لطفا منتظر باشید ...
The Relationship
between Philosophy and Theology
in the Postmodern Age
Dr. Muhammad Legenhausen
When I was a student at a Catholic high school in
Queens, New York, I was taught that although philosophy is the mother of
the sciences, she is also the handmaid of theology. Sometimes the dialogue
between philosophy and theology may have seemed to have taken the form of
orders given by the theological mistress to her erudite but obedient maid,
but that was a long time ago, if ever it was at all. The idea that
philosophy should be in service to theology has been rejected in the West
by most philosophers, and many theologians, at least since the
Enlightenment period of European thought.
But instead of bringing about the emancipation of
philosophy, the result has been to place philosophy at the service of her
own children, the natural and human sciences. Scientific realists would
determine being itself by the ultimate dictates of science. So, where does
this leave the relationship between philosophy and theology? Many see it
as forever broken off, and many Christian theologians think that this is
to the advantage of theology. As they see it, philosophy was never a very
good servant, for it was always raising more problems than it solved.
Of course, this attitude is not unknown to Muslin
scholars. It is easy to find Muslims who are suspicious of philosophy;
especially Islamic philosophy; there are even those, like Ghazali, who
would accuse philosophy of blasphemy. Others would be satisfied if
philosophy would mind its own business and stay out of the way of
theological doctrine.
Philosophy, however, refuses to be ignored. It has a
way of making itself noticed even by those theologians who wish it would
just go away. Philosophy accuses those who neglect her of lacking reason,
and since it proclaims that reason is the difference between man and the
other animals, this accusation amounts to the charge that those who
neglect her are subhuman.
So, after the rise and fall of positivism, after
philosophy had been declared to be a servant of the natural sciences,
assigned to clean up left over questions, philosophy arrives in the new
dress of philosophy of religion, coyly proffering her own questions for
the theologian. On the surface, most or many of the questions are those
which have been familiar to theologians for centuries: How can the
existence of God be proved? How can God know what free humans will do? Can
God make a stone so large that He Himself cannot lift it? How can the
eternal God know the temporal material world?
And so forth. While on the surface, these appear to be
the same questions familiar to theologians since reason was first applied
to religion, once one becomes familiar with the contemporary discussions
of these questions it becomes obvious that the philosophy of religion is
not as innocent as she may seem. Her questions are not those of a naive
girl seeking to understand her faith as best she can.
Philosophy has served the sciences for years, and its
servitude to the sciences has required countless compromises with
humanism, materialism, physicalism, naturalism, and other ideologies
antagonistic to religion. When it raises its questions for the
theologians, the arguments of all these ideologies are ready and waiting
for whatever response the theologians may offer. If the theologian
responds by rehearsing the standard discussions to be found in traditional
texts, whether. Christian or Islamic, he will be accused of -ignorance and
irrelevance to contemporary concerns.
The philosophy of religion is by no means merely
another name for rational theology as traditionally understood, for the
very standards of reason which are applied to theological issues have
changed. If the theologian is not to be caught off guard, he must be
prepared to question these standards, and thus, to adopt an unfamiliar
hypercritical stance toward the cannons of reason themselves.
The dialogue between philosophy and theology today is
not simply an affair between the questioning mind of the philosopher and
the pious spirit of the theologian. Every question comes with unspoken
expectations of what sort of answer will be considered suitable. Every
search for a reason presupposes a standard of explanation. The
expectations and presuppositions which inform the philosophy of religion
are deeply coloured by the entire history of recent Western thought. Since
many of those who write and publish in the area of philosophy of religion
have been trained in analytic philosophy, the standards of analytic
philosophy, which are influenced to a great degree by positivism,
pragmatism, and the thinking of natural scientists, play an important but
subtle role in this field.
The situation is complicated by the fact that many
philosophers -of religion, and even more Christian theologians, are
influenced more by what is often called "continental philosophy" than by
analytic philosophy. Most of the important continental philosophers have
been from France or Germany, while the majority of analytic philosophers
have taught at American or British universities. While philosophy in the
U.S. has been dominated by analytic thought throughout, most of the
twentieth century, over the last ten or fifteen years, continental thought
has come to play a prominent role in American philosophy.
What is emerging is a "world philosophy," but one from
which the Islamic world is largely excluded. The reason for this exclusion
is not because of some conspiracy to suppress Islamic thought, but because
we Muslims have not seriously attempted to enter the discussion. If we are
to enter the discussion, we must beware that it takes place in what is
often hostile territory, in the context of expectations, presuppositions
and standards of reasoning many of which are quite foreign to those found
in the Islamic sciences.
