Abstract
If the philosophy of religion has been dominantly3 the consideration of proofs of the existence of God, still it is recognized that proofs are only rarely the concern of religious people. The reality of God is presupposed in the three North African Mediterranean religions of the Book, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam,4 but proofs of His existence are a curious by-product of religious life. The attempt to find a proof is a philosophical5 rather than primarily a religious enterprise and its relation to religious life obscure.6
At the Higher Institute of Philosophy in Leuven, in December 1998,1 I raised this question: who can think the philosophy of religion? Thirty six years earlier in 1962, in the same city, I met Patrick Heelan for the first time. — He was then completing his doctoral work in the Institute on Heisenberg and the nature of quantum mechanics.2 I was beginning philosophy in the Collège Saint Albert in the outskirts of the city. I visited Patrick Heelan in his rooms weekly and learnt much from him then and later. To contribute an essay in his honour is for me, therefore, a great privilege and an opportunity, not to repay, but to acknowledge, a debt. To pursue a question that I raised first in Leuven is, I hope, an appropriate acknowledgment.
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Notes
Who Can Think the Philosophy of Religion?" Leuven, December, 1998.
Patrick A. Heelan, Quantum Mechanics and Objectivity: A Study of the Physical Philosophy of Werner Heisenberg (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1965).
Not exclusively even in recent times. Cf. Buber, Collingwood, Lévinas, Lonergan, Marcel, Nédoncelle, Unamuno, Wittgenstein… but still the dominant bias persists.
Bernard J. Lonergan, Philosophy of God, and Theology (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1973), remarks that ".there is no difficulty about theologians in a theology department reflecting on specifically Christian religious experience but there would be some difficulty in asking philosophers in a philosophy department to reflect on specifically Christian religious experience." 13-14. The burden of this essay is that if philosophers are to attempt a philosophy of religion, they must reflect on some religious experience; it may be Jewish, Christian, Islamic, Hindu, Sikh.…Whether or not there is a religious experience utterly unrelated to any religious tradition is a serious question that is not faced here. Sufficient for the moment to note that there is no religious experience utterly unrelated to any cultural tradition since the experiencing subject is inevitably a cultural subject. Compare: a linguistic experience utterly unrelated to any language.
Furthermore, if the attempt to find a proof of God's existence is philosophical, it should be noticed that there are several `philosophies' within which proofs are considered and several philosophers by whom they are considered. Consequently, the entire programme is considerably more uncertain, ambiguous and hazy than might, at first sight, be imagined. Cf. Lonergan, Philosophy of God, and Theology, 11-14, and R. G. Collingwood's early work, Religion and Philosophy (London: Oxford University Press, 1916), 59-71.
Cf. Leszek Kolakowski, Religion (London: Fontana, 1982), 75. See Lonergan's Philosophy of God, and Theology remark on an incongruity in Insight where the proof of the existence of God makes "no appeal to religious experience" while, in contrast, "my cognitional theory was based on a long and methodical appeal to experience," 12. That there exist different contexts is widely recognized; that questions arise as to how they are related is less commonly accepted.
Patrick A. Heelan, Space-Perception and the Philosophy of Science (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), 2. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, in his review of Gabriel Marcel's Etre etAvoir remarks that Marcel makes clear that philosophical enquiry is into the actions — among others he mentions prayer — that the enquirer is engaged in. Cf. Merleau-Ponty, Review in La Vielntellectuelle, Paris, Vol. XLV (1936): 98-109. This is true also of Bergson (cf. Barden, "Method in Philosophy" in John Mullarkey, ed., The New Bergson, (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999), 32-40.
Cf. Rush Rhees in D. Z. Phillips, ed., Rush-Rhees on Religion and Philosophy (London: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 121.
ascal's distinction is not the end of the matter. The religious person in Judaism, Christianity or Islam prays to the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob and, qua religious person, presupposes in religious practice the reality of God but raises neither the philosophical question about God's existence nor the philosophical question of the relationship between, say, the Being that accounts for the ultimate intelligibility of the universe, and the God to whom prayers are addressed. Cf. D. Cyril Barrett, S.J., "The Usefulness of God," Milltown Studies, 41 (1998): 23-34, esp. 30-31.
What is common is the question not any solution to it. It is sometimes suggested that a common conclusion is the rejection of truth and the espousal of a more or less radical relativism that is taken to be the only solution to the questions raised by the acknowledgement of different language-games or contexts. That there are different contexts or language-games and that serious questions arise as to how they are related is clearly so; that the answer to these questions is radical relativism is, I think, deeply mistaken, that is, it is a deep, not a superficial, error. Cf. Barden, "Insight and Mirrors," Method,Los Angeles, Vol. 4, No.2 (1986): 85-104, and Barden, After Principles (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1990).
In fact, few face the issue squarely. The question as to the influence of the male imagination on the course of Western Philosophy is raised in some feminist writings.
