By Authority

In the last two posts I have looked at reason and experience as sources of knowledge. I will now discuss my last category: authority.

By “authority” I mean, in essence, taking someone else's word as an accurate source of knowledge. The vast majority of what we know about the world is known through authority. The schooling that we spend almost two decades of our lives in, is almost entirely about our gaining knowledge through the use of authority. Have you ever sailed or flown around the world with the purpose of discovering whether or not it is round or flat? No, you first believed it to be round because someone told you that it was.

Almost all of our knowledge of history is based on authority. Men in the past wrote things about their time that men today read. Even archeology, which some might argue is a purely experiential means of gaining knowledge, actually relies quite a bit on inscriptions and drawings, which are simply men of the past telling men of today about the world in which they lived. And, of course, as soon as the archeologist begins to tell anyone about his findings the listener is relying on the authority of the archeologist for his knowledge.
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C.S. Lewis spoke of this saying that if we will refuse to accept authority as a source of knowledge then we must be content to know very little about the world.

If the fact that I cited C. S. Lewis helped to persuade you that authority is a genuine and indispensable source of knowledge, then you have been persuaded by the use of authority. First the authority of the Lewis and secondly my own authority in recounting it to you.

Thoughts Continued

In my last post, I divided all of our sources of knowledge into three categories: experience, reason, and authority. I then discussed how experience works to give us knowledge about the world. I would now like to move to 'reason'.

Reason or logic is a method for discovering knowledge or truths about the world that is fundamentally an enterprise of the mind. It begins with some fact or axiom or assumption and based on these starting points attempts to draw conclusions about the world. It is a way of linking together information so that other information is revealed. Reason and logic may take slightly different forms but all those forms possess a similar structure. A man first states a proposition or multiple propositions. This proposition is presented as reason or evidence for the truthfulness of another proposition which in turn is meant to provide reason or evidence for third proposition. This process continues until a particular conclusion is reached. 

A syllogism is one form that this process can take that was very popular among the ancient Greek philosophers. A syllogism might be structured something like this:

                                   All men are mortal

                                   Socrates is a man.

                                   Therefore, Socrates is mortal. 

Reason was held to be especially important in discovering truth for the ancient Greeks. They found little use for studying the physical world as a means to gain knowledge but rather relied heavily on the process of logical reasoning to discover truths about the world. The Platonic concepts of ideal forms surely played a role in why this was the case. The forms that they were seeking to understand were not physical and therefore not available to be scrutinized under a microscope (assuming they had invented microscopes). 

Reason as a primary means of discovering truth was also very popular during the Scholasticism of the High Middle Ages and during the Enlightenment. Rene Descartes is famous for his statement, “I think, therefore, I am.” In this statement he was attempting to find a proposition that could not possibly be doubted so that he could then begin to lay claim to the veracity of other truths arrived at through the process of reason.

A Few Thoughts about Thought

Have you ever thought about your thoughts? About how you know what you know? The study of where knowledge comes from, that is, what our source or sources of knowledge are, is call epistemology. Now I am no philosopher, but I have been thinking about this topic lately. As far as I have been able to discern there are only three categories that our knowledge of the world around us can stem from: experience, reason, and authority.

I'll start with experience. I'm using the term 'experience' to describe our interaction with the physical world. When we walk outside and find that it is raining, we have learned something about the weather of that particular day. When we put a pot of water over fire, we discover that, after time, the water will boil. When we strike a pane of glass with a hard object such as a stone or a stick, we find out that glass breaks. There are countless numbers of things that can be learned from direct experience and observation. The scientific method relies on just such a principle. The scientist devises an experiment in order to observe some sort of condition, interaction, or situation that he wants to learn about. Plant A grew taller than Plant B when compound X was added to the soil of former. The scientific method attempts to systematize what we all do on a daily basis, namely, learn about the world around us through direct observation.

Now, there is another part of experience that is equally important to mention and that is our emotions. Very little of what we experience in a given day is unaccompanied by our own internal reaction to it. You might be very excited by the rain if you are a farmer with dry fields or you could be irritated by it if you have a long walk to the post office and have no umbrella. Boiling water is nice and can produce feelings of contentment when accompanied with tea leaves and a little honey. Boiling water poured into your lap, however, would not produce those feelings of contentment. The emotional reactions that we have to the various things that we encounter in the course of a day are themselves a kind of raw fact, much like the raw fact that water boils. Simply because we have some degree of control over our emotions (and some people have less control than others) does not change the fact that the emotions we feel are important bits of information about the world. If you think one thing to be good and another bad, that is possibly just your opinion. If something makes you happy and another disgusts you, your happiness or disgust are facts in and of themselves.

