Theology's Epistemological Dilemma

How Karl Barth and Alvin Plantinga Provide a Unified Response

Kevin Diller

• Editore: IVP Academic
• Anno: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780830896998
• Argomento: Theology & Religion
• Categoria: Philosophy of Religion

The problem of faith and reason is as old as Christianity itself. Today's philosophical, scientific and historical challenges make the epistemic problem inescapable for believers. Can faith justify its claims? Does faith give us confidence in the truth? Is believing with certainty a virtue or a vice? In Theology?s Epistemological Dilemma, Kevin Diller addresses this problem by drawing on two of the most significant responses in recent Christian thought: Karl Barth's theology of revelation and Alvin Plantinga's epistemology of Christian belief. This will strike many as unlikely, given the common stereotypes of both thinkers. Contrary to widespread misunderstanding, Diller offers a reading of both as complementary to each other: Barth provides what Plantinga lacks in theological depth, while Plantinga provides what Barth lacks in philosophical clarity. Diller presents a unified Barth/Plantinga proposal for theological epistemology capable of responding without anxiety to the questions that face believers today.

Part One

Prospects for a Combined Barth/Plantinga Approach to Christian Theological Epistemology

1

What Is the Epistemic Problem?

If one finds oneself already well aware of the long-standing epistemological difficulties facing theology, one may want simply to scan the conclusion of this chapter and move on to the next. To a large extent, the observations I make here have been noted by countless philosophers and theoreticians in ages past. After all, though theology has some unique challenges, the epistemological difficulties facing theology are, to a great degree, no different from the epistemological difficulties that have always faced any pursuit of knowledge. In this chapter, I observe that at the root of these difficulties is the circularity generated by the humanly unattainable requirement that we certify the reliability of our own noetic resources independently by means of those same resources. In subsequent chapters we will go into greater detail in several areas that are only here quickly referenced.

The Value of Skepticism

At the outset, let me make an observation that will serve as both an introduction and a disclaimer. Though I teach philosophy, I have encountered students who seem as if they were better off remaining naive about epistemological difficulties. On a first encounter with skeptical arguments against the possibility of knowledge, for instance, some students begin to doubt the most obvious and mundane beliefs about themselves and the world. There are those who would argue that this is altogether positive. Some pedagogues appeal to Socrates and contend that emptying oneself of knowledge is the beginning of wisdom.1 I am not convinced that such extremes do much more than exhaust friends and family.2 To be sure, exposing one’s assumptions to criticism is a healthy and necessary discipline. But often, rather than arriving at a fair examination of assumptions, unconsciously held intuitions about knowledge are tacitly leveraged by skeptical arguments to the effect of confusing one’s most elemental beliefs. When the broader gamut of our assumptions about knowledge are fairly examined, skeptical arguments can serve helpfully to highlight conflicts between them. In what follows, I suggest that we can take skepticism seriously as an avenue for getting at the key epistemological issues, but I argue that we need not take seriously its radical conclusions.3 A brief elaboration on this theme will allow us to place one stake in the ground and then begin to make headway on the question at hand.

It is debatable whether skepticism, in its purest forms, is a tenable philosophical position.4 Skepticism to the extreme is complete withholding—that is, withholding of all assent, all belief. The oft-noted, and perhaps glaringly obvious, problem it faces is that it either remains mute or is self-defeating. This problem, however, was not generally the issue that the so-called common-sense philosophers raised against skepticism. Their argument was that the clarity of the conviction that we do in fact know some things outweighs the other considerations.5 If a conflict exists, in most cases the more strongly attested assumption should be the last to be jettisoned. It is far more likely that a presupposition attending the skeptical argument (about the criteria for or nature of knowledge) should be subjected to doubt than that we should conclude that knowledge is impossible. That an independent, noncircular argument cannot be marshaled to prove that knowledge is possible is not a liability. The strongest demonstration that knowledge is possible comes with the very act of knowing and our second-order reflections on it.6 In other words, before we even launch into our epistemological reflections, we already have the incorrigible sense that we have some knowledge. We may recognize that our experiences of knowing are imperfect, fuzzy or incomplete, but we cannot dismiss the clarity of the sense of knowing or the conviction that we possess knowledge to some limited degree. And, without any clearer grounds from which to build an argument against the reliability of this sense of knowing, we are left with the clearest datum in epistemology: knowledge is a human possibility. We are, therefore, entitled to take the possibility of knowledge as a rightful presumption, one that skeptical arguments cannot assail since their conclusions are always weaker by comparison.

So, most thoughtful human beings—and even a few philosophers and theologians—will, I think, agree with this first stake in the ground: that knowledge for human beings, though perhaps weak and impartial, is self-evidently a possibility. The epistemic problem we are seeking to identify is not the challenge to develop an independent, noncircular, rational argument against radical skepticism.7 The epistemic problem is not that knowledge might not be possible. The epistemic problem that plagues theology has to do with the criteria, conditions, content and nature of something that is a real possibility. Nevertheless, the rejection of the skeptical conclusion does not render skepticism unuseful. It can still serve us as a tool for exposing core epistemological concerns—to which we now turn.

What Is Knowledge? And What Does It Require?

