Please see below the reading for this assignment also please read the indtructions
Bennett, W. J. (2002). The Broken Hearth. Random House Digital Inc..
https://mbsdirect.vitalsource.com/books/9780385504867
Moreland, J. P., and William Lane Craig. Philosophical Foundations for a Christian Worldview, InterVarsity Press, 2017. ProQuest Ebook Central, https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/liberty/detail.action?docID=5144368.
Sire, J. W. (2020). The Universe Next Door. InterVarsity Press.
https://mbsdirect.vitalsource.com/books/9780830849390
The Universe Next Door
James W. Sire
Sire, J. W. (2020).
The Universe Next Door. InterVarsity Press.
https://mbsdirect.vitalsource.com/books/9780830849390
ZERO POINT: NIHILISM CHAPTER 5
If I should cast off this tattered coat,
And go free into the mighty sky;
If I should find nothing there
But a vast blue,
Echoless, ignorant—
What then?
STEPHEN CRANE,
THE BLACK RIDERS AND OTHER LINES
NIHILISM IS MORE a feeling than a philosophy, more a solitary stance before the universe than a worldview. Strictly speaking, nihilism is a denial of any philosophy or worldview—a denial of the possibility of knowledge, a denial that anything is valuable. If it proceeds to the absolute denial of everything, it even denies the reality of existence itself. In other words, nihilism is the negation of everything—knowledge, ethics, beauty, reality. In nihilism no statement has validity; nothing has meaning. Everything is gratuitous, de trop—that is, just there.
Those who have been untouched by the feelings of despair, anxiety, and ennui associated with nihilism may find it hard to imagine that nihilism could be a seriously held orientation of the heart. But it is, and it is well for everyone who wants to understand the twentieth and twenty-first centuries to experience, if only vicariously, something of nihilism as a stance toward human existence.
Modern art galleries are full of its products—if one can speak of something (art objects) coming from nothing (artists who, if they exist, deny the ultimate value of their existence). As we shall see later, no art is ultimately nihilistic, but some art attempts to embody many of nihilism’s characteristics. Marcel Duchamp’s ordinary urinal purchased on the common market, signed with a fictional name, and labeled Fountain will do for a start. Samuel Beckett’s plays, notably End Game and Waiting for Godot, are prime examples in drama. But Beckett’s nihilistic art perhaps reached its climax in Breath, a thirty-five-second play that has no human actors. The props consist of a pile of rubbish on the stage, lit by a light that begins dim, brightens (but never fully), and then recedes to dimness. There are no words, only a “recorded” cry opening the play, an inhaled breath, an exhaled breath, and an identical “recorded” cry closing the play. For Beckett life is such a “breath.”
Douglas Adams’s cosmic science-fiction novels picture the situation for those who seek an answer to human meaning in computer science. In The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy; The Restaurant at the End of the Universe; Life, the Universe and Everything; and So Long and Thanks for All the Fish Adams tells the story of the universe from the point of view of four time travelers who hitchhike back and forth across intergalactic time and space, from creation in the Big Bang to the final destruction of the universe.1 During the course of this history a race of hyperintelligent, pandimensional beings (mice, actually) build a giant computer (“the size of a small city”) to answer “The Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe and Everything.” This computer, which they call Deep Thought, spends seven and a half million years on the calculation.
For seven and a half million years, Deep Thought computed and calculated, and in the end announced that the answer was in fact Forty-two—and so another, even bigger, computer had to be built to find out what the actual question was.
And this computer, which was called the Earth, was so large that it was frequently mistaken for a planet—especially by the strange apelike beings who roamed its surface, totally unaware that they were simply part of a gigantic computer program.
And this is very odd, because without that fairly simple and obvious piece of knowledge, nothing that ever happened on the Earth could possibly make the slightest bit of sense. Sadly, however, just before the critical moment of read-out, the Earth was unexpectedly demolished by the Vogons to make way—so they claimed—for a new hyperspace bypass, and so all hope of discovering a meaning for life was lost for ever. Or so it would seem.3
By the end of the second novel, the time travelers discover that the “question itself” (the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe and Everything) is “What is six times nine?”4 So, they discover, both the question and the answer are inane. Not only is forty-two a meaningless answer to the question on a human level (the level of purpose and meaning), it is bad mathematics. The most rational discipline in the university has been reduced to absurdity.
By the end of the third novel, we have an explanation for why the question and the answer do not seem to fit each other. Prak, the character who is supposed to know the ultimate, says this: “I’m afraid . . . that the Question and the Answer are mutually exclusive. Knowledge of one logically precludes knowledge of the other. It is impossible that both can ever be known about the same Universe.”5 (Physics students will detect here a play on Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, where the position and momentum of an electron can each be known, but not with precision at the same time.)
So we can know the Answers—like forty-two—which don’t mean anything without the Questions. Or we can have the Questions (which give direction to our quest). But we can’t have both. That is, we cannot satisfy our longing for ultimate meaning. To read Samuel Beckett, Franz Kafka, Eugène Ionesco, Joseph Heller, Kurt Vonnegut Jr., and more recently, Douglas Adams is to begin to feel—if one does not already in our depressing age—the pangs of human emptiness, of life that is without value, without purpose, without meaning.6
But how does one get from naturalism to nihilism? Wasn’t naturalism the enlightened readout of the assured results of science and open intellectual inquiry? As a worldview, did it not account for human beings, their uniqueness among the things of the cosmos? Did it not show human dignity and value? As the highest of creation, the only self-conscious, self-determined beings in the universe, men and women are rulers of all, free to value what they will, free even to control the future of their own evolution. What more could one wish?
Most naturalists are satisfied to end their inquiry right here. They do in fact wish for no more. For them there is no route to nihilism.7
But for a growing number of people the results of reason are not so assured, the closed universe is confining, the notion of death as extinction is psychologically disturbing, our position as the highest in creation is seen either as an alienation from the universe or as a union with it such that we are no more valuable than a pebble on the beach. In fact, pebbles “live” longer! What bridges led from a naturalism that affirms the value of human life to a naturalism that does not? Just how did nihilism come about?
Nihilism came about not because theists and deists picked away at naturalism from the outside. Nihilism is the natural child of naturalism.
THE FIRST BRIDGE: NECESSITY AND CHANCE
The first and most basic reason for nihilism is found in the direct, logical implications of naturalism’s primary propositions. Notice what happens to the concept of human nature when one takes seriously the notions that (1) matter is all there is and it is eternal, and (2) the cosmos operates with a uniformity of cause and effect in a closed system. These mean that a human being is a part of the system. Though they may not understand the implications for human freedom, naturalists agree, as we saw in proposition 3 of chapter four: Human beings are complex machines whose personality is a function of highly complex chemical and physical properties not yet understood. Nietzsche, however, bites the bullet and recognizes the loss to human dignity: Human beings are simply deluded about having free will.
Still many naturalists try to hold on to human freedom within the closed system. Their argument goes like this. Every event in the universe is caused by a previous state of affairs, including each person’s genetic makeup, environmental situation, and even the person’s wants and desires. But each person is free to express those wants and desires. If I want a sandwich and a deli is around the corner, I can choose to have a sandwich. If I want to steal the sandwich when the owner isn’t looking, I can do that. Nothing constrains my choice. My actions are self-determined.
Thus human beings who are obviously self-conscious and, it would appear, self-determined can act significantly and be held responsible for their actions. I can be arrested for stealing the sandwich and reasonably required to pay the penalty.
But are things so simple? Many think not. The issue of human freedom goes deeper than these naturalists see. To be sure I can do anything I want, but what I want is the result of past states of affairs over which ultimately I had no control. I did not freely select my particular genetic makeup or my original family environment. By the time I asked whether I was free to act freely, I was so molded by nature and nurture that the very fact that the question occurred to me was determined. That is, my self itself was determined by outside forces. I can indeed ask such questions, I can act according to my wants and desires, and I can appear to myself to be free, but it is appearance only. Nietzsche is right: “the acting man’s delusion about himself, his assumption that free will exists, is also part of the calculating mechanism.”
If one were omniscient, one would be able to calculate each individual [human] action in advance, each step in the progress of knowledge, each error, each act of malice. To be sure, the acting man is caught in his illusion of volition; if the wheel of the world were to stand still for a moment and an omniscient calculating mind were there to take advantage of this interruption, he would be able to tell into the farthest future of each being and describe every rut that wheel will roll upon. The acting man’s delusion about himself, his assumption that free will exists, is also part of the calculating mechanism.
Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human
The problem is that if the universe is truly closed, then its activity can be governed only from within. Any force that acts to change the cosmos on whatever level (microcosmic, human, macrocosmic) is a part of the cosmos. There would thus seem to be only one explanation for change: the present state of affairs must govern the future state. In other words, the present must cause the future, which in turn must cause the next future, and so on.
The objection that in an Einsteinian universe of time-relativity simultaneity is impossible to define and causal links are impossible to prove is beside the point. We are not talking here about how the events are linked together, only noting that they are linked. Events occur because other events have occurred. All activity in the universe is connected this way. We cannot, perhaps, know what the links are, but the premise of a closed universe forces us to conclude that they must exist.
Moreover, there is evidence that such links exist, for patterns of events are perceivable, and some events can be predicted from the standpoint of earth time with almost absolute precision, for example, precisely when and where the next eclipse will take place. For every eclipse in the next fifteen centuries the exact shadow can be predicted and tracked in space and time across the earth. Most events cannot be so predicted, but the presumption is that that is because all the variables and their interrelations are not known. Some events are more predictable than others, but none is uncertain. Each event must come to be.
In a closed universe the possibility that some things need not be, that others are possible, is not possible. For the only way change can come is by a force moving to make that change, and the only way that force can come is if it is moved by another force, ad infinitum. There is no break in this chain, from eternity past to eternity future, forever and ever, amen.
To the ordinary person determinism does not appear to be the case. We generally perceive ourselves as free agents. But our perception is an illusion. We just do not know what “caused” us to decide. Something did, of course, but we feel it was our free choice. Such perceived freedom—if one does not think much about its implications—is quite sufficient, at least according to some.8
In a closed universe, in other words, freedom must be a determinacy unrecognized, and for those who work out its implications, this is not enough to allow for self-determinacy or moral responsibility. For if I robbed a bank, that would ultimately be due to inexorable (though unperceived) forces triggering my decisions in such a way that I could no longer consider these decisions mine. If these decisions are not mine, I cannot be held responsible. And such would be the case for every act of every person.
A human being is thus a mere piece of machinery, a toy—complicated, very complicated, but a toy of impersonal cosmic forces. A person’s self-consciousness is only an epiphenomenon; it is just part of the machinery looking at itself. But consciousness is only part of the machinery; there is no “self” apart from the machinery. There is no “ego” that can stand over against the system and manipulate it at its own will. Its “will” is the will of the cosmos. In this picture, by the way, we have a rather good description of human beings as seen by behavioral psychologist B. F. Skinner. To change people, says Skinner, change their environment, the contingencies under which they act, the forces acting on them. A person must respond in kind, for in Skinner’s view every person is only a reactor: “A person does not act on the world, the world acts on him.”9
The nihilists follow this argument, which can now be stated briefly: Human beings are conscious machines without the ability to affect their own destiny or do anything significant; therefore, human beings as valuable beings are dead. Their life is Beckett’s “breath,” not the life God “breathed” into the first person in the Garden (Genesis 2:7).
But perhaps the course of my argument has moved too fast. Have I missed something? Some naturalists would certainly say so. They would say that I went wrong when I said that the only explanation for change is the continuity of cause and effect. Jacques Monod, for example, attributes all basic change—certainly the appearance of anything genuinely new—to chance. And naturalists admit that new things have come into being by the uncountable trillions: every step on the evolutionary scale from hydrogen, carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, and so forth in free association to the formation of complex amino acids and other basic building blocks of life. At every turn—and these are beyond count—chance introduced the new thing. Then necessity, or what Monod calls “the machinery of invariance,” took over and duplicated the chance-produced pattern. Slowly over eons of time through the cooperation of chance and necessity, cellular life, multicellular life, the plant and animal kingdoms, and human beings emerged.10 So chance is offered as the trigger for humanity’s emergence.
But what is chance? Either chance is the inexorable proclivity of reality to happen as it does, appearing to be chance because we do not know the reason for what happens (making chance another name for our ignorance of the forces of determinism), or it is absolutely irrational.11 In the first case, chance is just unknown determinism and not freedom at all. In the second case, chance is not an explanation but the absence of an explanation.12 An event occurs. No cause can be assigned. It is a chance event. Not only might such an event have not happened, it could never have been expected to happen. So while chance produces the appearance of freedom, it actually introduces absurdity. Chance is causeless, purposeless, directionless.13 It is sudden givenness—gratuity incarnated in time and space.
But as Monod says, it introduced into time and space a push in a new direction. A chance event is causeless, but it itself is a cause and is now an integral part of the closed universe. Chance opens the universe not to reason, meaning, and purpose but to absurdity. Suddenly we don’t know where we are. We are no longer a flower in the seamless fabric of the universe, but a chance wart on the smooth skin of the impersonal.
Chance, then, does not supply a naturalist with what is necessary for a person to be both self-conscious and free. It only allows one to be self-conscious and subject to caprice. Capricious action is not a free expression of a person with character. It is simply gratuitous, uncaused. Capricious action is by definition not a response to self-determination, and thus we are still left without a basis for morality.14 Such action simply is.
To summarize: The first reason naturalism turns into nihilism is that naturalism does not supply a basis on which a person can act significantly. Rather, it denies the possibility of a self-determining being who can choose on the basis of an innate self-conscious character. We are machines—determined or capricious. We are not persons with self-consciousness and self-determination.
THE SECOND BRIDGE: THE GREAT CLOUD OF UNKNOWING
The metaphysical presupposition that the cosmos is a closed system has implications not only for metaphysics but also for epistemology. The argument in brief is this: if any given person is the result of impersonal forces—whether working haphazardly or by inexorable law—that person has no way of knowing whether what he or she seems to know is illusion or truth. Let us see how that is so.
Naturalism holds that perception and knowledge are either identical with or a byproduct of the brain; they arise from the functioning of matter. Without matter’s functioning there would be no thought. But matter functions by a nature of its own. There is no reason to think that matter has any interest in leading a conscious being to true perception or to logical (that is, correct) conclusions based on accurate observation and true presuppositions.15 The only beings in the universe who care about such matters are humans. But people are bound to their bodies. Their consciousness arises from a complex interrelation of highly “ordered” matter. Why should whatever that matter is conscious of be in any way related to what actually is the case? Is there a test for distinguishing illusion from reality? Naturalists point to the methods of scientific inquiry, pragmatic tests and so forth. But all these utilize the brain they are testing. Each test could well be a futile exercise in spinning out the consistency of an illusion.
For naturalism nothing exists outside the system itself. There is no God— deceiving or nondeceiving, perfect or imperfect, personal or impersonal. There is only the cosmos, and humans are the only conscious beings. But they are latecomers. They “arose,” but how far? Can they trust their mind, their reason?
Charles Darwin himself once said, “The horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man’s mind, which has developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy. Would anyone trust the conviction of a monkey’s mind, if there are any convictions in such a mind?”16 In other words, if my brain is no more than that of a superior monkey, I cannot even be sure that my own theory of my origin is to be trusted.
Here is a curious case: If Darwin’s naturalism is true, there is no way of even establishing its credibility, let alone proving it. Confidence in logic is ruled out. Darwin’s own theory of human origins must therefore be accepted by an act of faith. One must hold that a brain, a device that came to be through natural selection and chance-sponsored mutations, can actually know a proposition or set of propositions to be true.
C. S. Lewis puts the case this way:
If all that exists is Nature, the great mindless interlocking event, if our own deepest convictions are merely the by-products of an irrational process, then clearly there is not the slightest ground for supposing that our sense of fitness and our consequent faith in uniformity tell us anything about a reality external to ourselves. Our convictions are simply a fact about us—like the colour of our hair. If Naturalism is true we have no reason to trust our conviction that Nature is uniform.17
What we need for such certainty is the existence of some “Rational Spirit” outside both ourselves and nature from which our own rationality could derive. Theism assumes such a ground; naturalism does not.
Not only are we boxed in by the past—our origin in inanimate, unconscious matter—we are also boxed in by our present situation as thinkers. Let us say that I have just completed an argument on the level of “All men are mortal; Aristotle Onassis is a man; Aristotle Onassis is mortal.” That’s a proven conclusion. Right?
Well, how do we know it’s right? Simple. I have obeyed the laws of logic. What laws? How do we know them to be true? They are self-evident. After all, would any thought or communication be possible without them? No. So aren’t they true? Not necessarily.
Any argument we construct implies such laws—the classical ones of identity, noncontradiction, and the excluded middle. But that fact does not guarantee the “truthfulness” of these laws in the sense that anything we think or say that obeys them necessarily relates to what is so in the objective, external universe. Moreover, any argument to check the validity of an argument is itself an argument that might be mistaken. When we begin to think like this, we are not far from an infinite regress; our argument chases its tail down the ever- receding corridors of the mind. Or, to change the image, we lose our bearings in a sea of infinity.
But haven’t we gone astray in arguing against the possibility of knowledge? We do seem to be able to test our knowledge in a way that generally satisfies us. Some things we think we know can be shown to be false or at least highly unlikely—for example, that microbes are spontaneously generated from totally inorganic mud. And all of us know how to boil water, scratch our itches, recognize our friends and distinguish them from others in a crowd.
Almost all our discoveries are due to our violences, to the exacerbation of our instability. Even God insofar as He interests us—it is not in our inmost selves that we discern God, but at the extreme limits of our fever, at the very point where, our rage confronting His, a shock results, an encounter as ruinous for Him as for us. Blasted by the curse attached to acts, the man of violence forces his nature, rises above himself only to relapse, an aggressor, followed by his enterprises, which come to punish him for having instigated them. Every work turns against its author: the poem will crush the poet, the system the philosopher, the event the man of action. Destruction awaits anyone who, answering to his vocation and fulfilling it, exerts himself within history; only the man who sacrifices every gift and talent escapes: released from his humanity, he may lodge himself in Being. If I aspire to a metaphysical career, I cannot, at any price, retain my identity: whatever residue I retain must be liquidated; if, on the contrary, I assume a historical role it is my responsibility to exasperate my faculties until I explode along with them. One always perishes by the self one assumes: to bear a name is to claim an exact mode of collapse.
E. M. Cioran, The Temptation to Exist
Virtually no one is a full-fledged epistemological nihilist. Yet naturalism does not allow a person to have any solid reason for confidence in human reason. We thus end in an ironic paradox. Naturalism, born in the Age of Enlightenment, was launched on a firm acceptance of the human ability to know. Now naturalists find that they can place no confidence in their knowing.
The whole point of this argument can be summarized briefly: Naturalism places us as human beings in a box. But for us to have any confidence that our knowledge that we are in a box is true, we need to stand outside the box or to have some other being outside the box provide us with information (theologians call this “revelation”). But there is nothing or no one outside the box to give us revelation, and we cannot ourselves transcend the box. Ergo: epistemological nihilism.
A naturalist who fails to perceive this is like the man in Stephen Crane’s poem:
I saw a man pursuing the horizon;
Round and round they sped.
I was disturbed at this;
I accosted the man.
“It is futile,” I said,
“You can never—”
“You lie,” he cried,
And ran on.18
In the naturalistic framework, people pursue a knowledge that forever recedes before them. We can never know.
One of the worst consequences of taking epistemological nihilism seriously is that it has led some to question the very facticity of the universe.19 To some, nothing is real, not even themselves. People who reach this state are in deep trouble, for they can no longer function as human beings. Or, as we often say, they can’t cope.
We usually do not recognize this situation as metaphysical or epistemological nihilism. Rather, we call it schizophrenia, hallucination, fantasizing, daydreaming, or living in a dream world. And we treat the person as a “case,” the problem as a “disease.” I have no particular quarrel with doing this, for I do believe in the reality of an external world, one I hold in common with others in my space-time frame. Those who cannot recognize this are beyond coping. But while we think of such situations primarily in psychological terms and while we commit such people to institutions where someone will keep them alive and others will help them return from their inner trip and get back to waking reality, we should realize that some of these far-out cases may be perfect examples of what happens when a person no longer knows in the common-sense way of knowing. It is the “proper” state, the logical result, of epistemological nihilism. If I cannot know, then any perception or dream or image or fantasy becomes equally real or unreal. Life in the ordinary world is based on our ability to make distinctions. Ask the man who has just swallowed colorless liquid, which he thought was water but which was actually wood alcohol.
Most of us never see the far-out “cases.” They are quickly committed. But they exist, and I have met some people whose stories are frightening. Most full epistemological nihilists, however, fall in the class described by Robert Farrar Capon, who simply has no time for such nonsense:
The skeptic is never for real. There he stands, cocktail in hand, left arm draped languorously on one end of the mantelpiece, telling you that he can’t be sure of anything, not even of his own existence. I’ll give you my secret method of demolishing universal skepticism in four words. Whisper to him: “Your fly is open.” If he thinks knowledge is so all-fired impossible, why does he always look?20
As noted above, there is just too much evidence that knowledge is possible. What we need is a way to explain why we have it. This naturalism does not do. So the one who remains a consistent naturalist must be a closet nihilist who does not know where he is.
THE THIRD BRIDGE: IS AND OUGHT
Many naturalists—most, so far as I know—are very moral people. They are not thieves; they do not tend to be libertines. Many are faithful husbands and wives. Some are scandalized by the personal and public immorality of our day. The problem is not that moral values are not recognized but that they have no basis. Summing up the position reached by Nietzsche and Max Weber, Allan Bloom remarks, “Reason cannot establish values, and its belief that it can is the stupidest and most pernicious illusion.”21
Remember that for a naturalist the world is merely there. It does not provide humanity with a sense of oughtness. It only is. Ethics, however, is about what ought to be, whether it is or not.22 Where, then, does one go for a basis for morality? Where is oughtness found?
As I have noted, every person has moral values. There is no tribe without taboos. But these are merely facts of a social nature, and the specific values vary widely. In fact, many of these values conflict with each other. Thus we are forced to ask, Which values are the true values, or the higher values?
Cultural anthropologists, recognizing that this situation prevails, answer clearly: Moral values are relative to one’s culture. What the tribe, nation, social unit says is valuable is valuable. But there is a serious flaw here. It is only another way of saying that is (the fact of a specific value) equals ought (what should be so). Moreover, it does not account for the situation of cultural rebels whose moral values are not those of their neighbors. The cultural rebel’s is is not considered ought. Why? The answer of cultural relativism is that the rebel’s moral values cannot be allowed if they upset social cohesiveness and jeopardize cultural survival. So we discover that is is not ought after all. The cultural relativist has affirmed a value—the preservation of a culture in its current state—as more valuable than its destruction or transformation by one or more rebels within it. Once more, we are forced to ask why.
Cultural relativism, it turns out, is not forever relative. It rests on a primary value affirmed by cultural relativists themselves: that cultures should be preserved. So cultural relativism does not rely only on is but on what its adherents think ought to be the case. The trouble here is that some anthropologists are not cultural relativists. Some think certain values are so important that cultures that do not recognize them should recognize them.23 So cultural relativists must, if they are to convince their colleagues, show why their values are the true values.24 Again we approach the infinite corridor down which we chase our arguments.
But let’s look again. We must be sure we see what is implied by the fact that values do really vary widely. Between neighboring tribes values conflict. One tribe may conduct “religious wars” to spread its values. Such wars are. Ought they to be? Perhaps, but only if there is indeed a nonrelative standard by which to measure the values in conflict. But a naturalist has no way of determining which values among the ones in existence are the basic ones that give meaning to the specific tribal variations. A naturalist can point only to the fact of value, never to an absolute standard.
This situation is not so critical as long as sufficient space separates peoples of radically differing values. But in the global community of the twenty-first century this luxury is no longer ours. We are forced to deal with values in conflict, and naturalists have no standard, no way of knowing when peace is more important than preserving another value. We may give up our property to avoid doing violence to a robber. But what shall we say to white racists who own rental property in the city? Whose values are to govern their actions when a black person attempts to rent their property? Who shall say? How shall we decide?
The argument can again be summarized like that above: Naturalism places us as human beings in an ethically relative box. For us to know what values within that box are true values, we need a measure imposed on us from outside the box; we need a moral plumb line by which we can evaluate the conflicting moral values we observe in ourselves and others. But there is nothing outside the box; there is no moral plumb line, no ultimate, nonchanging standard of value. Ergo: ethical nihilism.25
But nihilism is a feeling, not just a philosophy. And on the level of human perception, Franz Kafka catches in a brief parable the feeling of life in a universe without a moral plumb line.
I ran past the first watchman. Then I was horrified, ran back again and said to the watchman: “I ran through here while you were looking the other way.” The watchman gazed ahead of him and said nothing. “I suppose I really oughtn’t to have done it,” I said. The watchman still said nothing. “Does your silence indicate permission to pass?”26
When people were conscious of a God whose character was moral law, when their consciences were informed by a sense of rightness, their watchmen would shout halt when they trespassed the law. Now their watchmen are silent. They serve no king and protect no kingdom. The wall is a fact without a meaning. One scales it, crosses it, breaches it, and no watchman ever complains. One is left not with the fact but with the feeling of guilt.27
One knows my demand of philosophers that they place themselves beyond good and evil—and that they have the illusion of moral judgement beneath them. This demand follows from an insight formulated by me: that there are no moral facts whatever. Moral judgment has this in common with religious judgment that it believes in realities which do not exist.
