Questioning Our Knowledge

Can We Know What We Need to Know?

David W. Gooding, John C. Lennox

• Publisher: Myrtlefield House
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781912721115
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Epistemology in Philosophy

In Book 3 – Questioning Our Knowledge, Gooding and Lennox discuss how we could know whether any of these competing worldviews are true. What is truth anyway, and is it absolute? How would we recognize truth if we encountered it? Beneath these questions lies another that affects science, philosophy, ethics, literature and our everyday lives: how do we know anything at all?

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Chapter 1How We Perceive the World

Epistemology starts by asking how, and by what means, and to what extent, we can gain not just opinion but true and certain knowledge of the world of things around us. And in that connection it asks if we can know for certain whether the world of human beings and things owes its existence to a Creator; and if so, can we know what he is like?

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How do we know anything?

It might well seem a silly question to ask: ‘How do we know anything?’ when in fact we all know that we know ten thousand and one things and run our daily lives on the basis of knowing them. We know that the world is full of material things like houses and chairs, rocks and rivers, vegetables and machines. We know intangible things like 3 × 3 = 9, and the laws of logic and that other people have minds as we ourselves have. We know historical things, such as that Caesar Augustus was emperor at Rome, and that Hitler never succeeded in capturing St. Petersburg. We instinctively know some moral truths, such as that it is wrong to torture children; and we know from experience that not everybody is honest and tells the truth. We even know hypothetical things, such as what would happen if we were to drive a car at 120 kph straight into a solid stone wall.

All these things and hundreds more besides, we feel we know so well that we do not necessarily stop to think how we know them, or whether we are justified in claiming to know them. We not only know these things but we believe them to the extent that we are prepared to commit ourselves to acting on the basis of this knowledge. Life would become impossible if we didn’t. Why, then, should we bother to discuss how we know things? And why should we be called upon to justify our claim to know them?

The limitations of sense perception

Some easy examples will help. For centuries the vast majority of people believed that the earth was stationary and that the sun went round the earth. As far as people’s sense perceptions were concerned, no one felt that the earth was rotating about 1,600 kph and carrying its inhabitants round the sun at 108,000 kph (no one feels it even now). Their senses told them that the earth was immobile; but their senses misled them.

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Sight can mislead us. Travellers in a desert sometimes see ahead what they interpret as an oasis with water and palm trees; but when they arrive at the spot, there is nothing there but sand. What they saw was a mirage.1 How, then, can we be certain that our sense perception of the external world is normally reliable?

If, in reaction to this, we try to ignore our senses and rely solely on reason to get to know the world around us, we shall soon discover that reason too has its limits. If you are sitting in your room, reason cannot tell you whether or not there is a red car parked out of sight round the corner in the next street. To find that out you will have to go and look—and trust your senses! In cases like this, reason cannot begin to work until it has got some factual evidence to work on.

At another level, we all know that juries have sometimes reached wrong verdicts, acquitting the guilty, or condemning the innocent. Let’s assume that in these cases they did their best to understand the propositions put before them, and honestly believed that their verdicts were true. But obviously, sincere belief was not enough to guarantee they were true. How and by what tests could they rightly have been expected to justify their belief? Could they ever have been certain that their belief was true? In some countries the standard set to juries is that a guilty verdict should be beyond reasonable doubt! Does it matter if juries can never be absolutely certain that their verdicts are true?

The role of epistemology

The term epistemology comes from two Greek words: epistēmē— ‘knowledge’, and logos—‘science’, or ‘study’. It is the name given to that branch of philosophy that is concerned not with what we do believe but with what we are justified in believing.

It starts by asking how, and by what means, and to what extent, we can gain not just opinion but true and certain knowledge of the world of things around us. And in that connection it asks if we can know for certain whether the world of human beings and things owes its existence to a Creator; and if so, can we know what he is like?

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Epistemology also invites us to consider how far our prejudices, values and even our methods of scientific investigation limit or even distort the impressions we receive.

Quantum physicists tell us that the very means they must use to investigate elementary particles so affects those particles that the scientist cannot simultaneously determine both the location and the velocity of any one particle. It is also well known that a scientist’s personal worldview can affect the interpretation he places on the results of his experiments, and on the theories he forms (see Appendix: ‘The Scientific Endeavour’).

Epistemology, then, is devoted to challenging our claims to sure and certain knowledge.

A second-order discipline

It is probably true to say that epistemology is one of the biggest, most complicated, and therefore most disputed, fields of philosophy. Certainly at its advanced levels it becomes intensely technical. In this chapter we shall investigate some, at least, of the major theories and positions that have been, and still are, held in this field. We can do no more than that in our limited space; but we hope to do enough to whet people’s interest to take up the subject themselves and to investigate it further.

It is only when we have discovered and learned many things, that epistemology will invite us rationally to justify our beliefs and to explain how we know these things to be true.

This much, however, we should understand right from the start: epistemology is a second-order, and not a first-order, discipline. That is to say, we do not first have to understand, still less to solve, all the problems that epistemology raises, before we can usefully begin the fascinating task of understanding the world around us, and of making valid discoveries about ultimate reality and how we are related to it. It is only when we have discovered and learned many things, that epistemology will invite us rationally to justify our beliefs and to explain how we know these things to be true. In other words epistemology does not lay down how we should go about discovering new knowledge. It invites us to test the knowledge that we believe we have discovered to see if it is true knowledge.

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Look at the progress of life itself. A baby is born with an instinctive urge to get to know and understand itself and the world around it. Watch a baby grab hold of its foot, bring it to its mouth, and so begin to discover that this thing, whatever it is, is a part of itself. Listen to a child interminably asking ‘Why this? Why that?’ It is, in fact, astonishing how much a child has learned by the time it is five (without having studied the abstract theories of epistemology about how we can justify our claim to know anything!). Much of what it has learned, moreover, will prove to be permanently valid, though from time to time, of course, critical reflection will rightly modify, or even eliminate, some of its beliefs.

Similarly at the other extreme, it would be a methodological mistake for scientists to regard epistemology as a first-order discipline, and to feel that, before they may rightly attempt to make any discovery, they must first solve by abstract reasoning epistemology’s theoretical question ‘How can we have any true perce...

Table of contents

• Illustrations
• Series Preface
• Analytical Outline
• Series Introduction
• How Do We Know Anything?
• 1. How We Perceive the World
• 2. False Alternatives at the Extremes
• 3. The Epistemology of Immanuel Kant
• 4. Reason and Faith
• What is Truth?
• 5. In Search of Truth
• 6. Particular Truths and Ultimate Truth
• 7. The Biblical View of Truth
• 8. Truth on Trial
• Postmodernism
• 9. Postmodernism, Philosophy and Literature
• 10. Postmodernism and Science
• Appendix: The Scientific Endeavour
• Series Bibliography
• Study Questions for Teachers and Students
• Scripture Index
• General Index
• About the Authors