Knowing God Exists

So, what do we mean when we say that we know God exists?

Despite the undeniable weaknesses of the Standard Definition of Knowledge, I think it is our best bet in making sense of the statement, "I know God exists." Based on the preceding epistemological discussions, we can only know God exists if we have a justifiable belief AND it is true. Knowing God exists comes because we can believe a truth and we can justify it. This involves using reason, rationality and belief. Without all three, I don't think we can honestly say we know anything. Granted, what we have been able to justify and believe in the past has not always been true. As mentioned before, I am free to justify and believe all sorts of untrue things. The trick will be in determining if my my arguments and faith that are built on a foundation of truth.

Can I just believe that God exists? I have always acted as if that were the case. As a new believer in Christ, I never questioned whether God existed. I just assumed it because I believed that Christianity was correct. Christianity doesn't, as far as I can tell, require that you know God exists. Rather, you are required to believe in Him (John 3:16, John 3:18, John 6:29, John 11:40, Acts 15:7, Romans 1:16, Romans 10:9, Galatians 3:5, 1 Thessalonians 2:13, Hebrews 11:6, ).

It is interesting, though, that in several passages of the Bible there seems to be a relationship between knowing and belief. Obviously, they are two different things. It is my impression that belief for the Bible writers was a more subjective experience and knowing was somehow more objective. Yet there seems to be an order of operations; knowing follows from belief (see John 19:35 and 1 John 5:13). In other cases (notably John 6:69), belief and knowledge appear to be coequal. My personal take on this is that the Bible is saying that you must have faith before you can know and that faith is more important. Hebrews 11:6 says "And without faith it is impossible to please God, because anyone who comes to him must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who earnestly seek him." So, knowing God exists doesn't seem as important as believing.

Perhaps, in the end, this is true. But I still feel I must have some kind of reasoned justification for my belief. Otherwise, I think, we are in danger of creating a completely subjective religion.

Knowledge, a Definition

Epistemology is the study of how we know but it occurred to me that I may not even know what knowledge is. What does it mean to “know” something? How can I tell if I “know” that God exists?
According to Merriam-Webster (http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/knowledge), the most useful definition of “knowledge” is:

2 a (1): the fact or condition of knowing something with familiarity gained through experience or association (2): acquaintance with or understanding of a science, art, or technique b (1): the fact or condition of being aware of something (2): the range of one's information or understanding c: the circumstance or condition of apprehending truth or fact through reasoning : COGNITION d: the fact or condition of having information or of being learned (a person of unusual knowledge>

In order to know that God exists then, it must be through personal experience, familiar acquaintance. I must be consciously aware of this knowledge and I must understand it.

As I've said before, epistemology is not my favorite subject. It always seemed to me that the major camps of epistemology are arrayed against each other like the old Nature v. Nurture camps. It's rather obvious to me that both play a major part in human development, and, thus epistemological subjectivism, rationalism, empiricism and faith all play a role in how we know anything. According to this definition, I may be required to use many different tools to know anything.

All of these tools have their weaknesses as well. Subjectivism fails because it cannot tell us anything about what exists outside of ourselves. Prepositional knowledge fails because it start from the general and makes assumptions about the specific and scientific knowledge fails because it starts from the specific and makes assumptions about the general. Faith fails because it attempts to know things that may have a variety of alternative and yet unknown explanations.

But all four have their own strengths. If we don't have a point of view (subjectivism) then we don't have any right to say that I know anything. If we don't think about why we know something (rationalism) or if there is nothing tangible (empiricism) to intuit, then there is no warrant to believe that we can know anything. Yet, there are things we cannot know for sure and we must make a leap of faith in order to accept. I wasn't at the Apollo moon landing in 1969 (I can barely remember 1969!) but it's reasonable to believe that it happened and I can actually touch some of the artifacts from the mission. That said, I cannot be 100% certain that it happened so some portion of my acceptance of the moon landing must be done on faith. All four theories seem to be necessary for a grounded view of knowledge.

According to the “standard definition of knowledge”, knowledge must contain the following three elements. I tend to agree with Plato by saying that knowledge must be "justified true belief". I only really know something if it is true, I believe it's true and can justify my belief in the truth of the matter. I cannot know untrue things, but I am free to believe all sorts of things that may not be true. There may be some true things I will never believed, so I do not know them. I can also believe untrue things; again, this is not knowledge. Thus what is known must be true by necessity and I must believe it is true.

As I said, one is free to believe all sorts of things, but we all know that there are many people who believe some pretty strange and obviously false things. Thus, belief alone is insufficient to knowledge. On the other hand, we can believe in something that is true, yet this is still insufficient. The belief must be warranted or justified. If I happened to believe that I have $1.35 in change in my pocket and there just by mere chance happen to be 4 quarters, a dime, 4 nickels and 5 pennies in my pocket and by pure chance there actually was $1.35 in my pocket, would I know it? The answer, of course, is no. I only guessed correctly and so the final element of knowledge is justification. My belief must be warranted somehow. In this case, I can reach into my pocket and count the change. In other cases, I may need to construct an array of evidence both logical and evidentiary.

So, on this view, that in order to know something, it must be true (some form of empiricism), it must be justifiable (rationalism) and I must believe in it (some form of faith). If I rely on any one theory to come to a conclusion, especially about the existence of God, I’m afraid this project will be hopeless. I think that’s why a lot of people fail in their attempt to prove God’s existence. Faith in God seems the most likely candidate for starters, but faith alone doesn’t seem to be sufficient to produce real, sustainable knowledge. For myself, I’m sure faith will continue to play a part in my relationship with God, but it cannot be the only way to know God.

