Board index ‹ Faith and Knowledge

[Chick Chick]

If we are fallible human beings, how can we know we are fallible human beings?

How can we know that God is God and Satan is Satan and not the other way around?

How do we know that the bible isn't Satan inspired?

How can we know that good is good, and bad is bad?

If Satan can appear as Jesus, how do we know who is who?

What if we're all Satan worshippers and we don't know it?

How do we know we even exist?

I'm having trouble and feeling discouraged.

[jimwalton]

Philosophers and theologians have studied your question for millennia. Knowledge is a tricky business. How do you know you know what you know? And how would you know if you knew it? Can you be sure you’re not dreaming or hallucinating? Can you be sure you’re perceiving things correctly? How do you even know you’re awake? We’ve seen enough science fiction movies to know how dicey things like this can get. Maybe you’ve been injected with a drug that makes you think you’re experiencing what you are (“Total Recall”), or a great computer is creating the world you imagine you perceive (“The Matrix”). Maybe it’s all a dream (“Inception”)? There’s even the contrived world of “The Truman Show”. Well, how do you know? This is your question, at least the background of it. If you talk with a philosopher, he or she can prove to you how uncertain all of knowledge really is. The conversation can get you going in so many circles that you don’t know which way is up any more, and even if you knew it, you couldn’t really be sure of it.

The field of the study of knowledge is called epistemology. Practically speaking, at the end of the day, my epistemic conclusions (what I know and how I know it) have to contain at least some things that I assume to be true, because many things simply cannot be proved.

- I assume that external physical objects are materially real, and have an objective existence outside of my sensory experience of them. In other words, things really exist whether I experience them or not and whether or not I even perceive them accurately. They have an objective existence outside of my mind, body, and experience.
- I assume, because I have experienced it, that sometimes my senses can deceive me, so that the truth of something or the truth about something doesn’t depend on me or my experiences.
- I assume that some truths don’t have a sensory component to them, such as the abstract truths of mathematics. Things can be true even though they can’t be touched, seen, heard, tasted, or smelled.
- I assume that though my senses can deceive me, I can consider them reliable when they coincide with the reality of existing objective physical objects.

In a sense it seems unnecessary to have to say these things, but my point is that when it comes to knowledge, the things I claim to know, at bottom, are based on my assumptions about what the world is like and how it works, what my senses and experiences tell me, especially compared and contrasted with the senses and experiences of others. These things I assume are called my presuppositions.

Even in the best of situations, we base our knowledge on certain things we believe. “We know what we know” because we make assumptions about what is knowable. We hardly think about it, but we even have beliefs about whether our assumptions dictate what we believe, or whether we believe that our experiences dictate what our assumptions will be. So much of what we know comes off the foundation of our presuppositions, and basically what we choose to believe about what we know.

Scientific naturalists are in a tough spot, since they believe that we and our cognitive faculties have been cobbled together by natural selection. Can anyone then sensibly think that our cognitive faculties are for the most part reliable?

I say you can't. The probability of our cognitive faculties being reliable, given naturalism and evolution, is low. If naturalism and evolution are both truth, our cognitive faculties don't have a high chance of being reliable. Nietzsche said, "Only if we assume a God who is morally our like can 'truth' and the search for truth be at all something meaningful and promising of success. This God left aside, the question is permitted whether being deceived is not one of the conditions of life." Thomas Nagel: "If we came to believe that our capacity for objective theory (e.g., true beliefs) were the product of natural selection, that would warrant serious skepticism about its results." Barry Stroud: "There is an embarrassing absurdity in [naturalism] that is revealed as soon as the naturalist reflects and acknowledges that he believes his naturalistic theory of the world. … I mean he cannot it and consistently regard it as true." Patricia Churchland: "Boiled down to essentials, a nervous system enables the organism to succeed in the four Fs: feeding, fleeing, fighting, and reproducing. The principle chore of nervous systems it to get the body parts where they should be in order that the organism may survive. … Improvements in sensorimotor control confer an evolutionary advantage: a fancier style of representing is advantageous so long as it is geared to the organism’s way of life and enhances the organism's chances of survival. Truth, whatever that is, definitely takes the hindmost."

In other words, the primary function of our cognitive faculties is not discovering truth, but contributing to survival. Evolution says that our behavior is reasonably adaptive to the circumstances, and doesn't guarantee true beliefs. Our beliefs *might* be true, but there is no particular reason to think they *would* be: natural selection isn't interested in truth, but in appropriate behavior.

Darwin himself expresses serious doubts along these lines: "With me the horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man's mind, which has been developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy. Would any one trust in the convictions of a monkey's mind, if there are any convictions in such a mind?" Materialists believe that rising in the evolutionary scale eventuates in content properties. The question is this: What is the likelihood, given evolution and naturalism, that the content thus arising is in fact true? What is the likelihood, given naturalism, that our cognitive faculties are reliable, thereby producing mostly true beliefs? Therefore, even the belief in naturalism and evolution is not only suspect, but defeated. And if naturalism and evolution and evolution are self-defeating, they can't be rationally accepted.

Theism is a more reasonable position. As Christians, we believe that an intelligent being created us with the capacity to learn and to know in a reliable way. Only under theism can knowledge be real and be reliable, despite our fallibilities and limitations, because God has created us with the capacity to know. We are able to observe, evaluate, compare, reason, and conclude. Those are capabilities that make sense under theism, but not so much under naturalism.

Another component of theistic epistemology is that we are not left to ourselves to learn and discern, but God helps to enable us to know truth.

How can we know we are fallible? Our reason is reliable enough for us to be able to discern that. How can we know that God is God, etc.? Because God has planted in us a moral compass so that we have a sense of good and evil. How do we know the Bible isn't Satan-inspired? We have a moral sense and can often distinguish between right and wrong. If Satan can appear as Jesus, how do we know who is whom? Satan can't appear as Jesus, but the Bible gives us some mechanisms to discern between good and evil spirits, and truth vs. falsehood. How do we know we even exist? Practically speaking, at the end of the day, my epistemic conclusions (what I know and how I know it) have to contain at least some things that I assume to be true, because many things simply cannot be proved.

[All is Well]

Very thorough and well stated. To add to your arsenal of quotes, I saw this tweet just today: "'If you believe in evolution & naturalism then you have a reason to believe your faculties are unreliable.' - Alvin Plantinga"

[jimwalton]

Thanks. Yeah, that's Plantinga's take. If reason has come about by natural selection and random mutation, can we really trust it? Some say we have developed the capacity to know truth, but that's not possible if that system is only comprised of chemicals, forces, and energy. Truth, and the capacity to know it, require a different source than processes that happened by chance and mutation. As Francis Schaeffer said, impersonal causes (chemicals, forces, energy) plus chance, even given enough time, cannot result in truth and reason. They're not part of the system and not possibilities.