19 November 2011

A Little Philosophical Reflection...

Theistic philosopher Bernard Lonergan (1904-1984) wrote in Method in Theology (1972):


To deliberate about x is to ask whether x is worthwhile.  To deliberate about deliberating is to ask whether any deliberating is worthwhile.   Has "worthwhile" any ultimate meaning?  Is moral enterprise consonant with this world? ...Does there or does there not necessarily exist a transcendent, intelligent ground of the universe?  Is that ground or are we the primary instance of moral consciousness?  Are cosmogenesis, biological evolution, and historical process basically cognate to us as moral beings or are they indifferent and so alien to us?  Such is the question of God.  It is not a matter of image or feeling, of concept or judgment.  They pertain to answers.   It is a question.   It rises out of our conscious intentionality, out of the a priori structured drive that promotes us from experiencing to the effort to understand, from understanding to the effort to judge truly, from judging to the effort to choose rightly.  In the measure that we advert to our own questioning and proceed to question it, there arises the question of God ...[H]owever much religious or irreligious answers differ, however much there differ the questions they explicitly raise, still at their root there is the same transcendental tendency of the human spirit that questions, that questions without restriction, that questions the significance of its own questioning, and so comes to the question of God.  The question of God, then, lies within man's horizon.   Man's transcendental subjectivity is mutilated or abolished, unless he is stretching forth towards the intelligible, the unconditioned, and the good of value.  The reach, not of his attainment, but of his intending, is unrestricted.  There lies within his horizon a region for the divine, a shrine for ultimate holiness.   It cannot be ignored.  The atheist may pronounce it empty.  The agnostic may urge that he finds his investigation has been inconclusive.  The contemporary humanist will refuse to allow the question to arise.   But their negations presuppose the spark in our clod, our native orientation to the divine.  (102-103)

No comments: