7.3 The Ordering of Impressions (part 3)

continued from here
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The Ordering of Impressions
8. So, our experiences of the world give us impressions. More accurately, our experiences of the world either conform to or do not conform to our mind's predictions of what we expect. And of course we have fake impressions as well, pseudo-impressions. How does our mind process these impressions?

Let's go back to Kant. As we mentioned, Kant believed that God had built our minds to have certain built-in or "innate" categories to accurately process our impressions. [18] The first of such categories he discussed were space and time. We perceive the items outside ourselves to have dimension. We perceive our experiences to string together in a sequence.

He would add to space and time other innate categories like cause and effect. Although not innate, he added logic and mathematics to the list of things that were not known by experience but could be known to be true through reason.

In short, there are a number of things that seem true about reality that go beyond our mere experiences. They seem to be intrinsic to reality itself. Can we go even further?

9. How about gravity? If I am on the roof of a tall building, I best not treat the question of jumping off as a matter of opinion. "You have your opinion; I have mine. You think I'll go splat but I don't." We can both debate whether we are going to go splat on the way down, but the ground doesn't care which position you take. There is a right and wrong answer. 

[As a quick aside, few people are truly relativists when it comes to matters of truth. [19] It's easy to be a relativist on matters of religion or the meaning of life, but you would be hard to find many people who think that the consequences of jumping out of an airplane without a parachute is a matter of opinion.]

Back to Hume. In his consummate skepticism, he suggested that we had no real reason to prefer going out of a building from the first floor rather than out a second floor window. [20] We have not experienced the future, so we cannot empirically say one is better than the other. Kant disagreed, and I hope you will too.

Roy Bhaskar, who coined the phrase critical realism, considered Hume and philosophers like him to be "unserious" when they ventured into suggestions like these. [21] Hume never actually climbed out a second floor window. Bhaskar suggests that there is an underlying structure to reality that, while our perceptions of it may vary, it is worthy of being called real. Our language about it, our pictures of it, our paradigms about it may vary, but we are getting at something that is actually true and there.

Bhaskar suggested that there were three dimensions to reality. [22] First, there is the actual -- the events that happen in the world. They are independent of us. They happen whether we are present or not. If a tree falls in the forest, it makes a sound.

But, yes, there is the empirical. This is my experience of the world. Yes, these perceptions are filtered by my mind. I do not experience the actual as it is but as it appears to me.

But he added a third category, the "real." There are structures and mechanisms that connect my perceptions with the actual. They are more than useful constructs of my mind. There's more to them than that. Gravity was one of them, as an example.

10. If I might tweak Bhaskar and Kant a bit, here is a similarly three-fold analysis of our knowledge of the world. First, the world outside of me is real. This is certainly a very pragmatic belief. If you find yourself in the middle of the road with a truck coming toward you, please step out of the way. It is best to treat the world outside yourself as real. We can hallucinate things about the world. We can be dreaming about the world rather than awake. But the existence of a world that is different from us is consummately reasonable.

It is reasonable to believe that the world would continue to exist even if I did not. If the earth did not exist, the universe would be just fine. No one has ever woken up to find that the world outside him or herself was not there.

Second, my perception of the world is thoroughly affected by my mind. In 1910, Ralph Barton Perry coined the phrase "the egocentric predicament." [23] I like to say that we are stuck inside our heads. We have no choice but to see the world from "in here." More on the paradigms and constructions with which we come to the world in a moment. As Kant put it, we do not see the world as it is. We see the world as it appears to us.

However, Bhaskar is also surely correct. There are underlying realities that are the basis for both the world and my understanding of it. We can surely go beyond pragmatic realism. Faith in certain structures of reality is more than merely useful. It is reasonable to believe that space and time, cause and effect, logic and math, and certain rules of nature are actually real beyond mere perceptions. The way any one person or group expresses that reality may differ, but the reality we are trying to express is real apart from our perception.

To summarize critical realism as I use the term, the world exists independently of me. It is real apart from my perception. However, my perception and understanding of the world will always be finite and shaped by my interpretive frameworks and fallen reason. Nevertheless, there are real truths about the world that we can grasp even if our knowledge of them is always mediated by human paradigms and frameworks of understanding.

