Journal: Westminster Theological Journal
Volume: WTJ 69:1 (Spring 2007)
Article: Husserl’s Phenomenological Reduction And The Exclusion Of God
Author: Carlos R. Bovell

WTJ 69:1 (Spring 2007) p. 87

Husserl’s Phenomenological Reduction And The Exclusion Of God

Carlos R. Bovell

Carlos R. Bovell is a graduate of Westminster Theological Seminary and is studying history of philosophy at the Institute for Christian Studies, Toronto.

It is the distinctive peculiarity of phenomenology to embrace within the sphere of its eidetic universality all cognitions and sciences and, more particularly with respect to everything in them which is an object of immediate insight, or at least would have to be such if they were genuine cognitions.

So writes Husserl in the first book of the Ideas.1 However, God, the transcendent, is excluded by Husserl in the phenomenological reduction. The experience of God, according to Husserl, is not immediate but rather “highly mediated” and must therefore be excluded. In this article, I consider how a pre-suppositional apologist might argue that the presentation of God to humans as his creatures gives sufficient reason for humans to be unable to exclude God when performing the εποχη.

An obvious predecessor to Husserl’s phenomenology is Descartes. Husserl recognizes him as such when he writes, “The striving toward phenomenology was present already in the wonderfully profound Cartesian fundamental considerations.. . .”2 Husserl goes on to mention Locke, Hume, and especially Kant as others who came closest to what Husserl himself is attempting to do, but my focus will be upon Descartes and the possible ramifications of his work (and that of his contemporaries) for the possibility of the exclusion of God when undertaking the phenomenological reduction. I will present a few strategies that may help apologists formulate arguments such that any philosopher interested in doing phenomenology will not be able to bracket God in the way Husserl stipulates—that is, to exclude God entirely.3

I

During the course of Descartes’ radical exercise in doubting everything that can possibly be doubted, he mentions that “there is an ancient belief somehow

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fixed in my mind that God can do anything and that I was created by him with the kind of existence I enjoy”4 He then surmises that there is a choice to be made between deliberately undergoing the sort of radical doubt that he is in the business of pursuing in the Meditations and clinging to the belief in God—an all-powerful, all-benevolent being. Descartes states explicitly that there is a seriou...