 138 14:20 128
33:9 133 1:19–28 136
34:5 95 1:29 129 2 Corinthians
111:2 19 3 139 5:8 131 n. 1
115:5 133 3:12–13 128 12:1–4 99 n. 49
Isaiah 3:16 91
5:35 137 n. 3
Ephesians
6 99 n. 49 1:13–14 139
8:9–20 63 n. 1 6:62 128
8:14 128
4:17–18 134
31:3 141
40:3–5 136 8:23 128 Philippians
45:5 49 8:26 128 3:21 140
45:12 49 14:9 137
45:18 49 14:10 137 n. 3 Colossians
14:17 139 1:16–17 142
Ezekiel 16:8–9 138 3:1–2 98
1–2 99 n. 49 16:14–15 138–9
16:28 128 1 Timothy
17:26 138 2:5 137
NEW TESTAMENT 20:28 132 6:16 141
Matthew Acts Philemon

10:29–30 91 2 138 13 131 n. 1
Hebrews OTHER ANCIENT 40e–41a 80

1:1–3 136 LITERATURE Phaedo
1:2–3 133 97c–99d 76
Aristotle Republic
11:3 133
Nichomachean
12:2 98 505b–c 84
Ethics 11, 90
505e 84
James Theology of
507c–509a 84
3:9 Aristotle 103–4
140 508b 84
1 John Augustine of Hippo 508e–509a 85

Confessions 509b 84–5
1:2 131 n. 1
I.1 117 Timaeus 11
4:10 97
Clement 29e–34 86
Revelation Stromata Plotinus
1 99 n. 49 5.109.1 (Fr. 23) 65 Enneads 92, 103
2:1 137 n. 3 5.109.3 (Fr. 15) 65 i.8 100
2:11 137 n. 3 7.22.1 (Fr. 16) 65
ii.9.9 102
Herodotus iii.2.13 102
BUDDHIST SCRIPTURES Histories v.1.6 96
i.74 68 v.3.12.40–49 96–7
Upanishads
v.3.14.1– 8 94
Chandogya Hesiod vi.7.36 97, 98
6.2.2 59 Theogony
vi.6.9.8 97
6.12 51 ll. 44–46 66
Katha ll. 114–115 66 Simplicius
4.10 56
ll. 116–117 66 Commentary on
ll. 119–120 66 Aristotle’s Physics
5.6–7 56
6.4 56 Hippolytus 23.11 (Fr. 26) 65
Shvetashvatara Refutation of all Heresies 23.20 (Fr. 25) 65
4.1–5 55 n. 21 i.6.3 69
Theophrastus
5.11–12 50 n. 12
Lucian of Samosata On Stone 32
Veda-nta Su-tras Vera

Xenophon
1.4.22 Historia 25
51 Memorabilia 79–80
2.1.14 51 Plato i.4.5 80
2.3.43 51 n. 15 Apology 79 iv.3.13 80
220
GENERAL INDEX
A atman 48, 49–51, 52, 56

abduction 161–3 atomic theory 73–5
actual (concept/state) 87–8, 89–90 atomism/atomists 73–5, 92, 114–15
Adams, John Couch 159 Augustine of Hippo 47, 55
Adebiyi, G. A. 112 n. 8 authority 148, 149, 161, 174
advaita 47–8 Avicebron (Solomon ibn Gabriol) 104–5
Advaita Vedantism 49–59 axioms 72, 173–4
and contemporary physics 56–9
defined 47–8
B
human divinity 49–51
Bacon, Francis 26, 149–50
illusion (maya) 54–5
becoming vs. being 130–1
meditation 51–3
being/Being 58–9, 71–3, 85, 91
summary 49–50
vs. becoming 130–1
afterlife 14–15 . See also heaven
Bhaktivedanta Swami, A. C. 60
agathon, to 84 . See also Good,
Big Bang theory 36, 110
Form of
biology 86–7, 163, 167
agency 163–6
Black, Deborah L. 103–4
air 69, 70
body 77, 83, 89, 115, 140
al-Fārābī 103–4
Brahe, Tycho 154–1, 156
al-Kindī 103
Brahmā 59 n. 27, 139
ananda 54
defined 48
Anaxagoras 70–1, 74, 76–7, 83, 89
Brahman 49–51, 52, 54–7, 58, 59, 94,
Anaximander 68–9, 112
98, 139. See also Self (Hindu
Anaximenes 69
concept)
apeiron 68–9
defined 48
Aquinas, Thomas 47
Bronowski, Jacob 38
archē 68
Buddhism 45, 46 n. 6
aretē 78 . See also virtue
Aristotle 11, 21, 85–91, 103–4, 112, 149
and biology 86–7 C
and causation 87–8 Carvakas 46 n. 6
concept of God 88–91 caste 46
theory of motion 89–90 causation 87–8, 165
Theology of Aristotle 103–4 Efficient Cause 87
Armstrong, D. H. 82 n. 21 Final Cause 85, 87
Aryan tribes 45 Formal Cause 87
ascension (of Jesus Christ) 143 Material Cause 87
astronomy 28, 154–5, 156–7, 159–60, 178 Moving Cause 87–8
atheism xiii, 75, 109, 164 . See also Change (flux) 56, 69, 71, 81, 130
independence from God chemistry 117, 121, 167
defined 109 Christ. See Jesus Christ
and God as Creator 24 Christianity 14
ultimate/supreme xii Cicero, Marcus Tullius 114
civilisation Democritus 73–5, 92, 114–5

