Philosophy of Religion 26: 89-108, 1989. �9 1989 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

Explanation from physics to the philosophy of religion

PHILIP CLAYTON Department of Philosophy, Stetson Hall, Williams College, Williamstown, MA 01267

1. The gradualist hypothesis

It is simply not possible to start a discussion of explanations in the various disciplines with a complete definition of "explanation." If it were specific enough to be helpful, it would be specific enough to beg some of the questions along our way. Indeed, it would be question-begging in an even more onerous way. For one of the more interesting issues implied by this paper's title is the question whether there even is "a" concept of explana- tion that applies to such diverse fields as physics and metaphysics or the philosophy of religion. We will find that the bulk of our task lies in specifying how one can speak of "explanation" in the singular when referring to such a broad spectrum of disciplines. The two concepts that I will treat in greatest detail, coherence and criticizability, provide at best a few necessary conditions and thus only the beginnings of a unitary theory of explanation.

I suggest as a first parameter that explanations are answers to why- questions. If one is asked to explain an action that she has performed, she will tell why she performed it, listing as "explanans" her reasons, her intentions, or the external forces that constrained her. Or, in order to explain the fact or "explanandum" that two magnets move together in a

certain manner, one will give an account of why they did so, referring to the laws of magnetic attraction and the way that these particular magnets were aligned. It is sometimes argued that explanations also answer how- questions, and hence that they need offer no more than a description of a series of events in order to explain the explanandum. In order not to beg this question, we must construe the term "why-questions" in a rather

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broad sense, such that their answers may be given by relatively unembel- lished descriptions of states of affairs. Theories of explanation in par- ticular disciplines will then have as their goal to specify how an explanan- dum is "explained" by its explanans in their field: must the explanandum be construed as the effect of certain causes? as the action that resulted from certain reasons (as in Aristotle's practical syllogism)? or merely as whatever a certain description describes?

In the title I singled out physics and the philosophy of religion in conjunction with explanation. The choice of these two disciplines stems from an intuitive formulation of the problem which I find to be a helpful starting point, though one that we will have to correct as we continue. Intuitively, we are aware of a whole spectrum of types of explanations in the various disciplines, explanations which vary according to certain parameters. One is tempted to place these disciplines and their explana- tions along a continuum ranging from "hard" to "soft" explanations. The position which holds that there is a gradual shift in explanations as one moves, roughly, from physics to religion I will label the gradualist hypothesis.

What content do we give to the term "hard" when we think intuitively of physics as providing the "hardest" explanations? 1 For one, quite precise explanations can be formulated in physics. Moreover, disagreements are in principle resolvable. It is possible to test proposed explanations through experimentation, by means of consequences of theories which either do or do not obtain, or by appeal to a clear inconsistency within a given hypothesis. Philosophers of physics may no longer accept the claim that theory construction in physics obeys the requirements of pure objectivity or Karl Popper 's conclusive falsifiability (physicists never did accept such claims); but this does not make physical explanations as subjective as religious ones. Equations of explanations in physics and religion - for instance, Feyerabend at his more flamboyant moments, or "creation science" - are versions of the so-called "black/white fallacy," the claim that there is no difference between black and white just because we cannot say exactly at what shade of gray the one gives way to the other.

Once the termini are in place, the points along the gradualist continuum are, one would think, easy enough to fill in. Most would grant that evolutionary biology is less "hard" than physics with regard to both the preciseness of formulation and the degree of testability. Psychology (even behavioral psychology) is "softer" still. We could then place most other types of explanation in rough order along the continuum. Although there

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might be some uncertainty about a given placement, one would not expect it to be of the most radical kind. Religious explanations, finally, would

represent a sort of limit case at the far end of the spectrum from physics, for here there is n o attempt at control and criticism is ruled out by various "immunization strategies" (Hans Albert).

Whatever its weaknesses, the gradualist hypothesis has a certain intuitive appeal; moreover, as a thought experiment it has heuristic value in helping to structure the treatment to follow. However, I do not believe that "gradualism" in fact represents the connections between explanations in the various disciplines accurately. It faces at least three major dif- ficulties. (1) If one asserts a continuum of disciplines, one must also

provide the principle according to which the continuum is to be con- structed. But what would that unitary principle be? Experimental to non- experimental disciplines? No, physical cosmology is not experimental (we don't create universes in the laboratory) and psychology is. Falsifiability? replicability? objectivity? Each of these principles on its own faces difficulties of one type or another sufficient to make it insufficient as a grounding principle. A combination of principles, on the other hand, would give us gradualist continua, with different disciplines falling into place at different points.

(2) If the principle is unclear, we fred ourselves unable to select the endpoints or limit cases of the continuum. "From physics to the philosophy of religion" seems to work well if we are thinking of, say, the movement from "reason" to "faith" (though I dispute even this claim in Section 4). If we choose as our principle "objectivity/subjectivity," we might find logic and mathematics taking the place of physics, and the arts

or psychology replacing religion. If it is to be a continuum of "specificity/generality," quantum physics (or an "idiographic" discipline such as history or philology) might take one pole. And in this case, metaphysics or ontology has as much right to the other end as does religion - indeed, perhaps more so, for the classical metaphysical ques- tion, "why is there something rather than nothing?" is a why-question that demands an explanation of rather broad scope.

