Epistemology II: A Tale of Two Systems
Epistemology II: A Tale of Two Systems
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I t is impossible to cover more than a small portion of the history of epis-temology between the time of Rene Descartes (1596-1650) and the pre- sent. Descartes represented a version of the rationalism defined at the end of chapter 3: “Some human knowledge does not arise from sense experi- ence.” He was a French Roman Catholic of modest religious convictions, though the existence of God did play a central role in The Meditations. Two other rationalists are worthy of mention, even though their beliefs, like those of Descartes, cannot be explored. The parents of Baruch Spin- oza (1632-1677) were Pottuguese Jews who fled persecution in Spain and moved to Amsterdam, where their son was born. Spinoza was expelled from the synagogue of Amsterdam for heretical beliefs, including panthe- ism. The third famous Continental rationalist of the seventeenth century was Gottfried Leibniz (1646-1716), a German Protestant.
Historians of philosophy typically contrast these three European ratio- nalists with three eighteenth-century British empiricists, namely, the Eng- lishman John Locke (1632-1704), 1 the Irishman George Berkeley (1685- 1753), 2 and the Scotsman David Hume (1711-1776). These six were then followed by the German thinker Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), whose work is sometimes misleadingly represented as a synthesis of rationalism and empiricism.
All of these systems are worthy of careful study, but not in this text. I have time only to take a brief look at some central ideas of Hume as preparation for a slightly more detailed examination of the epistemology of Kant. I will draw attention to several significant implications of Kant’s work and raise several challenges. In chapter 12, I will jump ahead to our own time and examine the content of a system known as Reformed
1. With Locke’s death in 1704, it is obvious that the label of eighteenth-century empiri- cism stretches things a bit, since all of Locke’s major works were written in the seventeenth century.
2. George Berkeley was a bishop in the Anglican church. He was the only important philosopher to visit America before 1900. He came hoping to start a missionary training college for the evangelization of the Indian tribes of New England.
EPISTEMOLOGY II: A TALE OF TWO SYSTEMS
epistemology. This latter view has links to a Scottish thinker named Thomas Reid (1710-1796), the great Reformed theologian John Calvin (1509-1564), and before him, Augustine (354-430).
However, before the theories of Hume, Kant, Reid, and others begin zooming past your eyes, I must include an introductory section that will acquaint you with a few major topics and problems raised by thinkers before Hume and Kant.
The Theory of Ideas
During the seventeenth centwy, many philosophers accepted the basic premise of a position known as the theory of ideas. The first step into the theory of ideas involves assent to the claim that the immediate objects of human knowledge are ideas that exist in the mind. In other words, when I perceive a brown table on the other side of the room, what I am immediately conscious of is not the table but an idea of the table. While the table presumably exists outside my mind, exists in the external world, the idea of the table exists in my mind. Most people make this distinction and also believe that the idea of the table in the mind is caused somehow by the table itself.3
The Problem of the External World In ways too complex to explore here, the existence of that real chair and all of the other furniture of the so-called external world (the world sup- posedly existing outside of our minds) became problematic, so much so that some philosophers felt obliged to produce arguments proving that the world outside our minds does exist when no human is perceiving it. This problem of the external world will occur in somewhat different forms in the positions of Hume, Kant, and Reformed epistemology.
The Problem of Other Minds Philosophers became puzzled by the question of how we might ever know that persons other than ourselves have minds. Look at some other person now; if you’re alone, you might have to turn on the television. What you perceive is a human body moving in familiar ways and uttering sounds and appearing to respond to other human bodies. But we never see the other
3. John Locke went on to distinguish between primaty qualities that exist as a part of the table outside my mind (such as size and shape) and secondary qualities that are not a part of external objects but exist in the mind (such as color, taste, and smell). George Berkeley rejected the distinction between primary and secondary qualities and argued that everything humans regard as a physical and material object is a collection of ideas exist- ing in human minds and primarily in the mind of God. These are fascinating subjects, but I do not have time to explore them. Check out a good history of philosophy book. Epistemology II: A Tale of Two Systems
Some Philosophical Background to Hume and Kant
john Locke Engraving from painting by Sir G. Kneller, 1830s CORBIS/BETrMANN, NEW YORK
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The Apparent Failure of
Empiricism
David Hume
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person’s mind. Of course, our relationship with our own mind (thoughts, itnages, other items of which we are conscious) seems both itnmediate and undeniable. My awareness of the brown table is mediated by other things; . I do not perceive the table itself immediately. But my awareness of my mind’s idea of that table is direct and itnmediate. While I find it possible to doubt the existence of the table (I might be dreaming or hallucinating), it is itnpossible to doubt my awareness of my idea of the table.
