Greek Philosophy – The Seeds of Doubt - Aristotle (The History of Epistemology! - Part 5)

In this series, we explore epistemology, or “How do we know what we know?” I think such a question is as relevant as ever, especially given our culture’s fairly recent leanings toward postmodernism – the belief that traditional norms should be abandoned in favor of abstractness. Josh McDowell defines postmodernism as “a worldview characterized by the belief that truth doesn’t exist in any objective sense but is created rather than discovered.” In other words, a postmodernist would claim that truth is a variable, and that it is relative to each individual who attempts to discover it. In the postmodern world, there is the potential for more than one truth.

Is truth relative, or is it an absolute? And does it matter? Read on…
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In the last entry, we saw that the Greek philosopher Plato believed that all perfect knowledge was inborn into every man – it was simply left to a lifetime of experiences to “discover” this whole truth. Plato’s foremost student was Aristotle (384-322 BC), who represents the third in a series of influential Greek philosophers (after Socrates and Plato). Aristotle continued to refine the thinking of the time, which was in stark contrast to the pagan times that went before.

Like many who have come after him, Aristotle speculated that in order for a man to live a good life, he must strike a balance between excess and scarcity. In other words, a good life is achieved through finding a balance in all things. Presumably, this philosophy extended to nearly all aspects of life, including that of religion and the existence of God. I cannot find that Aristotle took a strong position in either direction on the role and existence of God in our lives. Instead, his arguments asked men to reason their way to the truth.

In many ways, this would seem like an appeal to science as the ultimate authority in establishing a philosophical argument. Actually, Aristotle knew very little about science. His thoughts along these lines included the thinking that the earth was the center of the universe, that women were an inferior form of life compared to men, and even that men had more teeth than women. This seems ludicrous in light of the ease with which he could have simply counted the number of teeth in a given sample of people, but remember this – science did not really meet up with math and hypothesis testing until the sixteenth century. It was typical for philosophers and “wise men” of the time to simply draw inferences based on personal feeling and highbrow banter.

One of Aristotle’s favorite ways to “prove” his point was through the use of dialectic. Dialectic was the basis of “logic” for many of the Greek philosophers. It is simply a contrived written argument between two people of differing opinion, both of which wish to convince the other of their point of view. These can take a lengthy written form of argument between the two individuals – but the end result is that both sides were written by the same philosopher. I can write my own short dialectic right here:

Person A: Anchovies are tasty!

Person B: No, they’re not!

Person A: Yes, they are, because I eat them every week!

Person B: Oh…maybe they are tasty. I’ve never tried them.

Yes, that is a very simplified and silly form of dialectic. But here is the point - dialectic is not proof and it is not absolute. Karl Popper, twentieth century philosopher of science, said this when he argued against dialectic: “The whole development of dialectic should be a warning against the dangers inherent in philosophical system-building. It should remind us that philosophy should not be made a basis for any sort of scientific system and that philosophers should be much more modest in their claims” - (just a tip - while this is good, don't listen to everything that Popper said).

Where am I headed with all of this? My point is pretty simple. Greek philosophers, including most notably Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle changed thinking radically, by bringing man’s reason and personal opinions into the equation. Prior to this, men looked to the one true God or the pagan gods for answers and absolutes. When men (and women) get together and begin to speculate about a topic, without any reference to an absolute authority, they practice what I like to call “pooling ignorance”. Anyone can take the time to make the craziest ideas seem possible, if they spend their efforts on ways to turn a phrase, create a hypothetical example, or manipulate big words. In fact, I think a lot of college courses are designed to do exactly that.

But what happens to absolute truth in a world influenced by human philosophy? The answer is that it gets ignored, just as it does every day in our postmodern world. As Pastor Voddie Baucham, Jr. says in his excellent book The Ever-Loving Truth, “The denial of absolute truth is a hallmark of modern thinking.”

But the key to understanding an epistemology series is this – just because absolute truth is being ignored all around us does not mean that it does not exist! Whether man chooses to believe that 1) God exists, 2) that He has a plan and a desire for each of us, 3) that He sent His Son to die for us, and 4) that we all have a chance to live with Him for eternity – the truth of these statements is unchanged by man’s thoughts. It is true, and we Christians should not be ashamed of the boldness of that thought. Our position of one absolute truth would have been deemed unacceptable in Aristotle’s day. It is labeled as “intolerant” in our world today. I don’t care. IT IS TRUTH.

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Greek Philosophy – The Seeds of Doubt - Plato (The History of Epistemology! - Part 4)

In this series, we explore epistemology, or “How do we know what we know?” I think such a question is as relevant as ever, especially given our culture’s fairly recent leanings toward postmodernism – the belief that traditional norms should be abandoned in favor of abstractness. Josh McDowell defines postmodernism as “a worldview characterized by the belief that truth doesn’t exist in any objective sense but is created rather than discovered.” In other words, a postmodernist would claim that truth is a variable, and that it is relative to each individual who attempts to discover it. In the postmodern world, there is the potential for more than one truth.