(3) But the mention of metaphysics introduces yet another problem. Philosophical disciplines do not seem to belong on such a line at all. The business of philosophy is often to reflect on other disciplines' reflection on experience. Wolfhart Pannenberg, for instance, has written, "Since the origins of philosophy, philosophical assertions have been justified by means of reflection on other assertions [or disciplines] in which ex-

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perience has already been articulated or reflected. ''2 Perhaps religious (or theological) assertions also belong on a separate level of reflection. We would be courting confusion to construct a continuum that mixed second- and third-order disciplines without distinction.

I propose, therefore, that we keep the notion of a "gradualist con- tinuum" in mind as a sort of organizing principle for discussing the various types of explanation, yet without basing a case upon it. I will pursue a different strategy here. Let us in the first place see what philosophers of science are saying about explanation in the natural sciences. Then we will raise the question of social scientific explanations on its own terms. Not surprisingly, we find some significant discon- tinuities between the natural and social sciences as explanatory endeavors, discontinuities sufficient to invalidate talk of a gradual variation along a single continuum. Nevertheless, some clear continuities will emerge when we focus on what makes an explanation rational in these disciplines. I will attempt to construct a weak transcendental argument for necessary features of rational explanations in general. In the last section I will repeat the same procedure for religious explanations, granting the sharp discon- tinuities and appealing to the nature of rational explanation to argue for the possibility of some continuities.

A few quick caveats. (1) This endeavor is obviously not a purely descriptive one; we are dealing from the start with broad statements about the central features of groups of disciplines. Nonetheless, the starting point is descriptive: what do natural scientists do? what problems arise in formulating explanations in the social sciences? (2) The obvious diversity that one finds within particular disciplines need not vitiate my argument. One may argue that parts of biology scarcely resemble the other natural sciences, that, for example, evolutionary explanations of mental pattems in sociobiology should be included with the social sciences. Another may hold the methodological position that explanations in cognitive psychol- ogy should more closely resemble natural scientific explanations. My argument need not presuppose that disciplines are monolithic, although I do find discussion of explanations in terms of disciplines helpful. However one may wish to deconstruct disciplines, it is sufficient that there are recognizable groups of explanations to correspond to my labels "natural scientific," "social scientific" and "religious." (3) I call my argument here a "weak transcendental argument," since it attempts to say what qualities an account must have if it is to be a rational explanation. However, I have met with some resistance to weakening Kant in this way;

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one critic argued that soon we would find ourselves with transcendental arguments giving the necessary conditions for being a linebacker! I still

believe that it is useful to use the label "transcendental" in order to point out the similarities, however loose, with Kant's approach. But if the term offends, pluck it out.

2. The contextualist shift in natural science

Since my case concerning religious explanations depends most heavily on the nature of the human sciences, I will be as concise here as possible. Briefly, as I read the developments in the philosophy of science in recent decades, there has been a movement from purely "formalist" accounts of explanation to ones emphasizing contextual factors; I shall thus speak of

the "contextualist" shift in the philosophy of science. As he did in so many areas, Karl Popper gave the initial impetus for the formalist approach:

To give a causal explanation of an event means to deduce a statement which describes it, using as premises of the deduction one or more universal laws, together with certain singular statements, the initial conditions. 3

The work of Carl Hempel, perhaps the greatest formalist of them all, can be seen as a fleshing out of Karl Popper's early statement. His "deductive- nomological" theory of explanation required that the explanandum be a logical consequence of the explanans; the explanans, in its turn, must contain general laws.

The formalist approach to explanation is by no means dead; as recently as 1984, Wesley Salmon argued in an important monograph for a general, "ontic" theory of explanation, according to which "to give a scientific explanation is to show how events and statistical regularities fit into the causal network of the world. ''4 Nevertheless, the approach has fallen on hard times due to a new emphasis on context in our thinking about science. If we view most (all?) scientific vocabulary as "theory-laden" (Toulmin, Hanson, Kuhn) and hold that a certain circular relationship between context and result is built into scientific efforts, we will be skeptical of the linearity of deductive pictures of scientific explanation.

The contextualist shift suggests that we need to include contextual or "pragmatic" features in formulating explanations, and that there is no such thing as context-free explanation. Already in 1962 John Passmore had argued,

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There can be no purely formal definition of an explanation .... How [the formal] schema is used will depend on what we know and what we want to know; and these are not formal considerations .... Explaining, in short, is a particular way of using a form of argument; it has no logical form particular to it. 5

As Bas van Fraassen notes, " 'Why did Adam eat the apple?' may ask at least three different questions: Why Adam? Why eat? Why the (an) apple? ''6 In any given case, we ask "Why P?" in contrast to other members Q of a given set x of options, though the set X of alternatives is often left tacit. 7

This new concern with the context and "pragrnatics" of explanation has, of course, far-reaching implications for the study of science. For Kuhn, for instance, it has led to an awareness of the interconnectedness of scientific theory and practice; he grants the effect of one's question or "exemplar" (formerly "paradigm") on the criteria used and the answers chosen. Such a picture means that in the end we can derive a full picture of scientific explanation only by looking at (1) how explanations are conceived (the psychology of discovery), (2) how they are institutionally influenced (the sociology of research), and (3) how they are evaluated by the scientific community.

