Adventures in Epistemology 8

previous post
_______________
29 cont.
You sometimes hear a lot of rhetoric about truth. But it is not really about truth but about tribe. The most likely thing to be truth is what has the most evidence in its favor in the simplest way without being too simple. I'll talk later about Barth, Reformed epistemology, and post-liberalism as a conflicting point of view.

In philosophy class, I would put several dots on the whiteboard. I would point out that there was an infinite number of ways to connect the dots.

• Sometimes you don't have enough dots to come up with any likely image at all.
• Some drawings capture some of the dots but not all of them.
• A person might draw a picture that requires more dots outside the ones you have than around the ones you do have.
• Some drawings have contours completely unexpected by the dots you have--like twists and turns that the dots you have don't anticipate.

If the dots represent a matter whose truth exists and we are trying to ascertain, the most likely truth is the picture that 1) has lots of dots, 2) uses as many dots as possible without excluding many if any, and 3) draws a picture that is largely anticipated by the lay out of the dots you see.

Sure, many other pictures will always be possible. As I began to study the Bible formally, my scientific way of thinking stayed with me. And by scientific thinking I mean real world thinking. I mean life thinking. If you are looking for your keys, you go to the places you remember going recently. You probably don't walk to the next state on the hypothesis that you took a trip you don't remember taking, got amnesia, then hitchhiked home.

To be frank, a lot of people think in the crazy way. If you ever hear me say that an idea is "ingenious," maybe I mean it is really ingenious. Or I may mean it is preposterous but very clever indeed.

Over the next few years, I would increasingly come to the conclusion that the interpretations of a fundamentalist view of the Bible repeatedly involved "cooking the books" and special pleading. You might remember that I earlier considered myself detail-challenged but a savant at the big picture. It was this ability to see the big picture that repeatedly looked at arguments like Lindsell's and concluded that something wasn't quite right here. More to come.

30. The Devil is of course in the details. When forming my own hypotheses, I have had to learn to pay great attention to details. In Myers-Briggs terminology, I am a massive N, an intuitive. [1] People like me see connections. We see the big picture. We see the forest better than detailed people, who tend to focus on all the individual unique pieces of moss on every tree but may not be able to find their way to the road. [2]

Often when I start writing a paper, I see a possible pattern--patterns are the stuff of an N. But then as I learn the details, I realize the pattern has to be adjusted. Once I have all the details firmly in mind and have discerned a pattern, I usually have a compelling result. There is something exhilarating about this because concrete details are my "inferior function." Your inferior function is the letter opposite your greatest strength, in my case the S or "sensing" orientation. [3]

So I have learned to collect and wait for details. A theory is only as good as its ability to account for the details. The discernment of a pattern is a creative act. It is a birthing. It takes a threshold of mental energy. It is thus a cause of procrastination.

I am usually pleased with what is birthed, but the process can be tiring.

31. One of the most exciting set of ideas I encountered at Central was in my senior year in an interdisciplinary seminar with Dr. Martin LaBar. He introduced us to the ideas of Thomas Kuhn and his book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. The phrase "paradigm shift" was pretty common at that time.

Kuhn argued, as it were, that we are predisposed to look at a particular subject matter in a certain way. [4] There are default paradigms that are the frameworks we assume when thinking about or talking about something. This applies to the Bible. It applies to what you do with your house. It applies to how you go about eating, how you roll the toilet paper or squeeze toothpaste. We are very often not aware of these prevailing paradigms.

At one point of the class, Dr. LaBar had us go to the window. He asked us what we saw. We saw cars in the parking lot. We saw trees and sky. Then a clever person said, "I see a window."

That was what he was going for. The prevailing paradigm of windows is that we look out of them. So most of us assumed his question was asking about the things outside the window. We were not predisposed to see the window itself.

32. This is an incredibly helpful tool of analysis. Growing up, I did not realize there was such at thing as a Wesleyan paradigm. I didn't realize that someone could read certain verses in a completely different way. In my teaching, I used to say that it is no surprise that a Wesleyan brings a "Wesleyan dictionary" to the Bible and concludes that it obviously teaches Wesleyan things while a Baptist comes to the Bible with a "Baptist dictionary" and concludes it obviously teaches Baptist things and so forth.

One of the most critical questions of today goes beyond whether the Bible has authority to the question of who decides what the Bible means. I self-published a book on this question once upon a time. As I think Joel Green once said, a Jehovah's Witness believes the Bible is inerrant, but their interpretations are quite strange. I am convinced that many of those involved in the Bible wars of the past were more fighting over a tribal flag than truly over the content of God's word.

