I. Introduction
Roger Scruton is not much interested in the God of the typical philosopher of religion, and his work is of great significance to those, like myself, for whom questions of spirituality and praxis are just as important as those pertaining to metaphysics and theory.Footnote 1 I have been equally drawn to his cognitive dualism – a position which promises to accommodate the sense in which the world has its source in God, but without this requiring that God and the world are to be viewed in conjunctive, separatist terms. On Scruton's position God is revealed in the world. More specifically, God is revealed in our shared Lebenswelt, and it is Scruton's aim to ‘rescue [it] from those scientistically minded people who wish to explain it away’.Footnote 2 Spinoza is an obvious and acknowledged inspiration for this cognitive dualist framework, and Scruton's subliminal influence was no doubt at work in my own attempt to defend a form of naturalism which can accommodate God.Footnote 3
Scruton's position is not easy to pin down, and some of what he says suggests an implicit commitment to the ontological dualism he purports to reject – understandably so, if, as has been argued recently,Footnote 4 such a position is required for a properly theistic picture, and if it is Scruton's aim to accommodate God. I applaud Scruton's rejection of ontological dualism, and I do not think that cognitive dualism, properly understood, reduces to a form of atheism. On the contrary, I take it to be a way of avoiding such a position. As I see it then, it is ontological dualism which poses the real threat for theism, and cognitive dualism which repairs the damage.
Everything hangs on the question of how these positions are to be understood, and there is an interpretation which suggests that ontological dualism is indeed required if we are to avoid lapsing into atheism. According to this way of thinking, ontological dualism is that without which there would be no distinction between God and world. A distinction between God and world is fundamental to a properly theistic picture, but there is a question of how this distinction is to be understood, and a conception thereof which leads to a deeply problematic conception of God. This is the ‘conjunctive’ position to which I have referred already, and it involves conceiving of the relation between God and world as a conjunction of two, separable, things. The objections are familiar to theologians, and they are identified in the clearest terms by Hegel.Footnote 5
Scruton defers to Kant rather than Hegel, registering a ‘firm metaphysical commitment’ to transcendental idealism.Footnote 6 As he sums up the position, ‘our concepts cannot reach beyond the realm of phenomena so as to refer successfully to ‘things in themselves’. He claims also that ‘the concept of the supernatural [must be severed from] any ontological claims’.Footnote 7 These claims are difficult to square with some of the other things Scruton wishes to say, and I have argued elsewhere that his commitment to Kant leads to a deep tension in his position.Footnote 8 In what follows I want to spell out the relevant difficulties, and to get a clearer sense of what it could mean to be an ontological or a cognitive dualist in this context. The positive position at which I arrive involves a form of cognitive dualism, and it grants a distinction between God and world, albeit with no concession to the offending form of ontological dualism. It also accords with much of what Scruton himself says, although there is no longer any motive for insisting that ‘things in themselves’ lie on the far and inaccessible side of thought, nor that the concept of the supernatural ‘must be severed from any ontological claims’. I conclude that such a position makes for a more consistent theistic picture.
2. Scruton's position: a summary
Scruton does not spell out his conception of ontological dualism in any detailed way, but we get a clear sense of what he has in mind when, in the context of examining what it means to be a human being, he tells us that, for the ontological dualist, such a being is ‘not one thing but two’.Footnote 9 This is ontological dualism in the Cartesian sense, and Scruton contends that we are compelled to espouse it because the vivacity and centrality of the I-You encounter ‘tempts us to believe that it is an encounter between objects, and that these objects exist in some other dimension than that containing ordinary physical things’.Footnote 10 Scruton rejects ontological dualism in favour of cognitive dualism, the latter of which allows us to say that the human being is one thing not two, albeit something to be comprehended in ways which take us beyond the perspective of science. Of particular interest to Scruton is the human being in so far as she can be considered as a religious being – one whose life is enshrined in the ‘culture, art and moral consciousness that makes us accountable to each other and to the whole of things’.Footnote 11 We are concerned here with aspects of our shared human world or Lebenswelt, and Scruton distinguishes this way of seeing the world from that which is operative when we seek to comprehend it scientifically (‘the purely objective and instrumental way of viewing things’). His aim is to ‘rescue the Lebenswelt from those scientistically minded people who wish to explain it away.Footnote 12
