Online ordering is currently unavailable due to technical issues. We apologise for any delays responding to customers while we resolve this. For further updates please visit our website: https://www.cambridge.org/news-and-insights/technical-incident
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2024
I would like to thank Gavin D'Costa and Mervyn Davies for their helpful, constructive comments on an earlier version of this article.
2 I share Lash's concerns that Pope John Paul II's concentration on philosophy rather than ‘the whole sweep of what Newman called ‘the circle of the sciences’,’ is potentially misleading, but like Lash I assume that there would be little disagreement that the ‘sapiential’ needs to be recovered across this broad sweep. Lash, Nicholas ‘Visio Unica et Ordinata Scientiae’, in Hemming, L.P. and Parsons, S.F., eds., Restoring Faith in Reason, (London: SCM Press, 2002), p. 234Google Scholar.
3 See for example, Hampson, P.J., ‘Beyond Unity, Integration and Experience: Cultural Psychology, Theology and Mediaeval Mysticism’, New Blackfriars 86 (2005): 622–641CrossRefGoogle Scholarfor an initial discussion; also, Hampson, P.J., ‘Cultural Psychology and Theology: Partners in Dialogue’, Theology and Science 3 (2005): 259–274CrossRefGoogle Scholar for a more extended treatment.
4 Again my sympathies are with Lash here, I assume that the ‘unity of truth’ in FR can be read in contrast to the notion that we have created ‘wholly incommensurable conceptual frameworks’ not that there will, this side of the eschaton, ever be one simple, single world story. See ‘Visio Unica et Ordinata Scientiae’, in Restoring Faith in Reason, op. cit., p. 235.
5 Arguments can obviously be over as well as under-constrained. Whereas under-constraints allow potentially invalid or false arguments to flourish, over-constraints are generally fatal for those which otherwise can be shown to be valid and true. The over constraining claims of Logical Positivism, for example, unreasonably remove from explanatory space large areas of valid knowledge and understanding. The issue then is presumably whether constraints themselves are valid, necessary and appropriate. The current assumption is that those in FR are. A relativist might disagree, claiming that these too are unnecessarily over-constraining. I ask: from what universally compelling standpoint is this truth claim made? If from the constrained ‘ground’ that there is no unified truth, why need we heed it?
6 To use FR's nomenclature (FR 4).
6 This can be quite a fertile metaphor. Before the formation of every planetary system there must, it seems, have been a first generation star without planets which eventually ran out of fuel, expanded, then collapsed and exploded creating the debris out of which the planetary system proper was formed. The mediaeval synthesis, too, represented a stage where academic disciplines, as we know them today, were not differentiated from theology or ‘first philosophy’. After the synthesis collapsed, and disintegrated in the Reformation and the Renaissance, secular disciplines began to emerge particularly following the Enlightenment. In modern and postmodern times we are now left with a great deal of explanatory debris which is still settling, as well as solid planets! Obviously so simple and mechanistic a model hardly does justice to the cultural and historical complexities involved, but the collapse of a singular coherent system through to the growth of a pluriform one is present in model and actuality. In addition, we can distinguish our faith in the continuance of the central message from modernist assumptions that the centre is dead. It is also hardly surprising that postmodernists bewildered by plurality find it hard to accept that there might actually be a privileged centre when so many perspectives are granted the right to claim the plausibility of their own epicyclic views! It also offers a neat twist on Kant's ‘Copernican revolution’ - we recentre, as we shall see, not on the conceptual categories of the human subject, but on the union of knower and known best represented in and through Christ.
7 There are at least 28 separate mentions of such a common project in FR.
8 This implies a philosophical anthropology which allows some constant principles of human nature but varying cultural expression, as we shall see in the next article.
9 See Polya, George, How to Solve It: A New Aspect of Mathematical Method (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1945)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
10 See extensive arguments in Clark, Stephen, God, Religion and Reality (London: SPCK, 1998)Google Scholar.
11 For example, Skinner, B.F., Science and Human Behavior (New York: Collier-Macmillan, 1953)Google Scholar; Edelman, Gerald, Bright Air, Brilliant Fire: On the Matter of the Mind (New York: Basic, 1992)Google Scholar; Wolf, Fred, Parallel Universes (London: Paladin, 1991)Google Scholar.
12 Trigg, Roger, Philosophy Matters (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), p. 81Google Scholar.
13 Ibid., p. 81.
14 Searle, John, The Construction of Social Reality (London: Penguin, 1995), p. 155Google Scholar.
15 See for example Kauffman, Stuart, At Home in the Universe (Oxford University Press, 1995)Google Scholar, also, Kauffman, Stuart, Investigations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000)Google Scholar.
16 Ward, Keith, God, Chance and Necessity (Oxford: One World, 1996)Google Scholar.
17 See Quine, W.V.O., From a Logical Point of View (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1953)Google Scholar.
18 An example from perceptual psychology, the ‘Ames’ chair illusion, serves as a further analogy. Seen from an arbitrary perspective, this object appears as a random collection of sticks of different lengths and angles, seen from a single, key perspective a chair emerges occasioned by the logic of projective geometry. The point is that the perception of coherence, organisation and order is often critically dependent on a principled, singular point of view.
19 Roger Trigg reminds us that reason was known as ‘the candle of the Lord’ in the early Enlightenment, Philosophy Matters, op. cit., p. 38.
20 1 Corinthians 13:12.
21 The full implications of this dynamic still need to be determined. For example, the role of wonder, prayer and obedient submission to God's will should also be considered as helpful and possibly necessary components of any sustained attempt to approach truth inside and maybe even outside theology. (FR 4, 105). Consistent with the present account, prayer, aligning of the will with God's or conforming to Christ should help orient the person in the current arguments. There is also necessarily a Christian way of doing philosophy (FR 76). The latter might include, for example, the assumption that ultimate questions can be shown to be intelligible, that reason is not necessarily exhausted by the limits of language, that meaning and purpose exist and are worth exploring and so on.
22 There are issues to debate here, but it is by no means clear that the cultural location of ideas necessarily locks us into strict cultural relativism. Arguments from the human sciences against the primacy of human language, contra those accepted by constructivists and relativists, indicate that diachronic as well as synchronic translation between cultures is possible, and Turner's recent excellent demonstrations of the lasting validity of Thomist arguments, all offer grounds for optimism. See especially, Turner, Denys, Faith, Reason and The Existence of God, (Cambridge: CUP, 2004)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
23 This will be explored in more detail in the companion paper. For now note that the wider background to this whole argument is extensively developed and defended in Faith, Reason and The Existence of God, op. cit. Thus, as Turner cogently explains: through faith in Christ we trust that a route, through reason, from natural creatures to God cannot be ruled out; therefore there are reasons why, on reason's own terms such a route is intelligible, even though what it leads to is the ultimate mystery.
24 Faith, Reason and the Existence of God, op. cit., p. 262, but like Turner, I think it unlikely that many atheists will be prepared to adopt this standpoint even if only ‘for the sake of argument’.
25 Pluralitas non est ponenda sine necessitate (plurality should not be posited without necessity), in its original formulation by Ockham, with entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem (roughly - do not multiply entities beyond necessity) a later and more common rendering.
26 In the spirit of this debate I offer as a candidate for ‘Hampson's razor’: fines sunt parendi, quod fines requirendi, which we might roughly render as, ‘limits are to be heeded, in so far as they are needed’. Whether this will remain in currency for as long as Brother William's better known dictum remains to be seen!
