twist-of-faithWe find ourselves in a world in which religious truth-claims have been demoted to private, subjective opinions or values.  Religious knowledge is not considered “real” knowledge.  In fact, religious truth-claims are not even testable, and thus must be taken on blind faith.

How did it come to this?  Here I offer a very condensed, if not simplistic path to how we privatized faith, drawing largely on Dr. James Sawyer’s work in this area.

It started with Renee Descartes.  He demanded that what we claim to “know” we know with the same level of certainty as mathematical principles.  This drove a wedge between faith and knowledge, because religious claims cannot be known with that degree of certainty (virtually nothing can).

Then came the opposite extreme offered by David Hume.  Hume argued that there are no innate ideas or truths that serve as a foundation for knowledge.  The mind is a blank slate upon which our sense perceptions are received, and from which we gain knowledge.  Knowledge, then, does not correspond with reality, but is simply a well-ordered, coherent system within our minds created by sense perception.  This left no room for the idea of truth.  There is no correspondence between reality and what we perceive to be reality.  Each person’s perspective is as valid as the next person’s perspective (relativism).

Then came Immanuel Kant.  He took the best of Descartes’ extreme rationalism and Hume’s extreme skepticism and formulated a mediating position.  He argued that the mind possesses an inherent structure (categories) by which incoming sensory data is processed and turned into knowledge.  The mind is not a blank slate, but has an inherent structure common to everyone.  The form is found in categories, by which incoming sensory data is processed and turned into knowledge.  The categories produce no knowledge, but are a framework for organizing and processing it.

The good that came out of Kant’s philosophy was that he brought the idea of truth back into the public square, undermining Hume’s extreme epistemological relativism.  Kant argued that even if there is no correspondence to reality, everybody has the same illusion, and thus he reintroduced the notions of truth and falsehood.  Truth is more than just “my perspective;” it has universal application, even if it does not correspond to the real world.

The bad that came out of Kant’s philosophy was that he cut off religious claims from the arena of knowledge.  While the mind possessed various categories to process incoming data (quantity, quality, relations, modality), the categories only pertained to the phenomenal world (physical), not the noumenal world (spiritual).  Kant said there is no category in the mind capable of receiving and processing spiritual realities, similar to the way in which a blind man has no organ through which to receive the light around him.  The implication of this phenomenal-noumenal split was that man was cut off from possessing knowledge about God.  We might experience the divine, but we have no way of processing that information because no mental category exists for doing so.

Enter Friedrich Schleiermacher (1775-1834).  In the wake of Kant’s devastating philosophy of the mind, no place remained for religious knowledge.  Schleiermacher’s solution was ingenious.  He concluded that while we cannot know anything true about God, we can know God through our experience.  But wait…experiences differ.  No problem for Schleiermacher—he promoted religious relativism.  Doctrinal systems do not matter.  They are merely personal and cultural interpretations of the religious experiences we have—none right and none wrong.  The only thing that matters when it comes to religion is the feeling of absolute dependence on God.

And that’s where we’re still at today.  Because Christians bowed down to bad philosophy, allowing religious claims to be removed from the arena of knowledge, they settled for religious feelings.  That’s why Western religious culture speaks so much of, and relies so much on feelings.  We don’t want to dispute religious beliefs—after all, it’s everyone’s guess as to what is true.  As long as you follow your religious beliefs sincerely you are good to go.  Why?  Because religious claims are not testable.  All we can know about God is what we can feel, and surely God couldn’t fault us for that.

Our job is to bring religious claims and religious faith back into the arena of genuine knowledge; to demonstrate that religious claims are testable, and do count as genuine knowledge.