Proactionary Theology: Discovering the Art of God-Playing

Abstract

Just as a religious temperament does not demand a belief in a supernatural deity, a belief in such a deity does not require a religious temperament (cf. Nagel 2010: chap.1). Spinoza’s notorious philosophical radicalism, now routinely seen as a wellspring for the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, capitalizes on just this disjunction. Spinoza himself sided with those who found in nature a sufficient source of religious devotion without having to invoke a higher intelligence that underwrites it all. For him, God is simply coextensive with nature. This was the original meaning of ‘naturalism’, which with the help of Ockham’s Razor was then used to launch modern atheism in the nineteenth century, as people began to think: ‘Wouldn’t “Nature”, understood in its totality, suffice as the name of God?’ The authors of this book, on the other hand, stand with those who locate the ‘best explanation’ for nature in the workings of the sort of anthropocentric yet transcendent deity favoured by the Abrahamic religions (Meyer 2009; Fuller 2010).