3.3 God as First Cause

It's Thursday, philosophy journey day. Previous posts in my philosophical journey are at the bottom.
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1. One of the oldest and best known arguments for the existence of God has to do with the cause of the world. In the 300s BC, Aristotle (384-322BC) wrote about the "Prime Mover." [1] His argument was that everything that moves is pushed -- and of course the world is in motion. He did not believe this pushing could go back infinitely, so there must have been a first Mover that itself is unmoved. [2]

In the 1200s, Thomas Aquinas (1225-74) picked up this argument from motion and expanded it. God is not only the first Mover, but the first and last Cause, the only necessary Being. From our perspective today, some of his arguments make more sense than others. But the core argument stands.

Galileo effectively eliminated any simplistic version of the motion argument, discovering that a body in motion wants to stay in motion, and a body at rest wants to stay at rest. Bodies need pushed because of friction and gravity. Their natural disposition is to stay in motion forever.

2. The arguments from the need for a Cause and a Necessary Being continue to make sense. In fact, in a very real sense, they are more powerful arguments than ever.

William Lane Craig (b. 1949) has put the "efficient cause" argument like this. An efficient cause is that which brings about an effect. [3]

1. Everything that has a beginning has a cause.
2. The universe had a beginning.
3. Therefore, the universe had a cause.

This argument from cause is called the cosmological argument.

Modern physics has greatly helped us out here because it is currently the consensus among cosmologists that the universe had a beginning in time. Indeed, the current physics understanding of the beginning is so distinct that it fits very nicely with the argument above.

3. The biggest objection to the cosmological argument has always been the counterproposal that causes might go back in time infinitely. For example, David Hume (1711-76) famously made this countersuggestion in Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (1779).

In twentieth century physics, this showdown played out in the debate over the "big bang" versus "steady state" theories of the universe's origins. The "steady state" theory was quite popular among those who wanted to see the universe as infinitely old. [4] Yet others recognized that Einstein's equations of general relativity might also point to the universe having a distinct beginning in time. [5] 

This theory was derisively called the "big bang" theory. Indeed, it is ironic that many Christians today associate the Big Bang theory with atheism. This is a huge misunderstanding -- indeed, one that demonstrates great ignorance. Some of the key early proponents of the so called "big bang theory" were Christians who saw how well it supported the cosmological argument. By the same token, some of its most vocal opponents despised it for that same reason.

The "Big Bang" theory won the day. It is now the consensus of modern cosmology that the universe's existence goes back to 13.7 years ago when the entire universe was, effectively, a point. [6] For a few decades, a counter suggestion known as the "oscillating Big Bang" was proposed -- it allowed the universe to be infinitely old by a recurring expansion and collapse of the universe. But for several decades now it has been acknowledged that there is not enough matter in the universe to suppose such an infnite cycle.

William Lane Craig has given a more philosophical counterargument to the "infinite regress" counterargument. He has argued that there is no true infinite in this universe. The idea of infinity is a valid mathematical concept, but it does not seem to exist in the observable universe. Quantum theory has eliminated any sense that matter or energy can be infinitely divided. And cosmological theory does not hold the universe to be infinite in scope. Thus, Craig argues, an infinite regression in time would break all known precedence in this universe.

4. So we have strong support currently from science that the universe had a beginning. Why then, did it begin? The supposition of an Intelligent Creator remains the easiest answer -- especially after we consider the fine tuning of the universe (the next article). However, other options have been suggested.

The strongest counterproposal, it seems to me, is the multiverse proposal. It basically proposes -- with no evidence, mind you, that our universe is only one of an infinite number of universes, each with its own laws and physics. You are here reading this because our universe works. [7] But, for these universes to arise mindlessly, the overwhelming majority of them must be chance failures. We are just the extraordinarily, fantastically lucky ones.

Stephen Hawking advanced a version of this proposal that I call the "Hail Mary" proposal. What if, just maybe, something is possible in the quantum universe that we don't know about, something that makes universes popping out of nowhere possible. You might call this an "atheist of the gaps" argument. [8]

5. To be sure, a First Cause is not yet the Christian God. Perhaps we could assert omnipotence. After the next article we might assert omni-intelligence. Nor am I arguing that this is a definitive argument -- our own fallibility must surely keep us a little shy of absolute proof. I have been a little rhetorically sharp to have fun.

I don't consider this argument definitive. (God may in his infinite knowledge and understanding.) But I do find it very persuasive.

[1] Metaphysics XII.6-10.

[2] I am probably skewing Aristotle and Aquinas a little. They were probably thinking more in terms of potentiality and actuality rather than time.

[3] This is his formulation of the Islamic version of this argument, called the Kalam cosmological argument. William Lane Craig, The Kalām Cosmological Argument (Macmillan, 1979).

Aristotle identified four different types of causes in his Physics (II.194b16–195a3): 1) the material cause, which is simply the material of something, 2) the efficient cause or the direct cause -- this is what we most think of as a cause, 3) the formal cause or essence of something, and 4) the final cause, which we think of more as the purpose of something. 

[4] Notably, the charismatic scientist Fred Hoyle argued for this position in the 1950s. The idea is that, as the universe expands, a tiny bit o matter is generated to fill the new space.

[5] Einstein himself was repulsed by this possibility and even added a constant to his equations to try to stop them from suggesting it.

