Evidence and Transcendence: Religious Epistemology and the God-World Relationship

Schleiermacher and Absolute Dependence

Chapter 4 Schleiermacher and Absolute Dependence 87 Michael J. Buckley in At the Origins of Modern Atheism has argued convincingly that a gradual separation of natural theology from metaphysics occurred beginning in the seventeenth century, with the rise of modern science and defenders of theism such as Lessing, Mersenne, and Descartes. For many ancient and medieval philosophers , there were questions about why anything whatsoever existed, questions about the “why” of being itself, which pointed to a completely “other” and transcendent cause. This metaphysical concept of a “first” cause was distinct from the concept of efficient causes or, by contrast, “second” causes. Efficient causality was by no means assumed to be the only possible form of causality or the only possible way of interpreting the dependent relation between a creature and that which explains the existence of any creature. With the gradual abandonment of the older concept of an ultimate first cause, as traced by Buckley, the Christian God became portrayed as one cause among others. God was not totally other than the natural world. Rather, God and nature were parts of a larger whole. God became part of the system, an efficient, external cause of other data. Hand in hand with this went the idea that the human mind could investigate God rationally as one object of knowledge among others. The knowing subject was central. Deists defended God’s existence in terms of “natural theology.” The defense of the existence of God became independent of metaphysics as it was 05 inman chap04:Layout 1 2/20/08 10:23 AM Page 87 understood by most of the Scholastics. One might even say that with the collapse of the older concept and of its distinction of first from second causes, the distinction between infinite and finite also collapsed. A central failing common to the theologies of both Swinburne and Thiemann has been identified in the earlier chapters. For all the obvious differences between them, each fails to do sufficient justice to the distinction between God and finite realities and between knowledge of God and knowledge of finite realities. Since God cannot be known in the way in which a finite object is known, human knowledge of God must be radically distinct from knowledge of the finite. Yet Swinburne and Thiemann each present a defense of Christian faith in which the divine and the human are depicted as the same kind of reality. Despite their efforts to respect the notion of God’s transcendence, ultimately both are unable to incorporate into their account of the God/human relationship a recognition of the infinite difference between the transcendent and the transcended. Yet since all human knowledge is mediated by the finite, knowledge of God must nevertheless be somehow dependent upon knowledge of finite realities. Human knowledge of God and human knowledge of finite realities , therefore, are correctly understood as radically distinct and yet mutually dependent. This distinction in mutual dependence must be the central component of any religious epistemology that reflects accurately the relationship between God and the world. What are the features that must characterize such an epistemology? Most obviously, it must recognize that knowledge of God is mediated by the finite. What else? We have seen that any suggestion that knowledge of God is somehow episodic, confined to particular experiences or particular factors given in experience , cannot do justice to the radical metaphysical difference between God and finite reality. A sound epistemology must, therefore, entail the notion that knowledge of God is a permanent accompaniment to all human experience; yet God and the world cannot be treated as parallel realities. Nor can God be treated merely as the substantive explanation for the existence of the world, or as the efficient cause of particular existents. Rather, as Buckley argues, a sound religious epistemology must uphold the metaphysical distinction between first and second causes. Swinburne and Thiemann, admittedly in different ways, insist on the connections between knowledge of God and knowledge of finite reality: 88 evidence and transcendence 05 inman chap04:Layout 1 2/20/08 10:23 AM Page 88 Thiemann’s polemic against foundationalist intuitions is matched by Swinburne’s dismissal of a fideist appeal. Yet they both fail in their efforts to articulate the radical, indeed infinite, difference between the divine and the created. The question with which we are left is whether it is possible...