What Can We Really Know?: The Strengths and Limits of Human Understanding

By David Andersen and Angus Menuge

Today, it' s not uncommon to get the impression that our claims to know are either doomed before they begin or that they have a status that approaches certainty. The pendulum seems to swing from one end to the other, with our educational institutions too often perpetuating both depending on the person being asked. Yet the question of how and if our claims to know are really justified remains central. * Is knowledge a purely social construct without any objective basis, as many claim? * Or, if we do have some basis to believe some of our claims, are we justified in holding those claims with an attitude of certainty, as others in today' s environment seem to imply? * And what role do our quick judgments play in those claims? From the tenor of our public debates, one could easily be left with the suspicion that either we can' t know anything or that whatever the present state of knowledge is shouldn' t be questioned. What Can We Really Know? The Strengths and Limits of Human Understanding aims to bring some balance to the topic, and argues that while we do have reason to believe that a great many of our claims are justified, it' s also true that much of what passes for knowledge is a social product and therefore vulnerable to future revision. Exploring how knowledge can be understood, how far science can take us and what its limitations might be, and the status of some of the most recent arguments for God' s existence, it will be suggested that a healthy dose of humility should be reincorporated in our public and private debates.

• Language: English
• Publisher: 1517 Publishing
• Release date: Jun 13, 2023
• ISBN: 9781956658590

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Cover pictureTitle page: David R. Andersen, What Can We Really Know?, 1517 Publishing

What Can We Really Know? The Strengths and Limits of Human Understanding

© 2023 New Reformation Publications

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Publisher’s Cataloging-In-Publication Data

 (Prepared by Cassidy Cataloguing Services)

Names: Andersen, David, author. | Menuge, Angus J. L., writer of foreword.

Title: What can we really know? : the strengths and limits of human understanding / David R. Andersen ; foreword by Angus J. L. Menuge.

Description: Irvine, CA : 1517 Publishing, [2023] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: ISBN: 978-1-956658-54-5 (paperback) |

978-1-956658-58-3 (hardcover) | 978-1-956658-59-0 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Knowledge, Theory of (Religion) | Knowledge, Theory of. |

Religion—Philosophy. | Theology. | Realism. | God—Knowableness. |

Philosophy and science. | BISAC: PHILOSOPHY / Epistemology. | RELIGION / Philosophy. | RELIGION / Christian Theology / General.

Classification: LCC: BT40 .A54 2023 | DDC: 230.01—dc23

Printed in the United States of America.

Cover art by Zachariah James Stuef.

This digital document has been produced by Nord Compo.

CONTENTS

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Foreword

Introduction

Ignorance and the Beginning of Wisdom

Our Task: Balancing on the Tightrope

Looking Forward

Chapter 1 - What Is Knowledge?

Traditional View: Knowledge is Justified True Belief

Reliabilist and Causal Theories of Knowledge

Appearance and Reality

Retreat to Relativism

Maximizing Advantages: Critical Realism

Connecting Philosophy and Science

Conclusion

Chapter 2 - The Social Side of Knowledge

Challenging the Very Idea of Objectivity

Three Areas of Social Epistemology

Testimony

But I've Never Heard That!

Must I Be an Expert to Choose an Expert?

Weighing Opinions

What Do WE Know?

Networks

Institutionalized Knowledge

The Price of Knowledge

Conclusion

Chapter 3 - Science and Scientific Realism

What Makes Something Scientific?

Scientific Realism

Do Theories Themselves Have To Be True?

Conclusion

Chapter 4 - Antirealism and the Limits of Science

The Problem With Unobservables

Against Abduction

Miracle Argument

Nothing Succeeds Like Success?

Do Theories Retain Older Theories?

Hubris and The Fragility of Science

Four Constraints

Is Science Self-Correcting?

