Religious and epistemological mysteries

Abstract

In Faith After Foundationalism D.Z. Phillips quotes approvingly a passage that O.K. Bouwsma uses to sum up religious epistemology.1 Bouwsma likens those of us who are worried about the knowledge of transcendent things to people who are trapped in a room where they push continually against various closed doors, hoping to open them to what lies outside. The doors, however, are all dummy doors; they never open and one never catches a glimpse of the beyond. Still, the people inside them believe that these doors might open, and they cling to the hope of seeing out. The analogy is remarkably apt. Most believers assume that there is something "outside" the reach of religious language, some transcendent object to which it refers and which gives it its sense. At the same time, they say that knowledge of this object is impossible. After all, as the argument goes, we are natural beings with manifold limitations in our powers of knowing; and when we try to grasp transcendent things, we press our means of knowing beyond their scope. Our language is made for describing objects within the world, whereas the central mystery of theistic religion lies entirely beyond the "room" in which this language applies. If only we could escape our epistemological limitations and pass through the doors that confine us, then we might grasp what we cannot now even describe. The mystery would then dissolve, for as St. Paul says, we might see God "face to face" (I Cor. 13:12). Apparently Bouwsma endorsed the idea that there are things outside the prison-house of human knowing. For he mentions another door in this enclosure that can only be opened from the outside i.e., by way of revelation. But Phillips clearly does not accept the analogy in this sense. No, for him the expectation that we might have knowledge of transcendent things is illusory, and the claim that God is a mystery that lies beyond our understanding has nothing to do with our inability to see what lies beyond this life. It has nothing to do, that is, with our lack of metaphysical knowledge, or with our grasp of what Immanuel Kant called "things in themselves". In what follows, I want to explain, largely in my own words, the rejection of metaphysics that underlies Phillips's account. God, he suggests, is a mystery, but this is not because the hope of knowing him of seeing beyond the walls of our human limitations has yet to be realized. God is not an object