Friedrich Nietzsche, “The ‘Improvers’ of Mankind”
In a haunting dream sequence in Ingmar Bergman’s film Wild Strawberries, an old professor is arraigned before the bar of justice. When he asks the charge, the judge replies, “You are guilty of guilt.”
“Is that serious?” the professor asks.
“Very serious,” says the judge.
But that is all that is said on the subject of guilt. In a universe where God is dead, people are not guilty of violating a moral law; they are only guilty of guilt, and that is very serious, for nothing can be done about it. If one had sinned, there might be atonement. If one had broken a law, the lawmaker might forgive the criminal. But if one is only guilty of guilt, there is no way to solve the very personal problem.28
And that states the case for a nihilist, for no one can avoid acting as if moral values exist and as if there is some bar of justice that measures guilt by objective standards. But there is no bar of justice, and we are left not in sin, but in guilt. Very serious, indeed.
THE LOSS OF MEANING
The strands of epistemological, metaphysical, and ethical nihilism weave together to make a rope long enough and strong enough to hang a whole culture. The name of the rope is Loss of Meaning. We end in a total despair of ever seeing ourselves, the world, and others as in any way significant. Nothing has meaning.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr., in a parody of Genesis 1, captures this modern dilemma:
In the beginning God created the earth, and he looked upon it in His cosmic loneliness.
And God said, “Let Us make creatures out of mud, so mud can see what We have done.” And God created every living creature that now moveth, and one was man. Mud as man alone could speak. God leaned close as mud as man sat up, looked around and spoke. Man blinked. “What is the purpose of all this?” he asked politely.
“Everything must have a purpose?” asked God.
“Certainly,” said man.
“Then I leave it to you to think of one for all this,” said God. And he went away.
his may first appear to be a satire on theism’s notion of the origin of the universe and human beings, but it is quite the contrary. It is a satire on the naturalist’s view, for it shows our human dilemma. We have been thrown up by an impersonal universe. The moment a self-conscious, self-determining being appears on the scene, that person asks the big question: What is the meaning of all this? What is the purpose of the cosmos? But the person’s creator—the impersonal forces of bedrock matter—cannot respond. If the cosmos is to have meaning, we must manufacture it for ourselves.
As Stephen Crane put it in the poem quoted in the opening of the first chapter, the existence of people has not created in the universe “a sense of obligation.” Precisely: We exist. Period. Our maker has no sense of value, no sense of obligation. We alone make values. Are our values valuable? By what standard? Only our own. Whose own? Each person’s own. Each of us is monarch and bishop of our own realm, but our realm is Pointland. For the moment we meet another person, we meet another monarch and bishop. There is no way to arbitrate between two free value makers. There is no monarch to whom both give obeisance. There are values, but no Value. Society is only a bunch of windowless monads, a collection of points, not an organic body obeying a superior, all-encompassing form that arbitrates the values of its separate arms, legs, warts, and wrinkles. Society is not a body at all. It is only a bunch.
Thus does naturalism lead to nihilism. If we take seriously the implications of the death of God, the disappearance of the transcendent, the closedness of the universe, we end right there.
Why, then, aren’t most naturalists nihilists? The obvious answer is the best one: Most naturalists do not take their naturalism seriously. They are inconsistent. They affirm a set of values. They have friends who affirm a similar set. They appear to know and don’t ask how they know they know. They seem to be able to choose and don’t ask themselves whether their apparent freedom is really caprice or determinism. Socrates said that the unexamined life is not worth living, but for a naturalist he is wrong. For a naturalist it is the examined life that is not worth living.
INNER TENSIONS IN NIHILISM
The trouble is that no one can live the examined life if examination leads to nihilism, for nobody can live a life consistent with nihilism. At every step, at every moment, nihilists think, and think their thinking has substance, and thus they cheat on their philosophy. There are, I believe, at least five reasons that nihilism is unlivable.
First, from meaninglessness nothing at all follows, or rather, anything follows. If the universe is meaningless and a person cannot know and nothing is immoral, any course of action is open. One can respond to meaninglessness by any act whatsoever, for none is more or less appropriate. Suicide is one act, but it does not “follow” as any more appropriate than going to a Walt Disney movie.
Yet whenever we set ourselves on a course of action, putting one foot in front of the other in other than a haphazard way, we are affirming a goal. We are affirming the value of a course of action, even if to no one other than ourselves. Thus we are not living by nihilism. We are creating value by choice. From this type of argument comes Albert Camus’s attempt to go beyond nihilism to existentialism, which we will consider in the following chapter.30
Second, every time nihilists think and trust their thinking, they are inconsistent, for they have denied that thinking is of value or that it can lead to knowledge. But at the heart of a nihilist’s one affirmation lies a self-contradiction. There is no meaning in the universe, nihilists scream. That means that their only affirmation is meaningless, for if it were to mean anything it would be false.31 Nihilists are indeed boxed in. They can get absolutely nowhere. They merely are; they merely think; and none of this has any significance whatsoever. Except for those whose actions place them in institutions, no one seems to act out their nihilism. Those who do we treat as patients.
Third, while a limited sort of practical nihilism is possible for a while, eventually a limit is reached. The comedy of Catch-22 rests on just this premise. Captain Yossarian is having a knock-down theological argument with Lieutenant Scheisskopf’s wife, and God is coming in for a good deal of hassling. Yossarian is speaking:
[God] is not working at all. He’s playing. Or else He’s forgotten all about us. That’s the kind of God you people talk about—a country bumpkin, a clumsy, bungling, brainless, conceited, uncouth hayseed.
Good God, how much reverence can you have for a Supreme Being who finds it necessary to include such phenomena as phlegm and tooth decay in His system of creation?32
After several unsuccessful attempts to handle Yossarian’s verbal attack, Lieutenant Scheisskopf’s wife turns to violence.
“Stop it! Stop it!” Lieutenant Scheisskopf’s wife screamed suddenly, and began beating him ineffectually about the head with both fists. “Stop it!” . . .
“What the hell are you getting so upset about?” he asked her bewilderedly in a tone of contrite amusement. “I thought you didn’t believe in God.”
“I don’t,” she sobbed, bursting violently into tears. “But the God I don’t believe in is a good God, a just God, a merciful God. He’s not the mean and stupid God you make Him out to be.”33
Here is another paradox: In order to deny God one must have a God to deny. In order to be a practicing nihilist, there must be something against which to do battle. Practicing nihilists are parasites on meaning. They run out of energy when there is nothing left to deny. Cynics are out of business when they are the last ones around.
Fourth, nihilism means the death of art. Here, too, we find a paradox, for much modern art—literature, painting, drama, film—has nihilism for its ideological core. And much of this literature is excellent by the traditional canons of art. Ernest Hemingway’s “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place,” Samuel Beckett’s End Game, Ingmar Bergman’s Winter Light, Franz Kafka’s The Trial, Francis Bacon’s various heads of popes spring immediately to mind. The twist is this: to the extent that these artworks display the human implication of a nihilistic worldview, they are not nihilistic; to the extent that they themselves are meaningless, they are not artworks.
Art is nothing if not formal, that is, endowed with structure by the artist. But structure itself implies meaning. So to the extent that an artwork has structure, it has meaning and thus is not nihilistic. Even Beckett’s Breath has structure. A junkyard, the garbage in a trash heap, a pile of rocks just blasted from a quarry have no structure. They are not art.
Some contemporary art attempts to be antiart by being random. Much of John Cage’s music is predicated on sheer chance, randomness. But it is both dull and grating, and very few people can listen to it. It’s not art. Then there is Kafka’s “Hunger Artist,” a brilliant though painful story about an artist who tries to make art out of public fasting, that is, out of nothing. But no one looks at him; everyone passes by his display at the circus to see a young leopard pacing in his cage. Even the “nature” of the leopard is more interesting than the “art” of the nihilist. Breath too, as minimal as it is, is structured and means something. Even if it means only that human beings are meaningless, it participates in the paradox I examined above. In short, art implies meaning and is ultimately nonnihilistic, despite the ironic attempt of nihilists to display their wares by means of it.
Fifth, and finally, nihilism poses severe psychological problems for a nihilist. People cannot live with it because it denies what every fiber of their waking being calls for—meaning, value, significance, dignity, worth. “Nietzsche,” Bloom writes, “replaces easygoing or self-satisfied atheism with agonized atheism, suffering its human consequences. Longing to believe, along with intransigent refusal to satisfy that longing, is, according to him, the profound response to our entire spiritual condition.”34
A younger and an older waiter are closing a “clean, well-lighted” bar for the night. When the young waiter leaves, the older lonely waiter thinks to himself:
What did he fear? It was not fear or dread. It was nothing that he knew too well. It was all a nothing and a man was nothing too. It was only that and light was all it needed and a certain cleanness and order. Some lived in it and never felt it but he knew it all was nada y pues nada y nada y pues nada. Our nada who art in nada, nada be thy name thy kingdom nada thy will be nada in nada as it is in nada. Give us this nada our daily nada and nada us our nada as we nada our nadas and nada us not into nada but deliver us from nada; pues nada. Hail nothing full of nothing, nothing is with thee. He smiled and stood before a bar with a shining steam pressure coffee machine.
Ernest Hemingway, “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place”
Nietzsche ended his life in an asylum. Ernest Hemingway affirmed a “lifestyle” and eventually committed suicide. Beckett writes black comedy. Vonnegut and Adams revel in whimsy. And Kafka—perhaps the greatest artist of them all—lived an almost impossible life of tedium, writing novels and stories that boil down to a sustained cry: God is dead! God is dead! Isn’t he? I mean, surely he is, isn’t he? God is dead. Oh, I wish, I wish, I wish he weren’t.
It is thus that nihilism forms the hinge for modern people. No one who has not plumbed the despair of the nihilists, heard them out, felt as they felt—if only vicariously through their art—can understand the past century. Nihilism is the foggy bottomland through which we modern people must pass if we are to build a life in Western culture. There are no easy answers to our questions, and none of these answers is worth anything unless it takes seriously the problems raised by the possibility that nothing whatever of value exists.
Beyond nihilism- Existentialism Chapter 6
Every existing thing is born without reason, prolongs itself out of weakness, and dies by chance. I leaned back and closed my eyes. The images, forewarned, immediately leaped up and filled my closed eyes with existences: existence is a fullness which man can never abandon. . . . I knew it was the World, the naked World suddenly revealing itself, and I choked with rage at this gross absurd being.
ROQUENTIN IN JEAN-PAUL SARTRE, NAUSEA
IN AN ESSAY PUBLISHED in 1950, Albert Camus wrote, “A literature of despair is a contradiction in terms. . . . In the darkest depths of our nihilism I have sought only for the means to transcend nihilism.”1 Here the essence of existentialism’s most important goal is summed up in one phrase: to transcend nihilism. In fact, every important worldview that has emerged since the beginning of the twentieth century has had that as a major goal. For nihilism, coming as it does directly from a culturally pervasive worldview, is the problem of our age. A worldview that ignores this fact has little chance of proving relevant to modern thinking people. Existentialism, especially in its secular form, not only takes nihilism seriously, it is an answer to it.
From the outset it is important to recognize that existentialism takes two basic forms, depending on its relation to previous worldviews, because existentialism is not a full-fledged worldview. Atheistic existentialism is a parasite on naturalism; theistic existentialism is a parasite on theism.2
Historically, we have an odd situation. On the one hand, atheistic existentialism developed to solve the problem of a naturalism that led to nihilism, but it did not appear in any fullness till well into the twentieth century, unless we count a major theme in Nietzsche that quickly became distorted.3 On the other hand, theistic existentialism was born in the middle of the nineteenth century as Søren Kierkegaard responded to the dead orthodoxy of Danish Lutheranism. Yet it was not until after World War I that either form of existentialism became culturally significant, for it was only then that nihilism finally gripped the intellectual world and began affecting the lives and attitudes of ordinary men and women.
World War I had not made the world safe for democracy. The generation of flappers and bathtub gin, the rampant violation of an absurd antiliquor law, the quixotic stock market that promised so much—these prefaced in the United States Dust Bowl 1930s. With the rise of National Socialism in Germany and its incredible travesty of human dignity, students and intellectuals the world over were ready to conclude that life is absurd and human beings are meaningless. In the soil of such frustration and cultural discontent, existentialism in its atheistic form sank its cultural roots. It was to flower into a significant worldview by the 1950s.
To some extent all worldviews have subtle variations. Existentialism is no exception. Camus and Sartre, both existentialists and once friends, had a falling-out over important differences, and Martin Heidegger’s existentialism is quite different from Sartre’s. But as with other worldviews, we will focus on major features and general tendencies. The language of most of the propositions listed below derives from either Sartre or Camus. That is quite intentional, because that is the form in which it has been most digested by today’s intelligentsia, and through their literary works even more than their philosophic treatises, Sartre and Camus are still wielding enormous influence. To many modern people the propositions of existentialism appear so obvious that people “do not know what they are assuming because no other way of putting things has ever occurred to them.”5
BASIC ATHEISTIC EXISTENTIALISM
Atheistic existentialism begins by accepting naturalism’s answers to worldview questions 1 (prime reality), 4 (death), 5 (knowledge), 6 (ethics), and 7 (history). In short: Matter exists eternally; God does not exist. Death is extinction of personality and individuality. Through our innate and autonomous human reason, including the methods of science, we can know the universe. The cosmos, including this world, is understood to be in its normal state. Ethics is related only to human beings. History is a linear stream of events linked by cause and effect but without an overarching purpose.
In other words, atheistic existentialism affirms most of the propositions of naturalism except those relating to human nature and our relationship to the cosmos. Indeed, existentialism’s major interest is in our humanity and how we can be significant in an otherwise insignificant world.
The world, it is assumed, existed long before human beings came on the scene. It is structured or chaotic, determined by inexorable law or subject to chance. Whichever it is makes no difference. The world merely is.
Then came a new thing, conscious beings—ones who distinguished he and she from it, ones who seemed determined to determine their own destiny, to ask questions, to ponder, to wonder, to seek meaning, to endow the external world with special value, to create gods. In short, then came human beings. Now we have—for no one knows what reason—two kinds of being in the universe, the one seemingly having kicked the other out of itself and into separate existence.
The first sort of being is the objective world—the world of material, of inexorable law, of cause and effect, of chronological, clock-ticking time, of flux, of mechanism. The machinery of the universe, spinning electrons, whirling galaxies, falling bodies and rising gases and flowing waters—each is doing its thing, forever unconscious, forever just being where it is when it is. Here, say the existentialists, science and logic have their day. People know the external, objective world by virtue of careful observation, recording, hypothesizing, checking hypotheses by experiment, ever-refining theories, and proving guesses about the lay of the cosmos we live in.
The second sort of being is the subjective world—the world of mind, of consciousness, of awareness, of freedom, of stability. Here the inner awareness of the mind is a conscious present, a constant now. Time has no meaning, for the subject is always present to itself, never past, never future. Science and logic do not penetrate this realm; they have nothing to say about subjectivity. Subjectivity is the self’s apprehension of the not-self; subjectivity is making that not-self part of itself. The subject takes in knowledge not as a bottle takes in liquid but as an organism takes in food. Knowledge turns into the knower.
Existence is not something which lets itself be thought of from a distance: it must invade you suddenly, master you, weigh heavily on your heart like a great motionless beast—or else there is nothing more at all.
Roquentin in Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea
Naturalism had emphasized the unity of the two worlds by seeing the objective world as the real and the subjective as its shadow. “The brain secretes thought,” said Pierre Jean Georges Cabanis, “as the liver secretes bile.” The real is the objective. Sartre says, “The effect of all materialism is to treat all men, including the one philosophizing, as objects, that is, as an ensemble of determined reactions in no way distinguished from the ensemble of qualities and phenomena which constitute a table or a chair or a stone.”6 By that route, as we saw, lies nihilism. The existentialists take another path.
Existentialism emphasizes the disunity of the two worlds and opts strongly in favor of the subjective world, what Sartre calls “an ensemble of values distinct from the material realm.”7 For people are the subjective beings. Unless there are extraterrestrial beings, a possibility most existentialists do not even consider, we are the only beings in the universe who are self-conscious and self-determinate. The reason we have become that way is past finding out. But we perceive ourselves to be self-conscious and self-determinate, and so we work from these givens.
Science and logic do not penetrate our subjectivity, but that is all right because value and meaning and significance are not tied to science and logic. We can mean; we can be valuable; or better, we can mean and be valuable. Our significance is not up to the facts of the objective world over which we have no control, but up to the consciousness of the subjective world over which we have complete control.
Atheistic existentialism is at one with naturalism’s basic view of human nature; there is indeed no genuinely transcendent element in human beings, but they do display one important unique feature. To put it in Sartre’s words, “If God does not exist, there is at least one being in whom existence precedes essence, a being who exists before he can be defined by any concept, and . . . this being is man.” This sentence is the most famous definition of the core of existentialism. Sartre continues, “First of all, man exists, turns up, appears on the scene, and, only afterwards, defines himself.”8
Note again the distinction between the objective and subjective worlds. The objective world is a world of essences. Everything comes bearing its nature. Salt is salt; trees are tree; ants are ant. Only human beings are not human before they make themselves so. Each of us makes himself or herself human by what we do with our self-consciousness and our self-determinacy. Back to Sartre: “At first he [any human being] is nothing. Only afterwards will he be something, and he himself will have made him what he will be.”9 The subjective world is completely at the beck and call of every subjective being, that is, of every person.
How does this work out in practice? Let us say that John, a soldier, fears he is a coward. Is he a coward? Only if he acts like a coward, and his action will proceed not from a nature defined beforehand but from the choices he makes when the bullets start to fly. We can call John a coward if and only if he does cowardly deeds, and these will be deeds he chooses to do. So if John fears he is a coward but does not want to be, let him do brave deeds when they are called for.
From proposition 2 it follows that each person is totally free. Each of us is uncoerced, radically capable of doing anything imaginable with our subjectivity. We can think, will, imagine, dream, project visions, consider, ponder, invent. Each of us is monarch of our own subjective world.
We run into just such an understanding of human freedom in John Platt’s existential defense of B. F. Skinner’s naturalistic behaviorism:
The objective world, the world of isolated and controlled experiments, is the world of physics; the subjective world, the world of knowledge, values, decisions, and acts—of purposes which these experiments are in fact designed to serve—is the world of cybernetics, of our own goal-seeking behavior. Determinism or indeterminism lies on that side of the boundary, while the usual idea of “free will” lies on this side of the boundary. They belong to different universes, and no statement about one has any bearing on the other.11
So we are free within. And thus we can create our own value by affirming worth. We are not bound by the objective world of ticking clocks and falling water and spinning electrons. Value is inner, and the inner is each person’s own.
The objective world considered in and of itself is as the naturalist has said: a world of order and law, perhaps triggered into new structures by chance. It is the world of thereness.
To us, however, the facticity, the hard, cold thereness of the world, appears alien. As we make ourselves to be by fashioning our subjectivity, we see the objective world as absurd. It does not fit us. Our dreams and visions, our desires, all our inner world of value runs smack up against a universe that is impervious to our wishes. Think all day that you can step off a ten-story building and float safely to the ground. Then try it.
The objective world is orderly; bodies fall if not supported. The subjective world knows no order. What is present to it, what is here and now, is.
So we are all strangers in a foreign land. And the sooner we learn to accept that, the sooner we transcend our alienation and pass through the despair.
The toughest fact to transcend is the ultimate absurdity—death. We are free so long as we remain subjects. When we die, each of us is just an object among other objects. So, says Camus, we must ever live in the face of the absurd. We must not forget our bent toward nonexistence, but live out the tension between the love of life and the certainty of death.
Here is how an existentialist goes beyond nihilism. Nothing is of value in the objective world in which we become conscious, but while we are conscious we create value. The person who lives an authentic existence is the one who keeps ever aware of the absurdity of the cosmos but who rebels against that absurdity and creates meaning.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s “underground man” is a paradigm of the rebel without a seemingly reasonable cause. In the story the underground man is challenged:
Two and two do make four. Nature doesn’t ask your advice. She isn’t interested in your preferences or whether or not you approve of her laws. You must accept nature as she is with all the consequences that that implies. So a wall is a wall, etc., etc.
The walls referred to here are the “laws of nature,” “the conclusions of the natural sciences, of mathematics.” But the underground man is equal to the challenge:
But, Good Lord, what do I care about the laws of nature and arithmetic if I have my reasons for disliking them, including the one about two and two making four! Of course, I won’t be able to breach this wall with my head if I’m not strong enough. But I don’t have to accept a stone wall just because it’s there and I don’t have the strength to breach it.12
It is thus insufficient to pit the objective world against the subjective and point to its ultimate weapon, death. The person who would be authentic is not impressed. Being a cog in the cosmic machinery is much worse than death. As the underground man says, “The meaning of a man’s life consists in proving to himself every minute that he is a man and not a piano key.”13
Ethics—that is, a system of understanding what is the good—is solved simply for an existentialist. The good action is the consciously chosen action. Sartre writes, “To choose to be this or that is to affirm at the same time the value of what we choose, because we can never choose evil. We always choose the good.”14 So the good is whatever a person chooses; the good is part of subjectivity; it is not measured by a standard outside the individual human dimension.
If I’ve discarded God the Father, there has to be someone to invent values. You’ve got to take things as they are. Moreover, to say that we invent values means nothing else than this: life has no meaning a priori. Before you come alive, life is nothing; it’s up to you to give it meaning, and value is nothing else but the meaning you choose. In that way, you see, there is a possibility of creating human community.
The problem with this position is twofold. First, subjectivity leads to solipsism, the affirmation that each person alone is the determiner of values and that there are thus as many centers of value as there are persons in the cosmos at any one time. Sartre recognizes this objection and counters by insisting that every person in meeting other persons encounters a recognizable center of subjectivity.15 Thus we see that others like us must be involved in making meaning for themselves. We are all in this absurd world together, and our actions affect each other in such a way that “nothing can be good for us without being good for all.”16 Moreover, as I act and think and effect my subjectivity, I am engaged in a social activity: “I am creating a certain image of man of my own choosing. In choosing myself, I choose man.”17 According to Sartre, therefore, people living authentic lives create value not only for themselves but for others too.
The second objection Sartre does not address, and it seems more telling. If, as Sartre says, we create value simply by choosing it and thus “can never choose evil,” does good have any meaning? The first answer is yes, for evil is “not-choosing.” In other words, evil is passivity, living at the direction of others, being blown around by one’s society, not recognizing the absurdity of the universe, that is, not keeping the absurd alive. If the good is in choosing, then choose. Sartre once advised a young man who sought his counsel, “You’re free, choose, that is, invent.”18
Does this definition satisfy our human moral sensitivity? Is the good merely any action passionately chosen? Too many of us can think of actions seemingly chosen with eyes open that were dead wrong. In what frame of mind have the Russian pogroms against the Jews been ordered and executed? And the bombing of Vietnamese villages or the Federal Building in Oklahoma City or the targets of the Unabomber? What about the terrorist leveling of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001? Sartre himself has sided with causes that appear quite moral on grounds many traditional moralists accept. But not every existentialist has acted like Sartre, and the system seems to leave open the possibility for the Unabomber to claim ethical immunity for his murders, or for the perpetrators of the events of 9/11 to glory in the nobility of their cause.
Placing the locus of morality in each individual’s subjectivity leads to the inability to distinguish a moral from an immoral act on grounds that satisfy our innate sense of right, a sense that says others have the same rights as I do. My choice may not be the desired choice of others though in my choosing I choose for others, as Sartre says. Some standard external to the “subjects” involved is necessary to shape truly the proper actions and relationships between “subjects.”
Ordinary naturalists can choose to commit themselves to their families or neighbors, their communities or country, the environment or the world. They need not display overarching egotism or selfishness. But full-blown atheistic existentialists have already committed themselves to themselves. If they are indeed committed to this Sartrean notion of human selves making themselves who they will come to be, they are the monarchs and bishops of their own Pointland. Since they themselves make themselves who they are, they are responsible only to themselves. They admit they are finite beings in an absurd world, subject to death without exception. The authenticity of their value comes solely by virtue of their own conscious choices.
Before we abandon existentialism to the charge of solipsism and a relativism that fails to provide a basis for ethics, we should give more than passing recognition to Albert Camus’s noble attempt to show how a good life can be defined and lived. This, it seems to me, is the task Camus set for himself in The Plague.
A SAINT WITHOUT GOD
In The Brothers Karamazov (1880) Dostoyevsky has Ivan Karamazov say that if God is dead everything is permitted. In other words, if there is no transcendent standard of the good, then there can ultimately be no way to distinguish right from wrong, good from evil, and there can be no saints or sinners, no good or bad people. If God is dead, ethics is impossible.
Albert Camus picks up that challenge in The Plague (1947), which tells the story of Oran, a city in North Africa, in which a deadly strain of infectious disease breaks out. The city closes its gates to traffic and thus becomes a symbol of the closed universe, a universe without God. The disease, on the other hand, comes to symbolize the absurdity of this universe. The plague is arbitrary; one cannot predict who will and who will not contract it. It is not “a thing made to man’s measure.”19 It is terrible in its effects—painful physically and mentally. Its origins are not known, and yet it becomes as familiar as daily bread. There is no way to avoid it. Thus the plague comes to stand for death itself, for like death it is unavoidable and its effects are terminal. The plague helps make everyone in Oran live an authentic existence, because it makes everyone aware of the absurdity of the world they inhabit. It points up the fact that people are born with a love of life but live in the framework of the certainty of death.
