Intelligibility and Bias

Lonergan’s remark ‘if being is intelligible then God must exist’ is quite obscure. I think though if you said to a natural scientist, ‘man can never know the causes of global warming’ the natural scientist would disagree. He would point out that we need much better computers. We need to understand the jet stream much better. We need measures to quantify the effects of local pollution as below the Himalayas destroying the ice. We need to understand rainfall and forests much better. Etc. Etc. But there is the sense that man’s intellect faced with a question which cannot yet be perfectly answered can move, in the course of time, by authentic scientific collaboration to an increasingly probable understanding until one has a de facto certainty.
So science has faith in an intelligibility waiting to be discovered. Is there an area where this does not apply? Could one say, outer Mongolian Chinese is unintelligible? So someone said we live in a Hermeneutic universe. As an apple is ready to be eaten so the universe is ready to be understood. Such a universe is only explicable if made by God.
Lonergan knows that man grows in knowledge by using schematic image upon schematic image, adding insight to insight and so deriving an idea which is true, knowledge of some area of being. The idea of all being belongs to God. We have some idea of this and that, and when we come to know something we are in a limited way sharing in the mind of God. The Hebrews taught us that we are in the image and likeness of God and the scholastics saw that because we can know and love we are a created participation in the divine nature, capable of knowing and loving, but of course far more in potency that in act. We might think, well God can create out of nothing and we can’t and therefore we are not a created participation in the divine nature – a sort of spark – but in fact we create ourselves by freely choosing how to be and what to be – to abound in goodness or to be evil. The possibility to be evil is to make ourselves the only god recognised in our universe. We see, in this high fashioning of man, the possibility of damnation.
The fact that man can understand, develop understanding and share it gives to human history a progressive movement. How should so many millions live upon the face of the earth without the invention of the water closet? Without agricultural skills how should we be fed? Without politics how should we live together in peace? Without religion how should we know what to believe and what we can hope for?
Unfortunately man’s story is not entirely one of progress and the fact of progress provides greater resources and means of evil. Lonergan writes of bias which somehow prevents the intellect attaining truth or the wicked person being conscious of their wickedness. He sees love as not only being an instrument of progress, providing motivation for family life, for building up a people and for religious practice but also as having the task of healing the objective distortion of things caused by bias.
Whereas in traditional Thomistic philosophy nothing can be loved unless it is known – knowledge has about it an emanation of love – Lonergan, writing from his perspective says nothing is truly known unless it is loved. Love provides the most profound perspective and so sees the potency for healing and redemption. Such a perspective gives us some insight into divine mercy or the patience at a human level Jesus had in dealing with sinners and sinful situations, including of course the crucifixion.
The scale of values ascends through vital, social, cultural and personal values to religious values. As values imply decisions so bias implies poor judgement and so poor performance at at least one or more levels. Poor judgement comes either from a rush to judgement under some sort of interest or pressure one assumes so that one has lost all serene detachment which belongs to weighing the evidence – or poor judgement comes from failing to judge when the evidence is in. So in a world where everything, by the infinite care with which it is wrought, tells of God, from the robin to the scale of the galaxies, we can meet with Bertrand Russell’s reason for unbelief: you should have produced more evidence. Maybe the ultra intelligent person, busy with schematic images and insights, easily looses a grip on the importance of conclusions – this is so, this is not so, this may be so. Correct conclusions are in the end more important than intelligent surmises. Everything God made is evidence for his existence.
When Lonergan says that in much of Europe ‘being’ is lost in personalist, existentialist and phenomenological thought, yet alone by Kant who may be said to have lost the universe in his study, he implies that our culture is widely unaware of the importance of judgement and so is prone to weakness in failing to judge or rushing to judgement. One may be helped to recognise the point by recalling that Augustine stresses the importance of truth for the mind, that Aquinas pointed out that where you have truth you know what is real, that Newman distinguishes between notional assent and real assent. Lonergan gives us a technical term, ‘the virtually unconditioned’ which means recognising when the evidence is in, and whether it is sufficient for the matter being considered. Failure to make judgements which are true is caught up in the term ‘bias’.
Dramatic bias affects the way a person or a people looks at the world. Their outlook, their neurosis. There are things they cannot, will not see.
Individual bias entails a loss of sympathy with others so one looks only to self interest in work and family and so does not share the burdens of ordinary life or seek the common good.
Group bias leads to a failure to appreciate others, to nationalism, class hatred, ignorance of science or philosophy, of scholarship or religion.
General bias entails the common sense solution to all problems and so leads to religious decline, cultural decline, social decline and a failure to address personal or group spontaneous disorder. General bias leads to a general decline which can accelerate surprisingly. Mass murder enters upon the scene in concentration camps, abortion wards, old peoples’ homes and with weapons of mass destruction.
The reverse of such decline rests with religion for every biassed action has its rationalisation. The grace and love that God gives are genuine and so grant a rock to the person who finds himself called, by himself or with others, to reverse general decline and promote a genuine progress. Religious conversion leads to a moral conversion which insists on loving neighbour as self; to an intellectual conversion which only gives assent where there is sufficient reason to assent, though one should note that the authority of God is an absolute reason to assent; and Fr Doran argues there is need too for psychic conversion to overcome dramatic bias and to grant one a sensorium of transcendence. Such conversions go on over a life time and provide a ground for Theology which thus does not have to found itself on abstract principles.
When I first came across the phrase ‘a sensorium of transcendence’ I found myself thinking of sacramental life and rosaries and so forth but I now think it means a familiarity with the different emotional states when one is resting in the senses, finding solutions to problems, assessing the truth of the insight or theory, deliberating what to do, acting in a committed way. Emmanuel Mounier said man is naturally artificial. Lonergan claims, and claims it is possible to verify personally, that we are oriented to self transcendence in knowledge and love. This orientation is natural, but it comes to have a supernatural goal. One could echo Mounier and go far beyond him by saying man is naturally supernatural.
Primitive mythology and the great world religions witness to this and to the fact that God gives all men sufficient grace for their salvation. At the same time, all traditions, including our own, stand in some need of reform, of purification. So Pope John XXIII taught us ‘Ecclesia semper reformanda’. One reform which is upon us as a Church is the Declaration on Religious Liberty. In fact, each development in doctrine leads to a reshaping of belief, conduct and mission and I think an example of this would flow from a general acceptance that the world religions flow in some substantive way from the grace won for man by Christ our Lord.