Epistemological Relativism

I had a very interesting discussion with my carpool buddy about those atheism versus theism debates that are all the rage these days. He had some very astute observations despite his self-proclaimed lack of knowledge (he’s agnostic and I’m kidding). He noticed how the various camps typically claim that their side was the victor. See, debates aren’t exactly like the UFC. There isn’t a tap-out, a referee stoppage or a decision in the end. Instead, it is just a bunch of fans cheering for their fighter. What’s worse is that it is unlikely that one side would switch to the other as a result of such a brawl, but it is still entertaining and a great fuel source for conversation.

We discussed how atheistic arguments are sometimes made up of refutations of theistic arguments. Now, there is nothing wrong with this. If you can demonstrate that premises are incorrect or invalid you have successfully torpedoed the conclusion. What we observed is that in some cases this method (the refutation of theistic arguments) is successful. If they are successful (I think they are in some cases) then the argument for god is refuted. I agree with this. However, and I know this is obvious here, by refuting a positive proposition we have in no way confirmed it’s negative. In other words, refuting an argument for the existence of god does not get us to the truth claim that there is no god. I know, “the burden of proof is on you to prove god”. I agree. But if I cannot conjure up proof or my proofs are refuted, we simply slide into agnosticism. I can’t jump over the chasm into atheism without some logical help (I need some arguments). At the heart of it atheistic propositions, just like their theistic counterparts, are knowledge claims.

This of course led to all sorts of discussions regarding the problem of knowledge (a favorite of mine). Rarely, if ever, do I get the opportunity to talk about something that I think is fun and yet painful. So, I was sort of like the abominable snow man in this Looney Toons spoof. We talked about deduction and induction and the challenges of a priori knowledge. We talked about what meta-justification is. We even ventured off into the notions of “proof”. It seems that many today view scientific knowledge and proof in  the same way and forget that even within science there are a priori assumptions at play; nevermind the fun that ensues when we talk about sense data and what that data represents. Needless to say debates are a great way to pass the time of a long commute!

I’m on my latest book in our ‘08 reading bonanza. I’ve tried to read a variety of historical, philosophical and religious texts thus far (you can review the current list here). Since it *is* a race and I don’t yet have the desire to tackle the Barthian corpus, I selected Dogmatics in Outline. It is a short 150ish page book that is literally an outline of Barth’s theology (if I can make such a coarse assessment). I’m only 30 pages into it and as early as the second page you can see Barth’s emphasis on God’s transcendence and the limits of human reason to acquire any sort of meaningful (real) knowledge of God. What’s interesting is that in my recent reading of Russell’s Problems of Philosophy I’ve found similar themes regarding the limits of human reason.  I can say with some honesty that for a time I thought human rationality was the panacea for all human challenges. It seems to me from my reading of Barth that he is under no such illusion.  While conceding the human reason can figure things out, with respect to God Barth will not give an inch.

What man can know by his own power according to the measure of his natural powers, his understanding, his feeling, will be at most something like a supreme being, an absolute nature, the idea of an utterly free power, of a being towering over everything. This absolute and supreme being, the ultimate and most profound, this ‘thing in itself’, has nothing to do with God. It is part of the intuitions and marginal possibilities of man’s thinking, man’s contrivance. Mn is able to think this being; but he has not thereby thought God.   

-Karl Barth, Dogmatics in Outline (SCM Press, 1949) 15. 

You don’t get any beating around the bush with Barth. In many ways I agree with this theological reflection. In the past few centuries there has been a vigorous effort to “prove God”; to demonstrate through deductive arguments or experience of nature that God must exist. Human reason may be able to arrive at some vague notion of a divine power, but you’re very far indeed from anything that is communicated in the texts of Judaism, Islam and Christianity. I’m sure this need to prove God has arisen because for many centuries the existence of God has no longer been axiomatic. Barth is completely comformtable with the situation. For him,

Knowledge of God takes place where divine revelation takes place, illumination of man by God, transmission of human knowledge, instruction of man by this incomparable Teacher.   

-Karl Barth, Dogmatics in Outline (SCM Press, 1949) 16.

I know, I know, the modern, “I only *know* what I experience” person within us all is decrying this sort of “knowledge”. It’s fake, it can’t be trusted, it’s a mind game that we play on ourselves are the common responses. Barth, knowing this human emotion perceptively writes that,

The greatest hindrance to faith is again and again just the pride and anxiety of our human hearts.  

