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Religious Insight and the Cognitive Problem

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 October 2008

John E. Smith
John E. Smith
Affiliation:
Professor of Philosophy, Yale University
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Extract

Despite the title, I do not intend to launch another expedition into the domain of epistemology. I wish instead to call attention to some problems which have arisen for philosophical theologians and philosophers of religion, as a result of two facts about the development of modern philosophy and its bearing on the analysis and interpretation of religious insight. Following these considerations, I shall propose in brief compass a programme for the future which I believe will prove fruitful for the philosophical treatment of religious concerns.

Type
Articles
Information
Religious Studies , Volume 7 , Issue 2 , June 1971 , pp. 97 - 111
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1971

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References

page 97 note 1 For my purposes, it is not necessary to settle the question about the distinction between theology and the philosophy of religion. The following discussion is relevant for anyone who sets out to deal with religious and theological questions in a philosophical way, whatever his enterprise may be called. Hence, I have frequently used the blanket term ‘religious thinker’ to indicate both theologians and some philosophers.

page 97 note 2 See Bellah, R. N., Beyond Belief, New York, 1970.Google Scholar

page 100 note 1 I pass over the problem posed by the distinction between reason and understanding in Kant. In one sense, it is understanding which is limited since it is unable to provide us with knowledge of what reason is forced to think in its progress (or regress) to the unconditioned. On the other hand, Kant continually speaks of setting limits to season. Some confusion can be avoided by remembering that, assuming reason to be a unified faculty, understanding is often characterised by Kant as the form which reason takes in its legitimate, theoretical employment.

page 100 note 2 We cannot consider the point here, but Kant was too hasty in concluding that the impossibility of actually completing an infinite progression or regression attaches uniquely to the intended ‘objects’ of such Ideas as God and the World. The problem also exists in relation to finite sensible objects such as a table; unless we assume that, as finite, the table is ‘all there’ as sensible content apart from the successive synthesis of knowledge through which it is known, we are as much in need of completing our knowledge of that object in order to refer to it as a unity, as we are in the case of the ‘transcendent’ Ideas.

page 101 note 1 See the very able paper of Kai, Nielsen, ‘The Intelligibility of God Talk’ in Religious Studies, Vol. 6, No. 1, March 1970, pp. 1–21, where the aim is to show that the confirmability/disconfirmability criterion for determining when we have a legitimate case of ‘factual discourse’ is not ‘an arbitrary entrance requirement’ (p. 21) because it merely makes explicit ‘the procedures which are actually employed in deciding whether a statement is indeed factual’. Further on we discover that these procedures are the ones repeatedly used by ‘reflective men’. Here the attempt is made to give some warrant for the criterion by claiming that it states the principle implicit in actual practice. Now apart from the fact that the ‘reflective men’ in question must turn out to be those who already accept the criterion, no effort at all is made to deal with the explicitly philosophical problem of whether ‘factual’ has a univocal meaning with respect to every domain of inquiry, subject matter and context. If in order to be ‘factual’ God has to be of the same order as a star or a stone, then God is not ‘factual’, but this conclusion serves only to raise the problem over again. For if God is not ‘factual’ in that sense, the question is, is there some other sense in which we can speak about the existential order-what there is-which is appropriate to the entire range of realities about which men intend to speak, but which is not necessarily exhausted by the ‘factual’ as understood in the claisical empiricist way-colours, sounds, shapes, etc., combined to form sensible individuals.Google Scholar

page 104 note 1 I have argued elsewhere against ‘religious experience’ taken in the sense of a counterpart to ordinary sense experience and having as its object God rather than sensible things. The ‘religious experience’ conception seems to me merely to reproduce the subject-object view of experience according to which a spectator looks at ‘things’ which are ‘given’. The difficulty is that with respect to God there is no such consensus of opinion as it is possible to achieve in the case of familiar objects and ordinary perception. I find more accurate and more fruitful the concept of a religious dimension of experience which is at once a mode of reality and a stance of openness for the grasping and interpreting of whatever is encountered in the light of an ultimate perspective.

page 104 note 2 See, for example, Ross, James F., Philosophical Theology, New York, 1969, pp. 35–51Google Scholar; Nielsen, Kai, ‘The Intelligibility of God Talk’, op. cit.Google Scholar; Clarke, W. NorrisS. J., , ‘Analytic Philosophy and Language about God’, in McLean, G. F., O.M.I., Ed., Christian Philosophy and Religious Renewal, Washington, D.C., 1966, pp. 51–3Google Scholar; Ziff, Paul, ‘About “God”’ in Religious Experience and Truth, Ed. Hook, Sidney, New York, 1961, pp. 195–202.Google Scholar

page 105 note 1 Actually one of the points at issue goes beyond the charge of confusion; the more serious objection is that when the term ‘God’ is used as a proper name in proofs for God's existence the question is begged because the use of such names already involves existential import.

page 105 note 2 The dichotomy stems originally from the writings of the early Russell on Logical Atomism.

page 106 note 1 For a more detailed discussion of the problem see Ross, op. cit., pp. 35 ff.

page 110 note 1 Kant did, to be sure, consider dimensions other than science and ordinary experience. He analysed morality, religion and aesthetics, but a decisive indication of the fact that ‘experience’ was confined by him to ‘empirical cognition’ is given in his refusal to allow the expression ‘moral experience’ because it would confuse two spheres which are utterly distinct.