This is where cognitive dualism comes into play, for according to this position ‘the world can be understood in two incommensurable ways, the way of science and the way of interpersonal understanding’.Footnote 13 The further crucial thought – implicit in Scruton's disparaging reference to scientism – is that the second, non-scientific, way of understanding is perfectly legitimate on its own terms. Indeed, Scruton wishes to defend the stronger claim that it is indispensable if we are to arrive at an adequate conception of self and world.Footnote 14 The basic idea here is that there are ways of understanding things – including things like ourselves – which take us beyond the perspective of science. This does not mean that scientific investigation is to be rejected or its significance undermined. The point is simply to deny that it provides the only legitimate mode of comprehension. In favour of this anti-scientistic stance we can note that there are no good philosophical arguments to establish the relevant explanatory restriction, and nothing within science could deliver the required philosophical goods.Footnote 15
One does not have to be a theist to appreciate these points, and they have been taken on board by those for whom theism is just as problematic as scientism.Footnote 16 Scruton, by contrast, insists that the relevant non-scientific level of understanding involves thinking about ourselves as religious beings, and he describes the categories which are brought into play at this level as ‘transcendental’. These categories are said to be operative in our interpersonal relations; they involve such concepts as the sacred, the holy, the redemptive; and they are transcendental not by virtue of ‘applying to items that are not of this world’,Footnote 17 but in the sense that ‘they cannot be fully explained in empirical terms’, and ‘seem to refer always beyond the limits of our world’.Footnote 18
The atheist can concede much of this, for one can be religious without believing in God, and the idea that there are categories which exceed the limits of the world could mean simply that they take us beyond the world as described by science – as Scruton himself seems to be suggesting. He has this anti-scientistic point in mind when he talks of wanting to rescue the Lebenswelt from ‘those scientistically minded people who wish to explain it away’, referring to the various empirical explanations – biological, social, psychological and so forth – of the origin and development of religious consciousness. His reason for denying that such explanations can reach all the way to God is that scientific explanation operates within the system of causes, whereas God exceeds such limits – God is ‘transcendental, outside space and time, and therefore not part of the physical world’.Footnote 19 Scruton concludes that ‘there can be no causal connection between God and our thoughts of him’,Footnote 20 and that ‘[a] direct personal encounter with God…is no more possible than a direct personal encounter with the number 2.Footnote 21 A telling caveat is that the difficulty arises when ‘God is understood in the philosophical way of Avicenna or Aquinas’, for such an approach ‘seem[s] to set him entirely outside the sphere in which we exist and where we hope to encounter him’,Footnote 22 implying that faith in God is ‘simply a matter of entertaining beliefs of a cosmological kind, concerning the creation of the world and the hope of eternal life’. However:
the real phenomena of faith are nothing like that. They include prayer and the life of prayer; the love of God and the sense of his presence in the life of the faithful; obedience and submission in the face of temptation and the things of this world; the experience of certain times, places, objects, and words as ‘sacred’.Footnote 23
Scruton concludes that if we accept all of this then we are faced with two serious problems: one metaphysical, the other conceptual. The metaphysical problem concerns how it is possible for the transcendental to manifest itself in the empirical; the conceptual problem concerns how we are to comprehend the states of mind at issue when we relate to God in the relevant, faith-involving, ways.Footnote 24 These states of mind, we are told, are ‘subject-directed’, and one who searches for God is searching for a subject-to-subject encounter – one which ‘occurs in this life, but which also in some way reaches beyond [it]’.Footnote 25 In so far as such an encounter occurs in the here and now it involves our interpersonal relations with other human beings, and Scruton talks in this context of a ‘network of relations that are neither contracted nor negotiated, but which are received as a destiny and a gift’.Footnote 26 The sacred is fundamental to these relations, for ‘if there is to be a real presence of the divine in this world, it must be in the form of some sacred event, moment, place, or encounter’, sacred things belonging ‘both in our world, and also out of it’.Footnote 27 It is in this sense that ‘the experience of sacred things is…a kind of interpersonal encounter…It is as though you address, and are addressed by another I, but one that has no embodiment in the natural world. Your experience ‘reaches beyond’ the empirical realm, to a place on its horizon’. Footnote 28 Scruton refers here to ‘the experience of holiness, in which individuals encounter another order of things, an intrusion into the natural world from a sphere “beyond” it’.Footnote 29 He distinguishes this manner of ‘point[ing] towards the supernatural’ from that which is at issue when we ‘speculate about the nature and origin of the world, in search of the Being upon which the natural order depends’,Footnote 30 describing these ‘two ways to the transcendental’ as, respectively, psychological and cosmological.
