It's All About Experience

“Too often preachers want to deal with people simply at the level of publicly accessible reason. We participate with them in their own epistemology. But this is not New Testament preaching. We have a message that is not from this world; it is from God. We don't know it by our own cleverness; we know it because God has revealed it.”    ― Mark Dever

“How is it that hardly any major religion has looked at science and concluded, 'This is better than we thought! The Universe is much bigger than our prophets said, grander, more subtle, more elegant?' Instead they say, 'No, no, no! My god is a little god, and I want him to stay that way.' A religion, old or new, that stressed the magnificence of the Universe as revealed by modern science might be able to draw forth reserves of reverence and awe hardly tapped by the conventional faiths.”  ― Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space

How do we know things?

Where does our knowledge of the world come from?

What limits our confidence in being sure something is a fact?

These are the questions that Epistemology tries to answer as one of four main branches of western philosophy. The other three are:

• Ethics (how to behave and why)

• Metaphysics (the nature of existence)

• Logic (analyzing the premises and conclusions behind factual propositions)

Epistemology describes the process of acquiring and analyzing data that comes into our minds from outside ourselves.

From babyhood on we integrate sensory data into an internal representation of reality. We start off as children with no reason or ability to question anything we are told. We learn by experiment- like putting things into our drooly baby mouths to explore them. Later, as we compare the constant deluge of new information with previously assimilated data, we learn to evaluate what bits of information seems correct, incorrect, necessary or safely ignored. We then use these memorized notions to navigate the world successfully long enough to reproduce.

One important side trail we'll ignore for now has to do with brain function, specifically the ability of the neocortex to imagine fictional future events. Believe it or not, most of our conception of the world is constructed. Our brains "fill in" much of what we perceive and process.*

Epistemology can be thought of as differentiating between truth and nontruth. What does that mean?

Nontruth can be:

A motivated lie that is intended to deceive

A purposeful omission of a fact

Unintended ignorance of a set of facts

A proposition that has little or weak justification

Parroted well-meaning or uninformed propositions

Truth can be

An accurate-as-possible representation of a justifiable belief

A fact that is discoverable by empirical evidence

Something discoverable by trusting someone else's account of the facts

An socially agreed-upon interpretation of a given phenomenon that "works," even though it may not derive from a scientifically tested fact, e.g., causes of illness and their remedies**

Epistemology is developmental

Children usually trust their parents as reliable sources of information about the world. It doesn't take long though before a preschooler is exposed to broad new worlds of information through school, television or the internet, and they start to compare their base knowledge with these new sources, and must cope with discrepancies they find.

What causes a child to question their parents' proposition that every year on the night of December 24th, a jolly old supernatural being bestows gifts upon all the world's children based on each child's behavior? Simple. They start using their acquired knowledge to analyze the "truth" they thought was justified until the questions come. Bad kids still get presents? How does Santa get in the house? How did he wrap the presents in the very same paper that mom has in the closet? Flying reindeer? Our teacher said there were billions of people in the world- that seems like an impossible number of children to visit in one night.

It's epistemology in action. It may not be conscious metacognition (thinking about thinking), but the process shows how we test facts by comparison, contrast, critical thinking and logic. When something "doesn't make sense," our brains are actively doing epistemology.

Epistemology and Faith

Faith always has an object. Without some kind of raw material to start with, the act of believing is meaningless. Religious believers think of their object or raw material starting off as revelation from a God or gods to certain people whose experiences are eventually written down. One model points to three or four different domains popularized by the protestant denomination we call Methodism. Scholar Albert C. Outler named the model the "Wesleyan Quadrilateral" using principles emphasized by Methodism's founder, John Wesley. The four points of the square are:

• Scripture

• Tradition

• Reason

• Christian Experience

Other models focus on three elements in a triangle or a stool to point out a balance between the differing sources of authority, such as…

Catholic: Scripture, Tradition and Magisterium (the Holy Spirit guided decisions of church leaders)

Anglican: Scripture, Tradition and Reason

Others indicate an imbalance, emphasizing one source of truth over others:

Reformed (Lutheran): Sola Scriptura or Prima Scriptura- Scripture alone or as a primary source of authority, followed by tradition, reason and experience

Neo-Orthodox (Karl Barth): God's self-revelation of Christ in the individual. Scripture is one of many witnesses to Christ, not necessarily revelation on its own. Experience and Tradition are downplayed

Liberation Theology: Scriptural themes of justice and liberation, Experience, especially of the poor and oppressed, Praxis (action) that gives theological insight which can be considered revelation

Eastern Orthodoxy: Scripture, The Ecumenical Councils, Church Patriarchs, Liturgy and icons

Pentecostalism: Immediate identifiable experiences of the Holy Spirit, and the expression of spiritual gifts

One particular expression comes to us in the form of a tricycle. While you need all three wheels to go anywhere, there is one large driving wheel up front. Richard Rohr's tricycle model places personal experience up front as "inner authority," while the other intentionally smaller wheels represent "outer authorities."

