US History discussion on Metaphysics and Epistemology

From an exchange in US History II (DF 8, Thread "The Unsetting, Unsettling Sun"):

We were discussing the 1920s and the rise of the liberal churches and a widespread rejection of Christianity and the Bible as literal truth. We discussed this in part as it manifested in evolutionary theory, but this thread dealt more with the widespread rejection of the Bible's infallibility on the supposed grounds that science made authority unnecessary and made nonsense of some Biblical statements (e.g., that the sun stood still in Joshua 10). The italicized portions are my classmates' posts, the plain text ones are mine.

In any case, I likewise think that it is sad, not so much that people accepted some form of evolution, but that they then proceeded to build their theology on this idea of evolutionary progress--i.e., postmillenialism, the perfectibility of man, man's inherent/progressive goodness, etc. I am a six-day, young earth creationist, don't get me wrong, but, so long as my fellow Christians hold to a universe that is governed by God's providence (i.e., there is no random evolution, and no materialistic evolution), I personally think there are bigger fish to fry than theistic evolution. In any case, in apologetics, you must first deal with how unbelievers interpret the evidence before evidence contrary to their views means anything to them; this is what I appreciate about presuppositional apologetics.

But before I go off on that tangent (and no, I'm not debating that point), it has also struck me how theories of science affect theories of man and philosophy. Specifically, I have not been able to grasp before how one could make the leap from saying that matter, time, and space are relative to saying that morals and truth are relative. I was pondering it today, though, and it hit me--this makes perfect sense in a material world. If matter is all there is, and truth and morality are merely byproducts of matter, and matter is relative, then it follows indeed that truth and morality are relative.

Then again, if matter is relative, and our minds are merely matter, then even our perception of reality is relative--but to what? It would be more accurate to say that we (if we can even use personal pronouns) can have no confidence that our minds have any correlation to what is really there--it may be ordered or it may not be, but our minds cannot know because we don't even know what our minds are.

Epistemology and metaphysics are inextricably intertwined, and the major question of each (what is? How do we know?) must be answered simultaneously, in both objective being and subjective knowledge of that being and of our own being--I believe that the objective and unchanging revelation of God and the world in Scripture and the faith (being subjective knowledge correlative to objective being, not Kierkegaard's "leap") that is a gift imparted sovereignly by God to His are the only sufficient answers for those questions.

Okay, so that's my idea of philosophy, history, and science in a nutshell.... People can either make themselves the arbiters of what is and what can be known (and since we are finite reference points, this should be self-evidently foolish), or we can accept the rightful claim of the Lord who created us and the universe and thus has the right to interpret it and tell us what is, who we are, and what our meaning is.


"If matter is all there is, and truth and morality are merely byproducts of matter, and matter is relative, then it follows indeed that truth and morality are relative."

While matter may change, do the laws affecting matter change?

Aha! I knew this was bound to come up sooner or later. This strikes at the heart of materialism.

What laws? How do we know that there are laws? We observe that something happens over and over again (say, the sun rises every morning), and say that this is a "law," but, strictly speaking, it's not. "The sun rises every morning" is descriptive of what we have observed, but is not prescriptive because we have observed it. We cannot say with absolute certainty, only with high probability, that the sun will rise tomorrow. To say that it is a prescriptive certainty, we'd have to have access to all information about all the universe, and not just the fact, but also the meaning and relation of those facts. We do not have those, and if we are dealing with an atheistic worldview, no one does.
So, in materialism, it is an ASSUMPTION that there are unchangeable laws governing matter. As I was pointing out before, in the materialistic worldview, the world may or may not be ordered--we don't know. If we try to observe and make sense of it, we are ASSUMING A) that there is a reality outside our minds, B) that our minds are ordered and can have knowledge correlative to reality and C) that reality can be ordered. Note that, in trying to decide whether the universe is rational or not, it is ASSUMED that our minds are rational. But our minds are part of the material universe, so this point, by their standard, should not be assumed. Rationalism, from the start, assumes itself, but without good reason.

If you want to say that we can't know universal laws as absolutes (which, I'll concede, we can't), you're left with a few things.

1) God. But what if, as Descartes posited, "God" is merely a malicious demon out to deceive me? What if, as he further posited, "God" is my projection of authority onto a creation of my own imagination? Both of those show that it's possible (unlikely, but possible) that God does not exist and does not reveal Himself.

2) My senses. My senses are, in essence, five ways in which my brain interprets electrical signals. Sight, Sound, Scent, Taste, and Touch are all in my mind. It is possible (unlikely, but possible) that everything I sense is, as in a dream, just a figment of my imagination.

3) My mind. This is really a two-parter. My brain, which may or may not exist (again - it likely does, but there's that slim chance that it doesn't and I'm just a metaphysical consciousness), and my consciousness (important enough to be a fourth point).