Compare the common discussions of proofs of the existence of God with this remark of John Henry Newman: "Begin again. I am not to draw out a proof of the being of God, but the mode in which practically an individual believes in it." Quoted in a paper by Michael Paul Gallagher given at the Lonergan Centre, Milltown Park, Dublin, on the 31st March 2000. Here there is the suggestion that accepting or rejecting God's existence within "philosophical discourse" has an existential character that is absent from accepting or rejecting other philosophical positions. In the end, Newman does not confine this existential influence to questions of God and religious committment. To be context and subject independent is, I think, what many seem to mean by "objective." The issue of context limitation and subject bias is raised in some feminist discussions of philosophical enquiry and is a crucial and recurrent theme in Lonergan's discussions of philosophical understanding and judgement.
On prayers being heard and answered, see John Dowling, A Philosophy of Religious Experience (Dublin: Oscail, 1999), Ch. 12, 13-21.
I am not suggesting that, psychologically, the only way to make sense of life is by reference to God nor that any way of making sense of life that includes reference to God is, by that fact alone, satisfactory. Nor do I deny that popular readings of basic science may be used to this end. In a popular reading, for example, evolutionary theory may be used in a variety of ways to explain the purpose of life but basic science discovers no purpose.
Rush Rhees, 205 and Dowling, Ch. 10.
Goldbach, in the eighteenth century, made this conjecture in a letter to Euler. Neither an exception to it, nor a proof of it, has been found.
Henri Bergson repeatedly writes of teaching as bringing the student to perform the experiment for himself; to understand a mathematical proof is to be able to follow it. See my "Method in Philosophy" in John Mullarkey (ed.), The New Bergson.
Heelan, Space-Perception and the Philosophy of Science,242.
Psalm 130; some editions 129.
Rush Rhees, 199.
Ibid.
Psalm 130, verse 3 [King James Version] Another translation reads: If thou wilt keep record of our iniquities, Lord, who has the strength to bear it? The translation from The Jerusalem Bible reads: If you never overlooked our sins, Yahweh/Lord, could anyone survive?
On the idea of"virtual form," see Suzanne K. Langer, Feeling and Form (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1953).
The relationship between literature as the virtual form of moral action and moral action itself is a recurrent theme in the writings of George Steiner.
Langer, Feeling and Form, 219 "Now, all this analysis is not intended as an exercise in the New Criticism, but merely to show that all poetry is a creation of illusory events, even when it looks like a statement of opinions, philosophical or political or aesthetic" or, one might add, religious or moral. In Langer's work, as here, the term "illusion" and its cognates is, clearly, not derogatory.
The suggestion here is not that the religious reader experiences Yahweh but that he is present to himself as one related to Yahweh. Compare how we remember absent friends. See on this Dowling, Ch. 9, and Raymond Moloney, "The Person as Subject of Spirituality in the Writings of Bernard Lonergan," Milltown Studies, No. 45 (2000): 66-80, 75.
Rhees, 198.
The allusion to John Austin is clear but the range is enlarged. Prayer is one of the things we do with words. But note that we do things with the words only when we mean them, only when we use them in a certain way. To promise, that is to utter a promise, without meaning what one says is not to promise. To pray sceptically is not to pray.
Those that watch anxiously for the morning are shepherds for whom the night brings danger to their animals and for whom the coming of morning brings greater safety.
Barrett, "The Usefulness of God," 31.
On the distinction between "experiential knowledge" and "technical knowledge" see Aquinas' discussion of the mind's knowledge of itself [Summa Theologiae,I ques. 87 a.l], Lonergan, "Cognitional Structure" in F. E. Crowe, ed., Collection (London: Darton, Longaman and Todd, 1967), esp., 226-227, and Wittgenstein's discussion of being in pain. Wittgenstein claims that the person in pain does not `know' that he is in pain; what he means is that the person in pain does not know this by observing his own behaviour; obviously, he does not want to deny that the person is aware that he is in pain; he means that being in pain and being aware of this are the same thing.
This is sometimes what Bergson has in mind when he writes of intuition. See particularly his letter to A. A. Mitchell [Mélanges, p.1030-31] and my forthcoming "Creative Freedom" [Proceedings of the Bergson Conference, Longhirst, April 2000].
A recent essay by Moloney (cited above) can serve as an experiment. His essay is an effort to express and articulate philosophically the nature of religious experience. I think that a reading of this essay would incline the reader to agree that the author was trying to express and articulate an experience that he had undergone and would likewise incline the reader to the view that Moloney's meaning would be beyond him could he not refer to his own experience. I do not suggest that, because the author attempts to express and articulate his own experience, that he is correct or adequate; one might want to disagree with Moloney or to add to his account. One might, for example, reject his philosophy. To pray does not require prior philosophical purity. My assertion is simply that Moloney is writing of something rather than nothing; that what he is writing about is an experience that he has undergone, that his account cannot be adequately understood or assessed by a reader who has not undergone that experience.
To decide to study mathematics and to implement that decision is, of course, a moral act. Thus, to avoid the moral dimension of living is not possible. But, whereas one can decide to study mathematics in order to study the philosophy of mathematics, it is not possible to decide to act responsibly only in order to study the philosophy of responsible action. To pretend to commit oneself is not to commit oneself. How does one pretend to oneself? Self-deception?
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Barden, G. (2002). Thinking the Philosophy of Religion. In: Babich, B.E. (eds) Hermeneutic Philosophy of Science, Van Gogh’s Eyes, and God. Boston Studies in the Philosophy and History of Science, vol 225. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-1767-0_33
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