There are all sorts of issues where a cross-section of people feel incredibly strongly about some issue and yet they have no idea that they are wearing a certain pair of glasses. When I had students write a position paper for New Testament Survey, I would warn them to be sure and write a paper 1) that was about the New Testament and 2) engaged a topic about which the New Testament spoke extensively. In their unreflective, "pre-modern" paradigms, there was a tendency to confuse certain legitimate Christian perspectives they had with New Testament perspectives.

For example, I cannot think of any verses in the New Testament that relate directly to abortion. In other words, there is no direct statement about the issue in the Bible. Christian perspectives on abortion involve theological discussions about life that expand upon basic principles and bear indirectly on this subject. Richard Hays, in The Moral Vision of the New Testament, has a chapter on abortion and ends up with the position that abortion does not fit well at all with biblical biases and values. However, he is a master scholar well beyond any freshman or sophomore student I've ever met. He argues for this position from the Bible indirectly.

33. Our paradigms make things seem obvious to us that are more us than there. There was a turning point in college in my feelings on holiness standards. The verses are there for some of these standards. Ironically, the New Testament is much clearer on the topic of jewelry than it is on abortion. Take 1 Peter 3:3--"Do not let the outward adornment [of a wife] be the braiding of hairs or the wearing of gold [jewelry] or the putting on of garments." Similarly there is 1 Timothy 2:9 which says a wife should not adorn herself with "braids and gold or pearls or costly garments."

So I in my first two years of college I struggled with whether I should marry someone who wore earrings (and thus whether I should date someone who wore jewelry). There were other key verses from my holiness background. Deuteronomy 22:5 forbade an Israelite woman from wearing that which pertains to a man. In my circles, this verse was used to argue that women should only wear skirts, not pants or slacks. [5] Then of course 1 Corinthians 11 was used to say that women should have long hair and men short hair.

When I wrote my commentary on 1 and 2 Corinthians, I concluded that Paul was primarily talking about the veiling of a woman's hair in 1 Corinthians 11. A hair veil (not a face veil) functioned a little like a wedding ring, as well as providing modesty. A house church was an intriguing social situation. You had men and women who weren't married to each other in close quarters. And you had women praying and prophesying in the worship.

I believe this created an awkward social situation, indeed, an awkward sexual situation. By wearing a hair veil they might normally have worn in public situations, this situation was brought under control. The woman "had authority" on her head that said, "I'm married and in proper relation to my husband" even though she was in the presence of other men, not least the putative males, angels and God.

The reason this passage is so difficult to interpret--and scholars are divided over its meaning too--is because it comes from a different world that had quite different paradigms from ours. The Bible was not written in universal paradigms because they hardly exist. When God spoke in the Bible, he spoke to real people. And if God was to be understood, he would need to speak in their paradigms.

34. Revelation must be incarnational if it is to be understood. It seems to me that a lot of people act like revelation is all about God saying great things on his terms with no interest in being understood by anyone. At least that is the consequence of their sense of revelation.

Actually, they think they understand. But the implication of their approach, what they are really implying, is that God revealed himself in their paradigms. The implication that they don't realize is that they are implying no one else in history, including the original audiences, has really understood the texts until them. This is especially true of those who think Revelation is finally about the current events of today, as if no one in all of history has understood what the book was really about.

In other words, what they are really saying when they say, "The Bible was revealed for all time" is "The Bible was revealed for me in my paradigms and not directly to everyone else in history."

There is a simple and undeniable syllogism here:

• The Bible was initially addressed to specific audiences like Israelites, Romans, etc.
• God wanted them to understand the content revealed.
• They thought and understood things within certain paradigms.
• Their paradigms are quite often not our paradigms.
• Therefore, if we want to understand the original meaning of the Bible (aka, its actual meaning), we will have to do some cross-paradigm work.

Reading the Bible in context will inevitably be an intercultural experience.

I debated this question when I was getting ready to test out of New Testament Survey. I borrowed my sister Debbie's copy of Merrill Tenney's New Testament Survey (which she used at Marion College). Tenney was talking about the historical context of 1 Thessalonians, including where it was geographically located and so forth.

I asked myself, would God have let anything into the Bible that didn't apply to all times and all places? For example, if Paul's instructions about hair were just for "that time" and not for "all time," would God have put 1 Corinthians in the Bible in this form?

