I am always saddened to hear when someone I know decides to turn away from their Christian faith. There is greater sadness still when the person involved provides a public explanation and defence of their position to justify their stance.

When the person is also a colleague working at Australian Catholic University, it adds a certain piquancy to the situation. I have known Nick Trakakis and worked with him in various capacities for a few years now, and hope to continue to do so.

Of course, people turn away from their faith for all sorts of reasons. I know people who were raped by Catholic priests and who find the thought of entering a church nauseating. I can appreciate this. I know others who were similarly abused but who continue to hang in the church, not accepting that the abuse they suffered is truly representative of God or the church.

There are two fundamental elements to Nick's very public statement. There is, in the first instance, the narrative of his own experiences within the Greek Orthodox Church - some good, some bad, many unfortunate. Such personal, existential factors affect people in different ways, each of us with different sensitivities to negotiate. I am not in a position to know how the very personal narrative Nick provides affected him or measure the degree of its importance in his decision. That is a matter for Nick to sort out.

The other major element consists of supposed intellectual difficulties Nick claims to be present, not only in the Christian faith, but in any dogmatic claim to truth which might preclude free intellectual exploration. Here Nick is not speaking of his existential difficulties, but is adopting the persona of a professional philosopher. And it is at this point that I feel compelled to respond, lest others think his position is a fair and defensible account of intellectual problems in Christianity.

I shall consider these difficulties under three aspects: Trinitarian and Christological beliefs; the relationship between God and creation; and the possibility of revelation and what that might entail for our human response.

Trinitarian and Christological beliefs

Nick makes a claim in relation to classical doctrinal formulations (one God, three persons; one person, two natures), that these are a violation of the logical law of contradiction. This is a difficult position to maintain, and that Nick should take this as baldly as he did is quite surprising.

The law of contradiction is that one cannot affirm both p and (not p) of the same reality; however, there is a rider that one is comparing the one reality under the same aspects. So if we were required to believe that in God there is one nature and three natures, there would be a contradiction. But this is not the formulation. We believe in one God and three persons in God.

To assert such a belief is to assert a distinction between nature and person. As a belief proposed for our assent, it is an invitation to explore the nature of this distinction, to ask what it might mean. Significantly, in the history of philosophical ideas, it pushed forward the notion of person and led to various accounts as to what constituted personhood.

However, prior to these sophisticated philosophical formulations, there is a basic heuristic device that notes the distinction between the questions "what is it?" (nature) and "who is it?" (person). How do we answer each of these questions? Reflection on this process might lead one to recognize that there is some sort of distinction between nature and person.

There are then further questions as to whether three persons can share a single, identical nature (the Trinity), or whether a person can express their personhood through two distinct natures (the Incarnation). These are important and interesting questions and cannot simply be dismissed as self-contradictory.

Far from shutting down philosophical questions, these issues have spurred some quite profound philosophical reflections on the nature of personhood. It is rather surprising that Nick either seems unaware of them or has chosen not to refer to them.

The only position which is ruled out philosophically is one in which the distinction between person and nature cannot be made. This may appear to be an unreasonable constraint, but congruent with the history of Catholic theology, such a stance must be justifiable on purely philosophical grounds without recourse to the doctrinal position. Any notion of person used within Trinitarian and Christological contexts must stand or fall philosophically. Far from being a "degenerating research program," it has in fact proved most fruitful.

This is not to say there are not genuine intellectual difficulties, as Nick notes about "absolute identity." But difficulties may or may not be surmountable and if one does not try one will never know. As Augustine often told his audience, "unless you believe, you will not understand." Far from being a call to embrace fideism, it is a relatively sane observation that unless one believes what faith asserts as true, one would not be bothered trying to address the difficulties involved. Easier to declare them unsolvable and move on.

Christian belief in creation

I found Nick's handling of the question of creation quite confused. On the one hand, he posits a "dualism" in Christian belief in creation based on creatio ex nihilo and the absolute gulf between Creator and creature; he then contrasts this with a neo-platonic - and, he would claim, a more "biblical" - position in which creation is the result of a series of emanations from God. All this is highly contestable.

Clearly the first chapter of Genesis has a very "high" conception of divinity with creation the result of the divine command: "Let there be ..." This can also be found in the later Wisdom writings of the Old Testament. Indeed, the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo and its precursors can be found in Old Testament Wisdom literature and 2 Maccabees, briefly in Paul (Romans 4:17), and is widely present in the early Church Fathers.

Of course, the early Church Fathers were often highly influenced by neo-platonic thought and incorporated neo-platonic ideas into their theological reflections. However, they did not accept the neo-platonic position on emanation because it led to a different type of "dualism" from the one to which Nick refers - one which would undermine the goodness of creation itself. If creation is the result of a divine emanation, and not the result of the free, loving decision of God, then they could not find sufficient reason to assert that creation is good. This would lead to an inevitable dualism of "spirit = good; matter = bad." This type of dualism is frequently found where neo-platonism flourishes. And while it has had a continuing and unfortunate appearance within Christianity, it is generally understood to be a distortion of the Christian faith.

