Tag Archives: Epistemology

True? False? or Who Cares? Part 5

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I’ve titled this series “True? False? Or Who Cares?” I’m concerned that the “who cares” crowd is winning. Someone asked me the other day what I thought of subjective truth. My problem is that I don’t even understand what this means. In my reply, I used this example: Suppose one of your friends doesn’t believe in absolute truth. All truth is subjective, he thinks. Ask him to do this – when he gets his next pay check, he should cash it at the bank, bring all of the currency home, wad it up, and burn it in the middle of the driveway.

If there is no such thing as truth, then there is no such true statement as, “That $1500 worth of currency can buy me food or pay down my mortgage.” That’s just a matter of personal opinion and therefore burning it is no more significant than leaving it intact. Now, we all know that this whole example is stupid. In the real world, we work with true and false all the time. It’s just when it comes to religion and morals, and maybe politics, that everything is questionable. And we know what the reason is. No one really wants some Being to be able to tell us what to do.

I started this series by referring to Dr. Willard’s discussion of “profession”, “commitment”, “faith”, and “knowledge.” He was primarily discussing religion and the fact that we often emphasize profession and commitment without the foundation of knowledge or truth. This is not only a religious problem, but a problem in most areas of human life and is at the root of the collapse of so much discourse. Let’s take it out of the field of religion and use the words, feelings, opinions, beliefs, and truth. I maintain that our problem is that we argue at the level of our feelings and opinions. People operate on the assumption that if they feel something is true or are of the opinion that it is true, then it must be true.

It used to be that discussions and arguments were carried out at the truth level. People would say, “What you are saying is not true because of these three facts.” Someone else might respond by stating that fact number 2 isn’t true for the following reasons….

That’s not how arguments go today. People say things like, “I just don’t think you’re right because I just feel that….” Or, “You can’t say that because how will people who disagree with you feel about it if they think you are saying they are wrong?”

We need to get back to focusing on what the truth is and how we discover it. We need to base our arguments and discussions at that point.

Back to the religious aspect for a minute. When someone makes a profession of faith, it should be faith in something that is asserted to be true, not just in some mystical feeling. The Christian teaching is that in real time and space, Jesus Christ was literally born from a virgin. At some point he was executed on a Roman cross and he died, i.e., his heart stopped beating and his brain ceased to function. Three days later he came alive, proving that he was God in a human body. We assert these things to be true meaning we believe they actually happened.

When we get careless and begin to think at the level of our feelings, then we are exactly where Dr. Willard describes – profession and commitment become dominant, and the grounding in truth that people need won’t be there to sustain them through all of the challenges of life.

True? False? or Who Cares? Part 4

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In the last article in this series we looked at the concept of “presuppositions.” Presuppositions are ideas we believe or accept without proof. Everyone has them. Even in mathematics we have things called postulates which are statements that are accepted as true without proof. I remember a math class I had once where we assumed that the number 1 existed. We also assumed that the next number in a counting series could be found by adding the number 1 to the previous number. Every other “truth” that we used in the course had to be proved from these two postulates or assumptions or presuppositions.

So what does this have to do with our discussion of truth and how we know it? Let’s take the Creation vs Evolution debate for example. I worked in the public schools for 42 years and have seen the nuances that this debate has taken. When everything is sorted out through the legal system it usually comes down to this: Creation is a religious, faith-based idea and therefore has no place within the science curriculum. Evolution however is a scientific truth and therefore can and should be taught within the science curriculum.

I realize that I am probably not going to change many minds in this short article, but this is how I see it in light of our discussion about truth and how we know it. Scientific knowledge and truth come from proposing an hypothesis and then designing a controlled experiment to test that hypothesis to see if it is true. In the case of the origin of life, it seems obvious to me that there can be no experiment designed that will duplicate the conditions, time span, and forces needed to create and evolve life by random processes. Every attempt so far has involved a high level of human thinking and planning involved to set up conditions favorable for the creation of life. The true condition of randomness and chance events were not duplicated.  Even so, life has not been created by those experiments.

On the creation side, there is no one alive today who saw God create anything. All we have is ancient documents within various religious traditions describing how God did it.

My point is that those who claim evolution is true are actually proposing something just as faith-based as a creationist is.

But the evolutionist says, “No, that’s not true. You creationists are bringing God into the mix. We are providing a natural and scientific explanation of how life began and evolved.” The problem here is with the assumptions or presuppositions that underlie what we believe. In order to fit the definition of science, God must be left out of the equation. That is an assumption. All of the study and investigation that takes place looks for explanations that leave God out. It is assumed that God either does not exist or does not play any role in any way in the natural world. But suppose God actually exists. If God actually exists, isn’t it madness to try to get at the explanation for why things are the way they are without including him in the mix?