Is truth relative, or is it an absolute? And does it matter? Read on…
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Probably the best-known saying associated with Plato is this – “If you don’t put the lid back on when you’re done, it will all dry out.”

Okay, not really. But you have to admit that you didn’t expect that in the middle of an epistemology series.

Plato (428-348 BC) was a student of Socrates, and unlike his teacher, he actually wrote things down. Consequently, there is a lot more to look at and deduce from Plato and his writings. Plato refined much of the thinking of Socrates into more concrete form. As opposed to the thinking that went before him, he speculated that each soul, before birth, possessed a perfect knowledge of everything. Plato would argue that truth was “pre-loaded” into each person, and it is their task to “recall” that truth, rather than learn it. This was a unique concept for the time, and differed greatly from the pre-Greek philosopher thinking which simply looked to God (or pagan gods) for truth. The idea that each human began with perfect knowledge, lost it, and must spend a lifetime trying to regain it is not unlike many religions of today.

There is a fine line between this thinking, and that of Romans 1:18-21, where we are told:

“The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of men who suppress the truth by their wickedness, since what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them. For since the creation of the world God's invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse.

For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened.”

The difference between these schools of thought is that Plato’s thinking assumes a perfect understanding at the start of life, while the Bible makes no such claim. Since the fall of man through Adam, man has had an imperfect grasp and knowledge of God. We are told in 1 Corinthians 15:22 – “For as in Adam all die, so also in Christ all will be made alive.”

Plato used an allegory of a chariot driver being pulled by two horses to explain more of his thinking. The charioteer represents man’s reason – the decider who will guide the soul to truth. One horse is white, and stands for the positive part of man’s passionate nature (such as righteous indignation), and the other horse is black and represents irrational passions and appetites. The driver – man’s reason – must learn to tame and balance these two forces in order to make progress. The horse part of the analogy is not far from the apostle Paul’s reasoning in Romans 7:21-25:

“So I find this law at work: When I want to do good, evil is right there with me. For in my inner being I delight in God's law; but I see another law at work in the members of my body, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin at work within my members. What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death? Thanks be to God—through Jesus Christ our Lord!

So then, I myself in my mind am a slave to God's law, but in the sinful nature a slave to the law of sin.”

The real difference between the two philosophies is this – who is the driver of the chariot? For Plato, this was man himself, who learned to drive and control the horses as best he could. The whole of the process rested in man alone. For the Christian, as we see in Paul’s words above, we give the reins to Jesus Christ, who is our rescuer and who guides us into all truth. There is a huge difference between these two models.

Finally, in typical philosophical fashion, Plato also contributed to the roots of today’s postmodernism movement. He constructed an argument to discuss whether or not all objects have a universal form, by saying something like this – “When we look at an apple, for example, we see an apple, and we can also analyze a form of an apple. In this distinction, there is a particular apple and a universal form of an apple. Moreover, we can place an apple next to a book, so that we can speak of both the book and apple as being next to each other.” These are words that a post-modernist would love to discuss, but not I. My fifteen-year-old daughter likes to label words such as this as “a load of waffle”. For me, it’s enough to say that apples were created by God, and they taste good. Can we see some of God’s handiwork when we eat one? While the Greek philosophers are often credited with moving man toward a deeper understanding of truth, there is some doubt as to whether this is really right… Next up, the final Greek philosopher in this series - Aristotle. Then we will need to jump ahead almost 2000 years to get to the next major epistemological development.

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Greek Philosophy – The Seeds of Doubt - Socrates (The History of Epistemology! - Part 3)

In this series, we explore epistemology, or “How do we know what we know?” I think such a question is as relevant as ever, especially given our culture’s fairly recent leanings toward postmodernism – the belief that traditional norms should be abandoned in favor of abstractness. Josh McDowell defines postmodernism as “a worldview characterized by the belief that truth doesn’t exist in any objective sense but is created rather than discovered.” In other words, a postmodernist would claim that truth is a variable, and that it is relative to each individual who attempts to discover it. In the postmodern world, there is the potential for more than one truth.

Is truth relative, or is it an absolute? And does it matter? Read on…
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So far, we have seen that absolute truth does exist and can be known, this being the truth revealed by the Creator – God. To nearly all men before 500 BC, truth was either based in God the Creator or it was based in pagan beliefs. Up to this point, men looked to a deity of some sort to find the ultimate answers.

We’ve also seen Pontius Pilate respond to Jesus intimations about what is absolute with his question, “What is truth?” Did Pilate create this question on his own, or was he influenced by the times?