[6] The decisive moment in this debate was when a cosmic microwave background (CMB) was discovered in 1965. This radiation, steadily decreasing, is thought to come from the early universe. If the universe were infinitely old, not only would it not exist, but the amount of time would have likely dissipated such a decreasing radiation to zero long ago.

[7] This is the so-called "anthropic principle." Whatever the unlikelihood of us being here, we are here. So we must just be the lucky ones. This proposal is circular and very unsatisfying philosophically.

[8] Here I'm mimicking the well-known warning called the "God of the gaps." God is used to explain some gap in our current knowledge. The problem is when science fills in those gaps. Does that mean our faith now goes away? My quip about the "atheist of the gaps" is that Hawking supposes that we will one day find a non-theist explanation for the universe's existence that he does not currently have. Of course, theoretically, we may.

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Introduction
1.1 What is philosophy?
1.2 Is philosophy Christian?
1.3 Unexamined assumptions
1.4 Socrates and the Unexamined Life

Logic
2.1 The Structure of Thinking 
2.2 When Thinking Goes Wrong
2.3 Three Tests for Truth
2.4 Knowing the Bible
2.5 Plato and Aristotle
2.6 The Story of Logic 

Philosophy of Religion
3.1 Faith and Reason
3.2 How can we know that God exists?
3.3 God as First Cause

2.1 The Structure of Thinking

My philosophy meetings are done for the semester, but in honor of Thursday night, here is another post on my philosophical journey.
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1. There is a structure to the way we reason, a structure whose basic contours have been discussed at least since Aristotle in the 300s BC.

From one point of view, there are three basic components of reasoning. 

• There are assumptions. 
• There are relationships between assumptions. 
• And there are conclusions.

2. The relationships between assumptions are logic. There are no exceptions in this universe to the way logic works. Yes, it can take different forms. For example, logic can be expressed in stories. But the analysis that Aristotle and others abstracted always works as an analysis of good reasoning.

I want to emphasize this point because the late twentieth century had its share of detractors from logic as it historically has been used. I do not wish to argue that logic must be expressed in an Aristotelian way. However, I know of no approach that is as precise and reliable in its analysis of human reasoning. Other forms are far more prone to misdirection. They are, as it were, less mathematical.

Meanwhile, propositional logic -- as we might call it -- is always correct when it is formulated according to the rules. This makes it one of the most certain aspects of creation, closely related to math.

3. Aristotle laid out the fundamental pattern of logic in terms of what is called the syllogism. A syllogism has the form of 1) premise, 2) premise, 3) conclusion. The logic of a syllogism is valid if it works -- if the relationships between premises and conclusions work.

For example, take the following syllogism:

• All unmarried individuals are single.
• Jill is unmarried.
• Therefore, Jill is single.

Here we have 1) a general statement, 2) a subset of that general statement, 3) a connecting of the general statement with one example of it. The logic of this argument is valid. The conclusion must follow.

This is an example of deductive reasoning. The conclusion, as it were, is contained in the premises. You might think of deductive reasoning as an upside down V. It starts with an assumption and expands to the conclusions that follow from it.

The other kind of reasoning is inductive reasoning. It's like a regular V. With it, you start with evidence and then draw a conclusion from there. We will look at inductive reasoning in a later section.

4. It's important to note that, just because the logic of a syllogism is valid doesn't mean it's true. It is true only if both of the premises are true.

For example, it is true by definition that "All unmarried individuals are single." But what if Jill is actually married? Then the conclusion is false even though the logic of the argument works. 

5. As mentioned, the assumptions in logic are called premises. If the premises of an argument are true and the logic of an argument is "valid," then the conclusion of the argument is certainly true, without exception, and without any valid counter-argument. 

Why then do we diagree? The primary weak point of our arguments comes from faulty or debatable premises. That is, debatable assumptions. 

So there are two places where an argument may fail. It may fail because its logic isn't valid. And it may fail because one or more of its premises are false.

6. Where do our assumptions come from? First, sometimes they are wrong. Sometimes they come because we haven't interpreted the evidence correctly, as we will see. Perhaps we don't have all the evidence -- we rarely do. Perhaps we make a "hasty generalization" because we don't have all the evidence or we "connect the dots" in the wrong way.

Some of our assumptions are "unexamined," as we have seen. You may have heard the colorful saying that, "When we ASSUME, we make an A** out of U and ME." Jumping to conclusions when we don't have the facts or seeing what we want to see are major causes of bad thinking and faulty conclusions.

And here let me agree with some of the voices that have pushed back on logic in recent years. Mastery of logical reasoning does not guarantee moral clarity or correct conclusions. You can be an outstanding logician and hold troubling moral views or ridiculous perspectives. 

For example, Gottlob Frege (1848–1925), as we will see, was a brilliant logician. He is one of the most important figures in the history of logic. Yet in his later writings he expressed horrible views about Jews. Logical rigor doesn't mean your conclusions are correct -- especially if your premises are off. 

7. You no doubt have experienced or heard of the child that continues to ask "But why" until the parent finally responds in frustration, "Because I said so." This is a parable of all logic. 

Let's say we have a premise in an argument. We might support that premise with other premises. We might have an assumption that is a conclusion from another argument. And so on, and so on.

