“And to the immoral and wicked, each day brings into clearer relief the relationship between ethics and epistemology.”
Interesting remark. Can you expound on how epistemology and ethics are related? I have followed your stuff before and I don’t remember this emphasis. What do you mean by epistemology? Are you speaking in the Van Til vein? Or epistemology generally?
Thank you for your good question(s). I am tempted to spend the rest of this day answering you; I’m not sure if that would be immoral (wink). Let us briefly, then, dance a cha-cha in the Field of Knowledge. 1, 2, 3.
1. The Enlightenment project sought to trump God in the Knowledge Wars from the outset of the enterprise by relieving Him of any responsibility or relationship to or with our knowing of a thing or things. It actually wasn’t a great leap from our declaration of independence to our barring God from the discussions altogether. Since He had been excluded as a matter of METHOD, the method obviously presupposed autonomy and adequacy. God’s Lordship moves from Sovereign to Trusted Adviser to Hired Consultant to Who-Asked-for-Your-Opinion? The religion of Humanism has brilliantly engineered the seating arrangements for those in their theater, making it appear as if their thinking alone is uncontaminated by religious prejudice. Along with this fantasy comes its concomitant:
“Since we got here without His help (har har hardy har har), we do not need His help now, although, if He wants to agree with us and wish us well, we’ll let Him have a seat—somewhere; perhaps even a seat of honor—so long as He behaves. What we most certainly will not do is share our glory with another. No. This is OUR story, not His. All the evil that ever happened came about because people pretended to speak for this “God” who, by definition, cannot be wrong. To this fairytale belief must be attributed every past and present evil, including mass murder, sexual dysfunction, and insufficient parking spaces in Brooklyn. We’re not going to surrender all our gains by pretending we need Him now. That would be a step backward and worse.”
The Word once confessed to be the light in which we see light has become equated with darkness and ignorance. The light in Enlightenment was distinguished from the darkness which was from the beginning identified with the Word of God and traditions derived therefrom.
Witness the small “e” definition of enlightened: rational, tolerant and well-informed. What a set-up! That’s like an accused thief telling the court that every item found in his possession after the robbery-every item with the victim’s name etched on it-bears in itself the obvious evidence of rightfully belonging to the thief. “Of course it’s mine, your honor. The very fact that it says “from the library of Steve Schlissel” suggests that this egomaniac was jealous of my growing collection and sought to have it regarded as his by a mere engraving of his name. Not only does this prove all these etched items were mine all along, but it also makes the plaintiff guilty of vandalism for defacing my property.” Everything that can be considered as true “evidence” must pass a prior test of being regarded as vindicating the defendant. In order to be regarded as true knowledge, one needs to have begun the acquisition autonomously .
The Enlightenment project is the human-racial continuation of taking from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, and by that method, bypassing (we imagine) reliance upon God. (I’m wondering if we haven’t answered your essential question, by the way, simply by recalling here the NAME of the forbidden tree—KNOWING right and wrong, good and evil; in other words, the epistemology of ethics.) The underlying assumption is either a) God is not there so there’s no use waiting for instruction from Him; b) God is there but He has a serious ego problem and regards us as competitors, thus making communications from Him suspect—something like the Patriots coach telling the Giants what their next play ought to be; c) He is there and He means well, but He’s a bumbling communicator and simply unable to help us sort things out—His Word, variously interpreted from Day One (Six?), proves its inadequacy by that very variety. If it were REALLY God’s Word, it would pass all the tests that I’ve conjured beforehand, for, before looking or listening, I’ve firmly decided what qualities God’s Word OUGHT to have if it is indeed to be received as God’s Word. One of those qualities is convincing. If it is to be reckoned as coming from God it must have such power, pertinence and clarity as would make “misunderstanding” impossible.
All of that is merely an updated version of “The woman Thou gavest me…” It is humanity’s ace-long-out-of-the-hole. If there is a problem here, the matter of to whom responsibility can be traced, is obvious. No matter what: it’s God’s fault. The disparities which exist between His Word and our being, thoughts, and activities are only explicable on the basis of His imperfections (or His ignorance or His immorality, etc.).
