4. How Do We Know?
4 HOW DO WE KNOW?
Because Part Two of this book is about Christian doctrine we should perhaps start by looking closely at the whole business of how do we ‘know’?
Many people think the Christian faith is not something you ‘know’ but only something that you ‘believe’. In our culture, knowing and believing are supposed to be different from each other. So, this is the point where we should make a start.
In our present culture there is a strange belief that doubt is somehow more honest than faith. This belief suggests that faith might lead you astray, and that doubt is the mark of an honest inquirer. This, of course, is nonsense. Both faith and doubt have proper parts to play in the business of knowing. But faith is primary.
You cannot know anything unless you begin by believing. This beginning means opening your eyes, trusting the evidence of your senses and being aware of a world beyond yourself. We can only begin to ‘know’ something when there is this initial act of faith.
We might later come to doubt some of the things we first believed. We cannot believe everything, but doubt is only possible on the basis of something that we believe. I could make a statement and you might doubt its truth. I could then ask you why you doubted it, and you would reply, ‘Because I believe something else.’ I could follow this by saying, ‘But I doubt that.’ There is no rational doubt except on the basis of faith. So faith is primary and doubt secondary.
One of the consequences of this contemporary fashion, of regarding doubt as more honest than faith, is that it leads to a profound conservatism. This is because in every society there is what sociologists call a ‘plausibility structure’. There exists a whole pattern of beliefs that in general nobody questions. It is taken for granted that this is how everything is and everybody knows and accepts the situation. If something is proposed which seems to contradict that plausibility structure, then we doubt it. So when doubt is put primarily above faith it means that we tend to accept what everybody else believes. It is a profoundly conservative approach and is not – as is often thought – a radical shift.
I have often imagined meeting a native of one of the high mountain valleys of Papua New Guinea where they have never met anyone of European descent and have never heard anything of our ideas. I could imagine telling them of a tribe of white-skinned, blue-eyed people living on an offshore island on the other side of the world.
If I told them that these offshore islanders believe that the universe came into existence by a series of accidents and that although it works in a beautiful and orderly way, it was designed by nobody and for no purpose, they would probably say, ‘They must be a very superstitious tribe!’ It simply would not fit their plausibility structure. But those assumptions, which I have perhaps caricatured a little, are those that govern the thinking of many of our contemporaries. So faith is primary and doubt secondary. Both are necessary.
In our Western culture we have developed and relied upon the use of ‘science’ which, of course, means knowledge. Science is only another word for ‘knowing’ but we have separated science from other kinds of knowing in the belief that science gives us what is called ‘objective facts’ and that things which cannot qualify in that sense are of necessity purely subjective.
This again is a fashion of thought, and an absurd one, because there can be no knowing of anything without a knowing subject. If there is no subjectivity there is no knowledge. So the idea of purely objective knowledge is an illusion, but a most powerful one.
I was once trying to communicate my faith to a young man who finally told me, ‘Well, of course, that’s just what you think.’ The reply to that must surely be, ‘Well, did anyone ever find out anything without thinking?’ The idea that there is somehow a kind of knowledge which is not what you think, but something quite independent of your thinking, is absurd – but it is a prime and dominant illusion of Western culture.
There has to be a knowing subject and that subject is, by definition, someone moulded by a particular culture and shaped by his or her own psychological make-up.
Furthermore, knowing is not something that just happens to us. It is something we have to achieve, a skill we have to try to learn and in which we may succeed or fail.
Knowing in this respect is a learned achievement that requires our commitment. It is not like a photographic image but rather it is a skill and indeed an achievement that we have to accomplish.
In addition, we only learn by apprenticeship to a tradition of knowing. First there are the established practices and conventions embodied in language. We learn as small children to speak a language which is an apprenticeship into a tradition, a way of perceiving or grasping reality and no knowing is possible without that. This is supremely true of science. Science is profoundly conservative and traditional. No one is accepted as a scientist competent to undertake independent research without undergoing years of apprenticeship in the traditions of scientific method.
How can we be certain that the things we ‘know’ are really true? This is the momentous point at which, I think, the famous French philosopher René Descartes (1596–1650) led us astray. Descartes lived in a time of scepticism. He inaugurated the seventeenth–century intellectual revolution that laid down the foundation for what we think of as the ‘modern’ scientific age.
Descartes was convinced that by following the method that he adopted – the method that has guided science ever since – it would be possible to have more than what he would have called mere belief, but instead to have certainties, certain knowledge. He approached this in three stages. He started first with something he could not doubt, his own existence. Descartes wrote, ‘Even if I am doubting, that means that I am thinking, and if I am thinking, I exist. [Cogito, ergo sum] I think, therefore, I am. That is certain.’
