He has published on realism and anti-realism, religious epistemology, the relationship between theology, metaphysics, and political philosophy, and on the thought of Immanuel Kant. His books include his two major studies of Kant's relationship to theology. His recent research has moved into a more contemporary and constructive key, engaging with the category of natural theology, as it meets the limits of reason and knowledge.
Insole applied the “Page 99 Test” to his latest book, Negative Natural Theology: God and the Limits of Reason, and reported the following:
Looking again at this page, I picture myself sat at the kitchen table with a convinced and ideological humanist, of the ‘believing in God is stupid’ variety. I’m showing the humanist some uncomfortable evidence, perhaps incriminating photos, or documents. It’s not fun for the humanist. But I’m not being mean, and I’m not revelling in it. I’m holding the humanist’s hand, and I’m sharing the pain: because, as I say at the bottom of the page ‘I take it that every variety of worthwhile commitment and worldview has its own weaknesses, pathologies, tensions and paradoxes’, and as I say on the next page, ‘a worldview without problems is probably too simplistic and reductive, and not worth defending or inhabiting’.Learn more about Negative Natural Theology at the Oxford University Press website.
Because this is what the book is all about: tensions and fragmentations and limitations in our lives and thinking. I’m interested in these, and how and why some thinkers lean into the concept of God at this point, as an expression of their yearning for a type of wholeness and healing, whilst others resolutely set themselves again the idea of God (or, at least, against the word). I do a lot of hand holding in the book and sympathetic nodding, trying to understand the deep motivations for these different type of reaction.
The chapter on humanism comes after a discussion of absurdism (Albert Camus) and Karl Rahner’s notion of mystery, and before a chapter on William James and modern paganism. What is the ‘incriminating evidence’ I’m showing the humanist? Well, it’s this. There are two core commitments within humanist discourse: first of all, that we only believe things where there is strong empirical evidence, amounting to something like ‘objective knowledge’. Secondly, humanists really believe that studying objective truth ('science') will make us happier and more whole as humans. On page 99 I am gently suggesting that these two commitments don’t obviously sit comfortably with each other. Believing in the palliative goodness of objective truth looks a bit like a ‘religious’ leap of faith; but, we are not permitted to take such leaps, if we are restricted to ‘objectivity’. What if, I ask, ‘in the end truth, perhaps, is sad?’.
And I feel, here, a bit sad for the humanist. Being religious, I don’t mind people making such leaps, and I hope that my humanist companion might embrace a bit of inconsistency and subjectivity, and carry on leaping. If it helps.
--Marshal Zeringue
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