God and the Philosophers: The Reconciliation of Faith and Reason by Thomas V. Morris

Author:Thomas V. Morris
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Philosophy, Politics & Social Sciences, Reference
ISBN: 9780195101195
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 1994-11-09T22:00:00+00:00

A year into my physics major, I switched to philosophy. The science classes were geared to engineers, while my passion was theory. Professors were not interested in answering philosophical questions raised by undergraduates. I finally bit the bullet when I realized that I was spending all my available time reading philosophical theology. My father couldn't understand it, since I would have been able to make such a good living as an engineer. The truth is that I never gave earning a living a thought, then or since. When I found myself believing in God again, I immediately inferred that I should go into the ministry. The Episcopal church did not ordain women in those days, however, and my Anglo-Catholic friends assured me that I could still be a theologian. They had embraced an Oxford movement approach, which emphasized patristics and even some medieval theology. Nelson Pike, who paid a timely visit to the University of Illinois in the summer of 1963, warned that theology needs methodological discipline. So I decided to go to graduate school in philosophy. The presence of Bill Wainwright, a devout Episcopalian, in the Illinois department provided real encouragement in a faculty dominated by figures openly hostile to religion. During my last year there, the philosophy and math departments teamed up to defeat the proposal to establish a religion department. I got hold of one of their fliers and marched into the chair's office, declaiming it as full of bad arguments. He gave me one of my earliest glimpses into the dark side of professional philosophy when he replied, "They weren't meant to be good arguments; they were intended to convince!" When I announced philosophy of religion as my goal, most professors said I would change my mind. Nevertheless, I won my Woodrow Wilson graduate fellowship by telling the interviewers that I wanted to study philosophy, the better to understand the problem of evil and the doctrine of the Trinity. Intent on working with Pike, I set my sights on Cornell. Most of my work at Illinois had been continental or history of philosophy. Despite one bewildering course on Wittgenstein, I had little idea of what some of my teachers were talking about when they warned that Cornell had an analytical department focused on ordinary language.

On the whole, my experience at the University of Illinois had been positive. Intellectually, it had been exciting, despite the fact that its size allowed students to trace a rudderless course. Religiously, faith had found me again. And my Anglo-Catholic mentors and friends had given me a sketch of how to integrate faith with the life of the mind. The fly in the ointment was my old idolatrous desire to please, this time the philosophy teachers who were ushering me into the profession. More generally, my new sense of identity and purpose was fragile; I needed more time to let it stabilize. At twenty, I was too young for what awaited me. My years at Cornell were among the most traumatic in my life, like reentering hell at a still deeper level.

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