The Unknown God: Agnostic Essays (Continuum Compact S) by Anthony Kenny (PDF)

Description

Kenny, a philosopher by profession, struggles with the intellectual problems of theism and the possibility of believing in god, especially in an intellectual climate dominated by Logical Positivism.Here he revisits the Five Ways of Aquinas and argues that they are not so much proofs as definitions of God. He is also in constant dialogue with Wittgenstein for, Kenny writes, no man in recent years has surpassed him in devotion of sharp intelligence to the demarcation of the boundary between sense and nonsense.

User’s Reviews

Editorial Reviews: Review “In this new book Kenny has collected lectures and papers he has produced over the past 20 years.” –Church of England Newspaper, Paul Richardson, 11th February 2005“With lucid writing and careful examination of past arguments for the existence of God, Kenny succeeds in presenting agnosticism not as an indecisive idea but a deeply philosophical belief system that combines rationality and humility. Highly recommended for larger public academic libraries that have existing collections on the philosophy of religion.” –Library Journal, August 2005 (Library Journal) About the Author Sir Anthony Kenny was until recently Master of Balliol College, Oxford and Senior Lecturer in Philosophy in the University. The author of a number of books, including an autobiography The Path from Rome, he was formerly a Roman Catholic priest.

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐As to the so called “Christian Philosophy” in general (and St Thomas Aquinas in partocular) someone to be read without any hesitation. – In equality with Gilson and Owen.

⭐This is a book for philosophers of religion. It surveys views of God as presented by philosophers from Anselm to Wittgenstein. The title has been used by several authors to present an atheistic or agnostic world-view. The author here is a philosopher who trained initially as a Roman Catholic priest and served as a curate for four years. Since 1963 he has resigned the priesthood and returned to academia to lecture in philosophy at the universities if Liverpool and Oxford. His professional interests have centred on the philosophy of mind and religion.Sir Anthony Kenny gives a masterly presentation here of the arguments that prevent us logically from saying anything rationally meaningful about God. We have no answers in principle to questions like: `What kind of thing is God?’ As he says in the Introduction, if God is omnipotent and omniscient, then determinism is absolute and human free will is impossible. However, Kenny also makes the point that this describes only the view of God in western religion, where any definition of God generally posits an `all-knowing, all-powerful, all good being’. Other views of deity are possible that are less absolute. A God who is constant and unchanging cannot be moved by whether we do good or evil. Unfortunately Whitehead’s process theology describing an evolving God is not discussed here.In his opening chapters Kenny discusses the limitations of the attempts at ontological and cosmological proofs of God given in Anselm’s Proslogion and by Thomas Aquinas in his `Five Ways’. As the philosophers say, it is Man who has created God in his own image rather than God creating Man in His own image. Belief in God is purely a matter of faith, which is why theologians assert that direct mystical knowledge of God through some form of revelation is the only valid argument for God’s existence. As Kenny says: `The God of scholastic and rationalistic philosophy is . . . full of contradiction.’ He talks about the incoherence of trying to find language to talk about an inconceivable Godhead, though he admires the attempts made by the poet Arthur Hugh Clough. Most western religion regards God as pure spirit: but `[e]ven if such a spirit is conceivable it will not help us in giving content to the notion of a God who is a non-embodied mind.’If I have a criticism of this book it is that the author is too enchanted with Wittgenstein’s idea of language-games, though admittedly this has influenced much 20th century philosophy. The downside of this is that if you ask a question like, `Is there a personal God?’, we have to start by defining what we mean by `personal’ and what we mean by `God’; this kind of exploration soon becomes tiresome, though of course philosophically valid.

⭐A.Kenny is another priest who decided that agnosticism was the truer and better answer. His essays are excellently devised and cover many important issues confronting ‘believers’ who begin to doubt.

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