6.1 Beyond Binary Thinking

I had another meeting with a philosophy group tonight. We're in module 6, epistemology -- how do we know that we know what we think we know. I've decided to start capturing snippets of my philosophy class whenever I have live sessions. But here I'll give some personal thoughts that go well beyond class.

Ken
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1. It would have made a lot of sense to hammer out the question of knowledge and truth more extensively at the beginning of our quest. Shouldn't we have figured out more fully how to sort out what is true before we started exploring specific topics in philosophy?

We did lay some groundwork back in the beginning on the question of truth. For example, we asked what the proper balance of faith and reason was. We talked about logical fallacies and the three basic tests for truth: the correspondence test, the coherence test, and the pragmatic test. We talked about presuppositions, particularly those a person of faith might have.

If I've been doing my job, along the journey, you've been seeing that there is virtually always more than one perspective on an issue than the one we grew up with. That doesn't mean our "traditions" are wrong. But it does mean we do start off far more as "slaves" to our backgrounds than as free thinkers. So often, we don't know what we don't know.

2. For example, in ethics, we learned that the choice is not just between absolutism and relativism. I argued that, on most issues, the biblical position is "universal with exceptions." This is not absolutism but something closer to what we might call "principlism." Even then, the New Testament is much more virtue-based than act based -- a whole different approach than many of us grew up with. 

Similarly, relativism doesn't mean a person doesn't believe in right and wrong. It's just relative to culture or the individual. No belief in right and wrong at all would be moral nihilism.

My point is that, when we first encounter a position we've never heard or thought of, our first reaction is often to be defensive. We go into "binary-thinking" mode. This is "either-or" thinking. This is "us vs. them" thinking. "My way or the highway." 

But most of the time, there's a spectrum of possible positions a person could take on any particular issue. It's not just pacifist versus serial killer. There are several other positions in between.

3. Take our earlier discussion of economic philosophy. It's not just capitalism or communism. It's just bad thinking to say that if a person is not your kind of capitalist, they are a socialist or communist. There are gradations between these. Australia is capitalist, but they have universal health care. They are more socialist than the US, but far less than North Korea. They are still better classified as capitalist than socialist.

Binary thinking is often a defensive mechanism -- I'm caught off guard because I didn't realize there were other ways to think about something. It's also usually sloppy thinking. It gets me off the hook from having to think. You have a position different from mine so you're obviously wrong.

It's very useful. If I can give you a label, then I don't have to listen to you. "You're a Democrat" or "You're MAGA." Therefore, I don't have to think about what you're claiming. 

I call this "labelism." I try to attach a label to something so I don't have to think about it. "That's woke." Or "that's evangelical." Or "that's Marxist." It works well for those who want to stay in their particular cave of choice. [1] No thought necessary.

But it won't do if you want to be a good thinker. It works well on the campaign trail or on social media. It is good old average thinking.

4. Early in our journey was a section on Unexamined Assumptions. I have sometimes called this "unitary thinking" because you think in one way -- the only way you know how to think.

Then you find out that there is another way to think about an issue. You are taken off guard. Maybe you are alarmed. "Well, everyone knows that's wrong." Maybe you villainize the other perspective or the person with it. Maybe you invoke religion to try to shut down thinking the other way. 

But there are almost always other ways to look at things. We move into what I have called "spectrum thinking." We see that there are multiple possible positions on most issues, with several of them probably being within a tolerable range. 

Eventually, we move toward a certain "epistemic humility." I become aware of my own fallibility as a knower. It doesn't mean we don't believe in truth. It means that we realize our own limitations as thinkers about it. We realize that there is much more mystery to God and the universe than we might like to admit. Indeed, we recognize that the meaning of the Bible itself isn't always a clear as we might like it to be.

5. You may have heard of the Dunning-Kruger effect. Apparently, a person who knows very little about a particular topic may sometimes feel like they are virtually experts on it. A person with no expertise may be convinced that they are masters on a subject. No doubt this dynamic is on display every day all over social media.

One of my complaints about media right now is that it is providing a lot of skewed talking points. We are provided with a host of half-baked arguments that we can use on our verbal sparing partners. They are sometimes misleading, skewed, or downright wrong. But they give us a feeling of intelligence in our lack of true knowledge.

When you actually begin to gain genuine learning on a subject, you usually begin to realize quickly how little you actually knew during your earlier "cocky" phase. I certainly have experienced this dynamic myself repeatedly in the course of my life. I hear an interpretation of a Bible passage that I've never heard before. My first instinct has sometimes been to think, "Well, that's stupid." 

Then I begin to hear the argument. If I listen to the evidence, my arrogance often has softened. Eventually, I may even change my mind. I have repeatedly over the course of my life as a biblical interpreter.

Take the common sense that the story of Sodom and Gomorrah was about homosexuality. Extremely common. Yet these men want to rape the angels. An ancient reader would have assumed these men were married and had children. The more you dig into the context, the more you realize that this event is only tangentially related to contemporary debates about homosexuality. 

When I first heard this claim, I thought it was ridiculous. As it turned out, I was reading my paradigms and assumptions into the text withour realizing it. I was an "unreflective knower," a unitary thinker on this passage.

6. We will only advance in our understanding if we have a genuine openness to the real truth. I have found over the years that it is often those who most shout, "Stand up for the truth!" who are actually the least open to hearing it. "Truth" for them really means "my tradition." Unable to make an argument on the merits, they often resort to labels, power moves, and ad hominem attacks.

Why is education so unpopular right now? I don't personally think it is because it fiendishly leads people away from the truth. It's primarily because it threatens unexamined assumptions. It exposes blind spots. That doesn't mean that the experts in a particular area are always right, as we will see. The paradigms of today's experts are often the traditions that the next generation of experts deconstructs.

I think it's understandable that many would see education as "making people liberal." What may be going on in many cases is that a good education tends to uncover our blind spots. It exposes our unexamined assumptions. In that regard, it may not "conserve" our traditions and "free" a person to think in other ways. But this is what "conservatism" and "liberalism" are -- conserving traditions or freeing from them.

And that may be the primary reason for the stereotypes. I don't think it's generally nefarious. It actually seems predictable.

[1] Referencing Plato's allegory of the cave, something we'll look at in the next section.

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6.1 Beyond Binary Thinking
6.2 Plato's Allegory of the Cave
6.3 Reason vs. Experience
6.4 Kant Breaks the Tie.
6.5 The Bible as Object of Knowledge
6.6 Wittgenstein and Language
6.7 Kuhn and Paradigms
6.8 Foucault and Power
6.9 A Pragmatic Epistemology

Philosophy: 1.5 Unexamined Assumptions

Last night I had one of my frequent philosophy meet-ups with a different group of students. This was a module 6 meet up on "epistemology" -- how do I know that I know what I think I know? To try to make it relevant, we usually talk about moving beyond binary thinking on most topics into what I call "spectrum thinking," which is realizing that there are usually more than two positions a person could take on any given issue.

