² A and G are different in important ways from B to F. A, for example, might be taken to be a claim about location in the way that “The pointer is to the left of 17^e” is a claim about location. In that case it is not in the first place a claim about what God does or is doing at all, and would require separate handling. Likewise G is different, for if the religious speaker is confessing an initial act of bringing the world into being, G cannot like A-F be about God in the world, and if the speaker is by means of G acknowledging the dependence of the world upon God, as a whole and at every instant, it is not at once clear how God's action is involved in that dependence. Nevertheless, I include A and G with B-F in order to keep before myself and my readers the very variety of God-and-the-world claims which are made in the tradition most accessible to us.

³ Flew, Antony, Theology and Falsification, with replies by Hare, R. H., Mitchell, Basil, and Crombie, I. M., all in Flew, & Macintyre, , eds., New Essays in Philosophical Theology (London: S.C.M. Press, 1955), often printed elsewhere.Google Scholar

⁴ Austin, John L., Philosophical Papers (Oxford University Press, 1961), 221Google Scholar.

⁵ See my article, Christian Philosophers or Philosopher Christians? Christian Century (1968)Google Scholar, and the bibliography there cited.

⁶ Coburn, Robert C., The Hiddenness of God and Some Barmecidal God-Concepts, Journal of Philosophy (1960), 689–712. Also,CrossRefGoogle ScholarRamsey, Ian T., Religious Language (London: S. C. M. Press, 1957),Google ScholarModels and Mystery (London: O. U. P., 1964)Google Scholar, and other books and articles, passim.

⁷ For the concept of brute facts as employed in contemporary philosophy, see Anscombe, G. E. M., On Brute Facts, Analysis (1958)Google Scholar.

⁸ See also Isaiah 40ff., Genesis I.

⁹ Another illustration: the exponents of traditional theism have made frequent use of the cosmological proof of the existence of God. This proof or argument may be stated as follows:

But the hidden assumption in (1) (and of course it is not very well hidden in the form of the argument I have for that very reason selected here) is that this universe is created. I.e., the conclusion appears implicitly in the premises, as it must in all deductive arguments (and there are, says Ryle, no inductive arguments). If for “created,” which is, after all, hardly an observable property of the universe (how would you recognize a part of the universe which had not been created, but was just there?), we substitute “contingent” or “finite,” the same difficulties apply. We still show, by our use of these words, that we already believe at the outset of the proof what we think we are setting out to discover in its conclusion. Or if we reduce the language of (1) to

for that is neither logically self-evident, nor based on observation. So in that form the argument does not get off the ground. The logical gap between the “God” of traditional theism and the world is again the difficulty.

¹⁰ Cf. Temple, William, Nature, Man, and God (London: Macmillan, 1934), chs. 10–12Google Scholar.

¹¹ Since preparing the earlier drafts of this paper, I have read two works designed to set out a doctrine of God along lines suggested by process thought, the volume of essays by Schubert Ogden, collected under the name The Reality of God and Other Essays (New York: Harper and Row, 1966)Google Scholar, and the volume by Cobb, John B. Jr, A Christian Natural Theology in the Light of Whitehead's Philosophy (New York: Abingdon, 1965)Google Scholar. I have not felt it necessary in the light of these works to revise the preceding lines, but I offer the following supplementary remarks. In both these works, there is an attempt to present a doctrine, under the guidance of Whitehead and of Charles Hartshorne, which is conceptually adequate, and which conforms to the Biblical doctrine (s) of God. OGDEN, whose work parallels that of the present paper in a number of ways, believes that the introduction of the notion of temporality into the concept of God is just that move which will eliminate the inherent self-contradiction in the concept as we have it in traditional theism from Thomas Aquinas onwards (p. 59). Thus God lives and grows, and is not thereby imperfect, for his is eminent living and growing (pp. 59f.). One would express appreciation for OGDEN'S efforts, while noting that there seems still to be plenty of room for further clarification of his views. For example, it is not at all clear whether the following sentence about God:

His being related to all others is itself relative to nothing, but is the absolute ground of any and all real relationships, whether his own or those of his creatures, (p. 60)

is meaningful, or whether it is itself reflecting a logical or conceptual blunder. A part of the interest of OGDEN'S work is that he has given attention, if not to analysis proper, at least to the current religious applications of analysis. Thus a later essay in the volume raises a question near to that of the present paper: What Sense Does It Make to Say, “God Acts in History”? Concerning that essay, see below, footnote 12.

