Magnus the Mastermind first met Tim Miles in the early seventies when he came to speak at Cambridge and Donald Mackinnon entertained us both to dinner at the old Arts Theatre Restaurant. He had just become known to theologians by two books, Religion and the Scientific Outlook (1969), and Religious Experience (1972), in which, as a philosopher-psychologist writing after Braithwaite and Robinson, he argued for a non-literalist view of religious language. Realistic ideas of God and God’s action in the world make no sense, and we can’t begin to imagine what observations could confirm them.
Miles summed up our knowledge of God in the phrase “silence qualified by parables”, and his two books were very helpful to me as I began to work out my own position.
Tim Miles’s new book is called Speaking of God: Theism, Atheism and the Magnus Image (Sessions of York, £8.50).
For people brought up in the heyday of Oxford-style analytical philosophy a generation ago, this is a very good introduction to the non-realist philosophy of religion. The “Magnus Image” is the image of God as a great, world-controlling, invisible supernatural Person. Get rid of that image, and we can leave behind us the standard debate between “theism” (Magnus actually exists) and “atheism” (there is no Magnus out there), and learn a better way of understanding talk about God.
Tim Miles’s theory of what went wrong with the idea of God suggests a debt to Gilbert Ryle. When, around 1600-1650, early-modern science put about the idea that everything in Nature could be explained without remainder in terms of matter, motion and number, people were reduced to thinking of “the mind” as a paranormal entity, the ghost in the body-machine, and similarly of God as the ghost in the great World-Machine. Psychological realism and theological realism grew up together, but today we should leave both of them behind. I entirely concur.
Don Cupitt
A Rational Christian — a Faith for Tomorrow
by C.A.P. Ellis. Offers a succinct analysis of the human condition that visualises three phases of development: preservation, perpetuation, perfection on the road to godliness that eliminates God but postulates an inanimate Creator. It sees a Second Reformation as essential if our Church is to regain its former authority by applying rational Christian solutions to all our problems and thereby render politicians redundant. Not recommended for the faint-hearted.
Minerva Press, £4.99. ISBN 1858638887.