The time period around 500 BC seems to be pivotal. It was around this time that man began to consider himself wise. Many began to question the idea of what knowledge truly was and where it came from. For the first time, the answers did not always lie in God or some other deity. This belief began to take root within the ancient Greek culture. Three notable philosophers – Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle – played a major role in the shift that led to the Age of Enlightenment, later leading to Modernism, and which sowed the seeds of the Postmodern era that we live in today.

Socrates (469-399 BC) was the first of the three great Greek philosophers. His influence started the Greek society toward several generations of questioning truth and how it is derived. Indeed, the “Socratic method” was named for him – in which a person begins asking question after question in order to gain an understanding of an issue. This in itself is not a bad thing, as long as one looks for the real source of right and truth on the subject. But it is a strong characteristic of Modernism, where science rules – and science has often been wrong, as history has shown. Socrates once said, "I know you won't believe me, but the highest form of Human Excellence is to question oneself and others." This was a new concept at the time. It should seem very familiar to us today, as the seeds of Postmodernism lie in that very concept.

Socrates believed that evil was not a choice that a person made purposefully, but rather, each man spent his life trying to find “the Good”, with some being more successful than others. When he was condemned to choose between exile or death, Socrates chose to drink hemlock. Making his final statement to the jury who condemned him for philosophical heresy, his famous last words to them were, “The unexamined life is not worth living.” This is not a bad statement to go out with, but again, what truth would Socrates have judged a life against? His statement seems noble, but if it’s made simply for the sake of appearing noble, without an appeal to the real absolute truth, was it worthwhile?

Curiously, Socrates was known for asking many questions, but he did not necessarily answer them. His glory was in the ability to ask and ask and ask – without necessarily feeling the need to reply. Compare this to Jesus, who lived less than 500 years later and who was not afraid to answer the questioning crowds, often referring to absolute truth as his source and beginning with the words, “Truly, truly, I say unto you…” We see in the ancient Greeks the tendency to question things just for the pleasure of questioning – not necessarily with an eye toward discovering real truth. Socrates’ influence was passed on to his student, Plato, who developed a much more rigid approach to epistemology. Plato’s philosophy is the next topic in this series.
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Baseline – What Man Has Known From The Beginning (The History of Epistemology! - Part 2)

In this series, we explore epistemology, or “How do we know what we know?” I think such a question is as relevant as ever, especially given our culture’s fairly recent leanings toward postmodernism – the belief that traditional norms should be abandoned in favor of abstractness. Josh McDowell defines postmodernism as “a worldview characterized by the belief that truth doesn’t exist in any objective sense but is created rather than discovered.” In other words, a postmodernist would claim that truth is a variable, and that it is relative to each individual who attempts to discover it. In the postmodern world, there is the potential for more than one truth.

Is truth relative, or is it an absolute? And does it matter? Read on…***************************************
In any good measurement system, there must be a reference point. The definition of an “inch” cannot be allowed to vary over time, or we would have to start changing things like mountain elevation signs, tape measures, student rulers and the labels on your socket set every time a new definition came out. To be sure, we all understand that there needs to be a “truth” about exactly how long an inch should be, and this definition needs to remain unchangeable. This reference point is often called a “baseline”, and represents the starting point to which you must return to make sure that you stay on the right track.

In the Christian worldview, the reference point is the Bible and the baseline for truth can be found in John 18:37. When questioned by Pilate about whether or not he was a king, Jesus said,

“You are right in saying I am a king. In fact, for this reason I was born, and for this I came into the world, to testify to the truth. Everyone on the side of truth listens to me.”

To which Pilate, like many postmodernists today, gives his standard reply – “What is truth?"

For many, accepting Christ as the ultimate authority becomes a difficult concept to accept. Human pride and the desire for self-rule take over. We don’t like to be told that we are not the final arbiter of our destiny, or that we don’t know everything. From the modernist point of view, man should be able to understand truth over time through experimentation, science and personal discovery. And yet, Jesus maintains that he alone holds the truth – even if we have not yet grasped the entire concept.

The Bible expands on this idea in Romans chapter 1, where we see that the knowledge of God is “innate” – that is, God’s nature is intrinsic and inborn into each person. Verses 18 through 20 tell us,

“The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of men who suppress the truth by their wickedness, since what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them. For since the creation of the world, God’s invisible qualities – his eternal power and divine nature – have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse.”

It’s interesting that the Bible tells us that this innate knowledge can be seen in “what has been made”. This actually agrees with the portion of the modernist view which says that truth can be discovered by science and experimentation. The Bible tells us that, properly interpreted, scientific discoveries will point to God, not away from Him. In fact, it is true that most molecular biologists are convinced that God designed biological processes, rather than these processes evolving on their own – because the complexity of biochemical reactions is irreducible to individual evolutionary steps. The thousands of perfectly coordinated and intertwined steps had to happen all at once - in one created effort – or not at all (see Michael Behe’s excellent book Darwin’s Black Box if you want to read more).