It's ALL Experience

One common thread running through all these schools of thought is the idea that all the wheels and quadrilateral corners boil down to experience. Even the scriptural component depends on our own responses to the recorded experiences of the writers, redactors and editors of the texts. Reason (thinking your way to a conclusion) is a personal experience that is probably not shared by anyone else. Church councils and Papal decisions are mediated to us through a leadership hierarchy or personal interaction with a document.

What is the Bible but a long series of interpreted events, moral teachings, poetic hopes and fears, historical narratives and persuasive speeches? Nothing in the Bible was directly experienced by any modern person- we must rely on the good will of ancient writers' motives in writing down "truth that is discoverable by trusting someone else's report." Most Christians suppose that the Bible originated as some sort of hybrid of God speaking or acting and humans preserving it in language, with revealed truth in book form as the final product.

Believers trust God to hand us the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, but it's that pesky human mediation that epistemology interrogates.

Now many might insist that we do actually experience God directly in the pages of the Bible. This impression stems from the notion that the words of the Bible are in actuality the words of God as the Bible makes God's speech intelligible to human beings. By correctly interpreting the Bible, one is able to access the facts about the one true way to live out what God wants. And this is where the problems begin to pile up.

How can anyone be absolutely certain that their interpretation is correct?

For example, one might read in Romans that homosexuality is a feature of an out-of-control morally corrupt population of gentiles. One could conclude, then, that a proper course of action for the church is to reject anyone who is involved in homosexuality's modern iterations. That is of course contradicted by other biblical material, presenting a problem for interpreters. In the gospels, Jesus mingles with sinners all the time while calling his followers to love enemies- especially those who would actually slap us in the face if they had a chance. (Matthew 5)

Without reflection on the interpretive possibilities, believing that Paul's words in Romans are God's plain words to us, actions and attitudes without nuance will result. Others would affirm that it's not so simple. Without dealing with hundreds of years of scholarship, common sense readings, canonical questions, wildly differing interpretations, the absence of original manuscripts, etc., an approach that ignores epistemological questions leads to a hermeneutic of inerrancy, infallibility, inspiration, univocality, and even some "magic" thinking about how the Bible can be used.

If it all comes down to experience, and one person's experience of God is different than another's, how can we find the real truth?

Every interpretation of every Bible verse is mediated through some kind of intellectual filter. If someone were to read a certain passage without any reference to traditional meanings or the study of experts, that person will derive meaning in terms of their cultural moment, their needs and desires, their biases- even down to their mental model of what a book is and is supposed to do.

The final product of one's own interpretation of a verse of scripture rests squarely on the previous experiences of writers, translators and readers. A brief look into church history and the science of biblical translation and manuscript studies supports this idea.

Did biblical authors get some things wrong? Is there any way to check their work? On certain occasions, yes. (see Why Can't Luke and Matthew Just Get Along?) We also find descriptions of God that are either progressive or inconsistent, undermining the idea that God is perfect and therefore immutable.

No one can be quite sure how objective truth might appear- we can only surmise a few things based on our own biases. A scientific method of inquiry gets us closer, but the "truths" it reveals are famously open to falsification by further discovery. Einstein's theory of gravity, or General Relativity has undergone extensive challenges since it was published in 1915. Religious tenets are notoriously protected from challenge or falsification by those who hold positions of authority.

Human suffering is usually on the list of things we think of as absolute, universal moral principles. However, if one were to interpret the world from another viewpoint, say, that of animals and plants that have been almost wiped out by our presence on the planet, it's not quite so absolute. Our own justice system legitimizes penal sentences that cause suffering (and sometimes death) for those convicted of certain crimes.

Early on in the developing Christian church, suffering was admired as formative and useful, and something to be welcomed and that brought escape from sin and closeness to God. See James chapter one: "Count it all joy, my brothers, when you meet trials of various kinds, for you know that the testing of your faith produces steadfastness. And let steadfastness have its full effect, that you may be perfect and complete, lacking in nothing." Or Romans 5: "Not only that, but we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope..."

Oddly, some modern Christian leaders acknowledge the usefulness of suffering, but pray that God would spare them from difficulty at the same time.

“Pain insists upon being attended to. God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pain: it is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world.”

C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain

“God’s blessings are not limited by your circumstances. No matter what you are facing, trust Him to turn it around for your good and bring prosperity into your life.”

– Joel Osteen

Even the New Testament expresses some ambivalence about this...

"And lead us not into temptation (testing or proving by provocation), but rescue us from evil."

Matthew 6:13

So is human suffering an absolute evil that we can all agree should never have been part of creation? Should it be avoided or eliminated? Does it make a difference that we read the Bible as privileged affluent Americans?

Experience as Truth

Can we use communicated experiences as points of truth? Sure we can! Our law courts major in assembling as many facts as possible about a given case, many of which are testimonial. Witnesses to some pertinent aspect of a dispute are sworn to "tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth…" on pain of perjury.

Fictional accounts in novels and movies can spotlight truths about the human condition and what it takes to thrive in spite of the odds. Stories can move people to action, inspire them and help them live more closely to reality. Being true to oneself, for example, is a popular theme for modern stories. A very brief survey of recent movies gives us: Mean girls, Legally Blonde, Wreck-it Ralph, The Truman Show and dozens of others, none of which are true stories.

