Popper’s via negativa

Negative theology (also known as apophatic theology) is anapproach to the study of the divine nature that emphasizes that our knowledgeof God is (either largely or wholly, depending on how far one wants to takethis) knowledge of what God is not,rather than what God is.  There is aninteresting parallelism between this idea and Karl Popper’s account of thenature of scientific knowledge.  I don’tclaim that this necessarily has much if any significance for either theology orthe philosophy of science (and I’m no Popperian in any event), only that theparallels seem real.  Make of them whatyou will.

Note first that negative theology is not a kind of atheism, noreven agnosticism as that is usually understood. The negative theologian does not deny that God exists, nor even,necessarily, that we can know that God exists. The claim is rather that God’s essenceor nature (as opposed to his existence) is opaque to us, so that a soundtheology must characterize it mostly or entirely in negative terms.

Maimonides is a famous advocate of this approach.  Another is Aquinas, though the apophaticelement of his theology, important as it is, is sometimes overstated.  As Aquinas says in De Potentia:

Moreover the idea of negation isalways based on an affirmation: as evinced by the fact that every negativeproposition is proved by an affirmative: wherefore unless the human mind knewsomething positively about God, it would be unable to deny anything about him.  And it would know nothing if nothing that itaffirmed about God were positively verified about him. (Question VII, Article5)

All the same, Aquinas emphasizes that because of thedependence of human cognition on the senses, our positive knowledge cannotextend as far as the divine essence.  Wecan say that God is not caused, not changing, not in time, notmaterial, and so on, but lack the capacity for much in the way of a positivecharacterization.

Now, Popper famously presents his falsificationist philosophyof science as a response to Hume’s problem of induction.  The Humean, on the basis of his empiricistpremises, denies that we can be rationally justified in inferring universallaws from observation of particular cases. Popper agrees with this, but says that it doesn’t matter because scienceis not really concerned with justifying anything in the first place, but ratherwith falsifying claims.  We can know what has been proved false, but can never prove any scientificclaim true.  Corroborated scientifictheories are those which have not yetbeen proven false, but at some point they too are bound to be falsified andreplaced by other (only tentatively accepted) theories which will themselves eventuallybe falsified. 

Popper’sconfinement of certain scientific knowledge to negative claims about thenatural world is analogous to the apophatic theologian’s confinement oftheological knowledge to negative claims about the divine nature.  It has a similar source in the idea thatknowledge must be grounded in experience (where the Humean has a much thinnerconception of “experience” than an Aristotle or Aquinas, which is why Humeansare bound to think we can know much less about even the natural world than Aristotleor Aquinas did).  Popper also rejectsessentialism, so that he thinks we cannot know the essences of natural phenomena(in a way that is analogous to how Aquinas, though an essentialist, thinks wecannot strictly know the divineessence). 

Yet Popperis a realist and an objectivist.  He doesnot deny the reality of the natural world or that our cognitive faculties arecapable of making objectively true judgments about it.  It’s just that our knowledge of it is largelynegative.  This is analogous to how theapophatic theologian does not deny that God exists or that we can know that hedoes, but only that we can have much in the way of positive knowledge of hisnature.

Is there somereason for these parallels betweenPopper’s philosophy of science and negative theology?  Or are they merely coincidental?  I’m inclined to say that they are notentirely coincidental, though not because either had any direct effect on theother.  Rather, as I have indicated,their similarities are perhaps a result of a common foundation in empiricism(or at least, such a foundation is to be found in the Aristotelian style of negativetheology one sees in a thinker like Aquinas). Though, an important difference between the views also has the samefoundation.

What I meanis this.  Aquinas’s negative theology isgrounded in his Aristotelian brand of empiricism.  Because the empirical world is the natural subjectmatter of human cognition, we can’t form much in the way of a positive conceptionof what lies beyond it.  All the same,the Aristotelian brand of empiricismhas a much more ambitious conception of what the senses can reveal about thenatural world than modern, post-Lockeanempiricism does.  It allows, for example,that the intellect can abstract the essences of physical things of a certainkind from observations of particular instances of that kind.  This makes possible a more robust positive knowledgeof the natural world than is possible on Popper’s account.

Popperhimself was certainly critical of certain aspects of modern empiricism, but henevertheless worked within its broad, very modest conception (and, from theAristotelian point of view, excessively modest conception) of what experiencecould reveal about nature.   Hence, wherethe Aristotelian negative theologian would say that we can have little or nopositive knowledge of the divine essence but can have such knowledge about the naturalworld, Popper denies we can have it even about the natural world.  In both cases the view is (or at leastsometimes is, in the case of negative theology) grounded in a view about thelimits of empirically grounded knowledge, but in Popper’s case the limits aremore severe.

Related posts:

Tugwellon St. Albert on negative theology

McCabeon the divine nature

Dharmakīrtiand Maimonides on divine action

LaoTzu’s negative theology

Anote on falsification

Popper’sWorld 3

Jacksonon Popper on materialism