ABSTRACT
How did experience come to be a controversial topic in modern theology? There is a clue in the notion of ‘modern’ itself, for modernity can be defined by the understanding of experience that first emerged in the ‘new science’ of seventeenthcentury Europe – what we today call ‘modern science’. The names of Copernicus, Galileo, and Newton have come to signify a turning point in Western history (and eventually in world history): a new way of orienting ourselves in the world, of understanding what is real and how truth is discovered. The defining feature of modern science is its empirical approach to reality: all knowledge begins with experience; and any claim to know something that ignores experience and tries to begin with ‘pure reason’ is automatically suspect. And the only kind of experience that counts, according to scientific empiricism, is sense experience, which provides the raw data needed to generate reliable knowledge. Any other kind of experience, especially if it involves the emotions, must be rigorously excluded from the data, for it could lead only to confusion and distortion. The ideal scientific inquirer is disinterested; in seeking the truth about reality he or she strives to exclude everything personal or subjective, especially any experience tinged with emotion. This approach to knowing the world has been enormously successful (just look at the wonder world of science and technology we inhabit today!) – so successful that it has become our model of knowledge in the modern world. One might be tempted to put it more boldly still: the modern world simply is that world in which reality is assumed to be identical with the results of empirical science. But that account is too simple, for people have always known that there is more
to life than what the sciences can deliver, and the prime example of that ‘more’ has been religion. No wonder that ‘science and religion’ has become a thriving industry in our culture: we feel sure that there are truths to be learned beyond the limits of empirical reason alone, so we go on trying to find a way to secure those truths, all the while assuming that any reliable purchase on reality must follow something like the scientific-empirical method – which means that it must start from some sort of experience.