The story begins as rats start to come out from their haunts and die in the streets; it ends a year later as the plague lifts and life in the city returns to normal. During the intervening months, life in Oran becomes life in the face of total absurdity. Camus’s genius is to use that as a setting against which to show the reactions of a cast of characters, each of whom represents in some way a philosophic attitude.
M. Michel, for example, is a concierge in an apartment house. He is outraged at the way the rats are coming out of their holes and dying in his apartment building. At first he denies they exist in his building, but eventually he is forced to admit it. Early in the novel he dies cursing the rats. M. Michel represents the man who refuses to acknowledge the absurdity of the universe. When he is forced to admit it, he dies. He cannot live in the face of the absurd. He represents those who are able to live only inauthentic lives.
The old Spaniard has a very different reaction. He had retired at age fifty and gone immediately to bed. Then he measured time, day in and day out, by moving peas from one pan to another. “‘Every fifteen peas,’ he said, ‘it’s feeding time. What could be simpler?’”20 The old Spaniard never leaves his bed, but he takes a sadistic pleasure in the rats, the heat, and the plague, which he calls “life.”21 He is Camus’s nihilist. Nothing in his life—inside or out, objective world or subjective world—has value. So he lives it with a complete absence of meaning.
M. Cottard represents a third stance. Before the plague grips the city, he is nervous, for he is a criminal and is subject to arrest if detected. But as the plague becomes severe, all city employees are committed to alleviating the distress, and Cottard is left free to do as he will. And what he wills to do is live off the plague. The worse conditions get, the richer, happier, and friendlier he becomes. “Getting worse every day isn’t it? Well, anyhow, everyone’s in the same boat,” he says.22 Jean Tarrou, one of the chief characters in the novel, explains Cottard’s happiness this way: “He’s in the same peril of death as everyone else, but that’s just the point; he’s in it with the others.”23
When the plague begins to lift, Cottard loses his feeling of community because he again becomes a wanted man. He loses control of himself, shoots up a street, and is taken by force into custody. Throughout the plague his actions were criminal. Instead of alleviating the suffering of others, he feasted on it. He is Camus’s sinner in a universe without God—proof, if you will, in novelistic form that evil is possible in a closed cosmos.
If evil is possible in a closed cosmos, then perhaps good is too. In two major characters, Jean Tarrou and Dr. Rieux, Camus develops this theme. Jean Tarrou was baptized into the fellowship of nihilists when he visited his father at work, heard him argue as a prosecuting attorney for the death of a criminal, and then saw an execution. This had a profound effect on him. As he puts it, “I learned that I had had an indirect hand in the deaths of thousands of people. . . . We all have the plague.”24 And thus he lost his peace.
From then on, Jean Tarrou has made his whole life a search for some way to become “a saint without God.”25 Camus implies that Tarrou succeeds. His method lies in comprehension and sympathy and ultimately issues in action.26 He is the one who suggests a volunteer corps of workers to fight the plague and comfort its victims. Tarrou works ceaselessly in this capacity. Yet there remains a streak of despair in his lifestyle: “winning the match” for him means living “only with what one knows and what one remembers, cut off from what one hopes for!” So, writes Dr. Rieux, the narrator of the novel, Tarrou “realized the bleak sterility of a life without illusions.”27
Dr. Rieux himself is another case study of the good man in an absurd world. From the very beginning he sets himself with all his strength to fight the plague—to revolt against the absurd. At first his attitude is passionless, detached, aloof. Later, as his life is deeply touched by the lives and deaths of others, he softens and becomes compassionate. Philosophically, he comes to understand what he is doing. He is totally unable to accept the idea that a good God could be in charge of things. As Baudelaire said, that would make God the devil. Rather, Dr. Rieux takes as his task “fighting against creation as he found it.”28 He says, “Since the order of the world is shaped by death, mightn’t it be better for God if we refuse to believe in Him and struggle with all our might against death, without raising our eyes toward the heaven where He sits in silence.”29
Dr. Rieux does exactly that: he struggles against death. And the story he tells is a record of “what had had to be done, and what assuredly would have to be done again in the never ending fight against terror and its relentless onslaughts, despite their personal afflictions, by all who, while unable to be saints but refusing to bow down to pestilences, strive their utmost to be healers.”30
I have dwelt at length on The Plague (though by no means exhausting its riches either as art or as a lesson in life)31 because I know of no novel or work of existential philosophy that makes so appealing a case for the possibility of living a good life in a world where God is dead and values are ungrounded in a moral framework outside the human frame. The Plague is to me almost convincing. Almost, but not quite. For the same questions occur within the intellectual framework of The Plague as within the system of Sartre’s “Existentialism.”
Why should the affirmation of life as Dr. Rieux and Jean Tarrou see it be good and Cottard’s living off the plague be bad? Why should the old Spaniard’s nihilistic response be any less right than Dr. Rieux’s positive action? True, our human sensibility sides with Rieux and Tarrou. But we recognize that the old Spaniard is not alone in his judgment. Who then is right? Those who side with the old Spaniard will not be convinced by Camus or by any reader who sides with Rieux, for without an external moral referent there is no common ground for discussion. There is but one conviction versus another. The Plague is attractive to those whose moral values are traditional, not because Camus offers a base for those values but because he continues to affirm them even though they have no base. Unfortunately, affirmation is not enough. It can be countered by an opposite affirmation.
It may be that in the last two years of his life Camus recognized his failure to go beyond nihilism. Howard Mumma, the summer pastor of the American Church in Paris, recounts private talks with Camus during these two years in which Camus gradually came to feel that the Christian explanation was true. He asked Mumma what it meant to be “born again” and whether Mumma would baptize him. The baptism did not take place, first, because Mumma considered Camus’s childhood baptism valid and, second, because Camus was not yet ready for a public display of his conversion. The issue was not resolved when Mumma left Paris at the end of summer, expecting to see Camus again the following year. Camus died in an automobile accident the following February.32
Since I have been coming to church, I have been thinking a great deal about the idea of a transcendent, something that is other than this world. . . . And since I have been reading the Bible, I sense that there is something—I don’t know if it is personal or if it is a great idea or powerful influence—but there is something that can bring meaning to my life.
Camus, in Howard Mumma, Albert Camus and the Minister
HOW FAR BEYOND NIHILISM?
Does atheistic existentialism transcend nihilism? It certainly tries to—with passion and conviction. Yet it fails to provide a referent for a morality that goes beyond each individual. By grounding human significance in subjectivity, it places it in a realm divorced from reality. The objective world keeps intruding: death, the ever-present possibility and the ultimate certainty, puts a halt to whatever meaning might otherwise be possible. It forces an existentialist forever to affirm and affirm and affirm; when affirmation ceases, so does authentic existence.
Considering precisely this objection to the possibility of human value, H. J. Blackham agrees to the terms of the argument. Death indeed does end all. But every human life is more than itself, for it stems from a past humanity and it affects humanity’s future. Moreover, “there is heaven and there is hell in the economy of every human imagination.”33 That is, says Blackham, “I am the author of my own experience.”34 After all the objections have been raised, Blackham retreats to solipsism. And that seems to me the end of all attempts at ethics from the standpoint of atheistic existentialism.
Atheistic existentialism goes beyond nihilism only to reach solipsism, the lonely self that exists for fourscore and seven (if it doesn’t contract the plague earlier), then ceases to exist. Many would say that that is not to go beyond nihilism at all; it is only to don a mask called value, a mask stripped clean away by death.
BASIC THEISTIC EXISTENTIALISM
As was pointed out above, theistic existentialism arose from philosophic and theological roots quite different from those of its atheistic counterpart. It was Søren Kierkegaard’s answer to the challenge of a theological nihilism—the dead orthodoxy of a dead church. As Kierkegaard’s themes were picked up two generations after his death, they were the response to a Christianity that had lost its theology completely and had settled for a watered-down gospel of morality and good works. God had been reduced to Jesus, who had been reduced to a good man pure and simple. The death of God in liberal theology did not produce among liberals the despair of Kafka but the optimism of one English bishop in 1905 who, when asked what he thought would prevent humankind from achieving a perfect social union, could think of nothing.
Late in the second decade of the twentieth century, however, Karl Barth in Germany saw what ought to happen when theology became anthropology, and he responded by refurbishing Christianity along existential lines. What he and subsequent theologians such as Emil Brunner and Reinhold Niebuhr affirmed came to be called neo-orthodoxy, for while it was significantly different from orthodoxy, it put God very much back in the picture.35 It is not my goal to look specifically at any one form of neo-orthodoxy. Rather, I will seek to identify propositions that are common to the theistic existential stance.
Theistic existentialism begins by accepting theism’s answers to worldview questions 1 (prime reality), 2 (external reality), 3 (human beings), 4 (death), 6 (ethics), and 8 (core commitments). In short: God is infinite and personal (triune), transcendent and immanent, omniscient, sovereign, and good. God created the cosmos ex nihilo to operate with a uniformity of cause and effect in an open system. Human beings are created in the image of God and thus possess personality, self-transcendence, intelligence, morality, gregariousness, and creativity. Human beings were created good, but through the fall the image of God became defaced, though not so ruined as to be incapable of restoration; through the work of Christ, God redeemed humanity and began the process of restoring people to goodness, though any given person may choose to reject that redemption. For each person death is either the gate to life with God and his people or the gate to eternal separation from the only thing that will ultimately fulfill human aspirations. Ethics is transcendent and is based on the character of God as good (holy and loving). As a core commitment Christian theists live to seek first the kingdom of God, that is, to glorify God and enjoy him forever.
This list of propositions, identical to that of theism, suggests that theistic existentialism is just Christian theism. I am tempted to say that is in fact what we have, but this would do an injustice to the special existential variations and emphases. The existential version of theism is much more a particular set of emphases within theism than it is a separate worldview. Still, because of its impact on twentieth-century theology and its confusing relation to atheistic existentialism, it deserves a special treatment. Moreover, some tendencies within the existential version of theism place it at odds with traditional theism. These tendencies will be highlighted as they arise in the discussion.
As with atheistic existentialism, theistic existentialism’s most characteristic elements are concerned not with the nature of the cosmos or God, but with human nature and our relation to the cosmos and God.
Theistic existentialism does not start with God. This is its most important variation from theism. With theism God is assumed certainly to be there and of a given character; then people are defined in relationship to God. Theistic existentialism arrives at the same conclusion, but it starts elsewhere.
Theistic existentialism emphasizes the place in which human beings find themselves when they first come to self-awareness. Self-reflect for a moment. Your certainty of your own existence, your own consciousness, your own self-determinacy—these are your starting points. When you look around, check your desires against the reality you find, look for a meaning to your existence, you are not blessed with certain answers. You find a universe that does not fit you, a social order that scratches where you don’t itch and fails to scratch where you do. And, worse luck, you do not immediately perceive God.
The human situation is ambivalent, for evidence of order in the universe is ambiguous. Some things seem explicable by laws that seem to govern events; other things do not. The fact of human love and compassion gives evidence for a benevolent deity; the fact of hatred and violence and the fact of an impersonal universe point in the other direction.
It is here that Father Paneloux in The Plague images for us an existential Christian stance. Dr. Rieux, you will recall, refused to accept the “created order” because it was “a scheme of things in which children are put to torture.”36 Father Paneloux, on the other hand, says, “But perhaps we should love that which we cannot understand.”37 Father Paneloux has “leaped” to faith in and love for the existence of a good God, even though the immediate evidence is all in the other direction. Rather than accounting for the absurdity of the universe on the basis of the fall, as a Christian theist would do, Father Paneloux assumes God is immediately responsible for this absurd universe; therefore he concludes that he must believe in God in spite of the absurdity.
Camus elsewhere calls such faith “intellectual suicide,” and I am inclined to agree with him. But the point is that while reason may lead us to atheism, we can always refuse to accept reason’s conclusions and take a leap toward faith.
To be sure, if the Judeo-Christian God exists, we had better acknowledge it because in that case our eternal destiny depends on it. But, say the existentialists, the data is not all in and never will be, and so every person who would be a theist must step forth and choose to believe. God will never reveal himself unambiguously. Consequently each person, in the loneliness of his or her own subjectivity, surrounded by a great deal more darkness than light, must choose. And that choice must be a radical act of faith. When a person does choose to believe, a whole panorama opens. Most of the propositions of traditional theism flood in. Yet the subjective, choice-centered basis for the worldview colors the style of each Christian existentialist’s stance within theism.
As in atheistic existentialism, theistic existentialism emphasizes the disjunction between the objective and the subjective worlds. Martin Buber, a Jewish existentialist whose views have greatly influenced Christians, uses the terms I-Thou and I-It to distinguish between the two ways a person relates to reality. In the I-It relationship a human being is an objectifier:
Now with the magnifying glass of peering observation he bends over particulars and objectifies them, or with the field-glass of remote inspection he objectifies them and arranges them as scenery, he isolates them in observation without any feeling of their exclusiveness, or he knits them into a scheme of observation without any feeling of universality.38
This is the realm of science and logic, of space and time, of measurability. As Buber says, “Without It man cannot live. But he who lives by It alone is not man.”39 The Thou is necessary.
In the I-Thou relationship, a subject encounters a subject: “When Thou is spoken [Buber means experienced], the speaker has nothing for his object.”40 Rather, such speakers have a subject like themselves with whom to share a mutual life. In Buber’s words, “All real living is meeting.”41
Buber’s statement about the primacy of I-Thou, person-to-person relationships is now recognized as a classic. No simple summary can do it justice, and I encourage readers to treat themselves to the book itself. Here we must content ourselves with one more quotation about the personal relationship Buber sees possible between God and people:
Men do not find God if they stay in the world. They do not find Him if they leave the world. He who goes out with his whole being to meet his Thou and carries to it all being that is in the world, finds Him who cannot be sought. Of course God is the “wholly Other”; but He is also the wholly Same, the Wholly Present. Of course He is the Mysterium Tremendum that appears and overthrows; but He is also the mystery of the self-evident, nearer to me than my I.42
So theistic existentialists emphasize the personal as of primary value. The impersonal is there; it is important; but it is to be lifted up to God, lifted up to the Thou of all Thous. To do so satisfies the I and serves to eradicate the alienation so strongly felt by people when they concentrate on I-It relations with nature and, sadly, with other people as well.
This discussion may seem rather abstract to Christians whose faith in God is a daily reality that they live out rather than reflect on. Perhaps the chart in table 6.1 comparing two ways of looking at some basic elements of Christianity will make the issues clearer. It is adapted from a lecture given by theologian Harold Englund at the University of Wisconsin in the early 1960s. Think of the column on the left as describing a dead orthodoxy contrasted with the column on the right describing a live theistic existentialism.
When put this way, the existential version is obviously more attractive. Of course, traditional theists may well respond in two ways: first, the second column demands or implies the existence of the first column and, second, theism has always included the second column in its system. Both responses are well founded. The problem has been that theism’s total worldview has not always been well understood and churches have tended to stick with column one. It has taken existentialism to restore many theists to a full recognition of the richness of their own system.
An existentialist’s stress on personality and wholeness leads to an equal emphasis on the subjectivity of genuine human knowledge. Knowledge about objects involves I-It relationships; they are necessary but not sufficient. Full knowledge is intimate interrelatedness; it involves the I-Thou and is linked firmly to the authentic life of the knower. In 1835 when Kierkegaard was faced with deciding what should be his life’s work, he wrote,
What I really need is to become clear in my own mind what I must do, not what I must know—except in so far as a knowing must precede every action. The important thing is to understand what I am destined for, to perceive what the Deity wants me to do; the point is to find the truth for me, to find that idea for which I am ready to live and die. What good would it do me to discover a so-called objective truth, though I were to work my way through the systems of the philosophers and were able, if need be, to pass them in review?43
Some readers of Kierkegaard have understood him to abandon the concept of objective truth altogether; certainly some existentialists have done precisely that, disjoining the objective and subjective so completely that the one has no relation to the other.44 This has been especially true of atheistic existentialists like John Platt. It is not that the facts are unimportant but that they must be facts for someone, facts for me. And that changes their character and makes knowledge become the knower. Truth in its personal dimension is subjectivity; it is truth digested and lived out on the nerve endings of a human life.
When knowledge becomes so closely related to the knower, it has an edge of passion, of sympathy, and it tends to be hard to divide logically from the knower himself. Buber describes the situation of a person standing before God: “Man’s religious situation, his being there in the Presence, is characterized by its essential and indissoluble antinomy.” What is one’s relation to God as regards freedom or necessity? Kant, says Buber, resolved the problem by assigning necessity to the realm of appearances and freedom to the realm of being.
But if I consider necessity and freedom not in worlds of thought but in the reality of standing before God, if I know that “I am given over for disposal” and know at the same time that “It depends on myself,” then I cannot try to escape the paradox that has to be lived by assigning irreconcilable propositions to two separate realms of validity; nor can I be helped to an ideal reconciliation by any theological device: but I am compelled to take both to myself, to be lived together, and in being lived they are one.45
The full truth is in the paradox, not in an assertion of only one side of the issue. Presumably this paradox is resolved in the mind of God, but it is not resolved in the human mind. It is to be lived out: “God, I rely completely on you; do your will. I am stepping out to act.”
The strength of stating our understanding of our stance before God in such a paradox is at least in part a result of the inability most of us have had in stating our stance nonparadoxical. Most nonparadoxical statements end by denying either God’s sovereignty or human significance. That is, they tend either to Pelagianism or to hyper-Calvinism.
The weakness of resting in paradox is the difficulty of knowing where to stop. What sets of seemingly contradictory statements are to be lived out as truth? Surely not every set. “Love your neighbor; hate your neighbor.” “Do good to those who persecute you. Call your friends together and do in your enemies.” “Don’t commit adultery. Have every sexual liaison you can pull off.”
So beyond the paradoxical it would seem that there must be some noncontradictory proposition governing which paradoxes we will try to live out. In the Christian form of existentialism the Bible taken as God’s special revelation sets the bounds. It forbids many paradoxes, and it seems to encourage others. The doctrine of the Trinity, for example, may be an unresolvable paradox, but it does justice to the biblical data Among those who have no external objective authority to set the bounds, paradox tends to run rampant. Marjorie Grene comments about Kierkegaard, “Much of Kierkegaard’s writing seems to be motivated not so much by an insight into the philosophical or religious appropriateness of paradox to a peculiar problem as by the sheer intellectual delight in the absurd for its own sake.”47 Thus, this aspect of theistic existentialism has come in for a great deal of criticism from those holding a traditional theistic worldview. The human mind is made in the image of God’s mind, and thus though our mind is finite and incapable of encompassing the whole of knowledge, it is yet able to discern some truth. As Francis Schaeffer puts it, we can have substantial truth but not exhaustive truth, and we can discern truth from foolishness by the use of the principle of noncontradiction.48
What logic does is to articulate and to make explicit those rules which are in fact embodied in actual discourse and which, being so embodied, enable men both to construct valid arguments and to avoid the penalties of inconsistency. . . . A pupil of Duns Scotus demonstrated that . . . from a contradiction any statement whatsoever can be derived. It follows that to commit ourselves to asserting a contradiction is to commit ourselves to asserting anything whatsoever, to asserting anything whatsoever that it is possible to assert—and of course also to its denial. The man who asserts a contradiction thus succeeds in saying nothing and also in committing himself to everything; both are failures to assert anything determinate, to say that this is the case and not this other. We therefore depend upon our ability to utilize and to accord with the laws of logic in order to speak at all, and a large part of formal logic clarifies for us what we have been doing all along.
Alasdair MacIntyre, Herbert Marcuse: An Exposition and a Polemic
Theistic existentialism took two steps away from traditional theism. The first step was to begin to distrust the accuracy of recorded history. The second step was to lose interest in its facticity and to emphasize its religious implication or meaning.
The first step is associated with the higher criticism of the mid-nineteenth century. Rather than taking the biblical accounts at face value, accepting miracles and all, the higher critics, such as D. F. Strauss (1808–1874) and Ernest Renan (1823–1892), started from the naturalistic assumption that miracles cannot happen. Accounts of them must therefore be false, not necessarily fabricated by writers who wished to deceive but propounded by credulous people of primitive mindset.
This, of course, tended to undermine the authority of the biblical accounts even where they were not riddled with the miraculous. Other higher critics, most notably Julius Wellhausen (1844–1918), also turned their attention to the inner unity of the Old Testament and discovered, so they were sure, that the Pentateuch was not written by Moses at all. In fact, the texts showed that several hands over several centuries had been at work. This undermined what the Bible says about itself and thus called into question the truth of its whole message.49
Rather than change their naturalistic presuppositions to match the data of the Bible, they concluded that the Bible was historically untrustworthy. This could have led to an abandonment of Christian faith in its entirety. Instead it led to a second step—a radical shift in emphasis. The facts the Bible recorded were not important; what was important were its examples of the good life and its timeless truths of morality.
Matthew Arnold wrote in 1875 that Christianity “will live, because it depends upon a true and inexhaustible fruitful idea, the idea of death and resurrection as conceived and worked out by Jesus. . . . The importance of the disciples’ belief in their Master’s resurrection lay in their believing what was true, although they materialized it. Jesus had died and risen again, but in his own sense not theirs.”50 History—that is, space-time events—was not important; belief was important. And the doctrine of death and resurrection came to stand not for the atonement of humankind by the God-man Jesus Christ but for a “new life” of human service and sacrifice for others. The great mystery of God’s entrance into time and space was changed from fact to myth, a powerful myth, of course, one that could transform ordinary people into moral giants.
These steps took place long before the nihilism of Nietzsche or the despair of Kafka. They were responses to the “assured results of scholarship” (which as those who pursue the matter will find are now not so assured). If objective truth could not be found, no matter. Real truth is poetically contained in the “story,” the narrative.
It is interesting to note what soon happened to Matthew Arnold. In 1875 he was saying that we should read the Bible as poetry; if we did it would teach us the good life. In 1880 he had taken the next step and was advocating that we treat poetry in general in the same way we used to treat the Bible: “More and more mankind will discover that we have to turn to poetry to interpret life for us, to console us, to sustain us. . . . Most of what now passes with us for religion and philosophy will be replaced by poetry.”51 For Arnold, poetry in general had become scripture.
In any case, when theistic existentialists (Reinhold Niebuhr, Rudolf Bultmann, and the like) began appearing on the theological scene, they had a ready-made solution to the problem posed for orthodoxy by the higher critics. So the Bible’s history was suspect. What matter? The accounts are “religiously” (that is, poetically) true. So while the doctrine of the neo-orthodox theologians looks more like the orthodoxy of Calvin than like the liberalism of Matthew Arnold, the historical basis for the doctrines was discounted, and the doctrines themselves began to be lifted out of history.
The fall was said not to have taken place back there and then in space and time. Rather, each person reenacts in their own life this story. Each enters the world like Adam, sinless; each one rebels against God. The fall is existential—a here-and-now proposition. Edward John Carnell summarizes the existential view of the fall as “a mythological description of a universal experience of the race.
Likewise the resurrection of Jesus may or may not have occurred in space and time. Barth believes it did; Bultmann, on the other hand, says, “An historical fact that involves a resurrection from the dead is utterly inconceivable!”53 Again, no matter. The reality behind the resurrection is the new life in Christ experienced by the disciples. The “spirit” of Jesus was living in them; their lives were transformed. They were indeed living the “cruciform life style.”54
Other supernatural doctrines are similarly “demythologized,” among them creation, redemption, the resurrection of the body, the second coming, the antichrist. Each is said to be a symbol of “religious” import. Either they are not to be taken literally or, if they are, their meaning is not in their facticity but in what they indicate about human nature and our relationship to God.55
It is here—in the understanding of history and of doctrine—that traditional theists most find fault with their existential counterparts. The charge is twofold. First, theists say that the existentialists start with two false, or certainly highly suspect, presuppositions: (1) that miracles are impossible (Bultmann here, but not Barth) and (2) that the Bible is historically untrustworthy. On the level of presuppositions Bultmann simply buys the naturalist notion of the closed universe; Bultmann, although usually associated with the neo-orthodox theologians, is thus not really a “theistic” existentialist at all. Much recent scholarship has gone a long way toward restoring confidence in the Old Testament as an accurate record of events, but existential theologians ignore this scholarship or discount the importance of its results. And that brings us to the second major theistic critique.
Theists charge the existentialists with building theology on the shifting sand of myth and symbol. As a reviewer said about Lloyd Geering’s Resurrection: A Symbol of Hope, an existential work, “How can a nonevent [a resurrection which did not occur] be regarded as a symbol of hope or indeed of anything else? If something has happened we try to see what it means. If it has not happened the question cannot arise. We are driven back on the need for an Easter event.”56
There must be an event if there is to be meaning. If Jesus arose from the dead in the traditional way of understanding this, then we have an event to mean something. If he stayed in the tomb or if his body was taken elsewhere, we have another event and it must mean something else. So a theist refuses to give up the historical basis for faith and challenges the existentialist to take more seriously the implications of abandoning historical facticity as religiously important. Such abandonment should lead to doubt and loss of faith. Instead it has led to a leap of faith. Meaning is created in the subjective world, but it has no objective referent.
