3 Knowing and Believing
That Britain is a plural society is a fact no one can deny. Peoples of many ethnic origins and of many different religious commitments live together in our cities and share our public life. This fact of plurality must, as I have said, be distinguished from an ideology of pluralism. It is pluralism to which we must now attend. Within this single term it is also necessary to distinguish between cultural pluralism and religious pluralism. Of course it is true that culture and religion are deeply interconnected. Religion is from one point of view an aspect of culture, but this is not the whole of religion. Religions may be multicultural, as Christianity obviously is. And people of different religions can share much of a common culture. Cultural pluralism I take to be the attitude which welcomes the variety of different cultures and life-styles within one society and believes that this is an enrichment of human life. I accept the truth of this, but qualify that acceptance with the obvious point that cultures are not morally neutral. There are good and bad elements in culture. I would not wish to see cannibalism or infanticide introduced into Birmingham, and I would not wish to see sexual promiscuity and abortion on demand introduced into Madras. Religious pluralism, on the other hand, is the belief that the differences between the religions are not a matter of truth and falsehood, but of different perceptions of the one truth; that to speak of religious beliefs as true or false is inadmissible. Religious belief is a private matter. Each of us is entitled to have-as we say-a faith of our own. This is religious pluralism, and it is a widely held opinion in contemporary British society.
But it is vital for clear thinking to recognize the severe limits of pluralism. There is a very large area in which the writ of pluralism does not run, the area of what are called "facts." About "beliefs" we agree to differ. Pluralism reigns. About what are called "facts" everyone is expected to agree. Of course there are differences of opinion about the facts, but we don't accept the differences as final. We expect eventually to sort them out, clear up misconceptions and mistakes, and get general agreement about the facts.
But what are "facts"? It is certainly not more than a hundred years since children in Scottish schools learned at an early stage the fact that "Man's chief end is to glorify God and enjoy him forever." This was as much a fact as the movement of the stars and the Battle of Bannockburn. Today it is not taught as a fact. It may be included in a syllabus of religious studies, along with the beliefs of Hindus, Buddhists, and Muslims, for it is a "fact" that some people do have these beliefs. But it is not itself a fact: it is a belief which some people hold. It is not part of the curriculum in the public schools. On the question of "the chief end of man"-the purpose for which human beings exist-we are pluralists. Each person is free to believe what he or she prefers. It is a matter of personal choice, of having "a faith of your own." We do not ask whether the belief is true, but whether the believer is sincere in holding the belief. On the other hand, it does not occur to us to ask whether a person is sincere in his or her beliefs about physics; we ask whether the belief is correct.
Of course there are other things about human life which are taught as facts. It is widely taught that human life is the accidental result of a struggle for existence in which the successful succeed, and we are the successful. This is taught as fact. It has obvious implications about what kind of human life is to be regarded as successful. But it is taught as what "we know," not as what we-or some people-believe.
The way we understand human life depends on what conception we have of the human story. What is the real story of which my life story is a part? That is the question which determines what we believe to be success and what failure. In our contemporary culture, as exemplified in the curriculum of teaching in the public schools, two quite different stories are told. One is the story of evolution, of the development of species through the survival of the strong, and the story of the rise of civilization, our type of civilization, and its success in giving humankind mastery of nature. The other story is the one embodied in the Bible, the story of creation and fall, of God's election of a people to be the bearers of his purpose for humankind, and of the coming of the one in whom that purpose is to be fulfilled. These are two different and incompatible stories. One is taught as fact; the other-if it is taught at all-is taught as a symbolic way of expressing certain values in which some people, but not all, believe. The first is taught as what we know; the second as what some people believe.
