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Theology, Science, and Technology: Framing an Encounter in Light of Lonergan and Ricœur*
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 May 2015
Abstract
This article proposes a theological approach to the encounter between theology and the world of science and technology. A suitable locus for encounter is the different partners' shared commitment to the desire to understand. I draw on the work of both Bernard Lonergan and Paul Ricœur to describe understanding as the enactment of a pattern of cognitional operations. However, the theoretical mode of understanding proper to science is distinct from the practical mode of understanding proper to technology. Lonergan's elaboration of the “intellectual” pattern of operations is drawn on to enhance an encounter with science, while Ricœur's elaboration of the “action” pattern is drawn on to enhance an encounter with technology.
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Footnotes
*
I wish to dedicate this article to the memory of William R. Stoeger, SJ (1943–2014), leader and mentor in the dialogue between modern science and theology. This article had its origins in a talk delivered at the Institut Thomas More/Thomas More Institute in Montréal in 2012.
References
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5 Stoeger, “Contemporary Cosmology,” 236–38.
6 Ibid., 236.
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9 This is why Lonergan began his reflection on insight with five chapters on how modern empirical sciences acquire understanding. See Lonergan, Bernard, Insight: A Study of Human Understanding, vol. 3 of Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan, ed. Crowe, Frederick E. and Doran, Robert M. (Toronto, Buffalo, London: University of Toronto Press, 1992).Google Scholar
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13 Ormerod, “Bernard Lonergan and the Recovery,” 977: “Insight grasps . . . a unity, identity, whole in data.” He cites Lonergan, Insight, 271.
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22 Ricœur, “Existence and Hermeneutics,” 9.
23 Ricœur, “The Task of Hermeneutics,” 56.
24 Ricœur, “Existence and Hermeneutics,” 11.
25 Ricœur, Time and Narrative, 1:91. He relates his comment on this page to his specification of these operations as an “arc of operations” (ibid., 1:53).
26 Ricœur, Time and Narrative, 3:157–79.
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28 Readers of Lonergan will draw attention to four cognitional operations, the fourth being decision. I suggest that this operation has to be opened up. The movement from the third to the fourth cognitional operation may be made too quickly. Decision (to act in this way) does not draw simply on a judgment of fact but also on a judgment of value. As I shall maintain below, identifying the distinction between two distinct kinds of judgment is critical.
29 Van den Hengel, “Science of Action,” 239–40.
30 Stoeger, William R., “God, Physics and the Big Bang,” in The Cambridge Companion to Science and Religion, ed. Harrison, Peter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 173–89.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
31 Lonergan, Method, xi.
32 Lonergan refers to common ground in his stated aims of Insight. “My aim was neither to advance mathematics nor to contribute to any of the specialized branches of science but to seek a common ground on which men [and women] of intelligence might meet” (Insight, 7).
33 This idea is not new. See, for example, Stoeger, “Contemporary Cosmology”; Ladrière, “Role of Philosophy.”
34 On the virtues arising from dialogue between science and religion, see Ladrière, “Role of Philosophy,” 218–19.
35 On this, see also Ormerod, “Bernard Lonergan and the Recovery,” 962–63.
36 For an account of the diverse disciplines, see Ladrière, “Science, Philosophy, and Faith.”
37 Flanagan, Quest for Self-Knowledge, 157–58.
38 Ibid., 197. The integral structured pattern of these questions has been adopted by Joseph Flanagan in presenting an account of metaphysics and an account of ethics. Following Flanagan's strategy, I am adopting this same pattern of questions as a guide to developing the main lines of discussion for both illustrations in this article.
39 “Science assumes the intelligibility of the world, that it is open to our rational inquiry” (Polkinghorne, Science and Creation, 19); “There is a congruence between our minds and the universe, between the rationality experienced within and the rationality experienced without” (ibid., 20–21). See also Ormerod, “Bernard Lonergan and the Recovery,” 975.
40 Ladrière, Jean, “La théologie et le langage de l'interprétation,” in L'articulation du sens II: Les langages de la foi (Paris: Cerf, 1984), 109–34Google Scholar, at 122.
41 Ormerod, “Bernard Lonergan and the Recovery,” 980.
42 Lonergan, Method, 125–26.
43 Kelly, Anthony, The Trinity of Love: A Theology of the Christian God (Wilmington, DE: Michael Glazier, 1989)Google Scholar, 16.