Since we ARE created by the one true God, we insist that the very notion of our knowing anything independently of our Creator is manifest rubbish. Yet the devil aimed just here when seeking to remove our first parents from their created estate (i.e., in unbroken covenant with God). “Upon what basis shall you assign any particular to the category of ‘Good’ or the category of ‘Evil’?” (Perhaps we should note that, when ontology is added to this discussion—as it must be at some point—we have completed the headings of the principal areas of philosophical concern: Being, Knowing, Right Living.)
As you can see, the question from the beginning has been, “Whose knowledge is true, adequate and comprehensive enough to make Law?” If we speculate about knowledge as if it were distinct from, or unrelated to, Law, we would be engaging in the definitive act of futility: abstracting. God’s knowledge, for us, is no merely theoretical thing, but as intimately related to the what and ought of all, as the Holy Spirit is to the Father and the Son. These may be distinguished. They may NOT be separated.
God demonstrates His right to be the sole Lawmaker by creating the universe. This gives Him a distinct advantage over all competitors’ claims to equal adequacy. You will no doubt recall how this was the focus of God’s rebuke to Job and Co. “Did you make the world? Why then do you talk as if you did?” Until we create ex nihilo, we are doing nothing except playing catch-up (even though, ironically, playing catch-up puts us further and further away from God). The only proper response to the Word of God is to shut the mouth, bow the knee, open the ear. Even kids in the Bible know that. Little Sammy said it all: “Speak, Lord. Your servant is listening.”
Okay, quickly. Number 2 in our discussion about the unbreakable bond between knowledge and ethics would concern the skepticism and cynicism that has engulfed us. The greater our claims to infallible, autonomous knowledge, the deeper the skepticism that characterizes the daily lives of ordinary people. At the beginning of the 20th century, Western Civilization did not believe (as Hebrews 11 describes it). At the beginning of the 21st century, we disbelieve. An interesting byproduct of our disbelief has been the tyranny of the experts. This glorious human race that knows so much by itself that it doesn’t have need of a god, this same race daily becomes more insecure about anything and everything it thinks it knows. Just as God is boxed out of the legal, educational, and entertainment spheres, so also is knowledge gained by generational experience considered worthless.
There are few areas untouched by this pathetic slavery to experts, but one standout area that has provided the most compelling proof that moderns don’t know their tuchases from their elbows is child-rearing, particularly pedagogy. It’s enough to know that it worked for a thousand years to disqualify it for continued use. The tried and true is, for that reason, regarded as false. If a method successfully prepared literate and thoughtful citizens since 1776, it is sure to be scrapped in favor of the novel, the inane, or the insane. When it comes to modern school policies, from the rejection of phonics to the subjective “rightness” of wrong answers in mathematics, parents who follow the “experts” can count on just one thing: that their children will be ignorant and morally degenerate when they complete the requisite 12 years of preparing for four more years of drunken parties and STD’s.
(How should we rank our collective response to AIDS when evaluating the quality of particular evidences which illustrate and prove the inextricable bond between ethics and epistemology? It must be near the top, no? We KNOW, beyond a doubt, we KNOW the answer available to EVERYONE, which, if accepted and adopted, would provide a virtual guarantee that you would NOT get AIDS. [We are aware of the statistically miniscule likelihood of accidental contagion, but even that small group would be made smaller by the large-scale doing of deeds in keeping with repentance.] Yet, because the solution involves self-control and moral living, it is rejected out-of-hand. We have made the decision that we must NEVER instruct our youth that there are inescapable consequences attached to certain behaviors and choices. We have nationally accepted the fact that the truth is of no value in combating the so-called “plague of the 21st century.” Sufferers in the Great Plague that decimated Europe would have regarded it as nothing less than a complete miracle-by marrying as virgins and then remaining faithful to your respective spouse, you will successfully escape “the plague.” Yet moderns regard that price as insufferably high. It is rejected before it is proposed.)