This strange split between "We know" and "We believe" is to be the theme of my third chapter. Here I want to look at the origins of the split. Everyone knows that, in any investigation, the answers you get will depend on the questions you ask. And, in the whole vast enterprise of trying to understand what human life is and what the world is, the questions we ask will be determined by our interests. The spectacular success of the natural sciences in the past three hundred years has been due to their concentrating on tracing the cause-and-effect relation between happenings, and setting aside the question of purpose. There was a good practical reason for this. Purpose is a personal word. People entertain purposes and seek to realize them; things, inanimate objects, do not have purposes of their own. An inanimate object, such as a machine, may embody purpose, but it is the purpose of the designer, not its own. If I come across a piece of machinery or equipment and have no idea of its purpose, I can of course take it to pieces and discover exactly how it works. But that will not explain what it is for. Either the designer, or someone who knows how to use it successfully for the purpose for which it was designed, will have to tell me. There will have to be personal communication. Of course he might be a liar. He might be trying to play a trick on me. If I am to use the machine successfully I will have to trust him, at least provisionally, and try it out. And if the thing in question is something designed to save life from disaster-for example, a parachute-my decision to trust or not will be a life-and-death decision. This is very awkward!
Only if I know the purpose for which something was designed, can I say that it is good or bad. The mass of silk fabric in front of me may be good as a parachute, but bad as a bell tent or a bishop's rochet. If I do not know the purpose for which human life was designed, I have no basis for saying that any kind of human life-style is good or bad. It is simply an example of human life as it is. Judgments about what is good or bad can only be personal hunches. Each person will be entitled to her own. They will be, as we say, personal beliefs; and since there is no objective fact by which to test them, pluralism operates. If, on the other hand, it were a fact that the one who designed the whole cosmic and human story has told us what the purpose is, then the situation would be different. That would be a fact-a fact of supreme and decisive importance.
Our society does not accept it as a fact. It is not part of the "plausibility structure." In his runaway best-seller The Closing of the American Mind Allan Bloom, a Chicago academic philosopher, has described the resulting situation in the academic world as he sees it, a world where relativism and subjectivism reign. Bloom finds as the most significant sign of this the fact that the language of "values" has replaced the traditional language of "right" and "wrong." He traces this back through Max Weber to Nietzsche. Nietzsche, he says, was the first to realize that the operation of the modern critical principle would make it impossible any more to speak of right and wrong. The factual, ontological basis for using such language had been removed. There could only be personal choice. And what could guide that choice except the will? We choose what we want. So we are left with the will to power. This, it seems to me, perfectly explains the dichotomy of our usage between what we call "values" and what we call "facts." Facts are what we have to reckon with whether we like them or not. Values are what we choose because we want them-either for ourselves or for someone else. Middle-class parents want values to be taught to children in schools because life will be more pleasant if these values are adhered to. But they do not ask whether these values have any relation to the "facts" as taught in school. They do not ask whether it is possible to believe that concern for minorities, for the poor, for the disabled is important if the fact is that human life is the result of the success of the strong in eliminating the weak. If it is a "fact" that human life is the accidental result of the ruthless suppression of the weak by the strong, and it is not a fact that "Man's chief end is to glorify God and enjoy him forever," then "values" have no factual basis. They can only be the expression of what some people choose, and-inevitably-it will be the strong who prevail. The language of "values" is simply the will to power wrapped up in cotton wool. And we cannot use the language of right and wrong because it has no basis in the "facts" as we understand them.
How have we reached this point? Hannah Arendt, in her brilliant book The Human Condition, makes an interesting suggestion-no more than that. She suggests that it was the invention of the telescope that made people realize that things are not always what they appear to be. It sowed in their minds the suspicion that perhaps in what we all think are obvious facts we are being deceived. How can we be absolutely sure that we are not? The work of Descartes, she suggests, was a response to this anxiety. He sought for clear and distinct ideas based on truth which could not be doubted. As is well known, he found (or believed that he had found) this indubitable starting point in his own thought: "I think, therefore I am." From this there developed that radical dualism which has so controlled European thinking ever since-a dualism similar to that which had been characteristic of Greek thought between the intelligible world of ideas known directly by the mind and the world of objects known through the sense of sight, sound, touch, and so on. This dualism, expressed in Descartes's distinction between res cogitans (thinking reality) and res extensa (reality extended in space) created a situation in which it was necessarily doubtful whether the gap between these two worlds could be bridged. A scepticism about whether our senses give us access to reality is the background of the major philosophical thinking ever since. In the thought of Kant, whose giant intellectual achievement has overshadowed the thought of Europe ever since, the real or noumenal world must remain forever impenetrable by our senses. We can only know what appears to our senses, the phenomenal world. And the orderly structure which enables us to grasp and deal with this phenomenal world is not inherent in it; it is provided by our minds which, for the necessities of our own reason, provide the rational structure by which we can make sense of the phenomena. The rational structure of the created world, which science seeks to understand, is not given to it by its Creator; it is furnished by the necessities of human thought.
