The crushing burden of proof

Anthony Kenny does not believe in the existence of God, but his disbelief is qualified and complex. He does not believe that the existence of God can be proved through something like the five Thomist ‘proofs’: they depend too much on ‘outdated Aristotelian cosmology’. Further, he thinks that the traditional attributes of God such as omniscience, omnipotence and benevolence are incompatible. He implies that there is also a traditional attribution to God of (total?) ineffability and this, too, damages proof of existence.

I don’t quite understand his emphasis on the un-utterability of God. It’s true there is a strand of ineffability-thinking in the Church, but there are even stronger strands of Revelation. It’s through a glass darkly we see, we are not totally blind. Indeed one of Christ’s chief claimed identities is The Light. The qualification to the disbelief is about the limits of a ‘literal’ description of God. While for Kenny there is no such thing as the God of scholastic or rationalist philosophy, he says he is interested in the possibility of interpreting religious discourse in a poetic rather than a scientific mode.

This talk of reason, science, proof and the role of language is enough to show that Kenny’s disbelief is not any old dis- belief. It is not that of an existentialist French Sartre or German Nietzsche, still less any postmodern Continental deconstructionist. It’s a rather English Oxbridge disbelief and curiously 1950s. It is what happened when a convert to a certain sort of analytic philosophy applied it to Thomism. The discussion in The Unknown God has a very dated feel. Since the 1950s lots more people have started not believing, though not, it would appear, for any of the reasons discussed by Kenny or for that matter Sartre.