Last week I thought I would start writing up snippets of a typical Ken philosophy class these days as I have these meetups. So here's a relevant piece below. It's a bit of a mixture of material from the first and sixth modules of my typical philosophy class.
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1.5 Unexamined Assumptions
1. I had a moment in high school where a thought hit me. "How amazing it is that I just happened to be born into a family that has all the right beliefs! What are the odds?"

I was totally serious. I suspect that most people who read such a comment would either laugh or think I was joking. Do you know how many different interpretations of even individual verses of the Bible there are? I have sometimes used a parable I created from the issue of baptism. [1]

Susie is born into a Roman Catholic family and is baptized as an infant by sprinkling. Then her family switches to a Greek Orthodox church where they rebaptize her still as an infant -- by immersion three times in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

Then she becomes a Baptist as a teen. They certainly insist she rebaptize now as a believer. None of those other baptisms count. Then she joins a Christian Church -- which of course they say isn't really a denomination. But they insist her baptism in the Baptist church didn't count all the same, so she gets rebaptized again.

Then she goes to a Lutheran church. They are horrified that she has now been baptized four times! They used to put people to death for rebaptism of that sort! Finally, she goes to a Friends/Quaker church. She's almost afraid to ask. But it turns out that they don't baptize at all.

2. We all start off our philosophical journey in life -- whether we're in a philosophy class or not -- with unexamined assumptions. These are things we not only assume are true -- but it's never even occurred to us that there could be another way of looking at them. 

"Of course you don't eat cat or dog!"

"But why?" 

"Because I said so."

There are plenty of newly married stories about things you never realized might be done differently. "Everyone knows," a husband once told his new wife, "that you roll toilet paper from the top." He was basically calling her stupid for doing something differently than the way he grew up. "Everyone knows you roll toothpaste from the bottom rather than squeeze it from the middle.

You don't know what you don't know.

Often on the first day of a philosophy journey, I will tell students that my goal is not necessarily to change their opinions on a particular issue. It is much more to help them to choose their positions more freely. Here's what I mean.

If you only know one position on an issue, then you have not chosen that position. You have inherited it. You have inherited it from your parents or from your culture or from the random workings of your brain. But since you don't know of any other options, you are a slave to that choice.

Philosophy means to help you to see that there are almost certainly other ways of looking at almost everything. Then, if you choose the same position, you have made a choice for it. Then, just maybe, you have freely chosen it rather than being forced to choose it without even knowing it.

3. There are a couple footnotes to insert here that are important for the contexts in which I normally teach. One is that I am not advocating for a sort of relativism here. With regard to the question of knowledge, relativism is a sense that all positions on issues are equally valid on a personal level. In other words, "subjectivism" is the name of the game.

Subjectivism basically says that there is no significant universal truth. Rather truth is more or less subjective -- what I think it is or want it to be. In other words, you have your truth and I have mine.

I don't actually think anyone could be a total relativist. After all, the claim "All truth is relative" is an absolute statement. And if you fall off a tall building, I don't think your beliefs on what will happen when you hit the pavement are relative. I can tell you what's going to happen.

The problem, in my mind, is not the question of whether something is true or likely true. The problem is that I have a screwy brain. For one, it's relatively small. It's finite. If we could catch a glimpse of the vastness of God's mind, we would realize how absolutely and completely stupid we all are, relatively speaking.

Second, my mind is "fallen." It does not work perfectly even on the level that it does work. Everyone makes mistakes. Even the greatest genius is not correct on every question. Indeed, individuals who think on the highest levels of logic can lack perspective in the most basic of ways.

So the problem is not with truth itself. It's with us as knowers of the truth. Later on, I'll discuss how the Bible does not eliminate this situation because we have to interpret it... with our brains. The story about baptism above gives you a glimpse of this problem.

Eventually, I'll share that I am a "critical realist." That means that I believe the world and truth is real. The goal is intact. It is worth pursuing it. In the thousands of years of human conversation, I hope we've made some leeway toward some good answers. We have the revelation of Scripture to help us, assuming you are a believer.

But we are stuck in our heads. Our view of the world is inevitably skewed in ways of which we are unaware. If we knew what our unexamined assumptions were, we probably would have examined them. The tentativity is not about truth itself. It's about ourselves.

4. The early Christians had a concept of believing on a path toward understanding. In the 1000s, Anselm coined the phrase, "faith seeking understanding" (fides quaerens intellectum). The search for knowledge never begins with a blank slate. It always begins with assumptions.

It is perfectly appropriate to begin the journey toward reflection with faith -- indeed, with the faith you have. Don't throw anything out to start the quest. Assume your faith is right. If you need to expand or tweak some things, do so cautiously.

But we all start off the journey "unreflective." [2] The philosophical journey is a journey toward greater awareness of myself as a knower of the world. It is a journey toward at least partial self-reflectiveness. (We can never be completely relective, because there will always be areas where we don't know what we don't know.)

It is a journey toward freedom.

[1] I used it especially in Who Decides What the Bible Means?

[2] Some have called this stage "pre-modern" thinking. I have come to find that language less helpful, though we will see it again later. 
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1.1 What is philosophy?
1.2 Can philosophy be Christian?
1.3 How do faith and reason fit together?
1.4 Unexamined assumptions (this post)
1.5 Socrates and the Unexamined Life
1.6 What is good thinking?

Pensée 1: We can be epistemologically certain of almost nothing.

Descartes did the thought experiment for us. Almost everything we claim to be true can be doubted. 

1. Certainly anything having to do with my senses. We may say, "Seeing is believing." Sure. But that only means we find it most convincing. Our senses can be fooled. We could be dreaming. We could be in a matrix, a holodeck, or a computer simulation.

Is it likely? Probably not. I'm going to assume not -- reasonable people do. 

But I can't prove it. In fact, I can't disprove the claim that God created the world ten seconds ago with all our memories intact and the universe having apparent age. 

Do I think so? No. But I can't disprove it. And neither can you.

2. What about the things of my mind? Certainly my reasoning can be faulty without me realizing it. The human brain overwrites old memories, making even my memories of the past fallible. Drugs will do the trick to mutate my thoughts. So many, many people are mentally unstable. Maybe there's a little bit of insanity in all of us.

What about logic? Since I know of no instances of it ever being wrong, let's say it is reasonable to assume it is certain and reliable. Of course, we don't always have the right premises or follow valid logic. But if the premises are true and the logic is valid, then the proper inference must follow.

Let's throw a good deal of mathematics in here. It would seem to be certain beyond reasonable doubt. If done properly, most math seems reliable without exception.

3. What about the existence of God or God's dependability? Absolutely certain?

Faith comes in here, so the epistemological answer is no. Faith by its very nature implies epistemological uncertainty. This is as far as you and I am concerned. God no doubt has no doubts about his own existence.

