The subject is epistemology. It is a question of knowing and how we do it. The longest portion of this essay will be about that. The shorter part is about how this relates to faith. In my last essay, I wrote that I was an atheist. The reason I bring up faith here is that there are those that claim to know by faith. I hope to be able to demonstrate that this doesn't make sense. I will do this in Part 2 as this essay is quite long enough.
The above paragraph may seem to imply that all atheists are rational. This is not necessarily the case. You may recall that all that is required to be an atheist is a lack of belief in gods. Being an atheist is a non-position. Though I wear the label proudly (mostly because it provokes) I aspire to be acknowledged as a skeptic and an intellectual. The terms imply that I give careful consideration to positions before accepting them. Atheism is the lack of acceptance of gods. It is a negative stance. That doesn't mean a bad stance. It just means that to define yourself solely as an atheist is to define yourself solely by what you are not. Skepticism and intellectualism implies something positive (not necessarily good): that I posses certain attributes.
So, how do we know? This question has been the subject of much debate for several thousand years. So it seems improbable that I'll answer that question definitively. Indeed, how the brain works is a subject as yet unmastered. I can't answer the question of how the brain stores and retrieves information. But perhaps we can address how we acquire knowledge and how we know that we really really know it.
The way we acquire information is through our senses. As far as I know, there is no other way. If we learn something by reading, we use our eyes (or fingers, if one is blind). If we learn something in school, we add to our use of eyes our use of ears. We learn that fire is hot through touch. We learn that skunks can smell bad through our noses and that chocolate is wonderful through taste. There is no information that we acquire that comes to our brains any other way. There are those that dispute this, but I'll deal with that in Part 2.
So information comes to the brain. What do we do with it? This is where reasoning comes in. Broadly speaking we may say that reasoning is the name that we give the process of analyzing the input. Some of us may have bad reasoning and some of us may have good reasoning. What distinguishes good and bad reasoning? Good reasoning is simply that reasoning which when we apply it to the world around us we see what we were expecting. That is, good reasoning is that which tells the truth about the world.
The pinnacle of reasoning is usually considered to be deductive reasoning. Two examples of this are seen in my last essay: modus ponens and modus tollens. In general, deductive reasoning is where we infer a conclusion from a set of premises. A sound syllogism (a group of premises with a conclusion) is one where the conclusion is correctly derived via the rules of logic. A conclusion may be false even if the syllogism is sound. Soundness is determined by whether the rules are followed. This can happen when the premises are false. The rules of deductive logic don't saying anything about where the premises come from. The rules are about getting to a conclusion from those premises, whatever they may be. So when you are engaged in a logical argument, if your opponent's conclusion is sound you can still win by attacking the premises.
The reason, I think, that deductive reasoning is considered primary is that it gives a certain amount of certainty. If the rules are followed, we know with certainty that the conclusion is true. Well, provided that the premises are true. That's the catch. How does one know that the premises are true?
There two ways that a premise can be established as true. The first is inductive logic (I'll deal with this a little later); the second is more deductive logic. A premise may be the conclusion of some other syllogism. This is very seductive. Perhaps we can demonstrate that everything derives from somewhere and everything that is true is also provable and absolutely certain. Wouldn't it be lovely.
As it turns out, this cannot be done. Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead published a book titled Principia Mathematica. The goal of this book was to ground mathematics in logic and to show that the logic was both consistent and complete. Unfortunately, after it was published, Kurt Gödel proved that it was impossible to be both consistent and complete. As far as I know, this conclusion is not in dispute. A short discussion can be found here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principia_Mathematica#G.C3.B6del_1930.2C_1931
This means that any consistent logical system of thought must rest on unprovable axioms—at least unprovable deductively. Some get around this by certain things are properly basic. By this, as best I can tell, they mean that certain things are self-evident and require neither evidence nor deduction. Something is true because it is true and everyone knows it. In the cases, I've seen this it seems obvious that this is an excuse to not deal with lack of evidence for propositions that the arguer wants to be taken as a given. For example, William Lane Craig wants the proposition that God exists to be considered properly basic. (A discussion of “Basic belief” can be found here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_belief. You can find a 4-part lecture by Craig on Youtube.) I have my doubts that anything at all is properly basic.
