"Language versus literature" in the pulpit

I have nearly finished my degree in English Language and Literature. I have enjoyed pretty much all of it (though writing about the Benin Bronzes was pretty painful), and it is proving to be the jump-off point for lots of different reflections.

One is in relation to what happens in preaching, and Bible teaching. Frequently, teaching from the Bible can sound like literary analysis. The teacher takes a text, links it (apparently arbitrarily) with other texts, makes connections (apparently arbitrarily) with some of his own ideas and perspectives, makes (apparently arbitrary) assumptions about different aspects and shades of meaning, and draws (apparently arbitrary) conclusions. This is highly consonant with where we are culturally. From a literary point of view, there's a strong strand which says that meaning is not inherent in the text itself: it is imposed on the text by the listener/reader - hence, we can have black, or gay, or Marxist, or green readings of texts that apparently have little otherwise to do with those perspectives. But if one person derives a specific meaning from a text, it is quite possible that another person might derive a meaning which completely contradicts this. The effect of this understanding of the nature of the text and meaning is that any sense of authority of the text is completely undermined. The teacher explains a text - but this interpretation is just one amongst many; it only has force if you share his or her perspective; and if you don't, then you are free to ignore it. It raises the question of what exactly would be the point of Bible teaching - perhaps it's considered to be some shared existential experience which makes us part of the Christian community, but is not considered to have any real force.

However, this degree highlighted the fact that, in addition to the literature perspective to studying a text, there is also a language perspective. This was very interesting to come across - at various stages in the course, it became clear that the language approach was different. Writers on the language approach were reluctant to criticise their faculty co-members, but the divergence was clear. Firstly, they said, if you lose the idea of context, then you lose most of the meaning of a text. They talked in a Hallidayan way about register variables - field, tenor, mode. All of these have a bearing in understanding a text. And they said, with some deference to their colleagues, whilst different interpretations were possible, some were definitely preferable to others. In effect, whereas the literature approach puts the focus on the reader, the language approach places it back on the text and its purpose as originally written.

This will come as no surprise to Bible teachers from certain backgrounds. One of the thrusts in the Proclamation Trust approach, for example is to "take the listeners to Corinth". The literature approach takes words from 1 Corinthians, for example, disregards the context, and tries to go straight to understanding what it means to us. Proc Trust argue that to understand what it means to us, you need to understand what it meant to the people who heard it originally. Similarly, if a text was written as poetry (for example) then you don't try and interpret it as though it is a scientific treatise.

Or take the use of concordancing. This was introduced to us in E303, Grammar in Context. The idea is, if you want to understand the meaning and significance of a word, then look at how it is used elsewhere in the corpus. But this would be no surprise to those of us who have done Bible teaching. We are used to looking at how words are used throughout the corpus - so when we use the word "faith", for example, we know that we aren't using it in the modern, culturally-conditioned sense of "a leap in the dark". We don't only do this using one translation or version of the Bible, but refer to concordances in the original languages - Greek, Hebrew - to try and get closer to the actual meaning of the word. If we are using words in a way that is different from the way in which they were intended, then we are distorting the meaning.

What is the importance of all this? For Christians, we need to understand what the nature of Bible teaching is. It's not a subjective, literature approach, where meaning is all down to the reader/listener's interpretation. It's a language approach, where whilst we may not be able to fully unpack the meaning, we do accept that some meanings are more accurate than others. This further means that the message of the Bible is an objective matter - it's not something for people to take or leave, on the basis that someone else might interpret it differently. You may reject what a Bible teacher says - but if it has been faithfully explained, you are rejecting not an interpretation of the Bible, but the Bible itself.

Don Carson, in The Gagging of God: Christianity Confronts Pluralism, set about challenging what I have called "the literature perspective" and other ways in which postmodernism has altered our thought forms when it comes to understanding Christianity. But as far as I remember, he did not make reference to the fact that the language part of English faculties already assumes a greater role for objective meaning. It's not a simple question of "us against the world" - we have co-belligerents when it comes to epistemology.

Is Platonism a means, not an end?