In this area theistic existentialism comes very close to atheistic existentialism. Perhaps when existentialists abandon facticity as a ground of meaning, they should be encouraged to take the next step and abandon meaning altogether. This would place them back in the trackless wastes of nihilism, and they would have to search for another way out.
THE PERSISTENCE OF EXISTENTIALISM
The two forms of existentialism are interesting to study, for they are a pair of worldviews that bear a sibling relationship but are children of two different fathers. Theistic existentialism arose with Kierkegaard as a response to dead theism, dead orthodoxy, and with Karl Barth as a response to the reduction of Christianity to sheer morality. It took a subjectivist turn, lifted religion from history, and focused its attention on inner meaning. Atheistic existentialism came to the fore with Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus as a response to nihilism and the reduction of people to meaningless cogs in the cosmic machinery. It took a subjectivist turn, lifted philosophy from objectivity, and created meaning from human affirmation.
Siblings in style though not in content, these two forms of existentialism are still commanding attention and vying for adherents. So long as those who would be believers in God yearn for a faith that does not demand too much belief in the supernatural or the accuracy of the Bible, theistic existentialism will be a live option. So long as naturalists who cannot (or refuse to) believe in God are searching for a way to find meaning in their lives, atheistic existentialism will be of service. I would predict that both forms—in probably ever-new and changing versions—will be with us for a long time.
6
THEORIES OF TRUTH AND
POSTMODERNISM
To say of what is that it is, or of what is not that it is not, is true.
ARISTOTLE, METAPHYSICS 1077B26
If a prophet speaks in the name of the LORD but if the thing does not take place or prove true, it is a
word that the LORD has not spoken.
DEUTERONOMY 18:22
Pilate asked, “So you are a king?” Jesus answered, “You say that I am a king. For this I was born,
and for this I came into the world, to testify to the truth. Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to
my voice.” Pilate asked him, “What is truth?”
JOHN 18:37-38
1—INTRODUCTION
Down through the ages, people have asked Pilate’s question. Is there such a
thing as truth and, if so, what exactly is it? The Christian religion, as well as
its rivals, essentially contains claims about reality, which are either true or
false. Moreover, competing truth claims, especially those at the core of
competing worldviews, often have very different consequences for life. As
C. S. Lewis put it, “We are now getting to the point at which different
beliefs about the universe lead to different behavior. Religion involves a
series of statements about facts, which must be either true or false. If they
are true, one set of conclusions will follow about the right sailing of the
human fleet; if they are false, quite a different set.”1
Moreland, J. P., & Craig, W. L. (2017). Philosophical foundations for a christian worldview. InterVarsity Press.
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https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Deuteronomy+18%3A22&version=NRSV
https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=John+18%3A37-38&version=NRSV
The notion of truth employed in Lewis’s statement is called the
correspondence theory of truth, roughly, the idea that truth is a matter of
a proposition (belief, thought, statement, representation) corresponding to
reality; truth obtains when reality is the way a proposition represents it to
be. The correspondence theory of truth may properly be called the classical
theory of truth because, with very little exception, it was held by virtually
everyone until the nineteenth century. However, since then, the
correspondence theory has come under criticism, and alternative theories of
truth have been formulated. Moreover, according to many of its advocates,
an important contemporary ideology—postmodernism—rejects the
existence of truth, especially if it is construed according to some version of
the correspondence theory.
In order to get at these issues, this chapter is divided into two sections:
theories of truth and postmodernism. In the first section, after looking at
some preliminary issues, a correspondence theory of truth will be analyzed
and evaluated, followed by a discussion of alternative theories of truth. In
the second section, different aspects of postmodernism will be presented
and assessed.
2—THEORIES OF TRUTH
2.1 Preliminary Issues
Is there a biblical view of truth? The answer seems to be no and yes,
depending on what one means. No, there is no peculiarly Christian theory
of truth, one that is used only in the Bible and not elsewhere. If there were a
peculiarly Christian view of truth, two disastrous implications would
follow: claims that certain Christian doctrines are true would be equivocal
compared to ordinary, everyday assertions of truth, and Christianity’s claim
to be true would be circular or system-dependent and, therefore, trivial.
Further, the Bible does not use technical philosophical vocabulary to proffer
Moreland, J. P., & Craig, W. L. (2017). Philosophical foundations for a christian worldview. InterVarsity Press.
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a precise theory of truth, nor is advocation of a specific theory of truth the
primary intent of scriptural teaching.
However, none of this means that biblical teaching does not presuppose
or make the most sense in light of a particular theory of truth. The Old and
New Testament terms for truth are, respectively, ʾemet and alētheia. The
meaning of these terms and, more generally, a biblical conception of truth
are broad and multifaceted: fidelity, moral rectitude, being real, being
genuine, faithfulness, having veracity, being complete. Two aspects of the
biblical conception of truth appear to be primary: faithfulness and
conformity to fact. The latter appears to involve a correspondence theory of
truth. Arguably, the former may presuppose a correspondence theory. Thus
faithfulness may be understood as a person’s actions’ corresponding to the
person’s assertions or promises, and a similar point could be made about
genuineness, moral rectitude, and so forth.
Whether or not this first aspect of a biblical conception of truth
presupposes a correspondence theory, there are numerous passages in the
second group, “conformity to fact,” that do. Two interesting sorts of texts,
with numerous examples of each, fall within this second group. First,
hundreds of passages explicitly ascribe truth to propositions (assertions and
so forth) in a correspondence sense. Thus God says, “I the LORD speak the
truth, I declare what is right” (Is 45:19). Proverbs 8:7 says, “For my mouth
will utter truth,” and Proverbs 14:25 proclaims, “A truthful witness saves
lives, but one who utters lies is a betrayer.” According to Jeremiah 9:5,
“They all deceive their neighbors, and no one speaks the truth.” In John
8:44-45, Jesus says that the devil is a liar and deceiver who cannot stand the
truth but that he, Jesus, speaks the truth. In John 17:17, Jesus affirms that
the word of God is truth, and in John 10:35 he assures us that it cannot be
broken (i.e., assert a falsehood).
Second, numerous passages explicitly contrast true propositions with
falsehoods. Thus in Romans 1:25 we are told that “they exchanged the truth
about God for a lie.” Repeatedly, the Old Testament warns against false
prophets whose words do not correspond to reality, and the ninth
commandment warns against bearing false testimony, that is, testimony that
fails to correspond to what actually happened (Ex 20:16).
Moreland, J. P., & Craig, W. L. (2017). Philosophical foundations for a christian worldview. InterVarsity Press.
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https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Is+45%3A19&version=NRSV
https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Proverbs+8%3A7&version=NRSV
https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Proverbs+14%3A25&version=NRSV
https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Jeremiah+9%3A5&version=NRSV
https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=John+8%3A44-45&version=NRSV
https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=John+17%3A17&version=NRSV
https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=John+10%3A35&version=NRSV
https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Romans+1%3A25&version=NRSV
https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Ex+20%3A16&version=NRSV
It would seem, then, that Scripture regularly presupposes some form of
correspondence theory of truth, and indeed, this is both the commonsense
view and the classic position embraced by virtually all philosophers until
the nineteenth century. However, prior to our analysis of the
correspondence theory and its two chief rivals, two more preliminary issues
should be mentioned. Admittedly, these two issues cannot be fully treated
without some clarity about truth itself, and this sought-after clarity comes
from analyzing theories of truth. So the discussion appears to be caught in a
cul-de-sac. Fortunately, there is a way out. For at least two reasons, it is
appropriate to ponder these two issues before analyzing the theories of
truth. For one thing, while these preliminary issues cannot be adequately
discussed without looking at theories of truth, the converse is also true.
Since one has to start somewhere, these two issues are as good a place as
any for launching the discussion. More importantly, before one comes to
philosophy, one already has a commonsense notion of what truth is. As
noted above, some form of correspondence theory appears to capture both
commonsense intuitions and biblical teaching. Even if further analysis
justifies rejection of the correspondence theory, its preanalytic justification
gives one something with which to start.
The first issue is the distinction between absolutist and relativist
depictions of truth claims. According to relativism, a claim is true relative
to the beliefs or valuations of an individual or group that accepts it. It is
made true for those who accept it by that very act of acceptance. A moral
analogy may help to make this clear. There is no absolute moral obligation
to drive on the right side of the road. That obligation is genuine relative to
America but not to England. Similarly, “The earth is flat” was true for the
ancients but is false for moderns.
Those who claim that truth does not vary from person to person, group
to group, accept absolute truth, also called objective truth. On this view,
people discover truth, they do not create it, and a claim is made true or false
in some way or another by reality itself, totally independent of whether the
claim is accepted by anyone. Moreover, an absolute truth conforms to the
three fundamental laws of logic, which are themselves absolute truths.
Consider some declarative proposition, P, say, Two is an even number. The
law of identity says that P is identical to itself and different from other
things, say, Q, Grass is green. The law of noncontradiction says that P
Moreland, J. P., & Craig, W. L. (2017). Philosophical foundations for a christian worldview. InterVarsity Press.
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cannot be both true and false in the same sense at the same time. The law of
excluded middle says that P is either true or false; or, put somewhat
differently, either P is true or its negation, not-P, is true. Note carefully that
these three laws say nothing about one’s ability to verify the truth of P. For
example, a colorblind person may not know whether Q above is true or
false. The law of excluded middle says that Q is one or the other; it says
nothing about people’s ability to discover which is correct.
Who is correct, the absolutists or relativists? For at least two reasons,
the absolutists are right about the nature of truth. These two responses will
be discussed more fully throughout the analysis below of the three theories
of truth, but they may be briefly stated here. First, relativism itself is either
true or false in the absolutist sense. If the former, relativism is self-refuting,
since it amounts to the objective truth that there are no objective truths. If
the latter, it amounts to a mere expression of preference or custom by a
group or individual without objective, universal validity. Thus it cannot be
recommended to others as something they should believe because it is the
objective truth of the matter, and this is a serious difficulty for those who
“advocate” relativism.
Second, the reasons for relativism are confused in at least three ways.
For one thing, consider the relativist claim “The earth was flat for the
ancients and is not flat for us moderns.” This claim suffers from an
ambiguity that makes the assertion somewhat plausible. The ambiguity rests
in phrases such at “P is true for them (him), false for us (me).” Shortening
the phrase to enhance ease of exposition, ontologically (that is, with regard
to being or existence), the phrase should be construed as “P is true-for-me”
and, epistemologically (that is, with regard to knowing), it should be read as
“P is true for me.” The ontological sense is, indeed, an expression of
relativism, and it implies that something is made true by the act of believing
it. However, the epistemological sense expresses an opinion that P is true in
the objective sense: “I take P to be objectively true, but I’m not sure of that
and, in fact, I lack confidence in my ability to defend P. So I’ll hedge my
bets and say simply that the truth of P is just an opinion I hold.” So
understood, the epistemological sense requires absolute truth. When most
people claim that P is true (or false) to them and false (or true) to others,
they are speaking epistemologically, not ontologically, and relativists are
wrong if they think otherwise.
Moreland, J. P., & Craig, W. L. (2017). Philosophical foundations for a christian worldview. InterVarsity Press.
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The second confusion among those who argue for relativism is the
confusion of truth conditions and criteria for truth. A truth condition is a
description of what constitutes the truth of a claim. So understood, a truth
condition is ontological and it is associated with what the truth itself is. For
example, the truth conditions for S “Unicorns live in Kansas City” would be
the obtaining of a real state of affairs, namely, unicorns actually living in
Kansas City. Criteria for truth consist in epistemological tests for deciding
or justifying which claims are true and false. Criteria for S would be things
like eyewitness reports of unicorn sightings, the discovery of unicorn
tracks, and so on. Now in a certain sense, the epistemological justification
for a claim is relative to individuals or groups in that some may be aware of
evidence unknown to others. In light of the available evidence, the ancients
may have been justified in believing that the earth was flat. In light of new
evidence, this belief is no longer justified. So in this benign sense, a claim’s
satisfaction of criteria for truth is relative to the possession or lack of
relevant evidence. But it does not follow that the truth conditions are
relative. “The earth is flat” is objectively true or false, quite independent of
our evidence.
Finally, sometimes relativists are confused about the three fundamental
laws of logic associated with the absolutist position. Some claim that they
are expressions of Aristotelian logic and, as such, are merely Western
constructions or Western logic, which are not applicable cross-culturally.
This “argument” confuses the logical status of a proposition or argument
with the linguistic style used to express the proposition or the social
processes used to reach a conclusion.
In his Summa Theologiae, Thomas used a literary style in which his
prose explicitly follows strict logical form and syllogistic presentation. By
contrast, an isolated culture in the mountains of Brazil may use a poetic
form of oral tradition, their sentences may not follow an explicit, tidy
subject-predicate form, and they may reach tribal conclusions in ways quite
foreign to Western culture. But none of this has anything to do with the
deep logical structure that underlies their claims or with the conformance of
their individual assertions to the three laws of logic, and it is simply a
mistake to think otherwise. We invite the reader to present any declarative
utterance in any culture, including the assertion that “Western logic” is
culturally relative, that does not conform to Aristotle’s three laws of logic.
Moreland, J. P., & Craig, W. L. (2017). Philosophical foundations for a christian worldview. InterVarsity Press.
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Any such assertion, to the degree that it is meaningful or asserted as true or
false, will conform to the three laws of logic. Any alleged counterexample
will either be self-refuting or meaningless. After all, Aristotle did not invent
these laws any more than Columbus invented the New World. Aristotle may
have been a Western thinker and he may have discovered these laws, but
that does not imply that the laws themselves are Western constructions.
The second preliminary issue involves deflationary theories of truth.
The three theories of truth examined below all take truth to be a real and
important feature of the items that exhibit truth. But a recent view, the
deflationary theory of truth, implies that there is no such property or
relation as truth, and thus it is wrong-headed to develop a theory that
clarifies the nature of truth itself. A major version of the deflationary theory
of truth is the redundancy theory of truth, according to which the word
true has no unique or special function within language and can be
eliminated without limiting what can be expressed in language. Sentences
that appeal to truth—for example, T: “It is true that Lincoln is dead”—have
exactly the same content as others that contain no such appeal—for
example, U: “Lincoln is dead.” Some advocates of the redundancy theory
draw the conclusion that the role of assertions of truth is, at best, a way of
expressing agreement with what is being asserted (“I agree that Lincoln is
dead”) and, at worst, redundant.
A proper evaluation of deflationary theories lies beyond the scope of an
introductory text. But two brief replies are in order. First, as we shall see in
the treatment of the correspondence theory, it is arguably the case that
people actually experience truth itself; that is, they are aware of truth itself.
If this is correct, then truth exists. Second, it does not seem to be the case
that T and U express the same thing. U is a statement about a
state of affairs
in the world, namely, Lincoln’s being dead. T is not directly about Lincoln.
Rather, T is a statement about an assertion—U itself—and says of U that it
has truth. Moreover, U and T play different functions in one’s life. One may
be interested in U because one wants to know if Lincoln actually lived and,
if so, whether he is still alive. By contrast, one who is interested in T may
be concerned with inventorying his set of beliefs in an attempt to discern
how many of them are true. Thus T functions to describe one of his beliefs,
but U does not.
Moreland, J. P., & Craig, W. L. (2017). Philosophical foundations for a christian worldview. InterVarsity Press.
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It is time to look at three important theories of truth, beginning with the
correspondence theory.
2.2 The Correspondence Theory of Truth
In its simplest form, the correspondence theory of truth says that a
proposition (sentence, belief) is true just in case it corresponds to reality,
when what it asserts to be the case is the case. Many correspondence
theorists would hold that, more abstractly, truth obtains when a
truth-bearer
stands in an appropriate correspondence relation to a truth-maker. Thus a
proper analysis of truth involves analyzing the truth-bearer, the
correspondence relation, and the truth-maker.
Different versions of the correspondence theory analyze these three
constituents differently. In fact, one of the main criticisms of the
correspondence theory is that its advocates either cannot agree about the
details of this analysis or provide mysterious entities in their analysis.
Setting these criticisms aside for the moment, let us look at some issues and
alternatives in analyzing these three constituents.
First, what is the truth-bearer? Three main types of candidates have
been offered. To begin with, two linguistic candidates are sentences and
statements. Second, two mental states, thoughts and beliefs, have been
proffered. Finally, propositions have been named as the basic truth-bearer.
Let us probe these in the order just presented, beginning with the linguistic
options. A sentence is a linguistic type or token consisting in a sense-
perceptible string of markings formed according to a culturally arbitrary set
of syntactical rules. A statement is a sequence of sounds or body
movements employed by a speaker to assert a sentence on a specific
occasion. So understood, neither sentences nor statements are good
candidates for the basic truth-bearer. For one thing, a truth-bearer cannot be
true unless it has meaning, and there are meaningful and meaningless
sentences/statements. Further, some sentences/statements ask questions,
express emotions (“Ouch!”), or perform actions (uttering “I do!” at the right
moment during a wedding). These sentences/statements are neither true nor
false. In response to these problems, one could claim that it is the content of
Moreland, J. P., & Craig, W. L. (2017). Philosophical foundations for a christian worldview. InterVarsity Press.
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a declarative sentence/statement—what is being asserted—that is the
relevant truth-bearer. Unfortunately, while this response seems correct, it
also seems to move away from linguistic truth-bearers to propositions.
Second, certain mental states, namely, thoughts and beliefs, have been
identified as the appropriate truth-bearer. Compared to linguistic entities,
these candidates seem to be a step forward for two reasons. First, it would
appear to be only those sentences/statements that express thoughts or
beliefs that can be true or false, so the latter are more fundamental to truth
than the former. Second, while language helps people develop their
thoughts and beliefs, people—for example, young children—can have true
or false thoughts/beliefs without thinking in language or without yet having
acquired language.
On the other hand, there is a problem with identifying thoughts or
beliefs as the basic truth-bearer. To see this, consider a person having the
thought that grass is green. Considered from one angle, this thought is
merely an individual mental event, a dated conscious episode. So
understood, it may occur to a person at noon, last five seconds, and pass
away. Considered solely as individual mental events, thoughts or beliefs do
not appear to have meaning nor are they true or false. However, viewed
from a different angle, a thought does seem to possess these features. It is
the content of the thought that is true or false. An individual thinking event
seems to exemplify a mental content—for example, that grass is green—
and this is what is true or false.
So far, our study of truth-bearers has led to this conclusion: In the basic
sense, it is the content of declarative sentences/statements and
thoughts/beliefs that is true or false. Such a content is called a proposition,
and it represents the third candidate for the truth-bearer. What are
propositions? Philosophers who accept their existence are not in agreement
on the answer to this question. However, here are some things relevant to
answering it: A proposition (1) is not located in space or time; (2) is not
identical to the linguistic entities that may be used to express it; (3) is not
sense-perceptible; (4) is such that the same proposition may be in more than
one mind at once; (5) need not be grasped by any (at least finite) person to
exist and be what it is; (6) may itself be an object of thought when, for
example, one is thinking about the content of one’s own thought processes;
(7) is in no sense a physical entity. Though assessing the debate about the
Moreland, J. P., & Craig, W. L. (2017). Philosophical foundations for a christian worldview. InterVarsity Press.
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precise nature of propositions is beyond the scope of the present study, we
shall return to propositions shortly.
What about truth-makers? What is it that makes a proposition true, and
how does it do so? The most popular answer to the first question is facts or
states of affairs. Some distinguish facts from states of affairs, but they
seem to be identical, and the present discussion will treat them as such.
What, exactly, is a state of affairs? Providing an adequate definition is more
difficult than citing examples. A state of affairs is any actually existing
whole that is ordered by the relation of predication or exemplification (see
chap. 10). For example, two’s being even and the apple’s being red are
states of affairs.
How does a state of affairs make a proposition true, and given a specific
proposition, which state of affairs is the relevant one? To answer these
questions, consider the proposition “Grass is green.” This proposition is
true just in case a specific state of affairs, namely, grass’s being green,
actually obtains. The important thing to note is that propositions have
intentionality—ofness, aboutness, directedness toward an object. The
intentionality of a proposition is a natural affinity or intrinsic directedness
toward its intentional object, that is, the specific state of affairs it picks out.
Thus truth-makers make truth-bearers true, not in the sense that the former
stand in an efficient causal relation with the latter and cause them to be true.
Rather, the truth-bearer, the proposition, picks out a specific state of affairs
due to the proposition’s intrinsic intentionality, and that specific state of
affairs “makes” the proposition true just in case it actually is the way the
proposition represents it to be.
Currently, a certain version of the correspondence theory of truth is
called the truth-maker theory: x is a truth-maker for the proposition p if
and only if (1) p must be true if x exists, and (2) if x exists and p is true,
then p must be true in virtue of the existence of x.
One thing to note is that the truth-maker theory requires the present
existence of the truth-maker, granting that the relevant proposition p is true.
Certain counterexamples have been offered which purport to show that
propositions can be true without having a truth-maker. If successful, these
counterexamples may undermine the truth-maker theory by showing that
truth-makers are superfluous. On the other hand, it is hard to know what
Moreland, J. P., & Craig, W. L. (2017). Philosophical foundations for a christian worldview. InterVarsity Press.
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one means by claiming a proposition p is true if there is nothing in virtue of
which it is true.
Some advocates of the truth-maker theory respond to critics by rejecting
what is called truth-maker maximalism, roughly, the view that there must
be a truth-maker for each true proposition. These thinkers hold that in the
vast majority of cases in which there is a true proposition, there is a truth-
maker just as the truth-maker theory specifies. But in certain troublesome
cases—cases in which it is not clear what the truth-maker is—there is still a
sense in which the propositions are true without the relevant truth-maker.
Other advocates of the truth-maker theory resist adjusting the theory in this
way and seek to provide an appropriate truth-maker for the problematic
cases. Is there a plausible truth-maker for these cases? Advocates of the
truth-maker theory are divided on this question, and the reader will have to
make up his or her own mind about the matter. To facilitate reflection on the
issue, consider the following examples:
1. Baal does not exist.
2. Dinosaurs are extinct today.
3. All ravens are black.
4. Loving a child is morally right.
5. The US president in 2070 will be a woman.
6. If Jones were rich, he would buy a Lexus.
Are these examples of true propositions that fail to have truth-makers? It is
at least plausible to think that a relevant truth-maker may be found for each
proposition.
Consider (1). The truth-maker for (1) is simply the fact that all the states
of affairs that obtain in the actual world lack the state of affairs of “Baal’s
existing.” This is a real lack, a real privation that genuinely characterizes
reality. Consequently, we have a truth-maker for (1).
Proposition (2) actually makes two claims: First, it asserts that at some
time prior to today there were such things as dinosaurs (thus distinguishing
(2) from such propositions as “Unicorns do not exist today”), and second,
dinosaurs fail to exist today. Thus there must be two truth-makers for (2).
Moreland, J. P., & Craig, W. L. (2017). Philosophical foundations for a christian worldview. InterVarsity Press.
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The first is that at some time prior to today the state of affairs of “there
being dinosaurs” was real, while the second is that there is a real lack of
“there being dinosaurs” in all the states of affairs that obtain in the actual
world today.
(3) is a universally quantified statement. As such, it applies to all ravens
whatever, both actual and possible, and not just to those that just happen to
exist. So the truth-maker cannot be “actually existing ravens being black.”
What then is the truth-maker for (3)? The truth-maker is the conditionally
obtaining state of affairs “if something is a raven, then it is black”; that is,
on the condition that there is something that is a raven, then it will have the
property of blackness. (There is a further metaphysical ground for this
conditional being true; namely, there is a lawlike relation between the
property of being a raven and the property of being black.)
(4) is a proposition of morality that implies neither that children exist,
nor that any that do exist are actually being loved. What then is the truth-
maker for (4)? We suggest the following. There is a type of action, namely,
loving a child, that has the moral property of being right. This type of act
actually has the property of moral rightness in all possible worlds, including
those worlds without children, or without creatures capable of love. In
worlds where there are individual examples of children being loved, each of
those examples would have the property of moral rightness. Thus the truth-
maker for (4) would be the state of affairs of the type of act loving a child
having the property moral rightness.
As a future-tense statement, (5) poses distinct problems. Let us grant for
the sake of argument that the US president in 2070 will be a woman. The
problem with (5) is that in some sense it appears to be true now, even
though the election of a female to the presidency has not yet occurred. How
then should we handle (5)? Three strategies seem to be possible.2 First,
sentence (5) may be translated as (5’ ): “It is (tenselessly) true that the US
president in 2070 is a woman.” On this strategy, the state of affairs “the US
president’s being a woman in 2070” tenselessly obtains, and is the truth-
maker for (5). The second strategy does not translate (5) to eliminate tense,
but posits a tensed state of affairs as its truth-maker. That is, the state of
affairs “the US president’s being a woman” has the property of obtaining in
the future, specifically in 2070. The fact that the state of affairs “the US
Moreland, J. P., & Craig, W. L. (2017). Philosophical foundations for a christian worldview. InterVarsity Press.
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president’s being a woman” currently has this future tense property is what
grounds the truth of (5) on the second strategy. The third strategy says the
relevant truth-maker is the state of affairs of a woman’s being president
obtaining when 2070 is present, and 2070’s being present will obtain at a
time after the present moment or “now.”
