Session 2 A closer look at our foundation
In our last meeting we took a very brief look at some very big ideas, specifically the relationship of ontology (what is, what exists) and epistemology (what we know and how we know it) to the concept of worldview. We need to look at these concepts more closely and we need to talk a little more about why they're important.
In Matt 7:24-29 Jesus makes one of the most profound statements in the bible. It’s a mini-parable about two builders, and we're all very familiar with it. But the depth of meaning in this parable is sometimes overlooked. Yes, Jesus is the Rock upon which our faith must be built and without Him we will fall to pieces when the going gets tough, but there's another level of meaning here that is often missed and it relates specifically to the concepts we're exploring.
As we discussed last week, a worldview is very much like a house, it's constructed with our epistemology (what we know and how we know it) and it's constructed on our ontology (what we believe to exist, what is real). Our worldview is tested when people or circumstances push on our house and test our foundation. In Jesus' mini-parable the failure happens at the foundational level. The house of the foolish builder is built on sand and the sand is washed away in the flood of trouble and the house built on it crumbles, as any house would if its foundation were to shift or move.
Jesus simple parable was prophetic, because it describes exactly what has happened in the philosophical movements of the last three centuries.
The obvious problem
Before we go any further we need to deal with an obstacle that prevents most of us from ever considering the sort of ideas and concepts we're discussing. That obstacle is the word obvious. Much of what we're going to talk about seems extremely obvious. Example: 1+1=2. Duh. Of course. Couldn't be more obvious. And it is, but only if we accept a whole bunch of assumptions about reality and the human mind, only if we hold a certain ontology and epistemology to be true.
In western culture, we inherited our epistemology (our ideas about how we know things) from many centuries of progress in philosophy starting with, as many of our modern ideas do, the Greeks. It's important to note the Greeks didn't create our epistemology, just like they didn't create math, they simply formalized it by creating terminology and processes by which we could better understand it. Concepts like logic, information, and objectivity have been ingrained in us for centuries, and we all, with minor nuances, accept these ideas and include them in our epistemology without a second thought. They're so deeply engrained we assume them to be self evident, or, for our purposes, obvious. It would probably come as a surprise to some of you to hear that some eastern cultures (Hindu cultures for example) don't share our confidence in logic and objectivity, among other things, but instead give greater authority to individual perception and experience, ideas which have become more popular in postmodern western culture with odd results, which we'll explore later. The point is, we don't question our epistemology, we just use it. It's obvious, and that's problematic.
It's useful at this point to revisit some of these concepts since, as mentioned, we often accept and use them without even considering them, and they can't be accepted and used without some important philosophical consequences. We don't have time, or frankly the mental fortitude, for an exhaustive exploration of modern western epistemology (we'd all be asleep in about 5 minutes) but there are some specific elements that our important to our discussion.
Most important is the concept of logic. Logic is, in many ways, the ultimate authority on truth. It is the foundation of what we call rationality. An idea cannot be rational if it doesn't adhere to the laws of logic. Describing these laws would be pedantry at its worst, so we'll limit our discussion to the most obvious. First, logic works because of something called the law of noncontradiction, which simply means that two opposing ideas cannot both be true. A > B and A < B cannot both be true. This same principle also works in the physical world in that a thing cannot be anything except what it is, and two things cannot occupy the same space. An apple can't be an orange, and they can't both be in the same space at the same time. It's important to note at this point that I've started using a word that's about as loaded with meaning as a word can get, and that's the word truth. Truth is the objective of epistemology, it's why we're having this discussion. Logic is the way we overcome the limitations of our senses to discover truth. A classic example is the discovery that the earth moves around the sun, not the other way around. Our senses told us one thing, but logic proved the opposite was more true. A simpler example would be that of visual and audio illusions. A stick bends when you place it in clear water. A car changes sound when it passes you at high speed. Our senses are tricking us to think something is happening that isn't, and it's logic that helps us find the truth.
Logic, however, in order to produce truth, must assume the existence of at least three other incredibly important concepts; objectivity, abstraction, and indeterminism. These, again, are obvious things that we don't often think about, but because of what's happening in the culture around us we must think about them, and we must understand their importance.
Objectivity is the idea that something can be true on its own merits, and true for everyone regardless of their sensory perceptions or thoughts to the contrary. Returning to our example above, we take 1+1=2 to be objectively true because it's true for everyone regardless of our opinions on the matter. If it were subjectively true, in other words true only because I think it's true, 1+1=1,000,000 could also be true, and that would have some pretty serious consequences, especially on our bank accounts. Again, obvious, but as we will see, not as much as we'd think.