Harappan 45–6 design 13
Indian 45–6 determinism 17, 34
Indus 45–6 dharma 46
Western 63 dialectical materialism 23
Cloud of Unknowing, The 105 divine revelation 24–9, 94–5, 103, 120,
Collins, Francis S. 28 127, 130, 132–6
complexity DNA 28, 147, 169–70
irreducible 70 Druart, Th.-A. 103–4
theory 113–14 dualism 60, 73–5
concepts, defining 78–9, 81, 86–7, 100, duty xiii, 7, 9, 14
147–8
conscience 127, 134 E
consciousness in direct experience 34 earth 70
contingency 73 Easwaran, Eknath 52–3, 56–7
Copernican revolutions 177, 178 Eckhart (Meister) 47
Copernicus, Nicolas 154 Eddington, Sir Arthur 57
Cornford, F. M. 75, 90–1 education 3–4
cosmology 73 Efficient Cause 87. See also causation
quantum 110 n. 6 einai (to be) 71–3, 130
Cosmos 117–18 Einstein, Albert 28, 175
creation 58–9, 94, 103, 110, 114, 119–20, emanation 58–9, 67–8, 96, 101, 103–5,
127, 129, 130, 133, 141–2 130, 140–1. See also fayd .
Creator See also God as Creator emergence 169–70
Aristotle’s concept 87 Empedocles 70, 83
atheism and 24, 110 empiricism 71
Christian concept 49, 140–1 energy 57–8, 111–12
Greek concept 49 Epicureanism 85, 92. See also monism
Hebrew concept 49 equilibrium 69
Hindu concept 48–9, 139 ergon (work) 77–8 . See also work
Islamic concept 49 eros 66–7
Neoplatonist concept 140 Euthyphro 79
personal 114 evil 116, 140
Plato’s concept 86, 139 problem of 100–1, 110, 143
Sagan’s concept 117–18 evolution, organic 13–14, 28, 74, 111, 119
Crick, Sir Francis 147, 167, 170 existence 71–3
existentialism 38
D experience xi, xiii, xiv, 4, 9, 26, 34, 150,
data collection 149–51, 156–9 160, 170, 172, 173–4
Darwin, Charles 26–7 experimentation 149, 150, 153, 178
Davies, Paul 113–14, 118–22 explanation 163–71
Dawkins, Richard 165–6, 167, 178–9
de Unamuno, Don Miguel 100 F
death 14, 15. See also life: after faith 174–5
death fall, the 142–3
deduction/inference 150, 154–6, 161–3 falsifiability 159–60
defined 149–50 fatalism 105
defining concepts 78–9, 81, 86–7, 100, fayd. 104 . See also emanation
147–8 Feynman, Richard 111
Demiurge 139 Final Cause 85, 87. See also causation
222
GENERAL INDEX
final judgment 80, 142 Greek philosophy/philosophers 63–105