By various arguments, with the precision and certainty of mathematics, he set out to build upon that certainty a body of certain or indubitable truth. That was the second step. Finally he developed what is known as ‘The Critical Principle’. This has been the jewel in the crown of Western culture ever since. It is the principle that all claims to knowledge must be tested by those two criteria and anything which falls short of certainty in that sense is not knowledge, but only belief. And as the great philosopher John Locke asserted, belief ‘is a persuasion which falls short of knowledge’.
So when we stand up in church and affirm, ‘I believe’, what we are really saying, by Locke’s definition, is that we do not know. Belief is therefore considered something other than knowledge. Knowledge is something that is absolutely certain on the basis of the method that Descartes laid down. It is this ground upon which our so-called modern scientific world has been built.
But for the same reason that I suggested when I talked about doubt, Descartes’ critical method was bound for eventual destruction. The Critical Principle has to be subject to the Critical Principle itself. It is obvious that you can only criticise a statement on the ground of comparing it with something else which you believe. So it is always possible to turn this critical scrutiny round on that basis and criticise it. So it is hardly surprising that in the centuries of philosophy following Descartes there has been a descent into increasing scepticism.
David Hume (1711–76), the Scottish philosopher, demolished most of the principles of Descartes. Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), who was the professor of logic and metaphysics at the University of Königsberg, East Prussia, tried to restore the grounds for certain knowledge, but had to conclude that we cannot know ultimate reality and that it must be beyond our knowledge. But how Kant knew that, one does not know! Finally, the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) saw with terrible clarity that to continue in the direction that European culture had taken would lead inevitably and inexorably to the point where we could no longer speak of truth or falsehood, nor of good or bad. Any claim to know the truth would be an exercise of dominance. The only thing that would be certain is the will, and any claim to truth would have to be regarded as a claim to dominance, to power.
As a result, we have relapsed into what is now called ‘postmodernism’, a sinking into the kind of belief where people say, ‘Well, it may be true for you, but it’s not true for me.’ It is believed that there is no such thing as objective truth. In the field of science there is still a good deal of confidence in the idea of objective truth, but even in this area it has been increasingly eroded.
We have actually reached the point where – with the so-called deconstruction movement in literary criticism – the idea that any text has any meaning of itself is demolished. The ultimate development of that is in the work of Don Cupitt, who simply states: ‘Words are purely culture constructions and do not themselves correspond to any reality.’ So when we say, ‘I believe in God’ we are expressing a kind of subjective feeling, but there is no reality to which those words correspond.
It is true that all truth claims are the result of cultural influence. The English language is just one of many languages of the world and if I make a truth claim, I am using this particular language to express or suggest statements of truth that relate or belong to the culture implicit in that language. Where are we if we probe the relationship between words and those things which are not words? Do the words ‘I believe in God’ correspond to a reality which is not words? Is it not obvious that the relation between words and those things which are not words cannot be a matter of words? It must be something different. And this is where the profound error of Descartes’ thinking becomes clear. Descartes, who has been followed by three centuries of Western thought, conceived the human mind as though it was a disembodied, objective eye looking at the world in a disinterested or impartial way. It was as if the mind was not part of the world at all and was looking at it from outside and therefore able to take an objective view – not a view shaped by any particular personal thoughts, feelings or cultural influences.
That detached, or objective view, is of course absurd. The mind is not a disembodied entity; it is part of us. Any knowing that we have of anything arises out of our bodily engagement in the actual business of the world. There is no other way by which we can come to know anything and we test our beliefs about what is the case by acting upon them.
One can see in the simplest of ways how a child learns to understand the world. If a balloon is brought closer to a baby, then that balloon has apparently become bigger. It takes a long time before a baby can understand the idea of distance and perception and it does this by taking hold of objects and feeling them with its hands. In this way you can see a baby exploring the world. If its eyes do not tell it all the truth then it uses its hands. It is only by being embodied in the actuality of the world that we begin to understand it.
We are part of this world which we seek to know. The vast delusion that we have suffered since the work of Descartes is the idea that we are somehow at one remove from it with a kind of spectator’s privilege of looking at the world from outside. This non-committed view does not allow the influence of personal commitments or personal interests. Objective knowledge is supposed to be that kind of knowledge.
That is a God’s-eye view of the world and we do not have that privileged position. We are a part of the world and everything in it, and our knowing relates to our actual bodily engagement as we try to understand and cope with its reality.
