Words Worth Noting - August 21, 2022

“She [Iris Murdoch] cannot believe in a personal God, she says, because God cannot be ‘a thing among other things.’ That is disappointing. One learns in Christian Theology 101 that God is not a thing among things, an existent among existents, but the Absolute Being of all that is, was, or ever can be. But apparently Iris Murdoch did not learn that in her Anglo-Irish Protestant childhood. It is truly disconcerting how often this happens. One encounters people who say they do not believe in God only to discover, upon examination, that the God they do not believe in I do not believe in either. But it is especially disconcerting in someone of the intellectual stature of Iris Murdoch.”

Richard John Neuhaus in First Things December 2003