It follows that guidance for living is not to be found through knowledge of things as they truly are, for this knowledge is unobtainable. If the statements in the Shorter Catechism about human nature and destiny are factually true, then questions about right and wrong conduct can be rationally discussed on the basis of the facts. But this is no longer possible. Ultimate reality is unknowable. Human nature, like everything else in our experience, is to be understood in terms of efficient causes and not in terms of final causes. The study of the facts, in this view, will enable us to understand how human nature in fact functions. Opinions about how it ought to function can only be personal opinions, and any assertion that the purpose for which human life exists has in fact been revealed by the One whose purpose it is, is treated as unacceptable dogmatism.
This is so much the accepted view of our time and place that it is hard to look at it critically. Yet we must do so; we must examine the dogma which undergirds this rejection of dogma. The generally held assumption that doubt is more intellectually respectable than assent to a creed is one that must itself be criticized. It is a product of the move ment of thought which I have sketched. It assumes that ultimate reality is unknowable. It insists that truth claims about God and about the nature and destiny of humankind must be in the form "This is true for me," not in the form "This is true." Confident statements of belief about such things are regarded as arrogant. It is assumed that there are statements of what is called "fact" which have been-as we say-scientifically proved; to assert these is not arrogance. But statements about human nature and destiny cannot be proved. To assert them as fact is inadmissible. They can never be more than "How it seems to me," or "My personal experience," or-even more typically-"How I feel."
Just because these assumptions are so largely unquestioned and because it is these assumptions which underlie the contemporary religious and ethical pluralism, it is necessary to subject them to critical examination.
Let me suggest five points for consideration in this regard.
1. There is need for what Polanyi calls the critique of doubt. When we undertake to doubt any statement, we do so on the basis of beliefs which-in the act of doubting-we do not doubt. I can only doubt the truth of a statement on the ground of other things-usually a great many other things-which I believe to be true. It is impossible at the same time to doubt both the statement, and the beliefs on the basis of which the statement is doubted. Doubt may take two forms. It may be in the form: I doubt your statement because I believe that something else is true. I doubt it because it does not square with the rest of my beliefs. In that case the situation is clear. But there is also agnostic doubt, which again may take two forms. It may be: "Your statement is not proved," or "Your statement is of such a kind that it can never be proved, therefore I doubt it." But in both forms this assumes that the doubter believes that there are criteria of proof which would be applicable in this case, or he believes that there are no such criteria. In either case he is able to doubt only because of things which he believes without doubting.
2. This leads to my second point, which is about the relative roles of faith and doubt in the enterprise of knowing. If we consider what is involved in learning to know anything, we will see that knowing has to begin with an act of faith. We have to trust the evidence of our eyes and ears, or, if we are learning a language, or learning science or history or any other branch of knowledge, we have to begin by trusting those who undertake to teach us. There is no other possible way to begin. It is of course true that our eyes may deceive us and that textbooks may be mistaken and that even university professors may be wrong. Doubt, the use of the sceptical, critical faculty, is therefore necessary as we proceed. We may have to question and revise what we first accepted. But (a) we have no other way of starting except by accepting a-critically the evidence of our senses and the guidance of the tradition represented by teachers and textbooks; and (b) when we do begin to doubt and to criticize, it is always and can only be on the basis of other things which we have accepted as true and which we have learned in the same way, by accepting a tradition. There is no other possible basis for rational doubt. It follows, therefore, that, while both believing and doubting have a necessary place in the whole enterprise of knowing, believing is primary and doubting is secondary. The contemporary opinion-very widely held-that doubt is somehow more honest than faith, is an entirely irrational prejudice. It is a form of dogmatism which is entirely destructive.