An Alternative Account of Progress

Conclusion

Chapter 5 - Realist Replies

Theory-Dependency

Abduction Revisited

Realistic Progress

History Revisited

What We Can Observe

Conclusion

Chapter 6 - Critical Realism of Roy Bhaskar

Generative Mechanisms Versus Events

Levels of Nature

The Two Sides of Knowledge

Epistemic Fallacy

Conclusion

Chapter 7 - Knowledge In Action: Judgments and Decisions

Overview Of Positions

Two Thinking Systems

The Problem of Representativeness

What Comes to Mind

Egocentricity and Anchoring

Belief Perseverance

Framing Effects and Noise

Conclusion

Chapter 8 - Probability Judgments In Predictions

How Forecasts Go Awry

Expert Forecasting

Silver Lining

Overconfidence and Certainty

Conclusion

Chapter 9 - Knowledge of God

Can We Even Begin?

Religious Experience

Natural and Revealed Knowledge of God

Warrant and Knowledge

Broad and Narrow Image of God

Faith and Proper Basicality

But Is It True?

Conclusion

Chapter 10 - Resurgence of Natural Theology

Traditional Theistic Arguments Revisited

Science and the Re-emergence of Natural Theology

The Emerging Role of Complexity

Big Bang Cosmology

Fine Tuning

Our Minds and the Universe

Conclusion

Chapter 11 - Origin of Living Things on Earth

Biology and Irreducible Complexity

Design Arguments Refuted?

Challenges to Gradualism

The Fossil Record: The Burgess Shale

Specified Information and DNA

God-of-the-Gaps?

Conclusion

Chapter 12 - Historical Argument

Historical Core

Alternative Explanations

Form of the Argument

Conclusion

Conclusion

Works Cited

Index

Dedication

To my loving and beautiful wife, whose tenderness could soften the hardest heart, and who is one of the greatest gifts I’ve ever received. Thank you for inspiring all that is best in me and for modeling a life of devotion and gratitude.

Foreword

Angus J. L. Menuge

Aristotle is famous for his account of moral virtues, like courage and justice. Yet Aristotle also recognized intellectual virtues, such as practical wisdom, and today there is a thriving discipline called virtue epistemology. This approach to the theory of knowledge focuses on the attitudes that aid us in finding as much truth, and rejecting as much error, as possible. One of these attitudes is intellectual humility, the central motivation and guiding theme of David Andersen’s wonderfully insightful book. This is a welcome antidote to the epidemic of misplaced certainty and cultic deference to experts that plagues our age.

Why is intellectual humility so important? Why, for example, is it better to be like Sam Gamgee than it is to be like Saruman? First, notice that Sam, a lowly gardener, has a realistic sense of his own limitations. He does not claim to know all sorts of things that are beyond his capacity to know. Second, Sam listens to the testimony of others who may be better placed to know than he is. Third, Sam is a critical consumer, wisely concerned about the character and reliability of his advisors. In this way, Sam is both open to discovering new truth, yet healthily skeptical of even expert advice. He is also quick to admit that he got something wrong (as when he thought Frodo had been killed by Shelob), and he readily revises his beliefs in light of new evidence. Saruman, by contrast, represents the false certainty that fuels our emerging omnicompetent scientocracy. He asserts the godlike wisdom required to remake the world. Yet in his pride he overreaches, ignoring factors right under his nose, like the waking Ents, that will ensure the failure of his plans. He overrates the messages of Sauron that feed (and redirect) his guiding narrative, while shutting out those like Gandalf who try to disabuse him of his delusions.

Yet humility is not enough. One might be so humble that one despairingly concludes that truth is completely inaccessible, falling into a debilitating skepticism. This is unreasonable because we have ample evidence that scientific knowledge has increased, even if the best-confirmed scientific theories are still liable to falsification. So, humility must be balanced by a proper (chastened) confidence—confidence that truth exists and that our minds are sometimes able to discover it. This confidence is rooted in the prescientific natural faith that the world is orderly, our minds are rational, and that there is an affinity between the way we think and the way the world works. This is not a blind faith, as it has been vindicated time and again by the discovery of theories that increase our ability to predict and control phenomena.

