An Introduction to Epistemology (Part 1)
Let me begin with some fundamentals. Epistemology is not the study of pistons in a car or the study of whether some drunk guy went to the toilet on himself. It is the study of how we know things. In this article we are going to look at a brief history of this and why it is important and next week how we as Christians can respond to post-modernism, which is more or less in vogue at the moment.
This whole thing really started with a guy called Rene Descartes (1596-1650). Essentially he wanted to know if he could trust his senses or not. After all, what we “see” and “hear” in dreams is not real, so how do I know I am not dreaming now? Indeed how do I know I am not imagining all this? Or even: What if I am merely a part of someone else's imagination?
While he was thinking this it occurred to him that he was doing the thinking, not someone else. This became the basis of his knowing about anything—“I think, therefore I am”. People holding this view are called “rationalist” because they see the essence of knowing comes from man thinking.
It wasn't long before people began to realize that this couldn't be all there is to knowing. John Locke (1632-1704) and David Hume (1711-1776) both argued that the mind was in fact a clean slate and then we learn from the world. As Locke put it “there is nothing in the mind except what was first in the senses”. These guys are called empiricists because they see that knowledge can only be known empirically, that is, from observing the world.
While both camps were disagreeing with each other, Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) saw that both were partly right and partly wrong. The world could be known through our senses and yet our mind influences how we see the world. The marriage of empiricism and rationalism meant a new positive attitude that people had to knowing about the world. This found its height at the start of the 20th century as people could see that given enough time and resources mankind could know anything and do anything. This is the essence of what is known as modernism.
It only took a couple of world-wars and some disasters like the Titanic (the ship not the movie) for people to ask questions about whether people could really do what modernism was promising. At the same time cultural and linguistic studies were taking off which made people ask the question, “is our perspective the right one?” A movement called “postmodernism” arose that declared that we cannot know anything objectively, only what we interpret of the world. This leaves us with most people not really knowing if we know anything of the world.
There is of course another foundation for knowing: revelation. It happens every day. Your lecturers reveal things about your course and subjects to you in lectures. But then this is information passed on—where does it stop? The Bible tells us that the way we know everything about the world is because God has revealed it and given us His Spirit.
“For who among men knows the thoughts of a man except the man's spirit within him? In the same way no one knows the thoughts of God except the Spirit of God. We have not received the spirit of the world but the Spirit who is from God, that we may understand what God has freely given us.” (1 Corinthians 2:11-12)
Pete Hughes
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