Surfing on the Sea of Faith is available at £11 postfree from Stephen Mitchell,All SaintsVicarage,The Street,Gazeley, Newmarket,CB8 8RB.Special double deal:Surfing on the Sea of Faith and TheWay to Happiness by Don Cupitt are available from Stephen Mitchell at £20 postfree. David Boulton reviews Surfing on the Sea of Faith: the Ethics and Religion of Don Cupitt by Nigel Leaves Polebridge Press, 2005. 194 pages. £11. ISBN 0944344631 reviews The Disciple’s Tale William James and Daniel Dennett, for their own very different reasons, have expressed doubts about the existence of consciousness. If you follow that direction, you will not be entirely convinced by the arguments presented by most of the essays in this readable discussion of recent developments in the field of consciousness studies. The book is divided into three sections: (1) physics (2) neuroscience and psychology and (3) theology and ethics.
The first section could just as well have been labelled meta-physics. Each of the three writers in this section expresses a faith in the ability of physics to depict the world ‘the way it is’ even though this way, in their essays, is not that normally understood by scientific materialism.
In the opinion of this reviewer questions like ‘What is the world really like?’ (p. 90) are not better answered by increasing the resources from which to draw to include consciousness. Amore humble science which has shed all pretensions to be theology will still theorise how brain, mind and world relate (in the broadest sense of the term) and will still draw moral and religious lessons from this, but it will not think that in doing so it has uncovered something ultimate about the nature of reality. It is the thought that it can, expressed by many of the contributors, which I found the least appealing part of this book.
That said, the remaining two sections made for an interesting read. Section 2 begins with essays by Peter Fenwick, who is well known for his research into parapsychological phenomena such as mystical, psychical and near-death experiences, and Guy Claxton who is far more sceptical about both the cognitive nature of these phenomena and our ability to be certain that we have a substantial self. Agreater clarity of awareness is required, Claxton suggests, before we start to make grand claims on behalf of consciousness studies to have uncovered the nature of mind, humanity, the universe etc.
The place to start is down to earth with perceptions that are of human origin, developing thereby what he calls a ‘proximal spirituality’. For Fenwick, though, our experience of parapsychological phenomena is evidence, ‘that the mind is not limited to the body’ (p.111) and calls for a ‘science of spirituality’ (p. 126) giving priority to experiences which suggest that consciousness transcends the physical brain. I take the debate between the positions of Fenwick and Claxton to stand at the heart of this book.
Your attitude to the other essays is likely to be shaped by whether you are more in agreement with Fenwick or Claxton.
Keith Ward’s essay kicks off the final section of the book on theology and ethics with an excellent exposition of the Christian idea of the soul (understood as a unity of a material body and an immaterial consciousness) and its continuation after death. Combining strands of thought from the Bible and Aristotle, Christian tradition asserts that human consciousness and the purpose of human life cannot be fully understood independent of a belief in the reality of personal creator God.
Mary Midgley, a speaker at this year’s SoF conference, uses her essay to plead for an end to the apartheid of mind and body. Instead of dualism we must recognise the complexity of both mind and matter in forming the whole human personality within the context of a life lived in relationships with other people and the living planet.
Alan Torrance offers a clear defence of Christian theism against what he regards as the twin evils of naturalism (represented by Dewey, Davidson, Dawkins, and Dennett) and anti-realist social constructivism (represented, among others, by Rorty and Cupitt). Like Ward, Torrance gains from theism a hope in a life beyond this one and sees this as no more problematic than the problems secularism has to face meeting the challenges imposed on academic values by naturalism and antirealism.
Denis Alexander’s essay summarises a number of recent ways of modelling the relationship between science and religion and in the final essay, John Habgood offers a similar view of personhood to that put forward by Alexander and Midgley. Habgood is concerned with how this theistic view of personhood is being challenged by developments in reproductive medicine and the genetic view of humanity. The other essays in this volume present the case for theistic realism while the book as a whole raises scientific, moral and religious questions about the mystery of consciousness which should not be ignored.
These are questions that religious non-realists will need to address if it they are to be taken seriously by an audience engrossed by questions raised in consciousness studies.
Dr.Philip Knight teaches Religious Education and Citizenship in Canterbury.