Kant and Hume are brought into the picture at this point, and Scruton claims that if we accept their arguments then these two ways to the transcendent are effectively blocked. Kant establishes that we cannot reason ‘beyond the limits of our own point of view, which is circumscribed by the law of causality, and by the forms of space and time’, and Hume makes clear that we cannot deduce from our religious experiences that they are not illusions.Footnote 31 Scruton shares this scepticism ‘up to a point’.Footnote 32 However, such a picture does not satisfy him, and he takes seriously the idea – so important to Kant and Hegel – that reason is compelled to push beyond the relevant spatio-temporal and causal limits – ‘point[ing] beyond the edge of our world, towards a place at which [it] can never arrive’.Footnote 33 He denies that it follows from this that any reasonable religion must be intransitive,Footnote 34 claiming that the religious spirit with which he is concerned is that of a ‘free and accountable person’ who lives ‘at the edge of a one-sided boundary, knowing that, in a deep sense, he belongs on the other side’. Scruton talks in this context of the way in which our interpersonal emotions point ‘beyond the edge of the empirical world, to the unknowable perspective of the other’ – ‘the “I” that my outgoing emotions can never reach’.Footnote 35 He suggests also that the attempt to live without the relevant ‘transcendental’ categories is to ‘overlook what is actually there before us’.Footnote 36 They are ‘woven into the way the world appears’, and it is in this respect we can say that the relevant transcendental categories play an indispensable role ‘in showing us what is immanent in our world’.Footnote 37 Scruton makes clear that this has nothing to do with ‘leading us towards transcendental objects’,Footnote 38 and he denies that we can make claims about ‘any transcendental objects to which they might be taken to refer’.Footnote 39 Such claims are ruled out on Kantian grounds – ‘our concepts cannot reach beyond the realm of phenomena so as to refer successfully to “things in themselves”’ – and it follows that we must:
sever the concept of the supernatural from any ontological claims, and treat the sacred, the supernatural and the transcendental without supposing that we are thereby referring to specific persons or things, but rather to the ways in which our experience seems to ‘reach beyond’ what is given to us.Footnote 40
The world thus conceived becomes ‘a revelation of an ineffable beyond’, albeit a beyond which is sealed from us by a ‘window that can never be opened’.Footnote 41
3. Problems and solutions
Scruton rejects ontological dualism, and his explanation of its attraction as it applies to an understanding of human being is that ‘the vivacity and centrality of the I-You encounter tempts us to believe that it is an encounter between objects, and that these objects exist in some other dimension than that containing physical things’. We might question the implication that human beings are not objects, for it is going to be crucial to the preferred cognitive dualist position that we are objects who can be conceived also as subjects. Indeed, the more obvious reason for being tempted in a Cartesian dualist direction is when the natural world is viewed in the offending scientistic terms – terms which leave no room for subjectivity in the relevant sense, and which make it look as if it can be accommodated only with reference to ‘some other dimension than that containing physical things’.
Cognitive dualism promises to avoid this conjunctive picture, and with it the assumption that the limits of nature are to be circumscribed by science. It does so by granting us the right to say that our status as subjects is to be grasped not by adding something immaterial/supernatural to the human being, but rather, by switching to a radically different perspective from that which is operative when we seek to comprehend things scientifically. I have noted already that there are no good arguments for resisting this anti-scientistic approach. The justification for taking it seriously is that there are all sorts of things in the natural world which exceed the purview of science, and precisely because one has moved beyond the perspective from which one studies nature scientifically there is nothing in this alternative account which could contradict its findings.
The relevant non-scientific level of understanding involves thinking of ourselves as religious beings, and we have been told that this religious dimension is expressed in our I-you encounters, and that the categories which are operative at this level are ‘transcendental’.
Scruton is concerned here with the notion of the transcendent (to put it in more familiar religious terms),Footnote 42 and I have noted already that this move will be contentious to the typical anti-scientistic naturalist if taken to involve a commitment to theism. Such a figure agrees that there are things within nature that exceed the purview of science, and she can agree also that their understanding requires the adoption of a radically different, non-scientific, perspective. What she denies is that the world thus understood has anything to do with God.