Epistemological Rationalism

The second major epistemological theory I would like to cover is Rationalism, the belief that we acquire knowledge by using our minds. Knowledge is only warranted if our intuition can fully apprehend the thing in question. Knowledge is a result of analytic truth (deduction) and, thus, can be reliably expressed in syllogism. In its simplest form, this takes the form of an argument. The modus ponens (or modus ponendo ponens, "mode that affirms by affirming") states that if X and Y are true, the Z must be true. For example:

1. If today is Sunday, I will be at church.
2. Today is Sunday.
3. Therefore, I will be at church.

This can also be used to prove a negative (a modus tollens):

1. If you are a human being then you are not a stone.
2. You are made of stone.
3. Therefore, you are not a human being.

Of course, there are examples that don't work because we can deny the antecedent. Take for example:

1. If God would show Himself to me personally, that would prove that God exists.
2. But God hasn't done so.
3. Therefore, religion is false.

Just because 1. and 2. are both true, doesn't necessitate 3. There may be other explanations. God may show Himself to us, but our senses may not fully grasp His presence or just because something is not “shown” does not mean it does not exist.

For a rationalist, the mind and argument (essentially) determine what we can know, as opposed to an empiricist who may claim that that the only way to know if God exists if we can somehow experience Him. Only because the world has an inherently logical structure, can we, as an rationalist would claim, know anything. In our case, it must be proven to be a logical necessity before a rationalist can accept God's existence. So, when I begin to tackle the arguments for God's existence, I will be venturing into the world of rationalism, but I have my doubts about this method.

South Park and Philosophy

"South Park" AND . . .

What?!? Philosophy? Are you kidding me?

Well, the answer, of course, is no, they are not kidding.

It has taken me a while to really come to enjoy the Emmy Award-winning cartoon South Park. In fact, I really didn't like the show the first couple times I watched it. Mainly because it is a definitely not your average Saturday morning cartoon. I found it funny, but it's also extremely vulgar, crass, uncouth, needlessly controversial and it appears to have a bias against every possible interest group in the world. On top of that, it struck me as completely inscrutable. Case in point: Kenny. Why have a character the audience could not understand but the other characters could that died almost every episode? What's the point of that? Over the past year though, I've come to appreciate South Park, not just as entertainment (yeah, I feely admit, it's warped entertainment!) but as real social commentary and as way of beginning to think about the philosophical issues that swirl around us in modern and "sophisticated" people. If you're careful, at the end of a show, you can honestly say "You know, I learned something today."

That is where the book, South Park and Philosophy: Bigger, Longer, and More Penetrating, comes in. My wife and I noticed it on the bookstore shelf and quickly thumbed through it. Our first impression was "this must be a joke." Even the essay titles suggested it was; there was already enough vulgarity on the first couple pages to make me think that this was a gag book (I counted eight potentially-offensive terms in the titles alone). But, in the end, the essays seemed like they might just be worth a read.

The book, as all the Popular Culture and Philosophy series books, is a collection of essays. This one is "cobbled together" by Richard Hanley, an Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Delaware. He's a reasonably intelligent and knowledgeable writer, but, unfortunately, he doesn't mind being as vulgar and rude as some of the characters on South Park. I suppose that's the point; it IS a book about South Park, after all. That said, it got on my nerves pretty quickly. It's perfectly alright to point out other peoples' fallacies or be opinionated, but it's quite another to make personal attacks and slop vulgarities over perfectly good prose. Because he wrote fourteen of the twenty-two essays were written by Hanley, just getting through much of the book was a chore.

Even so, there is a lot about the book I enjoyed, particularly the essay on time travel by Sophia Bishop, the Golden Mean by Aaron Fortune and the essays on the philosophy of education and death by Randall Auxier. One can get a quick over-view of a good number of topics from almost all major fields of philosophy. It probably does require a little background in philosophy to truly appreciate though.

So what is "philosophical" about South Park?

I've always thought that South Park touches on quite few philosophical themes. In fact, almost every episode I've seen (and I've not seen them all by a long shot), centers around an ethical, metaphysical or epistemological idea. In a typical show, two extremes are pitted against each other and by the end of the show some third alternative presents itself, suggesting, perhaps, that that creators are big fans of the Middle Way. In addition, the book suggests that the Parker and Stone are astute students of Socrates (Auxier thinks Chef IS Socrates), Aristotle, Freud (the boys represent the Id, Ego, Superego and the Death Impulse--can you guess which is which?), and Heidegger, among others. While most of the episodes feature current events, movies and celebrities, the underlying message of South Park does not seem to be ABOUT those things. Rather, it seems to me (and the authors of the book), that South Park is about deeper issues that are drown out by the innane babble of today's media. It asks big questions: When does life end? How should we treat those with differing points of view? What is knowledge and how do you know what it is anyway? What is God like and why does the Devil always get such a bad wrap? Why should I believe my TV?

One last observation, one I've made myself, but the book brings out nicely. South Park seems to be anti-religious--it does a great job of bringing to light all of the silly, obnoxious, childish and plain stupid stuff the Church (well, any religious organization) can dredge up--but it really is simply against hypocrisy in any form. The show's creators have no problem taking on any kind of fallacious thinking but seem to be respectful of thoughtful consideration of a religious (even Fundamentalist Christian) view. There's nothing wrong with having a religious point of view, as South Park suggests, as long as you sincerely think about what you believe and allow others their due.

But for a couple of excellent articles, I can't say that I can recommend this volume, but I understand this is really the second South Park and Philosophy. I'll have to check that out South Park and Philosophy: You Know, I Learned Something Today and let you know what I think of it. I hope it's better than this one. If you are really into South Park and its sophomoric use of language, then you probably wouldn't find this book too difficult to read. On the other hand, if you prefer a little more sophistication and cool-thinking in your philosophy, then maybe you should pass on this one.