By contrast with humility and proper confidence, false certainty is a disease of the mind. What we most need is an accurate diagnosis of its sources and an identification of effective remedies. That is the main focus of the first eight chapters of Andersen’s book. These chapters provide an accessible introduction to the theory of knowledge and the philosophy of science, and they ultimately advocate critical realism. Critical realism is the sensible view of most ordinary people and of the many working scientists who have not succumbed to scientism. It recognizes the inevitable human and social contribution to knowledge: we are creatures of our times and our thinking is shaped and limited by the concepts available to us. Thus, in Mendel’s times, scientists could not entertain the thought that genes are DNA. Yet at the same time, critical realism rejects the extreme constructivist claim that all we have are different narrative conceptions that make no contact with the world as it is. Limited as our concepts always are, that does not prevent them from revealing partial truths about the real world. That theories are routinely falsified and superseded does not prevent them from disclosing insights into what is going on behind the manifest image of appearances.

One way that this book encourages the humility and confidence that it advocates is via its dialectical mode of exposition. Repeatedly, we learn of several opposing views and conclude that while none is entitled to full certainty, there are more reasonable alternatives. In the process, we are given ample reason to reconsider the culturally dominant idea that the experts have vast and infallible knowledge. This book can be read as a series of pins that puncture overinflated balloons of certainty, together with more modest and robust replacements.

On the sobering side, Andersen shows that both philosophers and psychologists have thoroughly exposed our intellectual frailty.

It may surprise non-philosophers that after a few thousand years of intense analysis, philosophers cannot provide a definition of knowledge for which there are no reasonable objections. This does not mean that we do not know anything, but that knowledge itself is one of those things that we only partially know. There are several basic features of knowledge beyond dispute but a healthy disagreement about what more is required to distinguish it from true belief. Turning to science, we learn that the best historians and philosophers of science have concluded that there is no clear demarcation line between science and non-science. We can identify paradigmatic examples of each, but every attempt to provide necessary and sufficient conditions for a theory or practice to qualify as scientific is vulnerable to counterexamples. Further, scientific realists have sometimes made overconfident claims about scientific confirmation. Confirmation of a theory does not show it is approximately true, since theories that have mostly false predictions can still be right in some cases. And since there can be multiple theories that make the same true prediction, it is a fallacy (affirming the consequent) to claim that one of these theories is made more credible. More generally, antirealists have leveled a number of powerful objections to scientific realism that need to be taken seriously. Yet, as Andersen shows, one should also be skeptical of the skeptics. A chastened critical realism provides good reason to believe that ultimately falsified theories may still identify real objects and processes in nature.

Cognitive psychology has also delivered a few slices of humble pie. Experts are sometimes tempted to think of themselves as the watchmen of our culture, issuing apocalyptic warnings and draconian edicts to control the populace. They should beware of the psychologists who watch the judgments and reasoning of the watchmen. The fact is that even the experts routinely acquiesce to cognitive biases that deviate from ideal logical and statistical reasoning. Experts who should know better draw conclusions that ignore the baseline, concluding a man is most likely a philatelist because he has representative stereotypical mannerisms, but ignoring the prevalence of stamp collectors in the general population. And they naturally overrate risks that are easily available to their consciousness, while underrating others. Thus, after a terrorist attack using an airplane, experts may advise driving even though driving is statistically much more dangerous than flying. Most humiliating of all, Andersen unpacks the research of Philip Tetlock on the accuracy of expert predictions. It turns out that the experts never outperform rather crude extrapolation algorithms, and that humble non-experts are often more successful. One reason for this may be that experts are proud of the models they have developed, and tend to ignore or reinterpret the data that does not fit, while humbler souls are more open to a variety of variables. Often enough, a humble hobbit may get it right when Saruman gets it wrong.

But this is not a counsel of despair. Precisely because we can detect limitations and biases in our thinking, we can develop procedures to counteract them. We can identify and consider all of the available explanations of the data. We can ensure that the baseline and potentially confounding variables are taken into account. We can allow our theories and models to be challenged by critics just as we challenge theirs.