The introduction of pragmatic context into the discussion of explana- tion suggests that a set of sufficient conditions for scientific explanations cannot be given. At the same time, the contextualist shift does perhaps provide one necessary condition. Contextual considerations have emerged as central enough in recent philosophy of science that we could speak of a context principle of rationality. Put negatively, explanatory claims cannot be evaluated apart from their context, e.g. in the natural sciences apart from the empirical problem or situation which they intend to explain. Explanation requires reference to the framework one uses in interpreting a given situation, in formulating a research problem, or even in specifying the data to be explained.

Positively, I propose that coherence has now emerged as a central component of the theory of explanation. As a criterion for explanatory adequacy, coherence requires the systematic interdependence or "fit" of the various components of an explanatory account (explanans), both internally (consistency) and externally, with the situation (pragmatics), with the data implied and expressed by the explanandum, and with the broader context of experience (comprehensiveness). Without belittling the role of empirical fruitfulness or mathematical simplicity, the context

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principle thus makes "goodness of fit" a necessary component of rational explanations. 8 It follows that formalist treatments represent at best a sort of limit case: all other things being equal - or, within the framework of a specified interpretation - natural scientists should seek to formulate and employ general laws in providing a full explanation of a state of affairs. But formalist treatments have in the past been a major component in the case for demarcating the natural sciences from the social sciences and non-scientific disciplines. If formalist requirements can be dropped and a coherence-based theory of rationality put forward in their place, we may perhaps have the groundwork for a general theory of rational explanation that is broad enough to handle both the sciences and religion.

One sharp contrast between the two areas is immediately evident: in religion we may have little more than context (system-internal coherence) to go on, whereas in the sciences we can appeal also to criteria such as

empirical fruitfulness. On the other hand, even this difference could in principle be unified conceptually if we understand coherence in a suffi- ciently broad sense. The theory-ladenness of observations has caused insuperable difficulties for attempts to defend a neat distinction between theory statements and observation statements. But if we can specify empirical fit as a coherence between these two sets of statements, we will be able to speak of "the theory's relation to the world" in terms of the coherence of two sets of statements. 9 And if a theory's correspondence to empirical reality can be determined only in terms of the mutual fit of sets of statements, we no longer need to posit a fundamental difference in kind between empirical and non-empirical disciplines.

3. Explanation, "Verstehen" and coherence

Soon after August Comte vehemently argued for a strictly scientific sociology in the middle of the last century, Wilhelm Dilthey just as vehemently defended the uniqueness of the Geisteswissenschaften or human sciences. The Geisteswissenschaften deal with human contexts of meaning and their interpretation. This subject matter, he maintained, has a different structure than the natural sciences with their laws of efficient causality; it thus requires "empathetic understanding" (Verstehen) on the part of the researcher who must "re-picture" or "re-construct" the psychic world of the subject whom he studies. The debate between Comte and Dilthey has of course continued into the present. Yet it seems at first blush

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to have lost its point: most now recognize that even the natural sciences are part of a hermeneutic endeavor carried out by interpreting subjects. Mary Hesse, for example, posits that the difference between natural and social science might just be one of degree:

My thesis is that there is not so much a parallelism as a linear continuity between the empirical and the hermeneutic... At each stage of the continuum, appropriate interpretive conditions enter the process of theorizing - the formal and material regulative principles at all stages from physics onwards, then interpretations in terms of forms and deviances, stabilities and instabilities in biology, and finally evaluations incorporated in world views in the sciences of man and in history, lo

Given the pervasiveness of interpretation, one might again be tempted to accept the "gradualist hypothesis" of a continuum of disciplines and to become a card-carrying gradualist.

But Hesse's claim of a linear continuity is problematic. If we speak of natural science as "hermeneutical" because of the interpretive activities of scientists, we should probably ascribe to the social sciences a "double hermeneutic" (A. Giddens): on the one hand, the researcher brings an interpretive horizon to her study; on the other, the "object" being studied is a subject with a horizon of her own. Each agent is engaged in the (conscious or unconscious) project of constructing a mental framework that will make action possible. We can speak of these frameworks as complexes of meaning or "semantic worlds." The individual's goal is to

make sense of her experience, to find categories that can structure it into a coherent horizon. Failure in this quest leads to cognitive dissonance and, ultimately, psychosis.

