Knowledge and the Transcendent: An Inquiry into the Mind's Relationship to God

7. In Defense of a Realist Interpretation of Theology

264 Chapter 7 In Defense of a Realist Interpretation of Theology The main aim of this book has been to overcome what I have argued is a distinctly modern, skeptical anxiety concerning whether God can be known by the mind; an anxiety that is generated by a distorted and consequently unintelligible conception or picture of the mind’s relationship to God. The first step in overcoming this anxiety required locating the origins of the picture and its variations in modern and contemporary religious thought, which has struggled to relate mind and God given the presence of the Great Boundary in the picture. The second step in overcoming this anxiety required challenging the picture and then abandoning it entirely in order to rehabilitate the mind’s relationship to God. Rehabilitating that relationship in turn required exploring and defending an alternative philosophical and theological framework offered by premodern philosophical theologian Thomas Aquinas. Aquinas convincingly shows how mind and reality (most broadly) and mind and God (more specifically) can and do meet (or “come together”) in paradigm cases of human cognition and knowledge. Consequently , Aquinas provides a way for us to bring mind and God back together again, without having to compromise God’s transcendence, or having to ignore or violate the inherent limitations of the mind. In conclusion, it is worth briefly considering what the methodological implications of rehabilitating the mind’s relationship to God are for doing theology or pursuing theological inquiry more broadly. I argue that once a realist interpretation of theology 265 we finally overcome anxiety about whether there can be objectivity in our knowledge of God and actually begin to embrace the possibility that there is objectivity in our knowledge of God, then we are also in a position to embrace what I argue is Aquinas’s approach to the study of theology more generally: humble and unreserved inquiry into the very nature, history, and purposes of the divine. If, as Aquinas argues, faithful adherence to divine revelation and rational reflection provides an objective foundation for thinking and speaking about God, then the goal of theological inquiry, insofar as it is guided by faith and reason, must be construed as inescapably normative : to make dogmatic, realist truth claims about who God is (as well as what God has done and will do), based on our knowledge of who God is (as well as what God has done and will do). In other words, rehabilitating the mind’s relationship to God, which allows us to rehabilitate objectivity in the mind’s knowledge of God, also allows us to rehabilitate the noble task and goal of theology itself. Put another way, once we eradicate the boundary separating God and the mind, we also eradicate the boundary separating God from theology. Theology itself, properly understood as a realist discipline— “unbounded,” as it were, on the outside—provides a reliable epistemic means for gaining and strengthening our knowledge of God. In order to defend this claim properly, we need to consider and rebut a final objection that prevents us from treating (and, I would argue, rehabilitating ) theology as a realist discipline of thought. In the final chapter of his recent book, God and Realism, philosopher Peter Byrne issues this objection, in the form of an argument, as follows: 1. All disciplines of thought that can be interpreted realistically show the accumulation of reliable belief. 2. Theology does not show the accumulation of reliable belief. 3. Therefore theology cannot be interpreted realistically.1 Crucial to this argument is the claim that theology, unlike science (and the natural sciences in particular), is not open to “real-world influences” or guided by rational processes necessary for ascertaining or “tracking” the truth. According to Byrne, if a discipline of thought is successfully tracking the truth that it investigates, then it will show the accumulation of reliable belief , that is, belief that is widely recognized and held as true by practitioners 1. Peter Byrne, “A Realist Interpretation of Theology?” in God and Realism, 155–78, in particular , 162. Much of this chapter appears as Paul A. Macdonald Jr., “In Defence of a Realist Interpretation of Theology,” Religious Studies 44.1 (2008): 23–42. 266 applications in thomistic epistemology within a given discipline of thought over time. Since theology does not show the accumulation of reliable belief—there has been no discernible increase of insight and discovery within theology over the major course of its history...