Committees and Commissions in India 1978 Part-B: A Concept's Project (Concepts in Communication Informatics and Librarianship-52)

Professor Chubb's work deals with the problem of the rationality of religious faith at the metaphilosophical level. It is, he believes, of the utmost importance to recognize different patterns of rationality and to ask, what is the concept of rationality or profit that is relevant to theological discourse? A significant clue, ignored by philosophers who operate with a model of rationality derived from mathematics, is that religious faith has always been taken by those who practise religion to be in some way self-contained and independent of logical demonstration, without necessarily ruling out the possibility of a rational endorsement of faith. But when faith goes out of itself to seek understanding using arguments that are religiously neutral, creats an intolerable tension within religious experience causing periodic outbursts of different forms of irrationalism which, in attempting to destroy reason, destroy themselves. The tension is resolved when it is realized that what is intuitively felt to be self-contained is also self-validating. Faith in some way already possesses the understanding that it seeks. The task of rational theology is to show how this is indeed the case. The author rejects all traditional arguments for the existence of God by showing that transcendent metaphysics is only the elaboration of the tautology 'God is God'. In accordance with his metaphilosophical disclosures his argument moves within the sphere of faith and at the same time, from the logical poin of view, remains fully autonomous. Athens he maintains, must be found in the soul of Jerusalem.