A good illustration of the value of this approach is the debate between theists and non-theists over the best account of reality. This is the focus of the remaining four chapters of Andersen’s book. He considers various views of our knowledge of God, rejecting presuppositionalism and Plantinga’s view that religious belief can be properly basic, requiring no independent ground. Turning to an evidentialist approach, Andersen explores the remarkable resurgence of natural theology. The new wine of recent scientific discoveries in cosmology and biology, mixed with the sophisticated tools of formal logic and probability theory, has reinvigorated the classical cosmological and teleological arguments for God’s existence. Andersen canvasses some of the best skeptical objections, but argues that theists are ready with persuasive rejoinders. What is striking about these new arguments for God is that they employ the best tools we have developed to counteract the bias identified in the earlier part of the book. They are models of cogent reasoning that consider the full range of competing hypotheses and seek to infer the one best explanation. They do not rely on any presuppositions that bias the investigation from the start but allow all of the hypotheses to compete on a level playing field.

To be sure, knowing that God exists is not much use if one does not know who God is. And there is also the worry that some arguments may establish the existence of a supernatural entity but fall short of establishing that this entity is what we mean by God. So, in the last chapter, Andersen considers the case for the resurrection of Jesus. If successful, such an argument supports both the existence and identity of a God worthy of worship. In dialog with skeptical challenges, such as swoon and hallucination theories, Andersen makes the case that a historical resurrection is the best explanation of several well-attested historical facts.

This book’s balance of intellectual humility and reasonable hope is an oasis in the barren lands of dogmatic scientism. May it enlighten, encourage, and refresh its readers!

Introduction

In his classic defense of liberty, F. A. Hayek commented that if old truths are to retain their hold they must be restated in the language of successive generations. What may have been communicated well at an earlier time can become worn with use and cease to have the same effect as it once did. Though the underlying ideas may still be as valid as ever, the language in which they’re stated can fail to convey the same conviction. This, he suggests, may be an inevitable consequence of the fact that no statement of an ideal can be complete. Hence, articulation of an idea must be continually adapted to the current climate, in terms that resonate with the concerns of contemporary recipients. ¹

Questions of the nature of human knowledge are perennial. But, as Hayek reminds us, our contemporaries may bring new concerns to the old questions of the status of human knowledge and judgments. While countless volumes have already been written on the subject, this topic will forever be a work in progress—even though much, if not all, of what we can say simply repeats the contributions of prior generations. Still, to be relevant, it must address present controversies and set out clearly what it affirms and denies. This volume attempts to do just that by placing the problem of knowledge and judgment within a broad context, one that grapples with the concerns of philosophers, research psychologists, theologians, and, to a smaller extent, even economists.

Much of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries were (at least partly) situated between two visions of what and how much can be known. First, there were those who argued for an objective basis of at least some of what we claim to know, whether it was grounded in human reason or empirically in the external world. Against them were those who insisted that all knowledge is a social construct and therefore relative, e.g., as articulated in postmodernism and social constructivism. To be fair, these debates have been waged along a vast continuum and reflect the endless variety that the idea of a continuum implies. Indeed, they’ve been discussed at least since the time of the ancient Greeks.

Yet attitudes about what we can know, and how certain we can be, have turned in a peculiar direction in just the past few years. Attempting to describe this development, Ilana Redstone has suggested that much of today’s discourse—e.g., within the university, science, the media, law, medicine, and social media—is caught in the grips of what she calls the certainty trap, which manifests itself as an intolerance of beliefs that deviate from prevailing views. ² She notes that two things seem to be driving this: a blind certainty about the unquestionable truth of the intellectual fashions of the day and a failure to recognize the profound limits of human knowledge. ³ Its pervasive presence can be felt with the dramatic rise in the tendency to express disdain, both for the position with which one doesn’t agree and the moral character of the person who holds it. ⁴ It is also detectable in other alarming trends, such as the now too common practice of canceling lectures by academics who don’t conform to current intellectual trends and passions. At least part of the problem is that ideological diversity within educational and cultural institutions has become an increasingly rare phenomenon, which has reinforced a group-think that solidifies trendy ideas.