(6) expresses a true counterfactual of creaturely freedom, namely, what
poor Jones would purchase if only he were rich. In examining (5), we
learned that there may well be tensed facts about the future, facts that now
exist even though the objects or events they are about do not. Similarly, we
claim that there are “counterfacts” (counterfactual states of affairs) that
actually exist, even though the objects or events they are about do not. Thus
what serves as the truth-maker for (6) is the counterfactual state of affairs
“if Jones were rich, he would buy a Lexus.” In other words, if Jones being
rich obtains, then his buying a Lexus obtains.3
It would seem then that there are plausible ways of handling these
putative counterexamples that do not require abandoning the
truth-maker
requirement, but again, the reader will have to decide whether these
responses are plausible. In any case, our investigation of these alleged
counterexamples allows us to make three important observations. First,
truth-makers do not cause propositions to be true; rather, they are the
intentional objects in virtue of which propositions that correspond to them
are true. Second, a truth-maker does not need to be a concrete object; in
many cases it is some type of abstract state of affairs.
Third, it may well be the case that current truth-maker theory is not an
adequate version of the correspondence theory of truth. Recall that for an
adequate correspondence theory, two features are crucial: (1) it is the
proposition’s intentional object (the object the proposition is of or about)
that is intimately related to “making” the proposition true; (2) the
intentional object must correspond to what the proposition ascribes to the
intentional object in the manner specified by the proposition. One
implication of this is that the truth-maker does not need to exist presently
for the proposition to be presently true. “Lincoln was shot in 1865” is true
and does not require Lincoln’s being shot to be a tenselessly existing state
of affairs, nor does it require something to exist currently (e.g., there being
some trace fact of the original shooting that currently exists in the universe).
Moreland, J. P., & Craig, W. L. (2017). Philosophical foundations for a christian worldview. InterVarsity Press.
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The truth-maker for this proposition does not exist. But the relevant state of
affairs did exist in the manner specified by the proposition, namely, at a
time when the shooting was present and that this time is earlier than now.
But the truth-maker theory requires the truth-maker to exist in the
present, and it does not need to be the proposition’s intentional object. Thus
some have suggested that the truth-maker for “Lincoln was shot in 1865” is
certain current facts about God’s memory. Recall the truth-maker principle:
x is a truth-maker for the proposition p if and only if (1) p must be true if x
exists, and (2) if x exists and p is true, then p must be true in virtue of the
existence of x. Let x be certain current facts about God’s memory. We then
have certain facts about God’s memory as the truth-maker for “Lincoln was
shot in 1865” if and only if (1) “Lincoln was shot in 1865” must be true if
certain current facts about God’s memory exist and (2) if certain current
facts about God’s memory exist and “Lincoln was shot in 1865” is true,
then “Lincoln was shot in 1865” must be true in virtue of the existence of
certain current facts about God’s memory. The truth-maker principle seems
to be satisfied, but the correspondence theory is not. The correspondence
theory requires that the proposition’s intentional object is what makes the
proposition true if it satisfies the ascriptions of the proposition in the
manner specified by the proposition. But clearly the proposition is about
something happening to Lincoln, not about a memory in God’s mind.
Because the truth-maker principle uses the rather vague “in virtue of”
locution and makes no reference to intentionality and a proposition’s
intentional object, it seems to be an inadequate formulation of the
correspondence theory.
Our study of truth-bearers has already taken us into the topic of the
correspondence relation. What, exactly, is this relation? Note first that
correspondence is not a monadic property of a proposition like redness is
with respect to an apple. A monadic property is an attribute that requires
only one thing to possess it. Rather, correspondence is a two-placed relation
between a proposition and the state of affairs that is its intentional object.
A two-placed relation, such as “larger than,” is one that requires two entities
to be instantiated. Thus truth is grounded in intentionality. The intrinsic
ofness of a proposition is directed toward a state of affairs, and the truth
relation is exemplified just in case that intentional object matches, conforms
to, corresponds with the proposition.
Moreland, J. P., & Craig, W. L. (2017). Philosophical foundations for a christian worldview. InterVarsity Press.
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Second, the correspondence relation seems to be unique among
relations. As will be noted below, the correspondence relation itself can be
directly experienced and made an object of thought, and it does not seem to
be reducible to something else. It is not a causal relation, it is not physical,
nor is it sense-perceptible. Neither is it a picturing relation. Propositions do
not picture or mirror the states of affairs that correspond to them. This
seems clear for states of affairs that are not themselves sense-perceptible;
for example, two’s being even, mercifulness’s being a virtue, Gabriel’s
being an angel. But it is also true for sense-perceptible states of affairs. The
proposition “Grass is green” does not picture the state of affairs, grass’s
being green. The proposition can be instantiated in a mind but is not itself
green or sense-perceptible at all, while the corresponding state of affairs is,
indeed, green. Thus the former is not a picture of the latter.
When we look at criticisms of the correspondence theory, we will see
that some object to it on the grounds that the correspondence relation is too
mysterious to admit into one’s ontology (one’s view of reality). For this
reason, some advocates have sought to state the correspondence theory
without employing the correspondence relation. For example, some claim
that a true proposition is one such that what it asserts to be the case is, in
fact, the case. Note that the claim does not explicitly mention
correspondence. It may be that this expresses an adequate correspondence
theory without mentioning the correspondence relation. However, it is more
likely that this claim makes implicit use of the
correspondence relation
without mentioning it. When we ask what it is for something to actually be
what an assertion claims to be the case, an answer seems to be possible: it is
for the former (what is the case) to correspond to the latter (what is asserted
to be the case).
Two main arguments have been advanced for the correspondence
theory, one phenomenological and one dialectical. Edmund Husserl (1859–
1938) stated the phenomenological argument most powerfully. The
phenomenological argument focuses on a careful description and
presentation of specific cases to see what can be learned from them about
truth. As an example, consider the case of Joe and Frank. While in his
office, Joe receives a call from the university bookstore that a specific book
he had ordered—Richard Swinburne’s The Evolution of the Soul—has
arrived and is waiting for him. At this point, a new mental state occurs in
Moreland, J. P., & Craig, W. L. (2017). Philosophical foundations for a christian worldview. InterVarsity Press.
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Joe’s mind—the thought that Swinburne’s The Evolution of the Soul is in
the bookstore. Now Joe, being aware of the content of the thought, becomes
aware of two things closely related to it: the nature of the thought’s
intentional object (Swinburne’s book being in the bookstore) and certain
verification steps that would help him to determine the truth of the thought.
For example, he knows that it would be irrelevant for verifying the thought
to go swimming in the Pacific Ocean. Rather, he knows that he must take a
series of steps that will bring him to a specific building and look in certain
places for Swinburne’s book in the university bookstore. So Joe starts out
for the bookstore, all the while being guided by the
proposition
“Swinburne’s The Evolution of the Soul is in the bookstore.” Along the way,
his friend Frank joins him, though Joe does not tell Frank where he is going
or why. They arrive at the store and both see Swinburne’s book there. At
that moment, Joe and Frank simultaneously have a certain sensory
experience of seeing Swinburne’s book The Evolution of the Soul. But Joe
has a second experience not possessed by Frank. Joe experiences that his
thought corresponds with an actual state of affairs. He is able to compare
his thought with its intentional object and “see,” be directly aware that the
thought is true. In this case, Joe actually experiences the correspondence
relation itself and truth itself becomes an object of his awareness.
The example just cited presents a case of experiencing truth in which
the relevant intentional object is a sense-perceptible one, a specific book
being in the bookstore. But this need not be the case. A student, upon being
taught modus ponens, can bring this thought to specific cases of logical
inferences and “see” the truth of modus ponens. Similarly, a person can
form the thought that he is practicing denial regarding his anger toward his
father, and through introspection, he can discover whether this thought
corresponds with his own internal mental states.
Some may reject the phenomenological argument on the grounds that it
is overly simplistic. But it is not clear that this is so. The argument is simple
but not simplistic because more sophisticated cases of the same sort can be
supplied in which scientists, mathematicians, or other scholars experience
truth. Moreover, it is a virtue of a theory of truth that it accords with
(corresponds with!) what we all experience each day before we ever come
to philosophy.
Moreland, J. P., & Craig, W. L. (2017). Philosophical foundations for a christian worldview. InterVarsity Press.
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The dialectical argument asserts that those who advance alternative
theories of truth or who simply reject the correspondence theory actually
presuppose it in their own assertions, especially when they present
arguments for their views or defend them against defeaters. Sometimes this
argument is stated in the form of a dilemma: those who reject the
correspondence theory either take their own utterances to be true in the
correspondence sense or they do not. If the former, then those utterances are
self-defeating. If the latter, there is no reason to accept them, because one
cannot take their utterances to be true.
A critic could respond that the second horn of this dilemma begs the
question. The critic could claim either that his own assertions are not being
offered as true or else they are offered as true in accordance with the
coherence or pragmatic theory of truth (see below). The defender of the
correspondence theory could reply as follows to each alternative: First, as
we will see in more detail later in the discussion of postmodernism, a
person may say that he does not take his own utterances to be true, but
when one actually reads that person’s writings or listens carefully to his
statements, one usually gets the distinct impression that the person really
does, in fact, take his own claims to be true in spite of protests to the
contrary. Second, it would, indeed, be consistent to reject the
correspondence theory and take that rejection itself to be true according to a
different theory of truth. However, when one looks carefully at the writings
of those who defend alternative theories of truth, it often seems that they
take their own points to be true because they correspond to reality. As a
simple example, defenders of a coherence theory of truth sometimes argue
for their position on the grounds that people cannot escape their web of
beliefs and get to reality itself, or on the grounds that people actually justify
their beliefs and take them to be true because they cohere well with their
other beliefs. The most natural way to take these assertions is along the
lines of the correspondence theory: the proposition that people cannot
escape their web of beliefs actually corresponds to the way people and their
beliefs really are, and similarly with the point about how people relate
coherence to their beliefs.
Three main objections have been raised against the correspondence
theory. First, some argue that since there is no clear, widely accepted theory
about the three entities that constitute the correspondence theory, it should
Moreland, J. P., & Craig, W. L. (2017). Philosophical foundations for a christian worldview. InterVarsity Press.
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be rejected. Two things may be said in response. For one thing, even if it is
granted for the sake of argument that no widely accepted account of the
three entities is available, it only follows that more work needs to be done
to develop the theory, not that it is false or unjustified. After all, we often
know many things, that God knows the future, that electrons attract protons,
even if there is no single, widely accepted theory for fleshing out the details
of what we know. Second, we believe the analysis given above, though
briefly presented, is along the right lines and can be given a more
sophisticated defense. The correspondence theory also seems to accord well
with clear cases such as the one involving Joe and Frank, and this fact may
well provide enough justification to override the strength of this criticism if
it is granted that it has some dialectical force.
Second, it has been argued that by distinguishing truth from the
evidence one has for truth, that is, by claiming that truth transcends and is
not identical to evidence, the correspondence theory leaves us vulnerable to
skepticism. Why? Because if the correspondence theory is correct, then one
could have all the evidence in the world for a belief and the belief could still
be false. Two things can be said in response. First, even if the point is
granted, it only follows that we cannot attain truth; it does not follow that
the correspondence theory is false. Second, while evidence is truth-
conducive, it is actually the case that evidence is not the same thing as truth
itself. So it is, indeed, logically possible, even if implausible, to say that one
could possess all the evidence one could possibly get and still be wrong.
Thus the argument actually surfaces a virtue of the correspondence theory,
not a vice. Moreover, in chapter four, a detailed argument was presented for
the claim that the logical possibility of error does not render one vulnerable
to skepticism.
Finally, some argue that the correspondence theory involves mysterious
entities—propositions, irreducible intentionality, and the correspondence
relation—and thus should be rejected. It is hard to see much force in this
argument as it stands. That an entity is “mysterious” is not sufficient reason
to reject it. Moreover, it is a virtue of the phenomenological argument for
the correspondence theory that these three entities all seem to be ordinary
and commonsensical, not mysterious. Everyday people experience the
propositional content of their thoughts/beliefs, the intentionality of those
Moreland, J. P., & Craig, W. L. (2017). Philosophical foundations for a christian worldview. InterVarsity Press.
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thoughts/beliefs and the associated intentional objects, and the
correspondence relation itself.
Critics who raise this argument usually mean something more specific
by it. They approach metaphysics with a prior commitment to philosophical
naturalism, including some requirement that a knowledge claim must in
some way or another “be connected to” what is sense-perceptible. As a
result, they hold that reality must fit into a naturalistic worldview, and this
often means that some form of physicalism is required. The argument is that
if naturalism is true, then entities such as propositions, irreducible
intentionality, and the correspondence relation do not exist. It is open to a
defender of the correspondence theory to adopt the modus tollens form of
the argument: since these three kinds of entities exist, naturalism is false.
Truth has always been a hard thing to countenance within the confines of an
empiricist epistemology or a naturalist worldview. The reader should be in a
position to see why this is the case.
2.3 The Coherence Theory of Truth
Since the discussion of the correspondence theory has already taken us into
some of the key arguments and counterarguments regarding truth, it is
permissible to treat the next two theories much more briefly.
According to the coherence theory, a belief (statement, proposition, etc.)
is true if and only if it coheres well with the entire set of one’s beliefs,
assuming that the set is itself a strongly coherent one. Thus the truth or
falsity of a belief is not a matter of its match with a real, external world.
Rather, it is a function of the belief’s relationship with other beliefs within
one’s web of beliefs. Key advocates have been Spinoza (1632–1677), Hegel
(1770–1831), and Brand Blanshard (1892–1987).
It is important to distinguish a coherence theory of truth from a
coherence theory of justification (see chap. 5). The latter offers
coherence
as a test for truth and it is consistent with a correspondence theory of truth,
since one could hold that when a belief coheres well with one’s other
beliefs, it is likely to correspond to reality.
Moreland, J. P., & Craig, W. L. (2017). Philosophical foundations for a christian worldview. InterVarsity Press.
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One of the major problems for the coherence theory of truth is the lack
of an adequate notion of coherence, and in fact, it has never been precisely
defined, at least not in a way that is plausible. The trick is to define it in a
way that is neither too strong nor too weak. It would be too strong to define
coherence as entailment such that a belief is true just in case it entails other
beliefs. One’s sensory belief that one seems to see a table could be true, but
this does not entail that there is a table there even though both propositions
(that one seems to see a table and that there is a table there) could be true
and even though both “cohere well” with each other. It would be too weak
to define coherence as mere logical consistency (two or more beliefs do not
contradict each other). A person could have a bizarre set of logically
consistent beliefs that would not be true. For example, if Tom Crisp
believed that he was an eggplant, that eggplants are conscious, and that all
attempts by others to change his mind were lies, Crisp would have a
logically consistent but false belief about himself. In response to this
problem, some coherentists define coherence as mutual explanatory power,
hanging together, fitting together, or being in agreement with one’s set of
beliefs.
Apart from alleged difficulties with the correspondence theory, the main
argument for the coherence theory of truth derives from a commitment to a
coherence theory of justification along with a desire to avoid skepticism.
Recall that on the correspondence theory, one could have highly justified
false beliefs since a justified belief could fail to correspond to external
reality. It is this gap between justification and truth that provides
ammunition to the skeptic who can argue that knowledge is impossible
since justification does not guarantee truth. (Issues regarding justification
and skepticism were taken up in chapters four and five, and they will not be
rehearsed here.) The coherence theory of truth, however, defeats the skeptic
because there is no longer a gap between adequate justified beliefs and true
beliefs. Since truth just is an adequate coherence of a belief with an
appropriate set of beliefs, when a belief is justified by way of a coherence
account, it is automatically true. Truth is a matter of a belief’s internal
relations with one’s other beliefs, not its external relations with reality
outside the system of beliefs itself.
This argument for a coherence theory of truth provides a fitting
occasion to turn to objections to the theory. First, according to the
Moreland, J. P., & Craig, W. L. (2017). Philosophical foundations for a christian worldview. InterVarsity Press.
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coherence theory, there is no such thing as an appropriately justified false
belief since “appropriate justification” and truth are the same thing. Indeed,
this is claimed as a virtue of the theory. But, in fact, it is a vice because it is
entirely possible and, indeed, actually the case that one has an appropriately
justified belief that is false. The only way to avoid this problem is to define
“appropriate justification” as the same thing as truth, but this begs the
question. Further, the coherence theory is cut off from the world since, on
this view, truth is entirely a function of a belief’s relations within one’s
system of other beliefs with no reference whatsoever to a reality outside the
system. This is a serious problem. In response, most coherentists simply
deny the existence of a mind-independent reality (independent of language
or belief). In other words, they accept antirealism regarding reality.
However, this move will be a further sign of the theory’s inadequacy for
those who believe or actually know that there is an external world.
Third, the coherence theory allows for the possibility of completely
different, contradictory beliefs to be true as long as they cohere well with
alternative systems of beliefs. Consider the Tom Crisp case again. If P is
Tom Crisp is an eggplant, then P is true since it coheres well with Crisp’s
overall set of beliefs, and it is false since it fails to cohere well with one of
Crisp’s critic’s beliefs. Since the coherence theory allows that P is both true
and false, the coherence theory must be rejected.
A coherence advocate could respond by claiming that coherentism is a
form of relativism regarding truth, and thus it avoids treating P as both true
and false in the same sense. On this view, P is true relative to Crisp’s
system and false relative to his critic’s. Earlier, criticisms were raised
against truth relativism, and those criticisms, along with problems regarding
relativism in general, apply equally to this coherence move.
Finally, the coherence theory fails in light of the phenomenological
argument for the correspondence theory, as we saw in the case of Joe and
Frank. That case, and countless examples of real human experience, teach
us that we often bring individual propositions (Swinburne’s Evolution of the
Soul is in the bookstore) and not entire systems of belief to reality to judge
their truth value. We are often able to be directly aware of reality itself due
to the intentionality of our mental states, and we are often able to step
outside of our thoughts/beliefs, so to speak, and compare them with their
intentional objects in the external world. When this happens, we experience
Moreland, J. P., & Craig, W. L. (2017). Philosophical foundations for a christian worldview. InterVarsity Press.
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the truth or falsity of our beliefs. The correspondence theory makes sense of
all of this, but the coherence theory fails on this score and, accordingly,
should be rejected
2.4 The Pragmatic Theory of Truth
In one form or another, the pragmatic theory of truth has been advanced
by William James (1842–1910), John Dewey (1859–1952), and more recent
philosophers Hilary Putnam and Richard Rorty. In general terms, the
pragmatic theory implies that a belief P is true if and only if P works or is
useful to have. P is true just in case P exhibits certain values for those who
accept it. Pragmatism is widely taken to be an expression of antirealism
regarding external reality.
Pragmatists differ about how to interpret works or useful to have, and
accordingly, there is a distinction between nonepistemic and epistemic
versions of pragmatism. According to nonepistemic pragmatism, a belief
is true just in case accepting it is useful, where “useful” is spelled out in
terms that make no reference to epistemic values. For example, P is true if
and only if “behavior based on accepting P leads in the long run to
beneficial results for the believer” or “accepting P provokes actions with
desirable results.” These “beneficial results” or “desirable results” may, in
turn, be identified with things such as the maximization of happiness, of the
net balance of pleasure over pain, of technology and control over nature,
and so on.
More frequently, works or useful to have is depicted in epistemic terms,
according to epistemic pragmatism. For example, P is true if and only if P
is (1) what one’s colleagues will allow one to assert rationally or (2) what
one is ideally justified in asserting or (3) what an ideally rational scientific
community with all the relevant evidence would accept or (4) such that P
exhibits simplicity, explanatory power, empirical adequacy, the tendency to
lead to successful predictions, and so forth. In one way or another,
epistemic versions of pragmatism identify the truth of a proposition with its
epistemic success.
Moreland, J. P., & Craig, W. L. (2017). Philosophical foundations for a christian worldview. InterVarsity Press.
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Advocates of pragmatism claim that problems with the other two
theories, our inability to transcend our theories (language, beliefs) and get
to the external world (if there is such a thing; most pragmatists are
antirealists) all favor pragmatism. Critics claim that it is self-refuting, that
in their defense of the view, its advocates do not recommend pragmatism
because the theory is itself “useful” but because it corresponds to certain
facts about language, scientific theory testing and so forth, that it is a form
of relativism, and that it fails the phenomenological argument for the
correspondence theory. Since these arguments have already been presented,
we leave to the reader the task of developing in more detail an assessment
of pragmatism.
3—POSTMODERNISM
In the contemporary setting, a discussion of truth would be incomplete
without an analysis of postmodernism. Unfortunately, for two reasons,
such an analysis is extremely difficult to do in a brief, introductory way. For
one thing, postmodernism is a loose coalition of diverse thinkers from
several different academic disciplines, and it would be difficult to
characterize postmodernism in a way that would be fair to this diversity.
Further, part of the nature of postmodernism is a rejection of certain things
—for example, truth, objective rationality, authorial meaning in texts along
with the existence of stable verbal meanings and universally valid linguistic
definitions—that make accurate definitions possible. Still, it is possible to
provide a fairly accurate characterization of postmodernism in general,
since its friends and foes understand it well enough to discuss the view. But
the reader should keep in mind that an advocate of postmodernism should
be allowed to speak for himself or herself, and it would be wrong to
attribute to an individual thinker every aspect of the characterization to
follow unless such an attribution is justified.
3.1 General Characterization of Postmodernism
Moreland, J. P., & Craig, W. L. (2017). Philosophical foundations for a christian worldview. InterVarsity Press.
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Postmodernism is both a historical, chronological notion and a
philosophical ideology. Understood historically, postmodernism refers to a
period of thought that follows and is a reaction to the period called
modernity. Modernity is the period of European thought that developed out
of the Renaissance (14th–17th centuries) and flourished in the
Enlightenment (17th–19th centuries) in the ideas of people like Descartes,
Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Leibniz, and Kant. In the chronological sense,
postmodernism is sometimes called “post modernism.” So understood, it is
fair to say that postmodernism is often guilty of a simplistic characterization
of modernity, because the thinkers in that time period were far from
monolithic. Indeed, Descartes, Hume, and Kant have elements in their
thought that are more at home in postmodernism than they are in the so-
called modern era. Nevertheless, setting historical accuracy aside, the
chronological notion of postmodernism depicts it as an era that began and,
in some sense, replaces modernity.
As a philosophical standpoint, postmodernism is primarily a
reinterpretation of what knowledge is and what counts as knowledge. More
broadly, it represents a form of cultural relativism about such things as
reality, truth, reason, value, linguistic meaning, the self, and other notions.
Important postmodern thinkers are Friedrich Nietzsche, Ludwig
Wittgenstein, Jacques Derrida, Thomas Kuhn, Michel Foucault, Martin
Heidegger, and Jean-François Lyotard. To grasp postmodernism more
adequately, it will be helpful to break it down into seven different aspects.
3.1.1 Postmodernism and Metaphysical Realism
Philosophically, metaphysical realism includes a commitment to (1) the
existence of a theory-independent or language-independent reality, (2) the
notion that there is one way the world really is, and (3) the notion that the
basic laws of logic (identity, noncontradiction, excluded middle) apply to
reality. Postmodernism involves an antirealist rejection of these realist
commitments. According to postmodernism, “reality” is a social
construction. Language creates reality, and what is real for one linguistic
group may be unreal for another. Thus God exists relative to Christians but
does not exist relative to atheists. Further, the basic laws of logic are
Western constructions, and in no way are they to be taken as universally
valid laws of reality itself.
Moreland, J. P., & Craig, W. L. (2017). Philosophical foundations for a christian worldview. InterVarsity Press.
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Some postmodernists, who may be called neo-Kantian postmodernists,
agree that there is in some sense a thing-in-itself, an external reality. But
they also hold that we have no way to get to reality and, since we know
nothing about it, reality itself is a useless notion and, for all practical
purposes, can simply be ignored.
3.1.2 Rejection of the Correspondence Theory of Truth
Postmodernists reject the correspondence theory of truth. Some eschew any
talk of truth at all, while others advance a coherentist or, more frequently,
pragmatist notion of truth. The important thing is that truth is relative to a
linguistic community that shares the same narrative (see below). There is no
objective truth, no God’s-eye view of things. Rather, all thought is
historically and socially conditioned. Moreover, postmodernists reject
dichotomous thinking. Dichotomous thinking occurs when someone
divides a range of phenomena into two groups and goes on to claim that one
is better than the other. Here are some dichotomies: real/unreal, true/false,
rational/irrational, right/wrong, virtue/vice, good/bad, and beautiful/ugly.
Each pair represents a dichotomy in which the first member is to be
preferred to the second one. By contrast, postmodernists claim that
assertions that employ these terms are relative to a widely diverse range of
groups constituted by a shared language, narrative, culture. Thus there are
as many ways of dividing these pairs as there are groups that divide them,
because all such divisions are social constructions.
3.1.3 Rationality and Knowledge
Postmodernists reject the idea that there are universal, transcultural
standards, such as the laws of logic or principles of inductive inference, for
determining whether a belief is true or false, rational or irrational, good or
bad. There is no predefined rationality. Postmodernists also reject the notion
that rationality is objective on the grounds that no one approaches life in a
totally objective way without bias. Thus objectivity is impossible, and
observations, beliefs, and entire narratives are theory laden. There is no
neutral standpoint from which to approach the world, and thus observations,
beliefs, and so forth are perspectival constructions that reflect the viewpoint
implicit in one’s own web of beliefs. Regarding knowledge, postmodernists
believe that there is no point of view from which one can define knowledge
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itself without begging the question in favor of one’s own view.