- Karl Barth, Dogmatics in Outline (SCM Press, 1949) 12.

This isn’t an apologetic or a comprehensive assessment of faith versus reason and their respective epistemic validity. I just wanted to point out that it is a modern “problem” that we struggle *in this way* with faith. We reflexively bar any sort of knowledge that we don’t immediately experience, but we don’t realize, in the way that Russell most certainly did (and Descartes before him), that that significantly and artificially limits what we can know (even though we already really know that we know). Confused? Yeah, me too. 

Many times in my religious experience I’ve had a desire to throw the baby out with the bath water because of the sheer stupidity of the present. I’m sure I’m not alone there either. For example, when reading about early church history and practices I would imperiously declare that the Greco-Roman Gentile converts-turned-leaders had gotten it all wrong. It was because of this confusion that Christendom was in such a sorry state today or so I thought. Naturally, the only real alternative was to throw everything out and start from the beginning. It took quite some time to realize that this beginning-ness had problems of its own. Where was the beginning? This jettisoning of tradition (whatever was left to begin with), the community of faith (past and present) and the general attitude of mistrust, however, made it nearly impossible to recover any sort of religious bearings. Barth is amazing because he manages to understand this dilemma and chart a course that avoids the problems that come from this type reaction and yet remain fluid enough to introduce needed corrections to the community. Barth will not allow everything to be discarded. He may give away too much in assuming that the community of faith did not go critically awry in the not-so-distant past, but he does not create an ivory tower out of this community of the past that is hitherto immutable.

Certainly, the assumption behind all this will be that the community itself may have been on the right track in the recent or remote past, or at any rate on a not altogether crooked path. Consequently, fundamental trust instead of mistrust will be the initial attitude of theology toward the tradition which determines the present-day Church. And any questions and proposals which theology has to direct to the tradition will definitely not be forced on the community like a decree; any such findings will be presented for consideration only as well-weighed suggestions. Nevertheless, no ecclesiastical authority should be allowed by theology to hinder it from honestly pursuing its critical task, and the same applies to any frightened voices from the midst of the rest of the congregation. The task of theology is to discuss freely the reservations as well as the proposals for improvement which occur to it in reflection on the inherited witness of the community.

– Karl Barth, Evangelical Theology (Eerdmans, 1963) 43.

–Update: Did anyone notice that I used the word ‘hitherto’?

Somewhat related to my ‘A Variety of Lenses‘ post, Barth in Evangelical Theology has some interesting things to say.

The remarkable assumption behind this project [the exegetical-theological task], however, seems to be that the content, meaning and point of biblical assertions are relatively easy to ascertain and may afterward be presupposed as self-evident…The truth of the matter, however, is that the central affirmations of the Bible are not self-evident; the Word of God itself, as witnessed to in the Bible, is not immediately obvious in any of its chapters and verses. On the contrary, the truth of the Word must be sought precisely, in order to be understood in its deep simplicity.

– Karl Barth, Evangelical Theology (Eerdmans, 1963) 35.

I was writing a bit off-blog about how different people approach the Protestant Bible. I thought it was interesting so I brought it into the blog to share. For a bit of context, I was speaking with a friend where I was mostly listening to him explain why his informed views of the meaning of the biblical text are to be preferred. Of course, like many people, his explanation was nothing more than an appeal to, “It is so clear, how can you *not* see it my way”. What he did not understand and, at first, acknowledge was the critical role that assumptions play in this process of understanding. Some people call them assumptions, others call them axioms and still others call them facts. The truth of the matter is that these assumptions, the lense by which we view the biblical text, are not themselves built into the text. They are part of our overall approach to reading texts like this. The challenge is that not everyone has the same set of lenses and yet many feel there particular brand of spectacles are the only ones authorized for this use.

These lenses control and in some ways determine how we understand biblical texts. This can be good and bad. If our lenses do not include the consideration of the cultural and historical context of the text things can get dicey. These considerations should constrain the possible meanings. Yes, you heard it right, we may receive the text in a particular way, but that is something entirely different than what the author intended and the first recipients may have understood . Many presume that our twentieth century lenses our the ultimate instrument to see the real meaning of a text. Unfortunately, this includes many, many people. We have to ask though, whether it is appropriate to view a text in a way that is disconnected from its temporal-spatial origin.

