2 - Limited Explanations

Summary

Introduction

When I was first approached to read a paper at the conference from which this volume takes its beginning I expected that Flint Schier, with whom I had taught a course on the Philosophy of Biology in my years at Glasgow, would be with us to comment and to criticize. I cannot let this occasion pass without expressing once again my own sense of loss. I am sure that we would all have gained by his presence, and hope that he would find things both to approve, and disapprove, in the following venture.

I also hope that my relationship with Flint, of friendly and outspoken disagreement in the service of a shared ideal, may be allowed to colour my opening response to Richard Swinburne's paper. Flint and I both thought of ourselves as philosophers, and as philosophers convinced of the relevance of biological inquiry to any truly informed anthropology. Richard Swinburne and I are both theists, and convinced of the relevance of reason to the proper grounding and explication of our theism. But even if I were entirely at one with him, agreement and mutual approval make for poor theatre, as well as poor philosophy. Pure and dismissive disagreement, of course, is not merely poor philosophy: it is not philosophy at all. To those, if there are any present, who see literally nothing to be said for theism, I can Only offer the following aphoristic warning: ‘when one does not see what one does not see, one does not even see that one is blind’.