Constructing 'God': A contemporary interpretation of religion

Heythrop Journal - Quarterly Review of Philosophy and Theology

Volumn 41, Issue 1, 2000, Pages 25-46

  Karuvelil, George ^a  

^a Jnana Deepa Vidyapeeth   (India)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 84949115254     PISSN: 00181196     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/1468-2265.00122     Document Type: Article

References (60)

1. Thomas Reese, SJ, '2001 and Beyond: Preparing the Church for the Next Millennium', America (June 21, 1997), p. 16.
2. I include in this category not only the 'Wittgensteinian fideists' but also the reformed epistemologists. The reason for this unconventional inclusion is to be found in G. Karuvelil, 'Some Problems in the Epistemology of Religion' in Job Kozhamthadom (ed.), Interrelations and Interpretation (New Delhi: Intercultural Publications, 1997), pp. 109-40.
3. I borrow this characterization of post-modernism from Anton Van Niekerk, 'Postmetaphysical Versus Postmodern Thinking: Retaining the Baby Without the Bathwater', Philosophy Today 39/2 (1995), pp. 171-84.
4. See note 2.
5. Anthony Flew, God: A Critical Enquiry (La Salle, Illinois: Open Court Publishing Company, 1984), pp. x-xi.
6. See Karuvelil, 'Some Problems'.
7. The concept of radical interpretation comes from Q. W. V. Quine and Donald Davidson. See Quine, Word and Object (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1960), chapter 2;
8. Davidson, Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), especially pp. 125-39. Its use in the context of religion is my own.
9. See J. M. Kitagawa, The Quest for Human Unity: A Religious History (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1990), p. 2.
10. See Peter Berger, The Sacred Canopy (NY: Doubleday, Anchor Books, 1969)
11. and Clifford Geertz, 'Religion as a Cultural System' in Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (NY: Basic Books, Inc., Publishers, 1973) for two excellent definitions of religion from this perspective.
12. William Alston, Perceiving God: The Epistemology of Religious Experience (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991).
13. See C. A. Hooker, A Realistic Theory of Science (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1987), p. 257. Hooker qualifies this thesis as 'not strongly constitutive'.
14. Hilary Putnam, Reason, Truth and History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), p. 49.
15. A provision is made for a formal object where the same material object is studied from different perspectives.
16. In this I follow the lead of Michael Arbib and Mary Hesse, The Construction of Reality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986)
17. and Berger (cf. note 9).
18. John Heil, Perception and Cognition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), p. 48.
19. This identification of experience with empirical knowledge can be seen in such passages as B 147, 166, and 218 of the Critique of Pure Reason. For the untenability of this identification, see Karuvelil, 'Epistemic Justification and the Possibility of Empirical Evidence', Journal of Indian Council of Philosophical Research XXII/1 (1994), pp. 29-48.
20. Anthony Flew, 'Theology and Falsification' in Anthony Flew and Alasdair MacIntyre (eds.), New Essays in Philosophical Theology (London: SCM. Press, 1955).
21. Ulric Neisser, 'From Direct Perception to Conceptual Structure' in Neisser (ed.), Concepts and Conceptual Development: Ecological and Intellectual Factors in Categorization, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 21.
22. According to Strawson there is a 'massive central core of human thinking' which is relatively invariant. See P. F. Strawson, Individuals: An Essay in Descriptive Metaphysics (NY: Doubleday, 1963), p. xiv.
23. A similar contention is to be found in Joseph Runzo who says that we inhabit the same perceptual world because we inhabit the same conceptual world. See Runzo, 'Radical Conceptualization of Perceptual Experience', American Philosophical Quarterly 19/3 (July 1982), p. 216.
24. Ulric Neisser, 'Perceiving, Anticipating, and Imagining' in C. W. Savage (ed.), Perception and Cognition: Issues in the Foundations of Psychology (Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science, Vol. IX, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1978), p. 91.
25. The 1967 reference is to Neisser, Cognitive Psychology (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1967).
26. John Hick, An Interpretation of Religion: Human Response to the Transcendent (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), p. 153.
27. Nancy Frankenberry, Religion and Radical Empiricism (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1987), p. 66.
28. W Cantwell Smith and John Hick (in some places) seem to take this approach. See C. Smith, The Meaning and End of Religion (London: SPCK, 1978);
