The ways of knowing
Greeley, Andrew M.
"Denziger-theology" of the old teaching manuals didn't work. Its reverse side --an anti-Denziger theology of new "shocking" conclusions --won't work any better. It is, to repeat, all more...
...If you do not trust the members of the liberal consensus of our own day on all this, then consider liberals of earlier days --for example, Thomas Aquinas or John Henry Newman...
...For myself, I would rather stay with all the real Catholics --like Geraldine Ferraro and Thomas Sheehan...
...It is Commonweal: 432...
...If they were honest with themselves, Kiing and the other members of the consensus would be able to say "As far as one can know, when you're dead, you're dead --and the same holds for Jesus, Rather than hoping him out of the tomb, leave him there and try to live the kind of life that got him to his grave" a life, according to Professor Sheehan, of moral, social, and political concerns...
...Of course, there is a story of ultimate reality implicit in Professor Sheehan's choice as there is in the choice of every agnostic...
...However the leap of faith, one way or another, is not irrational or superstitious or idiotic simply because it can neither be constrained nor refuted by critical analysis...
...The last two deserve further comment...
...If one ac- cepts this method, then the only alternative to fundamentalism is agnosticism...
...If you demand "proofs," then return to Ludwig Ott --or get yourself on Phyllis Schlaf- ly's mailing list...
...Stated thus baldly one wonders how Professor Sheehan can possibly propound it...
...One must wonder why...
...The issue finally in any discussion of religion is not the historical accuracy of a given story, but whether that which the story offers as a model of ultimate reality is true...
...Other than Professor Sheehan's own personal proclivities, why not choose an epicurean or a stoic model...
...Cognitive psychologists, researchers in artificial intelligence, post-stmcturalist students of human development, and cultural an- thropologists have developed converging approaches to the issues of knowing and language which are pertinent to the question of religious knowledge and religious language...
...It is, to repeat, all more complicated than that...
...This is an extremely important question --maybe the only important question...
...My principal effort in this commentary will be on the second proposition...
...A model is provisionally valid to human intelligence (if not to philosophers) when it fits the data of experience well enough to help one to direct one's actions in the necessary encounter with further experience -- empiricism and pragmatism with a vengeance...
...I hope to show that social science theoriz- ing today about the nature of knowing does not at all demand a choice between agnosticism (of the liberal political variety) and fundamentalism...
...I must emphasize here that social science does not address itself to the epistemological worth of such "model fitting" or"story telling" knowledge...
...When both are used, as they are by Professor Sheehan, as alternatives, they violate the rules of the language/model fitting game...
...Does a religious story which claims that love stronger than death is what the universe is about fit the data better than any other story...
...Science is that network of stories (images, pictures, models) which makes possible a critical, self-reflective, and self-conscious analysis of observable phenomena...
...As a consumer rather than a producer of theology, I will be content with the observation that the extremely limited nature of Pro- fessor Sheehan's thinking is indicated by the fact that he either does not know or does not report that the first question FATHER ANDREW M. GREELEY, currently a professor of sociology at the University of Arizona, is Senior Study Director of the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago...
...Those Catholics who think Marx is the only philosopher of the last two centuries might call this "model fitting" praxis...
...The most accessible and perhaps the most elegant of these neo-Jamesians is the cultural anthropologist Clifford Geertz...
...in the New York Review of Books is in fact a description of what Sbeehan calls the "liberal consen- sus" among Catholic theologians...
...Why does he play the same old game of science refuting religion...
...Thus Professor Sheehan, dismissing myths in a fashion which suggests he is not paying attention to anything written on the subject since Bultmann, must have his own story, his own myth, to find meaning for life: we should imitate the secular social and political concerns of Jesus --but not appar- ently listen to the stories Jesus told about his heavenly father, models for fitting in the search for an ultimate explanation of reality...
...Moreover, even those who in the name of science reject religious stories as fundamentalistic, must necessarily make up their own religious stories in order to have models to fit reality...
...Moreover, his assumption is at odds with the thinking of many of the social scientists who are on the leading edge of the search for explanations of how we humans know...
...Science cannot disprove the existence of Good in the cosmos and fundamentalism cannot prove scientifically the presence of Good in it either...
...We carry around in our brains explanatory "pictures" of the world (models, symbols...
...Or if he does, then why does he leave such materials out of his article...
...We fit our models (much as a mathematical sociologist does in analyzing data) to our experience, perhaps refine them in the light of the experience, and then use them tentatively as an explanation and a template --explanation in that they name .9the experience and template in that they are pragmatic patterns for our further action...
...There are better candidates for Catholic distinctiveness --some examples are a sense of trust in tradition, a sense of community, a sense of sacramentality, and a sense of a crucial role for "reason" in "faith...
...Like all too many philosophers and theologians (particularly on Catholic faculties), Professor Sheehan's social science is a generation too old...
