What is knowledge
and how can we truly know
anything? This is the crux of
epistemology and it’s something that we often take for granted. Everyone just accepts that they can think,
they can discern the world around them and they can tell the general difference
between the truth and a lie. But is it
all that easy? Why should there be
something that is so ingrained within us which gives us this ability? How could such a mechanism have ‘evolved’ and
how does it allow us to arrive at knowledge?
Some people (like
Stephen Hawking) have claimed nonsensically that philosophy is dead.
Epistemology is the most basic of philosophical concepts and can only be
declared dead if it’s we take for granted everything in our experience – which
is naïve and ignorant. Like the claim
that believing in religion ‘just because’ is irrational, so too is believing that you can arrive at
any truth ‘just because’.
How does this tie
into believing in God? First of all
because it’s such a basic tenet of
life that we don’t even have a grasp at, which gives rise to the notion of
there being a spiritual component to life.
Knowledge being merely derived by the senses as a theory collapses on
itself, as there is a deeper component to knowledge. But then no one can seem to pinpoint what
that deeper component is. Not only that
but like Plato suggested believing in knowledge to be absolute makes more
sense, but if you believe in evolution without intelligence then it should not
be absolute at all!
Basically,
intelligence comes into play, if we are created by an intelligent force our
ability to comprehend knowledge should be taken for granted. Yet if we were created by random processes
nothing in this world should be intelligible at all! As Albert Einstein said, it’s “a miracle”
that “the world of our sense experience is comprehensible”. He noted that science couldn’t even be
attempted without that “miracle” and “the setting up of a real external world
would be senseless without this comprehensibility”.
Senseless! This is the amazing thing,
that the world isn’t senseless at all.
And that just leads us to ask “why”?
God is the author of knowledge, it comes from his very nature (Proverbs
1:7, Colossians 2:3). The Christian
worldview gives us rational justification for using our minds and senses in
determining truth. If you have a
different worldview you’re left scratching your head to why there should be
knowledge at all. In a chance universe,
there is no reason to expect our senses to be trustworthy or for there to be laws
at all – so using logic is out.
A lot of the
non-theistic bases for epistemology talk about ‘intuition’ as a truth basis,
which in turn begs the question of why we should be able to trust our intuition
if it’s just a result of random processes.
If epistemology just ‘evolved’ then nothing but pragmatism becomes our
test for truth - it works so then it’s true.
But wait, isn’t that circular reasoning?
Instead God not
only gives us purpose in life (not individual purposes but purpose for
humankind that otherwise does not exist) but God also gives us a reason for the
universes' comprehensibility and for knowledge.
It’s not something we should take for granted but something that we should study about to
understand and think especially on the point that without God how can you
purport to understand anything at all?
