What counts for knowledge?

This is the big question in epistemology, the theory of how we acquire beliefs that can be relied upon.

Let’s start at the present situation—post-modernism. In a nutshell, this philosophy says that there is no way for humans to arrive at truth or knowledge—at least not in a way that goes beyond our subjective opinions. In this philosophy the Sophists Plato did battle against have come back and claimed victory. All knowledge is so subjective that our minds are filled with ideas that are simply that—our own ideas.

Yet post-modernism is complex and even confusing. It may mean that knowledge is impossible—that all we are examining in our thought processes is the interior of our minds. Thinking is a hall of mirrors that shows nothing beyond itself.

But it may be fair to say that post-modernism simply points out that our thoughts are always our thoughts and thus point to yet more thoughts. These ideas, however, could be, as Berkeley proposed centuries ago, the substance of reality itself.

Perhaps the entirety of the universe is a system of ideas after all. The phenomena that we are restricted to, as Kant put it in his epistemology, may well be the stuff of reality, not merely the stuff our inner mental furniture.

Epistemology has long argued as to whether our inner ideas and the objects outside our minds are fundamentally distinct or whether they are similar. If ideas and the objects of reality are of different orders of reality (dualism) then we can never be sure our ideas gives us insight into reality or not. An analogy fits here. If I want to know whether my photo of a person provides an accurate depiction of that person it will not do to compare my photo with another photo or series of photos. Since our minds contain only our impressions of reality, we can never be sure whether we know what’s out there or not. This kind of musing nearly drove David Hume to drink. It certainly motivated him to while away many hours at the backgammon table, whether fortified with a tankard or not I cannot say.

On the other hand, if we build on the perspective of George Berkeley (after whom Berkeley, CA is named) we might say that reality itself is a system of ideas rather than a conglomeration of brute matter. Berkeley’s view may be hinted at in the statement of St. Paul: “in Him we live and move and have our being.” Who is to say that God created a material world out of dead, inert, unthinking atoms, as Democritus said, rather than out of vibrant interacting ideas? We need not appeal merely to Leibniz’ monad (a kind of thinking atom) but to contemporary thinkers who say that the universe resembles a giant thought more than a swirling mass of dead particles.

One thing is clear to me. The theory of knowledge we espouse will decide what mental children our minds conceive. The drift of philosophy over the last century or so toward sensation and a material view of substances has taken us within view of the end of road for philosophy. This is what post-modernists often conclude, as the following shows.

Post-modernism is arguably the most depressing philosophy ever to spring from the western mind. It is difficult to talk about post-modernism because nobody really understands it. It’s allusive (sic) to the point of being impossible to articulate. But what this philosophy basically says is that we’ve reached an endpoint in human history. That the modernist tradition of progress and ceaseless extension of the frontiers of innovation are now dead. Originality is dead. The avant-garde artistic tradition is dead. All religions and utopian visions are dead and resistance to the status quo is impossible because revolution too is now dead. Like it or not, we humans are stuck in a permanent crisis of meaning, a dark room from which we can never escape. (Kalle Lasn & Bruce Grierson, A Malignant Sadness, ADBUSTERS #30, June/July 2000 as quoted in Wikipedia)

I venture to say that post-modernism does not necessarily point to such a dismal conclusion. It rather warns us that our thinking has veered off the track. If there is an Intelligence behind the reality we see all around us, especially with our scientific instruments, then we may have confidence that our way of thinking is suited to our cosmic environment. That environment, in turn, is pregnant with hints of intelligence as well as of power and grandeur. We think logically and systematically because we are children of a Transcendent Reality expressing itself with wisdom and especially with beauty. Here the epistemic and the aesthetic come together.

This is where my spiritual experience of God intersects with my philosophic understanding of the cosmic environment in which I am embedded.

And in the end, my astonishment at the incredible complexity and functionality of everything gives rise to experiences of elevation before the glory and beauty of The Real in all its stunning variety.

For me this is a philosophical expression of what the Apostle implied in the following references. “In Him we live and move and have our being.” Acts 17:38 “By Him all things hang together.” Colossians 1:17 “His eternal power and glory are evident in what has been made.” Romans 1:20

For me, this is the heart of worshiping the Infinite-personal Supreme Spiritual Being who has planted in each of us the spark of his own image.