Date: Thu, 18 Mar 2004 02:28:28 +0000
Subject: Re: BHA: CR & Theological Hermeneutics
From: Dafydd Roberts <dafydd.r-AT-btinternet.com>


on 17/3/04 10:03 pm, Andrew Potter at mymail-AT-andypotter.org wrote:

> 
> This is where CR comes into play.  Osborne has a section entitled
> "Verification or Validation of Theological Assertions" in which he says CR is
> the basis of his thinking and then he lists several criteria (coherance,
> comprehensiveness, adequacy and consistency) as a means of determing
> "correctness".
> 
> Is any of this familiar to you?  I need a concise and authoritative definition
> of CR and the above listed criteria.  Do you know where I can get that?
> Osborne also mentions a couple of other names (Paul Hiebert and Wentzel van
> Huyssteen).  Do either of these ring a bell woth you?
> 

Hello Andrew,

Your queries prompted in me a curiosity about a field that I know very
little about, except that there are theologians and theists who are part of
the CR philosophical community.

Having done a google search on 'theological critical realism" and not got
very far (except to discover a reference to an article by Shipway in Alethia
3 (2) - link at end), I then did a search for "critical realism in theology"
which produced more immediately pertinent results.

There is a comprehensive discussion by Robert J. Russell in the web-based
Interdisciplinary Encyclopedia of Religion and Science at:

http://www.disf.org/en/Voci/51.asp

The use of the idea of CR in the context in which you are interested is
there described as originating in the work of Ian G. Barbour, who first
formulates the criteria you mention in his Issues in Science and Religion
(1966), to further develop them over the following decades.

There's lots about this and about later contributions by others (incl. van
Huyssteen) in Russell's article, and a substantial bibliography too.

Some of the discussion I have seen would seem to have only a very
superficial similarity to Bhaskarian CR, and there's no reference at all to
Roy Bhaskar in Russell, so his/our kind of CR may not be very relevant to
your topic. 

I hope someone else can say more about this, but you will find the Shipway
article ("Critical Realism and Theological Critical Realism: Opportunities
for Dialogue') in PDF at the Journal of Critical Realism site:

http://www.journalofcriticalrealism.org/archive/ALETHIAv3n2_shipway29.pdf

Hope this helps,


Dafydd



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