作者：祈士真 Casey, John J.年份：1982
THE ANALYTIC PHILOSOPHER AND THE THEOLOGIAN:
A CONTEMPORARY DIALOGUE
I. INTRODUCTION
If we understand human experience in the broad sense of the conscious events that make up the individual life, then it is easy to see that throughout the history of the Christian tradition, people have considered themselves as coming in contact with the divine through various kinds of human experience. For instance physical experience has played a significant role in the lives of some. Saint Paul tells us he underwent a profound physical experience of God on the road to Damascus and his response was a sharp and immediate change in the direction of his life. Martin Luther underwent a more ordinary but no less physical experience when he was struck to the ground by lightning as a young student at the University of Erfurt and immediately vowed that if saved, he would become a monk. And emotional experience of the divine was a frequent claim of mystics as well as others. In fact in fundamental Protestantism today, this is a common experience of the born-again Christian. Finally, intellectual experience has provided a way to God whereby through reflection the reality of the divine becomes clear in our minds. The theology of the Christian tradition abounds in such experience and in the Catholic Church the master of this way has been considered to be Saint Thomas Aquinas.
Of the three kinds of the experience of the divine mentioned above, the most widely accepted has been the intellectual experience of God. This is not to say that other kinds of experience of the divine have been frowned upon. But physical and emotional experiences of God cannot be judged impartially as to their authenticity because they cannot be objectivised. Since they are intensely personal experiences, they cannot be shared at the experiential level. In short, they cannot be made scientific, that is couched in some kind of an objective framework of expression whereby others can also experience the same thing and by virtue of this experience accept or reject the conclusion. And since making the intellectual experience of God scientific is exactly what the great classical theologians have tried to do for centuries, it is not at all strange that this kind of experience of the divine should be the favored one. But in the recent history of thought, the traditional intellectual experience of God has shown itself to be less and less convincing to many people. The reason is that the framework within which one can objectify his reflective experience of any kind has been expanding and as it grows the traditional categroies of the intellectual experience of the divine receed further and further into the distance. The initial framework within which the divine was scientifically objectified was a framework of causes. God as the efficient and final cuase of everything seemed very close; in fact, his causality was seen as almost contiguous to us in space. But first the development of science extended our reflective framework through the discovery of the workings of natural laws which in turn pushed God off into the distance as efficient cause and ignored him as final cause. Thus the framework of science tended to make God spatially distant. Next history further expanded our framework of reflection while at the same time pushing the unique manifestation of God in the world in the person of Jesus Christ back into a specific temporal and cultural milieu. Thus the framework of history tended to make God in the world temporally distant. Finally, the development of philosophy seemed to give the final blow to any meaningful reflective experience of the divine.
Since Immanuel Kant synthesized epistemology into a dualistic principle of knowledge consisting of a priori categories of the mind and a posteriori elements of experience, the pre-reflective ground rules of knowledge lean heavily toward the assumption that any reflection that is not grounded in immediate conscious experience cannot be factual and therefore significant to the practical affairs of life. Nowhere is this idea more clearly expressed and defended that in the tradition of philosophy known as the analytic tradition. This way of thinking does not deny that people are having reflective experience nor does it deny that they are calling it religious experience. What it does question, however, is the connection between the reflective experience they are having and any factual religious content.
All of this, however, has not stopped the theologian from his search for an intellectual experience of God. By and large he accepts the post-Kantian pre-reflective ground rules of knowledge and thus espouses the claim that any meaningful thought about God must be grounded in immediate conscious experience. He also realizes that this acceptance is not enough and that he must submit himself to interrogation by the watchdog analytic philosopher who will determine whether he is talking sense or nonsense. This dialogue between the analytic philosopher and the theologian leads to some interesting conclusions and this paper will illustrate a few. It will look first at the way the analytic philosopher guards the field of meaningful experience. Then it will look at several theologians who claim that immediate conscious experience does lead to an experience of the divine. And finally, it will look at the dialogue as it develops. It must be noted here, however, that in this dialogue experience of the divine－which after all is very personal－must be objectivised into religious language. The dialogue, then, will concern whether immediate conscious experience－or common human experience, if you will－leads to meaningful religious language.
1)Cf. Ian Campbell, ‘Some Cultural Problems of the Galilean Period’ ATEISMO E DIALOGO Vol. XV, No. 3 (September, 1980) 149-156.
2)Cf. Peter Berger, A RUMOR OF ANGELS (Garden City: Anchor Books Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1970), pp. 1-27.