44 Lonergan, Method, 116.
45 Ibid., 102–3.
46 Flanagan, Quest for Self-Knowledge, 198, 206.
47 Ibid., 197, 227.
48 Ibid., 197.
49 Flanagan uses the term “moral epistemology” (Quest for Self-Knowledge, 208).
50 “We have distinguished different patterns of knowing and, therefore, different patterns of judging” (Flanagan, Quest for Self-Knowledge, 207); “Judgments of value, then, presuppose judgments of fact” (ibid., 199). On Lonergan's clear distinction between judgments of fact and judgments of value, see Lonergan, Method, 37.
51 Flanagan draws attention to the shift that has taken place in Lonergan's work between a faculty psychology approach in ethics and one grounded in intentionality analysis. The first relied on a metaphysics of the soul; the latter relies on the “choosing subject.” See Flanagan, Quest for Self-Knowledge, 198.
52 Lonergan, Method, 19; Lonergan, Insight, 269.
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56 Doran, Robert M., The Trinity in History: A Theology of the Divine Missions, vol. 1, Missions and Processions (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012), 147–48Google Scholar; see also 308–9.
57 Joseph Cassidy, “Extending Bernard Lonergan's Ethics: Parallels between the Structures of Cognition and Evaluation” (PhD diss., University of Ottawa, 1996).
58 Cassidy names the operators “intentional desires, projecting possible futures, judging values” (“Extending Bernard Lonergan's Ethics,” 43).
59 van den Hengel, John, “Paul Ricœur's Oneself as Another and Practical Theology,” Theological Studies 55 (1994): 458–80.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
60 Ladrière, The Challenge Presented to Cultures. See also Flanagan, Quest for Self-Knowledge, 218: “There is an important distinction between practical and theoretical patterns of knowing, but there is also a complementarity.”
61 Franklin, Ursula M., The Real World of Technology, rev. ed. (Toronto: Anansi, 1999)Google Scholar, 6.
62 Ibid.
63 Lonergan's chapter “Common Sense as Object” is regularly punctuated with references to the complex and interactive pattern of technology-economics-politics. “As technology evokes the economy, so the economy evokes the polity” (Lonergan, Insight, 234).
64 Lonergan, Insight, 234. Lonergan has also argued that the contemporary form of technology praxis is such that we have come to realize how human action can actually change our experience of the world.
65 Mumford, Lewis, Technics and Civilization (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1963).Google Scholar
66 Gaudium et Spes, §31: “We may rightly judge that the future of humanity is in the hands of those who can hand on to posterity grounds for living and hoping” (Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, 2:1088).
67 Whelan, Redeeming History, 206.
68 Ibid., 205, 19. See also Ladrière, The Challenge Presented to Cultures; Heidegger, Martin, “The Question Concerning Technology,” in Basic Writings from “Being and Time” (1927) to “The Task of Thinking” (1994), rev. ed. (San Francisco: Harper San Francisco, 1993), 311–41Google Scholar; Borgmann, Albert and Mitcham, Carl, “The Question of Heidegger and Technology: A Critical Review of the Literature,” Philosophy Today 31, no. 2 (1987): 99–194.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
69 Lonergan, Method, 116.
70 Ormerod, “Bernard Lonergan and the Recovery,” 973–74.
71 Lonergan, Method, 102–3. On the whole universe as “terminal value,” ibid., 116.
72 Flanagan, Quest for Self-Knowledge, 199. “Judgments of value . . . reveal a further reality,” ibid., 200.
73 With respect to the significance of the shift from a deictic mode to a wider mode of meaning regarding technology, see Stoeger, William R., “Cultural Cosmology and the Impact of the Natural Sciences on Philosophy and Culture,” in The Ends of the World and the Ends of God: Science and Theology on Eschatology, ed. Polkinghorne, John and Welker, Michael (Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press International, 2000), 65–77Google Scholar, at 70–71. Stoeger refers to the significance of Borgmann, Albert, Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984).Google Scholar
74 Ricœur, Time and Narrative, 1:91 (emphasis in the original).
75 For a detailed account of what follows, see Ricœur, Time and Narrative, 1:52–76.
76 John van den Hengel has insisted on the importance of not privileging event in Ricœur's understanding of action. Action implies a “who”; that is, action ascribes motives, desires, an intention. The focus falls more on the subject who acts than on the event as such. See Van den Hengel, “Science of Action,” 241.