fine-tuning of the universe 70 Anaxagoras 70–1, 74, 76–7, 83, 89
fire 70, 92 Anaximander 68–9, 112
First Law of Thermodynamics 111–12 Anaximenes 69
Flux (change) 56, 69, 71, 81, 130 Aristotle 11, 21, 85–91, 103–4, 112, 149
forgiveness 101 Democritus 73–5, 92, 114–5
Formal Cause 87. See also causation Empedocles 70, 83
Forms 81–6, 93, 96 Heraclitus 69–70, 71, 81
Good 83–6, 92, 94 Leucippus 73, 92, 114–5
Fotion, Nicholas 23 and mythology 63–7
Franke, Felix Klein 103 Neoplatonism 92–105, 140
free will 17, 34, 170 Parmenides 71–9, 81, 82
Plato 11, 21, 75, 76, 80–7, 89, 102, 103,
G 130, 139
Galileo Galilei 17, 149 Plotinus 63 n. 1, 80, 92–104, 130, 132
Galle, Johann 159 significance of 63–4
genes/genetics 88, 114 Socrates 9, 11, 21, 64, 75–80, 81–2
gignesthai (to become) 130 Thales 63, 65–6, 68
God See also God as Creator Xenophanes 65
Aristotle’s concept of 88–91
Zeno of Citium 114
biblical concept 91, 97, 115
Grene, Marjorie 91
Davies’ concept of 118–122
guilt 34
defined 100
Guthrie, W. K. C. 85–6, 91
existence of 129, 164–6
image of 14, 140–1
H
independence from 134
Harappan Civilisation 45–6
knowability of 127–39
heaven 15
new naturalism’s concepts of 117–22
as personal 136–9 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 23
prejudice in belief in 122–3 Heraclitus 69–70, 71, 81
prejudice in unbelief in 122–3 Hero of Alexandria 22
relation to humanity 139–43 Hertz, Heinrich Rudolf 173
and revelation 24–9, 94–5, 103, 120, Hinduism 45–60, 94, 98, 99, 101, 102, 135
127, 130, 132–6 history 22–4, 33, 127, 141–2
speaking 132–6 Holy Spirit 138–9
Stoic concept of 114–17 human
unwillingness to believe in 118, 120, progress 134
121, 122–3 rights 14–15, 17
will of 105 humanity. See also man as machine;
God as Creator 26–9, 114, 164–5 . See man: in image of God
also creation; Creator; God individual significance 35–6
atheism and 24, 110 nature of 14–15
in Greek philosophy 66, 88–9 origin of 36, 160
of humanity 14–15, 26 progress of 134
of rationality 14 purpose of 14, 15, 36–7, 64, 74–5, 76,
and science 26–9 77
of universe 175–6 relation to God 139–43
Godhead in Hinduism 48 , 56 rights of 14–15, 17
Good, Form of 83–6, 92, 94 superior to non-personal beings 34–5
Goodness 100–1 hypotheses 149–51, 154–5, 156–9, 162–3
223
hypothetico-deductive method 150, Justinian (Roman emperor) 63

154–6, 161–3
defined 149–50 K
Kanitkar, V. P. (Hemant) 46
I karma 46, 50
ibn Gabirol, Solomon (Avicebron) 104–5 defined 48
Ideas 81–6 Kenny, Anthony 94
idols 132–3 Kepler, Johannes 154–5, 156–7
illusion (maya) 29–30, 54–5, 71, 81, 140 Keter Malkhut (Royal Crown) 104
image of God 14, 140–1 Kekulé, Friedrich August 148–9
incarnation of Jesus Christ 121, 127, 128, kinēsis (motion) 82 . See also motion
129, 130, 134–5, 136–7, 140 Kirk, G. S. 70–1
independence from God 134 Knott, Kim 46
induction 150, 151–3, 154, 156, 175 knowledge 4–8, 84–5
Indus Civilisation 45–6 Krishna 45, 48–9, 60
inference 150, 154–6, 161–3 Kuhn, Thomas 177–9
information 168–9
information theory 113–14 L
intellectualism 60, 92, 123 Laplace, Pierre-Simon 166
intuition 17–18, 34–5 law(s)
Ionian philosophers 67, 85 mathematical 122
Anaxagoras 70–1, 74, 76–7, 83, 89 moral 140, 142
Anaximander 68–9, 112 of Moses 135
Anaximenes 69 of non-affirmability 34
Democritus 73–5, 92, 114–5 of physics 113–14, 119–21, 142
Empedocles 70, 83 legein (to speak) 115 . See also Logos
Heraclitus 69–70, 71, 81 Leucippus 73, 92, 114–5
Leucippus 73, 92, 114–5 levels of reality 92–7
Parmenides 71–9, 81, 82 Le Verrier, Urbain 159
Thales 63, 65–6, 68 Lewis, C. S. 95, 141, 176
Xenophanes 65 Lewontin, Richard 173
irreducible complexity 70 life
ISKCON 60 as accident 119
Islam 14, 175–6 after death 14–15 . See also heaven
origin of 36, 119–120
J source of 133–4
Jaeger, Werner 66–7 logical positivism 23
Jainism 45, 46 n. 6 Logos 14, 26, 66, 69, 115–16, 131. See also
Judaism 14, 175–6 legein; reason/reasoning
judgment, final 80, 142 Long, A. A. 116
Jesus Christ Lonsdale, Kathleen 148
ascension 143 Lucian of Samosata 25
and ethics xiv
and human rationality 26 M
incarnation 121, 127, 128, 129, 130, Madhva 47, 59
134–5, 136–7, 140 man. See also human; humanity
influence of 23–4 as machine 37–8, 170
resurrection 121, 143 in image of God 78
as revealer of God 24, 26 mantra 49
virgin birth 143 Marx, Karl 23
224
GENERAL INDEX
Material Cause 87. See also causation N