29. J. Hick, 'A Religious Understanding of Religion: A Model of the Relationship Between Traditions', The Journal of Religious Studies XXI/2 (1992), p. 32. It is worth noting that Hick's book An Interpretation of Religion is subtitled 'Human Response to the Transcendent'.
30. See Karuvelil, 'Epistemic Justification', pp. 37-8.
31. For more details of this method, see Karuvelil, 'Re-Visioning Epistemology', Journal of Indian Council of Philosophical Research, September, 1999.
32. This point is developed in my M.Phil. dissertation, Towards a Cognitional Characterization of Religion (University of Delhi, 1992).
33. Mary Hesse, Revolutions and Reconstructions in the Philosophy of Science (Brighton, Sussex: The Harvester Press, 1980), p. 159; see also pp. xviii-xix.
34. See Gerhard Vollmer, 'Mesocosm and Objective Knowledge' in Franz M. Wuketits (ed.), Concepts and Approaches in Evolutionary Epistemology: Towards an Evolutionary Theory of Knowledge (Dordrecht: D. Reidel Publishing Company, 1984), pp. 69-121.
35. William James, Varieties of Religious Experience, (NY: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1906), p. 485.
36. M. K. Gandhi, Young India, May 12, 1920 in Krishna Kripalani (ed.), All Men Are Brothers: Autobiographical Reflections (New York: Continuum, 1980), p. 51.
37. George Thottungal, 'Self-Transcendence and Spirituality', Vidyajyoti Journal of Theological Reflection, LIX (1995), p. 88.
38. Along with John Hick, I take this to be the main insight of the logical positivists. See An Interpretation, p. 177.
39. Peter F. Strawson, Individuals (New York: Anchor Books, 1963).
40. Peter F. Strawson, Bounds of Sense (London: Methuen & Co. Ltd., 1966), p. 26.
41. Strawson, Individuals, p. xiii.
42. G. N. Schlesinger, Metaphysics: Methods and Problems (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1983) is an example. '[I]t is very hard to see why, for instance, the assertion that others are not robots but possess a mind expresses a less solid fact about the nature of external reality than assigning a certain value to the mass of the electron.' (p. 11). This is strange because one of the main contentions of Strawson, whom he attacks, is precisely that our concept of person is that to which we ascribe both mental and physical properties.
43. This might seem paradoxical: on the one hand metaphysics is not about the structure of reality and on the other hand metaphysical principles are synthetic. This seeming paradox has to do with the relationship between the structure and content of human cognition. See Donald Davidson, 'The Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme', Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 47 (1974);
44. Reprinted in various places. Also, P. Berger and T. Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge (New York: Doubleday, 1974).
45. Although it is not easy to draw a distinction between ontology and metaphysics, I use the following distinction: Ontology is a theory of beings, the entities that are said to exist (tables, chairs, trees, God, etc.); metaphysics is the general categories and principles which we use in talking about that ontology (substance, accidents, causal principle, etc.)
46. Quine, Word and Object, p. 1.
47. Quine, 'In Praise of Observation Sentences', The Journal of Philosophy XC/3 (1993), p. 108.
48. Strawson, Individuals. Quine's omission of persons is not surprising when we know that his other characterization of observation sentences is physicalist.
49. John Macquarrie, 'How can we think of God' in Jerry H. Gill (ed.), Philosophy Today No. 2 (London: MacMillan, 1969), p. 151.
50. Bhagavan Das, The Essential Unity of All Religions (Benares: The Kashi Vidyapitha). Enlarged second edition, 1939, p. 10.
51. Gandhi, Young India, October 11, 1925, in Krishna Kripalani (ed.), All Men are Brothers, p. 52.
52. Kitagawa, The Quest, p. 18.
53. Raimundo Panikkar, The Cosmo-theandric Experience: Emerging Religious Consciousness (New York: Orbis Books, 1993).
54. Caroline F. Davis, The Evidential Force of Religious Experience (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), p. 178
55. See for example, Augustine Pamplany, CST, 'Eco-vision of Reality: Towards a Cosmotheandric Integration' in J. Kozhamthadom (ed.), Interrelations, pp. 53-70.
56. This thesis is propounded in different places, most notably in 'Theology and Verification', Theology Today 17 (1960), pp. 12-31
57. and 'Eschatological Verification Reconsidered' in his Problems of Religious Pluralism (London: Macmillan, 1985), pp. 110-27.
58. See S. Mark Heim, Salvations: Truth and Difference in Religion (New York: Orbis Books, Maryknoll, 1995), p. 18.
59. See Jung H. Lee, 'Problems of Religious Pluralism: A Zen Critique of John Hick's Ontological Monomorphism', Philosophy East and West 48/3 (1998), pp. 453-77.
60. I am grateful to Prof. Subhash Anand, Dr Rosario Rocha, SJ and an anonymous referee of The Heythrop Journal for their valuable comments on an earlier draft of this paper.