3. The work of philosophers and historians of science in the present century has shown very clearly that the whole work of modern science rests on faith-commitments which cannot themselves be demonstrated by the methods of science. This has been frequently pointed out and it is only necessary to refer briefly to it. The development of science as we know it would have been impossible without two beliefs: that the universe is rational and that it is contingent. The point has often been made and hardly needs to be repeated. If the universe did not have a rational structure, if different instrument readings at different times and places were simply random events which could not be brought into a coherent relation with each other, then science would be impossible. But the rationality of the universe is not something that science can prove; it has to be assumed as the starting point of scientific effort, and the assumption is a faith-commitment. So also, if the universe were not contingent, if it were (as Indian thinking has generally assumed) an emanation of the absolute spirit rather than the creation of a personal God who has, by the act of creation, given it a degree of autonomy, then science as we know it would be unnecessary. We would know ultimate reality by the exercise of pure contemplation and the whole business of testing hypotheses by laborious experiment would be unnecessary. It is therefore not an accident that modern science was born in a culture which had been shaped for many centuries by this belief.
If the historians of science have shown us that the roots of modern science are in a certain kind of believing, the philosophers of science have also shown convincingly that the popular dichotomy between "facts" (as what we know) and "beliefs" (of which we can only say, "This is true for me") rests on an illusion. Facts are only grasped by an activity of the knower which is impossible without long training. This training begins in infancy when the newborn child begins to make some sort of sense of the buzzing noises and the ever changing patterns of light and shade which surround her, and continues through the long business of being educated into the use of words, concepts, and patterns of thought which are part of the inheritance of a human culture. Facts do not imprint themselves on the brain like images on a photographic plate. They have to be grasped and understood. All so-called facts are interpreted facts. What we see depends on the way our minds have been trained. At one time people looking into the night sky saw chinks in the celestial sphere through which the light shone from beyond. Later they saw heavenly bodies moving around the earth; today they see the minute fraction of a universe vaster than the human mind can grasp, and know that they are only seeing a few of our nearest neighbors.
As Polanyi says, in discussing some of the great scientific controversies, "The two sides do not accept the same 'facts' as facts, and still less the same 'evidence' as evidence.... Within two different conceptual frameworks the same range of experience takes the shape of different facts and different evidence" (Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge, p. 167). What we see as facts depends on the theory we bring to the observation.
4. I have already given reasons for thinking that the fashionable preference for doubt as against faith, "honest doubt" as against "all your creeds," may conceal the very arrogance which it proposes to condemn. The fact that all our knowledge is limited ought not to be used to disallow such statements of what we can know as we are able to make. The believer, encountering such a move, is entitled to put the question: "How do you know that ultimate reality is greater than any possible statement about it?" To the Kantian one may put the question: "How do you know that the unknowable noumenon exists?" And to the one who says that the whole truth of God cannot be disclosed in Jesus Christ, the Christian may fairly ask, "What is the source of your knowledge that this is so?" How does the doubter know so much about the unknowable? And the point has to be pressed further. The most obvious feature of the unknowable reality is that each person is free to conceive it as he or she wants. The unknown god is a convenient object of belief, since its character is a matter for me to decide. It cannot challenge me or pose radical questions to me. It is likely to be, as Feuerbach saw, just the en larged image of my own ego thrown up against the sky like the Brockenspetre.
Certainly if, in affirming what I believe to be the truth, I suggest that I possess the truth in such a way that I have nothing more to learn, I am rightly condemned. That is the element of validity in the position I am criticizing. There is surely always more truth to be discovered. That this is so is one of the things that lie at the heart of life-even of the life of animals and birds. The curiosity which is always seeking to discover more seems to be one of the necessary conditions of life. But seeking is only serious if the seeker is following some clue, has some intuition of what it is that he seeks, and is willing to commit himself or herself to following that clue, that intuition. Merely wandering around in a clueless twilight is not seeking. The relativism which is not willing to speak about truth but only about "what is true for me" is an evasion of the serious business of living. It is the mark of a tragic loss of nerve in our contemporary culture. It is a preliminary symptom of death.
