In the course of studying in seminary, one of the philosophical issues that confronts every seminary student (and undergraduate students as well) is trying to figure out how you know what you know.One of the ways we ask this question has to do with how a child learns. Is a child's thinking determined by nature or nurture? Is our understanding and ability to think determined by our birth, our DNA, the inherent things within our creation and the things we inherit from our parents? Or is our environment the biggest factor in our understanding of things? Do we learn from others, experiences, the things that happen to us and around us? If you accept that both nature and nurture affect each of us in various ways (I think most of us would think that), then other questions arise that theologians and philosophers want to understand.
For instance, how do we learn? How do we come to perceive things? What are the factors that determine how we come to know what it is that we know? Most of the foundational textbooks that I have read for any of my seminars attempt in some way to answer this question. The term for this exploration is called epistemology. A fancy word for the pursuit of understanding how we know what we know.
To begin to understand how important this is, you should know that every realm of study from business to politics to science is concerned with the "epistemological question." Every area of educational discipline is concerned with how we know what we know. Theology is no different and, in many ways, it is the inspiration for the thinking that has taken place over thousands of years. If you have ever heard of Plato and Aristotle, then you have heard of the two men who helped to frame the debate that goes on to this day. If you have not read these two giants of philosophy, let me try and tell you what they said
- Plato believed that human beings seem born to ask, “Why?” His idea was that if a human being knows the truth they will do it.
- Also, Plato was deeply suspicious that the world we have before our eyes is not the world that is actually there. To describe this, Plato developed a famous allegory. It's called the Allegory of the Cave.
- Imagine that there are prisoners being held captive in a cave from birth. They are all chained, unable to move. In addition, their heads are chained to face only one direction, they all face a wall. Behind them is a fire that is always lit. Behind that is a raised conveyor along which statues of all various kinds of things (animals, plants, etc.) are being transported. The statues cast a shadow on the wall. The prisoners never see the statues nor have they ever seen real animals or plants. All they see is the shadow of the statues against the wall. The prisoners play a game in which they attempt to see who is best at naming the shadows on the wall. To the prisoners, the shadows are reality. They have never seen anything else. Reality is what they see because what they see is all they know. Finally, one of the prisoners is set free. As he turns around he sees a new reality. As he leaves the cave, he is blinded by the light of the sun. It takes some time but, eventually, he adjusts to the sunlight and experiences another reality of real animals (not statues) and real plants (not shadows). What happens if he returns to the cave? He will not see things in the same way. His reality has changed. He will not be as good as the prisoners in identifying the shadows. Everything has changed because his knowledge and reality have changed. Plato, seeing the prisoners looking at the wall, thinks that this may better represent humanity. We are not seeing what is really there but merely describing impressions, shadows of what is real.
- And that is why Plato didn't necessarily trust that the world around us is as real as we think it is. Therefore, Plato believed that the gaining of wisdom is the only thing that can help us gain a better understanding of what is real. What we see, the world around us, our emotions are all unreliable as a way to know what we know.
- Aristotle took a very different path to explaining what we know. He wrote a book called, Metaphysics (literally, those thoughts which are after or beyond thinking about the physical world). In it, Aristotle points to our senses as a way of understanding what is real. We gain our knowledge of the world around us by probing and testing. Our probing and testing gives us knowledge by way of reason. Reason makes sense of our experience.
- The basic difference between the two is that Plato thought that knowledge was transcendent - beyond this world. Aristotle believed that we can know this world through experience of it. And that has been the debate ever since.