“Knowledge” is a construction of one’s social, linguistic structures, not a
justified, truthful representation of reality by one’s mental states. For
example, knowledge amounts to what is deemed to be appropriate
according to the professional certification practices of various professional
associations. As such, knowledge is a construction that expresses the social,
linguistic structures of those associations, nothing more, nothing less.
3.1.4 Antifoundationalism
Postmodernists reject foundationalism as a theory of epistemic justification
(see chap. 5). Some of the reasons for this rejection are covered in the
previous chapter in the discussion of criticisms of and alternatives to
foundationalism; for example, the rejection of simple seeing. However,
there is an additional reason for the postmodernist rejection of
foundationalism that one finds peppered throughout postmodern literature:
foundationalism represents a quest for epistemic certainty, and it is this
desire to have certainty that provides the intellectual impetus for
foundationalism. This desire, the so-called Cartesian anxiety, is the root of
foundationalist theories of epistemic justification. But there is no such
certainty, and the quest for it is an impossible one. Further, that quest is
misguided because people do not need certainty to live their lives well.
Sometimes Christian postmodernists support this claim by asserting that the
quest for certainty is at odds with biblical teaching about faith, the
sinfulness of our intellectual and sensory faculties, and the impossibility of
grasping an infinite God.
3.1.5 Antiessentialism and Nominalism
Postmodernists deny the existence of universals (see chap. 10). A universal
is an entity that can be in more than one place at the same time or in the
same place at different, interrupted time intervals. Redness, justice, being
even, and humanness are examples of universals. If redness is a universal,
then if one sees (the same shade of) redness on Monday and again on
Tuesday, the redness seen on Tuesday is identical to, is the very same thing
as, the redness seen on Monday. Postmodernists deny such identities and
claim that nothing is repeatable, nothing is literally the same from one
moment to the next, nothing can be present at one time or place and literally
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be present at another time or place. Thus postmodernists hold to some form
of nominalism, that is, rather than terms such as redness representing real
universals, they consider such terms to be only names for groups of things.
Postmodernists also reject essentialism. According to essentialism,
some things have essential and accidental properties. A thing’s essential
properties are those such that if the thing in question loses them, it ceases to
exist. A thing’s essential properties answer the most fundamental question,
what sort of thing is this? For example, being even is an essential property
of the number two, being human is essential to Socrates, being omnipotent
is essential to God, being H2O is essential to water. An accidental property
is one such that a thing can lose it and still exist. For example, being five
feet tall is accidental to Socrates. According to postmodernists, there is no
distinction in reality between essential and accidental properties. Rather,
this division is relative to our interests, values, and classificatory purposes,
and as such, the division is itself a social construction that will not be
uniform throughout social groups. For example, if a group’s definition of
birds includes having a beak, then, assuming for the purpose of illustration
that everything that has a beak has feathers, having a feather is an essential
property of birds. If the group defines birds so as to include bats, having a
feather is an accidental property. Thus what is essential to birds is not a
reflection of reality; it is a construction relative to a group’s linguistic
practices.
3.1.6 Language, Meaning, and Thought
According to postmodernism, an item of language, such as a literary text,
does not have an authorial meaning, at least one that is accessible to
interpreters. Thus the author is in no privileged position to interpret his own
work. In fact, the meaning of a text is created by and resides in the
community of readers who share an interpretation of the text. Thus there is
no such thing as a book of Romans. Rather, there is a Lutheran, Catholic,
and Marxist book of Romans.
Further, there is no such thing as thinking without language, and in fact,
thinking is simply linguistic behavior in which people exhibit the correct
public know-how in their use of words according to the linguistic practices
of one’s social group.
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Third, postmodernists adopt a linguistic version of Descartes’s idea
theory of perception. To understand the idea theory, and the postmodern
adaptation of it, a good place to start is with a commonsense, critical
realist theory of perception. According to critical realism, when a subject
is looking at a red object such as an apple, the object itself is the direct
object of the sensory state. What one sees directly is the apple itself. True,
one must have a sensation of red to apprehend the apple, but on the critical
realist view, the sensation of red is to be understood as a case of being
appeared to redly and analyzed as a self-presenting property. What is a
self-presenting property? If some property F is a self-presenting one, then it
is by means of F that a relevant external object is presented directly to a
person, and F presents itself directly to the person as well. Thus F presents
its object mediately, though directly, and itself immediately.
This is not as hard to understand as it first may appear. Sensations, such
as being-appeared-to-redly, are an important class of self-presenting
properties. If Jones is having a sensation of red while looking at an apple,
then having the property of being-appeared-to-redly as part of his
consciousness modifies his substantial self. When Jones has this sensation,
it is a tool that presents the red apple mediately to him and the sensation
also presents itself to Jones. What does it mean to say that the sensation
presents the apple to him mediately? Simply this: it is in virtue of or by
means of the sensation that Jones sees the apple.
Moreover, by having the sensation of red, Jones is directly aware of
both the apple and his own awareness of the apple. For the critical realist,
the sensation of red may, indeed, be a tool or means that Jones uses to
become aware of the apple, but he is thereby directly aware of the apple.
His awareness of the apple is direct in that nothing stands between Jones
and the apple, not even his sensation of the apple. That sensation presents
the apple directly, though as a tool, Jones must have the sensation as a
necessary condition for seeing the apple.
For Descartes’s idea theory of perception, on the other hand, one’s
ideas, in this case, sensations, stand between the subject and the object of
perception. Jones is directly aware of his own sensation of the apple and
indirectly aware of the apple in the sense that it is what causes the sensation
to happen. On the idea theory, a perceiving subject is trapped behind his
own sensations and cannot get outside them to the external world in order to
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compare his sensations to their objects in order to see if those sensations are
accurate.
Now, in a certain sense, postmodernists believe that people are trapped
behind something in the attempt to get to the external world. However, for
them the wall between people and reality is not composed of sensations as it
was for Descartes; rather, it is constituted by one’s linguistic categories and
practices. One’s language serves as a sort of distorting and, indeed, creative
filter. One cannot get outside one’s language to see if one’s talk about the
world is the way the world is. In fact, it is superfluous to even talk about an
external world, and for this reason, postmodernists claim that the “external
world” is just a construction. In fact, the self itself is a construction of
language. There is no unified, substantial ego. The “self” is a bundle of
social roles, such as being a wife, a mother, a graduate student, an insurance
salesperson, and these roles are created by the linguistic practices associated
with them. For the postmodernist, consciousness and the self are social, not
individual.
Finally, postmodernists reject what is called the referential use of
language. Consider the sentence “The dog is in the yard.” According to the
referential use of language, the term dog functions, among other things, to
refer to an entity—a specific dog—in the language-independent world. On
this view, people use language to refer to reality all the time.
Postmodernists disagree and claim that linguistic units such as words
actually refer to other words or, more accurately, gain their use in a
community by their relationship to other words. Thus dog is not a term that
refers to a real object; rather, it is a term that is socially related to other
terms such as “man’s best friend,” “the pet that guards our house,” and so
forth.
3.1.7 No Metanarratives
According to postmodernists, there are no metanarratives. The notion of a
metanarrative has two senses. Sometimes it refers to a procedure for
determining which among competing conceptual schemes or worldviews is
true or rational. More often, it refers to broad, general worldviews that have
come to be accepted by large groups of people, such as Buddhism, atheism,
Christianity, and so forth. In claiming that there are no metanarratives,
postmodernists mean that there is no way to decide which among
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competing worldviews is true, and more importantly, there is no single
worldview true for everyone. There are no metanarratives, only local ones.
3.2 Assessment of Postmodernism
In some ways, this entire book is a critique of and an alternative to
postmodernism, so there is little need to develop a detailed critique here. In
chapter two, basic principles of logic and reasoning were stated and
defended for their universal validity. In chapters three and four, the nature
of knowledge was clarified and defended against various forms of
skepticism. In chapter five, foundationalism was discussed and defended,
and it was seen that the main arguments for foundationalism have little or
nothing to do with the quest for Cartesian certainty. Foundationalism just
seems to be the way that people actually and appropriately go about
justifying their beliefs. In chapter nine the nature of existence will be
discussed, and it should become obvious that people must enter that debate
by starting with the real existence of particular things they are trying to
explain. In chapter ten the existence of universals will be defended against
different versions of nominalism, and chapters eleven, twelve, thirteen, and
fourteen include a defense of the claim that consciousness and the self are
real and individual, not merely social constructions. In chapters twenty-five
through thirty, topics will be included that justify the claim that Christianity
is a metanarrative, a worldview true for everyone. To be sure, the items
treated in the chapters just mentioned do far more than defend the theses in
question, but they do include such a defense and, as such, provide grounds
for rejecting postmodernism. Earlier in this chapter, the correspondence
theory of truth was defended, as was the claim that one does not need to
think in language. And the phenomenological argument for the
correspondence theory of truth also supports the
referential use of language
and a critical realist theory of perception.
While a detailed critique of postmodernism is not necessary in light of
all this, two objections to postmodernism should be raised as this chapter
comes to a close. The first has to do with the postmodern rejection of
objective rationality on the grounds that no one achieves it because
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everyone is biased in some way or another. As a first step toward a response
to this claim, we need to draw a distinction between psychological and
rational objectivity. Psychological objectivity is the absence of bias, a lack
of commitment either way on a topic.
Do people ever have psychological objectivity? Yes, they do, typically
in areas in which they have no interest or about which they have not
thought deeply. Note carefully two things about psychological objectivity.
For one thing, it is not necessarily a virtue. It is if one has not thought
deeply about an issue and has no convictions regarding it. But as one
develops thoughtful, intelligent convictions about a topic, it would be
wrong to remain unbiased, that is, uncommitted regarding it. Otherwise,
what role would study and evidence play in the development of one’s
approach to life? Should one remain unbiased that cancer is a disease, that
rape is wrong, that the New Testament was written in the first century, that
there is design in the universe, if one has discovered good reasons for each
belief? No, one should not.
For another thing, while it is possible to be psychologically objective in
some cases, most people are not psychologically objective regarding the
vast majority of the things they believe. In these cases, it is crucial to
observe that a lack of psychological objectivity does not matter, nor does it
cut one off from presenting and arguing for one’s convictions. Why?
Because a lack of psychological objectivity does not imply a lack of rational
objectivity, and it is the latter than matters most, not the former.
To understand this, we need to get clear on the notion of rational
objectivity. One has rational objectivity just in case one can discern the
difference between genuinely good and bad reasons for a belief and one
holds to the belief for genuinely good reasons. The important thing here is
that bias does not eliminate a person’s ability to assess the reasons for
something. Bias may make it more difficult, but not impossible. If bias
made rational objectivity impossible, then no teacher—atheist, Christian, or
whatever—could responsibly teach any view the teacher believed on any
subject! Nor could the teacher teach opposing viewpoints, because he or she
would be biased against them!
By way of application, a Christian can lack psychological objectivity
regarding the existence of God, the resurrection of Jesus, and so forth, and
still have and present good reasons for the empty tomb, the reality of God,
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and the like. Rational objectivity is possible even if psychological
objectivity is not present, and this is what makes civil debate, rational
dialogue, and the development of thoughtful convictions possible. When a
Christian, Sharon, for instance, tries to present objectively good reasons for
a position and is greeted with a claim of disqualification on the grounds of
bias, the proper response is this: Tell the other person that she has changed
the subject from the issue to the messenger, that while the Christian
appreciates the attention and focus on her inner drives and motives, she
thinks that the dialogue should get refocused on the strength of the case just
presented. Perhaps at another time they could talk about each other’s
personal motivations and drives, but for now, a case, a set of arguments has
been presented and a response to those arguments is required.
Here is the second objection. Put simply, postmodernism is self-
refuting. Postmodernists appear to claim that their own assertions about the
modern era, about how language and consciousness work, and so forth are
true and rational, they write literary texts and protest when people
misinterpret the authorial intent in their own writings, they purport to give
us the real essence of what language is and how it works, and they employ
the dichotomy between modernism and postmodernism while claiming
superiority for the latter. In these and other ways postmodernism seems to
be self-refuting.
Postmodernists do have a response to this argument. For one thing, they
can claim that critics misrepresent postmodernism and defeat a straw man.
For example, some postmodernists defend their rejection of the objectivity
of truth in the following way: to say that truth is not objectively “out there”
in the real world is to say merely that where there are no sentences there is
no truth, that sentences are elements of human language, and that human
languages are social constructions. Unfortunately, this defense is not only
false but, understood in a certain way, also fails to avoid the problem of
self-defeat. The defense is false because it assumes that the proper truth-
bearer is language. But as we saw earlier, a more adequate candidate is
propositions. Moreover, there are numerous truths, such as mathematical
truths, that have never been and may never be uttered in language, but they
are surely “out there.” The defense may not avoid self-defeat because if the
argument assumes a relativist notion of truth, then if the argument itself is
presented as an objective truth in the nonrelativist sense, it is self-refuting.
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If it merely amounts to the claim that people are not able to express a truth
unless they do so by way of language, then the point can be granted but it is
irrelevant in the debate over the adequacy of postmodernism as a
philosophical standpoint.
Sometimes postmodernists respond by denying that they take their own
assertions and writing to be true, rational, constituted by their own authorial
intent, and so forth. If these claims are correct, then they would, indeed,
save postmodernism from self-refutation. But for two reasons, this response
must be rejected. First, when one actually reads carefully postmodernist
writings, it is very hard to avoid the impression that they do present their
assertions as true, rational, and so forth. In this sense, when on the
defensive, a postmodernist may deny that his or her writings exhibit these
features, but an examination of those writings seems to undermine those
denials. Second, postmodernists would need to offer postmodernist
alternatives to truth, rationality, and so forth that make sense of their own
claims while avoiding these undesired notions. It would seem that such
alternatives have not yet been convincingly presented. But suppose they are
forthcoming. What should we then make of postmodernism? Since
postmodernism would not in this case be offering itself as true, rational, and
capable of being understood by way of careful interpretation of
postmodernist writings, it would not be self-refuting. But neither would
there be any reason at all for accepting it, since it would not be claiming to
be true, rational, or even understandable in a determinate way. It would be
hard to know how a postmodernist could recommend his or her views to
others or what the point would be in uttering them in public.
Does all this mean that there are no advantages to be gained from
postmodernism? No, postmodernists are right to warn us of the dangers of
using language to gain power over others, to recommend the importance of
story and narrative, and to warn against the historical excesses of scientism
and reductionism that grew out of an abuse of modernist ideas. But this
admission does not mean that Christians should adopt a neutral or even
favorable standpoint toward postmodernism, rejecting its problems and
embracing its advantages.
To see this, consider Nazi ideology. Surely, some aspects of Nazi
thought, say a commitment to a strong national defense and to solid
education for youth, are correct and appropriate. But for two reasons, it
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would be wrong to say that one was neutral or even favorable toward Nazi
thought, rejecting its problems and embracing its advantages. First, Nazi
thought is so horrible and its overall impact so harmful that its bad features
far outweigh whatever relatively trivial advantages it offers. Thus such an
attitude would be inappropriate toward Nazi thought. Second, none of the
advantages just cited (strong national defense and solid education) requires
Nazi ideology for its justification.
The same points apply to postmodernism. Its harm to the cause of Christ
and human flourishing far outweigh any advantages that may accrue to it,
and whatever those advantages are, they do not require postmodernism for
their justification. After all, the importance of narrative and story and the
need to be aware of the inappropriate use of power have been understood
long before postmodernism came on the scene. Moreover, the way to avoid
scientism and reductionism is to argue against them by using the very things
postmodernists deny. The only alternative to this argument is the use of
mere rhetoric or sheer politically correct public power to marginalize
scientism and reductionism, and this use of power is the very thing
postmodernists rightly abhor.
CHAPTER SUMMARY
The chapter began by supporting the claim that the correspondence theory
of truth seems to be an important part of a biblical understanding of truth.
Next, an absolutist or objectivist notion of truth was defended over against a
relativist notion, and deflationary theories of truth were rejected.
The correspondence theory of truth was defined and an analysis was
given of the three key entities relevant to it: the truth-bearer, the truth-
maker, and the correspondence relation. A phenomenological and a
dialectical argument were offered on behalf of the correspondence theory of
truth, and three objections to the theory were examined.
The coherence theory of truth was analyzed, and arguments for and
against the theory were presented. The phenomenological argument was
offered as a serious difficulty for the coherence theory. Next, a pragmatic
theory of truth was described, a distinction was made between epistemic
Moreland, J. P., & Craig, W. L. (2017). Philosophical foundations for a christian worldview. InterVarsity Press.
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and nonepistemic versions of pragmatism, and the strengths and
weaknesses of the view were briefly described.
The chapter closed with an examination of postmodernism. Seven
important aspects of postmodernism were clarified, and difficulties with
postmodernism were examined.
CHECKLIST OF BASIC TERMS AND CONCEPTS
absolute truth
Cartesian anxiety
coherence
coherence theory of justification
coherence theory of truth
correspondence relation
correspondence theory of truth
criteria for truth
critical realist theory of perception
deflationary theories of truth
dialectical argument
dichotomous thinking
epistemic pragmatism
essentialism
fact
idea theory of perception
intentional object
intentionality
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law of excluded middle
law of identity
law of noncontradiction
metanarrative
modernity
nominalism
nonepistemic pragmatism
objective truth
phenomenological argument
postmodernism
pragmatic theory of truth
proposition
redundancy theory of truth
referential use of language
relativism
self-presenting property
sentence
social construction
state of affairs
statement
truth conditions
truth-bearer
truth-maker
truth-maker theory
Moreland, J. P., & Craig, W. L. (2017). Philosophical foundations for a christian worldview. InterVarsity Press.
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truth-maker maximalism
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Read: Bennett: Chapter 3
Bennett, W. J. (2002).
The Broken Hearth. Random House Digital Inc..
https://mbsdirect.vitalsource.com/books/9780385504867
DBFA 600
Familial Worldview Report Assignment Instructions
Overview
You will conduct a firsthand interviews related to one of the following topics listed below. Each familial worldview report must address a separate topic from the list provided.
·
Same sex attraction
Instructions
Enter each interview with a prayerful, respectful, and humble approach to learn about the beliefs, values, struggles, worldview, family history, etc., of the interviewee. In no way should you proselytize or attempt to convert the interviewee. Your objective is simply to interact and interact from others regarding differing viewpoints on the selected topic.
Each report should be a minimum of three pages in length, with a minimum of three (3) evidence based/peer-reviewed sources within the last five years. The page count will not include the title page or references page. The entire paper must be constructed in current APA format, incorporating the following sections:
1.
Topic – identify the topic of the interview and explain why an understanding of the topic is important to family, faith, and the future.
2.
Interviewee – identify the interviewee and explain the individual’s contribution to the topic.
a. Should the interviewee wish not to be identified, state the interview was conducted with an anonymous individual, and include their contribution to the topic.
3.
History – An explanation of the various aspects contributing to the controversy or struggle associated with the topic.
4.
Interview – list the questions asked and how the interviewee has been or is impacted by the topic, circumstances, or worldview;
5.
Insights – what insights you gained through the interview process that aligned or did not align with research.
6.
Conclusion – provide a summation to the assignment detailing the application of the interview to your participation in the course, and corresponding research.
Note: Your assignment will be checked for originality via the Turnitin plagiarism tool.
6
THEORIES OF TRUTH AND
POSTMODERNISM
To say of what is that it is, or of what is not that it is not, is true.
ARISTOTLE, METAPHYSICS 1077B26
If a prophet speaks in the name of the LORD but if the thing does not take place or prove true, it is a
word that the LORD has not spoken.
DEUTERONOMY 18:22
Pilate asked, “So you are a king?” Jesus answered, “You say that I am a king. For this I was born,
and for this I came into the world, to testify to the truth. Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to
my voice.” Pilate asked him, “What is truth?”
JOHN 18:37-38
1—INTRODUCTION
Down through the ages, people have asked Pilate’s question. Is there such a
thing as truth and, if so, what exactly is it? The Christian religion, as well as
its rivals, essentially contains claims about reality, which are either true or
false. Moreover, competing truth claims, especially those at the core of
competing worldviews, often have very different consequences for life. As
C. S. Lewis put it, “We are now getting to the point at which different
beliefs about the universe lead to different behavior. Religion involves a
series of statements about facts, which must be either true or false. If they
are true, one set of conclusions will follow about the right sailing of the
human fleet; if they are false, quite a different set.”1
Moreland, J. P., & Craig, W. L. (2017). Philosophical foundations for a christian worldview. InterVarsity Press.
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https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Deuteronomy+18%3A22&version=NRSV
https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=John+18%3A37-38&version=NRSV
The notion of truth employed in Lewis’s statement is called the
correspondence theory of truth, roughly, the idea that truth is a matter of
a proposition (belief, thought, statement, representation) corresponding to
reality; truth obtains when reality is the way a proposition represents it to
be. The correspondence theory of truth may properly be called the classical
theory of truth because, with very little exception, it was held by virtually
everyone until the nineteenth century. However, since then, the
correspondence theory has come under criticism, and alternative theories of
truth have been formulated. Moreover, according to many of its advocates,
an important contemporary ideology—postmodernism—rejects the
existence of truth, especially if it is construed according to some version of
the correspondence theory.
In order to get at these issues, this chapter is divided into two sections:
theories of truth and postmodernism. In the first section, after looking at
some preliminary issues, a correspondence theory of truth will be analyzed
and evaluated, followed by a discussion of alternative theories of truth. In
the second section, different aspects of postmodernism will be presented
and assessed.
2—THEORIES OF TRUTH
2.1 Preliminary Issues
Is there a biblical view of truth? The answer seems to be no and yes,
depending on what one means. No, there is no peculiarly Christian theory
of truth, one that is used only in the Bible and not elsewhere. If there were a
peculiarly Christian view of truth, two disastrous implications would
follow: claims that certain Christian doctrines are true would be equivocal
compared to ordinary, everyday assertions of truth, and Christianity’s claim
to be true would be circular or system-dependent and, therefore, trivial.
Further, the Bible does not use technical philosophical vocabulary to proffer
Moreland, J. P., & Craig, W. L. (2017). Philosophical foundations for a christian worldview. InterVarsity Press.
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a precise theory of truth, nor is advocation of a specific theory of truth the
primary intent of scriptural teaching.
However, none of this means that biblical teaching does not presuppose
or make the most sense in light of a particular theory of truth. The Old and
New Testament terms for truth are, respectively, ʾemet and alētheia. The
meaning of these terms and, more generally, a biblical conception of truth
are broad and multifaceted: fidelity, moral rectitude, being real, being
genuine, faithfulness, having veracity, being complete. Two aspects of the
biblical conception of truth appear to be primary: faithfulness and
conformity to fact. The latter appears to involve a correspondence theory of
truth. Arguably, the former may presuppose a correspondence theory. Thus
faithfulness may be understood as a person’s actions’ corresponding to the
person’s assertions or promises, and a similar point could be made about
genuineness, moral rectitude, and so forth.
Whether or not this first aspect of a biblical conception of truth
presupposes a correspondence theory, there are numerous passages in the
second group, “conformity to fact,” that do. Two interesting sorts of texts,
with numerous examples of each, fall within this second group. First,
hundreds of passages explicitly ascribe truth to propositions (assertions and
so forth) in a correspondence sense. Thus God says, “I the LORD speak the
truth, I declare what is right” (Is 45:19). Proverbs 8:7 says, “For my mouth
will utter truth,” and Proverbs 14:25 proclaims, “A truthful witness saves
lives, but one who utters lies is a betrayer.” According to Jeremiah 9:5,
“They all deceive their neighbors, and no one speaks the truth.” In John
8:44-45, Jesus says that the devil is a liar and deceiver who cannot stand the
truth but that he, Jesus, speaks the truth. In John 17:17, Jesus affirms that
the word of God is truth, and in John 10:35 he assures us that it cannot be
broken (i.e., assert a falsehood).
Second, numerous passages explicitly contrast true propositions with
falsehoods. Thus in Romans 1:25 we are told that “they exchanged the truth
about God for a lie.” Repeatedly, the Old Testament warns against false
prophets whose words do not correspond to reality, and the ninth
commandment warns against bearing false testimony, that is, testimony that
fails to correspond to what actually happened (Ex 20:16).
Moreland, J. P., & Craig, W. L. (2017). Philosophical foundations for a christian worldview. InterVarsity Press.
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https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Is+45%3A19&version=NRSV
https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Proverbs+8%3A7&version=NRSV
https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Proverbs+14%3A25&version=NRSV
https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Jeremiah+9%3A5&version=NRSV
https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=John+8%3A44-45&version=NRSV
https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=John+17%3A17&version=NRSV
https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=John+10%3A35&version=NRSV
https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Romans+1%3A25&version=NRSV
https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Ex+20%3A16&version=NRSV
It would seem, then, that Scripture regularly presupposes some form of
correspondence theory of truth, and indeed, this is both the commonsense
view and the classic position embraced by virtually all philosophers until
the nineteenth century. However, prior to our analysis of the
correspondence theory and its two chief rivals, two more preliminary issues
should be mentioned. Admittedly, these two issues cannot be fully treated
without some clarity about truth itself, and this sought-after clarity comes
from analyzing theories of truth. So the discussion appears to be caught in a
cul-de-sac. Fortunately, there is a way out. For at least two reasons, it is
appropriate to ponder these two issues before analyzing the theories of
truth. For one thing, while these preliminary issues cannot be adequately
discussed without looking at theories of truth, the converse is also true.
