Can we know the truth?

Here's a second blog covering I Don't Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist, a book that we will be discussing in a class at our church. The previous blog covered the first chapter which explained that denying absolute truth and its knowability is self-defeating. In this second blog I want to cover the next chapter in the book with the provocative title "Why Should Anyone Believe Anything at All?"

The authors discuss four reasons why people believe what they believe. They include sociological reasons (parents, friends, society, culture), psychological reasons (comfort, peace of mind, meaning, purpose, hope), religious reasons (scripture, pastor/priest, guru, rabbi, imam, church), and philosophical reasons (consistency, coherence, completeness -- best explanation of all the evidence). Of course, the key question is whether each of these reasons are good ones to believe something. Notice how many of the reasons are actually poor, reflecting only subjective preferences rather than logic and evidence.

Then comes the question about logic. In our society today there is skepticism about logic. Some suggest we should consider using Eastern logic rather than Western logic. What difference do people suggest there is in these two types of logic? Some say in the East people use both-and logic while in the West it is either-or logic. But notice the word choices here -- skeptics tell us there are two types of logic, but they present them as either-or choices. That means they are actually using Western logic alone in attempting to suggest there are two types of logic. That's self-refuting. The authors point out, as result, there really is no such thing as different kinds of logic to discover the truth. There's only one type: we have to use it; it's built into the universe.

Many Americans today are involved in such self-defeating arguments because of one man -- David Hume. He believed that all meaningful ideas were either true by definition or must be based on sense experience. So, according to him, propositions were only meaningful if the claim involved abstract reasoning like a math equation, or the truth claim could be verified through one of the five senses. If he is correct, then any book talking about God is meaningless. His two conditions became the basis nearly two hundred years later for a brand of philosophy called Logical Positivism, which became popular in university philosophy departments by the mid--1960s.

But the authors point out that Hume's statements are self-refuting. Why? The claim that something can only be meaningful if it's verified by the five senses or true by definition cannot be proven through one of those two methods. Now it's true that claims that are empirically verifiable or true by definition are meaningful, but these claims don't comprise all meaningful statements as Hume contended.

One other person has brought a lot of skepticism about truth to the world -- Immanuel Kant. He said there was no way to know anything about the real world because the structure of our senses and our mind forms all sense data, so we never really know the thing in itself. We only know the thing as it appears to us after our mind and senses have form it. That sounds powerful, but once again there is a simple response. Kant claims we can't know the real world, but he claims to know something about it. So, once again, his argument is self-refuting.

The authors then go on to ask how one can know truth. They say it begins with the self-evident laws of logic called first principles. One is the law of non-contradiction, which says contradictory claims cannot both be true at the same time in the same sense. Another is the law of the excluded middle, which tells us that something either is or is not; there are no third alternatives. For example, either Jesus rose from the dead or he did not. We also learn truth through induction, observing the world around us and then drawing general conclusions from those observations.

Can observation and induction help us know something about God? Yes, according to Geisler and Turek. God may be invisible, but we can observe the effects of God just as we cannot observe gravity but can observe its effects. Much of the rest of their book discusses some of these effects of God that we can observe in the universe, but since that covers a lot of territory, I'll save that for a future blog.