I have extreme confidence that a vast number of things are ontologically certain. Their existence is quite likely certain. The problem is not with their certainty, but with mine. I believe them by faith, not by certainty on my part.

I am stuck in my head, apparently. I am finite. I am extremely convinced that I see only the smallest infinitesimal of reality. Further, the way my mind puts together the pieces of the small portion I see is often riddled with fallacy. 

Yes, likely countless things are certain. But very few things are certain to me, whether I am convinced or not. They require some degree of faith on my part -- some more, some less. God may wield the ontological argument for his own existence with perfection. Epistemologically, it is a matter of faith -- and thus uncertainty -- for me and you.

4. "I think; therefore, I am." cogito ergo sum. Descartes came close, but failed because he assumed that the "I" exists, which is a matter of faith. The proper formation is cogito ergo esse. "I think; therefore, something exists."

Everything else requires faith on some level. Logic requires very little faith, for it never seems to fail. The fundamentals of math are apparently related and never seem to fail. The notion of cause and effect seems consistently reliable, although scientists continue to seek the most useful ways to express it. The idea of space and time is incredibly useful, although our perceptions of it turn out to be rather complicated.

Suffice it to say, almost everything we believe, we believe on the basis of faith to some degree or another. Things of which we are incredibly sure, are usually still ultimately a matter of faith. Much of which we are certain is also incorrect, although we usually do not know it.

God knows all the data. God knows all the data in its proper relation to all the other data. God knows it all certainly, for God either created it or its possibility.

But for us, these are matters of faith. 

References: René Descartes, Discourse on Method (1637), Meditations on First Philosophy (1641)

Pensees I may write later (these are mostly in a section, "A Basis for Knowledge")
2. The world outside me exists.
3. I exist.
4. Logic and math seem absolutely reliable.
5. Our situation requires some pragmatism.
6. Kant's distinction is useful.
7. The scientific method is useful.
8. The scientific method has clear limits.
9. Assumptions are inevitable in reasoning.
10. Reasoning is inevitable in thinking.
11. Faith can be reasonable and unreasonable.

12. Belief in a Creator seems reasonable.

7.5 Biblical Paradigms as a Case Study

Happy Philosophy Thursday! Finishing up a chapter on epistemology.
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17. There was a professor when I came to Indiana Wesleyan University who taught history through the lens of a biblical worldview. By that time, I had gone through the fires of seminary and beyond and was in the final stages of developing what I might call a contextual understanding of the Bible. Biblical worldview language hadn't really been part of my holiness background, although I had certainly heard of it. It was a foundational concept though for the history department at IWU at that time.

Coming to IWU was a good thing for me. If I had taken a job at a research university, I would probably have continued on my merry way in a bubble where I didn't have to articulate my paradigm shifts to anyone. I could just teach the Bible the scholarly way. I wouldn't have had to engage a quite powerful machine of counter-argument. 

But IWU students were me, ten years earlier. They hadn't gone through the fires I had, and they probably didn't need to. But how could I speak their language? How could I get back into their heads? How could I rewind my mind ten years?

18. In my third or fourth year at IWU, I talked the Religion Department into having a regular colloquium. We would make presentations to our students on one issue or another. The first one was in the old College Wesleyan Church, and it was on hermeneutics.

At that first one, I presented a paper titled, "The Bible as an Object of Knowledge." It was an early attempt for me to try to put into words the contextual paradigm shift that I had undergone during my formal studies of the Bible. The title presented a simple truth. The meaning of the Bible is something we have to input into our heads. In other words, we have to interpret it.

Many, many people act like the meaning of the Bible is obvious. It's an unexamined assumption. But in reality there is disagreement about every inch of the Bible. I have repeatedly pointed out that there are 10,000s of denominations each with different interpretations. Visit 10 churches preaching on the same text and you may get 10 different "truths" from the passage. "Now here's what's going on here" or "Here's what no one has noticed before." Grab a shelf full of commentaries on any passage and you will have multiple interpretations on the same passage by those who know the most about the passage! 

And, as I've mentioned, some of what people say is the Bible doesn't actually come from the Bible. For example, our position on abortion doesn't really come from the Bible. The Bible doesn't say a word about abortion. That doesn't mean our position is wrong. It just means that we don't realize how much of what we say is the Bible really comes from our traditions, experiences, and assumptions. 

When I say, "the Bible is an object of knowledge," I mean we have to interpret it. I chuckle when people pit reason and the Bible against each other -- trust the Bible, not your reason. I chuckle to myself. What the heck do you think you are using when you interpret the Bible??!! You use your reason when you are reading the Bible. Reason is what is taking place whenever you connect two thoughts together.

The magnitude of our lack of self-awareness is mind-boggling on such things.

19. So what is a biblical worldview as this phrase is normally used? It is a paradigm. It is a system of organizing the data of the Bible. In good Kantian fashion, there are two key components here. There is the data of the Bible and there is the organization our minds give to that data.

My paper back in 2000 talked about three main reasons why there are so many different interpretations of the Bible. The first is disagreement over the meaning of individual words, verses, and passages. The second is disagreement on how to integrate the various passages of Scripture together. And the third is the gap between the time of the Bible and our time. The result is a shocking multiplicity of possible biblical worldviews. I dare not say infinite. I won't say countless. But it is a much larger number than we probably can come to grips with. [32]

This correlates well with the elements of a biblical paradigm that I just mentioned. The "data" of the Bible is the interpretations of individual passages. These can be probably correct interpretations but they can also be false data, so to speak. Suffice it to say, 1) if there is one correct interpretation of the original meaning of a passage and 2) there are a lots of different interpretations of that passage, then 3) most of the interpretations of the passage are wrong about the original meaning. [33] This simple argument suggests that there is more false data about the Bible than true data -- at least in relation to what the Bible first meant. Remember, these are the "atoms" in a person's biblical worldview.

20. But then there is the organization of that data. If you think of the data of the Bible as a word cloud, some of the data is "bigger" than others. That is to say, some verses are going to be more central to the meaning of the Bible than others. A good biblical worldview would prioritize properly. Does Hebrews get a bigger say on the topic of sacrifice or Leviticus?

Martin Luther suggested that we use the "clear" verses to interpet the "unclear" ones. He is basically talking about organizing principles. Which verses do we select as most significant? (Which ones do we effectively ignore?) Which data do we make central? Which data do we consider strange and puzzling? The problem is that we disagree on which verses are clear and which are unclear!

There are a lot of different ways to prioritize and integrate the biblical materials. For example, 1 Corinthians 15 and 1 Thessalonians 4 both talk about death using the metaphor of sleep. Most Christian traditions consider this merely a metaphor and prioritize parts of Scripture that suggest we are conscious between our deaths and the resurrection.

But not the Seventh Day Adventists. One of the fascinating things about Seventh Day Adventists is that, from an orthodox perspective, they prioritize the wrong passages. They notice the "weird" passages and then choose them over the ones other Christians consider "clear." So most Christians recognize that the early Christians worshiped on the Lord's Day, Sunday. But the Seventh Day Adventists have noticed that the Old Testament Sabbath was on Saturday.  

