What a day! My time at Oxford is rapidly drawing to an end. Today, APU and OSAP hosted a Symposium for all the study-abroad students at the University Church of St. Mary the Virgin. We met in the Old Library on the second story of that church where, in times past, such as John Wesley, John Henry Newman, and C.S. Lewis (
The Weight of Glory), preached and spoke. Each student gave a short presentation on the topic of his or her primary tutorial.
I have included the material from my presentation at the end of this entry. The material was drawn, principally, from my eighth and last paper, entitled "Taste and See" for my primary tutorial on Integrating Philosophy and Theology with the Revd. Dr. Harriet Harris of Wadham College. It is a summary work, but, as with all my postings, I welcome questions and critiques.
I also won the 'Patricia S. Anderson Award' - in Recognition of Excellence in Researching and Writing the Oxford Essay for the British History, Culture, and Society Lecture Course. Yay! My award included £75 cash. My paper was entitled: "A Corpuscularian Account of the Seventeenth Century English Church" (subtitle: "the Seventeenth Century English Chuch, John Locke, and the
Essay Concerning Human Understanding").
I look forward to seeing my family in two days, seeing my APU friends in three days, and visiting with friends and relatives over Christmas break.
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Presented at the Student Symposium, sponsored by APU and OSAP, at the University Church of St. Mary the Virgin on Monday, 12 December 2005:
The concept and criteria of justified belief furnish a valuable point of intersection between philosophy, particularly epistemology, and Christian theology. When it comes to questions of faith and doctrine, we want to know that our beliefs are justified—correct, or reasonable; that the content of our beliefs are, in fact, True. But the classical system of Foundationalist justification that we have inherited from the Seventeenth Century Enlightenment, with its emphasis on
objectivity, in particular, is, I think, problematic.
In this presentation I would like to offer two brief critiques of objectivity and encourage you to consider an alternative approach—an approach both new and old—to Truth and certainty with respect to belief.
In the first place, since the Seventeenth Century, genuine objectivity has proven elusive. As much as we may try to divest ourselves of every bias, every presupposition, every prejudice, we continue to find that even our most raw and primitive sensations and our most basic reasoning involve and are influenced by a host of preexisting mental and psychological categories. When we enter a crowded room or look at a picture, before we even get a chance to think, our mind begins to sort through the torrent of sensory information that we receive so that we focus on one thing rather than another, our attention is directed in particular directions and toward particular things. When we employ our reason, for example, in interpreting Scripture; though we are always, I hope, trying to find the most accurate, correct, and True interpretation, we regularly find that a new piece of information or some life experience can radically alter our understanding of a given passage. More and more, philosophers have come to realize that we cannot escape the web of structures and categories that we bring to our most basic reasoning.
The second problem of ‘objectivity’, for the Christian in particular, has to do with its implicit assumption that there is some ‘objective’ reality
beyond God from which one can metaphorically stand and evaluate God, on the one hand, and all the various worldviews, on the other. The problem comes in that as soon as you get
past God or
beyond God, that’s just when you lose God entirely—that is, the transcendent God of Christianity who is all-encompassing, omnipotent, and omnipresent, who is over all and through all and in all, who is absolutely and inextricably bound up with all of our universe as both its creator and sustainer. As soon as one gets
past God to some ideal ‘mind-independent reality’ in an attempt to evaluate the ‘truth’ of Christianity, you lose the very truth that you were trying to reach—it is negated before you even begin.
And this isn’t just a problem for Christianity, but for any worldview. Each operates on its own terms and premises; each lives or dies according to the level of its own internal consistency.
So where does this leave us if the ‘objective’ approach proves impracticable as it seems it has? We want Truth, we want to know whether our beliefs are justified, whether they reflect reality. It seems, that if we cannot effectively evaluate a belief system or worldview from the
outside, perhaps we ought to evaluate it from the
inside. This approach is, in part reflected in the contemporary movement in virtue epistemology; with respect to Christianity, it also belongs to a much older, pre-Enlightenment tradition, as exemplified by such as St. Anselm and St. Thomas Aquinas. And it is, I think, far more consistent with the teachings of Jesus and the Apostles, who did not call us to think objectively, to divest ourselves of prejudice and bias, presupposition and prior assumption, to become pure and, by implication, void; rather, they called us to
follow Jesus, to
put on the mind of Christ, to
see the world from Christ’s perspective, if you will, to adopt
Jesus’ biases, prejudices, and presuppositions.
In this view, Bible study, prayer, church, discipline, and moral living, cease to be about just studying, and petitioning, and singing songs together, and doing the right thing—they become training—preparation for a certain kind of life and growth into a certain kind of person. Some of you will recognize this theme from our discussions of virtue. Part of becoming a certain kind of person involves thinking in a certain kind of way—and what epistemologists are realizing is that thinking either wisely or rightly or correctly doesn’t come naturally. Take the example of the child who is ‘forced’ to take music lessons and doesn’t want to, and would rather play outside, and avoids practice, and dreads lessons, and doesn’t understand why mom and dad are making him or her do this and thinks its stupid, and generally doesn’t see the point of it all—but who discovers in later life, maybe not ten or fifteen years later, that mom and dad were right. And wishes that they had taken more initiative, had applied themselves more diligently, had appreciated and understood how truly valuable those lessons were.
Wisdom and right thinking and the ability to discern and recognize truth don’t belong to us by birthright as those of the Seventeenth-Century Enlightenment thought. Rather they are skills which we must cultivate, train in, exercise, and practice, skills that develop over time and with experience. This is important to realize for philosophy—it raises important questions in epistemology and psychology about the categories that we bring to our observation and reason, about the malleability and changeability of those categories. It is important for us and our Christian faith.
Is your faith justified? Are you believing in something that’s real and true? If you want to find the answers, don’t step back, away from, and out of your faith. There is no ‘objective’ truth to be found, out there. But there is God’s truth in here and that’s the direction to go for—deeper in; toward putting on the mind of Christ, toward being transformed by the renewing of your mind so that you may, in the words of the Psalmist, “taste and see that the Lord is good.”
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Blessings, all,
My relatives, David and Callista, got me a wonderful little teapot for Christmas. And Joan and Dan and little David got me an electric kettle. I was so ecstatic to receive both (a point that may seem peculiar to those who either lack a proper appreciation for the beverage or who are unacquainted with my own eccentricities--ha ha!). Each will be put to good use in the course of the coming semester and will, doubtless, assist in the advancement of what may one day develop into a full-blown 'hobby' or, what some might already call, a 'peculiar obsession'. I am so excited.
My relatives, David and Callista, got me a wonderful little teapot for Christmas. And Joan and Dan and little David got me an electric kettle. I was so ecstatic to receive both (a point that may seem peculiar to those who either lack a proper appreciation for the beverage or who are unacquainted with my own eccentricities--ha ha!). Each will be put to good use in the course of the coming semester and will, doubtless, assist in the advancement of what may one day develop into a full-blown 'hobby' or, what some might already call, a 'peculiar obsession'. I am so excited.