Everything hangs on the question of what kind of addition God brings to the picture, and cognitive dualism promises to offer an alternative to an ontological dualist position according to which there is ‘not one thing, but two’. We can begin to see what this could mean by examining a similar antipathy to ontological dualism as it has been expressed by the aforementioned naturalists in the context of defending a form of value realism. Such figures stand opposed to scientism, but they argue that one of the deep motive forces behind naturalism as it applies to the case of value is that there is no longer any need to postulate a second, supernatural, realm. Thus James Griffin:
Values do not need any world except the ordinary world around us – mainly the world of humans and animals and happenings in their lives. An other-worldly realm of values just produces unnecessary problems about what it could possibly be and how we could learn about it. All that seems to me right. But to defend it, one does not have to adopt a reductive form of naturalism.Footnote 43
Griffin's objections are familiar from analogous worries as they apply to a substance dualist conception of human being, and it grants us the right to defend a one-world position – this world is value-involving, and there is no need to postulate a second, supernatural, realm. But what are the positions to be rejected and accepted in a theistic context? Given that ontological dualism involves a commitment to two things rather than one, one might suppose that the salient distinction is between God and the world, and that the cognitive dualist rejects its first term. Some of what Scruton says encourages such an interpretation, for he claims to be severing the supernatural from any ontological claims (obvious reading: there is no such thing as the supernatural), he denies that the ‘transcendental’ categories with which he is concerned ‘apply to items that are not of this world’, and he insists that our concepts are limited to the realm of appearance. Yet he purports to be defending a form of theism and using cognitive dualism to this end.
We could simply say that Scruton has failed on this score, and that the religion with which he is concerned is irredeemably ‘intransitive’.Footnote 44 However, there is an alternative way of comprehending the position towards which Scruton is gesturing – one which promises to make good its theistic credentials whilst exposing the deficiencies of a certain kind of ontological dualism. The implication here is that the cognitive dualist can grant a distinction between God and world, whereas a certain kind of ontological dualist cannot.
According to the offending conception of ontological dualism, God is to be viewed on the model of an other-worldly entity which exists in addition to the world. That is to say that God and the world are to be viewed in conjunctive terms – as if they ‘add up to two’ as Herbert McCabe has described the position.Footnote 45 This conjunctive picture is problematic for several reasons. First, it suggests that God is a supernatural entity to be located in some other world; second, and consequently, it compromises God's infinity, omnipresence, and status as creator of all things;Footnote 46 and third it divorces God from the world. It is easy to why an atheist might reject this seemingly superfluous and spooky addition on the ground that we can explain what needs to be explained in its absence. As Griffin put it in the context of rejecting an analogously conjunctive conception of the nature/value relation – an otherworldly realm just produces unnecessary problems about what it could be and how we could gain knowledge of it. We can note also that the offending conception of God will seem particularly compelling to one who commits to the truth of scientism. After all, if science is the measure of reality and science excludes God, then theism could only ever be a matter of adding a further suspect entity.
If this is what it means to reject an ontologically dualist conception of the God/world relation, then the move is to be applauded. The offending position leads to a distortion of this relation, and it also compromises the idea that God and world are to be distinguished. It does so by implying that God is on a level with any other thing. As Karl Rahner sums up the position, God ‘functions as an individual existent alongside other existents’ to be ‘a member of the larger household of reality.’Footnote 47 He continues:
[a]nyone in search of such a God is searching for a false God. Both atheism and a more naive form of theism labour under the same false notion of God, only the former denies it while the latter believes it can make sense of it.Footnote 48
The implication in all of this is that a conjunctive conception of the God/world relation is not mandatory, and that there is an alternative way of comprehending theism's commitment to God. It is here that we can appreciate the significance of cognitive dualism, for such a position grants us the right to say that bringing God into the picture requires not that we add some item to the world, but rather, that we switch to a radically different perspective from that which is operative when we seek to comprehend things scientifically. We might compare this to what happens when we switch to a different perspective to have the rabbit come into view when we are seeing a duck.Footnote 49 In such a scenario there are no prospects for seeing a duck and a rabbit – as if what we are trying to get into view is something in addition to the duck; nor is there a perspective which would allow us to make this conjunction. Rather, the rabbit is revealed in the very materials in which a duck can also be revealed provided that we switch perspectives. In an analogous way, we can say that seeing the world in God-involving terms involves switching to another perspective from the one within which we understand nature through the causal explanations characteristic of science. Doesn't this compromise the sense in which God is to be distinguished from the world – a distinction which is required if we are to make sense of God's status as infinite source, and avoid lapsing into atheism? Not at all. The idea is not that God is reducible to the world, and it is compatible with a cognitive dualist position that there is (infinitely) more to God's reality than is revealed in the here and now. The point is to be able to make sense of this revelation, and to do so in a manner which does justice to God's reality. The conjunctive framework fails on both of these scores.
