Certainty and Knowledge
In our culture, the need for certainty is often held up as the norm, skepticism is even praised. The default position in the Scientific Method is doubt. We seem to believe that if something is true, it will be able to stand up to any test (without even questioning the validity of the test itself).
Until a few months ago, I also embraced this view.
I thought truth was something that could be put into nice neat propositional statements and always could be proved with absolute certainty. The first time I read Descartes’ Meditations, I soaked it up like a sponge. I thought that here was how I could know, with absolute certainty, that I exist, and subsequently that God exists. I could build a firm foundation and be certain of anything that comes from this foundation. After all, this foundation was built form the idea of radical doubt. But our need for certainty is misplaced and leads to epistemic nihilism (the inablitiy to know anything, and a sense of loss in this).
Of course, the need for certainty did not begin with Descartes. “Classics, modernists, and skeptics have agreed: For knowledge to be knowledge, it has to be characterized by certainty and infallibility, necessity, universality” (Meek, Longing to Know). Doubt did become much more prominent as modernity rose, all in the name of “certainty.”
Descartes believed he could use the doubt of everything to prove his existence and the existence of God.
He was wrong to highlight that as the standard for everyone.
Subsequent philosophers have picked apart Descartes, and they have been right to do so. Foremost, “I think therefore I am” is a circular argument. Nietzsche even questioned if “I” even really exists. What if “I” is only the construct of language? What if only thinking exists? “Descartes’ doubt has not been sufficiently radical” (Sire, Naming the Elephant).
Descartes set the standard for determining truth extremely high. Western culture has mostly retained this high standard for truth. It sounds noble, but it is deadly (Meek). For a time, some thought we could get truth to pass this standard. Descartes, Locke, Berkeley, and Kant are a few examples.
However, others argued truth could not measure up. Hume argued against the law of causality. Nietzsche famously stated, “Truth is a mobile army of metaphors.” If truth really must pass through any test we can put it up to, it will eventually be disproved. Truth becomes impossible to know at best, and a total farce at worst. This is partly why relativism prevails so much in our culture. We want truth to stand up to a standard it cannot meet, and we don’t question the standard.
Another difficulty with our normal model of truth is that truth cannot always be put into propositional statements or captured entirely by reason. God is a being, not an idea. We can know some things about him (given that he exists), but we cannot know him fully. People share some of this trait too. We can know lots of facts about people, but can also not know them at all.
Let’s say I want to tell you who I am. I can start with my name, “Josh.” But this does not get at the heart of me. I can tell you facts about myself, but that still does not get at me. You may even meet me and become my friend. At this point you would say you “know me,” but based on our model of knowledge, you don’t know me. You only know a part of me. You do not have certainty in knowing me. In fact, no one does. My best friend cannot, my mother cannot, I cannot even know myself. Until we know the whole, the part is not truly known. Because we cannot know or portray the whole, the part is unknowable and unportrayable.
So what do we do with this? I think we have at least three options. I will begin examining these in my next post.
Suggested Reading:
Longing to Know by Esther Meek
-Great book that inspired much of this post, easy vocabulary for a heady topic
-I would suggest this one to anyone who has not read much philosophy
Naming the Elephant by James Sire
-Chapter three deals with Descartes and is method
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- Mar 28, 2008: Epistemology and the Nature of Scripture « Confessions of a Seminarian
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It’s very interesting to hear you talk about the formation of information (hah?) in relation to doubt, and then quote someone talking about how people have believed or not believed in facts throughout time and how those trends change.
In the past couple yers I’ve started culling the idea that it takes a certain level of suspension of disbelief to believe anything. And typing that just now makes it even more obvious to me. hehe
I mean that I’ve started to have this idea that nothing unknown is knowable (perhaps the agnostic in me, or maybe this is bringing in the agnostic). All our understanding of history is a total guess (and probably a lot of incorrect guesses at that), and maybe that comes from thinking of entropy philosophically. Or deductively.
I’m sick, I’m not sure if this is making sense.
Kyle-
Like I wrote in this post, I’ve been dealing with the same questions. I would like to challenge you on the “nothing unknown is knowable.” I have a baby sister, she is 21 months old. Today, I taught her how to kick a ball. Yesterday, she did not know how to kick a ball. It was in the relm of the “unknown.”
Obviously this example pales to something like the existence of God, or what the nature of this God is. However the way in which we come to know how to kick a ball and the way in which we come to know God must be somehow related. They both involve knowing.
Related, sure, but comparable or even alike? Hardly.