So it is easy to believe that I have or I am a mind. But how do I know that you have a mind? Lots of philosophers offered lots of arguments in an attempt to prove that other people have minds. But their arguments failed. 4
O ver a period of centuries, the failed efforts of many philosophers laid bare numerous weaknesses of empiricism. The belief that all human knowledge arises from sense experience proved inadequate to explain many important human ideas, including the concept of Equality itself (see Plato), the notion of oneness (see Augustine), the idea of infinite space (Locke), and causality (Hume). And finally, for now, empiricism cannot explain the many instances of necessary truth that humans can know. Once people commit themselves to the claim that all human knowledge arises from sense experience, the inability to carry this out with respect even to one idea is fatal. If humans can have as little as one idea that does not arise from sense experience, empiricism is proven false and the moderate type of rationalism explained in chapter 3 is true.
The writings of David Hume (1711-1776) are a watershed in the his-tOty of philosophy. Born in Scotland, Hume was and still is perceived as an agnostic or atheist whose anti-Christian views led to his being denied a university professorship in Scotland. Hume’s grave in Edinburgh is worth a visit by any traveler to this fascinating city.
Much of Hume’s notoriety among Christians results from a less than careful reading of his works . Hume is commonly believed to have attacked the foundations of Christianity, such as the existence of God, personal survival after death, and miracles. It is tme that Hume’s personal beliefs did not mirror the orthodox Calvinism that surrounded him in his early youth. Nevertheless, what Hume intended in his writings is often quite removed from what his interpreters have thought.
There are three common misconceptions about Hume’s philosophy. (1) Hume denied the reality of causal relations, that there is ever a nec- essary connection between that prior event we call a cause and the sub- sequent event we call its effect. (2) Hume rejected the existence of what
4. For an excellent review of such attempts, see Alvin Plantinga, God and Other Minds (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1967).
EPISTEMOLOGY II: A TALE OF TWO SYSTEMS
philosophers call the external world; that is, he doubted the existence of a real world outside of his mind. (3) Hume doubted the existence of what philosophers call the self, that is, the real I, the foundation of a person’s identity through tirne.s These three erroneous claims make up what might be called the philosophical package. What led to their promulgation has a bearing on one of Hume’s key teachings.
The philosophical package came to be attributed to Hume because of the writings of two of his fellow Scotsmen, Thomas Reid and James Beattie.6 In later years, philosophers came to believe that Hume’s enterprise was quite different from what Reid and Beattie envisaged. According to Hume, every- one holds to a number of beliefs around which most other beliefs, individ- ual actions, and social institutions turn. These pivotal beliefs include the reality of causal relations (that some things can and do cause changes in other things), the reality of the external world (that the existence of the world does not depend upon its being perceived), and the continuing existence of the knowing self. Hume had no quarrel with these beliefs; it would be fun- damentally foolish, he held, to doubt them. What most concerned Hume was how these beliefs come to be known. Hume showed that neither reason nor experience is sufficient to ground a knowledge of these matters. But there is no other way for them to be known. Therefore, if these pivotal beliefs can- not be known by reason and expelience, they cannot be known at all.