materialism 12–13, 74–5, 92, 178–9. See Nagel, Thomas 123
also atheism; Epicureanism; natural processes 13, 64
monism; naturalism; Stoicism naturalism xiii, 109–23
dialectical 23 defined 109
mathematical laws 122 difficulties for 110–12
matter 66, 67–9, 79, 87, 88–9, 110–11, new naturalism 117–23
115–16, 130–1 Stoicism and 114–17
Matter 92, 100–1 Nature 116–17
maya 54–5 . See also illusion negative theology 94, 103
mechanism 163–6 Neoplatonism 92–105, 140
Medawar, Sir Peter B. 20 influence on Christian thinking 105
influence on Islamic
meditation 49, 51–3, 55, 58
philosophers 103–4
memory 34, 170
influence on Jewish
Mendel, Gregor 152, 154
philosophers 104–5
meta (with) 131
of Plotinus 92–103. See also
metaphorical language 127–8 Plotinus
metaphysics 11, 103–4, 113, 119, 178 ‘neti, neti’ (‘not this, not that’) 94
Mill, John Stuart 149–50 New Age Movement 109 n. 3
Mimamsa 47 ‘not this, not that’ (‘neti, neti’) 94
Mind 70–1, 74, 76–8, 79–80, 89–90, 92–3, nomos 160
95–6, 97–8, 100 non-rationality/the non-rational 14, 35,
miracles 121, 143 36, 111. See also rationality
moksha 46, 50, 55 nous 89, 93 . See also Mind
defined 48 Nyaya 47
monism 73, 74–5, 92 . See also
Epicureanism; Stoicism O
in Indian thought 43–60 obligation 118
physical 74–5 observation 64–5, 149, 151–3, 154, 172,
Shankara’s philosophy 49–59. 178
See also Shankara ‘Occam’s razor’ 157, 158
monotheism 65, 132, 135 occultism 63 n. 1, 109 n. 3
moral One, the 92–7, 99–101, 137, 140
laws 140, 142 nature of 93–5
relationship to universe 95–7
responsibility 118
ontology 71, 170–1
Moses 135
organic evolution 13–14, 28, 74, 111, 119
motion 69, 70, 73–4, 82–3, 89–90, 112 .
Owen, W. 46
See also kinesis
defined 82 P
perpetual 69 panentheism 60, 92, 117, 140–1
Moving Cause 87–8 . See also pantheism 43–60, 101, 141
causation in Indian monist thought 45–9
mystery religions 63 n. 1 Vedanta philosophy 49–60
mystēs 63 n. 1 paradigm shift 149, 177–9
Mystical Theology 105 Parmenides 71–9, 81, 82
mysticism xiii, 60, 63 n. 1, 92–105 particulars 54–9, 81–2
in Plotinus 97–100 Peacocke, Arthur 169
mythology 63–7, 75, 79–80 Peirce, Charles Sanders 161
225
Penrose, Roger 82 n. 22 Randall, John H. 109