Human Paradigms
11. What critical realism gives us is a hope that the constructs of our minds -- the way we organize our thinking about the world -- are more than merely arbitrary inventions of our minds. It gives us hope that some interpretations of the world are actually more accurate than others. We briefly mentioned Thomas Kuhn and the idea of paradigm shifts earlier in the chapter. In the first edition of his 1962 Structure of Scientific Revolutions, his work was interpreted by some to say that one scientific paradigm was no more valid than another. [24] A critical realist view justifies us in thinking that some paradigms are more correct than others and that we might actually approximate truths about the world.

Nevertheless, we should recognize the significant degree to which we construct our understanding of the world. If our perception of the world involves a host of different impressions, we are rarely aware of all of the data points, and some of them will be mirages of our imagination. Remember that our minds come to the world looking to confirm our pre-existing expectations. Our default mode is to see them.

You may have heard of a concept known as confirmation bias. This is our tendency to see what we expect to see. In chapter 3, I mentioned Jonathan Haidt's metaphor of a rider on an elephant. [25] The rider is like our reason and the elephant our deep intuitions and urges. Our elephant largely goes where it wants to go, and our "riders" find reasons to justify it.

As we have argued thus far on the journey, this is often true of the most idea-oriented among us. It is true especially of those who do not use their reason to find the most probable interpretation of the data but rather use their intellects to find possible ways to make the evidence fit what they already believe and what they want or need it to fit.

12. Paradigms are interpretive frameworks. They are meaning-harvesting mechanisms. They affect what we see of the data and what we don't see. They are like a word cloud -- they make some aspects of reality seem bigger and other aspects seem smaller. They direct what data we select as significant and what data we ignore.

When I was growing up, jewelry of almost any kind was considered wrong for a woman to wear (e.g., 1 Pet. 3:3). In the paradigm of my church background, it was very significant. It was something someone in my group would notice immediately on a woman. It was part of our holiness paradigm. It was large in our "word cloud."

My paradigm came into conflict with the paradigms of others at college. Modest jewelry wasn't a no-no for the women at my college. It was only after a break-up in college that it came home to me how insignificant an earring was for most Christian women. In my paradigm, it meant pride. It meant "look at me, look at me" in a bad way. But it crashed in on me that most women put on earrings like I would wear a tie to church back then.

When I got married, I wore a wedding ring. For the first few years of marriage I think I twisted and twisted that thing endlessly. It was uncomfortable and a foreign object on my finger. Yet its meaning was one of commitment to my wife. It says, "I am committed to someone and am not looking for a relationship with anyone else." I assure you, no self-centered pride is involved with it.

Yet, given the holiness paradigm of my youth, someone asked if they could see it not long after I was married. I foolishly took it off and gave it to them to see. They then commenced to parade around, "Ooo, look at me," flaunting the ring in an over-the-top way. To be frank, the person looked ridiculous.

In the "word cloud" of their paradigm, it seemed impossible that a ring would not be some huge statement, some huge psychological indicator. For this person, it meant PRIDE with capital letters. Most of you reading these words will no doubt think this story was very weird.

And yet this is the way paradigms work. Certain datapoints seem very significant. Yet someone with a different paradigm may not find them very significant at all.

13. The idea of paradigms arose in science as Kuhn used them to explain, for example, the Copernican revolution of the 1500s and 1600s when people went from seeing the sun as rotating around the earth to the earth rotating around the sun. In the twentieth century, relativity and quantum mechanics similarly transformed the way we look at the physics of the very big and the very small.

We often think of changes like these as a matter of progress or people getting smarter, but Kuhn points out that the math of the geocentric (earth at the center) thinkers was at one point better than that of the new heliocentric (sun at the center) ones. But the geocentric view had become very complicated to try to account for data that didn't fit simply into the existing paradigm. 

Copernicus' (1473-1543) model was much more straightforward. And when Johannes Kepler (1571-1630) later suggested that the planets moved around the sun in ellipses, then the new model was both simpler and more accurate in its math. Kuhn's point is simply that what the prevailing view of science is at the moment ("normal science") is not simply a matter of objectivity. There are social and paradigmatic elements as well.

Paradigms are the scaffolding that stand alongside whatever it is we are interpreting. They affect what we do with the data. They direct what kinds of pictures we draw with the dots, so to speak. 

As we mentioned earlier, you can draw an almost infinite number of pictures with a set of dots. In ancient times, they didn't have a lot of dots. This significantly affects what picture you draw. The fewer the dots you have, the less likely it is that your picture either represents underlying reality or that it is highly useful.