“But”, they say, “we don’t know if God exists or not and therefore, we choose to leave him out of our assumptions regarding science and simply look for the natural causes of things.”

OK. That’s fine. But don’t call your explanation of origins totally scientific because you are basing your “science” on the belief that certain things are true. There are a set of beliefs or assumptions upon which the entire system is built. That makes it a faith based philosophy.

A scientist who includes the belief in a god or supreme being in his foundational assumptions will also build a faith-based science. But he, when he looks at the order and apparent “design” in the universe, will come to the conclusion that there is a designer behind it.

It’s interesting that in normal life we do this all the time. If you’re walking through the woods and you come upon a group of similar sized stones lying in the dirt forming the shape of a circle, you assume someone of intelligence placed them that way. You don’t assume that they just fell there randomly. And yet when some scientists look at the brain or the eye, they don’t see a designer at all, but millions of years of random circumstances producing it. So we attribute a simple circle of stones to an intelligent designer, i.e., a human being behind it, but something as complex as an eye evolved with no intelligent activity involved in it at all.

When trying to determine the truth, everyone begins their investigative reasoning with presuppositions or assumptions. Mathematicians do it and scientists do it. We all do it. We need to be careful to recognize that we are doing it. When you make statements of truth or believe what someone else says, look for the presuppositions that underlie those statements. Second, make sure that when you are discussing what you believe to be the truth, acknowledge your presuppositions. Don’t hide them. Finally make sure your presuppositions are logical and consistent. Only in so doing will you be able to get at the truth whether it is in the field of science, politics or religion.

True? or False? or Who Cares? Part 3

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(Part 1 is here: https://thetuinstras.net/?p=1387)

In the first article in this series we talked about the fact that in normal daily life we come at truth in very informal ways and yet in ways that work at the practical level. When we build our homes, we conform them to certain truths about how the construction needs to be done so our homes are safe and function well. We learn these truths by applying what we receive on good authority. This approach seems to be thrown out the window when it comes to discerning, believing and proclaiming religious truth.

In the second article we expanded more on the methods we use to discern what truth is. Here again we discussed the fact that most of us haven’t come in contact with the truth first-hand in most cases. In other words, we don’t learn to build a house by trial and error. We usually learn from somebody who already knows. We weren’t there when historical events took place and we aren’t privy to the information that forms the basis for political decisions. Most of us are not involved in the working out of mathematical equations or scientific principles. We learn these things and base our decisions on them based on good authority. But it’s interesting to recognize that different people accept different authorities. Why is this so? Why, when the President, any President, announces a decision, do some people assume it is a wise and truthful decision whereas others claim the decision is faulty and dishonest? Why do we gravitate to one news source over another or one religious leader over another? Most of these propensities to lean in one direction or another are not driven by facts that we know firsthand.

There are usually unproved and sometimes improvable assumptions, called presuppositions, that move us in one direction or another when we search for truth. The point I would like us to think very seriously about is that there is no guarantee that these presuppositions are directing us toward the truth. Our feelings tell us our sources are true, and we believe they are, but there is no guarantee. I may listen to a particular news source because I feel that it is a truthful source of information. But what makes me think that? And just because I think it, does that make it true? I watch with fascination as CNN fans put down Fox News for presenting a slanted view of the facts. At the same time, I hear Fox News followers cut down CNN for painting a false picture of causes and events. Since CNN and Fox present rather different perspectives on events, they can’t both be giving the true and complete picture. One or the other or both are presenting shaded views of the truth. Our presuppositions drive us to listen to and believe one over the other … or neither. Why is that?

The same thing occurs in religious discussion. Some people do not believe that the Bible can be historically accurate and truthful in the narratives about Jesus Christ, because it describes events which people have never seen with their own eyes. These miracles are described as though they are facts, but some people dismiss them out of hand because of the presupposition that such things cannot and therefore did not take place. Think of the implications if the resurrection of Jesus actually did take place. In other words, if we take it out of the realm of a religious teaching and put it into the same realm as the assassination of Julius Caesar or any other historical event, what would that mean? Think about it. If this man really died, his heart stopped beating, and his brain stopped functioning, someone put him into a cold cave, and then three days later he was alive again, wouldn’t such an event warrant a place in the history books? But somehow it has been relegated to a religious teaching, and the thought that it actually happened has pretty much disappeared. Has this happened because the history of it has been shown to be faulty or because of presuppositions coming into play?