Since one has to start somewhere, these two issues are as good a place as
any for launching the discussion. More importantly, before one comes to
philosophy, one already has a commonsense notion of what truth is. As
noted above, some form of correspondence theory appears to capture both
commonsense intuitions and biblical teaching. Even if further analysis
justifies rejection of the correspondence theory, its preanalytic justification
gives one something with which to start.
The first issue is the distinction between absolutist and relativist
depictions of truth claims. According to relativism, a claim is true relative
to the beliefs or valuations of an individual or group that accepts it. It is
made true for those who accept it by that very act of acceptance. A moral
analogy may help to make this clear. There is no absolute moral obligation
to drive on the right side of the road. That obligation is genuine relative to
America but not to England. Similarly, “The earth is flat” was true for the
ancients but is false for moderns.
Those who claim that truth does not vary from person to person, group
to group, accept absolute truth, also called objective truth. On this view,
people discover truth, they do not create it, and a claim is made true or false
in some way or another by reality itself, totally independent of whether the
claim is accepted by anyone. Moreover, an absolute truth conforms to the
three fundamental laws of logic, which are themselves absolute truths.
Consider some declarative proposition, P, say, Two is an even number. The
law of identity says that P is identical to itself and different from other
things, say, Q, Grass is green. The law of noncontradiction says that P
Moreland, J. P., & Craig, W. L. (2017). Philosophical foundations for a christian worldview. InterVarsity Press.
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cannot be both true and false in the same sense at the same time. The law of
excluded middle says that P is either true or false; or, put somewhat
differently, either P is true or its negation, not-P, is true. Note carefully that
these three laws say nothing about one’s ability to verify the truth of P. For
example, a colorblind person may not know whether Q above is true or
false. The law of excluded middle says that Q is one or the other; it says
nothing about people’s ability to discover which is correct.
Who is correct, the absolutists or relativists? For at least two reasons,
the absolutists are right about the nature of truth. These two responses will
be discussed more fully throughout the analysis below of the three theories
of truth, but they may be briefly stated here. First, relativism itself is either
true or false in the absolutist sense. If the former, relativism is self-refuting,
since it amounts to the objective truth that there are no objective truths. If
the latter, it amounts to a mere expression of preference or custom by a
group or individual without objective, universal validity. Thus it cannot be
recommended to others as something they should believe because it is the
objective truth of the matter, and this is a serious difficulty for those who
“advocate” relativism.
Second, the reasons for relativism are confused in at least three ways.
For one thing, consider the relativist claim “The earth was flat for the
ancients and is not flat for us moderns.” This claim suffers from an
ambiguity that makes the assertion somewhat plausible. The ambiguity rests
in phrases such at “P is true for them (him), false for us (me).” Shortening
the phrase to enhance ease of exposition, ontologically (that is, with regard
to being or existence), the phrase should be construed as “P is true-for-me”
and, epistemologically (that is, with regard to knowing), it should be read as
“P is true for me.” The ontological sense is, indeed, an expression of
relativism, and it implies that something is made true by the act of believing
it. However, the epistemological sense expresses an opinion that P is true in
the objective sense: “I take P to be objectively true, but I’m not sure of that
and, in fact, I lack confidence in my ability to defend P. So I’ll hedge my
bets and say simply that the truth of P is just an opinion I hold.” So
understood, the epistemological sense requires absolute truth. When most
people claim that P is true (or false) to them and false (or true) to others,
they are speaking epistemologically, not ontologically, and relativists are
wrong if they think otherwise.
Moreland, J. P., & Craig, W. L. (2017). Philosophical foundations for a christian worldview. InterVarsity Press.
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The second confusion among those who argue for relativism is the
confusion of truth conditions and criteria for truth. A truth condition is a
description of what constitutes the truth of a claim. So understood, a truth
condition is ontological and it is associated with what the truth itself is. For
example, the truth conditions for S “Unicorns live in Kansas City” would be
the obtaining of a real state of affairs, namely, unicorns actually living in
Kansas City. Criteria for truth consist in epistemological tests for deciding
or justifying which claims are true and false. Criteria for S would be things
like eyewitness reports of unicorn sightings, the discovery of unicorn
tracks, and so on. Now in a certain sense, the epistemological justification
for a claim is relative to individuals or groups in that some may be aware of
evidence unknown to others. In light of the available evidence, the ancients
may have been justified in believing that the earth was flat. In light of new
evidence, this belief is no longer justified. So in this benign sense, a claim’s
satisfaction of criteria for truth is relative to the possession or lack of
relevant evidence. But it does not follow that the truth conditions are
relative. “The earth is flat” is objectively true or false, quite independent of
our evidence.
Finally, sometimes relativists are confused about the three fundamental
laws of logic associated with the absolutist position. Some claim that they
are expressions of Aristotelian logic and, as such, are merely Western
constructions or Western logic, which are not applicable cross-culturally.
This “argument” confuses the logical status of a proposition or argument
with the linguistic style used to express the proposition or the social
processes used to reach a conclusion.
In his Summa Theologiae, Thomas used a literary style in which his
prose explicitly follows strict logical form and syllogistic presentation. By
contrast, an isolated culture in the mountains of Brazil may use a poetic
form of oral tradition, their sentences may not follow an explicit, tidy
subject-predicate form, and they may reach tribal conclusions in ways quite
foreign to Western culture. But none of this has anything to do with the
deep logical structure that underlies their claims or with the conformance of
their individual assertions to the three laws of logic, and it is simply a
mistake to think otherwise. We invite the reader to present any declarative
utterance in any culture, including the assertion that “Western logic” is
culturally relative, that does not conform to Aristotle’s three laws of logic.
Moreland, J. P., & Craig, W. L. (2017). Philosophical foundations for a christian worldview. InterVarsity Press.
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Any such assertion, to the degree that it is meaningful or asserted as true or
false, will conform to the three laws of logic. Any alleged counterexample
will either be self-refuting or meaningless. After all, Aristotle did not invent
these laws any more than Columbus invented the New World. Aristotle may
have been a Western thinker and he may have discovered these laws, but
that does not imply that the laws themselves are Western constructions.
The second preliminary issue involves deflationary theories of truth.
The three theories of truth examined below all take truth to be a real and
important feature of the items that exhibit truth. But a recent view, the
deflationary theory of truth, implies that there is no such property or
relation as truth, and thus it is wrong-headed to develop a theory that
clarifies the nature of truth itself. A major version of the deflationary theory
of truth is the redundancy theory of truth, according to which the word
true has no unique or special function within language and can be
eliminated without limiting what can be expressed in language. Sentences
that appeal to truth—for example, T: “It is true that Lincoln is dead”—have
exactly the same content as others that contain no such appeal—for
example, U: “Lincoln is dead.” Some advocates of the redundancy theory
draw the conclusion that the role of assertions of truth is, at best, a way of
expressing agreement with what is being asserted (“I agree that Lincoln is
dead”) and, at worst, redundant.
A proper evaluation of deflationary theories lies beyond the scope of an
introductory text. But two brief replies are in order. First, as we shall see in
the treatment of the correspondence theory, it is arguably the case that
people actually experience truth itself; that is, they are aware of truth itself.
If this is correct, then truth exists. Second, it does not seem to be the case
that T and U express the same thing. U is a statement about a
state of affairs
in the world, namely, Lincoln’s being dead. T is not directly about Lincoln.
Rather, T is a statement about an assertion—U itself—and says of U that it
has truth. Moreover, U and T play different functions in one’s life. One may
be interested in U because one wants to know if Lincoln actually lived and,
if so, whether he is still alive. By contrast, one who is interested in T may
be concerned with inventorying his set of beliefs in an attempt to discern
how many of them are true. Thus T functions to describe one of his beliefs,
but U does not.
Moreland, J. P., & Craig, W. L. (2017). Philosophical foundations for a christian worldview. InterVarsity Press.
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It is time to look at three important theories of truth, beginning with the
correspondence theory.
2.2 The Correspondence Theory of Truth
In its simplest form, the correspondence theory of truth says that a
proposition (sentence, belief) is true just in case it corresponds to reality,
when what it asserts to be the case is the case. Many correspondence
theorists would hold that, more abstractly, truth obtains when a
truth-bearer
stands in an appropriate correspondence relation to a truth-maker. Thus a
proper analysis of truth involves analyzing the truth-bearer, the
correspondence relation, and the truth-maker.
Different versions of the correspondence theory analyze these three
constituents differently. In fact, one of the main criticisms of the
correspondence theory is that its advocates either cannot agree about the
details of this analysis or provide mysterious entities in their analysis.
Setting these criticisms aside for the moment, let us look at some issues and
alternatives in analyzing these three constituents.
First, what is the truth-bearer? Three main types of candidates have
been offered. To begin with, two linguistic candidates are sentences and
statements. Second, two mental states, thoughts and beliefs, have been
proffered. Finally, propositions have been named as the basic truth-bearer.
Let us probe these in the order just presented, beginning with the linguistic
options. A sentence is a linguistic type or token consisting in a sense-
perceptible string of markings formed according to a culturally arbitrary set
of syntactical rules. A statement is a sequence of sounds or body
movements employed by a speaker to assert a sentence on a specific
occasion. So understood, neither sentences nor statements are good
candidates for the basic truth-bearer. For one thing, a truth-bearer cannot be
true unless it has meaning, and there are meaningful and meaningless
sentences/statements. Further, some sentences/statements ask questions,
express emotions (“Ouch!”), or perform actions (uttering “I do!” at the right
moment during a wedding). These sentences/statements are neither true nor
false. In response to these problems, one could claim that it is the content of
Moreland, J. P., & Craig, W. L. (2017). Philosophical foundations for a christian worldview. InterVarsity Press.
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a declarative sentence/statement—what is being asserted—that is the
relevant truth-bearer. Unfortunately, while this response seems correct, it
also seems to move away from linguistic truth-bearers to propositions.
Second, certain mental states, namely, thoughts and beliefs, have been
identified as the appropriate truth-bearer. Compared to linguistic entities,
these candidates seem to be a step forward for two reasons. First, it would
appear to be only those sentences/statements that express thoughts or
beliefs that can be true or false, so the latter are more fundamental to truth
than the former. Second, while language helps people develop their
thoughts and beliefs, people—for example, young children—can have true
or false thoughts/beliefs without thinking in language or without yet having
acquired language.
On the other hand, there is a problem with identifying thoughts or
beliefs as the basic truth-bearer. To see this, consider a person having the
thought that grass is green. Considered from one angle, this thought is
merely an individual mental event, a dated conscious episode. So
understood, it may occur to a person at noon, last five seconds, and pass
away. Considered solely as individual mental events, thoughts or beliefs do
not appear to have meaning nor are they true or false. However, viewed
from a different angle, a thought does seem to possess these features. It is
the content of the thought that is true or false. An individual thinking event
seems to exemplify a mental content—for example, that grass is green—
and this is what is true or false.
So far, our study of truth-bearers has led to this conclusion: In the basic
sense, it is the content of declarative sentences/statements and
thoughts/beliefs that is true or false. Such a content is called a proposition,
and it represents the third candidate for the truth-bearer. What are
propositions? Philosophers who accept their existence are not in agreement
on the answer to this question. However, here are some things relevant to
answering it: A proposition (1) is not located in space or time; (2) is not
identical to the linguistic entities that may be used to express it; (3) is not
sense-perceptible; (4) is such that the same proposition may be in more than
one mind at once; (5) need not be grasped by any (at least finite) person to
exist and be what it is; (6) may itself be an object of thought when, for
example, one is thinking about the content of one’s own thought processes;
(7) is in no sense a physical entity. Though assessing the debate about the
Moreland, J. P., & Craig, W. L. (2017). Philosophical foundations for a christian worldview. InterVarsity Press.
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precise nature of propositions is beyond the scope of the present study, we
shall return to propositions shortly.
What about truth-makers? What is it that makes a proposition true, and
how does it do so? The most popular answer to the first question is facts or
states of affairs. Some distinguish facts from states of affairs, but they
seem to be identical, and the present discussion will treat them as such.
What, exactly, is a state of affairs? Providing an adequate definition is more
difficult than citing examples. A state of affairs is any actually existing
whole that is ordered by the relation of predication or exemplification (see
chap. 10). For example, two’s being even and the apple’s being red are
states of affairs.
How does a state of affairs make a proposition true, and given a specific
proposition, which state of affairs is the relevant one? To answer these
questions, consider the proposition “Grass is green.” This proposition is
true just in case a specific state of affairs, namely, grass’s being green,
actually obtains. The important thing to note is that propositions have
intentionality—ofness, aboutness, directedness toward an object. The
intentionality of a proposition is a natural affinity or intrinsic directedness
toward its intentional object, that is, the specific state of affairs it picks out.
Thus truth-makers make truth-bearers true, not in the sense that the former
stand in an efficient causal relation with the latter and cause them to be true.
Rather, the truth-bearer, the proposition, picks out a specific state of affairs
due to the proposition’s intrinsic intentionality, and that specific state of
affairs “makes” the proposition true just in case it actually is the way the
proposition represents it to be.
Currently, a certain version of the correspondence theory of truth is
called the truth-maker theory: x is a truth-maker for the proposition p if
and only if (1) p must be true if x exists, and (2) if x exists and p is true,
then p must be true in virtue of the existence of x.
One thing to note is that the truth-maker theory requires the present
existence of the truth-maker, granting that the relevant proposition p is true.
Certain counterexamples have been offered which purport to show that
propositions can be true without having a truth-maker. If successful, these
counterexamples may undermine the truth-maker theory by showing that
truth-makers are superfluous. On the other hand, it is hard to know what
Moreland, J. P., & Craig, W. L. (2017). Philosophical foundations for a christian worldview. InterVarsity Press.
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one means by claiming a proposition p is true if there is nothing in virtue of
which it is true.
Some advocates of the truth-maker theory respond to critics by rejecting
what is called truth-maker maximalism, roughly, the view that there must
be a truth-maker for each true proposition. These thinkers hold that in the
vast majority of cases in which there is a true proposition, there is a truth-
maker just as the truth-maker theory specifies. But in certain troublesome
cases—cases in which it is not clear what the truth-maker is—there is still a
sense in which the propositions are true without the relevant truth-maker.
Other advocates of the truth-maker theory resist adjusting the theory in this
way and seek to provide an appropriate truth-maker for the problematic
cases. Is there a plausible truth-maker for these cases? Advocates of the
truth-maker theory are divided on this question, and the reader will have to
make up his or her own mind about the matter. To facilitate reflection on the
issue, consider the following examples:
1. Baal does not exist.
2. Dinosaurs are extinct today.
3. All ravens are black.
4. Loving a child is morally right.
5. The US president in 2070 will be a woman.
6. If Jones were rich, he would buy a Lexus.
Are these examples of true propositions that fail to have truth-makers? It is
at least plausible to think that a relevant truth-maker may be found for each
proposition.
Consider (1). The truth-maker for (1) is simply the fact that all the states
of affairs that obtain in the actual world lack the state of affairs of “Baal’s
existing.” This is a real lack, a real privation that genuinely characterizes
reality. Consequently, we have a truth-maker for (1).
Proposition (2) actually makes two claims: First, it asserts that at some
time prior to today there were such things as dinosaurs (thus distinguishing
(2) from such propositions as “Unicorns do not exist today”), and second,
dinosaurs fail to exist today. Thus there must be two truth-makers for (2).
Moreland, J. P., & Craig, W. L. (2017). Philosophical foundations for a christian worldview. InterVarsity Press.
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The first is that at some time prior to today the state of affairs of “there
being dinosaurs” was real, while the second is that there is a real lack of
“there being dinosaurs” in all the states of affairs that obtain in the actual
world today.
(3) is a universally quantified statement. As such, it applies to all ravens
whatever, both actual and possible, and not just to those that just happen to
exist. So the truth-maker cannot be “actually existing ravens being black.”
What then is the truth-maker for (3)? The truth-maker is the conditionally
obtaining state of affairs “if something is a raven, then it is black”; that is,
on the condition that there is something that is a raven, then it will have the
property of blackness. (There is a further metaphysical ground for this
conditional being true; namely, there is a lawlike relation between the
property of being a raven and the property of being black.)
(4) is a proposition of morality that implies neither that children exist,
nor that any that do exist are actually being loved. What then is the truth-
maker for (4)? We suggest the following. There is a type of action, namely,
loving a child, that has the moral property of being right. This type of act
actually has the property of moral rightness in all possible worlds, including
those worlds without children, or without creatures capable of love. In
worlds where there are individual examples of children being loved, each of
those examples would have the property of moral rightness. Thus the truth-
maker for (4) would be the state of affairs of the type of act loving a child
having the property moral rightness.
As a future-tense statement, (5) poses distinct problems. Let us grant for
the sake of argument that the US president in 2070 will be a woman. The
problem with (5) is that in some sense it appears to be true now, even
though the election of a female to the presidency has not yet occurred. How
then should we handle (5)? Three strategies seem to be possible.2 First,
sentence (5) may be translated as (5’ ): “It is (tenselessly) true that the US
president in 2070 is a woman.” On this strategy, the state of affairs “the US
president’s being a woman in 2070” tenselessly obtains, and is the truth-
maker for (5). The second strategy does not translate (5) to eliminate tense,
but posits a tensed state of affairs as its truth-maker. That is, the state of
affairs “the US president’s being a woman” has the property of obtaining in
the future, specifically in 2070. The fact that the state of affairs “the US
Moreland, J. P., & Craig, W. L. (2017). Philosophical foundations for a christian worldview. InterVarsity Press.
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president’s being a woman” currently has this future tense property is what
grounds the truth of (5) on the second strategy. The third strategy says the
relevant truth-maker is the state of affairs of a woman’s being president
obtaining when 2070 is present, and 2070’s being present will obtain at a
time after the present moment or “now.”
(6) expresses a true counterfactual of creaturely freedom, namely, what
poor Jones would purchase if only he were rich. In examining (5), we
learned that there may well be tensed facts about the future, facts that now
exist even though the objects or events they are about do not. Similarly, we
claim that there are “counterfacts” (counterfactual states of affairs) that
actually exist, even though the objects or events they are about do not. Thus
what serves as the truth-maker for (6) is the counterfactual state of affairs
“if Jones were rich, he would buy a Lexus.” In other words, if Jones being
rich obtains, then his buying a Lexus obtains.3
It would seem then that there are plausible ways of handling these
putative counterexamples that do not require abandoning the
truth-maker
requirement, but again, the reader will have to decide whether these
responses are plausible. In any case, our investigation of these alleged
counterexamples allows us to make three important observations. First,
truth-makers do not cause propositions to be true; rather, they are the
intentional objects in virtue of which propositions that correspond to them
are true. Second, a truth-maker does not need to be a concrete object; in
many cases it is some type of abstract state of affairs.
Third, it may well be the case that current truth-maker theory is not an
adequate version of the correspondence theory of truth. Recall that for an
adequate correspondence theory, two features are crucial: (1) it is the
proposition’s intentional object (the object the proposition is of or about)
that is intimately related to “making” the proposition true; (2) the
intentional object must correspond to what the proposition ascribes to the
intentional object in the manner specified by the proposition. One
implication of this is that the truth-maker does not need to exist presently
for the proposition to be presently true. “Lincoln was shot in 1865” is true
and does not require Lincoln’s being shot to be a tenselessly existing state
of affairs, nor does it require something to exist currently (e.g., there being
some trace fact of the original shooting that currently exists in the universe).
Moreland, J. P., & Craig, W. L. (2017). Philosophical foundations for a christian worldview. InterVarsity Press.
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The truth-maker for this proposition does not exist. But the relevant state of
affairs did exist in the manner specified by the proposition, namely, at a
time when the shooting was present and that this time is earlier than now.
But the truth-maker theory requires the truth-maker to exist in the
present, and it does not need to be the proposition’s intentional object. Thus
some have suggested that the truth-maker for “Lincoln was shot in 1865” is
certain current facts about God’s memory. Recall the truth-maker principle:
x is a truth-maker for the proposition p if and only if (1) p must be true if x
exists, and (2) if x exists and p is true, then p must be true in virtue of the
existence of x. Let x be certain current facts about God’s memory. We then
have certain facts about God’s memory as the truth-maker for “Lincoln was
shot in 1865” if and only if (1) “Lincoln was shot in 1865” must be true if
certain current facts about God’s memory exist and (2) if certain current
facts about God’s memory exist and “Lincoln was shot in 1865” is true,
then “Lincoln was shot in 1865” must be true in virtue of the existence of
certain current facts about God’s memory. The truth-maker principle seems
to be satisfied, but the correspondence theory is not. The correspondence
theory requires that the proposition’s intentional object is what makes the
proposition true if it satisfies the ascriptions of the proposition in the
manner specified by the proposition. But clearly the proposition is about
something happening to Lincoln, not about a memory in God’s mind.
Because the truth-maker principle uses the rather vague “in virtue of”
locution and makes no reference to intentionality and a proposition’s
intentional object, it seems to be an inadequate formulation of the
correspondence theory.
Our study of truth-bearers has already taken us into the topic of the
correspondence relation. What, exactly, is this relation? Note first that
correspondence is not a monadic property of a proposition like redness is
with respect to an apple. A monadic property is an attribute that requires
only one thing to possess it. Rather, correspondence is a two-placed relation
between a proposition and the state of affairs that is its intentional object.
A two-placed relation, such as “larger than,” is one that requires two entities
to be instantiated. Thus truth is grounded in intentionality. The intrinsic
ofness of a proposition is directed toward a state of affairs, and the truth
relation is exemplified just in case that intentional object matches, conforms
to, corresponds with the proposition.
Moreland, J. P., & Craig, W. L. (2017). Philosophical foundations for a christian worldview. InterVarsity Press.
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Second, the correspondence relation seems to be unique among
relations. As will be noted below, the correspondence relation itself can be
directly experienced and made an object of thought, and it does not seem to
be reducible to something else. It is not a causal relation, it is not physical,
nor is it sense-perceptible. Neither is it a picturing relation. Propositions do
not picture or mirror the states of affairs that correspond to them. This
seems clear for states of affairs that are not themselves sense-perceptible;
for example, two’s being even, mercifulness’s being a virtue, Gabriel’s
being an angel. But it is also true for sense-perceptible states of affairs. The
proposition “Grass is green” does not picture the state of affairs, grass’s
being green. The proposition can be instantiated in a mind but is not itself
green or sense-perceptible at all, while the corresponding state of affairs is,
indeed, green. Thus the former is not a picture of the latter.
When we look at criticisms of the correspondence theory, we will see
that some object to it on the grounds that the correspondence relation is too
mysterious to admit into one’s ontology (one’s view of reality). For this
reason, some advocates have sought to state the correspondence theory
without employing the correspondence relation. For example, some claim
that a true proposition is one such that what it asserts to be the case is, in
fact, the case. Note that the claim does not explicitly mention
correspondence. It may be that this expresses an adequate correspondence
theory without mentioning the correspondence relation. However, it is more
likely that this claim makes implicit use of the
correspondence relation
without mentioning it. When we ask what it is for something to actually be
what an assertion claims to be the case, an answer seems to be possible: it is
for the former (what is the case) to correspond to the latter (what is asserted
to be the case).
Two main arguments have been advanced for the correspondence
theory, one phenomenological and one dialectical. Edmund Husserl (1859–
1938) stated the phenomenological argument most powerfully. The
phenomenological argument focuses on a careful description and
presentation of specific cases to see what can be learned from them about
truth. As an example, consider the case of Joe and Frank. While in his
office, Joe receives a call from the university bookstore that a specific book
he had ordered—Richard Swinburne’s The Evolution of the Soul—has
arrived and is waiting for him. At this point, a new mental state occurs in
Moreland, J. P., & Craig, W. L. (2017). Philosophical foundations for a christian worldview. InterVarsity Press.
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Joe’s mind—the thought that Swinburne’s The Evolution of the Soul is in
the bookstore. Now Joe, being aware of the content of the thought, becomes
aware of two things closely related to it: the nature of the thought’s
intentional object (Swinburne’s book being in the bookstore) and certain
verification steps that would help him to determine the truth of the thought.
For example, he knows that it would be irrelevant for verifying the thought
to go swimming in the Pacific Ocean. Rather, he knows that he must take a
series of steps that will bring him to a specific building and look in certain
places for Swinburne’s book in the university bookstore. So Joe starts out
for the bookstore, all the while being guided by the
proposition
“Swinburne’s The Evolution of the Soul is in the bookstore.” Along the way,
his friend Frank joins him, though Joe does not tell Frank where he is going
or why. They arrive at the store and both see Swinburne’s book there. At
that moment, Joe and Frank simultaneously have a certain sensory
experience of seeing Swinburne’s book The Evolution of the Soul. But Joe
has a second experience not possessed by Frank. Joe experiences that his
thought corresponds with an actual state of affairs. He is able to compare
his thought with its intentional object and “see,” be directly aware that the
thought is true. In this case, Joe actually experiences the correspondence
relation itself and truth itself becomes an object of his awareness.
The example just cited presents a case of experiencing truth in which
the relevant intentional object is a sense-perceptible one, a specific book
being in the bookstore. But this need not be the case. A student, upon being
taught modus ponens, can bring this thought to specific cases of logical
inferences and “see” the truth of modus ponens. Similarly, a person can
form the thought that he is practicing denial regarding his anger toward his
father, and through introspection, he can discover whether this thought
corresponds with his own internal mental states.
