The Descriptive Criterion and Models of God-Modeling: Response to Hustwit’s “Can Models of God Compete?”

Abstract

In "Can Models of God Compete?", J. R. Hustwit engages with fundamental questions regarding the epistemological foundations of modeling God. He argues that the approach of fallibilism best captures the criteria he employs to choose among different "models of God-modeling," including one criterion that I call the Descriptive Criterion. I argue that Hustwit's case for fallibilism should include both a stronger defense for the Descriptive Criterion and an explanation of the reasons that fallibilism does not run awry of this criterion in virtue of its apparent inability to make sense of debates among models of God extant in religious communities. This paper was delivered during the APA Pacific 2007 MiniConference on Models of God.Keywords Models of God . Religious epistemology J. R. Hustwit's excellent paper, "Can Models of God Compete? Testing the Strength of Religion's Language-Reality Ties," is directed towards a number of essential questions concerning the intentions and capabilities of theistic discourse (Hustwit 2007). I think the issues he raises are crucial both to the aims of this conference and to theological inquiry in general. In this response, I raise two questions about his methodology of evaluating ways of thinking about our talk about God.Hustwit operates on the assumption of the co-constitution thesis, which holds that humans' experience of the world is a product of both the world and our sensory, cognitive, and cultural natures. He is interested in discovering the best "Model of God-Modeling," or MGM, among four choices: mysteriosophy, theopoetics, critical realism, and fallibilism. Hustwit concludes that we should approach God-modeling from the standpoint of fallibilism, the view that our God-modeling is referential in intent and ability, but that we are in dire epistemic straits due to our limited understanding even of the proper criteria for model choice.