In my Salt and Light post I referred to a transcript of a discussion that took place at Book Talk . The discussion was about Pale Blue Dot, a Carl Sagan bestseller. The special guest for this discussion was Ann Druyan, who was married to Carl Sagan up until his death in 1996. Ann was co-producer of the movie Contact.
At one point, Ann quotes Socrates who said: "True knowledge exists in knowing that you know nothing. And in knowing that you know nothing, that makes you the smartest of all."
Ann says: "I would like us to get to a place where we embrace our newness and lack of knowledge ... Clueless and proud! Yes! Because like Socrates knew we know most who know we know nothing."
I will let you figure out why Socrates' statement is self-refuting.
Now, I think where Ann is headed with this is that we ought not claim to know more than we do. At one point she says "That's why it makes me so furious when people say science is arrogant. Science doesn't make claims to knowledge it doesn't have."
I think she is referring to science as an approach to knowledge, not science as a bunch of scientists. At one point she says "scientists are just as screwed up as the rest of us" (meaning arrogant and fallible).
I agree with Ann that we ought not to claim to know more than we do. That only makes sense. The question is, what justification do we need for our truth claims in order for them to count as knowledge? Stated differently, what is it that Ann thinks some claim to know that they ought not claim to know.
She answers that question with this comment. "I believe we know nothing about God-not a thing. We hardly know anything about our tiny corner of the universe."
This is, of course, where I beg to differ. Ann, like Carl, like Michael Shermer and countless others, gets tripped up by their philosophy of scientism. Scientism asserts that the only path to knowledge is through scientific inquiry.
Scientism sounds humble and reasonable, but it is unlivable. Scientific inquiry requires all sorts of philosophical assumptions in order to work. The assumption of uniformity. The assumption of the reliability of the senses. The assumption of the knowability of the external world. The assumption of the reliability of conscious thought. The assumption of the reality of numbers.
In fact, the philosophical statement that "the only path to knowledge is through scientific inquiry" is itself unverifiable in a scientific sense. No experiment can verify it. Therefore, it falsifies itself.
The proper view of knowledge is that truth comes to us in many forms. Knowledge is justified true belief. For something to count as knowledge, one must look at the adequacy of the justification. The Greek work for justified, ironically, is logos. The very word used to refer to the Son of God in John 1.
Ann is simply wrong when she asserts we know nothing about God. To quote Schaeffer, "God is there and He has spoken." He has revealed Himself through the written word. He has left His fingerprints on this universe for us to see. He has written His moral code on the hearts of men. He has revealed Himself through events in history. He has revealed Himself through Jesus Christ, the Logos. God has not left us here to grope around in darkness. God has not left us clueless.
So, while we don't know everything about God, we do know quite a bit.
This is why it becomes important to know how we know things. It seems like I wax on and on about epistemology. Why waste so much time there?
Because the gatekeepers of ideas in our society are waging a steady campaign to try to demote a Biblical view of reality from the realm of knowledge to the realm of belief. Mere belief is much weaker than knowledge. It is easy to discard mere beliefs. Many Christian kids who hold that Christianity is just a belief end up discarding it the minute they run into intellectual challenges.
Discarding knowledge, however, is all together a different thing. That is why we need to establish what knowledge is. And there is one other, more important reason.
God calls us to know Him, not merely believe in Him.