Eventually, however, all thinking comes down to what we might call axioms or assumptions that are not provable or disprovable. They are necessary for us to make any arguments. In geometry, you might remember that "two points make a line." This isn't something to prove. It's an assumption. 

In what is called Euclidean geometry, an assumption is that two parallel lines never meet. There are other geometries that don't make this assumption, but in everyday geometry, this is an assumption that is never proved. It's just assumed.

Later on our journey, we'll talk about some of our core assumptions. They might include premises like "The world outside me is real and distinct from me." How about "When an event would not have happened without the event before it, we say that the one event caused the other event"? What about "Time is the succession of one moment after another" and "Space is the potential for my movement beyond the extension of my body"?

The philosopher Alvin Plantinga (b.1932) has spoken of warranted and properly basic belief. He would argue that belief in God is "properly basic," meaning that it is foundational enough to our reality that God's existence doesn't necessarily have to be argued for. It is a reasonable assumption. Interestingly, he has also offered many arguments for the existence of God. [1]  

8. Another word for an assumption in logic is a presupposition. In particular, a presupposition tends to be an assumption that more foundational or significant. Some schools of thought relate presuppositions to what they might call a worldview. Sometimes, worldviews are seen as large systems of assumptions.

I would argue that there are more and less helpful ways of thinking about worldviews, as we will see eventually. If a worldview is seen as a collection of related perspectives, it can be a useful construct. However, some treat worldviews as inevitable systems. Or, worse, they might see an element of a worldview and conclude a person then has a host of other positions they may not actually have.

We will explore this "bad logic" later on.

9. I've mentioned that logic has had its detractors in recent decades. I had a student once -- now a professor himself -- who went to Princeton Seminary, which has a fair amount of what might be called "post-liberal" thinking. Post-liberal thinking tends to be anti-evidentiary thinking.

We had an interesting conversation after his first year. Clearly, the significance of Reason was being called into question. In Christian circles, we often find faith and reason pitted against each other.

I remember making a distinction between what we might call "macro-reason" -- that is, large systems of assumptions and conclusions -- and what I called "micro-reason." In that conversation, micro-reason referred to the simple logic that we have been exploring in this post.

You cannot avoid this logic if you have any thoughts at all. You cannot argue against Reason without using logic. You cannot interpret the Bible without logic. Let that sink in.

The concept of the Wesleyan Quadrilateral has reason as one of the four sides. But in reality, it is unavoidable at the center. We use reason to interpret Scripture, experience, and tradition.

We cannot escape it. As soon as we form a sentence, we have used reason. Reason thus is the unescapable foundation of all truth, at least in this universe.

[1] Captured in the book by Jerry Walls and Trent Dougherty, Two Dozen (or so) Arguments for God (Oxford University, 2018). 

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Introduction
1.1 What is philosophy?
1.2 Is philosophy Christian?
1.3 Unexamined assumptions
1.4 Socrates and the Unexamined Life

Logic
2.1 The Structure of Thinking (this post)
2.2 When Thinking Goes Wrong
2.3 Three Tests for Truth
2.4 Knowing the Bible
2.5 Plato and Aristotle
2.6 The Story of Logic

4.1 What is a human being?

Last night I had a final meeting with another group of philosophy students. We were filling in some gaps. We principally talked about what a human being is. Here are my own musings, going beyond the class to what I think.
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1. What is a human being? There are a couple obvious answers, I think, as a Christian.

First, I involve a body. Whatever else I am, I have a material component. Some of course would say that a body is all we are.

We are, at the very least, highly complex animals. I hear that my DNA is about 98% the same as the DNA of a chimpanzee (yours too -- it's not just me). It's alarmingly 60% the same as a chicken's -- again, not just me. Yours too.

The behaviorist B. F. Skinner (1904-1990) famously pointed out that humans can be manipulated using the same techniques as you can use to train a dog. [1] "Chocolate?" Sheldon asks Penny on Big Bang Theory as he "conditions" her not to talk when he gives her sweets. 

Nevertheless, Skinner assumed that we were only animals. I don't think a Christian should have a problem with a sense that we are animals. [2] It seems undeniable from any objective point of view. The question is whether that is only what we are. 

Are we just roadkill waiting to happen? Christianity says a resounding "NO!"

2. There is a second answer that Christians give to this question, and it is more important, I think. Maybe it is more important because it has deep implications for how we treat other people. It is a distinguishing belief -- or at least should be.

That is the belief that humans are created in the image of God (Gen. 1:26-27). I have found that it is very easy to say this. It is much harder to parse its implications. I don't think it should be hard. It just is because a large number of people -- including people who call themselves Christians -- don't want to follow its implications out in society and the world.

There is an "egalitarianism" of sorts that follows from this belief because there are no gradations in the image of God. Egalitarianism in this context means that you and I are equally valuable qua human beings. [3] You are not "more" of the image of God than I am, and I am not "more" of the image of God than you are. It is a statement of "ontology" or "being." That is, it is a statement of who we are.

The Declaration of Independence put it in a secular way: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men [and women] are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights." We'll talk about rights (vs. graces or privileges) at another time. The point is that, no matter what an individual human being's instrumental value might be -- our usefulness. All human beings as human beings have intrinsic value.

3. It's worth expanding a little on this point. If you have to choose between saving my life and saving the life of a president, you should save the president. He or she plays an immensely important role in the world. Me? I'm a blogger. The instrumental or useful value of a president is immensely greater than my instrumental value.