So in their organization of the data of Scripture, they have prioritized the Saturday Sabbath over Sunday as the Lord's Day. It is another organization of the biblical materials. It is actually quite staggering to think of how many possible permutations there could be.

For example, someone might say, "The New Testament reflects a perversion of the Old Testament" and prioritize the Old Testament as the authority over a biblical worldview. Frankly, this would be the orthodox Jewish way to organize the Christian Bible.

Along with different interpretations of indivdiual verses, the different organizations of biblical material into different biblical theologies have naturally resulted in a myriad of different denominational biblical theologies.

21. In order to construct a biblical worldview, there have to be organizing principles that you bring to the text. When I learned about Gödel's incompleteness theorem, it seemed to apply here. The basic gist is that a system is never grounded completely in itself. Similarly, the text of the Bible can't entirely interpret or organize itself. There have to be guiding principles, scaffolding, that comes alongside, a meaning-harvesting mechanism.

I'm messing with some Reformation pillars here, but as a holiness child I didn't grow up with them. They ultimately were unreflective anyway. The perspicuity of Scripture is unaware that the clarity actually comes from tradition. "Scripture only" has resulted in 20,000-30,000 different denominations. They were ultimately unreflective perspectives. In 2000, I would have said they were pre-modern conceptions.

The Wesleyan Quadrilateral in this regard is more profound than you might think. (And who cares whether Wesley ever used those words or if Outler coined the phrase -- it is hermeneutically profound.) You can't get rid of reason if you utter sentences. Tradition is what steers our biblical theologies. And the Holy Spirit speaks to us in experience, so I would think twice before rejecting him.

22. So all the principles we have explored earlier in the chapter apply to this case study of biblical worldivews. They are paradigms. They shift from time to time and group to group.

And power is involved in those shifts. Denominations police their biblical paradigms. Inerrancy is a paradigm that is guarded by powers that be. In my first decade at IWU, I read the Chicago Statement on Inerrancy. I didn't find anything too difficult in it.

BUT, I also recognized that in the paradigm of those who drafted it, it likely meant a lot more than what it said. For example, once you allow for different genres to play by different rules, then inerrancy doesn't ensure any specific position on evolution or women in ministry or pseudonymity. It only requires that you consider the Bible to be truthful in what it affirms. 

But that's not why the term is policed. The term exists in part to prevent interpreters from drawing certain conclusions from the biblical text. That is the real nature of the paradigm. And it is guarded by those with power. This is why a John Sanders can lose his job over Open Theism, even though he believed he was interpreting the Bible correctly. 

So, there are many possible biblical worldviews. It seems reasonable to use Christian orthodoxy (that is, tradition) as its utlimate organizing principle. That can't change what it originally meant. As Gordon Fee once said, it can't come to mean something it never meant. [34]  I wouldn't put it exactly that way. But I would agree that the original meaning is what it meant, and it can't change. [35]

But we can prioritize those parts of Scripture -- a chorus of voices -- that align with orthodoxy. We can make those the fulchrum points and map the rest of Scripture to them. We can speak of an orthodox biblical worldview -- but it is only one of many, many possible interpretive organizations of the biblical material.

[32] In the early 2000s, I felt inspired to write up these insights for a contest with Westminster John Knox Press. I wrote Who Decides What the Bible Means? in a week. Unfortunately, they did not accept it, nor did Abingdon (I felt I was blocked by someone who got them to publish his version of the book instead). I finally self-published it.

[33] I want to be clear that I believe in the polyvalence of texts and that God uses the flexibility of potential meaning to speak many different messages to many different people. When I say there is one correct interpretation, I mean of the original meaning, which is only one possible valid meaning.

[34] Gordon Fee, How to Read the Bible for All Its Worth, 4th ed. (Zondervan, 2014).

[35] I have another writing project, The Flow of Revelation, that is basically a biblical theology that integrates the Bible's original meaning in a flow that ends in Christian orthodoxy.

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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 
3.1 Setting the Stage for a Political Conversation
3.2 Binary Political Thinking
3.3 Assumptions about Christ and Culture
3.4 All our thinking and living is enculturated.
7.1 How Do We Know (part 1)
7.2 A Framework of Understanding (part 2)
7.3 The Ordering of Impressions (part 3)
7.4 Paradigm Shifts (part 4)

 

7.4 Paradigm Shifts (part 4)

The philosophy chapter on "How Do We Know?" continues. Previous posts at bottom.
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13. Most of us have heard of "paradigm shifts." These are when our way of looking at some issue or question fundamentally changes. The classic example is when the western world slowly shifted from thinking that the sun goes around the earth to thinking that the earth goes around the sun. In this particular case, it took more than a century for the shift to take place on a widespread level.

When we look back, most of us don't think much of this shift, but it was serious enough at the time that Galileo almost got burned at the stake for it (1633). When a person grows up with a particular paradigm, past controversies over it may seem insignificant. We might even look down on those "stupid people" who couldn't see it at the time. But this current moment in history is one with a clash of many paradigms, and different herds are fighting vigorously to maintain a certain way of looking at the world.

We normally think of paradigm shifts happening because of some data that doesn't fit into the prevailing way of looking at things. If we go back to our "dots" illustration, there may be dots that we did not include in the picture we drew out of the dots. It is often hard to fit all the data -- the dots -- into our "drawings" of the world.

We do our best to fit those "naughty dots" -- or "naughty data," as I like to call it -- into our pictures of the world. But some of those dots resist. We have drawn a picture of a bunny out of the dots, but there's this one dot next to the bunny's cheek that just doesn't seem to fit the picture. "Maybe it's a wart," someone exclaims. They write a scientific paper, "On the anomalous wart near the bunny's cheek."

But maybe there's a younger scientist. That "wart" has been bothering her for months, maybe even years. She lies there at night thinking, "What if it's not a wart?" At some point she might think, "What if it isn't a bunny?" "What else could it be?" she asks herself over and over again.

She has a breakthrough (or what she thinks is a breakthrough). Maybe it's not a wart but a nose. Maybe the face isn't turned the direction that everyone thinks it is. Maybe it's a tree.

She will face resistance. She might not be granted tenure for her foolish "nose hypothesis." Her papers might not be accepted for publication. She might not get that job.

But eventually, maybe her idea will catch on. Maybe some of the young whipper-snappers coming through the system will do their doctoral research on her nose hypothesis. Maybe her idea will catch on. Eventually, the resistance will get old and retire. Who knows, in three decades, perhaps most scientists will think that it is a nose.

Our paradigms "select" certain data as important and "deselect" other data as less or unimportant. Our paradigms tend to see certain data and not see other data. Think of some argument you have had with someone over something you said. "I didn't mean anything by it," you say. "It was a joke. You're not fat." 

"No, you really think that I'm fat," comes the response. Paradigms are meaning-assigning mechanisms. They take the same data of the world and do different things with it.