perichōrēsis 137 n. 3 Raphael (Raffaello Sanzio da
Phillips, William D. 28 Urbino) 11
philosophy 15 –16, 20–2, 23 rationalism 71
Greek 63–105 rationality 14, 25–7, 34–5, 111, 175 . See
physics 56–7, 73, 111–14, 157–8, 167–9 also non-rationality/the non-
laws of 113–14, 119–21 rational; reason/reasoning
physis (nature) 116 . See also Nature of universe 119
Plato 11, 21, 75, 76, 80–7, 89, 102, 103, Raven, J. E. 70–1
130, 139 reality 29–35
Plotinus 63 n. 1, 80, 92–104, 130, 132 defined 29
pneuma 116 external 29–30
Polanyi, Michael 161, 168 and history 33
Polkinghorne, John 170–1 levels of 92–7
polytheism 63–4, 132, 135 ultimate 34–5, 79–80
Poole, Michael 165 vs. counterfeit 30–3
Popper, Karl R. 23, 73, 159–60, 168 Reason 92
Porphyry 103, 105 reason/reasoning 17, 21–2, 24–5, 64, 71,
potential (concept/state) 87–8, 89 94–5, 110–11, 128 . See also
Prance, Ghillean 28 rationality
prediction(s) 22–3, 150, 154–5, 159, 161, abstract 127
172 rebirth 48, 50, 55–6, 141–2. See also
preference(s) 7, 37, 157 reincarnation; samsara
presuppositions 14–16, 21, 150, 151, spiritual xiv
171–9 redemption 15, 142–3
and axioms 173–4 reductionism 57–8, 167–71, 179
and intelligibility of universe 175–6 reincarnation 48, 50, 55–6, 141–2.
and observation 171–2 See also rebirth; samsara
and paradigms 177–9 Plotinus’ theory of 102. See also
primal substance 68–9 Plotinus
Prime Mover 83 religion 15
probability 158, 176 mystery 63 n. 1
Proclus 105 repeatability 160–3
progress, human 134 resurrection of Jesus Christ 121, 143
prophets (Hebrew) 135–6 revelation
pros (with) 131 divine 24–9, 94–5, 103, 120, 127, 130,
psychē 83 . See also soul (human) 132–6
purpose 14, 15, 87 general 134
of humanity 36–8 special 134–5
Pythagoras 102 Two Book view of 26–7
revolution
Q in scientific thinking 149, 154
quantum cosmology 110 n. 6 rhēma (word) 131
rights, human 14–15, 17
R Royal Crown (Keter Malkhut) 104
Radhakrishnan, Sir Sarvepali 60 RNA 169
Rama 48–9 rules xii, 8, 21, 37, 149, 168
Ramakrishna, Sri 141 Russell, Bertrand 20, 123, 153
Ramanuja 47, 59 Russell, L. O. 112 n. 8
226
GENERAL INDEX
S smriti 46
Sagan, Carl 28, 109, 117–18 sociology 4, 167
salvation 101–2, 121–2 Socrates 9, 11, 21, 64, 75–80, 81–2
Samkhya 47 and search for definitions 78–9
samsara 46, 48, 55. See also rebirth; and Ultimate Reality 79–80
reincarnation and virtue 77, 78
defined 48 and work 77–8
sat 54 sophists 82–3
Schaff, Adam 36–7 soul (human) 74–5, 83, 97–8
science 4, 15–16, 18–20, 26–9, 118–19, 147– transmigration of 102
79. See also scientific method Soul (World) 83, 92–3, 96, 97–8, 100–1,
defined 147–8 140
explanation 163–71 spirit (human) 75
and God as Creator 26–9 spiritism 63 n. 1
limitation of 19–20, 36–7, 150, 164, State, the 17
175, 178 stewardship 78, 140
presuppositions 171–9. See also Stoicism 59, 85, 92, 140. See also
presuppositions monism
scientific method 148–63 . See also concept of God 114–17
science Zeno of Citium 114
abduction 161–3 substance, primal 68–9
axioms 173–4 suffering, problem of 143
data collection 149–51, 156–9 summum bonum 21
deduction/inference 150, 154–6, 161–3 supernatural, the 109–10, 122, 164
experimentation 149, 150, 153, 178 Svetaketu 50
explanation 163–71 syllogism 155
falsifiability 159–60 syn (with) 131
hypotheses 149–51, 154–5, 156–9,
162–3 T
induction 150, 151–3, 154, 156 ‘tat tvam asi’ (‘thou art that’) 51, 52,
observation 149, 151–3, 154, 172, 178 140–1
paradigm shift 149, 177–9 telic view of things 87
repeatability 160–3 telos 164
trust 174 tension 69–70
Scotus Eriugena, John 105 Thales 63, 65–6, 68
Self (Hindu concept) 47–8, 49–52, 53–4, theios (divine) 132
59 n. 27, 98 . See also Brahman theism xiii, 13, 16, 24–9, 127–44,
self-consciousness 34 175–6 . See also atheism;
Seneca (Lucius Annaeus Seneca, dualism; monism; monotheism,
Seneca the Younger) 114 panentheism; pantheism;
sense (experience, perception) 29–30, polytheism
174 arguments against 143–4
SETI 28 divine revelation 132–6
Shankara 45, 47, 49–59, 60, 80, 94, 99, 139 God is knowable 127–39
Shiva 48, 59 n. 27 God is personal 136–9
shruti 46 humanity’s relation to God 139–43
significance, individual 35–6 worldview 178
Sikhism 45 theology 139, 167
sin 97, 101, 102, 129, 134, 135, 136, 138, negative 94, 103
140, 142–3 Theology of Aristotle 103–4
227
Theophrastus 32 Vedas 46
theory/theories 150–1, 154, 156, 172–3 Verification Principle 23, 159
theos (God) 65–6, 132 virgin birth 143
Thermodynamics, First Law of 111–12 virtue 77–8, 102
‘thou art that’ (‘tat tvam asi’) 51, 52, Vishnu 48, 59 n. 27
140–1 visions 98–9
touchstone 32–3 Vivekananda Swami 60
transmigration of souls 102 Vygotsky, Leo 167–8
Triad of major Hindu gods 48–9
Trinity, the 130, 132, 137–9 W
trust 174 Wallis, R. T. 97
truth 85 water 68, 70
Two Book view of revelation 26–7 Watson, James D. 147, 170
Whitehead, Sir Alfred North 27
U Wittgenstein, Ludwig 82 n. 21
Ultimate Reality xi, xii–xiii, 34–5, 49, work 48, 77–8
79–80 World Soul 83, 92–3, 96, 97–8, 100–1, 140
uniformity 175–6 worldview 3–9, 15–29
universe definition 8–9
fine-tuning of 70 theism 178
intelligibility of 175–6
origin of 120, 122, 160 X
rationality of 119 Xenophanes 65
Unmoved Mover, the 89–90, 112
Upanishads 46, 59 n. 27 Y
utopia 14–15, 23 Yoga 47
V Z
Vaisheskika 47 Zaehner, R. C. 54
Vedanta 47, 49–60 Zeno of Citium 114
228
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
David W. Gooding is Professor Emeritus of Old Testament Greek at

