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Category Archives: Epistemology

Carl F. Henry, Ways of Knowing.5

11 Tuesday Oct 2016

Posted by memoirandremains in Carl F Henry, Church History, Epistemology, Uncategorized

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Carl F Henry, Church History, epistemology, God Revelation and Authority, Schleiermacher, The Ways of Knowing

The previous post on Henry’s essay, “Ways of Knowing” can be found here.

In the next section of the essay, Henry considers Experience as the basis for knowledge.

Empiricism: Empiricism relies upon the senses rather than upon intuition. However, that simple concept has undergone significant development over history.

Mystics: Mystics argue that their experiences should not be ruled out of court merely because they are not shared by all. However, in contemporary philosophy only objective sense information constitutes an acceptable experience to consider.

Aristotle/Thomas and Modern Empiricism: Aristotle and Thomas considered empiricism as a first step: “perceptual induction”can then lead to propositions upon which one can build. Thomas famously developed proofs for God based upon empirical perception of the world without resort to revelation.

Modern empiricism could not tolerate such a thing:

The special interest of empiricism, moreover, is to identify events for the sake of the prediction and control of perceptual experience, rather than to render them comprehensively intelligible in relation to metaphysical reality (cf. Edwin A. Burtt, Types of Religious Philosophy, pp. 197 ff.).

Carl F. H. Henry, God, Revelation, and Authority, vol. 1 (Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books, 1999), 79.

Applied to Theology:  Hume attacked the Thomistic proposition that one could move from empirical observation to proof of God:

Thomistic contention that the existence of God, and the existence and immortality of the soul, are logically demonstrable simply through empirical considerations independent of divine revelation.1 Hume’s contention was that those who profess theological beliefs on empirical grounds have no right to such beliefs unless they produce requisite perceptual evidence, and that in the absence of demonstrative empirical proof, belief is unreasonable.

Carl F. H. Henry, God, Revelation, and Authority, vol. 1 (Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books, 1999), 79–80.

Henry then draws an interesting line between Hume and Schleiermacher: Schleiermacher expanded the scope of empirical data to “religious consciousness” rather than mere cognition. He grounded Christianity in the human experience — thus attempting to rescue  knowledge of God from Humean skepticism but at the cost of a supernatural Christianity:

Schleiermacher boldly identified the empirical method as adequate to deal with religious concerns and decisive for the fortunes of Christianity, yet he sought at the same time to broaden the definition of empiricism so that—contrary to Hume’s skeptical analysis of theological claims—an appeal to the religious consciousness could yield a positive and constructive verdict. Schleiermacher considered feeling rather than cognition the locus of religious experience, and he applied the empirical method hopefully to the claims of Christian theism. Rejecting the historic evangelical emphasis that the truth of revelation rests on an authority higher than science, Schleiermacher broke with miraculous Christianity and held that all events must conform to empirically verifiable law.

Carl F. H. Henry, God, Revelation, and Authority, vol. 1 (Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books, 1999), 80.

This trajectory leaves open the development of a completely new religion still calling itself “Christianity” without maintaining the same revelatory content (which has happened in great deal in the West).

As Henry notes, what sort of rationale can ground one’s claim of “religious experience” or “truth”. Even empiricism generally can be of little use beyond analysis of material objects:  “But how does one arrive at a permanently valid ought, at fixed norms of any kind, by the empirical method of knowing?” (P. 83) That of course has not stopped many from claiming an absolute authority for empiricism.

It does boast engineering feats, but such feats do not prove or disprove anything with respect to God. One can simply cannot argue from “I made a bridge” to “There is no God.” As Henry explains:

Taken by itself, the empirical method provides no basis for affirming or denying supernatural realities, since by definition it is a method for dealing only with perceptible realities. It cannot, therefore, validate supraperceptible being; nor can it validate moral norms either or confirm past historical events in present public experience. The empiricist must acknowledge that his method leads finally to one of many possible views, and not to final certainty about anything.

Carl F. H. Henry, God, Revelation, and Authority, vol. 1 (Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books, 1999), 85.

 

 

If you comprehend, it is not God ….

