The truth shall set you free

I have often found myself lost in the sea of epistemological uncertainty that comes with postmodernism. As philosophers have deconstructed knowledge we have come to take as a truism that it is inextricably tainted by our personal, social and cultural contexts. The idea that anyone has access to "pure" knowledge is a fallacy. From this relativism quickly follows. If objectivity is unavailable to us, and if all knowledge is "tainted", then we are simply left with our own unique and individual take on things. What I consider to be True is true to me, and vice versa.

This morning I was reading the final chapters in the book "Exclusion and Embrace" by Miroslav Volf. It's an amazing read and one I highly recommend, if for no other reason than to find a way through the modern epistemological fog Descartes left us with; this being a seemingly unbridgeable gap between the inner world of our thoughts, and the world that is (theoretically) "out there".

The author standing in front of Descartes' tomb in the Abbey of Saint-Germain-des-Prés in Paris 2014
(Copyright Stephen A Richards, 2017)

For many years I struggled with this problem, and no more so than in the context of faith. For if I am unable to get outside my our mind then how can I possibly claim to know anything of the existence of God, for example? The belief that knowledge is constructed and relative led to a folding up of my faith over twenty years ago.

Recently I returned to the world of faith and belief in God again, and largely for the reasons Volf discusses in his chapter "Deception and Truth". He makes the point that trying to access Truth as an abstract metaphysical concept is impossible for the reasons we have already alluded to: There is no way we can step outside our own thinking processes to do this. We are always going to be inside our head in one capacity or another.

Looking at the street through a pair of glasses
(Copyright Stephen A Richards, 2017)

However, to resolve this seemingly irreconcilable tension, Volf directs us towards the notion of Truth as that found in the Bible; this being that Truth is not so much discovered, but lived:

Neither Jeremiah nor Paul speaks abstractly of the relation between "minds" and "facts," as the western philosophical tradition like to state the relation between the knower and the object of knowledge. In a sense, so then there are no such things as "minds" and "facts." Instead of forging abstract categories of "facts" and "minds," they narrate the things people do to each other… "facts" exist only within a… community (261)

Truth is not so much "out there" but in the midst of us. We live the truth we profess. If you want to know what Truth is, look at the lives people are living. Jesus is also making this point when he says that we will know what people are like "by their fruit" (Matthew 7:16). You want to know what someone believes is true, then look at how they live, the things they do, the people they hang out with, the places they go etc.

Truth is not hidden "inside" waiting to be discovered, but is "outside", lived, and being revealed. For me God's existence is not something I have proved through abstract arguments, but something I have chosen to organise my life by. I have chosen to believe God exists, and God's existence is proved true to me (and others) in the daily lived experience of my life.

Let your light shine before others, that they may see your good deeds and glorify your Father in heaven (Matthew 5:16)

Source

Volf, M. (1996) Exclusion & Embrace: A Theological Exploration of Identity, Otherness, and Reconciliation, Nashville: Abingdon Press 

An Introduction to Epistemology: Foundations of Knowledge (Part 1)

Epistemology, from the Greek word episteme (meaning to know), is to do with the science, or art of knowing what we know.

I say “science or art” here because epistemological debates often center around one of the following issues: Do we discover knowledge of things, or do we create our knowledge and understanding of them?

Let’s state this another way: Are our minds passive or are they active in the cognitive, or knowing process? 

When passive the mind plays no active part in the cognitive process. In one sense we might say knowledge is pure, untainted by anything outside or in the mind. There is also a correlation between the thing perceived and our mind’s ability to receive knowledge of it. In the end the mind acts as a repository or a store for the knowledge we acquire, and that is all.

In contrast, when we say the mind is active in the knowing process, we are suggesting it plays some role in deciphering and organising knowledge. For instance, the mind receives sense impressions from things, but these are filtered and organised through an array of social and cognitive (that is mental) filters to give us knowledge.

For example, imagine this coffee-maker is our mind. To make coffee we put water in, which passes through coffee granules in this filter, which fills this jug underneath. If this is our mind then every moment sense-based experiences (what we see, hear, taste, touch and smell) are pouring in, passing through a variety of physical and cognitive filters, on the way to forming knowledge. 

The passive mind model suggests there is nothing affecting the knowledge we acquire, whereas the active mind model suggests there is, and this seems to resonate more with our experience of things. 

For instance, many people enjoy drinking coffee. Their taste buds react positively with the experience and this creates knowledge and a memory that they like to do this. However not everyone enjoys the taste of coffee. For instance, some people, like me, prefer to drink tea!

Now nothing is fundamentally changing in the nature of the coffee to cause someone enjoy drinking it, and me not so much. It is not the case that the nature of the coffee is changing according to the person drinking it. Instead it is each person’s personal preference and taste, which change and influences our experience of drinking coffee (or tea).

Let’s expand this analogy to talk about religious knowledge. 

For someone who believes in the existence of God, sense-experience also passes through the “God exists” filter. For example, if they pray for x to happen and x happens, then they would interpret that experience as God answering their prayers, which for them is also proof that God exists. Of course, some might suggest this is circular logic; that prior to having the experience of answered prayers, one is already assuming God exists and will answer them.

