Tuesday, May 25, 2021

C.E.M. Joad's Turnaround

I see that an article which I edited (not wrote) is rising again in popularity. The philosopher C.E.M. Joad (1891-1953) for most of his life rejected religion -- but in the 1940s and early 1950s he first abandoned atheism, then accepted a form of theism, and finally converted to Christianity. He summarised his new position like this: 
"Having considered and rejected a number of views as to the nature and interpretation of the cosmos, I shall state the one which seems to me to be open to the fewest objections. It is, briefly, what I take to be the traditional Christian view, namely, that the universe is to be conceived as two orders of reality, the natural order, consisting of people and things moving about in space and enduring in time, and a supernatural order neither in space nor in time, which consists of a Creative Person or Trinity of Persons from which the natural order derives its meaning, and in terms of which it receives its explanation."

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