Can We Know Anything Without God?: Omniscience - Part 2.

In Part 1, we pointed out that the non Christian rejects the revelational starting point of Christianity and instead starts with the self in building an epistemology. We also noted that such a starting point is problematic, specifically making reference to the problem of connection. In this part, we'd be further exploring another problem for any epistemology that starts with the subject.

People do make mistakes in their examination and interpretation of certain facts. Sometimes, such mistakes are due to ignorance - ignorance of some relevant body of facts or information that would help interpret a certain fact correctly. It is also true that sometimes people believe something so strongly but some new fact comes along and overturns that belief. If we're going to posit the self as the starting point in epistemology as the non Christian does, then we have a problem. Without exhaustive knowledge of all facts and their relation to each other, how can we know that there isn't some fact out there that we will never discover that completely overturns everything we think we know? If we make faulty evaluations, interpretations, etc of a certain fact due to our ignorance of relevant/related facts, then without comprehensive understanding of all facts and their relations we cannot affirm that we know any fact.

So we see that in an epistemology that starts with the self, the subject must know everything  in order to know anything .

Given a Christian worldview, we do not have such problems. We start epistemologically with the revelation of God. And since God knows all things, he has revealed some things to us so we need not know exhaustively to know at all. We have God's Word as our epistemological tour guide so to speak. The non Christian does not want help from the tour guide and he's completely lost. His epistemology reduces to skepticism because he denies the revelation of the God of Scripture.

Comments

  1. Guyanese TheologianMay 23, 2018 at 7:00 PM

    This doesn't really solve the deeply epistemological problem of how it is we know anything.

    How do you know that your beliefs in Christianity are true? Because God has revealed Christianity as true. But how do you know that you believe that to be true?

    That second question is the project of epistemology, not the first question. Presupp fails for this exact reason.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. AdiSeptember 17, 2020 at 10:32 PM

      The existence of God is a logical necessity. This is how we know God must exist. Law of Causality requires God as a First Cause. Logic is the mother of all knowledge and sciences...

      Delete
    2. AdiSeptember 17, 2020 at 10:32 PM

      The existence of God is a logical necessity. This is how we know God must exist. Law of Causality requires God as a First Cause. Logic is the mother of all knowledge and sciences...

      Delete
    3. AdiSeptember 17, 2020 at 10:35 PM

      The existence of God is a logical necessity. This is how we know God must exist. Law of Causality requires God as a First Cause. Logic is the mother of all knowledge and sciences...

      Delete
  2. Daniel V.A.June 3, 2018 at 9:54 PM

    "How do you know that you believe that to be true"

    This question seems to imply that I can be wrong about my own mental states which seems implausible.

    ReplyDelete

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