When we say that a human being is intrinsically valuable, we are saying that human beings have worth whether they do anything or not. We will get into the details of when human existence begins in a person life and when if ever it ends. But assuming a body is a human being -- a "person," as it were -- that individual has intrinsic value and worth.

This was the great offense to humanity that was Joseph Mengele, who experimented on those who were in the concentration camps of the Nazi regime. He did not consider Jews to be human beings. For that reason, he did not consider it immoral to cause them great pain by experimenting on them. Ironically, his experiments intrinsically assumed that they were of the same species as he was -- he was experimenting on them to learn about the human body, I presume.

4. When we get to the fifth section of this journey, we will pick up this train of thought as we launch a discussion of ethics. Although ethics is bigger than human to human interaction, it is understable that we focus mostly on how we should treat other human beings when we think of ethics. 

From a biblical and Christian standpoint, we have a responsibility to give all human beings a certain dignity as bearers of the image of God. The image of God is not conditional. It is a fundamental aspect of human identity. This is why, from a Christian perspective, even a serial killer should be treated with some fundamental dignity -- indeed, the nature of their crime is that they did not treat their victims in that way. To treat them as they treated others is to come down to their level. [4]

We should emphasize again that, as a fundamental value, human dignity is not dependent on what a person does. In the current debates over immigration, human dignity is not dependent on whether a person is "legal" or "illegal." This is true even from a secular, Constitutional perspective -- the Constitution ascribes certain core rights to people regardless of what they have done. And it is even moreso the case from a Christian perspective.

Disregard for the "rights" (or privileges, if you would prefer) of a human being is thus anti-Christian and anti-American.

5. Human value is thus part of our "ontology" -- it is part of who every human being. Even the dead should be treated with respect. 

I suppose that there is a sense in which human value is derivative. To speak of the "image" of God suggests that we mirror God. We reflect God. If God did not exist, our value would cease to exist.

However, God's not going anywhere. In fact, God is a necessary Being. All existence is contingent on God's existence. In that sense, the value of all creation is derivative from God.

For this reason, while our value (and existence) is derivative from God, it is "inalienable." We can go ahead and say that it is intrinsic to our ontology. It is part of who we are and cannot be removed or detatched from us.

6. Throughout the centuries, there have been varied perspectives on what the image of God might be. I find almost all the suggestions to capture a truth about who we are as humans.

In Genesis, it is a political image. God rules over the creation; humanity "rules" over the creation. The image of God in Genesis has to do thus with our position or status in relation to the world.

However, theologians have also spoken of the "natural" and "moral" image of God. [5] To use these terms in my own way, we can reason at least analogously to God reasoning. And we can make moral decisions analogously to God making moral judgments.

There is some level of reasoning in a chicken or chimpanzee, but it does not come close to the capacity of an average human being. So Christians believe that God is supreme intelligence. Our ability to think comes nowhere close to God's, but there is a meaningful resemblance all the same.

I would suggest that humans are the only species that makes moral judgments. Perhaps I would almost make this claim by definition, although I hope there is an empirical basis for the claim as well. 

To put it another way, killer whales and vicious dogs don't sin even though they can seem quite "mean" from an anthropomorphic perspective. But we are simply ascribing human characteristics to them. [6]

That is to say, we might suggest that humans have a moral image of God that an orangutan does not.

7. I suppose from a non-theist perspective, some of these latter claims might seem disputable. Is human rationality and moral thinking simply a more developed version of the capacities of less complex animals? Perhaps such debates are not outside the bounds of Christian debate as well.

The core point is what seems essential, namely, that all human beings should be given a fundamental dignity and value qua human beings. From a secular standpoint, such value can be seen as part of a social contract -- I agree to assign value to other human beings under the agreement that they will assign such value to me.

Hopefully, we will be able to convince AGI to respect us under some similar agreement. But that's a topic for another time.

[1] B. F. Skinner, The Behavior of Organisms: An Experimental Analysis (Cambridge, 1938).

[2] Although I seem to remember my mother resisting this idea in some random conversation we had.

[3] I thought I'd work in the Latin qua for fun here. It means "as." We are equally valuable as human beings. What's philosophy without a little Latin here and there?

[4] Many in the modern world -- Christians and non-Christians alike -- take this principle to imply that the death penalty should not be a punishment. The question becomes whether it can be administered humanely, in my opinion, and under what circumstances.

[5] John Wesley's classic treatment of the image of God can be found in his sermon on "The New Birth." Of course, Wesley was largely premodern and didn't interpret biblical texts in context. That doesn't mean, however, that his theology was necessarily wrong at those points. The truth of an inference is not dependent on the strength of one's exegesis (a.k.a. the genetic fallacy).

[6] We have brainstormed the thought experiment in a Science and Scripture class I have taught whether it would make sense to hypothesize that homo sapiens before Adam and Eve did not sin because they were not yet fully "human" in a moral sense. What do you think?

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1.1 What is philosophy?
1.2 Is philosophy Christian?
1.3 Unexamined assumptions
1.4 Socrates and the Unexamined Life

2.1 The Structure of Thinking
2.2 Three Tests for Truth
2.3 Plato and Aristotle

3.1 Faith and Reason
3.2 Arguments for God's Existence
3.3 Suffering and Evil
3.4 Augustine and Aquinas

4.2 Beginnings and Endings
4.3 Free or Fated?
4.4 The Soul
4.5 Existentialism

5.1 Human Value (graces)

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.