27 Wednesday Jul 2016

Posted by memoirandremains in Augustine, Epistemology, Theology, Uncategorized

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Augustine, knowledge of God

Involved here is a matter of profound religious importance, to which Augustine gave expression as follows: “We are speaking of God. Is it any wonder if you do not comprehend? For if you comprehend, it is not God you comprehend. Let it be a pious confession of ignorance rather than a rash profession of knowledge. To attain some slight knowledge of God is a great blessing; to comprehend him, however, is totally impossible.” [Quoting Augustine, Lectures on the Gospel of John, tract. 38, NPNF (1), VII, 217–21.]

Herman Bavinck, John Bolt, and John Vriend, Reformed Dogmatics: God and Creation, vol. 2 (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2004), 48.

We Murder to Dissect

28 Tuesday May 2013

Posted by memoirandremains in Epistemology, John Frame

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Duchess, epistemology, John Frame, poem, Poetry, The Doctrine of the Knowledge of God, The Tables Turned, Theory, Wallace Stevens, William Wordsworth

We Murder to Dissect

John Frame begins his volume The Doctrine of the Knowledge of God with the observation that knowledge depends upon its object:  what we can know, how we can know differs with the object of knowledge. For example, today I read story of a “photograph” of a hydrogen atom. That photograph provided a kind of knowledge obtained in a specific manner. Such knowledge is true – but it is not comprehensive. Moreover such knowledge differs fundamentally from the knowledge I have of my family members.

Even the barest consider will demonstrate his point, “Our criteria, methods and goals in knowledge all depend on what we seek to know” (9).

To confuse the appropriate form of knowledge for a particular object would be to miss the object altogether. Wordsworth drew this out in his poem, “The Tables Turned”:

         UP! up! my Friend, and quit your books;

          Or surely you’ll grow double:

          Up! up! my Friend, and clear your looks;

          Why all this toil and trouble?

 

          The sun, above the mountain’s head,

          A freshening lustre mellow

          Through all the long green fields has spread,

          His first sweet evening yellow.

 

          Books! ’tis a dull and endless strife:

          Come, hear the woodland linnet,                             10

          How sweet his music! on my life,

          There’s more of wisdom in it.

 

The ‘friend’ who seeks nature in his books – in scientific study, if you will – will miss the beauty and wonder of nature in his study of nature.  Wordsworth contends that the friend has brought the wrong means to study the object. Thus, in “studying” the friend misses everything of importance – in fact he destroys the object in his search:

          Sweet is the lore which Nature brings;

          Our meddling intellect

          Mis-shapes the beauteous forms of things:–

          We murder to dissect.

 

          Enough of Science and of Art;

          Close up those barren leaves;                               30

          Come forth, and bring with you a heart

          That watches and receives.

 

This same principle applies to theology, “Knowing God is something utterly unique, since God himself is unique” (9).  Much of the argument about God hinges upon this plain proposition: God is not known the way knows the batting average of a baseball player; a wife cannot be known the way one knows a spider. God cannot be known the way one knows types of coffee. And yet, we often grow frustrated with a personal God who will only be known personally.

Now God – as all things and all persons – is not and cannot be known absent the knowledge of other objects.  God is known in his relationship to his creation – just as a child is known in relationship to a parent: the relationship is a fundamental aspect of the knowledge[1]. 

This implies a much broader understanding of knowledge, “So we cannot know God without knowing other things at the same time”. We cannot know God as Creator without knowing (in some manner) creation. [2] Now this problem of knowledge of God becomes all the greater when we think that we are within the scope of God’s creation – there is not some unbiased place from which to observe. It is as if one seeks to know about a person, but only after the relationship is established – as a child has no potential space to know the parent except from the vantage of being a child.


[1] Wallace Stevens gets at some of this in his poem “Theory:

I am what is around me.

Women understand this.
One is not duchess
A hundred yards from a carriage.

These, then are portraits:
A black vestibule;
A high bed sheltered by curtains.

These are merely instances.

[2] Wallace Steven’s poem, “Theory” illustrates this fact of relatoin

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