Any alien peeking into the homes of today’s Yuppy parents would think that no preceding generation had ever had children, so entire is their reliance on new methods of child-rearing. Spanking? Abuse. Forbidden socially, soon by law. Yelling? Out. Displeasure? Debatable. That this radical fear of punishing is cause-effect connected to the guilty consciences of this generation of parents is not discussed. It is simply assumed that effective discipline is equivalent to barbaric discipline. These moms and pops are enlightened! What’s enlightening is to hear the names the three and four-year-olds call their parents in public spaces whenever the little wretches hear that most hated of all words (“No”).
3) A third area you might want to consider in assessing the relationship of knowledge and morality is that which is suggested by God’s bringing of judgment upon willful sinners to “believe the lie.” As an exercise, why don’t you write a brief essay drawing out some implications? God punishes improper responses to His Word by binding His enemies to false beliefs and false explanations of things. What does that imply about what we “know”—if anything? Please do write a piece, short or long, then send it along to me as an encouragement by which I can know that my reply justified the time put into it. Or else I’ll feel guilty. Let’s figure stuff out together. Waddayasay?
Thanks again,
pastor steve
I am not sure that I can do as you ask right now. To make you believe that your masterful reply, of which maybe the best parts are this:
“if it were REALLY God’s Word, it would pass all the tests that I’ve conjured beforehand, for, before looking or listening, I’ve firmly decided what qualities God’s Word OUGHT to have if it is indeed to be received as God’s Word. One of those qualities is convincing. If it is to be reckoned as coming from God it must have such power, pertinence and clarity as would make “misunderstandingâ€? impossible.”
& the implications of the assignment you want to give me (very much aligned with Romans 1 and Isaiah 44, inter alia)
. . . anyhow, to make you believe that it was worth doing, I am forwarding my question and your response to a Presbyterian (en route from PCUSA to EPC) in PA, a lawyer in Ohio, and a dentist in Indiana. I would like to try to take up my “assignment,” but can’t do it at this instant because of commitments I think you would recognize as serious.
I am always grateful for what you write. I am sad that, so far, my understanding of 1 Corinthians 11 & Acts 2 has made it impossible for me to follow you in an area that I know you regard as critically important, but maybe God will convince one of us or find us a way to let it not be a barrier. I maintain a relationship, if at times uneasy, with Tim Bayly in Bloomngton, IN, who, as you may know, shares your zeal in this matter.
Many thanks for your response.
-Dan Reuter
It makes my heart cry. I cry in prayer to God. Nineveh heard the warning and repented. God had poured out His Spirit. Brooklyn was seized with bank collapse fear in 1858 and repented. God had poured out His Spirit then too. Neither the tragedies of 9/11 nor Katrina nor the gas crisis strikes fear in the hearts of the lost. They are fearlessly wicked. Millions of young children are required to devour lies that quickly harden their little hearts against God and direct their eyes toward the abundance of mammon’s addictive delights. Everywhere God’s people go, we are violently assaulted by the burgeoning power of the world’s evil and defilement. My church has opened its doors sat. evenings for prayer since February yet hardly any members come, though they live nearby. God has not poured out His Spirit. It makes my heart cry.
God punishes improper responses to His Word by binding His enemies to false beliefs and false explanations of things.
I am not sure what you mean by that… It seems that there are many folks who have had totally improper responses to God throughout their lives who have only later in life converted. I am not sure that I would say that God binds anybody to false beliefs as a consequence (punishment) of their initial improper response to His grace. It seems that false beliefs follow from false foundations. But even those who are atheists have many true beliefs about morality, albeit utterly inconsistently. I speak from personal experience with atheists who seem to just “know” that certain things are right and wrong. Which gets me to a point that I am suspecting you deny… the existence of Natural Law. I suspect you deny it because of how the line of reasoning went in your response. Maybe I am wrong about your position. But it seems that Natural Law is one of those things that cannot be denied if a person knows what is meant by it. Maybe I am just confused about your position…
Also, how does “binding His enemies to false beliefs” incorporate any kind of notion of free will? Does man’s free rejection of God’s Law then require an abdication of his free will? There are so many presuppositions that are left unexamined in a discussion like this!!!