Myths were expressions of mysteries using the dots they had. We shouldn't think of myths as bad science -- that's to misapply our modern paradigm to a different world. Ancient myths were as much expressions of things as explanations.

Take the Norse myth that expresses why the seasons change. Jostein Gaarder uses this story as an illustration in his novelized history of Western philosophy. [26] The god Thor gets his hammer stolen and the season goes to winter. He gets it back, and we have spring. It's the Norse version of the Greek story of Demester and Persephone.

The thing is, in the story, Thor kills the guy who stole his hammer. If you are thinking that myths are about explanations, this is a really bad one. The story only works for one year because then the guy is dead. In fact, Thor dresses up like a woman and marries the guy before killing him. He's not going to be fooled next year.

I was always amazed that Gaarder didn't see that his paradigm of what a myth is was inadequate. This story is a really bad explanation for why the seasons change. However, it is a fun expression of the mystery that is the changing of the seasons...

[18] "Innate" comes from words meaning "in born." In other words, we are born with these categories.

[19] I might also point out that relativism on questions of truth is different from relativism on matters of ethics. On matters of truth, a relativist would claim that all truth is relative to the individual or group. As often pointed out, this is an absolute claim which deconstructs the very claim of relativism itself.

Relativism in ethics is a distinct question. It holds that there are no universal moral norms. It sees right and wrong as relative to the individual or group. We have already discussed relativism in chapter 2.

[20] In Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (1779). 

[21] Roy Bhaskar, The Order of Natural Necessity: A Kind of Introduction to Critical Realism (Independently Published, 2017), 8.

[22] Bhaskar, A Realist Theory of Knowledge (Leeds, 1975).

[23] In his article of the same name, "The Ego-Centric Predicament," Journal of Philosophy (1910). 

[24] He denied that this was the case in the Postscript to his second 1970 edition.

[25] Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion (Vintage, 2013).

[26] Jostein Gaarder, Sophie's World: A Novel about the History of Philosophy (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux1991).

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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 
7.1 How Do We Know (part 1)
7.2 A Framework of Understanding (part 2)

 

1.2 Science and Scripture: Critical Realism and the Coherence of Truth

It's Tuesday, so my Science and Scripture writing continues from last week...
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Experience vs. Reason 
Believe it or not, philosophers have debated extensively these last two hundred years about what science actually does and what its goals truly are. We will mention a few of the details near the end of the chapter. For the moment, here is a practical, common sense approach that will hopefully allow us to move forward. We will mention more specific controversies as they seem relevant.

When the scientific method was first detailed by Francis Bacon in the 1600s (more below and in the chapter that follows), it fed directly into a stream of thought called empiricism. In empiricism, the path to truth is through our senses -- "seeing is believing." Our eyes, our ears, our touch, taste, and smell all "write" on the whiteboard of our minds. As the ancient Greek Aristotle once said, "There is nothing the intellect that was not first in the senses." [10]

However, David Hume (1711-76) -- who took empiricism to its logical extreme -- realized that many aspects of common human understanding do not come from our senses. For example, you can hit a pool ball with a cue stick and experience every moment along the way. It's getting closer. It's getting closer. It is barely touching. The ball is moving. The ball is moving. What you can't experience is the rule of cause and effect that says, "The cue caused the ball to move." You can experience individual moments, but it is your mind that "glues" those moments together. 

The same is true of time. We experience moment after moment, but we do not experience time as the glue our minds assign to those moments. The same is true of the relationship between events and the "values" we assign those events. If someone hits me, I experience pain, but I do not experience the "value" that says it is wrong for you to hit me. Hume extended empiricism to what seemed a ridiculous conclusion -- that cause and effect, time, and values might be illusions.

Hume remained an empiricist despite what seemed a non-sensical implication. [11] However, he awoke another philosopher by the name of Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) from what he called his "dogmatic slumber." Kant suggested a simple way of looking at our knowing that created a cosmic shift in philosophy. He suggested that the content of our minds comes from our senses, yes, but that it is inevitably organized according to certain "built-in" or innate categories that God had given us. These categories included concepts like cause and effect, space and time, and right and wrong. [12]

I like to use the analogy of a Google Doc or some similar processing software. The user inputs text into the Google Doc. I am typing into a text "box" as I write this chapter. My typing is like our senses -- our senses "type" stuff into our minds.