Queen’s University Belfast and a Member of the Royal Irish Acad-
emy. He has taught the Bible internationally and lectured on both
its authenticity and its relevance to philosophy, world religions and
daily life. He has published scholarly articles on the Septuagint and
Old Testament narratives, as well as expositions of Luke, John, Acts,
Hebrews, the New Testament’s use of the Old Testament, and several
books addressing arguments against the Bible and the Christian faith.
His analysis of the Bible and our world continues to shape the think-
ing of scholars, teachers and students alike.
John C. Lennox is Professor Emeritus of Mathematics at the Univer-

sity of Oxford and Emeritus Fellow in Mathematics and the Philoso-
phy of Science at Green Templeton College. He is also an Associate
Fellow of the Saïd Business School. In addition, he is an Adjunct Lec-
turer at the Oxford Centre for Christian Apologetics, as well as being
a Senior Fellow of the Trinity Forum. In addition to academic works,
he has published on the relationship between science and Christian-
ity, the books of Genesis and Daniel, and the doctrine of divine sov-
ereignty and human free will. He has lectured internationally and
participated in a number of televised debates with some of the world’s
leading atheist thinkers.
David W. Gooding (right)

and John C. Lennox (left)
Photo credit: Barbara Hamilton.

The Quest for Reality and Significance
Being Truly Human: e Limits of our Worth,

Power, Freedom and Destiny
In Book 1, Gooding and Lennox address issues
surrounding the value of humans. ey consider
the nature and basis of morality, compare what
morality means in different systems, and assess the
dangerous way freedom is oen devalued. What
should guide our use of power? What should limit
our choices? And to what extent can our choices
keep us from ful�lling our potential?
Finding Ultimate Reality: In Search of the Best

Answers to the Biggest Questions
In Book 2, they remind us that the authority
behind ethics cannot be separated from the truth
about ultimate reality. Is there a Creator who
stands behind his moral law? Are we the product
of amoral forces, le to create moral consensus?
Gooding and Lennox compare ultimate reality as
understood in: Indian Pantheistic Monism, Greek
Philosophy and Mysticism, Naturalism and
Atheism, and Christian eism.
Questioning Our Knowledge: Can we Know

What we Need to Know?
In Book 3, Gooding and Lennox discuss how we
could know whether any of these competing
worldviews are true. What is truth anyway, and is
it absolute? How would we recognize truth if we
encountered it? Beneath these questions lies
another that affects science, philosophy, ethics,
literature and our everyday lives: how do we know
anything at all?
The Quest for Reality and Significance
Doing What’s Right: Whose System of Ethics is