5. The devaluing of belief-statements as merely subjective ("What is true for you but may not be true for other people") involves a logical absurdity. It presupposes the possibility of an "objective" knowledge which is not knowledge as believed to be true by someone. This bogus objectivity is expressed in Bertrand Russell's definition of truth as the correspondence between a person's beliefs and the actual facts. This definition is futile since there is no way of knowing what the actual facts are except by the activity of knowing subjects. The definition implies a standpoint outside the real human situation of knowing subjects-and no such standpoint is available. An outsider may say that my belief is false because he sees the facts differently. In that case there is room for discussion. But I cannot apply this definition of truth to test my own perceptions of truth, since there is no way in which I can stand outside my own perception of the facts. I cannot at the same time say: "This is what I believe" and "What is the case is something different from what I 'believe."
When I say "I believe," I am not merely describing an inward feeling or experience: I am affirming what I believe to be true, and therefore what is true for everyone. The test of my commitment to this belief will be that I am ready to publish it, to share it with others, and to invite their judgment and-if necessary-correction. If I refrain from this exercise, if I try to keep my belief as a private matter, it is not belief in the truth.
In the next chapter I shall discuss more fully the question of believ ing and knowing, but meanwhile let me look briefly at what is involved in this dichotomy between "I believe" and " 1 know," as it affects our role as Christians in our contemporary culture.
It is surely obvious that knowing has both a subjective and an objective pole. It is subjective in that it is I who know, or seek to know, and that the enterprise of knowing is one which requires my personal commitment and often the development of skills in which I have to invest long hours and days of effort. And it is subjective in that, in the end, I have to take personal responsibility for my beliefs. In this enterprise of knowing I am dependent on my culture; I cannot, of course, detach myself from my culture or the tradition by which I was formed. The ways in which I have learned to cope with experience and to grasp the nature of things are ways which I have learned from my culture through all the years of training since infancy. Nevertheless I am responsible both for learning the skills and faithfully using the tools for understanding that my culture furnishes, and also for criticizing, refining, and even perhaps changing these tools. This is all my personal responsibility, and the beliefs which I hold are beliefs for which I must accept responsibility. But, on the other hand, I am not holding them responsibly if they are merely a transcript of my feelings. I am responsible for seeking as far as possible to insure that my beliefs are true, that I am-however fumblingly-grasping reality and therefore grasping that which is real and true for all human beings, and which will reveal its truth through further discoveries as I continue to seek.
What seems to have happened in our culture is a falling apart, a disconnection between the subjective and the objective poles. We have on the one hand the ideal, or shall I call it the illusion, of a kind of objectivity which is not possible, of a kind of knowledge of what we call the "facts" which involves no personal commitment, no risk of being wrong, something which we have merely to accept without question; and on the other hand a range of beliefs which are purely subjective, which are, as we say, "true for me," are "what I feel," but which are a matter of personal and private choice. To suggest that these latter beliefs ought to be accepted as true for all is to be guilty of the unforgivable sin-dogmatism. And, as I have said, this dichotomy between knowing and believing is embodied in the curriculum of our public schools and universities. The dichotomy is seen at its sharpest in the United States where it is established and fortified by the First Amendment. There is a legally enforced division between what is called science and what is called religion. The one may be taught as public truth, the other may not. To teach that human beings exist as the result of the successful elimination of weaker species by those which have accidentally inherited superior strength or skill is allowed. To teach that human beings exist to glorify God and enjoy him forever is not allowed. Yet both of these beliefs refer to what is believed to be true for all human beings. They are both-if true-extremely important. Both of them are affirmations about what is the case. One is held to be a matter of objectively true facts, even though the Darwinian theory is obviously incapable of proof; the other is held to be a matter of private opinion. It may be taught in churches which are voluntary associations of those who choose to belong to them; it may not be taught as part of public truth.
