Theism and Empiricism: A Review Article

THEISM AND EMPIRICISM: A REVIEW ARTICLE THOSE OF US WHO are convinced of the basic validity of the cosmological approach to theism and who believe in addition that it may rightly be called empirical will feel encouraged by the present work,1 which represents in a reasoned argument the results of a lifetime's thought on the matter by a professional philosopher of the highest reputation . On the one hand [Professor Boyce Gibson writes], I believe in God, not merely on authority, but because I think there are good reasons for believing in God: ... On the other hand, my belief in God is based not on inference but on experience : and my background is one which has not been much represented in recent controversy on the philosophy of religion: that of a Christian independency which rests on the assembled testimony of believers and not on the authority of church or academy. [p. 1] Recognizing that both traditional theists and traditional empiricists will declare that his hope of showing that there is no contradiction between the theistic and the empirical outlook is doomed to disillusionment, he begins his argument with a trenchant exposition of what he describes as "the Misadventures of Empiricism." The first of these is the "epistemological misadventure," which consisted in equating empiricism with sensationalism . Hume is the great offender here: Hume took the only way out, by resolving the mind into constituent sensations, and thereby depriving his conclusions of any claim to truth. It is notable, however , that he found them impossible to live with. . . . His philosophy is not a response to environment, but the pursuit of an unempirical thesis unempirically to its logical outcome. He does not listen for contexts or overtones. He is just a Scots dominie who has got the better of the minister in argument .... Now [Boyce Gibson continues] it is the linking of empiricism with sensationalism which, more than anything else, has made it implausible to talk about the empirical approach to God. If it is possible experientially to be aware of one's self and other people and Platonic " kinds," distinguished from sensation by activity on the one hand and permanence on the other, one of the a priori objections to an alliance between theism and empiricism is removed. [pp. 19f] 1 Theism and Empiricism. By A. Boyce Gibson. New York: Schocken Books, 1970. Pp. ~88. $8.00. London: S. C. M. Press, £UO, 482 THEISM AND EMPIRICISM 488 The second " misadventure " is that of " Subject-object Parallelism," the " standard view that ways of knowing stand in a defined one-one relation to ways of being." (pp. ~Of) The third "misadventure" consists of the assumption that any claim to direct insight or intuition must lay claim to incorrigibility. On the contrary, " the next phase of the argument is to show that religious assertions and practices are corrigible and that if they were not they would not properly be religious." (p. ~6) For the avoidance of these and further misadventures five suggestions are made: awareness (1) is of things-in-relation, (~) is of the continuous, (8) is not a fact in its own right but is " intentional" and directed to objects, (4) has to discover the objects to which it is directed, and (5) is inseparable from valuations. "It is only if all of them are accepted that the road is clear for the empiricist approach to God." (p. ~7) In a vigorous criticism of Professor R. B. Braithwaite's famous Eddington Lecture the assertion is made that " there is today a greater ignorance about religion than at any time in our history, and it is the sense of its irrelevance among the uninstructed (including graduates ) which gives power to the elegant and technical attempts to discredit it." (p. 8~) Starting, as an avowed empiricist must, with experience, Boyce Gibson insists that this must be "ordinary experience." However, he asserts, unfortunately, ordinary experience is frequently interpreted either as the experience of ordinary men (the appeal to "common sense," determined by numbers), or, much more misleadingly, as the experience of a fashionable cultured clique, parading as a popular mouthpiece (e. g. Western intellectuals alienated from their religious background). Neither of these senses is here...