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The final chapter, ‘Alone’, contends that the SETI (Search for Extra-terrestrial Intelligence) project conflicts with Darwinism – and all SETIscientists are Darwinists. Darwin shows just how specific conditions must bein order for life and intelligence to arise at all. Jaki goes on to give manyexamples showing how science would not be where it is had not certainpeople done what they did when they did it. And on a larger scale civilizationcould have been destroyed in the 12th century by a comet had the moon notbeen in the right place at the right time. Hence, by searching for intelligentlife, the assumption is made that such specificity has occurred elsewhere. Butthe specificity is so great that it would not exist without something that createsand guides it – and such guidance conflicts with Darwinism itself.

Overall, this book is an entertaining, though sometimes infuriating, romp.Jaki never doubts himself, seems to have read almost everything, and writesin a decidedly forceful manner. It is as if he just wanted to stuff all of hisbasic beliefs into one short book and say, ‘so there!’ It is definitely interestingreading.

Houston A. CraigheadWinthrop University

Grace M. Jantzen,Becoming Divine: Towards a Feminist Philosophy ofReligion. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1999, viiiand 296 pages, $24.95.

It was bound to happen: Just as feminists and postmodernists, both separatelyand together, have challenged every other area of traditional philosophy, theirtentacles have now extended to and become intertwined in the construction ofa feminist critique and deconstruction of the philosophy of religion. Begin-ning with a special issue on feminist philosophy of religion inHypatia: AJournal of Feminist Philosophyin 1994, feminist philosophers of religionhave taken up this challenge with fervor, resulting in the recent appearanceof booklength studies by two British female scholars, both of whom wereschooled in traditional Anglo-American philosophy of religion but seek toappropriate methods and insights from contemporary continental or Europeanphilosophy in their respective attempts to construct a feminist philosophy ofreligion. The first to appear wasA Feminist Philosophy of Religion(Oxford:Blackwell Publishers, 1998) by Pamela Sue Anderson, Senior Lecturer inPhilosophy at the University of Sunderland. Immediately on its heels camethe present volume under review by Grace Jantzen, John Rylands Profess-orial Research Fellow in the Department of Religions and Theology at the

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University of Manchester. Of the two, Jantzen’s book is by far more radicaland thoroughgoing in its critique of traditional philosophy of religion andin its (de)constructive attempt to provide not merely a feminist supplementto contemporary approaches to philosophy of religion, as Anderson seeksto do, but a postmodern feminist alternative to theist and atheist, realist andanti-realist philosophical accounts of religion. Both of these, in the author’sestimation, are mired in an oppositional, binary framework of philosophicalthinking that urgently needs to be dismantled and overcome because it reflectsand perpetuates a masculinist, violent, oppressive, necrophilic attitude towardlife, nature, women, and other marginal groups afflicted and excluded by theimperialisms of sexism, racism, classism, and colonialism.

Seeking to introduce a way of ‘thinking otherwise’ or ‘thinking differ-ently’ into the philosophy of religion that will enable women to ‘becomedivine’ or take up subject positions in which they may affirm and fulfillthemselves as women, Jantzen adopts a dual strategy of analytic critiqueand deconstruction. The latter, as defined and practiced by Derrida, involvesan activity of ‘double reading’ in which the interpreter seeks to disclose arupture, gap, or ‘blind spot’ in the text that destabilizes it and consequentlyopens up the possibility of a radically different reading that is more persuasivethan the old way of thinking. The fundamental gap which Jantzen discoversin philosophy of religion (and the whole western intellectual tradition) is anunacknowledged dependence upon a maternal, material origin that is denied,repressed, and negated by a preoccupation with death and mastery over itin a transcendent spiritual realm or disembodied afterlife. Over against thisobsessive necrophilia or necrophobia of western philosophy and culture,Jantzen proposes the development of a feminist imaginary and symbolic order(Lacanian psychoanalytic terms roughly equivalent to the unconscious andconscious realms or repositories of human thought, language, and institu-tions) focusing on natality rather than mortality. For this Jantzen turns tothe thought of Hannah Arendt, who identifies natality or birth as a material,embodied, gendered, unique, communal being as the fundamental humancondition and foundation of freedom and makes it the central category ofher political and philosophical thought. “Where natality is celebrated, totalit-arianism becomes impossible” Jantzen proclaims (p. 148). She continues toecho Arendt in emphasizingamor mundior love of the world as the basis ofethical and political action. Theologically, this leads to a focus in the text onhuman flourishing in the world rather than salvation from the world, trust-worthy community and ethical responsibility for the other rather than truebelief as a criterion of adequacy or accountability in religion and ethics, anda pantheistic rethinking of the divine in terms of human desire or yearning forfulfilment as a process of embodied becoming in the world.

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In spite of its immersion in psychoanalytic and postmodernist jargon andmethodology, which may be off-putting for many readers, Jantzen’s bookis well worth the attention of every philosopher of religion, most of whomare males, for it presents a needed and important, if not totally convincing,critique and rethinking of the discipline and its privileged practitioners. Asfor myself, I am left with basically three questions/reservations concerningthe book and its postmodernist orientation: (1) Does it really escape binary oroppositional thinking? Is not the feminist alternative Jantzen presents simplythealter, the other, the opposite, of the masculine imaginary/symbolic? Is itnot simply a ‘feminine’ imaginary/symbolic, and one that reflects a mascu-line definition of the feminine at that?!! (2) In a work that specializes in‘problematizing’ naive concepts and assumptions of the discipline throughits methodology, does not the concept of woman, identified here with thematerial, body, desire, nature, etc., remain naively unproblematized in heraccount? (3) Does it really escape the masculine symbolic, especially inusing the language of ‘resistance’, ‘disruption’, and ‘subversion’ and othersuch terms of violence to characterize the method of deconstruction that isemployed? Has it erred in adopting a method that is itself an expression ofmasculine imperialism rooted in a Nietzschean will to power? Jantzen admitsthat “there is no pure place for a woman to stand, no unambiguous subject-position already available” and that this position is ‘to some extent masculine’(p. 211), but she might do well to reconsider that position and its methods inlight of the words of Audre Lorde quoted in the text: ‘The master’s tools willnever dismantle the master’s house’.

Sylvia WalshStetson University

David O’Connor, God and Inscrutable Evil: In Defense of Theism andAtheism. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1997, xiii and 273 pages; Hb$63.00; Pb $23.95.

The most discussed version of the problem of evil is that which cites partic-ular cases of suffering – fawns dying in forest fires or the murder of children– as evidence contra theism. While this version receives discussion in DavidO’Connor’s important treatment of the problem of evilGod and InscrutableEvil, it is not the version he endorses. O’Connor’s version of choice appealsto the amount of evil (pain & suffering) found in the world; an amount whichis, he argues, excessive (p. 15). O’Connor’s argument might be paraphrasedas: there are three kinds of evil found in the world, suffering resulting from