Now of course I have shifted focus. Every single word of the Bible was for them. After all, it repeatedly addresses them. It is for us as Scripture but it was to them. The Bible itself models what for now I will call the re-appropriation of basic principles into new contexts. Even this statement is a little too Platonic for me but I will go with it for now.

Changes between the Old and New Testaments are not simply a matter of old covenant/new covenant. Underlying some of the old covenant/new covenant transition is a change of context from the Ancient Near East to the Mediterranean world. There are paradigm shifts lurking here (e.g., with regard to food laws).

In the end, the instructions of Scripture made sense within their contexts. As I argue in my New Testament Survey, "Doing what they did isn't doing what they did" if it doesn't have the same meaning and implications in our context. If a woman wore a veil today, it simply would not "do" or accomplish what Paul was trying to accomplish with his instructions to the Corinthians. It just wouldn't mean the same thing. Its specifics were a "that time" instruction.

I sometimes the example of greeting the brothers with a holy kiss in 1 Thessalonians 5:26. Doing that today in most churches certainly wouldn't mean now what it mean then. A holy handshake will probably do.

35. If I might synthesize Kuhn with a little Michel Foucault, paradigms focus on certain data and minimize other data. Meaning in a paradigm is a little like a word cloud. Certain things stand out large and others are small. We do not realize that it is our glasses that make them appear different sizes.

So in the holiness paradigm, earrings appear large in the word cloud of meaning. You notice them. Keith Drury has told me of a visit he made to a district conference where he perceived his wedding ring was completely distracting from his message. The eyes of the congregation followed the ring like people at a tennis match.

He finally stopped and said, "Is this a problem?" and took the ring off. He told me there was an audible sigh of relief and he had great rapport with the group from that point on in the message.

When I got married, my wife and I had wedding rings. To be honest, I found the ring annoying on my finger. For a long time I found myself fiddling with it. But I guarantee you there was zero pride involved with it. To me, it says that I am committed to a wife. I am not available. Not to wear a wedding ring could actually be an immoral act if one was trying to pretend not to be married.

Soon after I was married someone asked if they could look at my wedding ring (it has an inscription on the inside). They then proceeded to pretend like they were showing it off in a proud way, "Look at me!" The disconnect between how I viewed the ring and the way that, in their paradigm and word cloud, it surely must function could not have been more different.

This was the moment of paradigm shift for me in college. I realized that earrings and such were no different to the girls at Central than me combing my hair. [6] One moment in the library a certain girl with earrings broke the old paradigm. It rushed in on me that her wearing them had nothing whatsoever to do with ungodly pride.

I had prayed with Judy Huffman for God to show me if my sense of standards was wrong. He did. He showed me that I had those issues completely out of focus. The beginnings of a paradigm shift were in motion. [7]

36. Paradigms inevitably select certain data as significant and other data as insignificant. Then they usually ignore other data. The recent impeachment hearings would be fascinating to analyze in this light but of course I won't.

I was speaking to someone about the situation, trying to be conciliatory. The person felt that the other side (I won't say which) made up stuff. Certainly that could be true. But I suggested a more charitable scenario.

What if, I suggested, there are facts one through ten? What if side 1 is focusing on facts 3, 4, and 5 while side 2 is focusing on facts 6, 7, and 8? This is how paradigms work. One paradigm focuses on one set of data and has them large in the word cloud of meaning. The other focuses on other data and emphasizes them.

Of course interpretation is much more about the scaffolding we put alongside these "facts" than it is about the facts themselves. Nietzsche once said, "There are no facts, only interpretations." I don't fully agree, but there is some truth to his sentiment. I would rather go with what is called critical realism. Facts exist, but our apprehension of them will always be skewed somewhat.

I had James Bross for philosophy my senior year at Central. One of the concepts that stood out from the textbook he used was the notion of an "egocentric predicament." We are, as it were, stuck in our heads. I cannot get into your head and you cannot get into mine. The only hope is to input you as best I can into my computer.

Although I did not really understand Kant at the time, I find his epistemological framework helpful. [8] The content of our thinking comes through our senses. But the shape that content takes is a function of our minds. Post-Kuhn I would say a function of our paradigms. Our senses give us the content of the paper we are writing. Our minds (paradigms) are the Microsoft Word software that gives us a framework into which to put that content.

