Session 3 The Demolition Next Door

In our last session we took a very brief look at what it means to build our house on the Rock. We examined the foundation of the Christian worldview and confirmed that it is built on an ontology focused on the existence of the Judeo-Christian God of the bible and built with an epistemology that results from claims God makes about Himself and His creation. We could continue talking about that indefinitely, it is absolutely saturated with meaning and consequences that are of tremendous import to our daily lives, and we will touch on some of those consequences in later sessions, but for now I need to follow up on some of the consequences I hinted at that result from secularism’s astounding attempt to destroy Christian ontology while keeping its epistemology.

To get started, let's return to the topic of Christian ontology for just a moment. As we discussed last time, the ontology of the Christian worldview is based on the claims God makes about Himself and His creation, and we learn of those claims from the Bible. For the purposes of the point I'm trying to make, I will summarize the ontology these claims create as follows:

  • There is a self-existent and eternal consciousness/being that we call God. This God has left us a record of His activities and His statements about Himself, from which we derive the following
  • He is the designer, engineer, and creator of all that we experience as reality, both physical and non-physical.
  • He has created other consciousnesses/beings, including humanity, that have free will and authority over aspects of His creation
  • He created humanity "in His image"
  • He is consistent, reliable, rational, and unchanging, as are the fundamental rules of His creation.
  • He is the authority that defines morality and truth
  • He is benevolent and altruistic
  • Some of the consciousness/beings He created have chosen to reject His authority in favor of their own
  • These rebel beings are antagonistic, malignant, and destructive to His creation, and that they are actively working toward the destruction of humanity

As we've discussed, our epistemology—the ideas we have about knowledge and how we obtain and validate it—is derived from and built on our ontology. We've also discussed that within western culture it can be generally stated that what we think about knowledge and the methods by which we attain it and validate it is based largely on the ontology of the Christian reformation in Europe.

I make no attempt here at a rigorous, academic exposition of western epistemology, many have done that far better than I could, I am only drawing general conclusions that help us understand and clarify the conflicts arising between Christianity and secularism. When we argue over moral and scientific conclusions, we argue using epistemology, but we very rarely stop to consider that epistemology and what it's based on. This is a critical failing for Christians, because it is in the analysis of our epistemology and the ontology on which it's based that we find rational consistency in Christian thinking, and profound contradictions in secular thinking.

So what is this epistemology I keep mentioning? How do we describe it? How do we use it? Why is it so important? To answer these questions we have to ask different questions, but first, some oversimplification.

There is an entire genre of philosophy and no small amount of science being done on the topic of the human mind. Some of the ideas put forth are fascinating and fun to consider, but aren't horribly useful in any practical way as they tend to redefine our reality in ways that seem so counterintuitive and stand is such conflict with our day to day experience that we simply aren't willing to give them credence. I don't want to waste our time exploring each of these theories, since I'm most concerned with popular thinking in western culture, not small subsets of highly individualized and marginalized philosophy. An academic or philosopher/hobbyist would no doubt take issue with this, but for the purposes of our discussion I'm going to limit our theories of mind to those most common in western culture. These boil down to two essential options: reductionism and non reductionism.

Put as simply as possible, reductionism is the idea that any phenomena (like human consciousness/thought) can be reduced to simpler, physical phenomena (like electrochemical processes) and explained without an appeal to non-physical intervention. As you might have guessed, non reductionism rejects this idea in some way, and as such, I'm using it as an umbrella term to cover all the alternatives to reductionism. Christians are non reductionists. Materialistic atheists are reductionists. In fact, as soon as you eliminate any reference to the "supernatural" (a term I despise for reasons I'll get to in the future) you're options become rather limited, and as a result most secularists/atheists are stuck with reductionism when they address the human mind.

The problem with reductionism is that it comes with a major catch. Reductionism posits that all mental experience can be reduced to the physical interaction of matter and energy governed by unguided natural law. Everything we experience as "mind" is nothing more than changes in the physical composition of our brain caused by physical stimuli (which, importantly, are also unguided). What's startling about this perspective is that it is purely deterministic, which is to say there is no room for free will. Per reductionism, what happens in our brains may provide the illusion of choice, but is, in fact, determined strictly by the natural laws that govern the electrochemical processes that take place in the physical organ that is our brain.

The non reductionist rejects this notion in favor of something that seems more intuitively true, but is much more difficult to explain, namely that human consciousness/thought can't be reduced to purely electrochemical processes, but instead includes some non-physical element that allows us the free will we seem to experience and rely on every moment of our lives.