These issues must be kept in mind before the Muslim
scholar attempts to survey the questions contemporary philosophy of
religion poses for theology, where here, and in what follows, theology is
to be understood as including not merely kalam, but irfan nazari
(theoretical gnosis), religious ethics, and even some discussions of fiqh
and usul. What appears to be a dialogue between a philosopher who relies
on pure reason alone and a theologian is in reality a complex discussion
about philosophy, the sciences, theology and the various ideologies which
have influenced these broad areas of intellectual endeavor.
Perhaps the attitude of the Muslim scholar to the
complexity of the situation will be one of dismissal: The philosophy of
religion is the product of Western intellectual attitudes toward science
and religion and does not apply to the Islamic world. The conversation
between philosophy and theology is really a conversation between a Western
philosopher and a Christian theologian. However, we ignore the philosophy
of religion at our own peril. The ideas and attitudes that inform the
philosophy of religion are not confined within the walls of a few
universities in distant foreign lands.
They are part of the Western cultural atmosphere whose
volume is so large that it will find itself invading the Islamic world, or
rather has already started invading, whether anyone wants it to or not.
The international commerce in ideas-mostly Western ideas--cannot be
slowed, let alone stopped. Faced with a trade imbalance, attempts may be
made to preserve local markets, but ultimately the only successful policy
will be one in which locally manufactured products of export quality are
made widely available.
Since there are so many different kinds of Western
intellectual products on the market, we Muslims cannot hope to gain our
market share in all fields any time soon. However, we can hope to compete
aggressively in those areas in which Islamic thought has demonstrated its
strength in the past, and build on this to expand into other areas. In
order to compete in the international market of ideas, Islamic thought
must not only answer the doubts raised by various Western thinkers, it
must do so in a way that is distinctively Islamic. We cannot simply look
at the answers Christians have given and then search for an appropriate
,had'ith to make them seem Islamic. Serious full time work has to be done
to begin to formulate contemporary Islamic theologies which are in harmony
with the tradition of Islamic sciences, especially kalam, falsafah, and
irfan.
With these points in mind, we can turn to some examples
of the sorts of questions raised by the philosophy of religion for the
theologian.
One of the deepest areas to be surveyed is that of
epistemology. This is also an area to which medieval thinkers devoted less
attention than our contemporaries. How do we know that God exists? The
traditional answer given by Christians as well as Muslims was that we can
formulate sound deductive proofs whose premises are self-evident and whose
conclusions state the existence of God. The problem with this answer is
that many of the premises which seemed self-evident enough in the past
have now come to be questioned.
Consider, for example, the role of the principle that
an actual infinity of causes is impossible. A number of Western
philosophers, physicists and mathematicians have come to doubt this
principle. In defense of the principle, an important book has been written
in which some of the ideas of Muslim philosophers are given attention:
William Lane Craig's The Kalam Cosmological Argument (New York: Harper &
Row, 1979). This is one of the rare cases in which ideas from the Islamic
tradition (particularly those of Abu Humid Ghazali) have been the subject
of discussion in the contemporary philosophy of religion.
The continued discussion of this work in scholarly
journals sixteen years after the publication of the book is testimony to
its significance. The important point is that what has seemed for
centuries to be a self-evident principle is now the topic of vigorous
debate. At first glance it seems that what we have here is a case of a
principle of reason defended in Islamic philosophy and theology pitted
against the modem skeptics of the West. If we look closer, however, we
find that the principle has undergone its own evolution within the
tradition of Islamic philosophy.
By the time we get to Sadr al-Muta'allihin the
principle is limited to series of actual causes of existence occurring
simultaneously. The question that needs to be addressed here is how the
unqualified principle came to be qualified in Islamic philosophy, for the
unqualified principle was also taken by some (such as Ghazali) to be a
self-evident principle of reason, and the version of the principle stilt
defended by Craig is not subject to the qualification of simultaneity!
In any case, what we find here is rather typical of the
philosophy of religion. Philosophers impressed with the principles
employed in the natural sciences or mathematics raise doubts about what
had been considered to be self-evident or nearly self-evident principles
which had been used as premises of proofs for the existence of God. The
result is an epistemological problem. What was once claimed to be known is
now doubted. The doubts raised are not unanswerable, but the formulation
of answers requires a fair degree of sophistication, including a certain
amount of familiarity with current physics and mathematics. The debate
about the cosmological argument and the new physics is taken up by William
Lane Craig and Quentin Smith in a more recent book: Theism, Atheism and
Big Bang Cosmology (New York: Oxford, 1993).