On November 11, 1572, a Danish astronomer named Tycho Brahe (1546-1601) observed a new star. But new stars weren't supposed to happen under the existing paradigm of the universe at that time. The stars were meant to be fixed, created by God on the fourth day of creation and stuck in place ever since. If stars can still come into being, then our paradigm of the cosmos needs to be altered.

14. This framework for understanding how different groups assign different meanings to the same data is incredibly helpful. In my holiness background, an earring or ring was very significant. They indicated ungodly pride on the part of those who wore them. It was thus a significant paradigm shift when I realized that such things might not actually have much significance at all to someone wearing them. In the case of a wedding ring, the significance might actually be quite virtuous.

We have paradigms with regard to Scripture as well, as we will discuss at the end of the chapter. In my paradigm relating to the value of human beings, Galatians 3:28 features large -- God does not value differently men and women, those of one race or another, or those of one social status or another. But for other Christians the household codes of Colossians 3-4 or the words of 1 Timothy 2:12 are the core data points of their theology of women or -- in the past -- of slaves. Same Bible. Same text. Different paradigms.

The writings of Michel Foucault (1926-1984) explored some key paradigm shifts that have happened on various aspects of society in the last few centuries. We can view his work through the lens of Kuhn's paradigm shifts and see some good illustrations of how the prevailing thinking of culture shifts over time.

For example, in his work, Madness and Civilization (1961), he explored how views of insanity have shifted over the years. [27] In ancient times, insanity could be seen as a blessing from the gods, as in the case of oracles who seemed to "lose their mind" when they were being inspired by the god. By contrast, no doubt mental illness might have been interpreted as demon-possession in certain Jewish circles.

In medieval times, there was the concept of the "ship of fools" (more legendary than historical). This ship was thought to sail to and fro with its riders seeking to find their rightful home. The problem was misplacement. If they were to find their rightful home, they would find the minds that they had lost.

A century ago, those with mental illness were seen as having a medical problem that might be fixed by medical procedures. There were frontal lobotomies and chemical therapies. In general, however, such individuals were hidden away so that no one need think about them. Under the Nazis, such individuals were seen as a problem for the genetic purity of the German race, and were eliminated.

In more recent times, those with mental illness have been viewed more with compassion. Society is supposed to help them. Medications are developed to help restore them. We take care of them as families rather than sequestering them away. They are often integrated and mainstreamed into our classrooms.

15. In his other works, Foucault explored similar shifts in relation to what we do with those who break the law or how we conceptualize sexuality. His attempts to do "archaeology" on the way society views these things are potentially helpful for us to see ourselves where we may have blind spots. [28] His work titled, Discipline and Punish (1975) explored changing views of the criminal. Then he wrote a three volume series on The History of Sexuality (1976).

For example, not long ago, a key feature of criminal punishment was public shaming. Individuals who were put to death were put to death publicly as an example. In the England of the 1500s, people were beheaded or burned at the stake publicly so that everyone could see what happens to those who oppose the king or queen. The notorious lynchings of the post-Civil War era were a way of keeping blacks in line. "Know your place or we -- the ones with the power -- will show you who is in control."

The Romans did the same thing with crucifixion. [29] Jesus was crucified at one of the entrances to Jerusalem, just outside the gate. Victims were stripped naked and humiliated. The point was, "Don't mess with the Romans. We have the power, and you are insignificant."

But in more recent times, capital punishment has become a private ceremony with hints of revenge. Select individuals are invited to come watch and see justice done. Still other voices in our contemporary culture are opposed to capital punishment at all.

We feel the pressures of these shifts in the church too. Although I do not think that the Bible is opposed to capital punishment, I feel the pressure of my circles to say it does. The "virtuous" in my circles are opposed to capital punishment. (To be fair, the percentage of individuals wrongly convicted is so high that I suspect it should be used very rarely.)

We experience these forces, this "herd pressure" as the voices in power shift. Just a year ago (2024), it was overwhelmingly common for companies to have offices devoted to "diversity, equity, and inclusion" (DEI). But with the power shift under the current administration, those letters will not likely be heard anywhere by a company in the public sector. 

As Foucault wrote, "Knowledge is power." Those who have power can shape what is true -- or at least what is considered to be true. "History is told by the winners."

Christians today operate with different paradigms in relation to criminality. Take the question of undocumented immigrants. How serious of a violation is it to overstay your official welcome? Those currently in power want to villainize such individuals. "They have broken the law; they must be returned... with forcefulness." 

But this perspective is not at all obvious. It is a paradigm. For example, who determines whether overstaying your official welcome is a matter of a fine or for that matter having to stand on your head for twenty minutes. Culture assigns the significance.

How significant is that line that we call a "border." It's not a real line. It's an imaginary line that a bunch of people got together and drew (sometimes at the point of a gun). It is a paradigmatic line -- a "social construct," if you would. [30] The significance of stepping over it is something we collectively create. It is not "real" in that sense.

Notice I said "undocumented" rather than "illegal." The word illegal has certain power connotations that assign a certain negative emotive force. Technically, most immigrants in this regard have broken civil law rather than criminal law. In that sense, most undocumented immigrants are not illegal. They have simply overstayed their official welcome. Most of the American public are undoubtedly unaware both of their own assumptions on this topic and of the forces that unknowingly are working on them.

16. Foucault's exploration of how views of sexuality have changed over time are also relevant to our conversations on the topic today. [31] Chiefly, he argued that the very notion of sexuality is fairly recent. Before the 1800s, people didn't categorize themselves as "heterosexual" or "homosexual." In effect, there were people who behaved normally and then there were "deviant acts." The acts were policed, not identities.

The assumption of culture prior to the 1800s, then, would be that a male would marry and have children. This was not a question of "orientation" -- a modern concept. It was simply the norm, the default. Any reader of the Sodom and Gomorrah story prior to the twentieth century would have assumed that all the men of Sodom were married and had children.

What then of same-sex prior to recent times? It was seen as something done "on the side," a deviant act as opposed to normal behavior. Take King James of King James Version fame. He was married. He had children. And he is rumored to have had sex with some younger men of his court. It was something he did "on the side," so to speak.

Today, we want to categorize an individual like him as a homosexual in orientation, someone whose "sexuality" is oriented around the same sex rather than the opposite sex. But this is a modern way of thinking about the subject. It reflects a paradigm shift that has taken place over the last hundred years.

With regard to Scripture, this perspective might change the way we read passages dealing with same-sex actions. If we read the key passages carefully, we can see that they are all about activities. They are not about orientations, which is a modern construct. Being aware of our own paradigms -- as well as those of the biblical worlds -- is a potential game changer when it comes both to understanding the Bible and applying it to today.

Our default is to read our paradigms into the biblical text. We assume our family structures. We assume our economic structures. We assume our way of thinking about any number of things. And the more core the issue, the more likely we are to be blind to our own paradigms.