But there are rules. Google Docs won't make you breakfast (yet). It won't take out your trash. I can't doodle outside the box (yet). What I am getting at is that there are rules to how the content is entered.

So it is with our minds, Kant argued. Our senses don't input the things of the world into our minds as they are. Our minds "glue" the inputs together in certain predictable ways that come pre-loaded onto our "hard drives," so to speak. In the end, we do not see the world as it actually is. We see the world as our minds process our experiences. We see the world as it appears to us.

With this simple framework, Kant set the stage for the debates of the last two hundred years over knowledge. These debates have spilled over into the philosophy of science, as we will explore in slightly more detail near the end of this chapter. Despite Kant's dethroning of any concept of pure empiricism, the first part of the 1900s was dominated by a group called the "positivists" who apparently did not get the memo. 

On the other hand, there are other philosophers who have almost suggested that science is nothing more than different social groups who believe different things. [13] Thomas Kuhn (1922-96) did see some paradigms as more effective than others but went a long way toward suggesting that scientific paradigms were less about progress in understanding as new groups simply organizing data in a different way. [14] A "constructivist" view of science sees it far less as the study of what is true about the world as scientists imposing their own frameworks on the world.

Both extremes seem a little less than satisfying, especially given all the developments in technology that improved understandings of science have made possible. Surely there are other perspectives on science that have managed to hold these two sources of truth in better tension. Such an approach would not abandon the central role of our senses nor ignore the dominating factor of our paradigms. Arguably, there is such an approach.

Critical Realism
The notion of "critical realism" has appeared in several contexts over the last fifty years. [15] In general, the goal is to find a middle way between a naive realism -- which doesn't recognize the role our minds play in our perception of the world -- and some pure constructivism that suggests we are simply making up our sense of the world as individuals or society. [16] Roy Bhaskar, the originator of the phrase, proposed three categories of reality: 1) the actual, the events that happen in the world (apart from our senses or existence), 2) the empirical, that which we observe, and 3) the "real," the deep structures and mechanisms that make things happen.

Without committing to his precise formulation, we can discern in his three elements a way of looking at science and the world that checks all the boxes, as it were. First, there is the world as it is. This relates to what Bhaskar called the "actual." It is reality happening. If the earth did not exist, the universe would go on just fine. Christians have historically believed that God is the only truly necessary Being, That is to say, if the universe were not here, God's existence would not be affected. [17] God and the world are real. They are not simply constructs of our minds. This is an incredibly reasonable claim.

However, second, we do not have unfiltered access to the world as it truly is. We only know the world as our minds organize and process it. (By the way, this is true of the Bible as well.) This is what Bhaskar calls the "empirical." Our understanding of the world is finite and it is flawed. From a theological perspective, part of human fallenness is our inability to be fully objective. We are stuck in our heads, and our sense of the world is inevitably skewed.

Yet, third, surely there is something more. Here is where various critical realists might differ a little in their formulations. There are ways of thinking that work incredibly well. Consider logic. The rules of logic were explored 2300 years ago by Aristotle and have been taught repeatedly to this day. There are no known exceptions to these rules. There is a structure to logic that always seems to work without exception. If one's premises are true, and one's logic is valid, the conclusion must follow. 

There is a close relationship between logic and math. Math parallels the world so well that some concepts first explored by mathematicians were later found to have actual correlates in the world. Take the square root of negative one, known as i. A smart middle school student might think, "Who came up with this idea? You can't find the square root of a negative number!" 

Yet quantum physics regularly uses imaginary numbers. Those numbers help physicists explain the way particles function on the subatomic level. Some of the predictions of cosmology -- the study of the universe -- were first proposed because of equations. The existence of antimatter is an example of one such discovery.

What we find is that there is a correspondence between math and the real world that seems to belie an underlying structure to the world that the human mind can grasp very adequately. Call it what you will. The world exists, and though our perception of that world is heavily constructed by our own minds and culture, the quest for truth about the world does not seem completely in vain.

One key to critical realism is the fact that some constructs of reality work better than others. For example, if a construct helps us correctly predict what will happen next, that is a more successful one than if we are always predicting the wrong thing to happen next. The idea of cause and effect, for example, is consistently reliable as a predictor of what comes next. Bhaskar would say that in such cases we have hit on something that goes beyond our mere perception to something that is real. We are knocking on the door of structures and underlying mechanisms of the universe. 