This falling apart of the two poles of the business of knowingthe objective and the subjective-is reflected in the life of the Christian churches. It would be surprising if it were not so, for our churches are from one point of view part of our culture. I am referring to the deep and tragic split which divides Christians between those who are usually labeled liberals and fundamentalists. Clearly we are dealing here with another form of the same malaise. There are on the one hand those who seek to identify God's revelation as a series of objectively true propositions, propositions which are simply to be accepted by those who wish to be Christians. And on the other hand there are those who see the essence of Christianity in an inward spiritual experience, personal to each believer, and who see the Christian doctrines as formulated during church history as symbolic representations of these essentially inward and private experiences. This falling apart, this dichotomy, is one manifestation of the more general situation which I have tried to describe, the falling apart of the objective and the subjective poles of knowing. They are the twin products of the movement of thought which came to full self-consciousness in the eighteenth-century Enlightenment and which still dominates what we call "modern" culture. Between them they are tearing the Church apart.
George Lindbeck of Yale, in his important book The Nature of Doctrine, tries to develop a third way of understanding Christian belief which would-he hopes-open a way for healing. In contrast to what he calls the "Propositional Model" of the fundamentalists and the "Experiential Model" of the liberals, he proposes what he calls a "Cultural Linguistic Model," in which Christian doctrines would be seen rather as rules of language, the rules which make it possible to speak truthfully about God's revelation of himself in Jesus Christ. I think that this is a promising proposal, but I shall suggest (pp. 58f.) that this tragic split within Christen dom can only be healed as part of the wider healing of the split in our culture as a whole, only through a resolute assault on the fundamental problem which is epistemology, the way we formulate an answer to the question: "How do you know?" In the next chapter I shall venture some thoughts on this, thoughts which I hope will be relevant to this dichotomy within the life of the churches.
There is one particular aspect of pluralism which has become very important for people in the Western world during the past thirty years. Although the world has been a religiously plural place for as long as we know anything of the history of religions, most people for most of history have lived in societies where one religion was dominant and others were marginal. What the sociologists call the "plausibility structure" was provided by the dominant religion. This was the situation during the period when European civilization developed, and it is still the situation in a country like Saudi Arabia, except perhaps in the urban centers. But in the past thirty years European peoples have become accustomed for the first time to the presence in their midst of large numbers of people of other faiths. It has not taken long for them to discover that many of these Hindus, Buddhists, Sikhs, and Muslims are devout and godly people, whose religion means much more to them than Christianity means to the majority of Europeans. If what matters about religious beliefs is not the factual truth of what they affirm but the sincerity with which they are held; if religious belief is a matter of personal inward experience rather than an account of what is objectively the case, then there are certainly no grounds for thinking that Christians have any right-much less any duty-to seek the conversion of these neighbors to the Christian faith. To try to do so is arrogance. Since the interreligious issue is usually compounded by the interracial issue, and since we are aware of the racism which infects us so deeply, there are the strongest emotional reasons for regarding religious pluralism as something to be accepted and welcomed. The Christian faith may be true for us; it is not necessarily true for everyone. To confess Jesus as Lord and Savior and to worship him in the language that we use in church is quite proper as an expression of our devotion. But this does not entitle us to make the same claim outside the context of the life and worship of the Church. Our creedal statements are not to be understood as statements of objective truth, that is to say, statements of what is the case and therefore what everyone in the end has to deal with. Jesus is my Lord and Savior, our Lord and Savior; others, with equal sincerity, look to other names as the recipients of their devotion. We have no right to affirm, in such a society, that there is no other name given under heaven whereby we are to be saved. Here pluralism reigns. What matters is not the factual content of faith claims but the sincerity with which they are held. They are matters not of public knowledge but of personal faith. Knowing is one thing, and the schools are there to see that everyone knows what we all need to know about the real facts. Believing is something else, that is, it is a personal matter for each individual. Each of us should have a personal faith of our own.
In the next chapter we shall look more closely at this interesting dichotomy in our society between knowing and believing.