It sounds like I’m placing ancient texts in a vault and giving the key to a select few. Perhaps, this is the result and maybe that isn’t a terrible thing. In fact, in evangelical circles, this is the de facto standard anyways. Actually, this is the reason why I am blogging about this to begin with. Many people listen to those in authority who, with mostly good intentions, communicate the meaning of texts without communicating the method and built-in assumptions. I think the quote below from Frank Beckwith, a recent convert to Catholicism, summarizes the dilemma that most simply ignore.

In fact, it was just such reasoning that pushed me toward Catholicism. I thought to myself that if sola scriptura can result in everything from the philosophical theology of Calvinism to the Open View of God, from Nicean Trinitarianism to social trinitarianism to Oneness Pentecostalism’s rehabilitation of Sabellianism to 19^th-century Unitarianism, then sola scriptura is not a sufficient bulwark for sustaining Christian orthodoxy.

Since I have a few spare moments to read again I have decided to give Barth’s Evangelical Theology another attempt. Ironically, I was not prepared to engage with Barth until after battling it out with Brunner. For those of you that are not aware, these two had significant disagreements about one another’s theology.

Barth, in the beginning of this short book, attempts to sketch what theology is or, more importantly, what the object of theology is. Barth uses “God” to refer to that object which is “our highest desire”. I’ve heard this spun a bit differently in my previous evangelical experiences, but I think Barth makes the point clear.

There is no man who does not have his own gods or gods as the object of his highest desire and trust, or as the basis of his deepest loyalty and commitment.

This isn’t meant to be slanderous or a personal attack directed toward *theists. Barth is merely defining the term god and its possible referents (is that right?). Think of it as more of an abstraction or generalization that can be applied to everyone. Barth gives us examples of what suchs gods may look like.

Such an alternative object might be “nature”, creativity, or an unconscious and amorphous will to life. It might also be “reason”, progress or even a redeeming nothingness into which man would be destined to disappear. Even such apparently “godless” ideologies are theologies.

It is a good starting point for understanding what theology’s aim or object is. It is the study of, reflection upon those things that we elevate to the divine (whether legitimately or illegitimately is another story!) However, once you select your god object things change just a bit. Barth’s aim is to speak of the God of the Gospel. And the goal of this study is to:

..to apprehend, to understand and to speak of the God of the Gospel, in the midst of the variety of all other theologies and (without any value-judgment being implied) in distinction from them. This is the God who reveals himself in the Gospel, who himself speaks to men and acts among and upon them. Wherever he becomes the object of human science, both it source and its norm, there is evangelical theology.

– Karl Barth, Evangelical Theology (Eerdmans, 1963) 3-6.

As you can tell from my content I’ve recently been distracted from my epistemological studies that I outlined here. At first I wasn’t too sure if the distraction was worth it. But now, at my snails pace, I’m nearly complete with my initial reading of Reason and Revelation by Emil Brunner. This book was important for me because I wanted to see how a careful, honest thinker dealt with the challenges of faith and reason. It is understood by most that faith and reason are distinct methods of arriving at knowledge about the world. There are, of course, many problems that one is confronted with depending on how you define these terms. Defining the terms is a challenge unto itself (do you use faith and/or reason to define the terms?), but I won’t talk about that here. Maybe after I get through a second read of the book I’ll be able to talk intelligently about it. What is clear though is that Brunner does not limit the acquisition of knowledge using reason alone. Yet, he attempts to avoid totally divorcing faith from reason and the associated “leap into the void” kind of knowledge. While these quotes don’t contain the full context of what Brunner is arguing they are a decent window into how he views the inability of reason alone to “know everything” and the false ideas of the conflict between faith and reason.

Faith is aware of the higher rationality and the higher actuality of the truth of revelation, and is ready to maintain this; but it is also aware of the impossibility of asserting its validity within the sphere which the autonomous human reason has delimited for itself…The autonomous reason believes that this impossibility shows the untruth of the claim of revelation; faith, however, sees in every such demand for proof the consequences of an original perversion in the actual process of knowing, of the claim of our human reason to a false autonomy.

Reason has nothing to fear from genuine faith, nor has faith anything to fear from from the right use of reason. All conflicts between “faith and reason” are sham conflicts, which are caused by the fact that they have exceeded the limits of their respective spheres; either they spring from claims to revelation which are only in part due to real revelation, an in part to the confusion of revelation with human conceptions of revelation, or they are due to rational assertions which do not arise from reason, but from the misuse of the autonomous reason.

- Emil Brunner, Revelation and Reason (The Westminster Press, 1946) 213.
My goal is to complete the text by week’s end and resume my epistemological pain. We’ll see how that goes.

