Lloyd Geering - Emeritus Professor of religious studies

Lloyd Geering 20 October 2006

While I was attending the funeral of Peter Munz I met up with Lloyd Geering and took the opportunity to do some unfinished business. I took his picture and said I would like to post it on Pepptalk. That got me thinking about where we left off with Peter Munz and where Professor Geering fitted into the mosaic that Peter Munz had been creating.

I can't help liking Lloyd Geering, even if there is an underlying perverseness behind my doing so. The theological system was due for a good shake up and Lloyd Geering did it, but there is more. Peter Munz and Karl Popper between them created a whole new methodoloy in the age of uncertainty and Lloyd Geering embraced this theologically but not fully.

The logical positivists took morality out of public language. The logical positivists had said we could deal with facts, logic and mechanics and the rest (meaning, morals and metaphysics) could not be open to reason. Wittgenstein realized that values and meaning could not be derived from logic and mechanics. The strongest truths were tautologies and contradictions but they have zero truth range, to use a technical term. Now Lloyd Geering, the mathematician and logician, knows that so he reaches into his theological tool box for the much needed morals and values. Those of you who wonder how we can have a theologian that doesn't believe in a supernatural God will find an answer here. Lloyd Geering knows that autonomous reason cannot produce absolutes that underpin morals and values. Morals that are not absolute are meaningless to all but the deeply shallow. That is why Lloyd Geering continues with his theological reflections. He is still, if you like, a work in progress.