Our presuppositions tend to move us toward some information sources and away from others. We believe some people who purport to be authorities and we reject others. In most cases we haven’t and usually can’t do the research required to independently verify these authorities. This situation shouldn’t drive us to the conclusion that the truth doesn’t exist or that it can’t be known. We don’t do that in normal daily life and we shouldn’t do it in philosophical, political, or religious areas of life. However, we do need to recognize that our presuppositions may not be pointing us to the truth. If we really want to know what the truth is, we sometimes need to work against our natural presuppositions and give other sources a fair and reasoned hearing because it may be that the truth lies in that direction.

True? False? or Who Cares? (Part 2)

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(Part 1 Can be found here)

How do we know what is true and what is false in everyday life? Isn’t it true that most of us don’t know things from firsthand experience, but rather we learn them through other people who tell us or teach us about truth? For example, where was Abraham Lincoln when he was shot? Or was he shot? Maybe he died of a heart attack. How do we know these things? We don’t know any of this by having seen it with our own eyes. We don’t even know because we personally did hours upon hours of research to find out. Most of us know because someone, probably a teacher in school, and the textbooks we used, told us what happened to Abraham Lincoln.

Most of us who use math at the every-day level don’t know the truths underlying the math, although we probably could. For example, most people don’t know from personal investigation how fractions and common denominators work. But if we use them at all, we were taught how to work with fractions, and we know that the methods work, and that is good enough for us. But my point is that we didn’t learn it from personal investigation and discovery. We believe these principles because people we trusted, and who we assumed were authorities, taught us, and what they taught us works.

What is interesting to me is how and why we choose the people we decide to believe. In elementary school and probably through most of high school we believed what we were told by our parents and teachers. But as we grew older, we began to distinguish one opinion from another, and we began to argue and debate whether what we were being told was true or not. What matters to me is how we decide who to believe when we receive conflicting messages. Politics is a good case in point. Someone on TV says that the reason we are in the economic mess we are in is because we are spending billions on unnecessary wars. (This article was first written in 2013.) There are really two messages there: 1) the economic mess is caused by the wars, and 2) the wars were unnecessary. The purpose of this article is not to delve into the politics, but to observe that people on each side of the argument will rant for hours on their point of view. How do they know the economic problems are caused by the war expenditures? How do the people on the other side know that it was not the wars that caused the economic problems? Have any of these people looked at the numbers, compared the graphs, and analyzed all of the factors? No! We mostly listen to what people tell us. For some reason each one of us has a propensity to believe one explanation of events rather than another. In this particular example, some believe war caused the mess and some do not. These beliefs are based on who we have decided to listen to and who we believe. Why do we believe one source rather than another? Do we have any factual reason for doing so, or are we going by feelings?

I think the current debate over the Coronavirus is another similar situation. Some say the President and his team are doing a great job in handling the crisis. The other side says he should have started earlier, he shouldn’t have shut down the economy, etc. Here again, I think that very few of us actually know. We have chosen which news sources we believe because we are drawn to their arguments, but it’s hard to actually get to the truth. Most of us don’t analyze the graphs, we aren’t epidemiologists, we don’t know how viruses work. Truth is out there, but it is hard to get at.

Shouldn’t we be interested in truth? What is the truth? In many cases we could know if we took the time to do the research. Take historical events for example. I brought up Abraham Lincoln a moment ago. How does one know he was assassinated? I’m not a philosopher nor a historian so this is not a rigorous academic treatise, but it seems to me that to verify historic events, which no one living now witnessed, we need to go back to original documents, news reports, photographs, etc., and put together the best scenario we can as to what actually happened. This takes a lot of time – more time than we have if we are trying to determine the truth about everything we hear. So, we decide who we will believe and base our opinions on what they say.

These methods of determining truth pretty much work for day to day living. But the possibility exists that we have chosen to believe things which are not true simply because of who we listen to. We need to be open to the possibility that what we believe might be false. We need to be ready to discuss our ideas, and to probe other people’s ideas, and to give and receive facts and arguments in order to get at the truth. The problem is that today several things stand in the way of discussions of this sort. We’ll discuss these in more detail later, but basically discussions of truth end because 1) People don’t really care what the truth is – it doesn’t matter; 2) Truth is felt at the emotional level and so if it feels correct, it must be true no matter what the facts say; 3) Truth can’t be known so why bother talking about it; and 4) Truth doesn’t exist.

My main focus in these articles is to focus on religious truth, specifically the truth of Christianity and the implications. But, as I do that, I also want you to begin thinking about all truth claims you hear, whether in the realm of politics, advertising, advice about health, etc. Why do you believe what you believe and how do you know you’re listening to the people that are telling you the truth? But, in future articles I want us to think about how we as Christians get at the truth of Christianity, and why we believe it is true. I want us to think about the implications of saying that it is true. I also want us to see how the four hindrances to seeking truth even impact our understanding of the Bible and the differences of opinion among us.