An example of a properly basic idea is Descartes's Cogito ergo sum, “I think, therefore I am.” This idea isn't considered an axiom, per se, but rather incorrigible. That is to say, so persistent that we can't get rid of it. Here is why I disagree: the sense of self is something acquired by children as they grow. The narcissist, I think, is a narcissist because he fails to distinguish in his own mind the difference between himself and the rest of the world. In some sense, though this is more properly solipsism, we can see that the narcissist sees others as an extension of himself; they exist to serve him. Such a person gets unreasonably angry when one those that ought to be under his control won't do what he wants. I see this as a failure to grow out of infancy. An infant, perhaps, perceives his mother as an extension of itself. When it wants food, it gets it. When its diaper is dirty, it gets changed. As a child matures, it learns that its mother is a distinct person with distinct feelings and desires. This observation is not innate. It is acquired through induction and analogy. The idea of analogy can be seen in this ... um ... analogy: Somebody hits me with a rock, I cry; I hit someone else with a rock, they cry; ergo, they feel what I felt. Various psychological problems, I think, can be seen as a failure to make the analogy.
I remember when my daughter came into this awareness. She was about 8 as I recall. She and her mother were having a fight. My daughter kept insisting that my wife do something for her and that she should want to do that for her and how much it bothered her that my wife wouldn't. My wife kept telling her that she had feelings too. Every time my daughter would say something such as “But I wanted that,” my wife would respond, “But I didn't.” After sometime the light came on. She got it. I can almost remember a literal “ohhhhh.” Suddenly, she was able to put herself in someone else' shoes.
If someone understands the words “I think, therefore I am”, then I think they've ready inductively begun to understand his separateness. The idea is only incorrigible inasmuch as the person has already acquired it inductively and cannot conceive of not being or not thinking.
So what is this induction? It is the process by which we infer from what has happened before what will happen next. This is generally considered secondary to deductive reasoning because there is no absolute certainty about knowledge acquired this way. Indeed, this is known as the problem of induction. The fact the sun has risen every day of every year for at least 4 billion years does not allow us 100% certainty that it will rise tomorrow (speaking phenomenologically). I contend however that it is justification for believing it. Nevertheless, a asteroid of sufficient mass and angle of approach smacking the Earth could stop our rotation. But in the absence of information that contradicts our induction, we are justified in persisting in holding the conclusion.
Imagine that you overhear me counting “three, five, seven”, you might reasonably conclude that I was counting odd numbers. I would say you are justified in saying so. However, imagine that I then say “eleven.” Well, if you are somewhat mathematically inclined you'd probably guess that I was actually counting prime numbers. (For this example, you didn't here me counting until I said "three".) You would be justified. But suppose the next number was fifteen. That's not prime. You might puzzle for a while, but if you felt inclined to make a guess you might I had a pattern that involved the differences between the numbers. The first two differences were two. Now you have two differences of four, perhaps the next number will be nineteen. But it is likely you are wrong. I already had two steps of 4. Perhaps I will go back to two or perhaps I will go to six or even 8. And the guessing game could go on indefinitely involving cycles of repetition and layers upon layers. In each case you make an inference. In each case you are justified. But, in each case you could be wrong and in this example you were.
My point then is this. Everything that anyone might contend is properly basic is in fact induced. You might object that “1 + 1 = 2” is properly basic. Think about how you might teach a three year old this concept. You hold up a pencil and say “one”. Then you hold up a second pencil and say “two”. Then you repeat. If you are strategic in your teaching, you then pick up oranges to show that it applies to other things. What confuses the issue is the idea of categories or, more precisely, the naming of things that are. When there is one object, we say “one”. When there are two objects, we say “two”. It is the name of the circumstance that there are two objects there. Addition is the name we give the process of the state of “one” becoming the state of “two”. Children probably notice this subconsciously over and over again by the time someone tries to teach the words that go with observation. We call it obvious, but only because it always matches up with reality. Is this reality always the case? Actually no. Sort of. When we add one liter of water to one liter of water to one liter of water we get two liters. However, if we add a liter of water to a liter of vinegar (if I recall correctly) we get less than 2 liters of solution. Why? Because the molecules of one fill in some of the space between the molecules of the other. So we learn that if one wants to add two things they need to be in the same category and the answer will be in the same category. One object plus one object equals two objects. However, one apple and one orange is neither two apples nor two oranges. Since an apple is an object and an orange is an object, we could still say we have two objects, or even two specimens of fruit.
Some have argued that I should believe in God since I believe in love. The problem here is twofold. One is that even though I cannot measure love, I observe that which I call love. I don't observe whatever it is that people call god. The second problem is what love actually is. I aver that love is the name we give to a category of behavior. It isn't a thing at all. If people didn't behave in a way that could be called love as we recognize it in this reality then we wouldn't have a name for it.
So how do you know? You observe the world around you, you make inferences about how the world is, you act on that knowledge, revise, rinse and repeat. This is reasoning; this is learning; success indicates knowledge.
In Part 2, we will consider the claim that faith is a means of knowing.
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