In fact, what the history of the Christian theology illustrates is a striking dance of faith and reason. The early Church Fathers were not afraid to evoke philosophical reasoning to purify their biblical faith. The Bible may tell us that Jesus sits at the right hand of the Father; must we then suppose that God has left and right hands? They would regularly evoke philosophical ideas to expel such anthropomorphic ideas about God found in the Scriptures. On the other hand, the philosophical ideas were constrained by the need to be congruent with what they held in faith - that God was the creator of all things, and that creation is good.

Again, this led to significant philosophical developments about the notion of God and God's relationship to the created order. Many of the insights developed by Thomas Aquinas in this regard are still relevant to contemporary debates around questions of science and religion. Importantly, this debate needs to be carried out at a purely philosophical level. Aquinas's objections to Platonism and a subsequent emanationist account of creation is a philosophical critique.

The possibility of divine revelation

Underlying all this is, I think, the issue of divine revelation, its possibility and nature. Can God (given God exists) communicate with humanity, and if so, how is this communication received and what impact would one expect it to have? More particularly, can God enter into human history, a real act of divine self-communication, as Christians proclaim in the Incarnation?

If so, one will inevitably be confronted with the historical particularity of revelation. That it is here, at this place, in this time, that God has spoken definitively and authoritatively. This particularity of revelation ties itself to particular historical communities charged with the responsibility to carry divine meaning and value forward into human history. As Nick puts it, this inevitably gives rise to "institutionalised forms of religion that identify themselves in part in terms of dogmas or doctrines."

The Enlightenment marked a serious modern reaction against this claim of historical particularism, the "scandal of the incarnation." The only "rational" religion must be universal and so precludes the possibility of an historical revelation. The resulting deism may acknowledge God as creator, but apart from that God is removed from any further interaction with human history. It is only a small step to deem such a God as irrelevant to human existence and to embrace the liberating "fresh air" of atheism.

We can see some of this Enlightenment attitude when Nick asks for "especially strong reason or evidence is required in order to accept such doctrines" as Trinity and Incarnation. What might constitute evidence or strong reasons in cases where God has in fact revealed something to us? How would one "independently" verify that there are three persons in God, or that Jesus is the incarnation of the second person of the Trinity? Catholic tradition has always held that these beliefs are beyond human reasoning without the assistance of revelation. They cannot be proved philosophically, historically or scientifically. One can trace their emergence, their antecedents and the fact of their presence in the life of the Church. The best one can manage is that such beliefs are not offensive to reason, not self-contradictory, and then perhaps find some analogies for them in the created order which might shed some dim light upon them.

Such an appeal to religious tradition and authority is inimical to the Enlightenment mentality which rejects the possibility of revelation and any authoritative truth this revelation may proclaim. It asks us to believe not on the basis of what we ourselves can know, but on the basis of the testimony of the tradition itself.

Of course, some find this offensive to reason, an insult to human dignity - as Nick puts it, "religious commitment [is] incompatible with philosophy." Indeed, it may well be incompatible with philosophy conceived as a solitary search for truth. But as Alasdair McIntyre has argued, even philosophers dwell within traditions of reasoning; no one starts from scratch. Even in those paradigms of reason, mathematics and science, believing in the results of others is fundamental to the progress of the discipline.

Most scientists do not know for themselves that the Higgs boson exists, but they believe in the testimony of those working with the Large Hadron Collider, and move on to the next issue. Some may feel the need to duplicate the results for themselves, but most would accept it as scientific fact. Most mathematicians do not understand the work of Andrew Wiles in proving Fermat's Last Theorem, but they trust the process of review by those who do understand, and move on. This structure of belief allows for genuine progress to be made in these disciplines without always going back to basics.

Conceiving of philosophy in individualistic terms seems to condemn it to endlessly recapitulating in oneself the various philosophical dead ends of the past. As Etienne Gilson observed, the history of philosophy is littered with failed philosophical experiments. We do not need to repeat their mistakes.

***

In no way do I wish to condemn or criticise Nick for the decision he has made. Many people I know have left the faith for all sorts of reason, some more articulately than others. And often those articulations conceal as much as they reveal about the actual dynamics of the situation. But given the public nature of Nick's decision and the reasons he has stated, it does call for a public response. I wish him well on his journey, wherever it may take him.

Neil Ormerod is Professor of Theology at Australian Catholic University and a member of the Institute of Religion and Critical Inquiry. His latest book (with Christiaan Jacobs-Vandegeer) is Foundational Theology: A New Approach to Catholic Fundamental Theology.