Salvation from what?

Arthur W. Pink once wrote:

The nature of Christ's salvation is woefully misrepresented by the present-day "evangelist." He announces a Savior from hell rather than a Savior from sin. And that is why so many are fatally deceived, for there are multitudes who wish to escape the Lake of fire who have no desire to be delivered from their carnality and worldliness. The very first thing said of Him in the New Testament is, "Thou shalt call His name Jesus, for He shall save His people (not "from the wrath to come," but) from their sins." (Matt. 1:21) Christ is a Savior for those realizing something of the exceeding sinfulness of sin, who feel the awful burden of it on their conscience, who loathe themselves for it, who long to be freed from its terrible dominion; and a Savior for no others. Were He to "save from hell" those still in love with sin, He would be a Minister of sin, condoning their wickedness and siding with them against God. What an unspeakably horrible and blasphemous thing with which to charge the Holy One!

 Pink, here, points out the foolishness in a message that focuses on Hell rather than freedom from our own wickedness.  A desire to be freed from the sin that separates us from God, and thereby be reconciled to God, is what ought to drive a sinner to his knees.  But, oh, if Pink only knew what was to come after the preachers of his own day!  At least the preachers who wrongly focused on Hell were still preaching that which was true.  We are saved from Hell by Christ's death and resurrection even if our escaping Hell is not the thing we should rejoice in as much as our reunion with God is.  But today the situation has deteriorated into almost unfathomable lows.  Prosperity Gospel preachers like Joel Osteen and Kenneth Copeland would have you believe that you are saved from your sickness and poverty.  Leftists like Jim Wallis and Katharine Jefferts Schori would have you believe that salvation isn't really about the individual anyway, its about the kingdom of God (meaning leftist politics) and that it is the environment that is to be saved.  Then you have Brian McLaren, Rob Bell, and all of their copycats that don't really seem to know what salvation is but they are sure it has nothing to do with Jesus dying to save us from our sins.  Finally, you have people like the leaders of the Evangelical Lutheran Church who just recently officially recognized three lesbians as pastors within their denomination.  For them the clear teaching of scripture that homosexual conduct is a sin didn't seem to be a valid reason to call for their repentance rather than their promotion.  Much to the contrary, it was the leadership's failure to commit this travesty sooner for which they apologized.

Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness, who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter! Isaiah 5:20

 I really do fear for people like that.  Rather than preaching that Jesus sets us free from our sins, they have gone so far in the opposite direction that they are condemning the idea that sin needs to be repented of or that there is really anything that "feels good" to them that could possibly be considered sin.  It is a sad state that our Church is in today.  If this isn't the beginnings of the Great Apostasy then I can't even begin to rap my mind around how bad things will be when it comes.  Heaven help us.

Endless accommodation

I was reading an article from Albert Mohler's blog about the Catholic Church's accommodations to evolutionary theory 60 years ago in the papal encyclical Humani Generis. (article here) In rapping up the article Mohler says:

"For evangelicals, the direct lesson is that any accommodation to evolutionary theory comes with huge and inescapable theological costs. There is no way to affirm an historical Adam while holding to any mainstream model of evolution, and there is no way to affirm the Gospel without an historical Adam."

This is an insight which captures well the heart of many discussions that I have had with people over the theory of evolution and attempts to harmonize it with the truths found in the Bible.

The article also touches on the reality that even if a compromise position is put forward to those holding an ideology that is simply incompatible with Christianity the debate is not over.  Those holding a position alien to the Gospel are still going to push for more and more concessions that will only lead further and further away from the teachings of Scripture.  But honestly who can blame them.  They are simply being faithful to their creed.  In this case, it is the Christian who is not.

It is the truth to say that in most situations where Christians are willing or even eager to make such concessions, they are possessed by a motive that is looking for credibility in and approval from the wisdom of the world.  And if that is our goal then we have denied our master.

“If the world hates you, know that it has hated me before it hated you.  If you were of the world, the world would love you as its own; but because you are not of the world, but I chose you out of the world, therefore the world hates you.  Remember the word that I said to you: ‘A servant is not greater than his master.’ If they persecuted me, they will also persecute you. If they kept my word, they will also keep yours."                                               -John 15:18-20