Correcting these trends might prove to be more challenging than one would like; however, as Redstone also notes, certain barriers stand in the way of understanding truth. The one most relevant here is what she refers to as the settled question fallacy, which occurs when we behave as though certain questions have definitive and clear answers when they, in fact, do not. Consider, for instance, the highly charged issue of racism, which has come to dominate so much of the public conversation. While very few scholars reject racism as an important variable, systemic racism is widely touted as the definitive cause for the vast majority of disparities in group outcomes—meaning that, absent discrimination, all intergroup differences would cease to exist –without reference to other variables that have measurable effects, such as age, preferences, priorities, and effort. ⁵ A particularly pernicious form of the settled question fallacy occurs when one side of a controversial issue claims that a question is no longer up for debate. When this occurs, proponents portray a false degree of confidence which is caused by an unwillingness to acknowledge the limitations of our knowledge—a situation that often leads to coercion, judgment, or ostracism as the prime mechanisms for achieving stated goals. Perhaps nowhere was this more apparent than in the rapid consolidation of then-controversial positions during the COVID-19 pandemic. Questions that were previously open and highly debatable were suddenly considered to be definitively answered and no longer open for discussion; these positions were then solidified within an ever-changing orthodoxy.

Though the certainty trap may seem especially pronounced at present, it isn’t completely unlike prior searches for certainty. Beginning with the foundationalism of Descartes, which assumed that there are foundational or basic beliefs that guarantee their own truth and from which other non-basic beliefs can be derived, many Enlightenment thinkers insisted that any true knowledge would be infallible. The basic beliefs of which that knowledge is composed functioned as axiomatic, self-evident truth that required no demonstration or justification. ⁶ During the twentieth century, the same trap vexed logical positivism, though in somewhat different ways. For instance, on the basis of certain a priori assumptions regarding the foundations of knowledge, A. J. Ayer could strike down any metaphysical statement—including those concerning the nature God—as meaningless and therefore unworthy of attention. ⁷ Thus, the overconfidence afflicting today’s culture can be seen as a continuation of the human tendency to regard present knowledge as more certain than it is—which, in effect, is the tendency to downplay or deny our ignorance.

Ignorance and the Beginning of Wisdom

Along with countless philosophers before him, Hayek began his monumental study on liberty by stressing the Socratic maxim that the recognition of our ignorance is the beginning of wisdom. We must become aware, he argues, of our necessary ignorance of much that helps us achieve our aims—meaning that most of the intellectual advantages we have rest on the fact that individuals benefit from more knowledge than they realize. Yet ignorance too often is glossed over and treated as a minor imperfection that can be more or less disregarded. The truth is that human beings didn’t simply impose a pattern on the world created by their minds, as if it were by some omni-competent endowment. Rather, the mind is itself a system that continually changes as a result of our endeavor to adapt to our environment, which means that human knowledge isn’t something that stands outside of nature, nor is it independent of experience.

To demonstrate this, Hayek notes that there are two respects in which our conscious knowledge is only part of the conditions that enable us to achieve our aims. The first is that the mind is itself a product of the civilization in which it has grown up and it’s unaware of much of the experience that has shaped it (e.g., the habits, language, traditions, and moral beliefs that are part of its makeup). Second, the knowledge that any individual consciously applies is only a small part of the knowledge which, at any one time, contributes to his action. When we reflect, he says, how much knowledge possessed by other people is an essential condition for the successful pursuit of our individual aims, the magnitude of our ignorance of the circumstances on which the results of our action depend appears simply staggering. ⁸ Since the sum of knowledge possessed by all individuals doesn’t exist anywhere as an integrated whole, the problem becomes figuring out how to profit from this knowledge, which exists only as isolated, partial, and conflicting beliefs of all people. ⁹

