Kreitsauce's Musings

Many years ago, Thomas à Kempis made the observation that became the title of this post. Truth must exist in order for us to really know anything. If there is no such thing as absolute truth, if right and wrong don’t exist, we can’t really know anything. What exactly is knowledge? How do we know anything?

Some things are not prerequisites for knowledge. Absolute certainty isn’t. You don’t have to be completely confident in what you know in order to know it. Think of a person who is learning to ride a bike, or give a monologue in a speech class. They may not feel like they know it. They may not know how they know it. But, time and time again, a child learns to ride his bike, a freshman in college manages to pull off a speech.

Frankly, there aren’t many things in this life that you and I can say: “It’s impossible for me to be wrong on this.” We’re pretty much limited to math, some basic logical principles, and some experiences when it comes to having proof for things and being absolutely certain. In other words, we don’t have to remove all doubt and defeat all counter-arguments in order to say that we know something. Absolute certainty is a good thing, but it is not a necessary thing. Secondly, knowing “how you know” something is not a prerequisite for Knowledge, but I’ve already mentioned that in another post.

Now we turn to what knowledge is, and we discover that there are three different types of knowledge. At the most basic level, there is awareness. A baby is aware of feeling secure or perhaps a cat on a table, but she doesn’t necessarily have a true understanding of what security is or even what a cat is conceptually, nor does it have the linguistic skills to even explain how it feels or say the word “cat.” It can see and experience both without going any further. Some knowledge is this sort of “awareness” knowledge. It can be experienced and observed, but that may be all. Secondly you and I may have skills that are based on knowledge; we have know how. We can take our awareness and observation and do something with it to interact with reality. Finally, there is propositional knowledge. This sort of knowledge is believing something to be true because of reason and logic.

How can I know anything about Christianity to be true? I can be aware of truth even if I don’t know everything about that Truth with certainty, interact with truth, and – primarily- believe it because the Bible is replete with propositional knowledge that is both logical and reasonable.

There are two basic questions in life that you and I have to answer:

1. What do I know?
2. What can I know?

When it comes to these two questions, the skeptic and the down-to-earth person with good, old-fashioned common sense are forever at odds. Skeptics believe that anyone who claims to know something to be true has to prove that he can’t be wrong. This is because- to the skeptic- there is no good solution to either question above. They believe that you and I can’t answer one question without knowing the other. If I try to explain how I know something, I also have to explain how I know that I can know it, and vice versa. Life must be very confusing to the skeptic, which is why most become methodists for all practical purposes. I don’t mean the Christian denomination of Methodists. I mean the philosophical sort of methodist. These methodists believe that you have to know what can be known before you can know that you know something. For example, methodists tend to believe that you can only know things if you can observe them with the five senses. (Naturalism, by the way, is a favored perspective for methodists.) Of course, limiting knowledge in this way assumes that you can know things using the five senses, and it requires you to have knowledge of the five senses first. That means they accidentally answered the first question first and have yet to tell us how they knew something without answering the second question. Now they’re confused and embarrassed!

Skeptics also have a strange belief that asking “How do you know?” repeatedly without offering a reason for being skeptical about something is the ultimate endgame for a debate. I’ve stopped answering simple “How do you know?” questions if there’s no argument that follows. They don’t have any substance to bring to the discussion at this point, since they can’t explain how they don’t know!

Skeptics can also try to force a person into becoming a methodist by asking that some “How do you know?” question. They try to get their opponent to answer that second question first. The problem here is that you can know some things without having to necessarily explain how you know it. We teach children many things without explaining how we know they are true. Skeptics don’t see life that way. They would rather avoid error than embrace truth. If there’s a chance you might be wrong, you might as well not believe it. To their mind, the skeptic must be refuted (proved wrong) before they will accept something as knowledge

I prefer using plain old common sense. For those who believe in common sense, there are some very specific things that are simply true whether I know how I know them or not. I know many things- that I ate sushi just before typing this, that I am using a laptop, that 2 + 3 = 5, that kindness is a good character quality, and so forth- without wondering how I knew them or if I really knew them. Are the five senses being used in these cases? Yes, but the five senses are only partially helpful in establish what sushi (especially the sort that isn’t labeled) and laptops are, whether or not numbers are concrete or abstract, or who is kind. My point is that in all of these cases I never answered the second question (mentioned above) first. I simply know them and experience them without “proving” that I can know them. In the end, common sense will help me in establishing “what I can know” built on the platform of “what I already know.”

This isn’t just a philosophical argument with no bearing on the world of matter and energy. What I’m saying has far-reaching implications and illustrations to even the world of science. Scientists must sometimes observe what IS happening without knowing how they know it happens or why it happens. Take, for instance, the discovery of superconductivity by Heike Kamerlingh Onnes, a Dutch physicist. While he was the one who discovered superconductivity in 1911 and awarded a Nobel Prize for it in 1913, it would be another 50 years before quantum physics would begin to explain why and how this occured. Even science does not completely avoid knowing something before proving something.

For the person who practices common sense, the possibility of being wrong is not the same thing as being wrong. Fear of being wrong isn’t a motivating force, and the possibility of being wrong isn’t a good enough reason to label something as “unknowable.” People with common sense are more focused on finding Truth than avoiding anything that can’t be known 100%. The person with common sense doesn’t have to refute a skeptic; he just needs to demonstrate that the skeptic hasn’t proved that his skepticism is true.

In short, I’d rather know what I know and build on from there (common sense) than assume that I don’t know anything (skepticism) and not be able to prove it.