Note first that negative theology is not a kind of atheism, nor
even agnosticism as that is usually understood.
The negative theologian does not deny that God exists, nor even,
necessarily, that we can know that God exists.
The claim is rather that God’s essence
or nature (as opposed to his existence) is opaque to us, so that a sound
theology must characterize it mostly or entirely in negative terms.
Maimonides is a famous advocate of this approach. Another is Aquinas, though the apophatic
element of his theology, important as it is, is sometimes overstated. As Aquinas says in De Potentia:
Moreover the idea of negation is
always based on an affirmation: as evinced by the fact that every negative
proposition is proved by an affirmative: wherefore unless the human mind knew
something positively about God, it would be unable to deny anything about him. And it would know nothing if nothing that it
affirmed about God were positively verified about him. (Question VII, Article
5)
All the same, Aquinas emphasizes that because of the
dependence of human cognition on the senses, our positive knowledge cannot
extend as far as the divine essence. We
can say that God is not caused, not changing, not in time, not
material, and so on, but lack the capacity for much in the way of a positive
characterization.
Now, Popper famously presents his falsificationist philosophy
of science as a response to Hume’s problem of induction. The Humean, on the basis of his empiricist
premises, denies that we can be rationally justified in inferring universal
laws from observation of particular cases.
Popper agrees with this, but says that it doesn’t matter because science
is not really concerned with justifying anything in the first place, but rather
with falsifying claims. We can know what has been proved false, but can never prove any scientific
claim true. Corroborated scientific
theories are those which have not yet
been proven false, but at some point they too are bound to be falsified and
replaced by other (only tentatively accepted) theories which will themselves eventually
be falsified.
Popper’s
confinement of certain scientific knowledge to negative claims about the
natural world is analogous to the apophatic theologian’s confinement of
theological knowledge to negative claims about the divine nature. It has a similar source in the idea that
knowledge must be grounded in experience (where the Humean has a much thinner
conception of “experience” than an Aristotle or Aquinas, which is why Humeans
are bound to think we can know much less about even the natural world than Aristotle
or Aquinas did). Popper also rejects
essentialism, so that he thinks we cannot know the essences of natural phenomena
(in a way that is analogous to how Aquinas, though an essentialist, thinks we
cannot strictly know the divine
essence).
Yet Popper
is a realist and an objectivist. He does
not deny the reality of the natural world or that our cognitive faculties are
capable of making objectively true judgments about it. It’s just that our knowledge of it is largely
negative. This is analogous to how the
apophatic theologian does not deny that God exists or that we can know that he
does, but only that we can have much in the way of positive knowledge of his
nature.
Is there some
reason for these parallels between
Popper’s philosophy of science and negative theology? Or are they merely coincidental? I’m inclined to say that they are not
entirely coincidental, though not because either had any direct effect on the
other. Rather, as I have indicated,
their similarities are perhaps a result of a common foundation in empiricism
(or at least, such a foundation is to be found in the Aristotelian style of negative
theology one sees in a thinker like Aquinas).
Though, an important difference between the views also has the same
foundation.
What I mean
is this. Aquinas’s negative theology is
grounded in his Aristotelian brand of empiricism. Because the empirical world is the natural subject
matter of human cognition, we can’t form much in the way of a positive conception
of what lies beyond it. All the same,
the Aristotelian brand of empiricism
has a much more ambitious conception of what the senses can reveal about the
natural world than modern, post-Lockean
empiricism does. It allows, for example,
that the intellect can abstract the essences of physical things of a certain
kind from observations of particular instances of that kind. This makes possible a more robust positive knowledge
of the natural world than is possible on Popper’s account.
Popper
himself was certainly critical of certain aspects of modern empiricism, but he
nevertheless worked within its broad, very modest conception (and, from the
Aristotelian point of view, excessively modest conception) of what experience
could reveal about nature. Hence, where
the Aristotelian negative theologian would say that we can have little or no
positive knowledge of the divine essence but can have such knowledge about the natural
world, Popper denies we can have it even about the natural world. In both cases the view is (or at least
sometimes is, in the case of negative theology) grounded in a view about the
limits of empirically grounded knowledge, but in Popper’s case the limits are
more severe.
Related posts:
Tugwell
on St. Albert on negative theology
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