We experience scripture by reading and decoding written phrases that land in a mind that is already chock-full of structures and categories that enable meaning to emerge. No one starts with a completely blank slate, prepared for a pristine download of divine revelation.

We experience tradition by showing up to a community that displays or talks about such traditions. Many times we absorb traditional ways of believing and behaving through lecture, reading and interaction with teachers (who bring their own set of biases to their truth). And where did our traditions get their practices and beliefs? from other, older experiences. Even liturgical practices found in the Bible had their source in yet more ancient religion.

And of course we have our own felt experiences that we are free to interpret however we want. There is no objective measure by which we can agree on a meaning of something that happened in our own mind and emotions. That inner sensation of awe at a sunset or mountain view can be categorized and connected to innumerable pre-existing memories that have also been construed as one thing rather than another. When a group agrees on the meaning of an experience, it becomes a shared definition that supports belief.

We get in trouble when it goes beyond that, especially when an authority figure insists that their subjective experience is the true or divinely revealed one; any others have no value.

What is Truth?

Using the thought categories of epistemology, we can take a step back and observe what's going on when we talk about truth and how we understand it. All of us have some kind of internal map, or set of answers to what the world is.

"What's the meaning of life?"

Our accumulated internal store of "truths" has an answer.

"Why am I here?" Again, it's our assimilated intellectual structures that provide an answer. Other questions might run down the "belief" pathway:

"Is there a God or gods?"

"What can we know about God?"

"Are there truths about God that I need to know?"

"What is an authoritative source of truth I can rely on?"

"Can a supernatural being help me with my crisis?"

"How can I have access to God?"

"What does God want?"

"Is belief the same as faith?"

Do we know what beliefs are? How are they different from assumptions or conclusions? There's probably a great deal of overlap between these labels, seeing as they all have to do with the complex of facts we have decided to rely on to explain the world. Beliefs can be justified by evidence or not. Sometimes we assume something is true simply because a credible person has told us it is. Other propositions warrant more support.

There are also times when we respond with skepticism or critical thinking which allows us to detect and reject a false belief. There are all kinds of unexamined reasons we believe things, as long as they provide some benefit or prevent discomfort. Some are uninvestigated because it costs too much to verify them. Other propositions have never encountered a need to be tested.

When it comes to spiritual beliefs, specifically ones we accept as Christians from other Christians, we often don't question them because of the potential social cost involved. Giving up on a long-held and unquestioned agreed-upon community belief could reduce one's standing and reputation in the group, or cut off opportunities for involvement.  For humans there are very few things worse than losing status in a group. Questioning is not on the table.

Let's imagine that asking probing questions is on the table and that we are ready to put our beliefs to the test. Here's how an epistemologically aware approach might look as a set of questions:

1) What do I think I know already?

2) Can I identify the sources of that knowledge?

3) Is there a way to evaluate my sources in terms of reliability or bias?

4) To what can I compare what I think I know?

5) What are some other interpretations or conclusions that are both reasonable and different from mine?

6) Are my experiences in conflict with reason, scripture or tradition?

7) Is there a coherent and logical way to justify what I believe without chalking it up to mystery?

8) What should I do with untruths I find in my belief system?

Epistemology also touches on the question of reliability. Individual brains are easily fooled by optical illusions, hallucinations, confirmation bias, and delusions like the Dunning-Kruger effect. Groups can buy into false realities as well. Reasonable and well-meaning people can be drawn in by all manner of attractions later to find themselves trapped in abuse or damaging behaviors.

So is the Bible as we know it a reliable source that we can assume is true? Does it accurately reflect the way things are or ought to be?

For simplicity's sake we can divide the answers into two camps:

1) A conservative approach that affirms reliability based on the assumption that the texts of the Bible are produced by the God described in the Bible. The Bible reflects its source: transcultural and transtemporal, without error, concerned with human beings, univocal and fully reflective of true reality, both physical and metaphysical.

2) The various texts of the Bible are reliable as a source of wisdom produced by regular human beings who interpret and record their culturally formed opinions about the world they lived in. It is a diverse collection of ancient documents from various alien cultures and languages in need of scholarship to interpret. Many of its narratives are fictional and intended to convey or persuade the reader to a specific code of conduct.

The first camp is fairly easy to define and exemplify. The second is representative of a spectrum of views that can't be captured in a simple statement like the above. Suffice it to say that the first camp is notable in its fundamentalist approach which sets it apart from the spectrum of other views.

This is simply a beginning of a discussion aimed at a goal of discovery. For more on the topic of epistemology, have a look at our blog Sources of Truth: How do we know what we know?

*Bennett, Max, A Brief History of Intelligence

**Garlic, clay poultices, honey, mandrake root and opium were all used in ancient times partly because of their supernatural qualities and partly because there were some pharmacological benefit from their chemical composition. Honey was associated with the sun god Ra and its resistance to decay represented eternity, renewal and divine perfection. See the Ebers Papyrus (ca. 1550 BCE)