I am a little unsure of what you mean by “know” in your last question, “What does that imply about what we know- if anything”. I am no epistemologist and I don’t play one on TV, but in epistemology there is quite a range of meaning. I obviously “know” lots of things. I know that I exist, that I am writing a response to your response, that you (therefore) responded to my first response (etc.), that I am married, that God exists, that Jesus existed and was Resurrected. All of these things I know “naturally”. That is, I know them without the benefit of Divine Revelation. So, I guess I know a lot (as I said) and you do too.
How do you draw a distinction between what can be known naturally and what can only be known via Divine Revelation? (Like, the Trinity for example… I think that that doctrine was Divinely Revealed and is of such a nature that it cannot be argued for philosophically- that is, shown to be true. It can only be shown to be not contradictory. We require the certainty of Faith in God to have led the Church to formulate the Doctrine of the Trinity faithfully.) Finally, what about the relation of faith (natural and divine faith) to knowing? Surely I need no divine faith to know that 2+2=4. But I do have faith (natural) that Napoleon lived since I rely on testimony evidence and not first hand experience. I have no reason to doubt that he did exist, so I “trust” the sources. Would it be “immoral” to not trust these reliable sources?
Thanks for the response… I hope that didn’t take you too long!!! Now I feel guilty for causing you to write all that!
Steve:
I just got done reading your latest post about epistemology and ethics.
There are a number of problematic things in it. I don’t have time right now
to address all of them, but this one is particularly troublesome:
“The Enlightenment project sought to trump God in the Knowledge Wars from
the outset of the enterprise by relieving Him of any responsibility or
relationship to or with our knowing of a thing or things. It actually wasn¹t
a great leap from our declaration of independence to our barring God from
the discussions altogether. Since He had been excluded as a matter of
METHOD, the method obviously presupposed autonomy and adequacy….”
In order for scientific inquiry to proceed properly, propositions must be
falsifiable. If you cannot falsify a proposition, there is no way of proving
it false and it cannot be tested scientifically. Since God is
nonfalsifiable, scientific inquiry cannot include a concept of God in the
method. Interestingly, physicists are running into this problem with Super
String theory since there is no way (at least for now) of proving Super
String theory false.
The problem is not the method. The method is fine. Remember that scientific
inquiry can NEVER arrive at Truth. It’s an approximation. The whole subject
of statistics is about this very thing, to take into account the role of
apparent randomness.
Christian scientists must apply the same methods as other scientists. The
difference is in the way they look at the results which depends upon where
one stands at the start of the inquiry. In other words, it’s a noetic
problem, not a methodological one.