 _______________________
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)

7.2 A Framework of Understanding (part 2)

Epistemology cont.
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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.

_____________________________

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.
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1. In the first six chapters, we have tried to pull back the veil on some of our potentially false pretenses to knowledge. Quite often, we start off with a "unitary" way of thinking about a subject or way of behaving. We just think that way and we aren't necessarily very aware of why. We behave a certain way more or less without reflection. It's just the way we do it. These are unexamined assumptions.

It isn't practical to question everything all the time. We grow up trained to work on cultural autopilot. We don't think about whether to put our socks on before our shoes. We just do it. If we are hungry in the western world, we don't likely catch a lizard to fry up.

We just know you can kill a spider but not a dog. We just know that Christians vote for Republicans because of abortion or that Christians vote for Democrats because of people in need. We just know that things are getting worse and worse before Jesus returns or that we need to work to make the world a better place. We just know that all people need to be treated with respect or that some types of people should be treated with suscpicion.

Then we are exposed to the "other side." Someone points out that we crossed the street because a black person was coming toward us on the sidewalk. Someone makes a Democrat sound virtuous. We get defensive or go on the attack. We go into "binary," us-them mode. "That's not why I crossed the street!" "That's not really how Democrats are!" 

In the second half of the book, we'll go back through the areas we have introduced and discuss them from a more "spectrum" approach. We'll ask about the main options that philosophers of the ages have suggested as answers to ultimate questions. That process begins with this chapter as we begin to talk more objectively about how "knowing" actually works from a "meta" perspective.

If you wish, consider what follows a heuristic device. For some, it will come across as very modern in a postmodern age. However, I would maintain that such a conversation remains more useful than some postmodern sharing of perspectives that mainly improves our relationship with each other. Modernism is like looking under the hood of a car that isn't running properly. If it helps the car run more smoothly, it's more useful than two people sharing their perspectives on the car without its performance improving.

2. René Descartes (1596-1650) is often considered a turning point in epistemology, which is the study of knowledge. Epistemology asks how we know that we know what we think we know. How does "truth" work?

The claim has often been made that, prior to Descartes, there was clearly discussion of what is true and discussion of the sources of truth. But there was largely an unexamined assumption about our human reliability as knowers. If our senses were considered a source of truth, it was assumed that our senses were more or less reliable. More often our human reason was assumed to be a reliable source of truth.

As a sidenote, it is sometimes claimed that Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274), a very important Christian thinker from the "Middle" Ages, did not believe that our human reason was fallen. It seems to me that this is a somewhat unfair accusation in that the very question assumes a post-Cartesian perspective ("Cartesian" refers to Descartes' way of thinking). That is to say, before Descartes everyone more or less assumed as an unexamined assumption that human thinking worked. It just wasn't an issue yet. So even if Aquinas more or less assumed that human reason worked, he largely did so as the common assumption of his day. Further, he did believe that the mind could be clouded by sin.

From a Christian standpoint, there was also the unexamined assumption that we somehow automatically know what the Bible means. Luther and Calvin were largely unreflective in the 1500s about themselves as interpreters. People debated the meaning of the Bible, but they did not see the role their own assumptions and paradigms played in the process of interpretation. Most Christians today remain unaware of the role their paradigms play in their interpretations -- as we will explore in more depth later in this chapter.

Prior to the Protestant Reformation, the same unexamined assumptions applied to church dogma. There was no discussion of the historical and cultural forces at work on on the participants in the Council of Nicaea or the ebbs and flows of ideological trendlines in church history. If you were Roman Catholic, you assumed that the received dogmas were correct. If you were Orthodox, you assumed the received Orthodox perspectives were correct. Debates were really proxies for intergroup relations.

3. The time of Descartes was a time of unprecedented epistemological uncertainty. Protestantism had dethroned the church as the authoritative source of truth. Instead, Luther had called Christians back to the Bible, as John Wycliffe and John Huss had tried. If it was not found in Scripture, it must not be required of belief or practice.

However, as a text, the Bible is susceptible to a myriad of possible interpretations and integrations. From the moment Luther and Zwingli were unable to reconcile their biblical understandings of communion in 1529, the course of Protestantism was revealed to be one of endless multiplication of interpretation. Martin Marty once estimated that there were over 20,000 individual Protestant groups. All of these have their own interpretations of the Bible.

By the time of Descartes, there were now Lutherans, Reformed, Anglicans, Anabaptists, and more. Who decides what the Bible means? The answer was largely local and "tribal."

It seems to me that it is no coincidence that rationalism (the mind as the source of truth) and empiricism (our senses as the source of truth) rose to prominence as epistemologies in the 1600s. They had been around in ancient times. Plato was largley a rationalist. Aristotle had elements of both rationalism and empiricism. But Plato and Aristotle still largely took a "what you think is what you get" or "what you see is what you get" approach. That is to say, they largely assumed the reliability of whichever path of truth they chose.

Descartes questioned almost everything. [1] Are my senses reliable? Are my assumptions about truth reliable? He doubted everything he could doubt until he thought he couldn't doubt any more. "I think; therefore, I am" was his conclusion (cogito ergo sum). What he couldn't doubt is that he was doubting.