Scruton takes God to be revealed in our I-you relations, and he talks of the way in which our interpersonal emotions point ‘beyond the edge of the empirical world, to the unknowable perspective of the other’, to ‘the “I” that my outgoing emotions can never reach’. He refers in this context to a network of relations which are received as a destiny and a gift, and which involve being addressed by an ‘I’ that has no embodiment in the natural world. We are said to be both in the world and outside of it when this happens, and we ignore this level of experience at the cost of ‘overlooking what is actually there in front of us’. Scruton distinguishes this (psychological) way of relating to God from the (cosmological) approach at issue when we search for the nature of the being upon which everything else depends.
How is this psychological approach to be understood? The first difficulty is that it is unclear whether the ‘I’ in question refers to the human other, to God, or to both of these things. This is not really a criticism of Scruton, for the criteria of identity are hardly clear in this context, and one of the issues concerns how on earth we are to conceive of self, God, and the relation between them once we have moved beyond ontological dualism. What is puzzling and problematic is that although Scruton claims to be rejecting this framework, he consistently makes claims which tell in its favour. I have noted this tension as it applies to his conception of God, and it can be discerned also in his treatment of the human self: witness his talk of being addressed by an ‘I’ which has no embodiment in the natural world, and his claim that our interpersonal emotions point to an ‘I’ they can never reach. Scruton could perhaps be talking about God in these contexts. However, it is crucial to his position that we approach God via the human other, and the idea that the self of the human other eludes the natural world is fundamental to the position he defended in 1986.Footnote 50 He agreed back then that it is an illusion to think of ourselves in these Cartesian terms, but argued that we forsake this ‘illusion’ at the cost of retreating to the view that we are mere animals. The (ontologically dualist) assumption here is that the difference between ourselves and other animals can be accommodated only by introducing Cartesian souls – as if we exist ‘in some other dimension than that containing physical things’.
Whatever we are to make of Scruton's conception of self and God, he is clearly wishing to make a link between these terms, both in the sense that we ourselves are capable of relating to God, and in the sense that relating to other selves is a condition for enacting a relationship with God. It is in this context that he talks of being addressed by an ‘I’ that has no embodiment in the natural world. Assuming, as we surely must, that the ‘I’ in question involves God in some sense, then the idea that it is not embodied in the world contravenes the (cognitive dualist) idea that God is revealed. Yet Scruton himself insists that the relevant I-you encounters show us what is ‘immanent in our world’, and that we ignore this level of experience at the cost of ‘overlooking what is actually there in front of us’. He insists also, however, that the ‘ineffable beyond’ is sealed from us by a ‘window that can never be opened’. The implication again is that the immanent and the transcendent are to be dualistically opposed.
4. Moving ahead
Scruton harbours a residual commitment to the ontological dualism he claims to be rejecting. One motive for retaining such a commitment is that the position is required if we are to defend a distinction between God and world, and I have agreed that this distinction is central to any properly theistic framework. What does not follow, however, is that it is to be comprehended in conjunctive terms – terms which suggest that God and the world are two distinct things, and that they are separated by an insurmountable gap. This is ontological dualism as Scruton understands it, and he takes it seriously because of his commitment to the Kantian claim that ‘our concepts cannot reach beyond the realm of phenomena so as to refer successfully to ‘things in themselves’. The theistic implications are made clear – the beyond is sealed from us by a ‘window that can never be opened’ – yet nearly everything else that he says either flatly contravenes this framework or can be interpreted so as to compromise its force.
Its force is compromised if taken to apply only to those concepts which are operative in a scientific context, for the claim then is that scientific explanation eludes God, and it is left open that there are other ways of comprehending God's reality. This is cognitive dualism of course, and according to Scruton's version of the position God is revealed in appropriate interpersonal relations. He insists, however, that there is a sceptical difficulty here, and that the most we can say is that certain experiences seem to ‘reach beyond’ what is given to us in the relevant way. What he goes on to say is that ‘there is no establishing that we are thereby referring to specific persons or things’. The objectifying language suggesting yet again that God is a kind of thing, and if we add to this the accompanying Kantian framework, then we are returned yet again to the conjunctive position according to which this thing is to be dualistically opposed to the appearances. The implication here is that cognitive dualism has been traded for ontological dualism, and that there can be no ‘beyond’ in our midst. Yet Scruton himself is an ambivalent sceptic, claiming to share the relevant worries only up to a point.