...The question again it is embarrassing to have to say it at this late date -- is not the accuracy of a given account of the resurrection of Jesus in a gospel story, but whether the God whom Jesus preached --a God whose love is stronger than death -- is in fact a useful model to fit the data of experience...
...It cannot be answered by scientific theology nor can it be proved by rational argument, because religious models are not susceptible to that kind of treatment (or they wouldn't be religious, for by definition the ultimate cannot be rationally or scientifically considered...
...Two points follow: critical analysis (science) is a model- fitting exercise that does not and cannot of its very nature organize those experiences which create perplexity about ul- timate reality...
...Religion is that set of symbols which uniquely claims to explain the ultimate meaning of life...
...I shall leave to theologians the question of whether Profes- sor Sheehan's summary of their consensus is adequate...
...However much it pretends to be different from and superior to other culture systems, it nonetheless de facto works in the same way as the other systems: it fits its own stories to experiential reality and sees whether they work with regard to the phenomena it studies (a point Polanyi made a quarter of a century ago...
...Presum- ably most of those who are involved in the serious study of religion know them already...
...about the distinctiveness of Catholic teachings --has been answered by what should be recognized as the Summa of the "liberal consensus," David Tracy's The Analogical Imagina- tion...
...Everyone, in other words, has a religion, a model of ultimate reality which is fit to the data of experience.The agnostic's presumed advantage is that he doesn't have to make his model explicit and the rest of us must...
...The .consensus among scholars in the disciplines I have mentioned can be simplified as follows: we humans know by naming...
...We understand by imposing meaning on the conflictlO August 1984:431 ing phenomena of our existence...
...It seems fair tO summarize Sheehan's critique of this consensus in two propositions: 1. The critical analysis (scientific method) of the "liberal" theologians has left little that is distinctively Catholic: "One can ask what its teachings have to offer that cannot be found outside of the scope of its experience and discourse...
...We use our powers of lan- guage to order and refine our experience through a process of "model fitting...
...I T IS EMBARRASSING to have to repeat these materials about language games, different levels of model fitting, and the inevitability of an ultimate story (a religious model...
...We test the valid- ity of these pictures by using them to organize our experiences...
...He might not like the term, since he thinks of himself, I suspect, as a neo-Weberian...
...Catholicism is too rich and pluralistic a tradition to be reduced to such unlikely candidates for distinctiveness as refusal to accept historico-critical methods or a refusal to abandon a notion of rationality which involves a neo-Scholastic concept of proof which does not prove anything...
...Among the culture systems are ideology, common sense, art, law, science, and religion...
...Surely there are enough philosophers and theologians who have effectively refuted such a dichotomy --Ricoeur, Polanyi, Ramsey, Barbour, as well as Tracy, Lonergan, and Rahner within the Catholic tradition...
...NEITHER FUHDAMENTALISM NOR AGNOSTICISM The ways of knowing ANDREW M. GREELEY T HOMAS SHEEHAN'S LONG REVIEW of Hans Kiing's Eter-nal Life...
...It merely says that such is the nature of human knowing as best we understand it today...
...His books include The New Agenda, American Catholic: A Social Portrait, The Making of the Popes, and several best-selling works officaon...
...Since ultimate reality, in his perspective, is unknow- able, why opt for one posture towards life in preference to another...
...Presumably Michael Polanyi and Paul Ricoeur provide the epistemological foundation that we need...
...T HE UNDERLYING assumption of Professor Sheehan's com- mentary seems to be that there is but one valid way of knowing, the scientific method (critical analysis...
...2. The liberal consensus has not been sufficiently hard- headed to see that there is no middle ground between fun- damentalism and secular agnosticism...
...The Catholic tradition is much too multifaceted and polyvalent to be demolished by a handful of theologians, however skilled, precisely because, as Father Tracy demon- strates, its experience of the presence of God (radically differ- ent from that of the other three Yahwistic religions --Islam, Judaism, and Protestantism), its images and symbols of God, and its stories which recount the experience and explicate the symbols are unique...
...I shall return to this point at the end of my commentary...
...Neither fundamentalist literalism nor agnostic secularism is an appropriate criterion for religious model fitting...
...Our knowledge consists of the endless fitting of these culture systems to empirical phenomena by shaping our behavior in accord with our network of pictures and modifying them when they don't fit too well...
...In Geertz's perspective, we humans organize, respond to, and shape reality through sets of "culture systems," networks of symbols (models, pictures, stories) which are appropriate to different forms of our experience...
...Tom Sheehan, won't you please come home...
...Religion and science are different symbol test- ing games and use different language (stories) with different rules...
...Yet apparently Professor Sheehan does not...
...Those who have read a bit further would call it pragmatism and imagine the glee of the shade of William James as the social science world (whose gleaming white marble building on the Harvard campus does, after all, bear his name) rediscovers his genius (often without due credit...
Vol. 111 • August 1984 • No. 14