77 Ricœur, Time and Narrative, 1:54.
78 Ibid., 1:55.
79 Ibid., 1:59.
80 Worth noting in this context is Lonergan's appeal to the role of narrative in understanding history: “From the intelligible pattern grasped in the data, one moves to the intelligible pattern expressed in the narrative” (Lonergan, Method, 190; cited by Whelan, Redeeming History, 146).
81 Ricœur, “The Model of the Text: Meaningful Action Considered as a Text,” in From Text to Action, 144–67, at 145–56.
82 Ibid., 164–65.
83 See, in particular, the structure of Ricœur's The Rule of Metaphor: Multi-Disciplinary Studies of the Creation of Meaning in Language, trans. Czerny, R., McLaughlin, K., and Costello, J. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1977).Google Scholar
84 “I will say that, for me, the world is the whole set of references opened by every sort of descriptive or poetic text I have read, interpreted, and loved” (Ricœur, Time and Narrative, 1:80).
85 Ricœur, Oneself as Another, 148. On the reference to an “ethical laboratory,” see also Ricœur, Time and Narrative, 1:59.
86 Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, 170.
87 Van den Hengel, “Science of Action,” 247. Flanagan (Quest for Self-Knowledge, 221) maintains that ethics attempts to bring our relationship to history into the foreground.
88 Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, 197.
89 Van den Hengel, “Science of Action,” 247.
90 I am referring here to two significant shifts that have taken place in moral reasoning. The first concerns the shift from a faculty psychology approach grounded in a metaphysics of the soul to an intentionally based approach whose ground is the concrete subject in his/her self-transcendent relationship to the good. See Flanagan, Quest for Self-Knowledge. The second shift concerns the elaboration of “natural law” as a law of reason. See Barr, Michael, “Law and Natural Law,” in The Oxford Handbook of Aquinas, ed. Davies, Brian and Stump, Eleonore (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 238–54CrossRefGoogle Scholar. This, to my mind, is the reason for the diverse social disciplines. Lonergan was able to identify a “scale of preference” regarding values. These disciplines represent distinct schemata of action and praxis and, consequently, promote explanatory understanding of human action. Ethics affirms that there is a ground to the intelligibility of human action.
91 Flanagan refers to “beginning to exist” in a new way. Flanagan, Quest for Self-Knowledge, 201. For a fuller elaboration of this ontological dimension, see Van den Hengel, “Science of Action,” 243–47.
92 Here, I would allude to Lonergan's notion of “the scale of preference” with respect to how “feelings respond to value” (Method, 30).
93 For an elaboration of the implications of this with respect to a concrete illustration of promoting democracy, see Melchin, Kenneth R., “Reaching toward Democracy: Theology and Theory When Talk Becomes War,” Proceedings of the Fifty-Eighth Annual Convention of the Catholic Theological Society of America 55 (2003): 41–59.Google Scholar
94 Flanagan, Quest for Self-Knowledge, 221.
95 Undoubtedly a dialectical moment must be introduced. At the end of his account of the cognitive operations, Ricœur recognizes this when he writes, “Augustine's and Heidegger's two analyses are closest to each other at this level, before diverging radically—at least in appearance—as the one directs himself toward Pauline hope, the other toward quasi-Stoic resoluteness in the face of death” (Time and Narrative, 1:85).
96 Ricœur, Paul, “Christianity and History,” in History and Truth, trans. Kelbley, Charles A. (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1965), 81–97Google Scholar, at 82.
97 “The first week symbolizes the entirety of time.” Beauchamp, Paul, “Chemins bibliques de la révélation trinitaire,” in Le récit, la lettre et le corps: Essais bibliques, rev. ed., Cogitatio fidei, vol. 114 (Paris: Cerf, 1992), 155–87Google Scholar, at 165 (my translation).
98 This is one of the leading ideas expressed in Beauchamp, Paul, Création et séparation: Étude exégétique du chapitre premier de la Genèse (Paris: Cerf, 2005)Google Scholar. Beauchamp completes his study with a comment on the meaning of creation as received in faith: “Faith in creation passes from the old (or creation represented) to the new (creation received) by a word that severs the continuous and imprisoning form of time” (394; my translation). See Ricœur's own reflection, “On the Exegesis of Genesis 1,1–2,4a,” in Figuring the Sacred: Religion, Narrative, and Imagination, trans. Pellauer, David, ed. Wallace, Mark I. (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1995), 129–43.Google Scholar
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