It would be absurd to deny that there is a real sceptical difficulty here, and it arises precisely because if God does appear in the world, then it is in a manner quite different from anything else. Nor is there any clear and agreed upon sense of what the conditions are for establishing divine presence or absence, although it is a common enough assumption that leaving God out of the picture is a matter of dispensing with a problematic and superfluous addition which can be removed from our ontology at no cost to what really matters. I have suggested already that the offending conjunctive framework encourages such a response.
Our question then is whether a cognitive dualist framework can be articulated in a manner which gives due weight to the relevant sceptical difficulties, albeit without this involving a retreat to a conjunctive position. A clue to a solution to the second difficulty is to be found in Scruton's reference to the network of relations in which we are embroiled when we relate to one another in the theistically relevant interpersonal ways. We are to suppose that a central relation here – perhaps the relation – is love, and assuming, as Scruton surely does, that the God with which he is concerned is the God of love, then one (eminently orthodox) way of avoiding a conjunctive picture is to say that God's being in this context is to be comprehended in irreducibly relational terms, and that we partake in this reality when we stand in loving relations to others.Footnote 51 Understood from this perspective the distinction between God and world is no longer to be modelled on two externally related items between which there is an insurmountable gap. The picture is rather of a circle within a circle – the large circle corresponding to God's infinite love, and the small one capturing the sense in which we ourselves are capable of partaking in this love by standing in loving relations to other human beings. On this position, as Paul Fiddes has developed it, ‘the analogy is between relationships in human experience on the one hand and divine movements of relationship on the other, not between human and divine persons’.Footnote 52 Fiddes adds that it is an implication of this position that ‘the presence of God will always be hidden in the sense that it cannot be observed or known as an object of perception, but can only be participated in…God is not the object of desire but the one in whom we desire the good’.Footnote 53 Simone Weil makes a similar point when she advises that:
The real aim is not to see God in all things; it is that God through us should see the things that we see. God has got to be on the side of the subject and not of the object during all those intervals of time when, forsaking the contemplation of the light, we imitate the descending movement of God so as to turn ourselves toward the light.Footnote 54
I am gesturing towards a position which requires extensive thought and elucidation, but what little I have said suggests that it is not entirely alien to Scruton's approach, and that its structure offers a way of avoiding a conjunctive conception of the God/world relation. Indeed, we now have a justification for agreeing with Scruton that talk of the supernatural and the transcendent has nothing to do with ‘specific persons or things’, but without this implying that such talk falls short in this regard. It does not because specific persons or things are irrelevant in this context. What matters, rather, is the quality of the relationship – a relationship which, according to this way of thinking, is capable of revealing God. Scruton's talk of ‘the ways in which our experience seems to “reach beyond” what is given to us’ can likewise be better accommodated on this alternative relational model. For the picture now is not of experience striving to make contact with an ever elusive object (the conjunctive model). Rather, it is a matter of acknowledging that God's life has infinite and inexhaustible scope. It is in this sense that there is no getting to the end of it.Footnote 55
Where does this leave the problem of scepticism? The problem is inevitable in one respect given that God is not a clearly identifiable ingredient in the relevant relationships. It is therefore open to the sceptic to insist that they have nothing to do with God. The obvious counter-response is that such an ingredient would itself have nothing to do with God, and that nothing has been said to show that the position under current consideration is not worth taking seriously. Of particular relevance here is the case of the aforementioned naturalist who is a moral realist – someone who concedes in almost total measure to Scruton's conception of the Lebenswelt, but who stops short of introducing God. Once we reject a conjunctive conception of this move, then the temptation is to wonder whether it hasn't already been made.
None of this is intended to imply that we have a demonstration of God's existence, and it is in the nature of the case that there can be no such thing. What does not follow is that God is wholly inaccessible, and it is a virtue of Scruton's position that he makes room for a kind of openness to God in our interpersonal relations. I have argued that this exceedingly fertile approach is confounded by an underlying commitment to a conjunctive conception of the God/world relation, that this commitment undermines cognitive dualism, and that there are no good reasons for insisting upon it. Kantian considerations show at most that science is methodologically limited to intra-worldly explanations, but there are no good arguments to show that we are irrevocably sealed off from God, and Scruton himself does a good job of undermining such a framework.