True? False? or Who Cares? (Part 1)

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Several years ago, I listened to an interview of Dallas Willard by Ken Meyers. Dr. Willard is a professor of philosophy at University of Southern California. The interview was part of Volume 100 of an audio journal series published by Mars Hill Audio. (http://www.marshillaudio.org)

In the interview, Dr. Willard compared “profession”, “commitment”, “faith”, and “knowledge”. What interested me is that he said that in religion, we often emphasize profession and commitment without the foundation of faith based on knowledge. This might all seem too philosophical, but I think there are some important things for us non-philosophers to think about here. In normal pursuits of life there is such a thing as truth which can be known.

In virtually every area of normal life we know that there are some truths which can be known and taught. Then, when these truths are believed and acted upon, individuals, workers, and organizations can be committed to the policies and procedures that are based on this knowledge, and they can then profess that they can accomplish certain goals.

All of this normal thinking has broken down, however, when it comes to beliefs about religion, morals, and the like. We are told that there is no truth that can be known. Everyone’s opinion is as good as anyone else’s. Does this even make any sense?

I believe we need to think through all truth claims. For example, I saw a bumper sticker once that said, “The earth does not belong to us. We belong to the earth.” Is this true? How could we know? Does someone really believe this? It is certainly a profession of some sort. I wonder if the people who own the car are committed to this statement in their everyday life.

Every day of our lives we and others make statements about things we believe are true. In some cases, it doesn’t matter if there is truth behind our beliefs or not. In other situations, it’s crucial to know the truth that underlies our beliefs. If I’m going to have brain surgery to remove a tumor, my life depends on whether those who are going to operate know that there is a tumor there and know how to get to it and remove it safely. I certainly don’t want them to operate on me if they just profess that they know how to do it without actually knowing how. Similarly, if someone is going to rewire my home, I want them to know how electricity works and the facts that govern the proper wiring of a home.

Everything seems to change when it comes to religion and religious belief and profession. In our day, truth and knowing are under attack. For some, the whole concept that there is religious truth is absurd. For others, the problem is more the question of how one can know what is true. For these people, it’s not the existence of truth that is the problem, but that it seems impossible to them that we can know what the truth is. Both thinking there is no truth, and thinking truth can’t really be known, generate a level of skepticism that makes it almost impossible to have a normal conversation about religion and religious truth.

As a Christian, I was intrigued by Dr. Willard’s idea that often within Christianity we have begun to focus on profession or commitment without these being based on knowledge of the truth. In earlier times, churches grounded their members in what was at least purported to be the truth. They taught these truths to their constituents so that they had a knowledge of them, could believe them, develop commitments to them, and as a result, profess them.

These days, in many religious congregations, the idea that there is truth that can be known and believed has almost disappeared. In some other congregations where the idea of truth undergirds their teaching, the grounding and reinforcement that these things are truly true is lacking. When we simply have as our goal commitment and profession and put them first without the foundation of knowledge of truth, those commitments and professions will not last long. In addition, without the belief that there is such a thing as truth or that truth can be known, it’s impossible to subject one’s own belief or the beliefs of others to any sort of scrutiny or discussion. Personal growth and communication with others are stifled. As a result, the idea of sharing the gospel with others in order to bring them to faith in Christ seems more and more antiquated, because we’re trying to say we believe in something that is true. Many people don’t have any idea what that means.

Let’s go back to the narrative I presented at the beginning. Is it true that “the earth does not belong to us but rather we belong to the earth?” I might propose a bumper sticker that says, “The earth is the Lord’s.” Is one bumper sticker true and the other one false or are they both false? Maybe they are both true. Could they be? Does it matter? Maybe they’re just words and they don’t mean anything. If there is no truth, or truth cannot be discovered, then we can say whatever we want, and all statements are equally valid … or equally invalid.

However, if truth exists and it can be known, then what we say does matter. We can have discussions or even arguments about what is true and what is false. We can make decisions as to what beliefs to abandon and what beliefs to adopt based on their truth or falsity. When leaders try to lead us in a given direction, we have the foundation we need to discern truth from error. Otherwise we are just lead around like dumb animals babbling feelings and platitudes that mean nothing.

We are going to discuss this further in upcoming posts, but let me encourage you to apply the same principles in religious discussion as you do in the rest of life. There is truth. You may not know it all but it’s there. Some religious statements are true. Some are false. You need to find out which are which because your future well-being depends on knowing the truth.

Part 2 is here.