In "A Meaningful World", Wiker and Witt write, on Euclid's demonstration of Pythagoras' theorem:

Like the circle, [the right triangle is] one of the sturdiest things in the cosmos and, at the same time, utterly immaterial. Physical circles are never really perfectly circular; physical right triangles always fall short of perfection. We grasp such geometrical figures only with our minds, never with our hands. When we do grasp the demonstration, even though we may do it through particular drawings, we lay hold of why it must be so in any particular case from the nature of the right triangle as such - but there is no "right triangle as such" out there floating in the cosmos that we can either see with our eyes or grasp with our hands. The struggle to understand the demonstration about right triangles is the struggle to grasp something that is immaterial.

But if we are successful in this struggle, and we glimpse the necessity of the geometric relationships as such, then and only then can we see why it must be so in every possible case and not just in this or that particular drawn triangle. Even more profound, if we reflect on our own reflection, we receive a more beautiful proof, a demonstration that we have, in our reason, a power to grasp immaterial truths - a power that somehow exceeds the particular, physically defined powers of our senses and imagination and is capable of grasping universal truth. Could this be a proof of the immateriality of the soul?

Belief in God

bethinking.org, the UCCF apologetics website, has a good, meaty article by William Lane Craig here on religious epistemology. It covers lots of ground, including many of the issues raised by commenters here. If you'd rather listen than read, it's available to download as an MP3 file, apparently.

On the challenge represented by logical positivism to religious belief (which still represents the heart of the objection of many people from a science background to non-materialistic philosophy), he says:

In general, verificationist analyses of meaning ran into two insuperable problems: (1) The verification/falsification principle was too restrictive. It was quickly realized that on such theories of meaning vast tracts of obviously meaningful discourse would have to be declared meaningless, including even scientific statements, which the principle had aimed to preserve. (2) The principle was self-refuting. The statement “In order to be meaningful, an informative sentence must be capable in principle of being empirically verified/falsified" is itself incapable of being verified or falsified. Therefore, it is by its own lights a meaningless statement–or, at best, an arbitrary definition which we are free to reject. The inadequacies of the positivistic theory of meaning led to the complete collapse of Logical Positivism during the second half of the twentieth century...

Unfortunately, the word didn't really get out.

On whether a presumption of atheism is reasonable, in the absence of immediate evidence to the contrary, William Lane Craig writes:

Michael Scriven, for example, maintained that in the absence of evidence rendering the existence of some entity probable, we are justified in believing that it does not exist, provided that (1) it is not something which might leave no traces, and (2) we have comprehensively surveyed the area where the evidence would be found if the entity existed. But if this is correct, then our justification for atheism depends on (1) the probability that God would leave more evidence of His existence than what we have and (2) the probability that we have comprehensively surveyed the field for evidence of His existence That puts a different face on the matter! Suddenly the presumer of atheism, who sought to shirk his share of the burden of proof, finds himself saddled with the very considerable burden of proving (1) and (2) to be the case.

The author also explains why Pascal's Wager is not a good argument for Christianity, before explaining Plantinga's reformed epistemology, and extending it.

Another round with empiricism

I think the heart of the empiricist objection to belief in God is that they are unable to observe anything supernatural.

But does the fact that a person is unable to observe something have any bearing on whether or not it exists? And if not, is empiricism any use at all as a metanarrative to provide guidance as to what is true and what isn't?

A blind person is unable to see things - by definition - although obviously he or she can observe things by using other senses. But does the fact that somebody is unable to see mean that he or she would be right to conclude that there is no such thing as vision?

A scientist living in the pre-modern era might have no means of detecting radio waves. Does that mean that radio waves didn't exist in the pre-modern era? (No - they are generated naturally, as are all sorts of electromagnetic waves). Does it mean that he would have been right to say that there was no such thing, as an empirical worldview might have led him to?

People who have an empiricist worldview can argue this in one of two ways. They could firstly say that from the perspective of the blind person, or the scientist, they would be right. If so, empirical truth becomes relative - something which I'm sure my commenters would thunder against! Or they can say that those people would be wrong. The fact that the blind person can't see doesn't mean that there is no such thing as vision. The fact that the pre-modern scientist can't conceive of radio waves doesn't mean that they don't exist.

