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

2. Challenging Modern Skepticism and Subjectivism

43 Chapter 2 Challenging Modern Skepticism and Subjectivism In the last chapter, I identified a deeply embedded picture of the mind’s relationship to God, as it has come into focus in modern and contemporary philosophical and theological reflection on the very idea of knowledge of God. According to the picture, given that the mind is bounded in what it can know, and God radically transcends the mind, God therefore belongs outside or beyond a cognitive boundary, insulating God from the mind and thereby preventing the mind from coming to know God objectively . I argued that once the mind is bounded on the outside, and God is subsequently pushed outside the boundary, then God can only be known by filtering God through our own subjectivity—namely, our own religious symbols , experiences, responses, and practices. More specifically, once we place God outside a cognitive boundary, and thereby create an epistemological divide separating human subjectivity from divine objectivity, then the only way we can attain knowledge of God is either to relate God to our own subjectivity (still leaving God entirely outside the boundary) or to reduce God to our own subjectivity (drawing God entirely inside the boundary). Of course, if we find neither of these options appealing, we also can relieve ourselves of any obligation to know God, objectively speaking, altogether (again leaving God outside the boundary). The current chapter serves largely as an exercise in therapy. Its central aim is to alleviate the interminable anxiety that arises once God is situated in relation to a cognitive boundary, an anxiety that, upon further examina- 44 pitfalls in modern epistemology tion, proves to be a symptom of a much greater problem and confusion surrounding the mind’s relationship to the divine. If God is pushed outside the boundary, and God can no longer be reached or objectively known in thought or language at all by human cognitive subjects, then God’s distance from the mind and the outer boundary becomes so great that God’s presence to the mind is eclipsed entirely, and God’s distance from the mind gives way to total withdrawal. If God is brought inside the boundary—precisely in order to make God epistemically accessible—then God can no longer be identified as existing independently from the mind or transcending the mind, and God becomes completely absorbed in the mind. In the former case, God’s objectivity is eclipsed because God is rendered completely unknowable ; in the latter case, God’s objectivity is eclipsed because God is rendered completely knowable, as an aspect or feature of human subjectivity. Thus, with the presence of the boundary in the picture, God’s distance from the mind, or conversely, God’s proximity to the mind, becomes so great that the mind ceases to bear any intelligible relationship to God whatsoever. My main argument, then, is that the only way to alleviate the anxiety— and thereby end the perpetual oscillation between these two competing and problematic views of the mind’s relationship to God—is to eradicate the boundary entirely. Consequently, my main goal in this chapter is to challenge the cadre of modern and contemporary thinkers that I identified in the previous chapter. I intend to show how each version of theological antirealism they proffer inevitably exacerbates, rather than alleviates, the anxiety , because each version is prone to a level of distortion that proves to be self-defeating. My other goal in challenging modern skepticism and subjectivism is to open up polemical space for proffering an alternative model for the mind’s relationship to God, one that that refuses to place God in relation to the boundary and hence allows for genuine objectivity in our knowledge of God. The Problems Afflicting Modern Skepticism and Subjectivism I argued in the previous chapter that we can locate the origins of the boundary and thus the modern picture of the mind’s relationship to God in a distinctly Cartesian picture of human subjectivity in which the mind is seen as an inner realm or space utterly divorced or divided from the external world. In part, this picture emerges because Descartes weds modern epistemology to skepticism: beginning as he does by making methodical doubt central to the modern epistemological enterprise, Descartes puts the very pos- challenging skepticism & subjectivism 45 sibility of knowledge of the external world in question. As John McDowell writes, once Descartes places “subjectivity’s very possession of an objective environment...