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.