Even here, I would say he had unexamined assumptions. Chiefly, he assumed that "I" is something that exists. He more or less assumed that he was a unitary entity that existed. I would modify his saying to something like "I think; therefore, something exists." I think therefore existence (cogito ergo esse). In the venacular, you might say, "I think, therefore, stuff." What that "stuff" is goes beyond what we can know for certain.

Descartes fought his way back from that ultimate doubt, sneaking in assumptions of reason into the process. "If this is true, then that has to be true." He assumed the operations of reason. His road was paved with rationalist assumptions. If you could conceive of something clearly and distinctly, it was true. This seems to me potentially a horribly unreliable criterion.

4. At about the same time, Francis Bacon was developing the scientific method (1561-1626). [2] Later in the 1600s, John Locke (1632-1704) would lay a more philosophical groundwork for empiricism as a path to knowledge. The path to truth is through our senses. "Seeing is believing." Building on a tradition that ran from Aristotle through Aquinas, Locke would agree with them that there was nothing in our mind that wasn't first in our senses. [3]

For Locke, we are born with a blank slate, a "tabula rasa." [4] ...

[1] See Descartes' work, Discourse on Method.

[2] See Bacon's work, Novum Organum.

[3] Aristotle qualified this -- "except the mind itself." In this way, his language anticipated what we will explore later in the chapter.

[4] See Locke's work, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding.

_____________________________
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

3.4 All our thinking and living is enculturated (part 4)

The philosophy journey continues...

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 Political Conversation
3.2 Binary Thinking in Political Thinking
3.3 Assumptions about Christ and Culture I
_____________________________

18. There are other options. As an Arminian, I believe that God -- in his sovereignty no less -- gives us the freedom to disobey him. Yes, there will be eternal consequences. But he has built choice into the way he runs the world. Therefore, both because of human fallenness and because God has created a world where we have to choose, I believe the Western model that separates government from religion is actually a fair mirror of the way God runs the world.

As I (and most) understand the U.S. Constitution, there is meant to be a clear separation between religion and the law. Congress should not pass laws that are based on specifically religious beliefs or practices. It should allow Muslims and Hindus the freedom to practice their own religions unhindered. This is the now long-standing interpretation of the Constitution, and it has the wisdom of history behind it. We will explore this boundary in more detail soon enough.

Arguably none of the freedoms in the Constitution are absolutes. There are exceptions. If someone's religion involved sacrificing random individuals off the street, it would contradict a more fundamental principle. I am getting ahead of myself into some of the content of chapter 9. What we as Christians might call a basic moral code is really the basic stipulations of a social contract we make with each other. I won't kill you if you won't kill me. More on that to come as well.

This set up creates a distinction between what I as a Christian believe is right and what laws we should have as a nation. The Constitution largely sets us up as a relativist nation with regard to religion in general. The government is supposed to be agnostic with regard to which religion is correct (or if any of them are). You could argue that -- to a large extent -- this is how God is running the world before his second coming, although occasionally he might step in to steer the course of nations.

One way or another, we can have a lively debate about what we think God's approach is. He let the Nazis wreak havoc on the world for over ten years -- not very long. He gave the Amorites about four hundred years before he destroyed them. Nineveh got a reprieve because of their repentance but were fried a couple hundred years later.

So here is a question. We do not believe in gay marriage or abortion in the first trimester. What should the government do? Can we make a non-religious case against them in the secular sphere?

Or should we try to change the US Constitution and make America a religious state? There are people who would like to do so. Some would say that the forces associated with Project 2025 have ultimate goals along these lines. Are they correct? Perhaps we'll see. 

The question for now is about our unexamined assumptions. There are so many questions and so many options. Have we considered the options in perspective or are we blindly following the impulses handed to us by our upbringings and Christian subcultures?

Like the "Christ against culture" option, I believe many American Christians simply assume that the "Christ above culture" option is what Christians do. It is an unexamined assumption. And of course, others have unexamined assumptions on the "separation of church and state" side as well. Get these two sets of unexamined assumptions together at a Thanksgiving dinner table and let the fun begin. 

Are there aspects to American law that we would call "moral"? Yes, but I would argue that they technically should result from our implicit social contract with each other. Is freedom of religion absolute? No. There are clear exceptions. When freedoms come into conflict, they have to be prioritized. America was arguably designed to give us maximal religious freedom as long as our freedoms don't overrun the freedoms of others.

19. Some do not know how to reconcile their faith and religious identity with their existence and life within a secular environment. Some have therefore opted for a Christ and culture in paradox option. This option basically follows Christian faith when it is in a Christian context. Then it lives a potentially contradictory life in the world.  

Think "Sunday Christian." Worship God on Sunday and live like the Devil the rest of the week. I think of the mafia and organized crime movies I have seen where a family can be very religious on one level but then murderous on another. Go to Catholic mass and then have somebody murdered during the week. The contradiction doen't have to be that sharp.

Few of us face such sharp pressures unless they are of our own making. It is an incoherent life. But no doubt most of us have inconsistencies in our faith and life. These may come from blind spots we have. We might claim strongly that we don't have any racist attitudes when they are obvious to others. 