In this sense, we can go beyond what another school of realism -- pragmatic realism -- asserts. Pragmatic realism bascially asserts that we should only think in terms of what works, not in terms of actual truths about the world. [18] Leave the reality of the world as a black box we cannot look into and think only in terms of constructs that help us function in the world.

However, the existence of logic, math, and consistently dependable concepts like cause and effect may suggest we can say more than what the pragmatic realist does. Even if our way of talking about the world is subject to our language and paradigms, it would seem that our language is sufficient to express and predict some things with absolute accuracy (1 + 1 will equal 2 when the symbols refer to reality in their normal way).

The language and symbols we use to express the underlying reality of the world may vary. Nevertheless, in certain well known instances, it seems to be a fully accurate representation of what takes place as we experience it. The pragmatic realist brackets all consideration of the world as it actually is. The critical realist thinks more is possible.

Three Tests for Truth 
The previous section has paved the way for what may seem common sense to most of us. It is conventional to speak of three tests for truth. The third is our ultimate fall back: the pragmatic test. We often consider something true if it works, if it helps us predict what will come next, if it helps us make our way through the world. It is our ultimate fall back because, even if the pragmatic realist approach should turn out to work better than the critical realists', we would still be able to have the conversation that is in this book.

A second classic test for truth is the coherence test. Does a proposed explanation contradict itself, or is it logically consistent. You might argue that it is an extension, by faith, that the same logic that works consistently in deductive thinking also applies to the external world. It is an act of faith, for we cannot see the external world as it is. But it is a "reasonable" hypothesis.

One of our goals in this book is to explore whether a coherent integration between science and Scripture is possible. This goal assumes that truths about external reality are fundamentally coherent, and logic works both deductively and inductively. [19] We will assess how well this hypothesis holds up as we examine various topics.

Even in science, there are instances where coherency remains a goal rather than a worked-out conclusion. A well-known example is the ongoing challenge of reconciling general relativity with quantum mechanics. While each framework works extraordinarily well within its own domain, they resist integration into a single, coherent theory that explains all physical phenomena -- especially when it comes to extreme situations like black holes.

Do these incoherencies on the smallest level of reality indicate that, in the end, the universe is not coherent? Are matters of Scripture ultimately a matter of "blind faith," as Søren Kierkegaard generally believed? [20] Or is faith reasonable?

The third classic test for truth is the correspondence test. This test stands at the heart of why critical realism provides an important bridge from our perception to reality. If there is a real structure to truths about the world, then we should expect that our hypotheses and theories correspond to the data of the world. The more useful they are, the better they presumably will correspond.

Then there is the question of "elegance" in the correspondence. A complicated theory may account for the data, as the Ptolemaic model of the solar system did. In a complicated way, it mathematically expressed how the sun might actually go around the earth. But the Copernican approach -- whose math was initially less precise -- was more economical in its explanation. More on it in the chapter that follows.

These three -- the correspondence test, the coherence test, and the pragmatic test -- will be our friends in the pages that follow. We will not simply assume them uncritically. We will question them when it seems appropriate. However, they have stood the test of time as useful criteria for truthfulness. Hopefully, our confidence in them will only grow as we proceed.

[10] Aristotle, De anima III.

[11] He once remarked, for example, that empiricism left you with no reason to go out the first floor door rather than a second floor window. After all, you've never experienced what will happen in the future either way. In Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion I.

[12] The primary work in which he suggests this approach was Critique of Pure Reason.

[13] E.g., Paul Feyerabend (1924-94) basically reduced science to sociology. In Against Method (New Left, 1975).

[14] Thomas Kuhn, Structure of Scientific Revolutions (University of Chicago, 1962).

[15] The phrase was coined by Roy Bhaskar in 1975: A Realist Theory of Science (Leeds, 1975). In theology circles, the general concept was promoted by Ben Meyer, Critical Realism and the New Testament (Princeton Theological Monograph, 1989) and N. T. Wright, The New Testament and the People of God (Fortress, 1992). Before Bhaskar, similar lines of thinking were found in the work of Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge: Toward a Post-Critical Philosophy (University of Chicago, 1958).

[16] We might align this perspective with postmodernism.