Let me be clear – unless you can genuinely say that Jesus Christ is the source of truth for you, you are basing your reference point on something else – something which is false. Notice that I don’t equivocate and say that your reference point is “wrong for me” or “wrong for some, but possibly right for you”. That would be a postmodernist reply, just as Pilate gave to Jesus. The very purpose of having an absolute truth is that it must apply to everyone. And it does, whether a person chooses to believe in it or not.

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What Comes After Post-Modernism? (The History of Epistemology! - Part 1)

In this series, we explore epistemology, or “How do we know what we know?” I think such a question is as relevant as ever, especially given our culture’s fairly recent leanings toward postmodernism – the belief that traditional norms should be abandoned in favor of abstractness. Josh McDowell defines postmodernism as “a worldview characterized by the belief that truth doesn’t exist in any objective sense but is created rather than discovered.” In other words, a postmodernist would claim that truth is a variable, and that it is relative to each individual who attempts to discover it. In the postmodern world, there is the potential for more than one truth.

Is truth relative, or is it an absolute? And does it matter? Read on…
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Epistemology sounds scary – like it might hurt you. It’s a word that might make you want to hit the “Back” button on your browser and go read something else. Don’t. To keep you on the hook (because I think this series is going to be fun and meaningful), let me ask – what is truth to you? Do you believe it is the same for you as for everyone, or do you think it varies between people and changes over time as society matures?

I cannot tell you how many books I’ve read, classes I’ve attended, and conversations I have had where I was encouraged to be open-minded about things that I felt strongly about. Concerning topics that I feel a strong sense of right and wrong (abortion, baptism, the existence of God), I do not want to compromise or water down what I believe to be the truth. To me, the existence of God (and who He is) is not a relative concept. I may not know everything that I need to know about God or His character, but I am past the point of wondering whether or not He exists. He does - and anyone who refuses to acknowledge this point is going to deeply regret that they didn’t make the connection. My statements about what I believe to be absolute tend to be short and to-the-point (some would say rude and close-minded), but it is precisely because I believe them to be absolute that I insist on them. You wouldn’t jump off a thousand-foot cliff just because the person next to you doesn’t believe in gravity. You wouldn’t do it even if they agreed to jump with you. You would not suspend your absolute belief in the concept of gravity when your life is at stake…

Epistemology deals with the ideas of truth and knowledge – what is truth, what can I claim to be true knowledge, and specifically, how do I know this knowledge is truth? For the vast majority of people, when I ask “Do you believe that two plus two is equal to four?” they answer “Yes” because they know this statement to be true. They do not sit down each time they are asked and count on their fingers to be sure. They just know the answer, because they have seen the evidence in the past, and they recall that it is truth. It does not have to be rediscovered every time. Epistemology deals more with the knowing of truth, rather than its calculation or derivation.

The history of epistemology, and the various beliefs encountered along the way, are what this series is about. It began with the Greek philosophers, who assumed certain basic human beliefs to be true without really questioning where these beliefs came from. In the mid-seventeenth century, the Age of Enlightenment began and philosophers started to question how we really know what we know. This period was dominated by the thinking that reason alone was enough to justify power and “rightness”. God’s presence and authority were still given a great deal of consideration during this phase.

That began to change with the period of Modernism in the late nineteenth century, when people began to trust more in the scientific process and technology to determine what truth really is. Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution is a good example. It was during this period that philosophers began to wholly reject the idea of a divine Creator in their belief systems. Instead, the idea of man being able to save himself through learning and applying what he learned began to take shape (not that this idea didn’t occur before this time, but it became the primary philosophical way of thinking at this point).

Finally, in the 1960’s, mankind rushed into the next phase of philosophical thinking – Postmodernism. This period has been dominated by the abstract thinking that absolute truth cannot be known. Instead, philosophers (and religious leaders, and government officials, and many, many others) believe that the concept of truth is a variable – it is different for everyone. “We make our own truth” or “We discover our brand of truth as we live life” are familiar sayings. In essence, this chapter of epistemology says that “we can’t really know that what we know is absolutely right”. That can be a pretty frustrating argument to have with someone.

One thought occurs to me – what would the next phase of thinking encompass? As mankind has sped along the philosophical trail these last few hundred years, departing from centuries-old belief systems, he continues to accelerate into more arcane arguments than the last, until eventually there will be no regard for truth or morals or any real sense of right and wrong. What do you call the thing that follows Postmodernism?

This series will explore each of these phases and the history and thinking of the people who dominated the thinking in each – from Socrates to Plato, Rene DesCartes to John Locke, Kant to Hegel, Darwin, Nietzche and Marx. Through these, I hope to compare each phase with the “original” author of philosophy – Jesus Christ.

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