Objectivity is tied to another concept known as information, which in turn brings us to the concept of abstraction. Looking back to our example: in the statement 1+1=2, 1 and 2 are numbers, which are abstract symbols representing some other thing or idea that actually exists, but they are not the thing itself. Words work exactly the same way, one is a word for 1 which is a symbol for, let's say, an apple. If you have one apple and I have one apple, together they make two apples. If we put both apples in a bowl on a table, we now have the information that there are two apples in a bowl on the table in my house. That information is a series of abstract symbols (words and numbers) that represent something we take to be objectively true, that two apples exist in a specifically shaped container on a specific surface at a specific location. That information can be transferred to other people via language and they will know something they couldn't have known without seeing it themselves. That's how information works, and it requires that objectivity be real, that abstraction is possible, and that the human mind has the capacity to decipher this information, understand its symbolism, and choose to accept it as truth.
And that brings us to the concept of indeterminism. Indeterminism is a fancy word for what is essentially the concept of free will, so from this point forward I'll use the term free will or choice instead. Implicit in the concept of information is the concept of choice. Because information is made of abstractions (symbols that represent a reality) we must be able to accept it as true without actually experiencing the reality it refers to through direct sensory input, which means we must be able to choose what we think about instead of simply being pushed about by physical input. This requires a great deal more explanation, and we'll get into that in more depth in our next session, but for now it's sufficient for us to think of choice as an essential component of logic. Again, obvious, but as we'll see, also extremely problematic.
Already we have a list of epistemic tools—things that help us obtain and validate knowledge—that are deeply embedded in our culture: logic, objectivity, abstraction, and free will. Implicit in the idea of objectivity are two other epistemic assumptions we need to acknowledge. One is the trustworthiness of the human mind, another is the reliability and consistency of our senses. More than obvious, right? So let's get on with it, there's a point we're getting to, and that's enough groundwork to move forward.
The real problem
Our western culture also inherited its ontology—our ideas about what can and can't exist, what can be called real. Though it was the Greeks who began to formalize our thinking about the subject, like our ideas about what’s true, our ideas about what's real go much further back to the beginnings of human history. Every mythology, every religion, every explanation for what we are and how we got here has to start with ideas and assumptions about what is and isn't real. Western culture inherited its ontology from the Christian reformation, which in turn, inherited its ontology from several thousand years of Judeo-Christian history. Our epistemology has been shaped and refined over hundreds of years to fit comfortably on the foundation of this ontology, and the importance of this can't be overstated.
It's only within the the last few centuries, as secularity has grown in both acceptance and influence, that western culture has begun to reexamine and redefine its ontology. And here is where we circle back to the problem with obvious. Secular western culture, most prominently materialistic atheism, has done something truly astonishing. They have altered their ontology while insisting that their epistemology remains unchanged. They have changed what they believe to be real while still claiming that all the tools they use to decide if something is true, those things we claim to be obvious, are still exactly that. That's like digging up and altering the foundation of a house and insisting the house still stands in its place, unperturbed. What should be obvious, is that this simply doesn't work. You can't change your beliefs about what is real and continue to believe what you know to be true if how you know things in the first place relies on what you believe to be real. That sounds complicated, so let's use our example again. You can't continue to believe 1+1=2, or indeed that this statement has any meaning whatsoever, if there is no such thing as a number.
Certainly I'm being ridiculous, no one would say numbers don't exist, would they?
As described above, numbers are symbols that represent the abstract idea of things, of existence itself. The statement 1+1=2 is true of any two things in our physical reality. If you have two things, you have two things, they are separate and unique in their existence. Obvious, right? Well, not really, because abstractions only exist as ideas about real things. All of language and math works in the abstract. A word, number, or equation never caused anything to happen, it never changed anything about our physical reality, in fact these things have no direct influence on our reality whatsoever, they only help us describe and understand reality by replacing real things with symbols and ideas about those real things. In a very real way, math and language aren't real. But we know that's crazy, right? They work, math accurately reflects and predicts what we experience with our own senses, that's real, right? Well, that depends on your ontology.
As mentioned above, western ontology and epistemology existed in varying degrees of harmony for a long time, and were particularly well suited to one another during and after the reformation and the renaissance. It was during this period that science, which is nothing more than a set of epistemic tools used to obtain and validate knowledge, came into existence and began its trajectory toward what we see today. There's deep irony there that shouldn't be lost on us. The modern materialist who claims that science teaches there is no God is granted the tool of science by Christian ontology and epistemology. This same scientist wants to continue using the tools of science, but wants to dig out the ontology he inherited from the Christian worldview and replace it with an ontology devoid of anything that isn't material. Ever since the Enlightenment, perhaps the most poorly and ironically named period in history, we've been letting this pass as reasonable, mostly because we're all too lazy or too distracted to think about it and too intimidated by strange combinations of letters after names (like PhD) to think we have a right to voice the thoughts we do have.
