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The author of this book, who is Lecturer in Moral Philosophy at the University of Aberdeen, reveals himself as an able young man. He confesses to being religiously minded while finally unable to accept the dogmatic convictions of any of the Christian bodies. In demonstrating this last position Mr. Hepburn reviews in a useful way the contributions of a number of contemporary theologians who have reacted to the linguistic philosophy of the Logical Positivists on the one hand and on the other to the statements of Existentialists like Martin Buber. His demonstration of the weaknesses in their position is well weighed and cogent. His own position is that loss of dogmatic conviction need not be destructive of specific religious experience, while more positively he tries to demonstrate two ways in which “a secular religious orientation can avoid dangers into which religions centred upon a supernatural or transcendent God have fallen” (p. 208). First he holds, as well befits a moral philosopher in a Scottish university, that the foundations of the religious way of looking at the world and the moral life are those logically underived moral decisions to follow out a way of life. This way is based upon empirically derived information of all kinds, including science, and thus there can be no science-faith conflict in this kind of religious outlook. His second point is that his secular religious outlook, although hospitable to experiences like the “numinous”, does not interpret them as communications from “a beyond” concerning how men ought to live. This, he claims, avoids the risks arising from prophetical and pontifical claims to sure knowledge of the divine mind leading to “intolerance of and impatience with empirically informed opinion and a shirking of the hard work of investigating the human effects of human policies by resorting prematurely to the alleged will of God” (p. 209).
The author concludes that the chief value of adding fable, myth, and symbol (i.e. for him religi