Alan Torrance’s Didsbury Lectures 2009, 1/4.

‘Confronting Scylla and Charibdis: Religion, Naturalism and the Triune God.’

Lecture One: The Problem of Religion.

  Torrance outlined the critique from the ‘four horsemen of atheism’ (Dawkins, Hitchens, Harris, Dennet). He wanted to feel the force of the criticisms that religion has and can produce massive social harm; he mentioned the oppression of women as an ongoing problem. But he also wanted to argue against some of the crudity of the philosophical views underlying their critiques.

To do this he outlined the typology of Race (1983), promulgated by D’Costa in Theology and Religious Pluralism (1986), according to which people can be exclusivist, inclusivist or pluralist. But D’Costa later claimed that pluralism and inclusivism were incoherent because every position that made some truth claims had to reject truth claims from others if they contradicted their own.

He then critiqued the idea of an Archimedean point or neutral space from which to assess truth. He thought this was often based on a classical foundationalism. He also critiqued evidentialism as being inconsistent with its own demands, unable to recognise how we function in our daily lives and a couple of other reasons, but I assume most readers will already agree with this so I won’t belabour it.

His final point was that the ground of Christian belief is in “a Triune event of redemptive Self-disclosure that involves the reconstitutions of our perceptions by the Spirit (a sui generis paradigm shift) such that we are given to participate by the Spirit, as part of a Body of believers, in the incarnate Son’s epistemic communion with the Father.” Yet he also said that Christianity had the most explanatory power of any ‘vision’ even for non-Christians (who presumably have not had the benefit of this god-given paradigm shift). Is this a Barthian version of what we’ve heard already from Charles Taylor and John Milbank? We’ll see where he takes it in the next three lectures.

Two funnies. He made a joke about the Caliban wanting to blow him up, the Caliban being a fundamentalist Calvinist group educated in the Southern States. He also said that Bertrand Russell put an advert in the Times that ran, ‘Lonely solipsist seeks like-minded people for conversation.’