WHAT IT MEANS TO BELIEVE

Suppose, as suggested at the end of the last chapter, that one has reached a position of faith in a conscious creative power, independent of the phenomenal universe, a power that stands over against the universe as fundamentally ‘other’, yet which fills something like the role envisaged in traditional theological metaphysics – the uncaused cause of the cosmos and all its energy, the necessary foundation for the entire series of contingent events studied by science, the perfect source of all value, and the ultimate good towards which all things strive. What would it mean to believe in such a being, the being of which Aquinas said et hoc dicimus Deum, ‘and this we call God’?

This rather vague question can, I think, be broken down into three sub-questions. One way of inquiring into what it means to be a believer involves asking about the conditions for forming such a belief and the context in which theistic commitment operates.