In the 1920s, large portions of white Protestant churches in certain regions (especially the South and Midwest) were deeply intertwined with the Ku Klux Klan, and many members saw no contradiction between Klan membership and their Christian faith. Indeed, there's a story from 1899 where Christians went to church and then took trains out near Newnan, Georgia to watch the lynching of Sam Hose. These individuals saw no contradiction between their faith and what seem to many of us blatantly unChristian attitudes and behaviors.

While most of us would dismiss this sort of "two kingdoms in paradox" approach, we probably all live it out to some extent in our lives.

20. Niebuhr called another approach "Christ in culture." Although it is not exactly how Niebuhr meant it, it is popular to connect this approach to Christians who are perceived to be taking on worldly values. They are conforming to the world and letting the world influence their Christianity. They are being "syncretistic" -- inappropriately mixing their Christian faith with worldly values.

I have most heard Christians point the finger here at the acceptance of homosexuality by other Christians. Acceptance of a homosexual lifestyle by Christians is placed in the category of accommodating worldly perspectives. Support of women in ministry has also been included at times in this category as absorbing worldly feminism. Another possible example is Christian Smith's concept of "Moral Therapeutic Deism." By this term, he referred to a sense of some young people that God is distant and mostly interested in whether you are a good person. The goal of life is to be happy.

In each case, the concept is that the Christian has absorbed foreign elements into their faith from the surrounding culture. In other words, your faith has been compromised without you realizing it. You have unexamined assumptions about what Christian faith actually is.

That leads to an important question. What is the difference between contextualization and syncretism? When are you simply giving your faith a different form and when are you actually altering the substance of your faith? Our faith is always incarnated. It can never be "de-formed" into some pure substance. So how can we tell when we are mixing our faith with hostile elements and when we are simply "re-incarnating" it?

21. Here's the kicker. All our thinking and living is enculturated. Culture is not simply something that is "out there." The church has a culture -- in fact many cultures and subcultures. Similarly, culture is not "buy one, get them all." Simplistic worldview thinking often suggests that if you accept one piece or element of a worldview, you are accepting the whole thing. This is the fallacy of composition.

I am amazed at how ludicrous such thinking is, and yet it is very common. "You believe the government can run the post office; therefore, you are a communist." It is nothing but another example of binary thinking. If the government were to run health care, we would be socialist. This is ludicrous illogic because, as we will see, there is a spectrum of possible degrees to which the government might administrate society.

With regard to the incorporation of culture into one's faith, I would argue that some of those who most point the finger toward others typically have significantly mixed their own faith with foreign cultural elements. Indeed, it is possible that some of the criticisms of other Christians can actually reveal foreign elements in one's own faith.

Let me use the issue of women in ministry as a case study. I come from a tradition that has ordained women since the 1800s. I like to say that we were ordaining women before it was cool. My tradition was part of the women's rights movement -- but the one in the mid-1800s when the question was whether women might vote and have fundamental rights that all but the most extreme assume today.

My old friend Kerry Kind used to sharply contrast that 1800s movement from the modern feminist movement of the 1950s and thereafter. I wasn't sure I completely saw the difference, but I could see what he was trying to do. He was basically saying, "The modern feminist movement might be worldly, but the one we were a part of wasn't." 

In my mind, the fundamental equality of women with men is a core New Testament principle. It is a natural implication of the Day of Pentecost, captured in the fact that sons and daughters would now prophesy (Acts 2:17). Of course, women prophesy in the Old Testament as well (Judg. 4:4). In Christ, women are restored from Eve's sin and thus in Christ there is not "male and female" (Gal. 3:28).

It all makes sense because women are also created in the image of God. In 2 Kings 22:13-15, the prophetess Huldah is a higher spiritual authority than the high priest himself. In Acts 18:26, Priscilla teaches and disciples Apollos at Ephesus. In Romans 16:1, Phoebe is a deacon. In Romans 16:7, Junia may actually be referred to as an apostle. 

For all these reasons, there are strong biblical grounds to believe that women can minister to men on any level. The Holy Spirit is the great equalizer. And, to be frank, there are no logical or universal experiential reasons that make any sense against it.

But there are some "clobber verses" that are used to argue for the contrary position. A clobber verse is a verse that a herd member slaps down and says, "Bam! You can't do that because of this verse." As you might expect, I think the motivations often have little to do with Scripture. They are "prooftexts" that are used to say, "My group is right and you are wrong." They are tools the elephant rider uses to justify where the elephant wants to go. They take a complex issue and say, "You don't have to think because I have this verse."

22. 1 Timothy 2:12 is the strongest of these verses. But I think it will be more helpful to look at how the household codes of Colossians 3:18-4:1; Ephesians 5:21-6:9; and 1 Peter 2:18-3:7 might play out in our faith. I have often heard individuals present an argument like the following:

1. Husbands are the "heads" of their wives, the authority over them.
2. If a wife were a lead pastor, that would make her an authority over her husband in the congregation.
3. Therefore, a wife cannot be a senior pastor.

This all makes perfectly logical sense. What's the problem, Ken? The problem is that the Bible never thinks this way. Deborah is married in Judges 4:4, yet she is the highest political authority in the land. Her husband is mentioned, but there is no sense that his existence inhibits her function as a prophetess at all. Similarly, Huldah is married in 2 Kings 22:14. But her husband has nothing to do with her spiritual authority. He is not consulted. She is.

