I
I have for many years been convinced that the theological enterprise cannot survive in our age without affording to its language robust truth conditions. Contemporary men and women presuppose what Jaegwon Kim once called Alexander's Dictum, that is, "to be is to have causal powers." We don't live in the 19th century where ideas themselves are thought to have a kind of reality; we don' t live in a time in which the conceptuality of God can remain important for vast numbers of people.
In our days, people are not generally searching to find some overarching concept or principle that grounds our rational thinking about life and existence, a notion that might somehow explain why human experience is given as it is, and accordingly, somehow ground the preciousness and value of that experience. While Madonna once sung of a "material girl," we generally acknowledge that, even in our churches, the cultural primacy of the physical reigns. The new atheism talks breathlessly of its discovery of a worldview without divine agency and causality -- as if such a view of things is in any way new. There is an assumption of the causal closure of the physical among many unwashed in the complexities of the actual relations holding among experience, theory and truth, among those who simply believe that the theories of the natural and social sciences simply state the way things are.
The idea is easy enough to grasp. Consider this structure <{x | x is a natural event}, C>. This is a structure consisting of the set of all natural events and a causal operator C relating members of this set of events to each other. This structure can satisfy these two assertions: 1) For all x, there is some x (or other) that causes x, and 2) For all x, if x is caused, then it is caused by some x (or other). What is precluded by this structure is that there is an x that can be caused by some event or agency that is outside the set {x | x is a natural event}, or that x causes some event or state of affairs outside the set {x | x is a natural event}. Simply put, there are no non-physical events causing physical events, nor no physical events causing non-physical events.
In addition to the causal closure of the physical assumed by many impressed with the results and progress of the natural and social sciences, it is also supposed, though not always as clearly, by the heralds of late nineteenth century radical criticism, that human beings are somehow alienated when they fail to come to terms with the physicality of their fate. Feuerbach, Freud, Marx, and Nietzsche, all, in their own way, argued that the illusion of the traditional God connects with the fundamental alienation of men and women. Marx, for instance, argued that human value and ideology is determined by underlying economic processes, and that the concept of God simply operates to block human beings from understanding the basic materiality of their existence. The God concept sanctions prevailing ideology and functions to keep in place value ideologies grounded in the unequal distribution of economic materiality.
Most people that continue to practice the Christian life believe that there is a God and that God is active in the world, i.e., they assume that "to be is to have causal powers" and that God has causal powers. They speak about the divine design of the universe, and about the power of prayer, particularly prayers of petition. They assume that there are things that have come about that would not have come about were there no God, and that there are events and processed that have not come about that would have come about were there no God.
The structure they assume is perhaps this: <{x | x is an event}, g, C, D> where there is a set of natural events and there is God, and that there is a binary natural causal operator C linking natural events to other natural events, and a binary divine causal operator D, linking natural events to divine agency, e.g., 'Dgp' means God divinely produces event p, with p being a member of the set of all natural events.
Metaphysics remains crucial in theology because claims about that beyond the physical are by nature metaphysical, and assuming God to be with causal powers means that something beyond the physical is bringing about something physical. This is clearly a metaphysical claim. To afford to theological language robust truth conditions in an age that assumes that to be is to have causal powers means that theology must be self-consciously and boldly metaphysical. There must be intellectual honesty here. Either theological language is broadly expressive of the self, its experiences and existential orientations and possibilities, or it is a rule-governed customary discourse by and through which human communities function and operate in the world, or it is a type of discourse that non-subjectively donates possible ways of being, or perhaps it is realist in its motivations; it states what its utterers believe is the ultimate constitution of things.
One needs to think through these issues very clearly. What are either the truth or assertibility conditions of theological language if one eschews realism? Are sentences in the language rightly assertible simply because my tribe (the theological tradition) has traditionally asserted them? But clearly the assertibility condition cannot simply be 'x is properly assertible' if and only if x has been asserted by normative theologians of tradition T over time t. Why? In order even to begin to evaluate that claim we must know the identity conditions of 'normative theologian' and 'tradition' and 'time'.
Are the assertions of theology then either descriptions of the self -- its experience and existential orientations -- or are they expressions of the self? Clearly, embracing the latter is to give up on truth, for it entails that assertibility must be understood broadly in terms of a "boo hurrah" theory of theological language. But the former alternative is not much better, for on its assumption the truth-makers of all theological language are not theological. On this view, models satisfying a set of theological assertions are not theological models at all because the sets, functions and relations of the models deal with the human. Since human dispositions, experiences, and orientations are operated upon by relations and functions, these functions and relations ultimately concern the human. The fact that such models can satisfy a class of theological statements, should give us pause about what it is we are doing when we provide theological models.
But there is another alternative, for we might hold that theological language somehow operates to disclose truth, that language, the Word, in its wording grants world and our place within it must itself be given a theological model. But it is to me unclear exactly how this model can be constructed coherently. Models or structures concern domains with functions and relations drawn upon those domains. But what can be the domain of the creative Word? Remember that revelation is not insight. Insight concerns an intellectual grasp of that which is already present. Revelation, on the other hand, is a daring grasp of what is not present, but which shows itself eschatologically. There is so much that can be said here, but I cannot in this brief essay say it. We must move to the central issue of the influence that model-theoretic arguments might have for one who in her theological semantics, is broadly speaking realist.
II
While I could only sketch briefly in the last section my prima facie reservations with non-realist construals of theological language, I will assume in this section that the reader is sufficiently persuaded by what I have said to give theological realism a try. Theological realism, simply put, is the view that God, and divine states of affairs generally, exist and have the particular contour they have apart from human awareness, perception, conception and language. Theological realism is thus a species of external realism, the view the world consists of entities, properties, events, relations and states of affairs which, broadly speaking, exists independently of our human perceptual and conceptual processing, or, more to the point, apart from our epistemic structures and capabilities. We might call this the independence thesis with regard to external realism.
I am convinced with many others that external realism makes two other important claims as well. The first is the correspondence thesis which claims that statements about the world are true if and only if they correspond in appropriate ways with how the world actually is. (Clarifying what 'correspondence' and 'appropriate' might mean here is notoriously difficult.) The other thesis of external realism one can be called the Cartesian thesis which states that although our theories about the world might meet all theoretical and operational constraints of an ideal theory, we could still be wholly wrong in our theory. Since the theory is made true (or false) by how the world is apart from us, it is always logically possible to be wrong about everything that we might say about it. Satisfying all theoretical and operational constraints does not a theory true make. Only the way the world is can make the theory true or false. The external realist thus seems committed to all of these: the independence thesis, the correspondence thesis, and the Cartesian thesis.
Hilary Putnam in his famous "Models and Reality" distinguishes among three positions in the philosophy of mathematics. These positions deal with both truth and reference in mathematics, and are thus, for him and for us, relevant to considerations of truth and reference with respect to external realism generally. These positions are:
- Platonism which, according to Putnam, "posits nonnatural mental powers of directly 'grasping' the forms" (Models and Reality, p. 24). This notion of grasping is primitive and cannot be further explicated. Those familiar with Husserl's description of phenomenological intentionality will understand this quickly.
- Verificationalism replaces the classical Tarskian notion of truth with verificational processes or proof. Mathematic assertions are not true in any deep sense, but they are assertible on the basis of other mathematical procedures. Verificationist proposals within the philosophy of science of the last century are connected to this.
- Moderate Realism, for Putnam, "seeks to preserve the centrality of the classical notions of truth and reference without postulating nonnatural powers" (Ibid.). The idea here is that mathematical assertions are true, but that their truth does not involve one in a deep process of grasping or understanding the structure of some Platonic heaven.
