A
Note on Critical Realism
(pdf available here)
A large number
of criticisms have been made of my own particular version of
religious pluralism, the view outlined in the previous pieces;
and I have developed it in response to some of them. Because
of its implications for traditional Christian beliefs most of
the criticisms have come from the Christian right, the evangelical
and fundamentalist wing of the churches. But some, usually more
significant ones, have come from outside theology, voiced by
contemporary philosophers. I have replied specifically to the
latter in Dialogues in the Philosophy of Religion, and
have replied to both in The Rainbow of Faiths, where
both philosophical and theological criticisms are presented
and responded to.
But this is now
an additional note on the central epistemological issue. I have
suggested that the humanly thought and experienced God figures
and non-personal Absolutes are different manifestations formed
jointly by the universal presence of the Real and our different
human conceptual systems and associated spiritual practices.
In Kantian terms the Real is the noumenal reality-in-itself
of which we experience the phenomenal forms which our cognitive
equipment enables us to experience. Kant was analysing specifically
sense perception, but I want to apply the noumenon-phenomenon
distinction to religious awareness. This suggests that we cannot
directly experience the Real as it is in itself but only the
varying phenomenal manifestations of it to which its universal
presence, responded to by the spiritual dimension of our own
selves, comes to human consciousnesses in the varying ways formed
by the varying cultures of the earth.
This has led
some to ask whether this is a non-realist position according
to which religious people are worshipping figments of their
imagination? Since I have long argued against the religious
non-realism of such theologians as Don Cupitt and such philosophers
as D.Z. Phillips, the question is a pertinent one.
The answer involves
critical realism. The term is much used today in the philosophy
of science but comes originally from a group of epistemologists
in the USA in the last century working on the problems of sense
perception. Here it was a rejection of both the naïve realism
which held that we experience the world just as it is, and the
idealism which held that we experience only the contents of
our own consciousness. Critical realism was the view that we
do perceive a world that exists independently of our perceiving
it, but not it as it is in itself, unperceived, but always and
necessarily only as humanly perceived. Thus it is true both
that we are only directly aware of the appearances made possible
by our distinctive cognitive equipment and also that mediated
through these we are aware of the world beyond us. At the physical
level the process is determined by biological need and is accordingly
attuned only to a minute proportion of the information flowing
all the time through us and around us. (For example, out of
the electromagnetic spectrum extending from cosmic rays as short
as four ten-thousand-millionths of an inch to radio waves as
long as eighteen miles, our bodily receptors only respond to
those between sixteen and thirty-two millionths of an inch;
and we are likewise deaf to most acoustic stimuli and insensitive
to the great majority of chemical differences). And then the
physically selected aspects of the world are interpreted in
terms of our culturally formed conceptual systems and our intellectual,
aesthetic and valuational capacities, which can vary widely.
In its application
to the epistemology of religion, critical realism enables us
to understand how it can be that there are very different culturally
formed human awarenesses of a transcendent religious reality.
This is immune to the major problem that Kant’s position
provoked, namely how can the noumenal reality cause its
phenomenal appearances when causation is itself a feature of
the phenomenal world? This problem does not arise in the religious
case as understood by the pluralistic hypothesis. For it is
part of this religious ‘big picture’, presented by
the mystics of all traditions, that there is a spiritual dimension
to our own nature which is continuous with the spiritual nature
of the universe as a whole. The only causation involved is thus
at the human end, in our thinning of the ego barrier between
the conscious self and our deeper spiritual nature. And critical
realism explains how it is that the resulting religious awareness
can take such a range of differing forms within human consciousness.
All this is developed
much more fully in An Interpretation of Religion, and
less technically in The Fifth Dimension.
© John Hick, 2001.