The bottom line is that the argument above, as logical as it seems, is not biblical. Indeed, 1 Corinthians 11 is a balancing act between giving proper respect to a woman's husband -- by veiling her hair in worship -- and her speaking to or for God in a worship setting by praying or prophesying in worship. The headship of her husband and her exercise of spiritual authority (cf. 1 Cor. 11:10) are two completely distinct questions.

Now I'm going to give some logic of my own:

1. The use of the husband-headship framework was not distinctly Christian. In fact, it is right there in Aristotle 400 years before Paul used it. [27]
2. What was distinctive about New Testament thinking on this issue was movement toward equal value and the authority of women under the power of the Holy Spirit.
3. Therefore, husband-headship language in Scripture is part of the incarnation of the gospel into the cultural context of Paul (and Peter's) churches. It is not a core dimension of biblical revelation.
4. Therefore, in a context today where we can live out the ideal more fully, God's perfect will is for us to play out the full equality and participation of women in ministry and the home.

Let me spell out the consequences of what I'm saying here. I am saying that in fact it is the complementarian -- the person who insists that the woman is equal but fits in a distinct box (or jail) of God's creation -- who is inserting inappropriate culture into the gospel. It is the same culture that was inserted into the gospel in Paul's later days, but it was cultural then too. [28] He or she has mistaken fallen patriarchal culture for the fundamental nature of the kingdom. As Jesus says in Mark 12:25 -- women are not "given" in marriage in the kingdom. They are fully equal. And if we can move closer to the kingdom now here on earth, why wouldn't we?

23. I would like to argue that much rhetoric about Christians caving into culture often comes from groups who do not realize how much they have been assimilated into a culture. However, it is not a secular culture. It is a traditional Christian culture. The Gospel analogy is the Pharisees of Mark 7 who could not tell the difference between the traditions of their elders and the core values of the Old Testament. In the same way, many Christians may be riding the wave of a cultural understanding without knowing it. 

What makes this hard to see is because the Christians they are accusing may seem to align more with the world on a specific issue. Take the issue of women in ministry and leadership. The world says yes. The Wesleyan (my church) says yes. The conservative Christian says no. See. It looks like the Wesleyan has assimilated to a worldly position.

But let's flash back 150 years. The Wesleyan says, "Slavery is an offense to the gospel." The Princeton Calvinist says, "You just don't want to obey the Bible. Colossians tells slaves to obey their masters. You are just assimilating to the cultural values of the North and fighting against what God has taught in Scripture."

However, both sides used biblical passages to support their positions. The one that the Princeton Calvinists used was one relating to first century social order. It was a "precept" or a specific instruction in a particular time and place. The Christian abolitionists, on the other hand, were referring to a timeless value or principle -- the fact that all humans are created in God's image and are loved by him without partiality (Acts 10:34). 

The abolitionists weren't wanting to disobey God. They were trying to play out the core values of Scripture in the American context. It only seemed like they were fighting the Bible because of the antebellum (Christian) culture of the South. Both sides were ensconced in different cultures. One looked to timeless principles to apply Scripture differently in a different time. The other looked to time-bound precepts to resist the more fundamental principles of Scripture. I would argue the same dynamic is happening once again today with regard to women.

Today, there may be individuals who have the right values but faulty ideas. And there may be indivdiduals today who have the right ideas but the wrong values. It is not a sin to have a faulty understanding. It is a sin to play out faulty values. It is better to be right in your heart and wrong in your head than to be right in your head and wrong in your heart.

24. God is love, 1 John 4:7-8 say. I have received varied push back on the way I play out this fundamental truth about God's nature. "You're forgetting the other side, Ken," someone might say... "the part where he blows people away." No doubt I have been accused of absorbing "moral therapeutic deism" from the culture.

But I take the claim in Scripture that God is love seriously. I have chickens. I care for those chickens. I protect those chickens. I rescue those chickens. I try to modify the behavior of those chickens (i.e., discipline them). I'm not a permissive "parent" to them except that I want the best of chicken life for them within reason.

I'm a better chicken god than the god of many Christians is toward the world. Either God is love or he isn't. I abhor the attempt of some to redefine love into something it isn't. "Love is whatever God does by definition," they might say. "So if God fries someone, that's loving." Hogwash. On the human plane, love meant to be disposed to act in the best interests of others. And that's what it meant to say that God is love in the Bible.

Any idea a Christian might have that works contrary to love is a compromising of the gospel. It doesn't matter if you can find a prooftext in the Bible. Either God is love or he isn't.

Christ the transformer of culture...

[26] Christian Smith, Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers, Oxford University, 2009.

[27] Aristotle, Politics 1253b.

[28] I believe we can see a movement on this question in Paul's writings for practical reasons. In Galatians, he gives the radical position of equality in Galatians 3:28. But the elevation of women created such problems in the social structures of the day that he walks a tight rope. 1 Corinthians 11 is a brilliant balancing act between the authority of women and the sexual/household tensions of men and women being together in close quarters. 1 Timothy is in full order-making mode. 

But we don't have these problems today. We can play out Galatians and Acts! How ironic it would be if we insisted instead on what Paul calls the "weak and beggarly" aspects of earthly culture while rejecting the heavenly trajectory (cf. Gal. 4:9; Col. 2:8)!