Kicking a ball is a motor skill. Knowing God is………NOT.
Kyle-
Agreed. But take the example I gave in the post about knowing a person. Maybe that is more comparable? Getting to know how to kick a ball might be easy. Getting to know a person is far harder.
Of course my point was that if I say truth must be infallible or certain to be truth, I cannot have any truth at all. For if this is the case, one must possess all knowledge before one can know any truth. I think we can agree on that.
This is precisely why I never had the desire to study philosophy…………………!
Really, given some of the ideas in your plays I would have thought you loved philosophy!
Pascal is a good antidote to Descartes — same era, both brilliant mathematicians, both Christians, but Pascal understood that Descartes was in essence putting a wall between God and man — we could only accept what we understood. A good discussion of why Pascal disagreed with Descartes and how Descartes’s ideas led to our present disconnect with the idea of a truly supernatural God can be found in the book The Collapse of the Brass Heaven.
Waltzingaustralia-
Yes, I love Pascal for that very reason. “Enough to believe, never enough to be sure.”
Good post. John Frame often reminds his students that the theologian Cornelius Van Til often spoke of God as “absolute personality.” Absolute such that He is beyond our knowing fully, yet personal such that we can know him truly.
If you don’t mind me adding a couple of other books for those interested in a Christian critique of Cartesian Modernism, in addition to the two good title you offer I would add -
1. Proper Confidence, by Leslie Newbigin
2. Theology After Wittgenstein, Fergus Kerr
Cheers!
I find myself stating this a lot lately, so please forgive the repetition.
I take argument with the idea that science sets out to prove anything… or rather that the scientific method (and thereby the basis of modern thought) sets out to prove anything.
The only thing the scientific method attempts to do is to DISPROVE something. (Which I think you were hinting at with all the talk about truth attempting to stand up to all these tests.)
Granted, if something cannot be disproven and continues to remain that way, it is generally considered “fact,” although science would still more or less classify it as a theory.
And I would definitely agree with your statement: “We seem to believe that if something is true, it will be able to stand up to any test (without even questioning the validity of the test itself).” Because the nature of the scientific method is such that if something repeatedly fails to be disproven, we can almost consider it truth.
I loved your description about trying to find some basis for knowledge, proof that you exist and thus that God does and a method for reaching that conclusion. It highlights what I find utterly depressing about using the scientific method: the need to have a standardized system of dis/proof.
Does that then mean that everything I “know” about myself (if I can know anything about myself) must stand some rigorous test? Does each experience I have and my reactions to those experiences have to be entered in a statistical analysis of my observable reactions? Is each response then judged as to whether or not it proves or disproves my version of “me”? And if I vary from that, what does the outlier in the data mean? Have I disproven myself? Or is there insufficient evidence of “me”?
Those are are rhetorical (mostly) and depressing questions. And I think that’s the downfall that comes from relying on modern notions and scientifc method as a basis for truth. Because if each thought I have, for example, is observable evidence of “me,” then all of it could be used to disprove a greater theory of “me.” And if each contradictory or changing thought, each action I take that does or doesn’t allign with my moral code, etc. is used as part of some overall test, then I’ll never be able to know myself with certainty… because I’ll inevitably wind up disproving every statement I could make about myself. (I could go into specific detail, but this seems jumbled enough as it is. If you’re interested in examples, let me know.)
And what I suppose I am getting to then is that you could potentially replace all the instances of knowing “me” (as an idea, not as me personally) with knowing “God.” I think that beings are simply too complex to be held to a standard that calls for minute study of concrete parts. And each instance of seemingly observable fact will only disprove something else in increasingly circular and contradictory ways.
I think back to the idea that anthropologically there are two ways to observe: impartial or participant observation. A researcher goes out into a civilization. He records the rituals of the people in order to form a theory of what those rituals are and what they mean. He can either: a) record what he observes - the words, movements, number of participants, etc. - by watching and asking questions only; or b) participate in the ritual himself and add those impressions to his data. Impartial (if such a thing exists) observation has the benefit of being considered relatively free from bias. It is the scientific method of data collection. Participant observation, however, is considered more biased, but it has the uniquely human aspect of knowing by experiencing. While I could tell you the format of a seance, for example, it would never explain the adrenalin rush of fear or the hairs standing on the back of your neck that make the experience what it is for those who do it.
And all that makes me wonder if maybe the anthropologists are onto something, and that perhaps the method we should be using for testing faith (if we find such a thing necessary) is participant observation.
Eek! Sorry for the long post. I don’t know how to shut up.