Debates about the traditional proofs for the existence
of God have led some to question whether proofs are really necessary at
all for rational, religious belief. Alvin Plantinga has become famous
among philosophers of religion for his defense of what he calls "reformed
epistemology." [1] Plantinga claims that for the devout Christian, belief
in the existence of God is properly basic, that is, it doesn't need to be
proved. He claims that the founder of the Reformed Church, John Calvin,
held a similar view [2] Calvin was skeptical about the abilities of sinful
man to reason his way to the existence of God, but Catholic philosophers,
who have more faith in human reason, have also been impressed with
Plantinga's position.
The Catholic response to Plantinga is especially
interesting because in the Shi'i tradition there has been a similar
respect for the powers of reason. I suspect that in the long run, the
responses of Catholic and Muslim philosophers and theologians will be
similar in being diverse. [3] Some of the Catholic thinkers who have
researched the issue have defended a foundationalist epistemology, but the
majority have sought to find some common ground with the sort of view
defended by Plantinga. Another major figure who has defended the
rationality of religious belief without reliance on the traditional proofs
for the existence of God is William Alston [4].
Alston turns modem skepticism against atheism, claiming
that we have no more reason to trust sense experience than we have to
trust our religious intuitions. Since the beliefs based on sense
experience are considered to be rational, the same must be granted of
religious beliefs. Alston's work, like Plantinga's, has generated volumes
of criticism and responses, most of which focus on such epistemological
questions as the nature of knowledge and rationality, faith and belief, or
evidence and justification.
Other defenders of the Christian faith have argued that
the doubts raised by Hume (1711-1776) and Kant (1724-1804) about the
rationality of religious belief can be answered through an examination of
the standards of reasoning employed in the natural sciences today, which
are far from what Hume and Kant imagined. [5] In these discussions it is
the philosophy of science to which theologians must turn in order to
demonstrate to those who have faith in science but not in religion that
their bias is not dictated by their fidelity to the rational standards of
the empirical sciences.
In many of the discussions of the rationality of
religious faith, the concept of religious experience plays a pivotal role.
This is especially true of the writings of reformed epistemologists and of
William Alston, but of many others as well, including Gary Gutting, [6]
Richard Swinbume [7] and Jolu1 Hick. [8] The concept of religious
experience is one which is especially foreign to Islamic thought, for it
emerged in Europe and the United States in the writings of Friedrich
Schleiermacher and William fames as a result of the pressure religious
thinkers felt exerted by the legacies of Hume and Kant, romanticism and
empiricism.
Even the very term "religious experience" is difficult
to translate into Farsi or Arabic. The most commonly accepted translation
seems to be tajrobeh ye dini, but tajrobeh has the odour of the laboratory
and a sense of repetition which is absent from the Western concept. Other
terms which might be suggested each have their own problems, for example,
idrak, shenakht, and marifat each are appropriate only when some reality
is successfully apprehended, while the term "religious experience" is
supposed to be neutral as to whether it is illusory or veridical. It is to
be understood on analogy with scientific data, and just as the scientist
uses reason to judge which of competing hypotheses can best explain the
available empirical data, Gary Gutting and Richard Swinbume hold that the
hypothesis of God's existence can best explain the data of one's inner
religious feelings and intuitions.
Alston and Plantinga, on the other hand, claim that for
the believer, the proposition that God exists is more analogous to the
scientist's presumption that there is a physical world to be investigated
and about which empirical data convey information. They hold that
religious feeling and intuitions, including mystical visions, provide data
which convey information about God and His relation to the believer,
information which presupposes the existence of God. To say that according
to Alston and Plantings religious experience presupposes the existence of
God sloes not mean that for these philosophers God's existence is a mere
assumption, for they hold that the assumption is warranted, and that its
warrant can be demonstrated through a rational examination of the relation
between the assumption and the sorts of religious experiences that are
important to Christian life.
The focus on religious experience has led some
philosophers, such as William Proudfoot, [9] Steven Katz [10] and Nelson
Pike, [11] to an epistemological examination of the reports of the
mystics. They ask such questions as whether a meaningful distinction can
be made between what appears in the heart of the mystic and how he
interprets this appearance, whether mystical appearances must be analogous
to sensory appearances, whether mystics of various traditions all have the
same sorts of experiences, whether training determines the sort of
experience the mystic will have and whether the mystics themselves take
these experiences to have epistemological significance.
Here we find a number of issues about which the
philosopher and the theologian can be of mutual service. The theologian
provides the philosopher with the doctrinal setting in terms of which
