Critical Realism and Christianity
Why No Christian Should be a Critical Realist
Summary
By surveying some of the Christian proponents of Critical Realism, this book shows how it conflicts with and subverts orthodox Christian theology and hermeneutics. It also shows how Critical Realism undermines Christian apologetics by blunting the possibility of deciding between the claims of conflicting and contradictory theologies and beliefs. This book is an effort to alert Christian authors to the dangers of adopting Critical Realism as a part of a Christian worldview. It will be of interest to all those seeking to understand the impact of Critical Realism on Christian theology and hermeneutics.
Excerpt
Table Of Contents
- Cover
- Title
- Copyright
- About the author
- About the book
- This eBook can be cited
- CONTENTS
- List of Figures
- Abbreviations
- Chapter1 Introduction
- Chapter2 Emergence
- Chapter3 Ontology, Epistemology, and Monovalence
- Chapter4 Critical Realism and Relativism
- Chapter5 Refuting the Refutation of Anti-Relativism
- Chapter6 Critical Realism and God
- Chapter7 Why No Christian Should Be a Critical Realist
- Index
· 1 ·
INTRODUCTION
What Is Critical Realism?1
Critical Realism (CR) is quickly becoming the go-to epistemological position among Christian authors. According to Thorsten Moritz, “In recent years critical realism has made significant inroads in the theological interpretation of Scripture (Meyer; Wright).”2 N. T. Wright is an influential New Testament academic, former bishop of Durham, and senior research fellow at Wycliffe Hall at the University of Oxford until his retirement in 2019. In the first volume of his popular three volume series on the New Testament,3 Wright argues for CR as an essential aspect of his hermeneutic methodology. In his book, The Old Testament and God, Craig Bartholomew, director of the Kirby Laing Centre for Public Theology and formerly senior research fellow at the University of Gloucestershire, sets forth CR as his methodological approach. Bartholomew declares, “In my view, critical realism has great potential for OT studies, both in helping us to make sense of the way we have been making sense of the OT and in finding fresh ways forward for making sense of the OT.”4
The present rise of interest in and adoption of CR in biblical studies traces back to Roy Bhaskar (1944–2014), an English philosopher of science who is usually cast in the role of the “father of modern critical realism.”5 An introduction to Bhaskar’s CR is set forth in the book, Critical Realism: Essential Readings: “Critical realism is a movement in philosophy and the human sciences and cognate practices most closely associated with—in the sense of identified with or emanating from—though by no means restricted to—the work of Roy Bhaskar.”6 However, Bhaskar was not the founder of Critical Realism. Roy Wood Sellars (1880–1973), a Canadian-born American philosopher, was the author of the book, Critical Realism,7 published in 1916, and, in 1920, Drake Durant, Arthur O. Lovejoy, James Bissett Pratt, Arthur K. Rogers, George Santayana, Roy Wood Sellars, and C. A. Strong contributed to the book titled, Essays in Critical Realism.8 Some followers of Bhaskar’s CR claim that Karl Marx is best understood as a proto-Critical Realist.
According to Andrew Wright,
Bhaskar’s own philosophical development has passed through three phases: (1) critical realism was primarily concerned with the ontology and epistemology of the natural and social sciences; (2) dialectical critical realism built on critical realism to address issues of human emancipation via a critical conversation with the Western dialectical tradition; and (3) the philosophy of metareality, the result of Bhaskar’s so-called “spiritual turn”, addressed issues of the ultimate nature of reality and the meaning and purpose of life.9
The Dictionary of Critical Realism (DOCR) describes CR as,
A movement in philosophy, social theory and cognate practices that seeks to underlabour for science and other ways of knowing in order to promote the cause of truth and freedom, hence the transformation of social structures and other constraints that impede that cause and their replacement with wanted and needed ones, or emancipation. It is in no way a predominantly personal vision; it is rather, in broad outline, the dialectically necessary worldview supervenient, by processes of immanent critique, on the philosophical discourse of modernity, pinpointing its weaknesses, embracing its strengths, and drawing on the great pre-modern discourses to adumbrate an outlook fitting for a sustainable social order of free flourishing.10
Bhaskar provided a brief account of the development of CR:
There are five stages, as I understand it, in the development of critical realism. It started out as a philosophy of science, a critique of positivism but also of neo-Kantianism and radical philosophers of science like Kuhn and Feyerabend who said many shocking things which have also been resumed in postmodernist discourse today. That I call transcendental realism. Then it moved on to critical naturalism and concerned itself with the dispute between naturalists and anti-naturalists, between positivism and hermeneutics, and it tried to resolve this dispute. Basically it was oriented against the dualisms that beset social theory in the mid- to late 1970s and still to a large extent do today. . . . The third stage in critical realism broke down one particular dichotomy, characteristic of the dualisms of social science, which was very popular and insistent particularly in western thought: that one could not move from a factual statement or any set of factual statements to a value judgement. This prohibition was called Hume’s law, and I argued that one could move from facts to values. And I did this through what I called the theory of explanatory critique. This then provided the lynchpin by means of which I moved from a concern with science to a concern with questions of values and human freedom and emancipation. The fourth stage of the development was a dialectical one in which I developed a system which I called dialectical critical realism, which went into dialectical notions such as absence, totality, negativity and so on. In the latest stage of my work I have gone on to questions of the convergence of east and west liberatory thought around what could be loosely called a spiritual dimension. This I have called transcendental dialectical critical realism.11
Bhaskar’s “liberatory thought,” his enlightenment, which he refers to as “universal self-realisation,”12 is the conviction that “man is God,”13 in which he espouses the “ideas of reincarnation, karma and moksha or liberation.”14
Bhaskar gives the following points concerning CR:
I begin by introducing some distinctive features of the critical realist approach to philosophy (section 1.1). These are: (i) its intent to philosophically underlabour for science and practices oriented to human well-being; (ii) its seriousness, that is, commitment to the unity of theory and practice; (iii) its method of immanent critique; (iv) its realism about philosophy, namely, its conception of its goal as the elucidation of the normally unreflected presuppositions of social practices of various kinds and its commitment to transcendental argument (understood as a species of retroduction); (v) its aim of enhanced reflexivity and/or transformed practice; (vi) its endorsement of the hermetic principle, that it should be applicable to and verifiable by everyone and in the context of everyday life; and (vii) its criticality and commitment to dispositional realism.15
Some Basic Principles of Critical Realism
Andrew Wright identifies ontological realism, epistemic relativism, and judgmental rationality as the three core philosophical principles of Bhaskar’s CR. This section will examine the basic principles of CR—Transcendental Methodology, Transitive and Intransitive Dimensions, The Stratification of Nature, Epistemic Fallacy, and Emergence. The following chapter will probe CR’s Ontology, Epistemology, theory of Truth, and Bhaskar’s critique of Monovalence.