Yet reading the Bible in context is an intercultural experience. It is like visiting a foreign country. If we listen to it closely, we will find it a strange new world. And we will begin to see our own assumptions more and more clearly too in contrast.

[27] Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in an Age of Reason (Random House, 1965).

[28] Foucault's core concept was how power stood in the background of such shifts. This is an important consideration, but I want to focus more on the epistemological dimension of such shifts at the moment.

[29] James Cone drew this parallel in his book, The Cross and the Lynching Tree (Orbis, 2013).

[30] A classic work here is Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckman, The Social Construction of Knowledge: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge (Anchor, 1967).

[31] We might note that he himself was gay and died of AIDS in 1984. In his work, he never claimed objectivity since as a postmodern he rejected the concept outright. Rather, for him, knowledge was a function of power. Despite his extreme views in this regard, however, there is much insight to be gained from his explorations, as I hope I am demonstrating.

_______________________
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 
3.1 Setting the Stage for a Political Conversation
3.2 Binary Political Thinking
3.3 Assumptions about Christ and Culture
3.4 All our thinking and living is enculturated.
7.1 How Do We Know (part 1)
7.2 A Framework of Understanding (part 2)
7.3 The Ordering of Impressions (part 3)

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).

_______________________
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)

 

7.2 A Framework of Understanding (part 2)

Epistemology cont.
_____________________________

For Locke, we are born with a blank slate, a "tabula rasa." [4] Our lives are basically the constant input of source material into our minds. Experience writes on the whiteboard of our minds, and we know stuff.

In the 1600s and 1700s, the rationalists and the empiricists vied with each other for prominence. On the rationalist team, you had Descartes, Baruch Spinoza (1632-77), and Gottfried Leibniz (1646-1716). On the empiricist team, you had Locke, George Berkeley (1685-1753), and David Hume (1711-76).

David Hume would prompt the next step in the debate. Hume was the empiricist to end all empiricists. He noted that Locke and others were sneaking in some patterns that weren't actually part of experience. [5] For example, I can experience the moment when a fist starts coming toward me. I can experience all the individual moments as the fist comes toward my face. I can experience the fist hitting my face and the pain that accompanies it.

However, Hume argued that I cannot experience the law of cause and effect that, in my mind, connects that fist with my head lurching backward. (I am making up the fist example. His example was a billiard ball.) In fact, he would argue that I cannot experience time itself -- I only experience an individual succession of moments. 

He was also known for what we call the fact-value problem. I can experience the fact of pain because you hit me. But I can't experience that it is wrong for you to hit me. There is a distinction between the fact that murder or someone stealing something from you or your spouse cheating on you is painful, on the one hand, and the claim that those actions are wrong. Hume argued that you cannot experience the value. You can only experience the fact.

The Kantian Synthesis
5. Enter the Prussian philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724-1804). He would say that Hume woke him from his "dogmatic slumber." [6] Before he engaged Hume's thoughts on causation, he leaned to the rationalist side of the debate. But Hume would spark perhaps the biggest paradigm shift in philosophical history.

Kant proposed a synthesis of empiricism and rationalism. My mind clearly organizes the inputs of my senses. I experience individual moments; my mind stitches them together into a sequence in time or into a cause-effect relationship. I only experience the moments. My mind shapes them into an order.

Similarly, I only experience someone taking my stuff. It is my mind that puts the valuation on the event as "wrong." My mind connects "facts" with "values."

I like to think of what Kant was saying as something like typing into a laptop. Right now, I am entering content into a computer. There is a box on the screen. I cannot enter letters outside the box. There are rules to the box. For example, the box won't make me coffee or breakfast. The software organizes the inputs I am making in certain predictable ways.

Similarly, our senses input experiences into our minds, but there are rules to the ways our minds organize that content. Our minds organize our experience into frameworks like cause and effect, space and time, and right and wrong. Kant believed in God, and he believed in the reliability of that organization. So he was not proposing uncertainty. He trusted that God had created reliable "software."

The bottom line is that Kant suggested that the content of our minds comes through our senses, but the organization of that content came through our minds because of certain "a priori" categories God had put in our minds. A priori means "from before." It means that the categories were already there before we began. The categories are "innate" or "inborn."

One consequence of this approach is that, ultimately, it means we do not experience the world as it is. We only experience it as our minds organize it. This shift to our minds as the organizers of reality was the seismic shift in philosophy I was mentioning before. If Descartes led us to focus on our role as knowers (versus simply assuming that the world was more or less as we see it), Kant would imprison us somewhat in our heads, ultimately opening the door up for postmodernism later. [7]

We cannot know, Kant would say, das Ding an sich, "the thing in itself." We only know it as it appears to us, as our minds organize it. If metaphysics is the study of reality, Kant put a significant footnote on it. He would write a book titled, Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics. [8] Because we cannot know "things in themselves," it puts a huge damper on the study of such things.

For example, there is a debate in philosophy over whether the world is made of matter (materialism) or ideas (idealism). George Berkeley (1685-1753) wondered if we were all ideas in the mind of God. It's a fun thought experiment. But how would we tell the difference? We do not experience the world as it is. We experience it as we experience it, and our experience of the world is the same no matter what it is made of, whether that underlying substance is something called matter or something called ideas.

A Framework of Understanding
6. Kant's revolution did not end the epistemological debate, which continues to this day. But I have found him to provide a useful starting framework for a working model of how we know things. That framework is that our "knowledge" is a combination of inputs and their organization in our minds. There is far more shaping of the world by our minds than we might like to admit. What we see is not exactly what we get.

For example, psychology has concluded that our brains come to our senses with certain expectations -- certain predictions of what we are going to experience. Far from a blank slate, our minds start with a sketch already in place of what we think we are going to see, hear, touch, taste, or smell. Our unthinking bias is to see it -- even if it is not there. Our senses can modify those expectations, but our minds save work by coming to the world with certain predictions of what we are going to see. [9] Our bias is to see them.

The raw inputs of our senses are indispensable, but their role in shaping our understanding is often dwarfed by the interpretive work of our minds. They are incredibly significant, but they can be swallowed up by our mind machine. If we cannot be sure to know the world as it actually is, our goal is to organize the data of the world in our mind in as "useful" a way as possible, meaning that our interpretations account for as much of the "data" of the world as possible in as "elegant" a way as possible.

Let's say that the world is a picture, but all we can perceive of that picture is a selection of dots. Depending on the size of our canvas, we can potentially draw an infinite number of pictures out of those dots because we can draw as much and as far as we want outside the dots. This is the "elegant" criteria. The most justifiable picture will stick closely to the dots. Similarly, the more dots we have, the better chance we have of a representation that corresponds to the reality we are trying to perceive.

