Lonergan and Hume III

Extract

Lonergan sometimes calls his epistemology the fully critical position on account of its total rejection of the naive realist notion that reality is an-already-out-there-now and that objectivity consists in sensory extroversion to this already-out-there-now. The residue of the naive realist notion is found in the empiricist assumption of a world of bodies ‘out there’ and in the Kantian assumption of things in themselves, or noumena, with the debilitating consequence for both that the real becomes unknowable since knowledge is confined either to sense data or sensible phenomena, i.e. appearances. By its rejection of naive realism the fully critical position denies the intelligibility of any mere matter of fact that is simply given in experience. It affirms that the real is what is understood on the basis of experience and affirmed in rationally grounded judgments. Besides the real there is nothing. But the real is, in its very constitution, intelligible. Therefore, besides the intelligible there is nothing. The universe is intelligible.

In a scientific age many would be willing to grant this much, since science itself seems to assume and support the notion of the universe’s intelligibility, without seeing any reason for proceeding from this to an affirmation of God’s existence. But the fully critical position demands an answer in terms of itself to the question of the universe’s intelligibility. Science is unable to supply such an answer since science is methodologically restricted to investigating the intelligibility of the data of sense by erecting explanatory hypotheses that stand or fall by appeal to the data of sense. Science has its own autonomous realm — the explanation of sensible data. The question of God does not arise from the questioning of sensible data but from questioning our questioning, that is, when we take a global look at the process of coming to know and ask what are the implications of the mind’s demand for explanation at the level of understanding and of the mind’s demand for the unconditioned in its movement towards judgment.