Selections of earlier material will eventually appear at the bottom.
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1. In the first six chapters, we have tried to pull back the veil on some of our potentially false pretenses to knowledge. Quite often, we start off with a "unitary" way of thinking about a subject or way of behaving. We just think that way and we aren't necessarily very aware of why. We behave a certain way more or less without reflection. It's just the way we do it. These are unexamined assumptions.
It isn't practical to question everything all the time. We grow up trained to work on cultural autopilot. We don't think about whether to put our socks on before our shoes. We just do it. If we are hungry in the western world, we don't likely catch a lizard to fry up.
We just know you can kill a spider but not a dog. We just know that Christians vote for Republicans because of abortion or that Christians vote for Democrats because of people in need. We just know that things are getting worse and worse before Jesus returns or that we need to work to make the world a better place. We just know that all people need to be treated with respect or that some types of people should be treated with suscpicion.
Then we are exposed to the "other side." Someone points out that we crossed the street because a black person was coming toward us on the sidewalk. Someone makes a Democrat sound virtuous. We get defensive or go on the attack. We go into "binary," us-them mode. "That's not why I crossed the street!" "That's not really how Democrats are!"
In the second half of the book, we'll go back through the areas we have introduced and discuss them from a more "spectrum" approach. We'll ask about the main options that philosophers of the ages have suggested as answers to ultimate questions. That process begins with this chapter as we begin to talk more objectively about how "knowing" actually works from a "meta" perspective.
If you wish, consider what follows a heuristic device. For some, it will come across as very modern in a postmodern age. However, I would maintain that such a conversation remains more useful than some postmodern sharing of perspectives that mainly improves our relationship with each other. Modernism is like looking under the hood of a car that isn't running properly. If it helps the car run more smoothly, it's more useful than two people sharing their perspectives on the car without its performance improving.
2. René Descartes (1596-1650) is often considered a turning point in epistemology, which is the study of knowledge. Epistemology asks how we know that we know what we think we know. How does "truth" work?
The claim has often been made that, prior to Descartes, there was clearly discussion of what is true and discussion of the sources of truth. But there was largely an unexamined assumption about our human reliability as knowers. If our senses were considered a source of truth, it was assumed that our senses were more or less reliable. More often our human reason was assumed to be a reliable source of truth.
As a sidenote, it is sometimes claimed that Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274), a very important Christian thinker from the "Middle" Ages, did not believe that our human reason was fallen. It seems to me that this is a somewhat unfair accusation in that the very question assumes a post-Cartesian perspective ("Cartesian" refers to Descartes' way of thinking). That is to say, before Descartes everyone more or less assumed as an unexamined assumption that human thinking worked. It just wasn't an issue yet. So even if Aquinas more or less assumed that human reason worked, he largely did so as the common assumption of his day. Further, he did believe that the mind could be clouded by sin.
From a Christian standpoint, there was also the unexamined assumption that we somehow automatically know what the Bible means. Luther and Calvin were largely unreflective in the 1500s about themselves as interpreters. People debated the meaning of the Bible, but they did not see the role their own assumptions and paradigms played in the process of interpretation. Most Christians today remain unaware of the role their paradigms play in their interpretations -- as we will explore in more depth later in this chapter.
Prior to the Protestant Reformation, the same unexamined assumptions applied to church dogma. There was no discussion of the historical and cultural forces at work on on the participants in the Council of Nicaea or the ebbs and flows of ideological trendlines in church history. If you were Roman Catholic, you assumed that the received dogmas were correct. If you were Orthodox, you assumed the received Orthodox perspectives were correct. Debates were really proxies for intergroup relations.
3. The time of Descartes was a time of unprecedented epistemological uncertainty. Protestantism had dethroned the church as the authoritative source of truth. Instead, Luther had called Christians back to the Bible, as John Wycliffe and John Huss had tried. If it was not found in Scripture, it must not be required of belief or practice.
However, as a text, the Bible is susceptible to a myriad of possible interpretations and integrations. From the moment Luther and Zwingli were unable to reconcile their biblical understandings of communion in 1529, the course of Protestantism was revealed to be one of endless multiplication of interpretation. Martin Marty once estimated that there were over 20,000 individual Protestant groups. All of these have their own interpretations of the Bible.
By the time of Descartes, there were now Lutherans, Reformed, Anglicans, Anabaptists, and more. Who decides what the Bible means? The answer was largely local and "tribal."
It seems to me that it is no coincidence that rationalism (the mind as the source of truth) and empiricism (our senses as the source of truth) rose to prominence as epistemologies in the 1600s. They had been around in ancient times. Plato was largley a rationalist. Aristotle had elements of both rationalism and empiricism. But Plato and Aristotle still largely took a "what you think is what you get" or "what you see is what you get" approach. That is to say, they largely assumed the reliability of whichever path of truth they chose.
Descartes questioned almost everything. [1] Are my senses reliable? Are my assumptions about truth reliable? He doubted everything he could doubt until he thought he couldn't doubt any more. "I think; therefore, I am" was his conclusion (cogito ergo sum). What he couldn't doubt is that he was doubting.
Even here, I would say he had unexamined assumptions. Chiefly, he assumed that "I" is something that exists. He more or less assumed that he was a unitary entity that existed. I would modify his saying to something like "I think; therefore, something exists." I think therefore existence (cogito ergo esse). In the venacular, you might say, "I think, therefore, stuff." What that "stuff" is goes beyond what we can know for certain.
Descartes fought his way back from that ultimate doubt, sneaking in assumptions of reason into the process. "If this is true, then that has to be true." He assumed the operations of reason. His road was paved with rationalist assumptions. If you could conceive of something clearly and distinctly, it was true. This seems to me potentially a horribly unreliable criterion.
4. At about the same time, Francis Bacon was developing the scientific method (1561-1626). [2] Later in the 1600s, John Locke (1632-1704) would lay a more philosophical groundwork for empiricism as a path to knowledge. The path to truth is through our senses. "Seeing is believing." Building on a tradition that ran from Aristotle through Aquinas, Locke would agree with them that there was nothing in our mind that wasn't first in our senses. [3]
For Locke, we are born with a blank slate, a "tabula rasa." [4] ...
[1] See Descartes' work, Discourse on Method.
[2] See Bacon's work, Novum Organum.
[3] Aristotle qualified this -- "except the mind itself." In this way, his language anticipated what we will explore later in the chapter.
[4] See Locke's work, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding.
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Previously,
1.1 Unexamined Assumptions
1.2 "Unitary" Thinking
2.1 Binary Thinking in Ethics
2.2 Contextualization in Missions
2.3 Beyond Relativism and Absolutes