It is the same with understanding the Bible, by the way. The Bible provides the content but it is our paradigms that give shape to the content of the Bible (e.g., Wesleyan, evangelical, catholic, scholarly). The Bible does not come inputted already onto our hard drive. We have to input it, which means we have to interpret it. Our software puts the content of the Bible into the word cloud of our paradigms.

Any argument will do in an echo chamber. When you look at the Republicans and Democrats today, it often doesn't seem to matter what the whole data is. Republicans will select certain data and ignore others and the same with the Democrats. In the Democratic paradigm, Trump is a liar and a schemer, a selfish narcissist who will do anything to exalt himself and win over everyone else. In the dominant evangelical paradigm, Trump is a hero who is finally doing something about abortion and appointing judges who will eventually stop abortion. He is the man of the hour, God's man, perhaps even a godly man, whom God has appointed to restore America as a Christian nation.

These two paradigms are so starkly different that both sides almost have to make the other into evil fiends. For me as a philosopher, it is a source of despair.

But it is perfectly understandable. It fits everything I have come to believe about human epistemology. Humans are herd animals. We are tribal. We do not see the world as it is, what Kant called das Ding an sich. We see the world as it appears to us. We see the world through paradigms darkly.

37. Paradigms shift when anomalous data grabs the attention of someone and they are able to turn the tide of knowers toward a different way of evaluating the data in the word cloud. This often has a good deal to do with sociology. Indeed, Kuhn's hypothesis (which he pulled from back a little in the second edition) was that science wasn't about truth at all, that it was just an endless series of shifts.

I don't believe that myself. Kuhn was part of the postmodern shift. It's not just secular thinkers who built on this non-realism. The Christian community has also capitalized on a cultural situation where truth is what you believe without the possibility of falsification.

I call anomalous data, "naughty data," data that doesn't fit into your current paradigm. It could be verses of the Bible that don't fit your theology. These annoying outlying bits of data can sow the seeds of shifts.

My senior year of college one of the professor's daughters returned to college after a spiritual breakthrough. She had short hair, wore earrings. In short, she did not look like a holiness person in the slightest.

But she had such joy in the Lord! There was no question that she was fully sold out to God. She was so spiritually minded. It was another key bit of naughty data. This person had the fruit of the Spirit. This person demonstrated the sanctifying work of God in her life. But she didn't look anything like my holiness word cloud. Easter was coming...

[1] By the way, of all the things I learned in seminary, one of the most useful was the fact that people are different and that we all have different strengths and weaknesses. Myers-Briggs taught me that better than anything else, my first semester at seminary. Simple truth whose implications are often missed.

[2] At this point, a detail savant might respond, "Of course I know where the road is. You pass this maple tree with a very interesting third branch, then this pine tree with a burn spot about four feet up... then you reach the road. But this is not what I am saying. I am speaking of seeing the road in broad relation to everything else. They might not see the territory, only the map.

This is a problem in academic communities. We have bred academics to evolve into hyper-detailed, siloed scholars and have put detailed administrator personalities into leadership. They see the details of their disciplines oh so well--or the details of the institution or their part of the institution--so much better than others. They are so good at their thin slice of the pie that it is hard for them to believe that they are not right about everything.

[3] A sensing person does not tend to think abstractly but concretely. They see what is in front of them. By contrast, as I have sometimes remarked to my wife, "I've lived most of my life inside my head." There is a scene in Watership Down where the rabbit who understands symbols and metaphor is mocked and viewed with great suspicion by the concrete bunnies, but they simply cannot see what he sees. For a lighter example, see Drax in Guardians of the Galaxy.

[4] Kuhn was of course talking about science, but I will broaden the application.

[5] This was the issue I spoke with Dr. Dongell about where he pointed out that men and women both looked very similar in ancient times because the men wore robes that would look to us like dresses. It is now interesting to see this verse re-emerging in the transgender discussion.

[6] I started to say me wearing a tie, but there have been holiness people in the past who felt men shouldn't wear ties.

[7] Someone told me that if I changed on one of the holiness standards, I would change on all of them. The person said they had never seen it not be so. I denied it at the time but there was a great deal of truth to it. However, the change was not a matter of slippery-slope, as it was being framed. It was a matter of paradigm shift.

[8] I met with my high school friend Paul Herman a couple summers after graduation. He threw out Kant to me. I responded with Aquinas. But he was right. Philosophy cannot go back before Kant. Anything before Kant is just that much more unreflective, and we have become even more reflective since Kant.