The contrast here is startling, and its implications are astounding, especially in the realm of epistemology. To help us get our heads around it let's look at some basic questions that we don't often ask ourselves.

First, what does it mean to know something? Not an easy question to answer, is it? We have an oddly intuitive way of knowing what knowing means, but it's extremely difficult to articulate in a concise and simple way. That seems odd, doesn't it? Something so fundamental to our existence, the very cornerstone of what it means to be human, is something very few of us could thoroughly explain. Knowledge is an abstract idea, it's a word that serves as a reference to something that is bigger and more important than words themselves, which helps to explain why it's so difficult to fit into words. Knowledge is also a concept that's exclusive to the human mind. There are some that argue animals are able to attain and use knowledge, and in a very narrow sense this is true, but the knowledge we're referring to is that which requires abstraction—the ability to think about universal concepts that can be understood in particular terms but are not particular things themselves. Despite some rather creative testing methods and some even more creative conclusions, there remains no convincing evidence that animals have this capacity.

This concept of abstraction is absolutely essential to human thinking and we need to be clear on what it means. The idea that both a physical thing and the ideas we have about that thing can both exist and one can be objectively linked to the other is so essential to our thinking that we simply take it for granted. Back to our simple mathematical illustration from our last session: 1+1=2. In this example, the symbols used are abstract representations of physical things, and the behavior of the abstract symbols, namely that adding 1 to another 1 produces a 2, is objectively true in the same way that placing one apple in a bowl with another apple results in two apples in the same bowl. The ability to understand this connection and contemplate its meaning requires abstract thinking. Abstraction is critical to knowledge because most of the ideas we hold in our minds involve abstract representations and concepts that refer to and require real things to exist.

Abstraction, however, poses a significant problem for reductionism. In order for the human mind to think in the abstract we must have the freedom to govern our thoughts, we must have free will. To illustrate why this is true let's look at an example.

Let's say we had a set of 5 flashcards and 5 different individuals each held one flashcard. On one side of the flashcard is a number between one and five, each card showing one number in the sequence. On the opposite side of the card are 5 sentences that form a conversation. Let's say the cards are as follows:

1 — "I don't believe in god."
2 — "Oh really? Why not?"
3 — "There's no evidence to support His existence."
4 — "What do you mean by evidence?"
5 — "He hasn't and doesn't affect the physical world in a way we can perceive."

There are some pretty hilarious problems with that conversation, but ignore them for now, and focus on the numbers. Let's say the person holding card 1 lifts it so the group can see the number and reads the sentence on the back. The person holding card 2 sees card 1 and is compelled to lift their card so the group can see the number and reads the sentence on the back, and so on until all cards have been read. Did these 5 people have a conversation about God, did they share knowledge and ideas, or did they experience a transition in brain states triggered by visual and audio stimuli? If the latter, then perhaps you see the problem. If what we experience in our minds is nothing more than electrochemical cause and effect, then our conversations are never about the abstractions of language and symbol and idea, but only about the stimuli that caused the physical event. The abstractions, which seem to be the important bit, are, in fact, completely meaningless. The point here is that without the concepts of abstraction, and objectivity, there can be no knowledge in the sense that we commonly understand it. Reductionism mandates that these things are meaningless as they are purely symptoms of a more fundamental, physical event.

The divergence in our understanding of knowledge itself between the reductionist and the non-reductionist happens at such a fundamental level that it almost seems silly to continue discussing it. If the mind lacks a mechanism for free will, and as a result abstract thought is a meaningless concept, what's the point in talking about knowledge, which is, itself, an abstract concept and requires free will to exist? And yet, despite this, we still engage in conversation, and we still rely on the same basic epistemology to acquire and validate knowledge.

Let's start articulating this epistemology with a few basics that, regardless of our justifications in believing them, we accept to be true.

  • Knowledge requires self-awareness
  • Knowledge requires abstraction
  • Knowledge requires choice
  • Knowledge requires an objective reality and objectivity in our abstraction

That lays some groundwork, but raises more questions. Objectivity is only meaningful if we accept that all of our minds are individual and that we all experience a shared reality in mostly the same way. Here we start to get into another aspect of epistemology, specifically the ways in which we validate knowledge. Intrinsic to the conclusions above is the idea that knowledge is rather meaningless if it's restricted to a single, individual mind. Abstraction and objectivity are relevant only in the context of information, which is a higher-level concept that's essential to our epistemology. Information is portable knowledge. Information is the package of abstract ideas and relevant concepts about those ideas that make them coherent and understandable. This is, of course, a pointless thing to think about if there isn't more than one mind. Knowledge and information restricted to a single consciousness ceases to be meaningful outside of that mind.