Let us look a little more deeply into what I have called the ‘structure of knowing’. Take a piece of paper with writing on it. The lines are just ink marks on a white sheet. That is all they are, from one point of view. When we learn to read we have at first to pay an awful lot of attention to the actual shapes of these ink marks. We have long since passed the time when we even look at the shape of those letters. We have moved on to attend to the meaning they communicate.
This ‘from to’ structure is fundamental to all our knowing. If we look at a picture with a magnifying glass we see tiny daubs of paint here and there, but it is only when we stand back that we see it as a coherent whole. We see the picture, not by ignoring the little paint marks, but precisely by an action of our mind that integrates all these little markings into a united whole – the single picture. Similarly, the marks of ink on the page are integrated by our minds into a meaning, and we attend to the meaning from these subsidiary clues, of which we are normally quite unconscious. While we are learning to read we have to attend to the clues and, of course, it is an effort, a struggle, to learn. But once we have learnt these clues there is a tacit unconscious integration of them into a whole structure of meaning that crosses an enormous range of our knowing.
The learning of language is one of the first examples of the way we learn by ‘apprenticeship’ to a tradition. As we go on, we learn words, concepts, models, pictures, theories and hypotheses which to begin with are often strange to us. Asking the question: ‘What does this concept mean?’ we have to attend to it in the same way the small child pays attention to forming letters while learning to read.
When we have mastered these things, then they become the subsidiaries from which we attend to the focal meaning. And, in that sense, we ‘indwell’ the tradition. All of our knowing involves indwelling our bodily senses. I am able to see a group of people only because my retina is stimulated by light in various ways. I am not conscious of the process but it is from this process that I attend to the meaning of what I am looking at.
So we have a threefold structure of knowing. First, there are the subsidiaries from which you attend to the focal meaning, and all our learning then involves us in new efforts to integrate a great number of subsidiaries into that focal meaning. So there are the subsidiaries and then the focal meaning. The third element is what I call the ‘heuristic passion’. As I said, knowing does not happen automatically. We have to struggle and that struggle involves trying to find meaning and coherence in all these different and apparently separate details.
This third element, heuristic passion, is the desire and longing to know. It is something we share with animals. One can observe an animal puzzled by something it has never previously seen and watch it as it struggles to discover what it is. This passionate desire to know and to find out things for oneself is fundamental to our nature and something we undoubtedly share with the animal world.
This means that we have to take seriously the personal factors involved in all knowing. Science proceeds by a whole series of personal efforts which involve intuition, a kind of sense that there is a pattern in these apparently meaningless and random facts. There is an intuition that there is something there which can be seen as a meaningful whole.
There is the imagination which can frame a possible picture, a hypothesis of how things are. There exists the patience that can go on, year after year, trying to solve a difficult problem, sometimes failing right up to the end. Einstein spent the last years of his life trying to establish a credible and workable theory that would unify relativity and quantum physics, and failed.
The heuristic passion and courage of Einstein governed the closing years of his life. And what of courage? This involves the willingness to take risks, as Einstein did, because there is always the risk of failure. All of these profoundly personal factors are involved in the business of knowing, and the strange idea that knowing is something that does not involve these subjective elements, that it is something purely objective, is nonsense.
But if you say that, then how do we know that we are in actual contact with the truth? I have emphasised the subjectivity of our knowing, but what about its objectivity? How can we or do we know that as a result of all this we are actually connecting with reality?
In this respect I think there are at least three topics that deserve our consideration. The first token of reality is a sense of meaning. When a scientist struggles to make sense of a whole lot of apparently random data, and suddenly sees a picture that holds it all together, then the conviction occurs that something true has been discovered. The sense of meaning and beauty, of symmetry and coherence – these are the first tests of objectivity.
The second test, of course, is that the scientist publishes these findings and invites other scientists to consider their worth – their truth. This is relevant to the whole question of Christian mission and evangelism. Any belief that we are not prepared to publish is not a real belief. If we believe something to be true, then we must publish it because its truth is universal.
Thirdly, if something is true, it will lead to further truths. This is crucial. Any real discovery will always lead the researcher, the searcher or the scientist onwards towards further discoveries. Many dedicated people have spent years in search of the solution to some problem which led them nowhere. Think of those long centuries spent by thinkers trying to understand the nature of gravity in relation to perpetual motion, or to produce the philosopher’s stone which would turn dross into gold. These attempts over hundreds of years have ended in nothing but failure.