The social scientist, then, faces "a pre-interpreted world where the creation and reproduction of meaning-frames is a very condition of that which it seeks to analyze. ''11 Some sort of understanding of or access to

this realm would seem to be required if we are to make progress in explaining human behavior. Verstehen is therefore at least a necessary condition for adequate explanation in the social sciences. One "understands" an action or situation by grasping (sensing, intuiting) what it means or signifies. In the process, one learns to "place" it within the ongoing project of individual or communal world-construction.

Even if we accept that understanding plays a crucial role in the human sciences (as not all theorists in the field would), ~ e implications for the theory of social scientific explanation are not immediately clear. Perhaps

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understanding should replace explanation in this field; perhaps the human sciences should aim instead at fostering communication between humans or at changing the world. Social science would then seek not explanatory theories but "critical theories" (the Frankfurt School) or revolutionary change. Contrariwise, perhaps understanding is no more than a precondi- tion, a hurdle that must be overcome before explanations in terms of general laws can be pursued (say, on the model of most natural scientific explanations). However, closer analysis of the latter option would show it to be positivism in sheep's clothing, for it amounts to a de facto reduction of the social sciences to natural science. The former model (social science

la critical theory) wins political engagement for the social sciences at the cost of their giving up the claim to be explanatory disciplines at all. Of course, the choice between ultimate ends cannot be falsified; one could also argue with impunity that the social sciences should aim only for aesthetic-sounding theories. Still, I predict that few social scientists would be willing to abandon their quest to explain human behavior in this m a n n e r . 12

I propose a third option. Explanation in social science can fruitfully be taken to mean a rational reconstruction in a primarily theoretical context

o f the same human actions and structures of meaning that we

"understand" on an intuitive level. Explanatory disciplines are thus necessarily second-order disciplines. After describing the phenomenon in question, one attempts to reconstruct its network of subjective or social factors in the (second-level) terms of the relevant discipline. The result is a theoretical framework which re-presents the semantic world of the subject(s) involved, together with the interconnections, beliefs and valuations which make it a (more or less) coherent - and thus meaningful - subjective whole for them. In second-order disciplines, publicly acces- sible reasons must be given for the superiority of one's own reconstruction to other existing or conceivable reconstructions and the opportunity for criticism must be allowed (I can't present a paper and then escape before the question and answer period).

"Rational reconstruction" in the above definition connotes reformula- tion in terms of criticizable hypotheses. Dilthey also wrote of the "reconstruction" of fife-expressions, but he grounded the reconstructive process, at least in his early work, on a metaphysical principle (the shared "unity of life"). By contrast, however, I am proposing a methodological

requirement, one falling under the rubric of intersubjective criticizabili- ty. 13 This notion specifies on the one hand a type of discourse, that of

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theoretical rationality, in which all participants have an equal opportunity

to propose theories and the proposals of each are subjected to (and potentially rejected because of) impartial criticism. 14 On the otl-~er hand,

criticizable theories face certain requirements of a formal-semantic nature, which insure that they are not insulated from critique and that some idea is

given of what sorts of things would count against them.

One formal-semantic criterion has already distinguished itself in our discussion of natural and social scientific explanations. In the latter, the

implied move from understanding to explanation involves the attempt to represent or recreate in the theoretical realm the coherence or "fitting together' that agents strive for in the social world. A chess analogy is

helpful. Imagine the various persons and ideas that are represented in - or the actions that stem from - an individual's mental landscape as pieces on a (rather idiosyncratic) chess board. In understanding her world we

somehow grasp intuitively how these various pieces do or do not fit together for her. But something more is involved in communicating the strengths of a board position or the reasons for a move. In offering a psychological or sociological explanation of actions or beliefs we must use theoretical terms - the language of psychological or sociological theory - to specify these mental interrelationships in a generaUy accessible manner.

An explanation is adequate if it can re-present the level-one patterns in a level-two account that itself instantiates the same sort of interconnected- ness that it seeks to establish in its data. The theoretical coherence of

explanatory accounts in their attempt to make sense of human actions is therefore a central criterion in social science.

Clearly, this sort of explanation evidences some strong discontinuities

with explanation in the natural sciences. Rather than establishing relations of cause and effect, one is striving to give an account of individual and social worlds, of horizons of meaning, of motivational structures.

Moreover, in contrast to natural science, coherence here functions on two different levels. Subjects are involved in the attempt to "make sense" of their experience by constructing coherent semantic worlds. Likewise,

explanations are attempts to answer specific why-questions on a theoreti- cal level by reconstructing the agent's intention or semantic horizon in a coherent manner.

On the other hand, I would argue that some continuity has still been preserved. Explanation in the social realm must still involve formulating an answer to a why-question in the context of a controlled, theoretical

discourse. If the parallels are denied, the use of the term "explanation"

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becomes equivocal and one might just as well dispense with it completely, as Marx did in the Theses on Feuerbach: "Philosophers have only

interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it." It might be that explanation as I have presented it - i.e. a group of statements or a theory which is formulated in generally accessible terms and can be intersubjectively criticized - is impossible in the human sphere; at least the possibility cannot be ruled out a priori. However , / f one still wishes to employ the term here, as most social scientists today do, then it cannot be defined in the social sciences in a completely idiosyncratic manner. Our use of explanation in this sphere must be at least analogous to its meaning in the natural sciences. One might label this a weak transcendental argument, in that it insists on a principle of continuity or certain necessary conditions common to all explanations in order to avoid outright equivoca- tion.