It was at this point that Hume’s critic Beattie presumably made a mis- take. Beattie wrongly concluded that Hume denied these pivotal beliefs. Hume really denied that there is any sense in which we can be said to know these things. But this is a far cry from saying that we should doubt them. We must continue to believe them, since the consequences of not believing are too absurd to contemplate. And no one has to force or per- suade us to believe them; believing them is the natural thing to do. With this last observation we begin to approach Hume’s basic point: Hume tried to show that most of our pivotal beliefs about reality are matters that human reason is powerless to prove or support.
5. This notion also goes by another name, that of a continuing self. If we consider the mind or self of a person at the time of birth and again at the time of death, it is easy to believe that individual is the same person at his death that he was at his birth. One argu- ment for a continuing self is that the notion of reward or punishment after death makes no sense unless the person receiving the reward or punishment is the same individual who perfomed the original actions.
6. Beattie’s major work in this area was his Essay on the Nature and Immutability of Truth, first published in Edinburgh in 1770. Thomas Reid is by far the more significant philosopher of the two. Worth consulting is his Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man, first published in 1786 and reprinted several times. Some contemporary philosophers con- tend that Reid’s handling of Hume’s philosophy is misunderstood. And even if Reid’s cri- tique of Hume were flawed, it would not detract from Reid’s own positive contribution to the theory of knowledge. Epistemology II: A Tale of Two Systems
DavidHume Mezzotint, 1776, after a painting by Allan Ramsay, 1766 THE GRANGER C OLLECTION, NEW Y ORK
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Hume’s Gap Hume was doing two things. First, he was attacking the supremacy of human reason, one of the cardinal tenets of the Enlightenment, by seeking to show that human reason has definite limits. (I leave it to the reader to decide if Hume, who died in 1776, was a postmodernist.) All who attempt to extend reason beyond its limits become involved in absurdities and con- tradictions and become prone to the disease of skepticism.? Philosophers have been too optimistic in assessing the claims of human reason, Hume believed. Most of the important things we think we know are not known at all. That is, they have not been arrived at on the basis of reasoning, and they are not supported by experience .
Hume’s second point was that these pivotal beliefs rest on something other than reason and experience, namely, on instinct, habit, and cus- tom. Some nonrational inner force compels us to accept these pivotal beliefs. In his writings on ethics also, Hume argued that moral judgments rest not on reason but on nonrational human nature. In ethics, as in meta- physics and religion, human reason is and ought to be the slave of human passions, that is, our nonrational nature.8 This is tantamount to the claim that we cannot have knowledge about the transcendent. This axiom is the foundation of what I call Hume’s gap.
If Hume was a skeptic, then he was not one in Beattie’s sense of the word. Hume did not doubt the existence of the external world. As Hume saw it, this kind of skepticism is absurd because it contradicts common sense and violates our natural instinct to believe (against all reasoning) in certain propositions.9 Nature, instinct, and common sense all lead us to believe in an external world. According to Hume, we should ignore the arguments of the rationalists and trust our instincts. He believed that inves- tigation ought to be limited to areas such as mathematics where knowl- edge is possible. Speculative knowledge claims about certain topics in metaphysics, theology, and ethics should be avoided.10 Such matters should be accepted on the basis of Hume’s type of faith, not knowledge.
7. As I show later in this chapter, this conviction was also a fundamental thesis of Kant. The claim that there are more similarities between Hume and Kant than meet the eye is argued by Lewis White Beck in “A Prussian Hume and a Scottish Kant, ” in McGill Hume Studies, ed. David Fate Norton et al. (San Diego, Calif.: Austin Hill Press, 1979), 63-78. Epistemology II: A Tale of Two Systems
8. Hume’s well-known statement about reason being the slave of the passions appears in his Treatise on Human Nature, 2.3.
9. The possibility that Hume’s position was essentia lly the same as that advanced by the Scottish Common Sense philosophers Reid and Beattie is examined by David Fate Norton in “Hume and His Scottish Critics,” in McGill Hume Studies, ed. David Fate Norton et al. (San Diego, Calif.: Austin Hill Press, 1979), 309-24.