John Cobb devotes himself to the exposition of the Whiteheadian doctrines, and o t their adjustment to fit the demands of a Christian natural theology, i.e., one which can provide the categories by means of which the Christian gospel can be expressed. COBB is concerned to set out Whitehead's doctrine of God, and then to offer modifications of that doctrine which, while not inconsistent with the main lines of the Whiteheadian metaphysics, will be more evidently appropriate when applied to the content of the Christian religion. It is not clear to me that the revisions COBB offers are sufficiently radical, or that he has met the demand for conceptual clarity and persuasion in argument made by Whitehead's critics. But these ventures are not the task of the present paper, which is much more limited in scope.

¹² An illustration of the powerful (and fatal) hold which Cartesianism can have over philosophical theologians is to be found in the generally admirable work of SCHUBERT OGDEN (see preceding footnote). Ogden, in What Sense Does it Make to Say, “God Acts in History”? (op. cit.), attempts to deal sympathetically with both Whiteheadian metaphysics, Heidegger/Bultmann existentialism, and philosophical analysis. Such breadth is rare in contemporary theology, and is in itself commendable. However, it lands Ogden in the following inconsistency. As does the present paper, Ogden notes that talk about human persons may form a useful model for talk about God. (Indeed Ogden maintains the much stronger thesis that a personal God must be understood on the analogy of the metaphysics of the human person [p. 173]. That is a stronger claim than can be demonstrated, save in a trivial way, which Ogden does not seem to intend.) Now arises the difficulty. Ogden gleans his notion of the human person, and of the acts of the human person, from Heidegger. But Heidegger (according to Ogden) holds that the proper and original sense in which men act is not that “external” act by which they sit down, or pull a banana from the stem, or cross the Rubicon. Rather the primary meaning of the words “human act” (pp. 176f.) is to speak of “the self's own private purposes or projects,” the self-constituting act of affirming its own being. “Indeed it is only because the self first acts to constitute itself, to respond to its world, and to decide its own inner being that it ‘acts’ at all in the more ordinary meaning of the word; all its outer acts of word and deed are but ways of expressing and implementing the inner decisions whereby it constitutes itself as a self.”

Now in making the distinction, which modern philosophy owes to Descartes, between “inner” and “outer,” Ogden opens the door to a host of troubles. They appear, as we would have expected, in his philosophical psychology. He can never be absolutely certain that his wife's (external) behavior reveals to him her ((internal) reality (p. 182) —and this is not the diffidence of a husband in the presence of the elusive female, but the hollow profundity of a Cartesian skeptic! Then, of course, the same trouble arises when these Cartesian principles are applied to God and the world. God's inner, primary, private act turns out in Ogden to be a diffuse relationship to every creature. From the creature, if we knew it properly, we could know with Charles Wesley that God's being is pure unbounded love (pp. 177, 186). But God's outer public “acts” are the events, such as the words of the prophets, and the words and deeds of Jesus, which may be taken, and which Ogden in Christian faith does take, to be revelatory of the inner act of God, the real thing.

The virtue of this account of what it means to say “God acts” is that it explicates, along lines William Temple has made familiar, the notion of revelation as related to creation and to the acts of God in events. Its vice is that religious certainty is forced to rest squarely upon philosophic uncertainty or Cartesian doubt, that doubt resting in turn upon a metaphysical gap between self and body, as characterized by Bultmann and Heidegger. All this might have been avoided had Ogden seen that the analogue of process theology is not Cartesian philosophical psychology, but the philosophical psychology of Ryle or of Wittgenstein. Or had he realized that the doctrine of the logical priority of private experience has been under heavy and effective attack by the philosophical analysts, he might have foreseen difficulty, as he did not.

¹³ Cf. Wittgenstein, L., Philosophical Investigations (New York: Macmillan, 1953), andGoogle ScholarRyle, Gilbert, The Concept of Mind (London: Hutchinson, 1949)Google Scholar.

¹⁴ Here my primary source is a paper which David Armstrong allowed me to read in manuscript form, titled, I think, A Program for a Physicalist Doctrine of Mind. But I refer as well to the earlier papers of Place, U. T., Is Consciousness a Brain Process, British Journal of Psychology (1956), andCrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMedSmart, J. J. C., Sensations and Brain Processes, Philosophical Review (1959)Google Scholar.

¹⁵ Cf. , Ogden, op. cit., 21–43Google Scholar, where he tries to do just that!

¹⁶ Cf. my essay, How is Religious Talk Justifiable? American Philosophy and the Future, ed. Novak, Michael (New York: Scribner's, 1968)Google Scholar. There I describe in a preliminary way some of the ways in which religious talk may possess both descriptive force, emotive force, and elocutionary force, and how these elements are related to one another in the speech-act.