Epistemology is the science of knowledge. It is a discipline that addresses the following questions:
- HOW we know what we know…or how do we acquire knowledge.
- What is knowledge
- What do people know
- Can our senses be trusted
- Is human knowledge trustworthy?
The word epistemology is a combination of two Greek words epistēmē meaning “knowledge” and the suffix –logy, meaning “logos” whose semantic range goes as far as to mean a “Discourse” and “Logic“.
In Christian epistemology, there are exclusively two approaches to the theory of knowledge.
- WE KNOW (investigate, evaluate, analyse, critic, test, synthesise, and inquire) TO BELIEVE
- WE BELIEVE (don’t do the above) TO KNOW
There are things in this world that need to be investigated before one applies belief, this is why we go to school, read books, participate in debates, sit down with ourselves deliberate to the capacity of our senses, listen to oral traditions of the ELDERS, ask the experts etc. This what I call, KNOWING TO BELIEVE.
It is in this field that most of the challenges of the scientists all those who do not believe in the existence of God come from. They take everything to the laboratory before they believe and once they get to the lab and some things don’t yield results they say: we are still investigating.
The Christian scientist, however, at this stage, knows what needs further investigation and what actually needs belief in order to be appreciated and understood. If you have been involved in serious thinking and in contact with the realities of our planet, you will have no option but to put BELIEF in its rightful place and CONTINUOUS INQUIRY in its rightful place.
Let us look at it from the context of the argument that Jesus was God who became flesh, or actually let us take it from the top and ask: IS THERE A GOD?
The proper REASONING (good epistemology) would be… Yes there is a God – scientifically because of the GENETICS, the key element being the DNA, without relieving our logical faculties, we cannot say our genetics have no conscience being behind their composition. To dismiss the belief of a God behind our genetics and insist that there is still CONTINUOUS INQUIRY is participating in the habit of chasing our tails.
History is after ORIGINS of the present. We are human beings tuned to discovering how everything came to be. We trace these origins from where we are and follow this up to the CAUSE of the FIRST CAUSE. Any epistemology that does not ask the cause of the first cause is half-baked. And any epistemology that does not confirm that the cause of the first cause was not and could not have been caused is naïve epistemology.
Whether this world is a result (caused) of evolution or the big bang, there must have been the cause of this cause. Again, logically it makes sense to establish that the first cause wasn’t caused or else… we come back to the circles.
Finally, when we look at this world, we believe it is designed and it makes sense to believe that every design has a DESIGNER and all designers have intentions. It is our responsibility to find out this. To dismiss the idea that every design has a designer is to contradict ourselves. For we are daily designers wherever we are and this is something we can limit to human inventiveness but rather humanity operating within the realm of the ultimate designer who is God.
Kids have a toy for almost every item adults use. There is, therefore, a GOD responsible for our GENETICS for our ORIGINS and for the DESIGN we see, and you epistemologically have two options if you are to know him. know to believe him, believe him to know him.
It is your choice, the rest like trusting your senses, what other human beings with titles (scientists, scholars, etc.) have said are details that might be limiting your knowledge to facts and figures and yet life is way far beyond that.
God bless you. I invoke TRUTH, REASON and FAITH.
Pr ITM White
The Gospel Hawker
iTiS Well of Worship Fellowship (John 4:24) 