Section 1, Chapter 5: The Inadequacy of the Self as a Reference Frame Leads to Total Skepticism

Section 1, Chapter 5 of the Logic of God

We live in a time when many people do not believe that there is such a thing as truth. Others are not sure what to believe. One of man’s basic questions is: How can we know what we know? What is the basis of our certainty, or can we be certain of anything? There is a branch of philosophy called epistemology that deals with these issues. The philosophy or movement called postmodernism asserts that there is no objective truth and no knowledge of truth. All we have are perspectives and opinions. This mindset is increasingly becoming the dominant mode of thought among non-Christians.

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Since Postmodernists do not believe in truth (in theory, at least) they do not regard language as communicating any predefined content. They reason that if there is no truth, one can read any meaning one wants into a message. They call this deconstruction. This is commonly referred to as spinning or spin doctoring. Since postmodernists claim not to believe in any truth, they do not seek to gain a unified understanding of the particulars they see by appealing to objective truth or reality as a universal to provide a unified view of things. It’s like having a bunch of drawers with no dresser to put them in or worse, a pile of clothes lying on the floor. A postmodernist looks to politics rather than truth to unite his or her private world. This is called political correctness.

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How did we get to this place? Philosophy is based on human wisdom and traditions rather than on Christ. The Bible says that God brings to nothing the wisdom of the world. (Is 29:9-14; 1 Corinthians 1:18-24) A study of the history of philosophy bears this out. In the 1600’s, a man who is considered by many as the Father of modern philosophy established a self-based philosophy. He coined the phrase ‘ I think, therefore I am.‟^5:1 He used the self-evident knowledge that we have thoughts to prove the existence of the self and then sought to prove everything else by the existence of the self. This created a problem. It does not follow that any perception I have of the outside world is true ‘out there’ simply because I perceive it in my mind. Descartes’ thinking created a divide between the inner world and the external world. If one only understands what is in his understanding, how can one go beyond the domain of thoughts to verify what is ‘out there ’

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In the quest to know what is ‘out there,’ a philosophy called empiricism developed. Empiricism is the belief that all knowledge comes from sense experience. The logical conclusion of empiricism is that all we can know are sensory perceptions. In a logically consistent empiricist epistemology or theory of knowledge, “Trying to go beyond perceptions, as metaphysics must, inevitably involves going beyond anything that can have cognitive content.^5:2” There are several problems with empiricism. If ALL knowledge comes from sense experience, how can we know this statement to be true? If it is a self-evident proposition, then not all knowledge comes from sense experience. If it is a sense experience, then it is a circular argument which goes like this: A is true because of B; B is true because of A; A has not yet been proved – the argument collapses.

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Empiricism cannot explain the difference between valid sense experience and illusion, since both are sensory experiences. Something distinct from the sensory impression must exist to serve as a standard of measurement to judge our experience. It is not raw experience but processed experience that counts. A dog can see a barn, but we can also call it a barn and compare it with other barns.

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Kant saw that experience had to be processed. He proposed that we have categories of hardwired knowledge that we bring into experience that interpret experience. He introduced several concepts that govern philosophy discussions to the present time. The world became divided into the phenomenal realm (things as they appear to us) and the noumenal realm (things as they are).^5:3 While Kant answered some problems unique to empiricism, he did not tell how we have this hardwired knowledge or how to bridge the gap between our subjective view and the way things really are. He seems to have widened that gap.

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The next stage in the history of modern philosophy is called Logical Positivism^5:4. Logical Positivism, sometimes called Logical Empiricism, asserts that philosophy- logic in particular- can say nothing about what is ‘out there’. Logic provided rules of inference to assist the scientific method. Experiments and observation provided ALL knowledge of the real world. Positivists still had hope of salvaging the idea of verification – that it is somehow possible to verify that our perception of what happens “out there” is actually true “out there” Philosophy is valid for defining terms and constructing rules of valid reasoning for the scientific method but that knowledge about the outside world can be gained only by using the scientific method to parse empirical or experiential observation or experiment. In other words, philosophy was used to construct the scientific method, but it was the scientist, as practitioner of the scientific method, who gathered knowledge about the world

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This, however, did not solve the subject-object problem. If philosophy knows nothing about the world ‘out there,’ how is it possible for philosophers to develop rules of inference that apply ‘out there ’? Logical Positivism does not make any provision for people to know that the categories of our perception correspond to categories as they exist “out there” or external to us. The practice of drawing inferences from observations or experiments involved a leap of faith. Since we can’t exhaustively observe everything, we observe a sample with the belief that the results of a sufficiently large and representative sample will correspond to the results of the whole. This approach was flawed for two reasons. In order to know whether our sample is representative and sufficiently large, we would have to already know something about the whole before we can construct our experiment. How does man, beginning from the self as a frame of reference, do this?

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A philosopher named Karl Popper comes along. In his book,The Logic of Scientific Discovery, he destroys the idea that man can verify the world “out there.” Popper argues that there is no logical demarcation for concluding that inferences are reasonable leaps of faith and others are unreasonable by using induction. This is because it is logically impossible to reduce universal statements to a finite set of particular statements.^5:5 No matter how many observations one makes, the next observation could falsify the theory. Any such attempt to draw a universal statement out of a particular one is risky – it is a leap of faith

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In order to quantify the likelihood of an inference being true, we would need to know something of the whole prior to starting the experiment; if we need this knowledge before the experiment, we cannot rely on applying the scientific method to these experiments to gain the knowledge. Without knowing something about the whole in order to quantify the risk of the inference being incorrect, then the inference itself is no more than a blind guess. There is no logical demarcation between reasonable leaps of faith and mystical leaps of faith.

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Popper proposed what he called the falsifiability criterion.^5:6 Science could never verify anything, but a scientist would test hypotheses to see if they would be falsified. Hypotheses that were not falsified would be accepted. The falsification criterion avoids the issue of inductive inferences committing the informal fallacy of sampling bias^5:7or hasty generalization^5:8. It also fits well with the deductive aspects of the scientific method. Experiments and observations can test only the consequences, and falsification is the only valid inference^5:9.

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Falsification, however, suffers the same fundamental limitation as verification. Neither can actually reach the external world. No way to be certain that it is the external world and not a particular perception of it that falsifies the hypothesis. If rules of inference tell us nothing about the real world, then Popper’s falsification criterion – as a rule of inference – cannot tell us anything about the external world.

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Analytic Philosophy states that logic – rules of inference – says nothing about the real world but reflects only the relations of terms used in language^5:10. If logic does not apply in the real world, then the scientific method collapses. None of these philosophies answers how we can move beyond our perception of reality to verify what is out there. We don’t see what is out there, but only our perception of what is there. How do we know that there is anything beyond our perception if we cannot see beyond our perception? This logically leads to Postmodernism, which sees logic and science as nothing more than linguistic and social constructs. Postmodernists have concluded that we cannot know anything beyond our perception.

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In the next section, I will show that there is a sufficient condition for knowledge and a sufficient explanation for the big issues. These can be explained in a theistic worldview.

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Chapter 5 References

1. “I Think, Therefore I am.”, Wikiquote

http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/I_think_therefore_I_am

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2. “David Hume”, section on Empiricism, para2, StanfordEncyclopedia of Philosophy

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/hume/#Emp

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3. “Kant’s Theory of Judgment”, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kant-judgment/

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4. “Logical Empiricism”, section “Empiricism, Verificationism, and Anti-Metaphysics”, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy