First things first!

My stereotype of most theologians suggests that, when they set down their theological perspective, they begin by describing God and construct their theology down (?) from there. I see a huge problem with that: it completely ignores the question of how we can know things about God. In order for me to talk about how we know things about God, though, I must first examine how we go about knowing things in general. This is the discipline philosophers call epistemology.

So, how do we know anything at all? At different points in history, different sources of knowledge have been placed in a privileged position. Throughout most of human history, people in positions of authority were privileged over other sources of knowledge. Old ideas were preferred over new ideas simply because they were older. Within the early Christian tradition, the source of truth was the ultimate authority: God. Divine revelation served as the ultimate authority. This system of recognizing truth is known as premodernity.

From the earliest attempts at Christian theology (possibly as early as the fourth gospel), the Greek philosophical tradition known as Neoplatonism became the norm for understanding reality. One of the features of Neoplatonism was a mind-body dualism. Physical matter was viewed as, at best, a shadow of actual realities, known as the "Forms", from which all objects received their attributes. At the other extreme, matter was viewed as intrinsically evil and the non-physical realities were viewed as the highest good. As a result, leading thinkers created elaborate theological systems based purely on either speculation or on previously established views from respected authorities; there was little effort to examine the world to gain knowledge because the world was inherently corrupt.

During the High Middle Ages (about AD 1000-1300), the works of Aristotle re-entered Western philosophy's awareness via Muslim scholars and commentators. Aristotlian philosophy asserted that an object's essence was internal to that object. Any given object had two attributes: its substance (what the object actually is) and its accidents (what the object looks, tastes, smells, sounds, and feels like). [This belief was the basis for the Roman Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation. The accidents of the elements remained those of bread and wine; the substance of the elements became those of the body and blood of Jesus.] This emphasis on matter's intrinsic reality led to a movement toward observing natural reality.

One of the early Christian adopters of Aristotle's worldview was Albertus Magnus (ca 1200-1280). He was an avid naturalist who left numerous written descriptions of such varied phenomena as an apple from peel to core, the leaves of a mistletoe, and which spiders spin their webs where. He began a sequence of events which would eventually lead to Copernicus, Galileo, and Kepler.

As the Middle Ages came to an end with the Reformation, people on opposing sides of the Reformation had different ideas about what constituted divine revelation. This led thinkers to seek a different set of criteria. There were two distinct attempts to resolve this conflict. René Descartes sought to find the truths which one could arrive at by rational proofs from absolutely knowable facts. Ultimately, the only absolutely knowable fact for Descartes was the reality of his own existence. From this point, he constructed an elaborate metaphysical system. His work established a stream of philosophy known as Continental Idealism.

Simultaneously, English philosophers followed Aristotelian philosophy toward its inevitable conclusion. This stream of philosophy, known as English Empiricism, was David Hume. Hume asserted that the only truth humans have access to is through their sense data. This would mean that even such concepts as causality are not knowable truths. Immanuel Kant provided a synthesis of these two traditions. Educated as an Idealist, Kant found Hume's empiricism compelling. His Critique of Pure Reason is a vigorous and systematic critique of traditional metaphysics. Unlike Hume, though, Kant recognizes the importance of categories such as causality and possiblity and found a place for them in his Critique of Practical Reason.

From this period forward, empirical observations were given the privileged position in epistemology. This is a system called modernity. The modernist tends to believe that objective truth is fully accessible as long as one employs the correct tools. The challenge for the modernist, then, is to develop the correct tools: the scientific method, in studying Scripture one seeks the correct hermeneutic tools.

In my next post, we will follow the story of epistemology into the present as the trend shifts from modernity to postmodernity.