In order to take this any further we need to look this ontology I keep mentioning. Again, ontology is the term that describes what we believe exists, what is, what's real. The Christian ontology western culture inherited holds a couple astounding things to be real, but first and foremost, is the concept of God. We hold this God to be eternal, without beginning and end, and though that makes no intuitive sense to our finite brains, we can understand it logically because we also hold that this God created time itself, and if He created time, He is surely not bound by it as we are. He also created everything we call our physical reality, the energy, matter (which is just arranged energy), and the laws that govern the physical realm. Again, He created it, so He is therefore not bound by it. So we believe there is a timeless, non-material being that has authority over the physical world of matter, energy, and physics that we live in. We get all this from the Bible, the authority and trustworthiness of which we'll explore in a different session, but for now it's sufficient to talk about these ideas based on their own merits.
The bible is filled with statements about who and what God is, and because we believe God to be the source of the bible, we take these claims as claims He makes about Himself. For the purposes of our discussion I want to point out a few important claims. Please note, the scriptural support for these points is far more diverse and comprehensive than the verses listed here, I've limited the list of verses for brevity, not because they are scarce.
- He claims He is the answer to infinite regression (Exodus 3:14, Revelation 1:8). Infinite regression refers to the idea that everything must have a cause, and without an initial "uncaused cause" nothing can exist. This is a hard problem in philosophy, and one that no atheistic worldview can provide an answer to
- He claims to be the source of our reality, the intelligence that conceived every natural law and designed and caused to exist everything that can be said to exist. He claims He created these things by "speaking" them into existence (Genesis 1). Clearly, a non-material being wouldn't have a larynx and mouth with which to speak, and since sound waves are also a material construct, there would have been no sound anyway, so "speaking" must mean, as it does for us if we think on it deeply, the point at which a thought becomes a physical reality that's accessible to more than one mind. That's a complex way of saying God thought things into existence. It would then follow that He must be the source of rationality and logic, since these ideas are clearly apparent in the reality He created. Also, because of the obvious complexity and ingenuity in our created reality, He is clearly intelligent in all the ways we continue to define that word today.
- He claims He is reliable and consistent, that He doesn't change in any fundamental way. (Hebrews 13:8, James 1:17, Psalms 111:17)
- He claims to be the source and objective authority over what is and isn't truth (John 14:6, Psalm 119:160)
- He claims He is altruistic and benevolent, and the source of all benevolence (1 John 4:7-8)
- He claims to be the objective authority over what is morally right and wrong (Psalm 19:7-9)
- He has demonstrated that He abides by His own rules, He is not arbitrary. He claims to be fair and just (Deuteronomy 32:4, ultimately revealed in the story of Jesus)
- He claims that He created us in His "image," which, because he isn't physical, must mean He created us to be like Him in a fundamental, non-physical way. This would suggest that, like Him, there is something about us that is non-physical, and superior to the physical.
Because we believe He exists before anything else can, then all of these ideas about consistency, rationality, objectivity, and benevolence are things He chose to be, and in doing so He has chosen them as the foundational concepts upon which His creation should exist. He has defined an ontology, He has made decisive claims about what can be said to exist, and He's gone a step beyond that to tell us why these things and ideas exist, because He decided they should.
This ontology is unique to Judea-Christian theism. Let's just review some of these points and consider their import. According to our theistic ontology, it can be said that the following things exist, they are fundamental to all of reality and are the foundation upon which we base our epistemology, our ideas about what we know and how we know it:
- human consciousness and a set of senses that are reliable and trustworthy
- consciousness/mind, which precedes and is superior to the physical
- an objective, shared reality that all of humanity experiences in the same fundamental ways
- truth as an objective concept, which includes logic, cause and effect, the law of noncontradiction
- objective morality, a non-subjective right and wrong
It's not difficult to make some connections here. Clearly, the epistemology we use in western culture, these concepts of rationality and information, and even the idea of truth itself, all sit very comfortably on this foundation. Western epistemology was built on the Rock, and it works.
So what happens if, as secularism is so keen to do, we dig out that foundation, throw it away, and replace it with an ontology devoid of any deity, any non-human, non-physical authority? If we're honest, the house collapses spectacularly, and that's what we're going to talk about next time.