There have been a bewildering 170 comments so far in response to a post published here a week ago. The bewilderment, for me, has been that much of the discussion has been a debate on the Law of Noncontradiction. It’s hard for me to see how that could be controversial–or how controversy is even possible if the LNC is not an agreed principle–but it has been.
It started with the question whether there is such a thing as nonempirical knowledge. One commenter proposed this test:
“If you can’t check it (ie. test it), then even if it is true, you can never know that.”
This alone doesn’t assert that the test must be empirical (based on observation), but that’s the direction the discussion went. One example:
“I showed you a specific example of how logic is verified by observation. I’ll repeat: if the observations I laid out didn’t verify the logic, we wouldn’t believe in the logic, so the logic is directly dependent on those observations.”
All this time I’ve had a relevant resource in my list of waiting web pages–pages I saw when I did not have time study them, and bookmarked to return to later. A few weeks ago J.P. Moreland published a short article on Christianity and Non-Empirical Knowledge. Here’s a taste of it (he is using “see” as shorthand for “testing something with the five senses”):
First, truth (the relation of matching or correspondence between a thought/proposition and reality) is not something we can see, so if we are limited to our five senses, we can have no grasp of it. If I believe that a book I ordered is at the bookstore, and then go to the bookstore and see the book, I know that my belief about the book is true. I can see the book there, but I cannot see my belief that the book was there, nor can I see the correspondence relationship between the book’s being there and my belief that it was there.
(Emphasis added)
What does this have specifically to do with Christianity? I don’t know where Moreland is planning to go with it in his next article in this series. There is, though, a common belief that the only reliable form of knowledge is scientific knowledge, which is further believed to be all empirical. If this is true, then faith is excluded. Moreland shows that this is a false assumption.
Disclaimer: I don’t have time to read the 170 posts in the prior thread. Sorry. 😛
J.P. Moreland is correct about this.
The problem is that he’s making an artificial division between mental experiences and physical ones. Have you ever had a physical experience that wasn’t a mental experience? I haven’t. The physical experiences are always seen through mental experiences.
We need to make some basic assumptions about this unified world of experiences in order for us to be rational. In particular, we have to assume non-contradiction, the factual nature of our experiences (that we experience what we experience), and that past experiences are guides to future ones. (We also have to assume we have rational faculties, or, rather, partially rational ones.) These assumptions get made before we introduce a distinction between the mental and physical experiences.
Yet, science and computational methods (like mathematics) emerge automatically from these privileged assumptions. I don’t believe we can say the same of faith.
Faith does not flow from those privileged assumptions. Granted. I doubt you’ll find any believer who would say that was where their faith came from.
On the other hand, it’s not at all clear that history agrees that science and mathematics emerge automatically from human thinking, without faith in a rational God, however. At least some of those “privileged assumptions” were hotly contested in ancient philosophy and continue to be in many modern cultures. Many thinkers contend that these privileged assumptions prevailed on account of belief in the Judeo-Christian God. Not that they originated only in Jewish Christian minds, but that the theistic soil was required from them to take root, grow, and eventually become predominant where theism and its influence has been predominant.