While this would seem difficult to deny, one of the great ironies is that, even though the best minds have seen that the range of acknowledged ignorance will grow with scientific advance, popular beliefs have gone in the opposite direction; even among scientists, there’s an assumption that the range of our ignorance is steadily decreasing and that we can aim at more comprehensive and deliberate control of human activities. But this contradicts the fact that the growth of our knowledge constantly reveals new realms of ignorance. This is partly because the more knowledge increases, the more it’s divided into specialties, which in turn increases the necessary ignorance of the individual. No matter how much of an expert she may be in one ever-narrowing domain, she is bound to be ignorant of vast areas of most others. Moreover, such a division of knowledge implies that those solving problems (scientific, societal, etc.) have no way of predicting who will discover new ways of solving them. Precisely because every individual knows so little and because we rarely know which of us knows best, we rely on the independent and competitive efforts of the many. Humiliating to human pride as this might be, our necessary ignorance of so much means that we have to deal not with certainty, but with probabilities and chances.

Our Task: Balancing on the Tightrope

As with so many mistakes in life, intellectual errors often occur when one truth is elevated at the expense of other equally important truths, leaving only a reductionism that turns a blind eye to the nuance inherent in a complex world. Such errors can be easy to make, because simultaneously holding two truths that seem to be in tension is taxing for even the strongest minds. Difficult as it is, if we’re to avoid an artificial conception of reality, we need to be mindful of the key variables. This means that we must walk a bit of a tightrope when discussing what and how we know what we claim to know, how certain we can be, and—even more vexingly—whether some aspects of the world may simply be unknowable.

To maintain our balance, we’ll affirm two ideas that often seem at odds. The first is that human beings have the remarkable ability to gain knowledge about the world and can represent the workings of nature through abstract thought. The second is that their knowledge is a social product, which means that it’s fallible, culturally conditioned, and comes with some built-in constraints. Taken in their raw forms, these two principles tug at one another in opposite directions, with the first pulling us toward the certainty trap and the second toward radical skepticism or a blanket denial of objectivity (e.g., as in social constructivism). Affirming both, however, this book will resist all reductionist approaches that artificially elevate any single idea and will invite us to view the topic of epistemology in a holistic way.

In order to do this, it will be necessary to provide context for our topic. Toward that end, this book will provide an overview of the debates within two independent but closely related branches of study: namely, the relevant branches of philosophy as well as the recent social scientific research on judgment and decision-making. Because philosophers have been discussing the problem of knowledge since at least the time of the ancient Greeks, we’ll begin with a brief introduction to the problems they consider, focusing particularly on contemporary concerns. (Note: Because these chapters provide only a high-level overview, they’re not intended for professional philosophers who could no doubt write a much more extensive introduction than the one offered here.) Next, we’ll explore relatively recent research that aims to understand how humans actually make judgments, and compares this with how they ought to make judgments. As we examine some of the core controversies, it will become clear that common contemporary claims to certainty are unfounded and that a healthy dose of humility should be at the heart of all claims to knowledge. Just as importantly, however, we’ll see that there are solid reasons to believe that we do in fact have at least some justified knowledge of the world and of God.

Looking Forward

To begin our examination, chapter one will discuss some of the basic debates within the field of epistemology (which examines how we know what we know) and ask questions such as: Do we derive knowledge from our senses, or does it arise via human reason? If from our senses, do they give us an accurate picture of the way the world really is, or do our minds simply construct a world consistent with our social context? Also, what does it mean to have what philosophers call justified belief? While chapter one focuses primarily on the individual knower, chapter two explores the effects of social interactions and social systems on our claims to know. Since so much of what we know is transmitted by others, we’ll ask when our beliefs that are based not on the evidence of social science can be considered justified. In a complex society like ours, information is vast and spread out in a fragmentary way across multiple institutions and groups. Given this, how can the non-expert know whom to trust, and how can even experts who rely on other experts distinguish the wheat from the chaff? The issues addressed will highlight the fact that our knowledge has some important built-in constraints, given the social way knowledge is often mediated.