What about God, or the supernatural. Does the fact that God can't be observed have any bearing on whether or not he exists?

NO!!!!!!!! Of course it doesn't. There are all sorts of reasons why God might not choose to be observed, why the universe might appear not to contain anything supernatural to a sceptical observer, why a reasonably plausible case might be made for the natural origin and evolution of the universe. But this has absolutely no bearing on the issue of whether or not there actually is a God.

Another question. What is the impact of an empiricist worldview on the pursuit of knowledge, compared to (say) a theistic one? The theist will continue to observe the universe, eyes and imagination wide open, looking for new things. The empiricist will work towards simply closing the gaps in knowledge, and not expect the unexpected.

I'm sure that this will provoke some response ...

"Why isn't evidence sufficient when it works?"

My anti-empiricism isn't fundamentally because the scientific method doesn't work. It's because it doesn't represent a sufficiently solid epistemological foundation. Let me try and explain.

Descartes, when he famously said, "Cogito ergo sum," was trying to derive a philosophical foundation from which it was possible to derive everything else in the universe - he was concerned about epistemology (how we can know). The statement is a good start, but unfortunately, you can't get past that foundation. You can't know that the rest of the universe is anything other than some aspect of your own consciousness.

The empiricist approach is to put this issue to one side, and say, "Well, the universe seems to behave itself - it seems to behave as though there is something really there, that acts in a tractable and reproducible way - I can do experiments on it, I can make observations in ways that I hadn't previously imagined, and it all hangs together properly."

The problem with this is, how can I know that this isn't simply my own consciousness constructing a world around me? How can I know that I am not a part of some Matrix-like construction? How can I know that, in fact, there isn't a god, and I am seeing exactly what he/she/it wants me to see? And the answer to all of those questions is, you can't. You start from your own consciousness, and make a leap of faith to conclude that there is a real universe beyond you. You then make another leap of faith to conclude that the real universe is all that there is - and in many ways, this is the oddest one. Given that you had to make a leap of faith to conclude that there was a universe at all, how can you then have any confidence that there is nothing more than the universe?

So what's the alternative? What do I believe that isn't empiricism?

Start instead from the proposition that there is an external absolute, a prime mover (if you like). Yes, this is a faith position, but so is the belief that there is a universe there at all, and nothing else. Both are presuppositions. Both are foundations for knowledge upon which the rest of our understanding of the universe is built.

Francis Schaeffer, in an essay entitled "Is Propositional Revelation Nonsense?" makes the case for the reasonableness of this position, and I could do no better than he has already. In addition to which, I need to go to work now ....

Alvin Plantinga says ...

Among our chief intellectual obligations is that of believing a proposition that is not certain (i.e., either self-evident or incorrigible) only on the evidential basis of propositions that are certain. What I argued, in essence, is that from this point of view belief in other minds and belief in God are on an epistemological par. In neither case are there cogent arguments of the sort required; hence if the absence of such arguments in the theistic case demonstrates irrationality, the same goes for belief in other minds. If you flout epistemic duty in accepting one, then you flout it just as surely in accepting the other; hence if the former [belief in God] is irrational, so is the latter [belief in other minds beyond mine]. But clearly the latter isn't irrational; this version of the evidentialist objection to theistic belief, therefore is a failure.

Alvin Plantinga - "God and Other Minds", Preface to 1990 edition (emphasis mine)

Which is pretty much what I was saying. The difference is that Alvin Plantinga backs this up with 260 pages of substantial logic and philosophy of religion.

Epistemology - the alternative

Part 1, Part 2

Now, what becomes obvious, despite the current popularity of street-level postmodernism, is that we do have a sense that there is such a thing as objective truth. Postmodern writers, despite what they say, write assuming that they are able to convey something real about the nature of the universe – even when what they write is supposedly denying this. And the assumption of empiricism is that there is such a thing as objective truth, even if modernism doesn't provide us with an adequate means of knowing what the objective truth is.