Obviously, the specific features of an "adequate explanation" or a "criticizable argument" will vary as disciplines and methods vary. On the other hand, we seem to have come up with a framework that is applicable across the various scientific disciplines without being as a consequence utterly vacuous. To stipulate that an adequate explanation must be a coherent explanation entails, roughly, that there is a relationship of mutual

(though not necessarily logical) implication between the components of the explanation, as a consequence of which each part contributes to the whole and no part is arbitrary or ad hoc. In an ideally coherent explanation

there will be afit between the various concepts in a theory (consistency), between the theory and its data ("correspondence" understood as the fit of the set of theory-statements with the set of observation-statements), between it and accepted theories in other areas of human experience (comprehensiveness), and, ultimately, a coherence of opinion regarding its adequacy (consensus). Although we are dealing here only with the rationality of theories, it is clear that one could easily develop these coherential considerations into a coherence theory of truth, a task which I happily sidestep in the present paper.

Religious explanations

Religious explanations could be addressed "from above," that is theologi- cally; we could discuss the manner in which God has revealed the answers to religious why-questions (and presumably the questions as well) to a

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people or through a sacred writing. Because conflicts between religious traditions could not be legislated in this way and such conflicts are important, it seems more advisable to approach religious explanations "from below," or anthropologically. We beg perhaps the fewest questions if we begin with the meaning of religious belief for the individual or social group, as opposed to, say, the question of its ultimate truth status.

I suggest, then, that we view religious explanations first in the context of the individual's project of making sense of his experience. 15 The religious person, like the social agent, is a subject who is trying to con- struct a meaningful world using the symbols of his tradition. His goal is to make sense of a variety of experiences by structuring them according to his religious symbols, beliefs, and practices. If we ignore this process and move directly to a philosophical critique of the content of religious truth- claims (as philosophers too often do), we run the risk of neglecting the "double hermeneutic" discussed above.

At first glance religious explanations seem to have little or nothing in common with explanations of the natural or social world. A full treatment would have to explore the numerous discontinuities with scientific explanations; here I can only list a few. (1) Primafacie, even to compare religious and scientific explanations is a category mistake. Social scientific explanations are theoretical (second-order) answers to why-questions regarding (e.g.) the (first-order) verbal behavior of participating subjects. But are religious explanations not likewise included among the behaviors of participants (for instance, in worship or prayer), and thus also first- order? Would one not do better to compare scientific explanations with the more theoretical explanations found in the "study of religion" (psychology, sociology, anthropology of religion) or in the philosophy of religion? I return to this allegedly sharp distinction of levels below.

(2) Religious explanations are formulated within the context of a believing community. Are not their meaning and their justification both relative to the semantic practices of that community? This is, for example, Wittgenstein's position:

Suppose that someone believed in the Last Judgment... He has what you might call an unshakeable belief. It will show, not by reasoning or by appeal to ordinary grounds for belief, but rather by regulating in all his life... This in one sense must be called the firmest of all beliefs. 16

I doubt that the theological beliefs of, for example, many liberal Protestants are appropriately labeled "unshakeable." But certainly in

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religious fundamentalism of all types one finds the determined attempt to insulate religious belief from all outside criticism, a move Bartley has

called "the retreat to commitment." (3) Scientists know what sort of data would count for or against their

belief; such are the advantages of empirical disciplines. By contrast,

religious explanations often contain references to a transcendent being or beings who are in principle inaccessible to rational analysis. The believer himself may even deny that anything can be truly (tmivocally) predicated of his object of worship. Some argue that religious statements have a logic of their own, e.g. they may be "doxological" (Wainwright).

(4) A last discontinuity deserves a fuller treatment, namely the tendency toward holistic explanations in religion. Religious explanations cover a spectrum from narrow to broad. At the narrower level, the believer will take a particular complex of experience and belief to constitute an explana-

tion for some particular event or events: Yahweh caused the Flood to punish the people's sinfulness; God aUowed the flat tire to teach me patience. A religious explanation of the events in question win include

reference to the activity of the divine in or behind the event. For the believer the explanation will be true if the divine actually acted in the way claimed. Though this is on the surface an empirical claim, it already evidences a certain resistance to empirical test. 17

Even at a somewhat broader level, why-questions can still be formu- lated: why did God create the world? why is the circle of death and rebirth

perpetuated? Here also doctrinal "explanations" are given, usually in terms of higher-order theological statements referring to the creation of the world or "God's plan in history." In this case, though, believers are

referring to the meaning of history as a whole. Truth is claimed for the belief that God exists or that samsara will end when amassed karma no longer causes another cycle, although there may be no particular event in the present that could falsify such truth-claims. These broader explana- tions function to explain for believers why their life is as it is, but they do so by providing an overarching interpretation of experience which is more clearly a description or picture of the whole than an explanation of any particular part of it. Still, it is hard to fred a system of religious belief that does not make any existence claims or predictions. While evaluating or criticizing these claims in the present may be impossible, they may be falsifiable at some point in history. If Messiah comes next year and asserts, "Second Coming? No, this is my first time here," Christians will turn out to have been wrong.