There are two related philosophies here. Both are realist. That is to say, both affirm (by faith) that the world outside ourselves and our human communities is real. Both reject what might be called "naive realism," which simply assumes that we see the world as it is. Critical realism is more optimistic about our ability to discern a truthful underlying structure to the reality we perceive. Pragmatic realism more or less says that such metaphysical questions are a diversion. We may as well treat our interpretations as heuristic devices meant to help us make our way through the world.

The pragmatic approach is the ultimate fall back. [11] The constructions that are organized by our minds are most useful if they account for as much data as possible in as elegant a way as possible. To summarize something that Einstein once said, "That explanation is best which is the simplest without being too simple." [12] 

If we wish to call ourselves critical realists, as the New Testament scholar N. T. Wright has explored, [13] we might say 1) the world beyond ourselves is real, 2) our perception of that world is finite and fallen, inevitably skewing our perceptions, although we can approximate accurate knowledge. Here the classic tests for truth are incredibly useful. The correspondence test asks whether the data of the world corresponds well to the theories we construct to account for it. The coherence test asks whether our interpretations of the world are internally coherent. Inner contradiction is taken as a sign of a defective theory.

External Impressions
7. Our unattainable goal is objectivity -- to see the world as it is more than as what it appears to us -- we face an impossible battle. However, I would argue that it is a useful battle -- far more useful in fact than throwing the goal out the window. Some interpretations fit the data better than others. Some interpretations are more elegant than others. We commit ourselves to be "honest" with the lay of the evidence even though we are allowed to take positions by faith as well. [14]

We might think of the inputs of our senses -- from outside us -- as data points. Undoubtedly, some of those data points are real and others are a mirage. But perception is reality -- or at least it is a reality. If our minds perceive some input to be factual, then it is factual as far as our minds are concerned. We do not make decisions or formulate understandings based on the way the world actually is but on the way that we perceive it. 

The quest for objectivity thus requires us to police our data. For example, our internal "paradigms" are naturally selective. We choose some data and exclude others. We find some data more significant than others. The world looks much different if you are only looking at part of the data.

Here the work of Thomas Kuhn (1922-1996) is incredibly helpful. [15] Our normal operating procedure is to process the data of the world from within certain frameworks or paradigms. These paradigms select certain data as significant and other data as less significant or ignored. I like to call the data that a paradigm ignores "naughty data." These are data points that are anomalous in our paradigm. We like to ignore them. We come up with "ingenious" explanations for them that are ultimately truth-avoiding.

This anomalous data, Kuhn argued, are the seeds of paradigm shifts. He argued that we should not see these shifts as some inevitabe progression toward the truth. Sometimes, a shift is just different from the paradigm before it. There is no inevitable progress of science. Sometimes, we are just rearranging the data rather than improving our interpretation of it in some objective way.

There is thus a social dimension to science. There is peer pressure. There is the herd mentality we have mentioned so often even in science. Extroverted, inspirational, charismatic figures can lead science in a particular direction just as in politics or any other domain of knowledge. We would like to think that this is less the case in science, but inasmuch as humans are involved, it is still a factor. [16]

These frameworks are part of our cultures. We absorb them unthinkingly as children and as we grow up. The more foundational they are for our personhood, the more we resist the naughty data, the harder we fight to keep our paradigms in place. Kuhn explored how resistant "normal science" is to fundamental paradigm shifts. 

But, eventually, the older scientists die off. Einstein never accepted the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum physics, but he is no longer here to fight against it. Younger scientists may go for a new paradigm. [17] They may initially be denied jobs. They may have to keep their views somewhat quiet at first. But if they eventually acquire enough power in the guild, they may have the opportunity to bring about a paradigm shift...

[5] Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding.

[6] Kant, Critque of Pure Reason.

[7] Kant himself did not see this as imprisonment. His trust that God would not lie to us meant that he believed our minds accurately organized reality.

[8] Kant, Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics.

[9] For an accessible introduction to this "predictive modeling" that our brains do, see especially Andy Clark, Surfing Uncertainty: Prediction, Action, and the Embodied Mind (Oxford University, 2016). The initial work was done by Karl Friston. See especially now Friston, Active Inference: The Free Energy Principle in Mind, Brain, and Behavior (MIT, 2022). For a fun example, watch this video.

[10] This, by the way, is a fundamental tenet of Protestantism. The understanding of any visible church is always susceptible to reform (semper reformanda, "always needing to be reformed").

[11] In all that follows, my ultimate justification is that logic, realism, and the classical tests for truth "work" incredibly well when used scrupulously. That is to say, they meet the pragmatic test for truth. We thus need not fall into the abyss of skepticism or extreme versions of postmodernism. I consider Richard Rorty (1931-2007) to be the king of pragmatic realism. Cf. Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton University, 1979).

[12] The actual quote that comes closest was from a 1933 lecture "On the Method of Theoretical Physics": "It can scarcely be denied that the supreme goal of all theory is to make the irreducible basic elements as simple and as few as possible without having to surrender the adequate representation of a single datum of experience."

[13] N. T. Wright, The New Testament and the People of God (Fortress, 1992).

[14] A key problem with a lot of human argument is that we act like we are trying to be objective when in fact we are taking a position by faith. It is acceptable to take a position by faith, but let's be honest about it.  

[15] Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (University of Chicago, 1996).

[16] The main voice here was Paul Feyerabend (1924-94), Against Method (New Left, 1975). We might also note the words of that song from the musical Wicked: "Popular, I know about popular... Celebrated heads of state or really great communicators -- did they have brains or knowledge? Don't make me laugh. They were popular!"

[17] I don't mean to suggest that new paradigms are always a matter for the young or old paradigms always for the old, but you get the picture.

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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)

7.1 How we "know" what we think we know

Selections of earlier material will eventually appear at the bottom.
_____________________
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.

_____________________________
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

Wesleyan philosophy 2 -- What is good thinking?

Deductive Reasoning
There is a style of logic whose official form seems to go back to Aristotle from 384-322 BC. You might call it “syllogistic logic” because it has a format that involves “syllogisms.” With syllogisms, you have premises that build to logical conclusions. If the premises are true and the logic is valid, then the conclusion must also be true.

I have never been able to imagine a scenario where this approach to truth claims would not be valid. I recognize that such logic might possibly take on a different form in a different culture. For most of us, especially in daily life, our reasoning is more intuitive and implicit. We do not usually tell our spouse, “premise 1, premise 2, conclusion.” (Some of us might from time to time, but our spouses may consider us rather weird and annoying.)

While this particular form of logic might be cultural in some sense, I cannot see where it does not reflect underlying absolute truths of this universe. Another culture might express such truths in other forms, but I consider that a difference in form rather than substance.

The moniker, “Western logic” seems a bit peculiar. Ancient Greece was a quite different world than mine. There was no Europe at that time. Ancient Greece was different from Renaissance Italy and Enlightenment Prussia too. “Western” mainly says, “not Eastern, not Africa, not Middle East, not South American," and so forth. I suppose it means a modern European perspective on Aristotelian logic that has carried over from Europe to academic philosophy in the United States.