10. This is what Hume meant in the famous conclusion to his Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. “When we run over libraries, persuaded of these principles, what havoc must we make? If we take in our hand any volume; of divinity or school [scholas-
EPISTEMOLOGY II: A TALE OF TWO SYSTEMS
Hume’s Religious Beliefs It is sometimes thought that Hume was an atheist, that he attempted to prove that God does not exist, and that he argued that miracles are impos- sible. To be sure, Hume was not a Christian in the New Testament sense of the word. He did not believe in miracles, which is, however, some- thing different from trying to prove them impossible. He did not person- ally believe in special revelation, immortality, or religious duties like prayer. But he was not an atheist; he did not attempt to prove the nonex- istence of God. 11 And he never argued that miracles are impossible. Hume’s famous attack on miracles amounts to the assertion that no one could ever reasonably believe that a miracle had occurred. 12
Hume believed in the existence of a divine mind that was in some unknown way responsible for the order of the universe .13 Hume was both shocked and amused by the dogmatic atheism of the French philosophes whose views represented the French Enlightenment. What this means is that we have a leader of the Scottish Enlightenment attacking the leaders of the French Enlightenment for their unacceptable use of reason in deny- ing the existence of God. Does this make Hume a postmodernist? This information supports my claim in chapter 10 that contemporary post- modernists have misrepresented the view of reason held during the Enlightenment. Hume’s point was that we cannot have any knowledge about God. But it is natural to have faith that God exists. In fact, the same nature that compels us to hold the pivotal beliefs mentioned earlier leads us to believe in the existence of God. But nature does not compel us to go beyond this basic belief in God’s existence and accept the theological claims added by conservative Christians. Those theological claims must be rejected because they go beyond the limits of human knowledge. To argue, as many Christians do, that reason can prove the existence of God is to exceed the bounds of human knowledge, Hume believed.
tic] metaphysics, for instance; let us ask, Does it contain any abstract reasoning concern- ing quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental1·easoning concerning mai- lers of fact and existence? No. Commit it then to the flames: for it can contain nothing but sophistty and illusion. ”
11. I am aware of Hume’s arguments against traditional theistic proofs such as the cos- mological and teleological arguments. But at the end of his Dialogues Concerning Nat- ural Religion, in which Hume’s objections to theistic proofs appear, Hume appears to affirm his belief in God’s existence. See Ronald H. Nash, Faith and Reason (Grand Rapids: Zon- dervan, 1988), chaps. 9-10.
12. See Nash, Faith and Reason, chap. 16. 13. Consider the following quote from Hume’s Natural History of Religion in The Philo-
sophical Works of David Hume (London, 1874-1875), 4, 309: “The whole frame of nature bespeaks an intelligent author; and no rational enquirer can, after serious reflection, sus- pend his belief a moment with regard to the primary principles of genuine theism and Religion.” In this connection, section 12 of Hume’s Dialogues should be studied. Students of Hume’s thought know how difficult it is to reconcile everything Hume says in this work. Epistemology II: A Tale of Two Systems
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Some Christians no doubt have overestimated the ability of human reason with respect to proofs about God’s existence. I have no desire to attempt to defend that use of reason. (See this book’s chapters 13 and 14 about the existence of God.) More serious, however, is Hume’s denial of the possibility of any knowledge about God in general and the possibil- ity of revealed knowledge. In these respects also, Hume can sound like a postmodernist or at least a forerunner of postmodernism.
To summarize, Hume’s goal in his discussions of religion was the same as his objective in philosophy: he wished to show that reason is power- less to convert anyone to the claims of faith. “To be a philosophical scep- tic, ” he wrote, “is the first and most essential step towards being a sound believing Christian. “14 German religious thinker]. G. Hamann (1730-1788) believed that Hume’s skepticism could be a godsend for Christianity .IS Liv- ing in the same German city as Immanuel Kant, Konigsberg, he translated Hume’s Dialogues into German, hoping it would lead rationalists16 like Kant to see the light and move toward accepting a more traditional view of the Christian faith. It is unclear whether Hamann recognized that Hume’s own preference seems to have been for a nonrational faith in a god unsupported by reason, revelation, miracles, or evidence of any kind.