Spiritual sterility, indeed, may reach such a pitch that human beings may no longer have any interest in anything beyond the immediate and purely natural fulfillment of human needs; this loss of interest produces a state of almost total insensibility to the claims of any higher sphere.

- Emil Brunner, Revelation and Reason (The Westminster Press, 1946) 268.

That which can be based on rational grounds is, by its very nature, not revelation but rational truth. The truth of reason is that which we as rational beings can tell ourselves; the truth of revelation is that which, by its very nature, we could not tell ourselves, which by its very nature is truth that has been communicated, and indeed is transcedent, communicated truth. Anything a human being can verify or deduce for himself by any process of argument, investigation, or proof, cannot possibly be revelation, and, vice versa, that which is revelation cannot be verified by any such process.

- Emil Brunner, Revelation and Reason (The Westminster Press, 1946) 207.

Let the games begin! Now, I’m not sure I agree with all that Brunner has to say here, but he does give some food for thought. I don’t particularly relish the idea of moving theology into Schaeffer’s “upper story”, but at the same time, this is almost the defintion of real theology isn’t it? Of course, some out there will wonder about competing revelatory claims and such. My answer is that I haven’t finished the book yet.

Theological knowledge is no different than your everyday propositional knowledge. By this I mean it is no more certain. I know, this may sound shocking, but try to stay with me. It is not because somebody’s god made a mistake or two. This is not because there are flaws within a particular theistic framework. If anything there is a certain, ummm, certainty about this framework. Direct and unmediated revelatory information from the divine (if you believe in that sort of thing or even temporarily agree for the sake of argument) is hard to dispute. However, this isn’t what we’re talking about.

Most of the time we’re talking about some intermediate delivery system. I say intermediate precisely because the Christian bible, to use a relevant example although any holy book will do, was communicated, written and compiled by human authors. Sure, there are some examples of a direct divine communique to a faithful servant (the Ten Commandments are a good example), but most passages do not follow this pattern. Keep in mind that there are wide disagreements on just what sort of “divine influence” affected the original autographs (if there were such things, but let’s not chase that one for now). Even if we allow for any of these, there still remains a rather acute problem. The problem is that this information when communicated in this way is indirect.

At first glance this may seem to be a trivial difference. Looking back at my previous post on being objective you may be able to see what the implications are. In order to get at this information it isn’t simply a matter of automagically processing it and out come the results. You have to wade through not only your own time and place circumstances, but also that of the author’s. These texts, if we allow for the sake of argument that they are divine communications using a human intermediary, are fixed in time and place. This is so by the very definition of a human intermediary. They are constrained in their ability to communicate by their language, culture and experiences. This leads to some seemingly troubling results. Some portions of our theological truths when derived from these types of texts are not as certain as we like to think. I say some because, as always, we may happen to get lucky (even though we won’t actually *know* this in the epistemological sense).

People, as part of a religious community, and through faith or a priori beliefs know that their texts are god’s communication to mankind. Even allowing for this, we cannot easily overcome the challenge of the human author. This is a problem because within this type of framework some assume their holy texts are not merely the source of propositional knowledge, but the sure, certain and concrete kind of knowledge. The problem is we have to wade through the twofold human element (author and receiver). But, using this reasoning process to extract the most probable meaning (which I believe can be done using reason), however refined and systematized, unfortunately results in merely propositional knowledge. It must be said, that this is not to mean that it is not “good enough” or close enough. Because, for most endeavors, religious or otherwise, this is the type of knowledge we act upon day in and day out. However, we must realize this isn’t the certain and immutable kind of knowledge and many make that mistake.

There have been attempts that assert that certain holy texts have a simple, literal and plain meaning that is mysteriously not subject to the author/reader problem. But, we must ask where this presumption comes from. Is it a divine transmission sent to a select group? Obviously only some get this transmission and the subsequent simple meanings from the texts. Perhaps god is like the phone company’s service. Some people get the right message, others get parts and others get a completely garbled messaged. In the end, even if, as Barth claims, our knowledge of god is certain, how do we get from that knowledge to theological knowledge that isn’t merely propositional? We can’t. But, this is okay and yet causes a great deal of angst among many people. They want the certain and immutable type. Without question it is comforting and secure, but is it really possible or, better yet, necessary to live within the confines of a religious system?

Obviously this only scratches the surface and is incomplete or completely hopeless in certain parts, but I think it is worth reflecting on this and the implications of such a position.