Transcendental Methodology
Bhaskar’s form of CR began as a philosophy of science under the designation Transcendental Realism. This designation was predicated on Bhaskar’s basic methodology, a transcendental argument. The transcendental argument originated with Immanuel Kant. A transcendental argument is one in which the first premise asserts a state of affairs, X, that is taken to be uncontroversial. It then argues that, for the state of affairs, X, to be the case, then something else, Y, must be the case. It concludes with the assertion that therefore Y must be the case:
- Premise 1: X is a claim that is accepted to be the case.
- Premise 2: X could not be the case unless Y is the case.
- Therefore: Y must be the case.
As a methodology, a transcendental argument asks the question, what must be the case given X? As Bhaskar puts it, “. . . transcendental realism uses Kantian means, employing in particular transcendental arguments. Transcendental arguments ask what the world must be like for such-and-such a human activity to be possible.”16 An observation by Étienne Gilson is pertinent here: “The whole question here is whether it is possible to overcome Kantian agnosticism ‘starting from its own principles.’ To this we must answer: no, for Kantian agnosticism is inscribed within the principles from which it flows, which is precisely why they are its principles.”17 In other words, the principles with which any investigation begins will determine its outcome. In this case, by beginning with Kant, Bhaskar must inevitably end up with some form of Kantianism.
Consider the example given by Bhaskar:
Philosophy, then, operates by the use of pure reason. But not by the use of pure reason alone. For it exercises that reason always on the basis of prior conceptualizations of historical practice, of some more or less determinate social form.
Now philosophy, as so conceived, can tell us that it is a condition of the possibility of scientific activities φ and ψ that the world is stratified and differentiated, X and Y. But it cannot tell us what structures the world contains or how they differ. These are entirely matters for substantive scientific investigation. Scientific activities are contingent, historically transient affairs. And it is contingent that the world is as described in “X”, “Y”, and “Z”. But given φi, X must be the case. A demonstration, or “deduction”, of this necessity (which may be termed “transcendental”) will normally consist of two parts: a straightforward “positive” part, in which it is shown how X makes φ intelligible; and a complementary “negative” part (in general only analytically separable from the positive part), in which it is shown how absurd, incoherent, counter-intuitive or counterfactual results flow from the failure to sustain the concept of X,13 typically expressed in the form of one or more theories that explicitly or implicitly deny the activity as conceptualized in “φi”.18
But there is a serious problem with this reasoning, and because the transcendental argument is the foundation of Bhaskar’s reasoning project, it is crucial to consider this problem. Bhaskar claims, “But given φi, X must be the case.” But the question is, is φi the case? To adapt an observation made by Barry Stroud, “It is not a sufficient refutation of the skeptic who doubts that φi to present him only with a conditional to the effect that if not-φi we couldn’t possibly do φ and ψ. What is in question is whether we ever ‘validly’ or ‘justifiably’ do φ and ψ.”19 The strength of the transcendental argument rests on the truth of φi. But the truth of φi can itself be questioned. In fact, using a transcendental argument, philosophy as Bhaskar conceives it cannot tell us that the world is stratified and differentiated unless the prior conceptualization of historical practice can be demonstrated to be the case. But the transcendental argument does not justify these prior conceptions, but rather starts by assuming these. And, to employ another transcendental argument to justify these prior conceptions will lead to the same outcome since a transcendental argument must assume its first premise. Not to sustain the concept of X would be absurd, incoherent, counter-intuitive, or counterfactual only if φi has been proven to be the case, which it has not. And the prior conceptions cannot be verified by another transcendental argument since this would issue in an infinite regress. Additionally, that X may make φ intelligible does not show that φ is the case. It is an unjustified leap to conclude that because φ is intelligible that it is the case in reality. This is the very point that must be demonstrated. The existence of a concept does not demonstrate existence in extra-mental reality. This would be a case of confusing the rational with the real.
Details
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- X, 234
- Publication Year
- 2025
- ISBN (PDF)
- 9781636677897
- ISBN (ePUB)
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- DOI
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