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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 October 2008
‘Dialectic’ or ‘dialectics’ has been defined as the ‘art of investigating the truth of opinions, testing of truth by discussion’. What can usefully be said about the art of investigating or testing the truth of religious opinions by discussion?
page 417 note 1 Concise Oxford Dictionary (Oxford, 1976).Google Scholar
page 417 note 2 This view is well represented by Winch, Peter, in The Idea of a Social Science (London, 1958)Google Scholar, and ‘Understanding a Primitive Society’ (American Philosophical Quarterly, October 1964, pp. 307–24).Google Scholar
page 418 note 1 Lonergan, B., Method in Theology (London, 1972), p. 158.Google Scholar
page 419 note 1 A notable exponent of this approach is Smith, Wilfred Cantwell; see his The Meaning and End of Religion (New York, 1964)Google Scholar, and Towards a World Theology (Philadelphia, 1981).Google Scholar
page 421 note 1 See especially The Meaning and End of Religion, chapters 6 and 7.
page 421 note 2 I say ‘more or less essentially’, because it is true that, if only by way of exception, a person can have a sense of belonging to a religious tradition, without assenting to all of its doctrines, however central. The expression ‘Muslim atheist’ would be rather paradoxical than strictly senseless.
page 421 note 3 See his God and the Universe of Faiths (London and Basingstoke, 1973).Google Scholar
page 422 note 1 Cf. Hick, John, ‘Jesus and the World Religions’ (The Myth of God Incarnate, ed. Hick, , London 1977, pp. 167–85).Google Scholar
page 422 note 2 See Zaehner, R. C., Concordant Discord (Oxford, 1970), 443.Google Scholar
page 422 note 3 See Eliade, M., Patterns of Comparative Religion (London, 1958).Google Scholar
page 422 note 4 Singh, Jaidev, An Introduction to Madhyamaka Philosophy (Delhi, 1976), p. 7.Google Scholar
page 423 note 1 Cf. Magee, Bryan, Popper (London 1973), p. 47.Google Scholar
page 423 note 2 See Lonergan, B., op. cit. chapter 1; Insight, a Study of Human Understanding (London 1957), ‘Introduction’ and passim.Google Scholar
page 424 note 1 Cf. Lonergan, , Method in Theology, pp. 16–17. What I have called the ‘new dialectic’ is in effect an application of Lonergan's principles.Google Scholar
page 424 note 2 Anyone who doubts this assertion should ask himself what are the limits on what would count as a satisfactory explanation of why any human being in any society acted as he did.
page 424 note 3 Smith, Cantwell, Towards a World Theology, p. 65.Google Scholar
page 425 note 1 Ibid. pp. 82 f.
page 426 note 1 Of course there is a sense in which one should, on the account which I have given, do just the opposite of ‘justifying’ one's beliefs, by attending with special care to the evidence against them. Cf. Popper, K., Objective Knowledge (Oxford 1972), pp. 3, 6, 7, 13, 29 f, 82 f., etc.Google Scholar
page 427 note 1 Quite a few who would call themselves Christians would not hold the latter belief, a very few (it became the fashion, along with some other ideological curiosities, in the sixties) not even the former. Yet this would be only by way of exception. See n. 2, p. 5.
page 427 note 2 Plantinga, A., ‘Is Belief in God Rational?’ (Delaney, C. F., ed., Rationality and Religious Belief, Notre Dame, Indiana, 1979), p. 8.Google Scholar
page 427 note 3 Summa Theologica, I, ii, 3.
page 428 note 1 Of the traditional Catholic theological schools, the Thomists are known as maintaining that the Incarnation would not have happened but for human sin, the Scotists for holding that God would have become a man even if man had never sinned.
page 428 note 2 Cf. Zaehner, , loc. cit.Google Scholar
page 428 note 3 Cf. the view maintained by Tolkien, J. R. R. and Lewis, C. S., that the Gospel story is the ‘true myth’Google Scholar. See Green, R. L. and Hooper, W., C. S. Lewis. A Biography (London, 1974), pp. 116–18.Google Scholar
page 429 note 1 There is an interesting discussion of this issue in Cantwell Smith, op. cit. chapter 6.
page 429 note 2 This appropriateness is a part of what was meant by the ‘convenientia’ stressed by traditional Catholic theology. Tillich, Paul tried to establish it through his ‘method of correlation’ (Systematic Theology, I, 1953, 35).Google Scholar
page 429 note 3 In thinking about the matter in this paragraph, I have learned a great deal from argument with Professor Harold Coward, and from reading his writings.
page 430 note 1 Cf. the early disputes in Buddhism which led to the bifurcation between the Theravada and the Mahayana (see Singh, op. cit. p. 7); and the aspersions by Shankara on the opinions of the Buddhists and by Madhva on the opinions of Shankara (see Sharma, C., A Critical Survey of Indian Philosophy, London, 1960, 264–73, 372–5).Google Scholar
page 430 note 2 Conflicting claims to revelation are just as little negotiable, short of such adjudication, as conflicting claims made on the basis of religious experience; Schleiermacher and Barth, for all their notorious differences, thus end up at the same impasse. The wonderfully brilliant sophistries of the Madhyamaka school do not really provide a way out, as I hope to argue on some future occasion. Briefly, reason, in spite of what they claim, is not self-destroying, unless one starts from false assumptions; and if it were, ‘relative’ truth would be just as fatally compromised as ‘absolute’ truth. The most consistent of sceptics was Cratylus, who is said ultimately to have reached the stage of refraining from the utterance of any proposition whatever, and merely wagging his finger from side to side. For a very useful summary of the Madhyamaka position, see Singh, op. cit.