4) My consciousness. I am. I exist. I know I exist because I am conscious of the question of my existence. I think, therefore I am. If I know nothing else absolutely, I know that I exist because, if I didn't exist, I wouldn't be thinking about this.

None of that is to say that objective reality's actual existence is doubtful, but it is to say that, like the rising of the sun, there is the slimmest of chances that the earth does not exist, that my senses mislead me, that God does not exist, and that I am the only inhabitant of reality.


1) I'll deal with this more fully in point 4, but for now note that even Descartes eventually deduced that, for his mind to exist and have any correlation to reality, there had to be a God external to himself. He was self-conscious first, chronologically, but his self-consciousness presupposed an external God.

2) Agreed.

3) As you separate the idea of consciousness from the necessity of a brain, I agree with your summary so far as it goes, though I must note that it is incompatible with materialism. In a truly materialistic world, all things must be explained in terms of matter/energy (which, as you'll remember, have recently been discovered to be interchangeable. ;-)).

4) .1 First of all, as noted above, for a consciousness to exist without matter is contradictory to the fundamental assumption of materialism--that all phenomena can be eventually explained in terms of matter. That is what we were originally discussing. Descartes was not a strict materialist, and in fact was a rationalist in a specific sense (which, in his time, was opposed to an empiricist). I use "rationalist" in the broader sense of "a believer in objective reality and our ability to understand it by our use of reason," as opposed to "irrationalist"; if Ayn Rand's specific philosophy hadn't already been labeled "objectivism," "objectivism v. subjectivism" would be a fair denominator of the two points. Both Descartes' rationalism and Hume's empiricism would fall under objectivism in that broad sense. Existentialism and New Age philosophy would fall under subjectivism--Hinduism would be more precisely described as "irrationalist."

Okay, so with the understanding that this goes beyond the strict materialism (empiricism) which was at issue in the first place, I continue. ;-)

4.2. First of all, realize that the truth of "I think, therefore I am" is under debate. I haven't read the argument myself, but someone, I think Nietszche or Hegel, posited that being itself was merely a result of abstract Idea--in other words, "I" is a result of Thought which no one is thinking, but just exists in some abstract sense. So even then, there is no concrete "I." Indeed, if being is a product of Idea, then ultimately you come to the point, I think, where you cannot distinguish being and thus "I" becomes nonsense as a distinguisher (think of the "nirvana" of Buddhism, wherein identity is lost).

Anyway, my point is that Descartes' argument is not absolutely fool-proof, from the standpoint of unrevealed philosophy.

4.3 Also note that Descartes, though he was first self-conscious, realized that his self-consciousness did not merely point to the existence of a transcendent, eternal being (God), but REQUIRED it. Descartes would disagree that you (or he or "I") could possibly be the only inhabitant of reality. God is required.

Read a summary of his argument here.


4.4 Further, to return strictly to your argument, even if we know that I exist ("I" defined as the being doubting), it is, for the materialist, a leap of faith to begin making judgments on material reality and on the nature of his existence. He must KNOW the nature of his existence before he can trust his ability to reason, and he cannot reason out the nature of his existence for precisely that reason. There is a necessity for innate knowledge or granted knowledge.

4.5 Christian theology provides some grounds of innate knowledge. Romans 1 says that all men know that God exists and at least some of His attributes. It may also be in 1, but it's somewhere in the Pauline epistles, wherein it is said that all men also know, in some sense, right and wrong. It is because they actively suppress that knowledge that they do not acknowledge it.

Further, Christ is revealed by granted knowledge. He cannot be discovered or rendered reasonable simply by rationalization (1 Corinthians 1, 2) but is revealed by the Spirit to those whom God has chosen. Those who do not believe "do not believe because you are not my sheep." (John 10:26). Those who do believe do so because belief has been granted them--faith is a gift (Ephesians 2:8) and is not just trust, not Kierkegaard's "leap" (as too many mainstream churches present it), not simply a subjective choice, but knowledge. Pistos is the Greek word for faith, and you may recognize that as the root for "epistemology," the study of theories of knowledge. "Faith is the substance of things hoped for and the evidence of things not seen."

Faith is not the opposite of reason, but is rather the grounds of reason--one could just as well call one's faith one's assumptions or presuppositions. The materialist assumes that reality exists and that it can be ordered and future decisions can be accurately extrapolated from it. In a sense, these assumptions are a faith. I believe, however, that these assumptions are faulty and will ultimately lead to self-contradiction (and, btw, I don't believe that one can reach Christian faith strictly by the operation of autonomous reason). The Christian's implanted faith in God is the grounds for his reason, and is consistent in its epistemology and metaphysics--the questions of those fields (what is? How do we know?) are simultaneously answered by God. God is and has created us, and we know because He tells us both objectively in Scriptural revelation and subjectively by the witness of the Spirit which enables us to accept His objective revelation.

"The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom." Proverbs 1:7