Sparing the historical recapitulations, at the heart of the matter for most skeptics is a worry that the requirements for knowledge cannot be achieved humanly.8 This worry has fundamentally two components. The first is a supposition about the nature of knowledge.9 The second is a determination about the requirements necessary to attain it, in other words, to know something means x and therefore requires y. The skeptic usually reasons that since y (whatever is required to have knowledge) cannot be attained, we cannot have knowledge. Given that knowledge is possible (our stake in the ground: we do know things), there are naturally two kinds of responses: (1) responses that adjust our understanding of what it is to know and (2) responses that adjust the requirements for knowledge. It is difficult, however, to adjust one and not the other. Like hitting a target with a ball, an adjustment in angle requires a change in velocity and vice versa.

The typical skeptic has an unattainably high view of knowledge. It notoriously features the ideal of certainty10 and roughly requires that one be in a position vis-à-vis what is known such that one could not fail to be correct.11 However, not only must we be in this position; but we must also somehow see that we are in this position. Sometimes it is said that there must be no reason to doubt the possibility of our being correct about the things we know. In whatever form, the requirement for the impossibility of failure is patently unrealistic. To err is human, and there are many ways humanly to err.

In what follows, I will briefly entertain four important areas of ineliminable, potential human epistemic failure. Each is a facet of the general epistemic problem we are seeking to identify. Each is broadly recognized as an aspect of our human noetic limitations. To flesh these out, it will be helpful to work with an example—a common uncontroversial instance of human knowing with which all readers would be familiar. Consider your knowledge of your own name. This proposition is usually expressed in the first-person form, e.g., “my name is Kevin.” Most of us are fairly confident about what our name is most of the time, but we must acknowledge that we cannot rule out several possible avenues of epistemic failure.

1. Small-scale failures. Beginning with what might be called small-scale failures, I have in mind things like the possibility that you mis­remember your name, that your parents deceived you about your name or that the people you think are your parents are not your parents at all. I am drawing an admittedly artificial distinction between these kinds of failures and large-scale failures that involve more invasive kinds of error. The potential for small-scale failure stems from our basic inability to grasp correctly all the relevant facts. Like other kinds of potential failure, it is a feature of our basic human epistemic limitations. The larger-scale potentials for failure are more systemic, and, for sake of presentation, I divide them into failures of interpretive framework, semantic failures and second-order epistemic failures.

2. Failures of interpretive framework. We need not clarify the boundary between small- and large-scale failure. All failures can be construed as failures to grasp correctly the relevant facts though, of course, the very notion of facts becomes controversial. This second class of potential failure is the possibility that we are gravely mistaken about salient features in our general understanding of the nature of reality. I have in mind larger-scale deceptions like the possibility that you are a brain in a vat (BIV) hooked up to the “matrix,” that your memories have just been uploaded from another human being, or that you are not in fact human but are a single molecule of carbon dioxide.12 These possibilities are simultaneously ridiculous and impossible to disprove. They are the kinds of fanciful scenarios that give philosophers a bad reputation with “normal” people. They involve massive distortions in our view of reality. Nevertheless, there is no way to discount the potential for large-scale failure in our interpretive frameworks.

It is extremely significant that our primary means of growing in knowledge is inductive. It involves trial and error and the formation of functional generalizations, and it assumes the relative regularity of our environment and consistency of our experience. The provisional assumptions we make may only be tested for consistency with experience. This leaves open two significant avenues for epistemic failure, both of which are well known in the epistemology of science. The first has to do with the untestability of the assumption that the world is regular.13 The second has to do with the possibility of generating multiple internally consistent though mutually exclusive interpretive frameworks.14 In both cases there is no epistemically neutral human point of view from which an evaluation can be made.15 We cannot transcend our own interpretive frameworks; therefore, we cannot provide ourselves assurance of their accuracy or their superiority to competing internally consistent frameworks.16 The impossibility of providing a self-guarantee of our frameworks for understanding and interpreting reality is an unavoidable human epistemic limitation that provides truly large-scale potential for epistemic failure.

This is a profound and perhaps profoundly unsettling realization that is worth pausing briefly to absorb—we have no way to prove to ourselves or anyone else that we are not under massive epistemic delusion. This gives us a healthy degree of epistemic humility. An awareness of our humble estate is important; however, it is also important to see that this in no way requires that we suspend our deeply held convictions that we are not in fact massively deluded.

3. Semantic failures. We are also open to epistemic failures at the level of the expressions by means of which we articulate the propositions we think we know. The English expression we were considering is “my name is x.” To what extent are we dependent on the capacity to formulate an expression of a proposition in human language in order for it to be an article of knowledge? Regardless of the answer, it would seem that for all effable knowledge we are susceptible to epistemic failures caused at the level of semantic reference. One might protest that this is not really a problem for knowledge as much as it is a problem for the effability of knowledge. But, if an encoding of some kind is necessary for the acquisition and retrieval of knowledge—whether or not expressed—then semantic failures are a potential problem for knowledge in general. We will return to this issue in chapter eight, even there only scratching the surface.17 Suffice it here to observe that in the expression we are considering, “my name is x,” there is a variety of potential semantic difficulties. For each term there is the impossibility of ensuring idealized referential success and idealized success of predication. Terms could always be more precise. What ensures the proper mapping of concepts to the terms and to the realities? How do I know that I know what I mean by this expression? Qualification...