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Title: Reason and Belief by Brand, Blanshard ISBN: 0-300-01825-8 Publisher: Yale Univ Pr Pub. Date: May, 1975 Format: Textbook Binding List Price(USD): $37.50

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Average Customer Rating: 5 (2 reviews)

Rating: 5
Summary: Analysis of Karl Barth in Reason and Belief
Comment: Blanshard's analysis of Karl Barth's liberal Protestant theology is devastating.

Rating: 5
Summary: A rationalist's survey of reason and religion
Comment: In this uniformly clear and incisive volume (the third in Brand Blanshard's landmark trilogy in defense of reason), the twentieth century's greatest philosophical rationalist carefully examines the claims of religion in the light of reason (including its claims that something other than reason may provide an ultimate standard of truth). Entering sympathetically but critically into the thought of great religious thinkers in the Roman Catholic and Protestant traditions, Blanshard concludes that whatever legitimate content religion may have, the claims of reason as ultimate arbiter of truth cannot be compromised.

This conclusion does _not_, Blanshard insists, remove the whole of religion. He conceives religion as the response of the "whole man" to whatever he regards as ultimately true and important, and he finds much in Christian tradition that is worthy of a rationalist's praise. And in the volume's final, positive section, "The Faith of a Rationalist," Blanshard sets out in detail what he thinks we may and may not accept from received religious tradition.

The concept of "God" is one that he finds we must at least attenuate; he finds that while he can profess belief in an "Absolute" (roughly, all of reality regarded as a logically and causally coherent whole), this Absolute does not share enough features with the "God" of traditional theism that Blanshard feels able to retain that word as a description of his own quasitheistic belief. Nevertheless he also does not argue for scrapping the concept completely, and his disagreements with more traditional theists are always presented with the utmost generosity.

Despite its fairly explicit focus on Christianity, this brilliant work also presents a model for budding nontheists in other traditions who seek to take a similarly sympathetic-yet-critical approach to, say, Judaism or Islam. For Blanshard, the primacy of reason does not involve wholesale rejection of religion as inherently "irrational." Indeed, he concludes that reason, properly conceived, has been the unadmitted architect of religion all along, and that taking it seriously is precisely the way to transform our world for the better.

Blanshard, in short, takes the service of reason as his own religion. His thorough account should be read by anyone who takes either reason or religion with the seriousness such topics deserve.