Given this background, the nature of what I earlier called Hume’s gap can now be identified. Hume’s gap is the rejection of the possibility of a rational knowledge of God and objective religious truth. Hume grounded humankind’s belief in God in our nonrational nature. Hume was a precursor of those philosophers and theologians who insist that religious faith must be divorced from knowledge and who believe that the impossibility of knowledge about God will in some way enhance faith. Like Kant, as we’ll see, Hume was engaged in denying knowledge in order to make room for faith, a nonrational and unbiblical kind of faith. To both Hume and Kant, knowledge and faith have nothing in common. The arrogance of rational religion (the Enlightenment? modernity?) must be destroyed so that faith (a nonrational faith) can assume its proper place as the only legitimate ground of religion.
14. The quotation comes from the conclusion to section 12 of Hume’s Dialogues Con- cerning Natural Religion. Epistemology II: A Tale of Two Systems
15. Hamann is an interesting but little known person. Born in Konigsberg, East Prus- sia , he came under the influence of the kind of Enlightenment rationalism we have noted earlier. At the age of twenty-eight, while working in London, he had a profound religious experience that led to his abandonment of Enlightenment theories. His life was not always a consistent testimony to Christian practice. The Christianity toward which he hoped to influence thinkers like Kant was at least closer to the historic faith than that found in the writings of Kant.
16. Keep in mind that “rationalist” has several meanings. I use it here in the sense of a person who elevates human reasoning above the Scriptures and teachings of the historic Christian faith.
EPISTEMOLOGY II: A TALE OF TWO SYSTEMS
Hume’s gap appears prominently in the thought of many modern thinkers. The contemporary eclipse of God can be seen in Jean-Paul Sartre’s “silence of God,” in Martin Heidegger’s “absence of God,” in Paul Tillich’s “non-being of god,” and finally in radical theology’s assertion of “the death of God.” Paul ‘s sermon to the philosophers on Mars Hill (Acts 17) concerning worship of the unknown god is all too relevant to the contemporaty theological scene. Liberal Protestant theology for the past two centuries is a chronicle of futile attempts to retain respectability for religious faith while denying religion any right to revealed truth. Ironi- cally, this is precisely where almost all of the postmodern religionists of the current generation also can be found. In radical theologian Tillich’s version of Hume’s thesis , all that is left of Christianity is a religion that is neither objective, rational, miraculous, supernatural, nor even per- sonal. About the only thing that liberal , neoliberal and postconservative thinkers can agree about is that God has not spoken and, indeed, can- not speak.
One trademark of theological liberalism for the past seventy years is a reduction of faith to “courageous ignorance. “17 Many contemporary spokespeople for the historic Christian faith have shamefully ceased defending God’s objective communication of truth. Hume’s gap has affected their thinking to the extent that many now ignore or deempha- size the cognitive dimension of divine revelation.
The most obvious consequence of Hume’s gap is a minimal theism. Once Hume’s stance is adopted, New Testament Christianity, with its proclamation of a divine Christ whose death and resurrection secured redemption from sin and gave hope beyond the grave, must be replaced with a religion that talks about how good it feels to have an experience with a god about whom nothing definite can be known. The legacy of Hume’s gap undermines the Christian faith not by denying it but by directing our attention away from the importance of its knowledge claims and its truth content. Postmodern Christians owe much to that legacy. With friends like that, the Christian faith has no need for any enemies. Epistemology II: A Tale of Two Systems
I mmanuel Kant (1724-1804) is justly counted among the most important and influential thinkers in the history of philosophy. Early in his philo- sophical career, Kant had been trained in a kind of sterile German ratio- nalism that denigrated the role of sense experience in human knowledge. All of this changed when Kant encountered the system of Hume. As Kant wrote, “I openly confess my recollection of David Hume was the very thing which many years ago first interrupted my dogmatic [rationali