This leads us to additional epistemic conclusions:

  • Knowledge can be transferred from one mind to another via information
  • Separate minds can be aware of similar or identical ideas
  • Separate minds can conceive of similar or identical ideas using different abstractions

That last one takes us further down the road of validating knowledge. Intrinsic to the concept of objectivity is the concept of non-contradiction, which, as we've discussed, is the backbone of logic. Non-contradiction seems self-evident, but it's important. If an idea (like 1+1=2) is objectively true, a contradictory idea cannot also be true (1+1=purple). What's quite incredible is that two different minds can process this idea very differently without altering the truth of the idea itself. For example, I may think of adding an apple to a bowl that already contains an apple and understand that I now have two apples in a bowl. You may think of giving your child two $1 bills and sending them to the corner store for a carton of milk that costs $2. Neither contradict the idea that 1+1=2, but the abstraction used to conceive of the idea is very different.

This is what's amazing about logic. We can use our knowledge that two separate ideas can't both be true to deduce a truth we couldn't experience directly. In our last session we used the examples of a stick appearing to bend when placed in clear water and a car producing different sounds as it passes us at high speed, both of these present conflicting truths. The stick is bent, the stick is straight. Both can't be true. The car is in a constant state of motion over the same surface so it's producing a consistent sound, the car is producing different sounds. Both can't be true. We rely on the law of non-contradiction and the collection of knowledge we've acquired about the world around us to establish which is more true and we accept that as logically true and therefore true indeed.

This leads us to additional epistemic conclusions

  • Two conflicting ideas can't both be true
  • Knowledge includes the awareness of truth and falsehood
  • Truth can be known either through experience or through logical deduction
  • Knowledge gained by experience must be validated with logic before it can be truth
  • Truth is ultimately rational and objective

You'll notice that last point employs a rhetorical flourish. Using the word truth in place of knowledge may seem a jump too far, but I'd argue it's what every one of us does without knowing it. The secular reductionist who uses materialism as her ontology also draws this conclusion and employs it with great fervor when arguing against theistic worldviews, and we should clearly understand why that's intellectually dishonest.

In practical, everyday use, knowledge and truth are nearly inseparable. If something is valid knowledge, it is, in practicality, a form of truth. This makes epistemology all the more important because if epistemology is the way in which we validate knowledge it is also, to such a large degree as to be true, the way in which we validate truth. Some Christians might find this heretical and argue that only God defines truth, He is "the way, the truth, and the life" after all, and I would say, amen and amen. My point is that Christian ontology and the epistemology that grows from it are the very creation of God and are the ruleset He established for us to use as the foundation of our thinking. It is the way in which God defines truth for humanity.

If we put all these conclusions together we get something like the following as our general articulation of common western epistemology:

  • Knowledge occurs in a mind that is self aware and governed by free will
  • Knowledge requires the ability to use and understand abstraction
  • Knowledge requires an objective reality and objectivity in our abstraction
  • Knowledge can be transferred from one mind to another via information
  • Separate minds can be aware of similar or identical abstract ideas
  • Separate minds can conceive of similar or identical ideas using different abstractions
  • Two conflicting ideas can't both be true
  • Knowledge includes the awareness of truth and falsehood
  • Truth can be known either through experience or through logical deduction
  • Knowledge gained by experience must be validated with logic before it can be truth
  • Truth is ultimately rational and objective

What should be extremely obvious is that any epistemology that includes and relies on these conclusions to function must be built on an ontology that provides a reality in which these conclusions are possible in the first place. Christian ontology is completely consistent with all of these. Materialism/reductionism is not, and cannot be. At the very top of this list is the necessity for free will, and every conclusion after it relies on the first being true. The ontology of materialism/reductionism does not provide a reality in which free will can exist.

The conclusion we should draw here is that any individual participating in a conversation that puts to use an epistemology similar to that described above must be prepared to justify their use of that epistemology. Christians engaging in conversation with non-Christians need to stop allowing the use of an an unsupported epistemology in arguments against faith and in support of secular morality. We need to move the conversation back to the point at which non-theistic ontology fails to support the epistemology being implemented and engage in a meaningful discussion surrounding the acceptance of that flawed ontology. We need to stop letting secularism demolish its own house and then proclaim their house is better built than ours.

In our next session we'll start looking at how that can be done.