Next, because scientific knowledge is (rightly) considered to be one of humankind’s greatest achievements, chapters three through six will discuss the central debates within the philosophy of science. The questions that will occupy our attention include the following: What is science, and what separates its claims from those we consider to be non-scientific? What is the aim of science, and do its theories give us truth about the inner workings of nature, or are they merely fictions that allow us to make useful predictions? Just as importantly, is there an upper limit to scientific knowledge, and how certain can we ever claim to be? We’ll discover that the bulk of the debates discussed in these chapters occurs between two rival camps: realism and antirealism, the former of which affirms that science gives us a literally true picture of the world, while the latter questions whether such claims are justified. Chapter seven will conclude our discussion of science with an exploration of critical realism, which seeks to maintain both that science can give us a true picture of the world and that much of our knowledge is a social product, and therefore fallible.

Because of its relevance to our topic, chapter seven will examine the extensive experimental research into the judgment and decision-making literature. Known also as the heuristics and biases program, these researchers seek to understand empirically, via experimental procedures, how people actually make judgments, and then compare that to how they ought to make them. It becomes evident that human knowledge, as manifested in judgments and decisions, is limited by internal constraints that aren’t easily (if ever) corrected. Subsequently, chapter eight will conclude our non-theological overview by noting the not-so-obvious fact that much of what we claim to know comes in the form of prediction. This being so, it will examine how or if such knowledge can be legitimately included in what we can claim to know. Though we deal with expert judgment in various chapters, chapter eight will discuss the comprehensive research of Philip Tetlock, which spanned the years 1984 to 2004, on the accuracy of expert predictions. Given our cultural reliance on expert forecasts, this chapter will ask how justified we can be in trusting such pronouncements. What the research will show is that knowledge of the future, while potentially valuable in some respects, is constrained by certain factors inherent in the human condition.

Rounding out our analysis, the final four chapters will deal with the question of our knowledge of God. With the failure of certain attempts to bar claims to knowledge of God before they begin, debates between theists and critics have tended to take on a more a posteriori form (i.e., they are based on concrete evidence), centering around particular arguments and evaluating specific evidence for or against. Thus, these chapters explore various arguments for God’s existence, including Alvin Plantinga’s case for Reformed Epistemology; the argument from Big Bang cosmology and origin of life research, which challenges the traditional Darwinian account of evolutionary development; and a case for the historicity of the bodily resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth. In addition to laying out the arguments themselves, we’ll also examine the logical form they typically take and discuss exactly what and how much each one claims to show.

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1. F. A. Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty: The Definitive Edition (Chicago, 2011), 47-8.

2. We should note, however, that current attitudes have been in the making since at least the early decades of the twentieth century. See, for example, F. A. Hayek’s remarks in The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism, ed. W. W. Bartley III (Chicago, 1989), 52-4.

3. Ilana Redstone, The Certainty Trap, https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/the-certainty-trap, and America by Gaslight, https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/[sectionSlug]/articles/america-gaslight-ilana-redstone.

4. That such attitudes have plagued human history is easy to show. Edmund Burke, for instance, once commented similarly that, It is no excuse for presumptuous ignorance that it is directed by insolent passion. Quoted in Thomas Sowell (who documents many other references of this type) in A Conflict of Visions: Ideological Origins of Political Struggles (New York, 2007), 64.

5. For a critique of this popularized argument, see Thomas Sowell, Discrimination and Disparities (New York, 2019).

6. Alister E. McGrath, A Scientific Theology, vol. 2, (Grand Rapids, 2002), 21ff.

7. Alfred Jules Ayer, Language, Truth and Logic (New York, 1946).

8. F. A. Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty: The Definitive Edition, 73-82.

9. For Hayek, this serves as a prime reason that any reliance on the central planning of society is doomed to failure.

CHAPTER 1

What Is Knowledge?

Until June of 1979, scientists were convinced that bacteria can’t grow in the stomach, because stomachs are acidic. Because stomachs are acidic, they must be sterile, it was thought—a fact so well known it was practically dogma in the field of medicine. ¹ Then, Robin Warren (a pathologist at the Royal Perth Hospital in Australia) discovered H. pylori, when he began to notice