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Finally, at the broadest level of religious belief one can speak of explanation, if at all, only in such a different sense from its meaning in any

science that equivocation threatens. I refer to the "total interpretations" of the individual's or group's experience. Understood at the level of "total experience," faith is "an uncompelled mode of 'experiencing as'... No way of accounting for the data can be said to be, in any objectively ascer- tainable sense, more probable than another. ''18 When the concern is with the meaningfulness of the whole, basic intuitions are more at home than arguments; one speaks symbolically if at all; and religious experience is undifferentiated in the sense that meaning is ascribed directly to the whole and only by derivation to each of its parts.

At this final level one's unitary religious intuition "makes sense" of one's experience as a whole more in the manner of an immediate aesthetic sense of beauty than in the manner of propositional analysis. The believer or mystic senses ("sees") that things fit together, that there is an underly- ing coherence, that "All shall be well, and/All manner of thing shall be well. ''19 Here at the borders of propositionality scant analogy remains with

explanatory projects elsewhere. Intuitive understanding is not a precondi- tion for explanation but seems to supersede it. The best account one can give is in terms of the semantic line from limited to broadest contexts of meaning that I have drawn; and even this line is not unbroken in practice.

Perhaps we could say that this highest level, the making sense of total experience, is the regulative ideal that lies behind the efforts to make sense at other levels. For here there is a final coherence, an ultimate, comprehen- sive fit. Yet the elements that typified explanations in our earlier discus- sions are now absent: no "problem-situation" can be specified, no field delimited, since the "explanation" encompasses everything; no why- question can be formulated; no distinction between general law and specific instances remains. The "reference" (if subject and object, intuition and reference, can be separated any longer) is not an item in the world but the world as a whole, its relationship to the transcendent as totally other. The middle-level religious explanations mentioned above have clear parallels in philosophy, for instance in the classic metaphysical question, Why is there something rather than notlfing? But all propositional ac- counts such as philosophy provides are left behind in the mystic's appeal

to ineffability. Of course, few readers ever doubted that there are major discontinuities

between scientific and religious explanations. I must now make good on the strange claim implied in my title, namely that there might be sig-

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nificant continuity between explanations in the realms of physics and religion. In order to reveal these connections, consider the case of the student of religion whose concerns include the social scientific study of religion (anthropology, psychology) and the philosophy of religion, and who is engaged in studying a particular religious community. In her work as describer, she must grant that the cosmogeny of this religion can be explanatorily adequate to its adherents as long as it explains the (objective and social) world known to them and does so in terms that they can appropriate. It need only answer the relevant why-questions in a way that makes sense of their world to them. For instance, their deities are worthy of worship because they have the power to supply those things needed or esteemed within their social context.

Nevertheless, when she moves from description to evaluation of these beliefs, the philosophically minded anthropologist is justified in faulting the native cosmogeny for not being able to explain salient features of her

world. She would have trouble worshipping their gods, for instance (questions of "proving" their existence aside) if they are utterly lacking in ethical qualities crucial to her (justice, benevolence) or cannot be symbol- ized as powerful vis-a-vis the conflicts of her world. Historically, one might reflect on the loss of religious adequacy of the Greek gods, or the contemporary claims that an omnipotent esse subsistens is incompatible with the loving Father of the New Testament and is hence no longer a viable object of worship. 2~

When religious explanations are conceived as in this example, an interesting possibility begins to come to light. The distinction between the approaches, between believer and the student of religion, need not be absolute. Both persons can be engaged in the critical process of accepting or rejecting explanations on the basis of reasons. Instead of positing a western anthropologist who finds native beliefs to be explanatorily inadequate, we can imagine a widely traveled native undergoing a similar reaction. Of course, it does not follow that the rejection of a belief system will follow automatically from its effective criticism, even if the domain of experience to be explained has been broadened and the requirement of intersubjective criticizability has been followed. For the believer or community may introduce ad hoc modifications, or may interpret the status of their beliefs differently (aesthetically, symbolically) in order to insulate them from the difficulties. But that believers do not always allow rational assessment full sway is no proof that religious belief and criticizability are incompatible. Scientists also are not "pan-critical,"

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though more of them agree that they ought to be, and they are so to a greater degree. The phenomenon of the anthropologist "going native" and uncritically accepting parts or the whole of a native cosmology is well known. In such cases the assessments of the anthropologist may well be less critical or "objective" than those of the native believers themselves.

