The Dawn Treader

How certain are you of what you know?

David Opderbeck and I are having an interesting discussion about certainty over on Through A Glass Darkly.   He posted a reaction to the Frame article I linked.  He has a follow up post that is quite meaty.  If epistemology (or apologetics) is of interest to you, come join the discussion.  I enjoy learning from my interactions with David.

My sister works in administration at Fuller Theological Seminary.  We were talking this past Easter, when I mentioned the words "emergent church".  "Yeah, those are some of our biggest classes at Fuller.  People are signing up in droves for classes on the emergent church."

My stomach churned at that point.  She sensed my uneasiness.  "Is that a bad thing?", she asked.

"Don't you know what the emergent church is?", I asked.

"Not really", she replied.

Prerequisite reading: Problem of the Criterion III

I outlined the common sense approach to the problem of the criterion ... an approach called particularism.  We start with things we do know and build on them.  We don't have to know how we know them or even be able to prove them.  If they are fundamental, commen sense types of knowledge, then we assert them and start building our knowledge.

The skeptic does not like this.  He knows he can defeat the methodist, and attempts the same attack on the particularist by saying, "well how is that you know what you claim to know?"

This is a continuation of this post: The Problem of the Criterion II

Methodism is not a very good strategy because it leads to a vicious infinite regress. Note: methodism, as used here, is an approach to knowledge and not the John Wesley sort of Methodism.

Methodism implies that before I can know anything (P), I must know two other things: Q (my criterion for knowledge) and R (the fact that P satisfies Q). But the skeptic will ask, well how is it that you know Q and R? The methodist will scramble to come up with a new criterion Q' and R' to defend his claim, but this only sets up another challenge (to Q' and R') ... the vicious regress is set up.

Methodism is in trouble.

Please read this post for background on this discussion.

We are talking about sorting through our beliefs in an effort to keep the true ones and throw out the false ones.  We need a system to do this.

To do this, we need to answer two questions.

Question A. What is the extent of our knowledge?
Question B. What is the criteria of our knowledge?

"The problem of the criterion."  Ever heard of it?  Me neither.  At least not until I heard Dr. J.P. Moreland reference it in a presentation on knowledge (epistemology).  Moreland claimed that this is useful to know when engaging skeptics.

At that point, Moreland had my interest.  I engage with skeptics all the time about worldviews and knowledge.  I decided to investigate this mysterious "problem of the criterion".