Jim> It isn't just consevative Christians who criticize liberal
Jim> theologians for attempting to deny that they are really
Jim> agnostics or atheists. Some leading atheist philosophers
Jim> have made the same sorts of criticisms of liberal
Jim> theologians. Thus Sidney Hook argued that Paul Tillich was
Jim> really an atheist who just didn't want to admit it. Corliss
Jim> Lamont likewise contended that the bulk of liberal
Jim> theologians were really agnostics or atheists but were
Jim> unwilling to say so. On the other hand liberal theologians
Jim> like Don Cupitt contend that it is possible to be a believing
Jim> Christian while denying the tenets of traditional theism.
Jim> But Cupitt's theology seems to me to be little different from
Jim> the views espoused by many philosophers who would describe
Jim> themselves as atheistic naturalists.
Yes, though this determination has to be made case by case, I think. Richard Swinburne, at Oxford, makes a similar argument but based on some unusual historical claims, and his own philosophy of God. In other words, this kind of argument can take philosophical or psychological forms.
Cupitt's point (not his work as a whole) is, in my view, fairly unassailable: when one denies the tenents of traditional theism, one is denying a *conceptuality* which to some degree gives or fails to give expression to some basic reality. Being unable to distinguish between a conceptual apparatus and the reality which it describes or expresses is a hallmark, in my view, of a fundamentalist mindset.
The rough analogue is of right-wing, conservative cosmologists or astronomers running around claiming that the 'liberal' cosmologists Einstein or Hawking *really* deny the existence of the Universe but are unwilling to admit it because they have abandoned the Ptolemaic conceptuality.
In case anyone cares about these issues, the single best essay covering this ground is Schubert Ogden's "The Reality of God". I'm partial though since he was my teacher.
I suspect that with this post, we may have gone too far afield from the regular fare of lbo-talk. Sending followups to private mail, I suspect, is warranted. I'd be glad to hear otherwise.
Best, Kendall Clark