The mark of truth is that it always leads on to further truth. And so that gives us a dynamic picture of knowledge, in contrast to the one that Descartes gave us. He, like most of the philosophers of science following him, conceived truth as something buttoned up and complete. There were no doubts or no uncertainties. It was a kind of static picture of truth, something which could only be possible ‘from above’.
But a working scientist will give you a different picture of truth. That person knows that there is yet more to be discovered. The test of the truthfulness of what has been discovered is not that there is nothing else to be learned but precisely that it leads onward into further reaches of reality. This is what I would call an epistemology ‘from below’. The word epistemology simply means ‘the science of knowing’ – how do we know anything? It comes from the Greek word episteme – knowing.
There is a kind of epistemology ‘from above’ where, as a philosopher, one looks down on truth claims and judges whether or not they can be sustained. But there is also an epistemology ‘from below’ which is the way that the scientists actually work, where they know that they have not arrived at the final truth and are always pressing forward and seeking more. But the test that they have made contact with reality will be that they are led on to further discoveries. It is a dynamic conception of truth, unlike that of Descartes.
And so we arrive at an important new area of consideration. I have previously been writing about knowing in the sense that scientists talk about it: knowing the natural world, the world of things. But there is another kind of knowing, which is the knowing of persons. In many languages there are two different verbs to express this notion. In German the verb wissen means to know things and kennen means to know people. In French savoir means knowing things while connaître means knowing people. Unfortunately in English there is only one such word, but there is an acknowledged difference between the kind of knowing where the object is a thing and the knowing of a person.
If it is a thing that cannot answer back then I decide what to do about it. I can put it on the laboratory table and dissect it. I can put it through various tests and decide the questions to be asked. I am in control. That is one kind of knowing. But we also know that there is another kind of knowing, coming to know a person. In one sense, you can dissect a person on the operating table and discover how the body works, but then you lose the chance of getting to know that person!
This other kind of knowing is where the object is a subject. The object of my knowing is himself or herself, a subject. Therefore, I am not in full control. If I am to know that person I must be prepared to be questioned myself. I must put my trust in that person. I must be willing to open up and trust that this person is speaking the truth. There is no other way to get to know a person. So here we use faith in a second sense. They are not two separate senses.
At the I wrote that we do not know anything except by an initial act of faith. That is faith considered in its cognitive aspect, that is to say as a way of knowing. But faith also has an affective or emotional aspect; it is more a way of loving, of relationship with another.
Now these two are not separate, but they are two different dimensions of faith. So the question is: ‘How are these two moulds of knowing related to each other?’ Obviously they are not separate. We do not get to know a person as a disembodied spirit but rather through the acts of speaking and gesture, the actuality of events in this physical world by which people make themselves known to one another. That point is fundamental.
A machine’s correct mechanical functioning and structure depends on the skill of the person who built it just as much as it depends upon the quality of the metals and components that went into its construction. It depends on the physics and chemistry of its parts and the competent mechanical design of the person who made it possible.
But if you come across a machine you have never seen before, you can examine it to your heart’s content but you will never discover its purpose unless you are told by the maker or by someone who has learned from the maker, how to use it. In other words, the mechanical structure of the machine provides the conditions under which the machine works, but does not provide its meaning or purpose. This belongs to a different level of logic.
If I may return to the context of knowing persons, neurosurgery, for example, has developed enormously in the past few years and doctors can now examine the brain and understand better, with amazing surgical precision, how its complex electrical circuits and synaptic connections work. But no matter how far the neurosurgeon might go in this anatomical and physiological analysis of brain function, it would not tell that surgeon a single thing about what the subject thought or felt. There is no possible way it could. It is a different logical level. Consequently, there is a hierarchy of logical levels in all our knowing.
The laws of chemistry depend upon the laws of physics but physics can never replace chemistry. The laws of mechanics depend upon the laws of physics and chemistry but mechanics cannot be replaced by physics and chemistry. Biology in this sense depends upon all three theoretical laws because a bird or an animal is also, in one sense, a mechanism. Creatures function because they are chemically composed of hard and soft tissue – muscles and blood and so forth – and these tissues in turn comprise the atomic structure of the animal. But neither physics, chemistry nor mechanics can replace biology. There exists a hierarchy of levels, and each level can never fully explain the true function of the higher one.
It is therefore clear that in viewing humanity there is a level above the physical, chemical, mechanical and biological level. You cannot really explain a human being. You cannot come to know a person in the sense that we normally use this term of ‘knowing’, simply by knowing the physical, chemical, biological and mechanical working of the body. The attempt to explain things on a logical level lower than the appropriate one is known as reductionism and it could be said that the whole of the past three centuries of the so-called modern or scientific view of the world has been an example of reductionism – of trying to explain reality on logical levels, on lower levels than those that are appropriate.