More later,
Val
I think you have to read the above post together with the other post I have on the subecjt. Compulsory religious studies in my Catholic School years was only given as an example of brainwashing school curriculum. There are other examples of compulsory study materials given in the other posts. Let me post all of them here:Excuse me for writing in English. The Chinese software in my computer is not working properly. I also apologize for not noticing the difference between ??????????????? and?????.The purpose of my message is not to judge the value of ????, and even less do I dare to suggest our beloved school to accept or reject the program. The purpose of my message is to make the point that: “With so many voices opposing the National Education program, do we really realize that we have already received a large number of indoctrinations during our school years? If we do, why do we single out our objection on the National Education program and passively accept others?”The answer has been partly provided by the very eloquent message of Mr Well Lee: “It is not the indoctrination process in education to which one objects; rather it is the content of the doctrine which decides one’s choice.” This, however, immediately leads to the next question: “Who is best to be the judge of the content of the education material?” In my view, hopefully, we have a sensible Education Department which may make the “unbiased” decision by following the national and international history as well as development trends. A fair and unbiased decision may still not be possible since “fairness” and “biasness” are relative terms. Then, is following the majority always right? Not necessarily! (Not long ago, some schools in southern USA chose to abandon the teaching of Darwin’s Evolution due to pressure from the majority of the parents and the outcries of extreme religious groups.)In describing the National Education program, it was mentioned ?????????????”, and the term “??” was also used. I have not studied the program content, therefore, I cannot pronounce, in my own opinion, on the suitability of the National Education program in school education. However, I remember through my personal experience of the primary and secondary schools in Hong Kong, there were quite a few occasions in which official text-books (as well as teachers) showed complexion which suits those words of description. The religious classes I had (mentioned in my last message) could be cited as examples; the massacres of hundreds of thousands of Muslims, Jews and Eastern Christians in Jerusalem in 1099 was (and probably still is) described in history books as “holy” and we were supposed to worship such “wars”; the infamous Opium War caused by drug smuggling and drug pushing by the East India Co. was taught to us as “the Chinese needing British goods”; the rule of the great British Empire was always glorified while the atrocities committed by her troops to the natives in Africa, Australia, N. America and the Middle East were dismissed as “disciplining the savage”. The above are just a few examples in a multitude. However, I must admit that, in many of the “civilized” countries I visited, such education materials of glorifying one country’s past while downplaying (or even omitting) its atrocities can be commonly found in schools – Japan, USA, UK, Israel, France, (and even Canada!), etc. Due to the stand of the colonial Hong Kong Government in the past, such biased materials were approved for education and have infiltrated our text-books and schools. Somehow, we accepted them – no protest!In the eve of sending out a petition, I like to ask ourselves to sit back and consider this analytically, “Is the content of the National Education program that much worse than the materials I have cited? If so, please go ahead and protest! If not, singling out the National Education program as a target of protest will be infringing on ‘double-standard’”.Yours truly,Max Wong
AHHAHHAHH. Buzzer sounds! Wrong answer. Short reply: you pack your room in the outcome citing no certainty but only and always approximate knowledge. I see the room as having been stolen at the outset, God is only nonfalsifiable on the premises of unbelief. It’s rather amazing that you missed that. On the premises of a sound mind, i.e., a believing one, we insist that if God did not exist, that would be knowable. But since He does, AND HE reveals Himself, He is not not knowable. Your “scientists” all start out with immunity. Mine start out with guilt, should they fail to cite God as the indispensable presupposition of all intelligible predication.
love you,
steve
No. I do not agree. And I didn’t miss your overarching point.
Nonfalsifiability means that God (or whatever else you may or may not consider in your investigation) is not DISPROVABLE/PROVABLE (as opposed to KNOWABLE) by the investigative method. God is KNOWABLE but not PROVABLE through the scientific process. God reveals Himself to us immediately through his Creation, which is suppressed in unrighteousness, and through special revelation. In other words, there are other ways of knowing.
Now here’s the important point. Christian scientists apply the same method and believe they are learning about God’s creation. Unbelieving scientists do not have such a commitment presuppositionally. The former believe that God is indispensable to all intelligible predication, the latter do not. This does not change the fact that both groups can contribute to a body of useful knowledge and the success of the method of inquiry is all around us. Again, the root problem is metaphysical which spills over into an incorrect epistemology (noetic effect of sin).
The main problem with the modernistic, Enlightenment enterprise is what it promised us. It promised unending progress and human evolution. It could not deliver that. We got rid of God for an alternative metanarrative (metaphysical story) that was supposed to answer every question. It did not. Enter postmodernism, the rejection of all metanarratives.
But this is all academic. While terribly interesting to me, your blog post is probably not very interesting to our postmodern culture. The debate between science and religion is viewed merely as two competing metanarratives.
I believe that it is counterproductive for us to continue to engage in these modernistic debates publicly. We need another strategy entirely.
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