Ronald Hepburn (1927-2008)

I read Professor Ronald W. Hepburn's first book, Christianity and Paradox, in 1977. It was the first book of analytical philosophy of religion that I had ever read and one of the few such works to make a lasting impression upon me. Perhaps what impressed me most about the book was Hepburn's reluctant rejection of the claims of theism. The popular skeptics of the last decade or so--people who've managed to make a living out of militant unbelief (Dawkins, Hitchens, et. al.)--don't impress me (or don't impress me favorably). I find nothing attractive about having to choose between dogmas. Hepburn's honest wrestling with the cogency of theistic claims won my admiration and, eventually, persuaded me of the deeply problematic nature of "God-talk." In the Preface that he wrote for the American edition of his book, Hepburn observed that "We need calm and undramatic reflection; or else we shall merely substitute new illusions and new obscurities for old ones. We need religious imagination and critical toughness in equal measure: a sense of the numinous, certainly--but as strong a sense of the logically absurd" (Hepburn, Christianity and Paradox, New York: Pegasus (1966), viii).

In chapter One, Hepburn described his philosophical project and what motivated it. His project was to subject "a number of influential theological views" to critical scrutiny and to show that they are "exposed to a variety of logical objections which render them untenable--or at least less sure than their upholders believe" (Hepburn, 1). He then averred that he would not have written the book had he not undertaken a "personal pilgrimage in search of a satisfactory justification of religious belief." In his view, he had managed, in the end, "to bring out how a theology may be logically faulty but yet express insights of enduring value concerning human experience, and thus still be worth study by sceptics as well as believers, for all their differences over the interpretation of those experiences" (ibid).

I call this the "tough-minded, tender-hearted" study of religion. The scholarship of Ronald Hepburn was, and remains, an exemplary model of this approach.