While I believe more metaphorical and intuitive forms of logic are valid and get at the same truths, I find Aristotelian logic and its heritage to be more precise and thus more helpful at truth-processing than more impressionistic, everyday arguments or more narrative versions. The syllogism is a bit like math, and it is hard to argue that 1 + 1 does not equal 2. Accordingly, if all truth is God’s truth, then syllogistic logic is part of natural revelation and thus absolute truth in its substance. I can’t see any way around it. I find it extremely unhelpful to align it with certain people groups, except perhaps in relation to its form.

I call this sort of reason, “micro-reason.” It is not worldview reasoning or even paradigmatic reasoning. Such larger “macro-reason” is very open to question and examination. "Macro-reason" is the use of micro-reason to argue for truths. It is micro-reason in action. When our contemporaries question Wesley’s quadrilateral, they must surely be questioning macro-reason with larger assumptions and the application of micro-reason. When they do so, they are using micro-reason or fundamental logic.

Micro-reason is used in all thinking, as soon as we connect two atoms of thought together. We cannot interpret the Bible without using our micro-reasoning. [1] We cannot process a word from the Lord through the Holy Spirit without micro-reasoning. From Tertullian to Kierkegaard to Barth, these “I believe it because it is absurd” folk used micro-reason. Even Jacques Derrida, as opaque as his deconstructionist writings are, used micro-reason, although he tried very hard to obfuscate it. Micro-reason is thus foundational, underlying truth of any propositional kind, including truths we might draw from the Bible.

This sort of micro-reason or fundamental logic to the universe ultimately boils down to fundamental presuppositions. At some point, you hit basic definitions and assumptions that cannot be proved. Geometric proofs ultimately are built on the basis of fundamental axioms that cannot be proven. They are simply assumed.

One of the fundamental tests for truth is the coherence test. Does a proposed truth contradict itself? The law of non-contradiction states that a claim cannot both be true and untrue if it is stated literally. So if you find a fundamental contradiction in a collection of truth claims, at least one of your truth claims must be false in some way.

It does not seem to me that any of these understandings of logic contradict faith in general, let alone Wesleyan faith. Logic seems to be fundamental to the way God has made this universe. It is part of absolute truth. It is part of natural revelation. We cannot avoid it, not even when we are trying to listen to Scripture and interpret it.

Inductive Reasoning
Deductive reasoning starts with certain assumptions and then draws conclusions, like an upside-down V. By contrast, inductive reasoning is like a normal V. You draw in evidence and make inferences. Unlike deductive reasoning, inductive reasoning tends to be open-ended. Unless you have all the possible data, there is always the chance that the next piece of data you collect will throw the coherence test out of whack and sink your hypothesis.

The scientific method is inductive. You collect evidence. You form a hypothesis. You collect more data and test the hypothesis. You refine the hypothesis if necessary. Eventually, you have enough proven results to present a theory, and so forth. This process never strictly ends as long as there is more data to collect. Paradigms form. Paradigms shift. And so on.

A recent display at the Smithsonian declared the scientific method to be white in nature. We face a similar question to that we mentioned in relation to Aristotelian logic. In this case, we point back to Francis Bacon, who was English and lived from 1561-1626.

I consider any such designation extremely unfortunate and undesirable because of how incredibly successful the method has been. It seems to me that it describes the approach that people in all times and all places have used in one form or another for discovery. Where can we find water? Such and such suggests we might dig here. Let’s dig. No water. Let’s try over here. Water. While there may be cultural dimensions to the way the scientific method is expressed and formulated, let us strongly refrain from associating it with any ethnicity or people group. That almost begs for racist inferences of a most heinous nature.

Thus while the results of any particular scientific quest are not absolute truth, the scientific method as a model for seeking truth would seem to be part of the logic of the universe. It is sound reasoning. The results, however, are more often than not eternally tentative.

If the coherence test is a test for truth that relates to deductive reasoning, the “correspondence test” is a test that relates to inductive reasoning. Does the claim that I am making correlate with the data I have? A third test for truth is the pragmatic test. If I operate on the assumption that this hypothesis is true, does it “work” in the world? Does it get me from a to b? You may have heard the expression, “for heuristic purposes.” The idea is that I assume something to see if the hypothesis “works” without assuming it is actually true.

Logical Fallacies
Many different logical fallacies lurk and abound in our reasoning. Some are formal and relate more to deductive reasoning. Others are informal and relate more to inductive reasoning. They are fallacies because they violate the fundamental laws of logic above. Note that one’s conclusion might be true and yet poorly argued.

Below are some logical fallacies. We should point out that they are fallacies because they do not necessitate a certain conclusion. Practically speaking, sometimes this sort of reasoning turns out to point to something that proves to be true in the “real world.” By calling them logical fallacies, we mean that you cannot be certain the conclusion is true. The conclusion does not follow for certain.

• Hasty generalization – you form a conclusion without enough evidence yet
• Ad hominem fallacy – you attack the person rather than the argument they are making
• Circumstantial fallacy – you assume a conclusion without direct observation but from surrounding, “circumstantial” evidence.
• “After this, because of this” – A form of the circumstantial fallacy. Just because something followed something else chronologically doesn’t prove the first thing caused the second.
• Genetic fallacy – The origins of a conclusion or the reasons why someone believes a conclusion neither prove nor disprove the conclusion.
• Fallacy of diversion – basically, changing the subject
• Fallacy of equivocation -- slipping a different meaning to your terms in mid-argument
• False alternative – You give an "a or b" choice when there are actually other options as well.
• Slippery slope fallacy – Once you start moving in a particular direction, it is not guaranteed that you will continue moving further in that direction.
• Circular reasoning/begging the question – assuming your conclusion in your argument
• Fallacies of composition and division – You assume everything in a group is a certain way because something in that group is that way. Also the opposite: because of a general trend of a group you assume everything in that group manifests that trend.
• Appeal to ignorance – Absence of evidence does not disprove a claim
• Appeal to the majority – something isn’t true just because most people believe it
• Appeal to improper authority – citing someone who is not an authority on an issue does not support your case
• Appeal to emotion – something isn’t true because it “feels so right”
• Appeal to force – you can’t make something true by forcing people to affirm it

These basic fallacies would seem to be sound warnings. They do not indicate for certain that your conclusion is false, but they do indicate that your logic for reaching those conclusions is invalid. They are the stuff of political and religious rhetoric. We would be wise to know them well so that we can spot when our minds are potentially being manipulated.

There is nothing unWesleyan about the idea of these fallacies. This would seem to be a good thing because they would seem to be part of the absolute truth of the universe as God has created it. Their form may have cultural elements, but the underlying truth to which they point would seem to be unassailable. They are part of natural revelation.

[1] Unavoidably, micro-reason is thus logically prior to Scripture because we cannot interpret Scripture or any revelation without using it. When we speak of the priority of Scripture to reason in the quadrilateral, we are speaking of it in relation to what I am calling "macro-reason."