I am suggesting, in other words, that the distinction between the levels, between believer and student of religion, need not be taken as absolute. When the scope of the relevant experience is broadened, the semantic and explanatory demands on an interpretive system increase. A religious explanation once judged rationally adequate may be rejected because it cannot account for new data in a coherent manner - i f the believer chooses to admit such data into consideration or to consider "external" problems with his belief system. Hence there need be no sharp line between religious explanations and those found more typically in discussions in the philosophy of religion. Put differently, the lines between "involved" adherent to (critic of) a religious tradition and the "objective" ideal analyst of its rational strengths and weaknesses need not be drawn using a participant/non-participant schema. Many religious statements will presumably have meaning only within a given religious framework (so Wittgenstein). But "intemalist" accounts of religious belief, which hold that critical assessment can have no place in religious belief-systems, do not have the last word. The believer can play the role of objective analyst and vice versa.

If space allowed, we could explore in depth the implications of this position; I will mention just four. (1) Faith and reason need not be con- strued as incompatible. Although religious explanations occur within a believing community, this faith context does not eliminate certain connec- tions with the philosophical project. Religious explanations are criticizable and in principle falsifiable even for the believer. It follows that religious beliefs could be held even when there is the epistemic possibility that they might not turn out to be justified in the end. (2) Theology, as second-order reflection on the first-order beliefs and practices of a religious community, need no longer be construed as a Glaubenswissenschaft (faith science) ~t la Karl Barth and others. Under the model here defended, the barrier between the disciplines of theology and the philosophy of religion is lowered and, in the limit case, eliminated. Theologians make explanatory claims that compete with those of other explanatory disciplines; broader dialogue and criticism may reveal strengths and weaknesses of the theological responses vis-~t-vis non-theological alternatives.

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(3) In fact, I suggest that these developments have in fact given rise to a category of believers in western culture for whom philosophical doubt and

some form of religious faith are not mutually exclusive. We might call these persons secular believers. The location and number of such persons is a matter for sociological study; I would be satisfied to show that there is no contradiction in the concept. Secular believers are adherents to a religious tradition who at the same time have been (and continue to be) intellectually molded by categories and modes of thought not inspired by, and often inconsistent with, their religious beliefs. For these persons undivided intellectual assent to all the propositions of their religious tradition is not a possibility, perhaps not even a virtue. For them, some traditional religious doctrines are found to be in tension with their fun- damental scientific and historical beliefs, or with basic moral and ethical intuitions. The secular believer may defend altering the problematic beliefs (or warrants), or she may avoid considering the conflicts and seek to suppress the resultant cognitive dissonance. Although it need not block the secular believers' religious devotion or involvement, this epistemic conflict is an intrinsic part of their religious life.

The logic of my argument to this point amounts to a de facto defense of the secular believer, for I have advocated the abandonment of the in- side/outside dichotomy and the importance of intersubjective justifications for religious belief. In fact, it does seem that doubts concerning the truth of received beliefs and appeals to alternate sources of doxastic authority are endemic to the cognitive status of religious truth claims today. Doubt is not a sin but a response to genuine epistemic conflicts. Like other epistemic responses, it should be manifested to the extent justified by the

setting - whether it requires agnosticism regarding individual beliefs, criticism of underlying assumptions, or the search for better arguments on behalf of religious truth claims.

(4) Finally, given (1)-(3), a strategy for evaluating religious explana- tions might be developed using the coherence criterion presented earlier. Thus George Thomas writes:

Since [religious experiences] are not self-authenticating, we must subject them to critical examination to determine whether they are supported by other religious experiences and by experience as a whole. If they are not supported by the religious experiences of others and are not consistent with other kinds of experience, they are bound to be regarded as doubtful, if not false. 2x

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The believer may feel a subjective certainty about his beliefs, just as the scientist may. However, this does not rule out

that from other perspectives, namely from those of theoretical reflec- tion, even the truth claim of religious experience and tradition must be judged as hypothetical and the certainly of faith as a subjective anticipa- tion. 22

Religious believers may of course decline to subject their truth claims to theoretical reflection, given what I have argued such reflection to entail.

But freedom from critique is bought at the price of a certain intellectual isolation. If one's religious explanations are entirely "intratextual" and one accepts only criteria of adequacy authorized by one's authoritative texts, 23

one cannot insist on the same recognition accorded to explanations that are subjected to more universal criteria.