Good Enough?
In Book 4, Gooding and Lennox present
particular ethical theories that claim to hold the
basic principles everyone should follow. ey
compare the insights and potential weaknesses of
each system by asking: what is its authority, its
supreme goal, its speci�c rules, and its guidance
for daily life? ey then evaluate why even the
be
best theories have proven to be impossible to
follow consistently.
Claiming to Answer: How One Person Became the

Response to our Deepest Questions
In Book 5, they argue it is not enough to have an
ethical theory telling us what standards we ought to
live by, because we oen fail in our duties and do what
we know is wrong. How can we overcome this
universal weakness? Many religions claim to be able
to help, but is the hope they offer true? Gooding and
Lennox state why they think the claims of Jesus Christ
ar
are valid and the help he offers is real.
Suffering Life’s Pain: Facing the Problems of Moral

and Natural Evil
In Book 6, they acknowledge the problem with
believing in a wise, loving and just God who does not
stop natural disasters or human cruelty. Why does he
permit congenital diseases, human trafficking and
genocide? Is he unable to do anything? Or does he not
care? Gooding and Lennox offer answers based on
the Creator’s purpose for the human race, and his
en
entry into his own creation.
Myrtlefield Encounters
Key Bible Concepts

How can one book be so widely appreciated and
so contested? Millions revere it and many
ridicule it, but the Bible is oen not allowed to
speak for itself. Key Bible Concepts explores and
clari�es the central terms of the Christian gospel.
Gooding and Lennox provide succinct
explanations of the basic vocabulary of Christian
thought to unlock the Bible’s meaning and its
signi�cance for today.
�e �e�nition o� C��isti�nity
Who gets to determine what Christianity
means? Is it possible to understand its original
message aer centuries of tradition and
con�icting ideas? Gooding and Lennox throw
fresh light on these questions by tracing the
Book of Acts’ historical account of the message
that proved so effective in the time of Christ’s
apostles. Luke’s record of its confrontations
with competing philosophical and religious
systems reveals Christianity’s own original and
lasting de�nition.
Myrtlefield Encounters
Christianity: Opium or Truth

Is Christianity just a belief that dulls the pain of
our existence with dreams that are beautiful but
false? Or is it an accurate account of reality, our
own condition and God’s attitude toward us?
Gooding and Lennox address crucial issues that
can make it difficult for thoughtful people to
accept the Christian message. ey answer those
questions and show that clear thinking is not in
con�ict with personal faith in Jesus Christ.
e Bible and Ethics

Why should we tell the truth or value a human
life? Why should we not treat others in any way
we like? Some say the Bible is the last place to
�nd answers to such questions, but even its
critics recogni�e the magni�cence of Jesus’
ethical teaching. To understand the ethics of
Jesus we need to understand the values and
beliefs on which they are based. Gooding and
Lennox take us on a journey through the Bible
and give us a concise survey of its leading events
and people, ideas, poetry, moral values and
ethics to bring into focus the ultimate
signi�cance of what Jesus taught about right and
wrong.
Myrtlefield Expositions
�yrtle�eld ��positions provide insights into the thought��ow and
meaning of the biblical writings, motivated by devotion to the Lord
who reveals himself in the Scriptures. Scholarly, engaging, and
accessible, each book addresses the reader’s mind and heart to increase
faith in God and to encourage obedience to his Word. Teachers,
preachers and all students of the �ible will �nd the approach to
Scripture adopted in these volumes both instructive and enriching.
– e Riches of Divine Wisdom: e New Testament’s Use of the

Old Testament
– According to Luke: e ird Gospel’s Ordered Historical
Narrative
– True to the Faith: e �cts of the �postles� �e�nin� and �efendin�
the Gospel
– In the School of Christ: Lessons on Holiness in John 13–17
– An Unshakeable Kingdom: e Letter to the Hebrews for Today
www.myrtlefieldhouse.com
�ur website, www.myrtle�eldhouse.com, contains hundreds of
resources in a variety of formats. You can read, listen or watch
David Gooding’s teaching on over 35 Bible books and 14 topics.
You can also view the full catalogue of �yrtle�eld �ouse
publications and download e-book editions of the ��rt�e�e��
Expositions, Encounters and Discoveries series.
e website is optimized for both computer and mobile viewing,
making it easy for you to access the resources at home or on the go.
For more information about any of our publications or resources

