Saving God

by Johnston, Mark

• ISBN13: 9780691152615
• ISBN10: 0691152616
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2011-07-11
• Publisher: Princeton Univ Pr

Summary

In this book, Mark Johnston argues that God needs to be saved not only from the distortions of the "undergraduate atheists" (Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and Sam Harris) but, more importantly, from the idolatrous tendencies of religion itself. Each monotheistic religion has its characteristic ways of domesticating True Divinity, of taming God's demands so that they do not radically threaten our self-love and false righteousness. Turning the monotheistic critique of idolatry on the monotheisms themselves, Johnston shows that much in these traditions must be condemned as false and spiritually debilitating.A central claim of the book is thatsupernaturalismis idolatry. If this is right, everything changes; we cannot place our salvation in jeopardy by tying it essentially to the supernatural cosmologies of the ancient Near East. Remarkably, Johnston rehabilitates the ideas of the Fall and of salvation within a naturalistic framework; he then presents a conception of God that both resists idolatry and is wholly consistent with the deliverances of the natural sciences.Princeton University Press is publishingSaving Godin conjunction with Johnston's forthcoming bookSurviving Death, which takes up the crux of supernaturalist belief, namely, the belief in life after death.

Author Biography

Mark Johnston is the Walter Cerf Professor of Philosophy at Princeton University and the author of Surviving Death (Princeton).

Table of Contents

Preface	p. xi
Is Your God Really God?	p. 1
Believing in God
On the ôNamesö of God
The Meaning of ôGodö and the Common Conception of God
What is Salvation?
Salvation Versus Spiritual Materialism
The Idolatrous Religions	p. 18
The Ban on Idolatry
Idolatry as Perverse Worship
Graven Images and the Highest One
Idolatry as Servility
The Rhetoric of Idolatrousness
The Same God?
The Pharisees'
Problem with Jesus
Could we be Idolaters?
Supernaturalism and Scientism	p. 37
Scientism and Superstition
Supernaturalism
Legitimate Naturalism
Scientism Versus Science
The Argument for Naturalism from True Religion
The Phenomenological Approach	p. 53
The Method and the Question
Yahweh's use of the Method
A Criterion, or an Enclosed Circle?
Yahweh's Criterion Applied to Himself
Forgiving the God
A Reply to Yahweh's Answer to Job
Is There and Internal Criterion of Religious Falsehood?	p. 70
The Pope's Criterion of Religious Falsehood
A Consequence of the Pope's Criterion
Religious and Scientific Fallibilism
Why God?	p. 80
Doesn't Substantive Reasonableness Suffice?
The Fall
Homo Incurvatus in se
The Redeemer?
After Monotheism	p. 95
The Highest One
The Tetragrammation
The Paradox of the Highest One
Speaking of the Highest One
Existents as Dependent Aspects of Existence Itself
An Alternative to the Thomistic
Interpretation of the Highest One
Process Panentheism	p. 115
The Goodness of the Highest One
The Analogy of Logos
Process Panentheism
The Self-Disclosure of Existence Itself
The Problem is with the Pantheon
Panentheism, Not Pantheism	p. 126
Distinguishing Panentheism and Pantheism
Presence
Presence as Disclosure
Is being almost Entirely Wasted?
Ubiquitous Presence
Against Natural Representation
Representation and ôCarrying Informationö
Can Causation Account for Aboutness?
What Could Replace the Representationalist Tradition?
A Diagnosis of the Representationalist's Mistake
A Diagnosis of the Representationalist's Mistake
A Transformed Picture of ôConsciousnessö and Reality
Confirming the Surprising Hypothesis
The Mind of God	p. 152
The Objectivity of the Realm of Sense
How the Structure of I Resence Might Impose Evolutionary Constraints
Objective Mind and the Mind of the Highest One
The Doubly Donatory Character of Reality
Does God Exist?
The Highest One
Christianity without Spiritual Materialism	p. 160
Religion and Violence
The Gospel According to Girard
Where is Original Sinfulness?
Original Sinfulness as self-will and False Righteousness
Christ Destroys the Kingdom of self-will and False Righteousness
The Afterlife as an Idolatrous Conceit
Against ôMan's Quest for Meaningö
The Afterlife as Resistance to Christ
Naturalism's Gift: Resurrection without the Afterlife
Postscript	p. 187
Index	p. 189
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