By Schubert Ogden
The Notebooks of Schubert Ogden
In what sense is it true that "God is absent from modern science"?
According to Lonergan, this statement is true in the sense that "the divine is not a datum to be observed by sense or to be uncovered by introspection" ("The Absence of God in Modern Culture": 9).
But against such a view, I would urge, first, that, by this reasoning, God could never have been present in any science, modern or otherwise; and, second, that it contradicts the essential claim of theism as to the ubiquity of the divine. A God who is not presented somehow in all experience is precisely no God at all.
The alternative view, which affirms the same statement, albeit in a different sense, is that modern science, by its very method, abstracts from that aspect or dimension of experience in which God is a datum, however dimly given. In other words, the absence of God from modern science is not so much because God is who God is as because modern science is what modern science is.
1971; rev. 22 August 2003
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