contact us at� info�myrtle�eldhouse.com
Clear, simple, fresh and highly practical—this David Gooding/John
Lennox series is a goldmine for anyone who desires to live Socrates’
‘examined life’.
Above all, the books are comprehensive and foundational, so
they form an invaluable handbook for negotiating the crazy chaos of
today’s modern world.
Os Guinness, author of Last Call for Liberty
These six volumes, totalling almost 2000 pages, were written by two
outstanding scholars who combine careers of research and teaching
at the highest levels. David Gooding and John Lennox cover well the
fields of Scripture, science, and philosophy, integrating them with
one voice. The result is a set of texts that work systematically through
a potpourri of major topics, like being human, discovering ultimate
reality, knowing truth, ethically evaluating life’s choices, answering
our deepest questions, plus the problems of pain and suffering. To get
all this wisdom together in this set was an enormous undertaking!
Highly recommended!
Gary R. Habermas, Distinguished Research Professor & Chair,
Dept. of Philosophy, Liberty University & Theological Seminary
David Gooding and John Lennox are exemplary guides to the deepest
questions of life in this comprehensive series. It will equip thinking
Christians with an intellectual roadmap to the fundamental conflict
between Christianity and secular humanism. For thinking seekers it
will be a provocation to consider which worldview makes best sense
of our deepest convictions about life.
Justin Brierley, host of the Unbelievable? radio show and podcast
I would recommend these books to anyone searching to answer the

big questions of life. Both Gooding and Lennox are premier scholars
and faithful biblicists—a rare combination.
Alexander Strauch, author of Biblical Eldership

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FI N D I N G U LTI M ATE

Book 1 – BEING TRULY HUMAN:

Book 2 – FINDING ULTIMATE REALITY:

Book 3 – QUESTIONING OUR KNOWLEDGE:

Book 4 – DOING WHAT’S RIGHT:

Book 5 – CLAIMING TO ANSWER:

Book 6 – SUFFERING LIFE’S PAIN:

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in

Cover design: Frank Gutbrod.

Published by The Myrtlefield Trust

ISBN: 978-1-912721-05-4 (hbk.)

REMEMBERING THAT WE WERE ONCE STUDENTS—AND STILL ARE

BOOK 2: FINDING ULTIMATE REALITY

IN SEARCH OF THE BEST ANSWERS TO THE BIGGEST QUESTIONS

1 Indian Pantheistic Monism:

2 Greek Philosophy and Mysticism:

3 Naturalism and Atheism:

Appendix: The Scientific Endeavour 145

Series Bibliography 181

Study Questions for Teachers and Students 213

Scripture Index 219

General Index 221

I.2. The School of Athens by Raphael 10–11

I.3. On the Origin of Species (1859) by Charles Darwin 27

Ap.1. Benzene Molecule 148

Ap.2. Model T Ford Motor Car 165

Ap.3. Milky Way Galaxy 176–77

The average student has a problem—many problems in fact, but one

really by accident that we are? In what sense, if any, do we matter, or

For this reason, we have devoted Book 2, Finding Ultimate Real-

Therefore, it seemed to us that it would be seriously deficient

SERIES INTRODUCTION 1 CHAPTER 1. INDIAN PANTHEISTIC

Socrates’ concept of ultimate The difficulties inherent in

Aristotle’s four causes 87 The Stoic concept of God 114

God spoke at creation, and still APPENDIX. THE SCIENTIFIC

Through general revelation 134 Observation and

The preparatory function of the Data, patterns, relationships and

The human race is made in Basic operational presuppositions 169

Our worldview . . . includes our views,

In this introductory section we are going to consider the need for

WHY WE NEED A WORLDVIEW

There is a tendency in our modern world for education to become a

2 Especially in Book 1 of this series, Being Truly Human.

FIGURE I.1. A Rose.

Reproduced with permission of ©iStock/OGphoto.

Then, the chemists, biochemists, biologists and geneticists will tell

a rose, or will even prefer ugliness, it must be that their in-

a way that he could be certain that he would never be found out.

from? How do I know things? Do I

ASKING THE FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS

FIGURE I.2. The School of Athens by Raphael.

Reproduced from Wikimedia Commons.

First fundamental worldview question

Group A. There is nothing but matter. It is the prime reality, being

still blindly and purposelessly—into all the variety of mat-

Group B. Behind matter, which had a beginning, stands some un-

Second fundamental worldview question

This leads us to our second fundamental worldview question, which

Group A. Inanimate matter itself, without any antecedent design or