Fire and Knowledge

Here’s a comment I made on Justin Taylor’s blog about whether atheists can trust their reasoning abilities or not. It was in response to an Alvin Plantinga lecture arguing that atheists could not trust them.

Plantinga argues in the last talk that a naturalist cannot trust his own mental facilities. That might be true, but that is why methods like the scientific method exist and are used — it takes something out of the mind in order to test if something is really predictable and testable (and thus, scientifically “true”).

So even if we doubt our facilities, the fact is, we can test our deductions. That will help us determine if our minds our reliable in their deductive abilities. It doesn’t matter whether it is probable or not that we can trust them — the question is, can we?

For instance, we may hypothesize that every time we drop a large stone, on earth, under normal conditions, it will fall. We could doubt that it is true – our minds could be tricking us – but that is why we test it. And we find that every time we test it, it happens. So that would lead us, after thousands of years of testing and theorizing and philosophizing, that our faculties are not all that bad after all, which allows us to put more trust in ourselves for higher levels of thinking. (And thus understand and debate on the concepts of mind and reason and truth!)

So I think the naturalist/atheist has every right to trust their mental faculties just as much as a theist. Both the theist and the atheist can be mentally tricked and lead astray, and both have explanations on why that can happen. And both recognize that and seek to minimize it through methods.

In the end, the theist believes that man is able to reason. So does the atheist. And the atheist believes the theist can reason, and the theist believes the atheist can reason. So, ultimately, they can start at the same place to begin building methods, which is why theists and atheists can both (for instance) be scientists and come to the exact same conclusions when running the same test. (And why they are able to argue about it if they come to different conclusions!)

Greatness has no reality in nature, but is a creature of the fancy, a notion that consists only in relation and comparison…. There is, in truth, no rising or meridian of the sun, but only in respect to several places: there is no right or left, no upper hand, in nature; everything is little, and everything is great, according as it is diversely compared.

–Abraham Cowley (1618–1667), “On Greatness” in The Art of the Personal Essay by Phillip Lopate (1994), p. 121

The modern scientific enterprise apparently is directed toward the goal of complete knowledge. But if you had complete knowledge, if you knew everything, could you then act? Could you apply what you knew, or would you be paralyzed by a surplus of considerations? If you were to map within a circle all possible relationships among all the points along its circumference, you would end up with a black circle—an engorgement of “information” that would not be knowledge, but rather the practical equivalent of the blank circle you began with.

Thus the proposition that it would be good to know everything is probably false. The real question that is always to be addressed is the one that arises from our state of ignorance: How does one act well—sensitively, compassionately, without irreparable damage—on the basis of partial knowledge?

–Wendell Berry, Life is a Miracle: An Essay Against Modern Superstition (2000), p. 149

Beauty is meaningless until it is shared.

–George Orwell, Burmese Days (1934), p. 57

“Having saddled yourselves with laws that you assume will be broken, you’ve never found anything to do that makes better sense than punishing people for doing exactly what you expected them to do in the first place. For ten thousand years you’ve been making and multiplying laws that you fully expect to be broken, until now I suppose you must have literally millions of them, many of them broken millions of times a day.”

–Ishmael in Daniel Quinn, My Ishmael (1997), p. 109

If God is outside of nature, then science can neither prove nor disprove His existence. Atheism itself must therefore be considered a form of blind faith, in that it adopts a belief system that cannot be defended on the basis of pure reason.

–Francis S. Collins, The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief (2006), p. 165

So convenient a thing it is to be a reasonable creature, since it enables one to find or make a reason for everything one has a mind to do.

–Benjamin Franklin, as quoted in H.W. Brands, The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin (2000), p. 41

How can an idea, which is not material, have a material origin? “Average” for example, is an idea which partakes of none of the physical properties of the things that are averaged. Materialism itself is an idea, just as immaterial as any other.

–Wendell Berry, Life is a Miracle: An Essay Against Modern Superstition (2000), 50