To introduce empirical theology historically, the story of its philosophical origins will be interpreted with the bias of an empirical theologian. Empirical theology is understood to be an effort to defend religious knowledge in a new way, particularly after it had been challenged by a turn of events in European thought. Take empiricism back to its modern origins, back to Englishman FRANCIS BACON (1561–1628), who was the first major Western thinker to propose an empirical method for learning about the world. Bacon was impatient with thinkers who seemed to spin ideas out of their thought or who followed what he called the “idols” of biased perception, private predilection, commercial metaphor, and philosophical dogma. He admired the new scientists, such as Copernicus and Galileo, who looked to physical evidence in the world that stood before them.
JOHN LOCKE (1632–1704) also revolted against those who believed that good ideas could be gained by thought alone. For Locke, the mind possessed no ideas innate to itself, but began as “a blank slate,” an “empty cabinet” ready to be filled with clear and distinct ideas delivered by the five senses as they regarded the external world. The store of ideas contributed by the five senses was increased, Locke said, by additional ideas contributed by a kind of “internal sense,” whereby one reflects on the ideas gained through sensation and relates those ideas to each other through acts of reason, believing, doubting, or willing.
Locke was followed by other empiricists, principal among them the Scottish philosopher DAVID HUME (1711–1776). Hume went beyond Locke by asserting that if we have only our own impressions (“matters of fact”) and only our own ways of relating those impressions (“relations of ideas”), then we have no reason to claim that our beliefs apply to the external world. We merely have head-realities—impressions and ways of relating impressions. Accordingly, such external realities as space, time, and causality are merely our habits of speech, only customs of talking about our impressions and their logical relations. But Hume went still further. For him, religion, AESTHETICS, and ETHICS failed to refer even to matters of fact and relations of ideas. Religion, aesthetics, and ethics cannot show how they are based on facts or on the relations of ideas, so that if they are theories, then they are theories without even the weak empirical plausibility that Hume had accorded to sense experience.
Before Hume, an implicit empiricism had been Western religion’s best friend. Scriptural JUDAISM, Christianity, and Islam had all used historical evidence to justify their beliefs. God had been encountered not behind closed eyelids and not behind closed doors in dark, silent chambers, but rather in the open spaces of the desert, in the clouds on mountaintops, in the outcomes of military battles, in green pastures and beside still waters, in outdoor sermons before hungry crowds, and at a bloody execution on the outskirts of Jerusalem.
Modern philosophical empiricism could have refined sense knowledge and lent new plausibility to the implicit empiricism of the scriptures and traditions of the ancient Middle East. But Hume prevented that; even if religious language had been empirical, empirical knowledge referred to the self rather than to the world external to the self. In effect, he bent the hook of Western religious thought, so that it caught only the garments of the believer and let the fish in the sea of history swim away. He turned history’s time, space, and causality into arid customs of thought and made the mighty acts of God ghostly constructions imaginatively entertained in the private interiors of isolated individuals.
But it was not as though Hume—an elite, European, male—had single-handedly dissolved empiricism and with it the hard, time-tested reality of the masses. Hume’s argument was simply an emblem of the emerging, secular, commercial, and scientific practices and beliefs of ordinary Europeans. He and they treasured information, whatever it referred to, and began to have doubts about the supposedly factual religious stories of the ancient Middle East. They created a new, self-critical empiricism that broke the religious bed in which, for millennia, religious claims had been sleeping and exposed religious beliefs to drafts of hostile analysis. No one, certainly not the European masses, had wanted to expose religion to hostile analysis, but this happened anyway.
The well-meaning German philosopher IMMANUEL KANT (1724–1804) tried to save the West from empirical skepticism, but he only made matters worse. He first turned his attention to empirical knowledge, primarily to save SCIENCE, which had long assumed that its empirical knowledge had referred to something real. Agreeing with Hume that science’s knowledge might not refer directly to the external world, Kant argued that it was nevertheless true, because it was based on universal structures of the human mind. Space and time, quantity and quality, and substance and causality were universal aspects of thought, Kant said, and it was the human mind that, with these structures, made knowledge of the external world possible, not the other way around. Using mental structures, science synthesized phenomena and thereby arrived at real truth. However, although he may have cast aside Hume’s bent hook, Kant seemed also to place the fish of the sea of history in the aquarium of the human mind.
For Kant, science kept one foot in the known world of phenomena, but morality and religion were entirely removed from that world. Morality and religion depended on one’s own private will to do what is good, but this will derived neither from sense experience nor from pure and universal reasons of the mind. Nevertheless, Kant argued that the moral will was thoroughly real, so that people should examine it and uncover and affirm what it presupposed. Among those presuppositions was a God who would reward moral efforts in HEAVEN as they were not rewarded on Earth. However, this God was derived from reasoning about one’s internal, spiritual life and had no empirical basis.
Kant’s efforts were about as helpful to religious empiricism as ocean water is to a thirsty person. Kant may have saved science’s indirect access to phenomena of physical history, but at the same time he removed God from physical history. For Kant, religious meaning was derived from reasoning about the subjective human spirit, not from the social and incarnational histories so important to the ancient Israelites and Christians.
The solution offered by Kant and other nineteenth-century philosophical idealists caused the great majority of theologians of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to locate religious knowledge more in the private and spiritual events of a person’s heart and mind than in the public and material events of a society’s history. For these theologians, people might sit in the train of spatial-temporal history, but their religious dreams were about a world outside spatialtemporal history. These theologians were more attuned to Plato and Aristotle, whose sublime ideas existed somehow apart from historical contingency, and less attuned to the biblical worlds in which material and spiritual history were united and made up all the world there was.
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