Let’s expand this cognitive model a little more. Just as different flavoured coffee granules can be placed in the coffee maker to give different flavoured coffee, so different social and cultural factors will influence the way our mind acquires religious-based knowledge.

For instance, someone born into a Christian family will most likely understand God as Trinity. A Muslim will experience God as Allah. A Hindu will perceive God to be Brahman, the living presence in all things…. and so on!

Unsurprisingly, the suggestion that the mind is active in the knowing process has led to skepticism and difficult questions about the nature of truth, belief and justification. For instance, can we claim any knowledge to be ultimately true? What criteria is needed to demonstrate true knowledge? Can anyone claim to be truly objective in terms of what they know?

In terms of religious knowledge, a believer might interpret an experience as the product of Divine interference, but an atheist interpret the same experience differently, judging it to be the product of natural causes and that is all. How do we decide whose experience is true?

Ever since the time of Immanuel Kant it has become increasingly popular to view what goes on in the mind as highly influential in the knowing process, and this has tended towards the notion that there is no independent source of knowledge beyond our own realm of sense-experience. But this is not exactly what Kant believed. Although he argued that the mind is active in the knowing-process, he also proposed the existence of a realm beyond human perception (called the noumenal realm) where we find the true nature of things (or things as they are). The problem he left us with is how to attain knowledge of anything as it truly is.

And so we arrive at the crux of the matter: Ontology!

Ontology is to do with the nature of reality. Obviously, logically, reality must have an essential and true nature, but the question is whether we can ever come to know and understand what this is?

If we accept the notion that knowledge is always influenced by social and cognitive filters, then this might suggest we never can never know the true nature of things. On the other hand, if we accept the possibility that mystical experiences or some form of mental training can take us behind the veil of human reason, then it might be argued that (in theory) we can.

An Introduction to Logic and Reasoning Skills (Part 2)

There are over 7 billion people in the world, and with each person on the planet comes a unique perspective on the nature of things.

People are born into different families, different countries and different cultures, all of which shape the way each of us perceive the world.

We are also different from each other in many other ways. Male and female; fair-skinned and black; straight, gay, transgender; disabled, blind, colour-blind. So many things combine to make us very different from each other.

When it comes to thinking about each other’s beliefs and opinions, these too are many and varied. What we think about the nature of the world, reality, purpose of life, meaning of things, morality, religion, and God even, our beliefs are not necessarily going to be the same as what other people think. When we consider the multitude of influences that go into making us who we are, it is easy to see why this is the case.

So with this in mind our starting-point for evaluating another person’s beliefs and opinions must surely be that of asking questions. For example:

• Why do they believe that?
• When did they acquire these beliefs?
• What has led them to continue having these beliefs?
• How are my beliefs different to theirs?
• Where might we agree on this issue?

And so on…

Of course, if we all have our own unique beliefs and opinions then how do we decide which of them are reliable or true, if any?

In his book “The Problem of Philosophy”, the Philosopher Bertrand Russell illustrated this point in the following manner:

“To make our difficulties plain, let us concentrate attention on the table. To the eye it is oblong, brown and shiny, to the touch it is smooth and cool and hard; when I tap it, it gives out a wooden sound… but as soon as we try to be more precise our troubles begin. Although I believe that the table is 'really' of the same colour all over, the parts that reflect the light look much brighter than the other parts, and some parts look white because of reflected light. I know that, if I move, the parts that reflect the light will be different, so that the apparent distribution of colours on the table will change. It follows that if several people are looking at the table at the same moment, no two of them will see exactly the same distribution of colours, because no two can see it from exactly the same point of view… The same thing applies to texture… and shape.” [1]

So if people are having different experiences of the table at the same time, whose experience is the most valid or true?

Let’s illustrate this point another way using a well-known Indian parable:

In a village three blind men were touching an elephant. They were asked to describe what they were feeling. The first blind man, holding the elephant's leg, said he was touching the trunk a great tree. The second blind man, holding the elephant's tail said he was holding a rope. The third blind man, touching the elephant’s side, said he was standing in front of a great wall. Each blind man was convinced he was right and others were wrong, even though they were all touching the same elephant.

The table and elephant analogies suggest there is no such thing as Absolute Truth; that in fact all truth is relative to the individual and many philosophers will accept that this when it comes to social, moral and religious truth-claims. However, this is not to say we are now living in a world devoid of any truth or sense of certainty.

For instance, we can’t drive up to a gas station and decide to fill up our vehicle’s fuel tank with milk. Everyone at the gas station would agree that in order to make their vehicle work they need to put gas, or petrol in it. A combustion engine will not run on milk. Even if someone insists it does, they will soon come to realise they are wrong, especially when they attempt to start their car and drive off. So although someone next to me may have been born in a different country, have a different skin colour, is the opposite gender to me, and different in all manner of other ways, both of us would agree that we need to put gas into our vehicle in order to continue driving it.

One final point. Sometimes a disagreement between two people is simply about the meaning of the words we use. For instance, consider the person who believes the earth is flat versus the one who believe it is not. Both would say that the earth is “Round”, but both would also clearly mean different things by this.

[1] Taken from chapter 1, “Appearance and Reality”.