The relevance of all this will emerge later, but in the meantime let us consider that most famous of conundrums in this whole business of knowing as propounded by Plato, who asked these questions: ‘What does it mean to seek truth? Is truth something that we know or something that we do not know? If we know truth, why do we seek it? If we do not know it, how can we recognise it when we find it?’
Plato’s answer was to invoke the prevailing doctrine of reincarnation. His answer was that essentially truth was recognised, known and remembered from a person’s previous incarnation. Today few people accept Plato’s explanation, and yet scientists go on their merry way making ‘discoveries’ without attempting to answer the conundrum: ‘What does it mean to search for truth? What does it mean when people talk of the love of truth?’
As I said earlier, heuristic passion is the third component in all our knowing – the passion to understand and find meaning in apparent meaninglessness. So is it not at least possible that heuristic passion is a response in us to something beyond us which draws out that passion?
Research scientist Michael Polanyi (1891–1976) was an academic with many discoveries to his credit. He struggled with Plato’s conundrum and felt himself to be drawn onward. He was propelled forward by an intuitive feeling that there was something further to be found, as if there was some hidden meaning, beauty or coherence, in the things that baffled him both as a research scientist and as a human being. He felt himself as a scientist being drawn forward beyond the point of being a scientist. Heuristic passion is a response to something prior to us, touching one of the central truths of our being.
This brings us in a sense to the limits of philosophy. The Christian faith affirms that the ultimate logical level upon which things are to be understood is neither physical, chemical, biological, nor mechanical, but the personal, and that our whole existence can only be understood if we take this personal level into account. If that is true, then everything will depend upon whether the one who is the person whose purpose governs all things has revealed that purpose to us. And that, of course, is what the gospel affirms.
Whereas Muslims, for example, maintain that God has simply dictated the truth for us to take it or leave it, the gospel affirms that God’s revelation of himself is an action in which truth and grace go together, where truth and love are one. God’s self-revelation of himself is exactly what this argument would suggest – something which draws us to himself. And if that is true, then we have to conclude that this is the secret both of knowing and being.
Our knowing is not separate from our being. If this is true (and that is what the gospel affirms to be true) then there is something that causes the acorn to grow into an oak and not a cabbage, or a foetus to become a human being and not a monster. That something which has drawn forth the whole process of evolution is not, as Darwin thought, the result of chance mutations operating from below, but is the response of the created order to the one who has created it and who calls all creation to its proper fulfilment.
This would mean that the heuristic passion at the heart of our knowing is a response to God’s calling upon us. Alone in creation we are conscious of this calling to seek the truth and to seek it in him. So contrary to Descartes, we are not dealing with disembodied ideas.
The truth can only be known through incarnation, through the actual presence of God in history, the presence of the one in the midst of history, who calls upon us with the words: ‘Follow me!’
That would mean that the ultimate secret of knowing is in following Jesus. When we accept that calling, we are not then people who pretend to know everything. But we know that we are on the way, that we are ‘in via’, that we have the clue that will lead us into the fullness of the truth.
Obviously there will be those who reply, ‘This is irrational. This is a mere leap of faith. It doesn’t have a rational basis.’ But it is so easy to point out the illusion which underlies that criticism. If this world is ultimately a thing, if everything in this world, including ourselves, is ultimately to be understood in terms of physics, chemistry, mechanics and biology and in the last analysis this world is a thing, then the way to know would simply be by observation and reason.
But if the ultimate reality by which this world is constituted is personal, the eternal love of the triune God, then the only way by which we can come to know the truth is by a personal response to a personal calling. And that is what we affirm as Christians. The Bible states, ‘The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom’ (Proverbs 9:10). It does not say, ‘The fear of the Lord is the beginning of religious education.’ It is the beginning of all wisdom and this is the clue by which, in the end, we shall understand all things. It also means we have to remind our contemporaries that there is no spectators’ gallery.
When that young man told me, ‘Well, of course, that’s just what you think,’ he was typically representing the illusion that there is available to us some kind of so-called objective standpoint where things are not just what you think but somehow stand apart from any thinking. This is an illusion. We are in fact called upon to a personal commitment, to understanding and knowing, and the limits of natural theology are at that point.
It is only because we know that God has revealed himself in the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ in the actual flesh and blood of his incarnation, death and resurrection that we are able to recognise the illusion of Descartes. Consequently, we accept our calling to be among those who follow the word addressed to us by the incarnate Lord, and know that this is the way to the truth.