Atheism and Theism 79an immaterial, intelligent, uncaused cause of reality, and that this – as
St Thomas Aquinas (1225–74) says – ‘is what we call God’ (et hoc dicimus
Deum).
Jack Smart is well known for his direct and consistent espousal of a sci-
entific, naturalistic version of realism. He is a straightforward atheistic realist.
Let me, therefore, add at this stage what readers should also know, both as
a matter of ‘declared interest’ and as a fact relevant to the style of argument
and defence I shall present, namely that I am a Christian of a largely
‘unreconstructed’ sort. More precisely, I am an orthodox Roman Catholic
believing in such Credal doctrines as the Trinity, and by implication the
Divinity of Jesus Christ; his crucifixion, death and resurrection; the establish-
ment and divine protection of one holy, catholic and apostolic church; the
forgiveness of sins; the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to
come. This is clearly not ‘minimalist’ theism; but nor, as I shall try to show,
is it religious fundamentalism of the sort that distrusts or is antagonistic
towards philosophy, science and historical scholarship. Indeed, it has been
a feature of Catholic Christianity since the days of the Church fathers (the
Patristics) that it lays great emphasis on the reasonability of theism in general
and on the defensibility of Credal belief in particular.
Of course, there are other views among practising Christians and those
who take a philosophical but uncommitted interest in the nature of religion.
That which is most clearly opposed to my own approach is one associated
with trends emerging out of nineteenth-century Protestant theology –
though, along with more or less everything else, it is prefigured in the Middle
Ages and in antiquity. On this view (or better, family of views) religion is
an autonomous mode of personal engagement with the world. That is to say
it is a ‘way of going on’, the point and coherence of which does not depend
upon historical, scientific or philosophical reasoning. The religious person
is one whose words and deeds express an orientation of the will towards a
set of spiritual values. For this reason the approach is sometimes known as
religious ‘voluntarism’ (L. voluntas, will or inclination) or as ‘fideism’ (L. fides,
trust or faith).
One appealing feature of this account is that it makes personal character,
in particular spirituality, essential to religious commitment; and this contrasts
with the image of the soulless scholastic who, though he may debate the
metaphysics of angels, the possibility of God’s restoring virginity, and the
logic of the Trinity, is devoid of religious sense and inclination. A second
attraction of voluntarism is that it is more or less (according to its character)
immune to rational criticism. Since it does not rely upon reasoned truth it
cannot be brought down by philosophical, scientific or historical investiga-
tions. In the modern period, and particularly in the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries, traditional theism was subjected to a battery of criticisms from