So what we really need is another epistemological foundation – one that doesn't throw away the idea of objective truth (like postmodernism), but one that doesn't ground the idea of objective truth in the first instance in the observer (like modernism), which we have seen is also a dead end in epistemological terms.

The universe didn't start with the arrival of Descartes, and as I hinted before, the epistemological basis of the first scientists wasn't that of the modernists. Modern science actually arose, by and large, in post-Reformation Europe. The Reformation took place at around the same time as the Renaissance, but whereas the Renaissance was a humanist movement that looked back to the classical era, the Reformation was fundamentally a Christian movement, that was shaped by people with a high regard for the Bible. The epistemology of the Reformation was widely shared in post-Reformation Europe, even though the man in the street would perhaps have been no more able to explain it than the man on the Clapham Omnibus can today explain postmodernism, despite the fact that he has an aversion to the idea of absolute truth.

So what was this epistemology? It was based on the Bible, and it is founded upon the idea of a God who had created the universe. There is a gap between this creator God and humanity, caused by the rejection of the authority of God by humanity. This means that the creator God is now hidden from humanity, and the universe is “messed up”. But God wanted to act to restore the proper relationship between himself and humans, and has acted to do so.

God has made himself known to humans, firstly in general revelation (the idea that when we look at the universe, or ourselves, there are signs that there is a god), and secondly in special revelation (the Bible gives us a much more full account of what God is like, in particular in the person of Jesus, and these are consistent with what we see in the world).

The picture we are given about God in the Bible is that (from the point of view of a working epistemology) he is eternally consistent and he is the creator of the universe. Humans were created within the universe to know God, and he is seeking to make himself known to us.

So what, in short terms, is the nature of this epistemological foundation? It is that we can know truth because there is an external absolute who created us to know it. We are unable to know more than subjectively, but we can be confident that there is a correspondence between our subjective knowledge and objective truth about the universe because there is an objective knower who is making it known to us.

What are some of the effects of this?

Our instinct that there is such a thing as objective truth would be well-founded – it isn't simply a by-product of a chemical reaction. Nor is it simply a “good working hypothesis”, with no necessary basis in anything that is real.

No human viewpoint is artificially “privileged” - everybody has access to both “general revelation” through which God makes himself known and now also “special revelation” in which God gives more detail about what he has done to deal with the gap between himself and humanity.

The gathering of knowledge about the universe (“science”) is a reasonable pursuit – if God is eternal and consistent, we can work on the basis that all else being equal, the universe will behave in a consistent and predictable way. So naturalism is a sensible methodological approach within this epistemological framework. Further, perhaps one could argue that the more knowledge that we gather about the universe, the more clearly the God who created it will be revealed.

On the other hand, since God as creator is free (in the same way that he was free to create, or not create) we have to allow the possibility that not everything about his actions will be comprehensible. His consistency doesn't mean that he is bound by the laws of the universe (which after all, he would have made!), but it does mean that he is bound by the laws of his own nature. What are the limits of this? Perhaps one could argue that naturalistic consistency would apply unless this would override God's purposes to make himself known – his self-revelation.

Due to the difference in nature of the creator and the created, we wouldn't expect to know exhaustively about what God is like – but that doesn't prevent us from truly knowing about God.

It can hardly come as a surprise to regular readers of this blog that this is very much my epistemological foundation. I see big flaws in the alternatives, all of which are dealt with in this reformed epistemology.

In future posts, I'd like to try and show how different epistemological worldviews shape other aspects of people's philosophy.

Epistemology - postmodernism

Part 1

Another possible foundation has been proposed. This foundation is that there is no such thing as objective truth – that all that is possible is to know that something is subjectively true “for me”. This is the postmodern epistemological foundation.

The problem with this foundation is that it doesn't even hold itself up. We can't come to the conclusion that all truth is subjective if we have no way of being able to establish that something is objectively true – the statement that all truth is subjective is itself a statement that makes objective claims about the nature of truth. This can be written right across the entire output of postmodern philosophy. We are told by postmodern writers (for example, Derrida) that the interpretation of a text depends not upon the author's intent, but upon the reader. This is founded upon the postmodern epistemology, that truth is subjective. But if the same process is applied to the text of the postmodern writer, then it is obvious that his or her writing has no objective force at all.