[17] The relevant theological term is God's "aseity." He does not require anything outside Godself. By contrast, the existence of our universe is "contingent." There is no need for it to exist.

[18] Richard Rorty would be the key figure in pragmatic realism. See Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton University, 1979).

[19] Deductive reasoning begins with certain assumptions or "premises" and then uses the rules of logic to proceed to a valid conclusion. Inductive reasoning, as we will see, stands at the heart of the scientific method. In inductive reasoning, we begin with the observations of data in the external world and then infer various hypotheses to account for that data, patterns, inferences. Deductive thinking has been likened to an upside down V, starting with assumptions and broadening out to conclusions. Inductive thinking is like a right side up V, starting with data and inferring hypotheses from there.

[20] Kierkegaard did not use this exact phrase, but it captures his sense of the absurdity (and yet validity) of religious belief in Fear and Trembling (1843).

Archaeology of Knowledge

I came up with this diagram last night:

Our knowledge of the world is constrained and formed by the world around us, which God made.  Our brains also have a similar structure, which implies that all humans, to some extent, have a similar view of reality. A Christian might say that God designed it to have a generally accurate sense of the world. Evolution would say that the brain evolved in a way that makes it function successfully in the world. These two viewpoints do not seem to be mutually exclusive.

Within these external constraints, a good deal of our view of the world is a function of culture and individuality.  Our cultural inheritance assigns meaning to many objects, events, and actions that is not universal or timeless.  Similarly, our individual genetics, environment, and choices shape individual aspects to our view of the world.

The universe gives us most of the content of what we might call our knowledge through our senses.  But our minds, consisting of our brains, cultural and individual constructions, organize that data.

The Bible does not make an end round all this.  The Bible is processed in our brains and our interpretations are impacted by our culture and individuality.  Indeed, its original moments of writing involved the biblical authors' culture and individuality in the midst of inspiration. God does tell us about the world in the Bible, but he does so in an incarnated way rather than an objective way.

Some thoughts...

Monday Wesleyan: Critical Realism

We've now broadened the Dean's blog of the seminary to become the Seminary blog and as such we will be having a regular cycle of seminary professors and leaders posting on it. Lenny Luchetti has made the inaugural post of the new cycle today. I believe Wayne Schmidt, the seminary head, may post next Monday.

So I'll continue my series, A Great Time for the Wesleyan Tradition here on Monday's, Lord willing.

Heart 8: The Bible and Critical Realism (this is a cross over from Heart 7)
Critical realism no doubt comes in more than one form, but the form that I advocate is one that affirms by faith that there is actually a world out there and that some interpretations of that world are better than others. If you would, we could consider it a subcategory of what is sometimes called "pragmatic realism." Pragmatic realism claims that while the actual existence of the world and knowledge is a matter of significant doubt, our affirmations of reality and of understanding are useful. That is to say, "reality works," and we get through life best if we act as if the world is real.

Critical realism then goes one step further and affirms not only that the idea of reality and truth is useful but that, by faith, it actually exists beyond ourselves. Where it differs from "naive realism" is that, at least as I mean it, it fully recognizes the level of faith such affirmations actually require. It recognizes how much of my view of the world is colored by cultural categories I have inherited and beyond which it is difficult for me to see. It recognizes that I am "stuck in my head" and cannot get a bird's eye view of things the way God can. It recognizes that my apprehension of reality, especially when I express it in words anc categories is finite and therefore almost certainly flawed from the very beginning in respects I will never be able to see or understand.

As it relates to the Bible, then, our ability to determine the original meaning of the Bible will always be flawed. The truth of the Bible does not stand outside my normal process of knowing. The Bible is an object of my understanding the same as the rest of the world. John Calvin and others spoke of the Spirit illuminating the meaning of the Bible, and such illumination might potentially solve our conundrum. But the tens of thousands of differing interpretations imply either that the Spirit often lets us continue on in our skew or perhaps that He only illuminates some very small group of elect.

Here we run into the same fundamental problem of full blown Calvinism in general. If God fully determines who will be saved and Christ has paid the price for sin, then presumably a God of love would save everyone. Presuming, then, that God does not save everyone, the god of this system seems to undermine the fundamental definition of what it means to say that God is love. In the end, we must surely conclude that God mostly allows the fallen processes of human understanding to stand even when it comes to the interpretation of the Bible...