In summary, then, we have noted the temptation to take explanations in the physical sciences as the sole model for explanatory excellence. But a number of the qualities that set these explanations apart - mathematical formalizability, empirical falsifiability, the "formalist" requirements of deductive-nomological explanation - are not generalizable outside the natural scientific context. By contrast, the notion of a second-order discipline in which explanations are formulated as hypotheses and

criticized does not do injustice to the plurality of disciplines and subject matters that we encountered. This concept involves certain "pragmatic" requirements, such as the free and public exchange of ideas, reasoned evaluation of proposed hypotheses, use and acknowledgement of sources, and the ideals of clarity, objectivity and criticizability. It also involves one pragmatic criterion (consensus) and a number of formal-semantic criteria which can be derived from the umbrella criterion of coherence (consistency, correspondence, and comprehensiveness). Of course, more precise criteria and specific accounts of what constitutes a "good explana- tion" will vary between disciplines; the ideal of legislating these through a general theory of explanation is a mere chimera. Nonetheless, the general desiderata here described do offer some guidance in the formulation of intersubjectively criticizable explanations in religion. If religious persons wish to share in the honorific qualities of scientific explanations, as many in the western traditions have wished to do, then the essential characteris- tics of such explanations must be observed. If one wishes the epistemic privileges of explanations that are broadly intersubjective (or "pansubjective") in nature, one must accept the dangers of openness to criticism as well. 24

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Notes

1. Although I cannot stop here to make the full case, I believe it is a category mistake to place pure mathematics as the limiting case on the "hard" end of the continuum. As a purely analytic field it cannot be compared directly with the other (more or less) empirical scientific disciplines.

2. W. Pannenberg, Theology and the Philosophy of Science, trans. F. McDonagh (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1976), p. 221.

3. Karl Popper, The Logic of Scientific Discovery (London: Hutchinson, 1935, 1959), p. 59; cf. Objective Knowledge: An Evolutionary Approach (Oxford: Clarendon, 1972, 1979), p. 103.

4. Wesley Salmon, Scientific Explanation and the Causal Structure of the Worm (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984).

5. John Passmore, "Explanation in Everyday Life, in Science, and in History," History and Theory 2 (1962): 109.

6. Bas van Fraassen, The Scientific Image (Oxford: Clarendon, 1980), pp. 126-129.

7. Bengt Hannson, "Explanations - Of What?" cited by van Fraassen, "The Pragrnatics of Explanation," American Philosophical Quarterly 14 (1977): 147.

8. Coherence has also become the central criterion (and definition) for both rationality and truth according to a number of philosophers of science; see, e.g., Hilary Putnam, Reason, Truth and History (Cambridge University Press, 1981), and Nelson Goodman, Ways of Worldmaking (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1978). Putnam writes, "'Truth' ... is some sort of (idealized) rational accep- tability - some sort of ideal coherence of our beliefs with each other and with our experiences" (pp. 49 f.). Or, more briefly: "Truth is ultimate goodness of fit" (p. 64). Although I think Putnam is correct in linking coherence and truth, I will consider here only the rationality question.

9. Van Fraassen, "pragmatics," p. 150. 10. Mary Hesse, Revolutions and Reconstructions in the Philosophy of Science

(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980), p. 225, emphasis mine. 11. Anthony Giddens, New Rules of Sociological Method: A Positive Critique of

Interpretive Sociologies (London: Hutchinson, 1976), p. 158. 12. By the way, this example also explains my silence on, e.g., literature and the

arts. My omission of them in no way denigrates their value; but to the extent that they do not aim to be explanatory disciplines, they fall outside the purview of the present discussion.

13. Cf. Imre Lakatos, "History of Science and Its Rational Reconstructions," in Lakatos, The Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes (Philosophical Papers, Vol. 1), ed. J. Worrall and G. Currie (Cambridge University Press, 1978) and Jiirgen Habermas, Reason and the Rationalization of Society (The Theory of Communicative Action, Vol. 1), trans. T. McCarthy (Boston: Beacon, 1984), e.g.p. 67.

14. The pragmatics of criticizability have been nicely developed by Habermas;

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see his theory of "ideal speech situations" in "Was heisst Universalprag- matik?" in Sprachpragmatik und Philosophie, ed. K.O. Apel (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1976), pp. 174-272.

15. To assist in distinguishing the levels of religious belief and the study of religion, I will consistently use masculine pronouns to refer to the religious believer and feminine pronouns for the student of religion.

16. Wittgenstein, Lectures and Conversations on Psychology, Aesthetics and Religious Belief, ed. Cyril Barrett (Oxford: Blackwell, 1966), pp. 53-54.

17. But see Raeburne Heimbeck, Theology and Meaning (Stanford University Press, 1969), who argues that such claims often have entailments which are testable.

18. John Hick, Faith and Knowledge, 2nd ed. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1966), pp. 151,154.

19. T.S. Eliot, "Little Gidding," The Four Quartets, in The Complete Poems and Plays (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1971), pp. 138f.

20. So Charles Hartshorne, A Natural Theology for Our Time (La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1967).

21. George F. Thomas, Philosophy and Religious Belief (New York: Scribner's, 1970), pp. 83f.

22. Pannenberg, "Wahrheit, Gewissheit und Glaube," Grundfragen systemati- scher Theologie, Vol. 2 (G6ttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1980), p. 264.

23. Cf. George Lindbeck, The Nature of Doctrine: Religion and Theology in a Post-Liberal Age (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1984).

24. The line of argument presented here is developed more fully in Philip Clayton, Explanation from Physics to Theology: An Essay in Rationality and Religion (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989). I am grateful to the late Laszlo Versenyi, and to other colleagues at Williams, for criticisms of an earlier draft of this paper.