For people who haven't come across “high postmodernism”, this form of explicit statement about the nature of truth may be something of a surprise. However, you don't have to look very far into our culture to see things like “feminist interpretations of Shakespeare” (with the implicit assumption that Shakespeare's interpretation of Shakespeare doesn't exist, and that this interpretation is at least as good as any other). Also, we now have a culturally instinctive opposition to any statement that sounds like a declaration of absolute truth. For example, I remember a conversation I had once. The person I was talking to said something along the lines of: “I don't smoke, but I think people have the right to do what they choose.” I said: “I think smoking is a stupid, dangerous habit, and the only reason it is allowed to continue is because the government makes so much money from it.” “Well, we're all entitled to our opinions,” was the prickly response – in the sense, presumably, that whilst I might consider smoking to be stupid and dangerous, people were quite at liberty to believe something else if they chose to – whether smoking was stupid and dangerous was a matter of subjective truth. So at the level of normal people, the postmodern idea that truth is entirely subjective is increasingly taking hold.

Epistemology - modernism

Epistemology is a part of philosophy that is to do with how we can know. It represents a foundation for our knowledge. We need to know how we can know before we can draw meaningful conclusions about what we know. Questions of epistemology are deeply fundamental – even more fundamental than questions like whether or not there is a god. The nature of our epistemology will have an impact on the conclusions that we draw about the nature of the universe. But epistemological questions are so fundamental – so low-level – that for the most part, they remain below the level of our consciousness. In this series of posts, I want to talk about what I understand of epistemological questions, where I am coming from, and how I justify my beliefs.

A possible epistemological foundation is the idea that an observer is able to objectively apprehend the nature of the universe around him or her. We can know things because when we look at the universe around us, we see it universe as it truly is. This is the foundation of modernism and naturalism – it continues to underlie the work of most scientists. Its philosophical roots were in the Renaissance – in, for example, Leonardo da Vinci looking as an observer for universals (incidentally, he failed – he was left only with mechanics) – and it reached its height in the Enlightenment.

But there are various problems with it. One is that it is not possible to determine whether an observer's view of the universe is objective. I don't know whether what I perceive of the universe is really how the universe is like. Hence the reference to Descartes in earlier posts - “I think therefore I am” allows me to conclude that I am truly conscious. However, it doesn't allow me to be confident of anything “outside” me – it gives me no confidence that what I perceive has any objective reality. In philosophical terms this foundation was beginning to look shaky before Darwin appeared. Various things have acted to discredit it. For example, Gödel's incompleteness theorem showed that there were propositions within mathematics that could not be proved – and that maths isn't an “absolute”, or an “objective truth”. The neodarwinian synthesis – a concept built up from this foundation – suggests that our consciousness is no more than a side effect of chemical processes. As such, we have no reason to believe that there should be any correlation with what our consciousness perceives and the nature of the universe. The fact that data can be interpreted in different ways also takes away confidence in this understanding of the universe.

It would be wrong to suggest that this foundation was useless. It wasn't the foundation of knowledge that modern science was originally built on (I'll come to that), but “modernist” scientists continue to dominate science – and they have achieved a great deal in helping us to understand the universe, even though their epistemological foundations don't allow them confidence that the universe exists!

One might argue: “Well, if this foundation is so helpful in allowing us to understand and explain the universe, then why not just run with it?” I would suggest that it's all about the difference between a mathematical observation (say that the sum of the squares on the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares on the other two sides) and a mathematical proof of that observation. We may observe that we seem to be able to objectively apprehend the rest of the universe – but if we are unable to prove why that is the case, then have we missed the point somewhere? Many people simply work on the basis that this sort of knowledge is impossible, but they assume that their analysis of the universe is correct – I think this is what “empiricism” is. But without knowing that we have a sound epistemology, we are left wondering: will the universe continue to behave in this way? Do I have any way of knowing whether my observations of the universe will still be correct tomorrow? Do I have any way of knowing that my observations of the universe are shared by anybody else? Do I have any way of refuting an observation that somebody else claims to have made about the universe?