The Unknown God: Agnostic Essays - Hardcover

"By profession I am a philosopher; and in the present century philosophers in this country have been keen to emphasize not only the difficulty of stating God's will on particular issues but the difficulty for human beings of saying anything intelligible at all about the nature of God. It is probably true to say that the majority of philosophers in this country in the last fifty years have been atheists of one kind or another." In this new book Kenny has collected lectures and papers he has produced over the past 20 years. Church of England Newspaper, Paul Richardson, 11th February 2005

Kenny writes: "By profession I am a philosopher: and in the present century philosophers in this country have been keen to emphasize not only the difficulty of stating God's will on particular issues but the difficulty for human beings of saying anything intelligible at all about the nature of God. It is probably true to say that the majority of philosophers in this country in the last fifty years have been atheists of one kind or another". In his introduction, Kenny explains the autobiographical background to this volume. For some years, Kenny was a Roman Catholic priest. He lost his faith and resigned from the priesthood. This was something of a cause celebre and Kenny gave a full account of this development in "The Path From Rome". But, as this work demonstrates, he has never been able to let go of God and he continues to struggle with the intellectual problems of theism and the possibility of believing in God, especially in an intellectual climate dominated by Logical Positivism. In this title Kenny revisits the Five Ways of Aquinas and argues that they are not so much proofs as definitions of God. He is also in constant dialogue with Wittgenstein for, Kenny writes, no man in recent years has surpassed him in devotion of sharp intelligence to the demarcation of the boundary between sense and nonsense.