Below is a copy of the handout for my upcoming presentation at the Univ. of Notre Dame on critical realism in science and religion. It is one of a number of papers at the New Conversations in Science and Religion: What Difference Might Critical Realist Philosophy Make? conference.
You can follow the thread of my exposition from the quotations below perhaps. From them, you will surmise that I am defending critical realism as a generalized cognitionally based epistemology that can describe how science and theology operate in a way in which they resemble one another. McMullin's theory of retroduction, which I described in my doctoral dissertation, is complemented by Lonergan's understanding of judgment. In both cases, against empiricist and idealist accounts of knowledge, judgment occurs as the result of two distinct processes. There is both a creative, imaginative and constructive process producing hypotheses and also a verification of these hypotheses through experimentation. Or, in the case of theology, there are insights that come from recognizing divine revelation at work in scripture and religious experience. The verification of these insights comes in the formulation of doctrines and the process of their evaluation in new linguistic and cultural contexts.
You can follow the thread of my exposition from the quotations below perhaps. From them, you will surmise that I am defending critical realism as a generalized cognitionally based epistemology that can describe how science and theology operate in a way in which they resemble one another. McMullin's theory of retroduction, which I described in my doctoral dissertation, is complemented by Lonergan's understanding of judgment. In both cases, against empiricist and idealist accounts of knowledge, judgment occurs as the result of two distinct processes. There is both a creative, imaginative and constructive process producing hypotheses and also a verification of these hypotheses through experimentation. Or, in the case of theology, there are insights that come from recognizing divine revelation at work in scripture and religious experience. The verification of these insights comes in the formulation of doctrines and the process of their evaluation in new linguistic and cultural contexts.
Paul.Allen@concordia.ca
New Conversations in Science and
Religion: What Difference Might Critical Realist Philosophy Make? University of
Notre Dame. July 30-31, 2015
1. “Science must not impose any
philosophy any more than the telephone must tell us what to say.” G.K.
Chesterton
2. “What happens in philosophy of
science reflects at the second level what happens in science itself. That is,
it is empirically discovered in scientific practice that certain kinds of
evaluative procedures or of epistemic demands… are effective in bringing about
the broadly-stated goals of science. Then a theory of a broadly
philosophical sort is brought about to account for this.” Ernan
McMullin, “The Goals of Natural Science” in Proceedings and Addresses of the
American Philosophical Association Vol. 58, No. 1 (Sep., 1984), pp. 37-64,
57.
3. “referring successfully to an
entity, say an electron, can be achieved by affirming that one is referring to
that which causes (say) this cloud chamber track to take such and such a path.
And this can be achieved without knowing what electrons are ‘in themselves’.
Given the parallel between the use of models and metaphors in scientific and
theological language, it seems to me to be equally legitimate to affirm that
God can be ‘that which causes this particular experience now (or in the past)
in me (or others)” Arthur Peacocke, “Intimations of Reality: Critical realism
in science and religion” in Religion and Intellectual Life 2 (4) Summer
1985, 7-26, 22
4. If there is such a thing as
orthodoxy in the religion-and-science field, critical realism is one of its
dogmas. This privileged position is undeserved. Critical realism suffers from
at least two fundamental defects. First, its presupposed cognitive psychology
entails that the cognitive value of both religious and scientific discourse is
strictly indeterminable. Second, critical realism’s presupposed psychology
forecloses future cognitive scientific inquiry in the name of a preconceived
idea about the nature of human cognition.” Wesley Robbins, “Pragmatism, Critical
Realism and the Cognitive Value of Religion and Science” Zygon: Journal of
Science and Religion vol.
34, no. 4 (December 1999) 655-666, 656.
5. “Peirce was the first to say
straightforwardly that to deduction and induction, we must add a third (which
he variously named abduction, hypothesis, retroduction) if we are to categorize
properly what it is that makes science. Abduction is the move from evidence to
hypothesis; it is ‘the provisional adoption of a [testable] hypothesis’…(85) As
a process of inference, it is not rule-governed as deduction is, nor regulated
by technique as induction is. Its criteria, like coherence, empirical adequacy,
fertility are more of an oblique sort. They leave room for disagreement,
sometimes long-lasting disagreement. Yet they also allow controversies to be
adjudicated and eventually resolved. (92) Let us agree to call the entire
process retroduction. [It] is a continuing process that begins with the
first regularity to be explained or anomaly to be explained away…The product of
retroduction is theory or causal explanation. It is distinct from
empirical law, the product of the simpler procedure of induction. (93)
Ernan McMullin, The Inference that Makes Science (Marquette Univ. Press,
1992).
6. “Doctrines express judgments
of fact and judgments of value. They are concerned, then, with the affirmations
and negations not only of dogmatic theology but also of moral, ascetical,
mystical, pastoral, and any similar branch. Such doctrines stand within the
horizon of foundations. They have their precise definition from dialectic,
their positive wealth of clarification and development from history, their
grounds in the interpretation of the data proper to theology.” Bernard
Lonergan, Method in Theology (Univ.
of Toronto Press, 2003, 1971), 132