Some may reject the phenomenological argument on the grounds that it
is overly simplistic. But it is not clear that this is so. The argument is simple
but not simplistic because more sophisticated cases of the same sort can be
supplied in which scientists, mathematicians, or other scholars experience
truth. Moreover, it is a virtue of a theory of truth that it accords with
(corresponds with!) what we all experience each day before we ever come
to philosophy.
Moreland, J. P., & Craig, W. L. (2017). Philosophical foundations for a christian worldview. InterVarsity Press.
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The dialectical argument asserts that those who advance alternative
theories of truth or who simply reject the correspondence theory actually
presuppose it in their own assertions, especially when they present
arguments for their views or defend them against defeaters. Sometimes this
argument is stated in the form of a dilemma: those who reject the
correspondence theory either take their own utterances to be true in the
correspondence sense or they do not. If the former, then those utterances are
self-defeating. If the latter, there is no reason to accept them, because one
cannot take their utterances to be true.
A critic could respond that the second horn of this dilemma begs the
question. The critic could claim either that his own assertions are not being
offered as true or else they are offered as true in accordance with the
coherence or pragmatic theory of truth (see below). The defender of the
correspondence theory could reply as follows to each alternative: First, as
we will see in more detail later in the discussion of postmodernism, a
person may say that he does not take his own utterances to be true, but
when one actually reads that person’s writings or listens carefully to his
statements, one usually gets the distinct impression that the person really
does, in fact, take his own claims to be true in spite of protests to the
contrary. Second, it would, indeed, be consistent to reject the
correspondence theory and take that rejection itself to be true according to a
different theory of truth. However, when one looks carefully at the writings
of those who defend alternative theories of truth, it often seems that they
take their own points to be true because they correspond to reality. As a
simple example, defenders of a coherence theory of truth sometimes argue
for their position on the grounds that people cannot escape their web of
beliefs and get to reality itself, or on the grounds that people actually justify
their beliefs and take them to be true because they cohere well with their
other beliefs. The most natural way to take these assertions is along the
lines of the correspondence theory: the proposition that people cannot
escape their web of beliefs actually corresponds to the way people and their
beliefs really are, and similarly with the point about how people relate
coherence to their beliefs.
Three main objections have been raised against the correspondence
theory. First, some argue that since there is no clear, widely accepted theory
about the three entities that constitute the correspondence theory, it should
Moreland, J. P., & Craig, W. L. (2017). Philosophical foundations for a christian worldview. InterVarsity Press.
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be rejected. Two things may be said in response. For one thing, even if it is
granted for the sake of argument that no widely accepted account of the
three entities is available, it only follows that more work needs to be done
to develop the theory, not that it is false or unjustified. After all, we often
know many things, that God knows the future, that electrons attract protons,
even if there is no single, widely accepted theory for fleshing out the details
of what we know. Second, we believe the analysis given above, though
briefly presented, is along the right lines and can be given a more
sophisticated defense. The correspondence theory also seems to accord well
with clear cases such as the one involving Joe and Frank, and this fact may
well provide enough justification to override the strength of this criticism if
it is granted that it has some dialectical force.
Second, it has been argued that by distinguishing truth from the
evidence one has for truth, that is, by claiming that truth transcends and is
not identical to evidence, the correspondence theory leaves us vulnerable to
skepticism. Why? Because if the correspondence theory is correct, then one
could have all the evidence in the world for a belief and the belief could still
be false. Two things can be said in response. First, even if the point is
granted, it only follows that we cannot attain truth; it does not follow that
the correspondence theory is false. Second, while evidence is truth-
conducive, it is actually the case that evidence is not the same thing as truth
itself. So it is, indeed, logically possible, even if implausible, to say that one
could possess all the evidence one could possibly get and still be wrong.
Thus the argument actually surfaces a virtue of the correspondence theory,
not a vice. Moreover, in chapter four, a detailed argument was presented for
the claim that the logical possibility of error does not render one vulnerable
to skepticism.
Finally, some argue that the correspondence theory involves mysterious
entities—propositions, irreducible intentionality, and the correspondence
relation—and thus should be rejected. It is hard to see much force in this
argument as it stands. That an entity is “mysterious” is not sufficient reason
to reject it. Moreover, it is a virtue of the phenomenological argument for
the correspondence theory that these three entities all seem to be ordinary
and commonsensical, not mysterious. Everyday people experience the
propositional content of their thoughts/beliefs, the intentionality of those
Moreland, J. P., & Craig, W. L. (2017). Philosophical foundations for a christian worldview. InterVarsity Press.
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thoughts/beliefs and the associated intentional objects, and the
correspondence relation itself.
Critics who raise this argument usually mean something more specific
by it. They approach metaphysics with a prior commitment to philosophical
naturalism, including some requirement that a knowledge claim must in
some way or another “be connected to” what is sense-perceptible. As a
result, they hold that reality must fit into a naturalistic worldview, and this
often means that some form of physicalism is required. The argument is that
if naturalism is true, then entities such as propositions, irreducible
intentionality, and the correspondence relation do not exist. It is open to a
defender of the correspondence theory to adopt the modus tollens form of
the argument: since these three kinds of entities exist, naturalism is false.
Truth has always been a hard thing to countenance within the confines of an
empiricist epistemology or a naturalist worldview. The reader should be in a
position to see why this is the case.
2.3 The Coherence Theory of Truth
Since the discussion of the correspondence theory has already taken us into
some of the key arguments and counterarguments regarding truth, it is
permissible to treat the next two theories much more briefly.
According to the coherence theory, a belief (statement, proposition, etc.)
is true if and only if it coheres well with the entire set of one’s beliefs,
assuming that the set is itself a strongly coherent one. Thus the truth or
falsity of a belief is not a matter of its match with a real, external world.
Rather, it is a function of the belief’s relationship with other beliefs within
one’s web of beliefs. Key advocates have been Spinoza (1632–1677), Hegel
(1770–1831), and Brand Blanshard (1892–1987).
It is important to distinguish a coherence theory of truth from a
coherence theory of justification (see chap. 5). The latter offers
coherence
as a test for truth and it is consistent with a correspondence theory of truth,
since one could hold that when a belief coheres well with one’s other
beliefs, it is likely to correspond to reality.
Moreland, J. P., & Craig, W. L. (2017). Philosophical foundations for a christian worldview. InterVarsity Press.
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One of the major problems for the coherence theory of truth is the lack
of an adequate notion of coherence, and in fact, it has never been precisely
defined, at least not in a way that is plausible. The trick is to define it in a
way that is neither too strong nor too weak. It would be too strong to define
coherence as entailment such that a belief is true just in case it entails other
beliefs. One’s sensory belief that one seems to see a table could be true, but
this does not entail that there is a table there even though both propositions
(that one seems to see a table and that there is a table there) could be true
and even though both “cohere well” with each other. It would be too weak
to define coherence as mere logical consistency (two or more beliefs do not
contradict each other). A person could have a bizarre set of logically
consistent beliefs that would not be true. For example, if Tom Crisp
believed that he was an eggplant, that eggplants are conscious, and that all
attempts by others to change his mind were lies, Crisp would have a
logically consistent but false belief about himself. In response to this
problem, some coherentists define coherence as mutual explanatory power,
hanging together, fitting together, or being in agreement with one’s set of
beliefs.
Apart from alleged difficulties with the correspondence theory, the main
argument for the coherence theory of truth derives from a commitment to a
coherence theory of justification along with a desire to avoid skepticism.
Recall that on the correspondence theory, one could have highly justified
false beliefs since a justified belief could fail to correspond to external
reality. It is this gap between justification and truth that provides
ammunition to the skeptic who can argue that knowledge is impossible
since justification does not guarantee truth. (Issues regarding justification
and skepticism were taken up in chapters four and five, and they will not be
rehearsed here.) The coherence theory of truth, however, defeats the skeptic
because there is no longer a gap between adequate justified beliefs and true
beliefs. Since truth just is an adequate coherence of a belief with an
appropriate set of beliefs, when a belief is justified by way of a coherence
account, it is automatically true. Truth is a matter of a belief’s internal
relations with one’s other beliefs, not its external relations with reality
outside the system of beliefs itself.
This argument for a coherence theory of truth provides a fitting
occasion to turn to objections to the theory. First, according to the
Moreland, J. P., & Craig, W. L. (2017). Philosophical foundations for a christian worldview. InterVarsity Press.
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coherence theory, there is no such thing as an appropriately justified false
belief since “appropriate justification” and truth are the same thing. Indeed,
this is claimed as a virtue of the theory. But, in fact, it is a vice because it is
entirely possible and, indeed, actually the case that one has an appropriately
justified belief that is false. The only way to avoid this problem is to define
“appropriate justification” as the same thing as truth, but this begs the
question. Further, the coherence theory is cut off from the world since, on
this view, truth is entirely a function of a belief’s relations within one’s
system of other beliefs with no reference whatsoever to a reality outside the
system. This is a serious problem. In response, most coherentists simply
deny the existence of a mind-independent reality (independent of language
or belief). In other words, they accept antirealism regarding reality.
However, this move will be a further sign of the theory’s inadequacy for
those who believe or actually know that there is an external world.
Third, the coherence theory allows for the possibility of completely
different, contradictory beliefs to be true as long as they cohere well with
alternative systems of beliefs. Consider the Tom Crisp case again. If P is
Tom Crisp is an eggplant, then P is true since it coheres well with Crisp’s
overall set of beliefs, and it is false since it fails to cohere well with one of
Crisp’s critic’s beliefs. Since the coherence theory allows that P is both true
and false, the coherence theory must be rejected.
A coherence advocate could respond by claiming that coherentism is a
form of relativism regarding truth, and thus it avoids treating P as both true
and false in the same sense. On this view, P is true relative to Crisp’s
system and false relative to his critic’s. Earlier, criticisms were raised
against truth relativism, and those criticisms, along with problems regarding
relativism in general, apply equally to this coherence move.
Finally, the coherence theory fails in light of the phenomenological
argument for the correspondence theory, as we saw in the case of Joe and
Frank. That case, and countless examples of real human experience, teach
us that we often bring individual propositions (Swinburne’s Evolution of the
Soul is in the bookstore) and not entire systems of belief to reality to judge
their truth value. We are often able to be directly aware of reality itself due
to the intentionality of our mental states, and we are often able to step
outside of our thoughts/beliefs, so to speak, and compare them with their
intentional objects in the external world. When this happens, we experience
Moreland, J. P., & Craig, W. L. (2017). Philosophical foundations for a christian worldview. InterVarsity Press.
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the truth or falsity of our beliefs. The correspondence theory makes sense of
all of this, but the coherence theory fails on this score and, accordingly,
should be rejected
2.4 The Pragmatic Theory of Truth
In one form or another, the pragmatic theory of truth has been advanced
by William James (1842–1910), John Dewey (1859–1952), and more recent
philosophers Hilary Putnam and Richard Rorty. In general terms, the
pragmatic theory implies that a belief P is true if and only if P works or is
useful to have. P is true just in case P exhibits certain values for those who
accept it. Pragmatism is widely taken to be an expression of antirealism
regarding external reality.
Pragmatists differ about how to interpret works or useful to have, and
accordingly, there is a distinction between nonepistemic and epistemic
versions of pragmatism. According to nonepistemic pragmatism, a belief
is true just in case accepting it is useful, where “useful” is spelled out in
terms that make no reference to epistemic values. For example, P is true if
and only if “behavior based on accepting P leads in the long run to
beneficial results for the believer” or “accepting P provokes actions with
desirable results.” These “beneficial results” or “desirable results” may, in
turn, be identified with things such as the maximization of happiness, of the
net balance of pleasure over pain, of technology and control over nature,
and so on.
More frequently, works or useful to have is depicted in epistemic terms,
according to epistemic pragmatism. For example, P is true if and only if P
is (1) what one’s colleagues will allow one to assert rationally or (2) what
one is ideally justified in asserting or (3) what an ideally rational scientific
community with all the relevant evidence would accept or (4) such that P
exhibits simplicity, explanatory power, empirical adequacy, the tendency to
lead to successful predictions, and so forth. In one way or another,
epistemic versions of pragmatism identify the truth of a proposition with its
epistemic success.
Moreland, J. P., & Craig, W. L. (2017). Philosophical foundations for a christian worldview. InterVarsity Press.
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Advocates of pragmatism claim that problems with the other two
theories, our inability to transcend our theories (language, beliefs) and get
to the external world (if there is such a thing; most pragmatists are
antirealists) all favor pragmatism. Critics claim that it is self-refuting, that
in their defense of the view, its advocates do not recommend pragmatism
because the theory is itself “useful” but because it corresponds to certain
facts about language, scientific theory testing and so forth, that it is a form
of relativism, and that it fails the phenomenological argument for the
correspondence theory. Since these arguments have already been presented,
we leave to the reader the task of developing in more detail an assessment
of pragmatism.
3—POSTMODERNISM
In the contemporary setting, a discussion of truth would be incomplete
without an analysis of postmodernism. Unfortunately, for two reasons,
such an analysis is extremely difficult to do in a brief, introductory way. For
one thing, postmodernism is a loose coalition of diverse thinkers from
several different academic disciplines, and it would be difficult to
characterize postmodernism in a way that would be fair to this diversity.
Further, part of the nature of postmodernism is a rejection of certain things
—for example, truth, objective rationality, authorial meaning in texts along
with the existence of stable verbal meanings and universally valid linguistic
definitions—that make accurate definitions possible. Still, it is possible to
provide a fairly accurate characterization of postmodernism in general,
since its friends and foes understand it well enough to discuss the view. But
the reader should keep in mind that an advocate of postmodernism should
be allowed to speak for himself or herself, and it would be wrong to
attribute to an individual thinker every aspect of the characterization to
follow unless such an attribution is justified.
3.1 General Characterization of Postmodernism
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Postmodernism is both a historical, chronological notion and a
philosophical ideology. Understood historically, postmodernism refers to a
period of thought that follows and is a reaction to the period called
modernity. Modernity is the period of European thought that developed out
of the Renaissance (14th–17th centuries) and flourished in the
Enlightenment (17th–19th centuries) in the ideas of people like Descartes,
Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Leibniz, and Kant. In the chronological sense,
postmodernism is sometimes called “post modernism.” So understood, it is
fair to say that postmodernism is often guilty of a simplistic characterization
of modernity, because the thinkers in that time period were far from
monolithic. Indeed, Descartes, Hume, and Kant have elements in their
thought that are more at home in postmodernism than they are in the so-
called modern era. Nevertheless, setting historical accuracy aside, the
chronological notion of postmodernism depicts it as an era that began and,
in some sense, replaces modernity.
As a philosophical standpoint, postmodernism is primarily a
reinterpretation of what knowledge is and what counts as knowledge. More
broadly, it represents a form of cultural relativism about such things as
reality, truth, reason, value, linguistic meaning, the self, and other notions.
Important postmodern thinkers are Friedrich Nietzsche, Ludwig
Wittgenstein, Jacques Derrida, Thomas Kuhn, Michel Foucault, Martin
Heidegger, and Jean-François Lyotard. To grasp postmodernism more
adequately, it will be helpful to break it down into seven different aspects.
3.1.1 Postmodernism and Metaphysical Realism
Philosophically, metaphysical realism includes a commitment to (1) the
existence of a theory-independent or language-independent reality, (2) the
notion that there is one way the world really is, and (3) the notion that the
basic laws of logic (identity, noncontradiction, excluded middle) apply to
reality. Postmodernism involves an antirealist rejection of these realist
commitments. According to postmodernism, “reality” is a social
construction. Language creates reality, and what is real for one linguistic
group may be unreal for another. Thus God exists relative to Christians but
does not exist relative to atheists. Further, the basic laws of logic are
Western constructions, and in no way are they to be taken as universally
valid laws of reality itself.
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Some postmodernists, who may be called neo-Kantian postmodernists,
agree that there is in some sense a thing-in-itself, an external reality. But
they also hold that we have no way to get to reality and, since we know
nothing about it, reality itself is a useless notion and, for all practical
purposes, can simply be ignored.
3.1.2 Rejection of the Correspondence Theory of Truth
Postmodernists reject the correspondence theory of truth. Some eschew any
talk of truth at all, while others advance a coherentist or, more frequently,
pragmatist notion of truth. The important thing is that truth is relative to a
linguistic community that shares the same narrative (see below). There is no
objective truth, no God’s-eye view of things. Rather, all thought is
historically and socially conditioned. Moreover, postmodernists reject
dichotomous thinking. Dichotomous thinking occurs when someone
divides a range of phenomena into two groups and goes on to claim that one
is better than the other. Here are some dichotomies: real/unreal, true/false,
rational/irrational, right/wrong, virtue/vice, good/bad, and beautiful/ugly.
Each pair represents a dichotomy in which the first member is to be
preferred to the second one. By contrast, postmodernists claim that
assertions that employ these terms are relative to a widely diverse range of
groups constituted by a shared language, narrative, culture. Thus there are
as many ways of dividing these pairs as there are groups that divide them,
because all such divisions are social constructions.
3.1.3 Rationality and Knowledge
Postmodernists reject the idea that there are universal, transcultural
standards, such as the laws of logic or principles of inductive inference, for
determining whether a belief is true or false, rational or irrational, good or
bad. There is no predefined rationality. Postmodernists also reject the notion
that rationality is objective on the grounds that no one approaches life in a
totally objective way without bias. Thus objectivity is impossible, and
observations, beliefs, and entire narratives are theory laden. There is no
neutral standpoint from which to approach the world, and thus observations,
beliefs, and so forth are perspectival constructions that reflect the viewpoint
implicit in one’s own web of beliefs. Regarding knowledge, postmodernists
believe that there is no point of view from which one can define knowledge
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itself without begging the question in favor of one’s own view.
“Knowledge” is a construction of one’s social, linguistic structures, not a
justified, truthful representation of reality by one’s mental states. For
example, knowledge amounts to what is deemed to be appropriate
according to the professional certification practices of various professional
associations. As such, knowledge is a construction that expresses the social,
linguistic structures of those associations, nothing more, nothing less.
3.1.4 Antifoundationalism
Postmodernists reject foundationalism as a theory of epistemic justification
(see chap. 5). Some of the reasons for this rejection are covered in the
previous chapter in the discussion of criticisms of and alternatives to
foundationalism; for example, the rejection of simple seeing. However,
there is an additional reason for the postmodernist rejection of
foundationalism that one finds peppered throughout postmodern literature:
foundationalism represents a quest for epistemic certainty, and it is this
desire to have certainty that provides the intellectual impetus for
foundationalism. This desire, the so-called Cartesian anxiety, is the root of
foundationalist theories of epistemic justification. But there is no such
certainty, and the quest for it is an impossible one. Further, that quest is
misguided because people do not need certainty to live their lives well.
Sometimes Christian postmodernists support this claim by asserting that the
quest for certainty is at odds with biblical teaching about faith, the
sinfulness of our intellectual and sensory faculties, and the impossibility of
grasping an infinite God.
3.1.5 Antiessentialism and Nominalism
Postmodernists deny the existence of universals (see chap. 10). A universal
is an entity that can be in more than one place at the same time or in the
same place at different, interrupted time intervals. Redness, justice, being
even, and humanness are examples of universals. If redness is a universal,
then if one sees (the same shade of) redness on Monday and again on
Tuesday, the redness seen on Tuesday is identical to, is the very same thing
as, the redness seen on Monday. Postmodernists deny such identities and
claim that nothing is repeatable, nothing is literally the same from one
moment to the next, nothing can be present at one time or place and literally
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be present at another time or place. Thus postmodernists hold to some form
of nominalism, that is, rather than terms such as redness representing real
universals, they consider such terms to be only names for groups of things.
Postmodernists also reject essentialism. According to essentialism,
some things have essential and accidental properties. A thing’s essential
properties are those such that if the thing in question loses them, it ceases to
exist. A thing’s essential properties answer the most fundamental question,
what sort of thing is this? For example, being even is an essential property
of the number two, being human is essential to Socrates, being omnipotent
is essential to God, being H2O is essential to water. An accidental property
is one such that a thing can lose it and still exist. For example, being five
feet tall is accidental to Socrates. According to postmodernists, there is no
distinction in reality between essential and accidental properties. Rather,
this division is relative to our interests, values, and classificatory purposes,
and as such, the division is itself a social construction that will not be
uniform throughout social groups. For example, if a group’s definition of
birds includes having a beak, then, assuming for the purpose of illustration
that everything that has a beak has feathers, having a feather is an essential
property of birds. If the group defines birds so as to include bats, having a
feather is an accidental property. Thus what is essential to birds is not a
reflection of reality; it is a construction relative to a group’s linguistic
practices.
3.1.6 Language, Meaning, and Thought
According to postmodernism, an item of language, such as a literary text,
does not have an authorial meaning, at least one that is accessible to
interpreters. Thus the author is in no privileged position to interpret his own
work. In fact, the meaning of a text is created by and resides in the
community of readers who share an interpretation of the text. Thus there is
no such thing as a book of Romans. Rather, there is a Lutheran, Catholic,
and Marxist book of Romans.
Further, there is no such thing as thinking without language, and in fact,
thinking is simply linguistic behavior in which people exhibit the correct
public know-how in their use of words according to the linguistic practices
of one’s social group.
Moreland, J. P., & Craig, W. L. (2017). Philosophical foundations for a christian worldview. InterVarsity Press.
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Third, postmodernists adopt a linguistic version of Descartes’s idea
theory of perception. To understand the idea theory, and the postmodern
adaptation of it, a good place to start is with a commonsense, critical
realist theory of perception. According to critical realism, when a subject
is looking at a red object such as an apple, the object itself is the direct
object of the sensory state. What one sees directly is the apple itself. True,
one must have a sensation of red to apprehend the apple, but on the critical
realist view, the sensation of red is to be understood as a case of being
appeared to redly and analyzed as a self-presenting property. What is a
self-presenting property? If some property F is a self-presenting one, then it
is by means of F that a relevant external object is presented directly to a
person, and F presents itself directly to the person as well. Thus F presents
its object mediately, though directly, and itself immediately.
This is not as hard to understand as it first may appear. Sensations, such
as being-appeared-to-redly, are an important class of self-presenting
properties. If Jones is having a sensation of red while looking at an apple,
then having the property of being-appeared-to-redly as part of his
consciousness modifies his substantial self. When Jones has this sensation,
it is a tool that presents the red apple mediately to him and the sensation
also presents itself to Jones. What does it mean to say that the sensation
presents the apple to him mediately? Simply this: it is in virtue of or by
means of the sensation that Jones sees the apple.
Moreover, by having the sensation of red, Jones is directly aware of
both the apple and his own awareness of the apple. For the critical realist,
the sensation of red may, indeed, be a tool or means that Jones uses to
become aware of the apple, but he is thereby directly aware of the apple.
His awareness of the apple is direct in that nothing stands between Jones
and the apple, not even his sensation of the apple. That sensation presents
the apple directly, though as a tool, Jones must have the sensation as a
necessary condition for seeing the apple.
For Descartes’s idea theory of perception, on the other hand, one’s
ideas, in this case, sensations, stand between the subject and the object of
perception. Jones is directly aware of his own sensation of the apple and
indirectly aware of the apple in the sense that it is what causes the sensation
to happen. On the idea theory, a perceiving subject is trapped behind his
own sensations and cannot get outside them to the external world in order to
Moreland, J. P., & Craig, W. L. (2017). Philosophical foundations for a christian worldview. InterVarsity Press.
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compare his sensations to their objects in order to see if those sensations are
accurate.
Now, in a certain sense, postmodernists believe that people are trapped
behind something in the attempt to get to the external world. However, for
them the wall between people and reality is not composed of sensations as it
was for Descartes; rather, it is constituted by one’s linguistic categories and
practices. One’s language serves as a sort of distorting and, indeed, creative
filter. One cannot get outside one’s language to see if one’s talk about the
world is the way the world is. In fact, it is superfluous to even talk about an
external world, and for this reason, postmodernists claim that the “external
world” is just a construction. In fact, the self itself is a construction of
language. There is no unified, substantial ego. The “self” is a bundle of
social roles, such as being a wife, a mother, a graduate student, an insurance
salesperson, and these roles are created by the linguistic practices associated
with them. For the postmodernist, consciousness and the self are social, not
individual.
Finally, postmodernists reject what is called the referential use of
language. Consider the sentence “The dog is in the yard.” According to the
referential use of language, the term dog functions, among other things, to
refer to an entity—a specific dog—in the language-independent world. On
this view, people use language to refer to reality all the time.
Postmodernists disagree and claim that linguistic units such as words
actually refer to other words or, more accurately, gain their use in a
community by their relationship to other words. Thus dog is not a term that
refers to a real object; rather, it is a term that is socially related to other
terms such as “man’s best friend,” “the pet that guards our house,” and so
forth.
3.1.7 No Metanarratives
According to postmodernists, there are no metanarratives. The notion of a
metanarrative has two senses. Sometimes it refers to a procedure for
determining which among competing conceptual schemes or worldviews is
true or rational. More often, it refers to broad, general worldviews that have
come to be accepted by large groups of people, such as Buddhism, atheism,
Christianity, and so forth. In claiming that there are no metanarratives,
postmodernists mean that there is no way to decide which among
Moreland, J. P., & Craig, W. L. (2017). Philosophical foundations for a christian worldview. InterVarsity Press.
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competing worldviews is true, and more importantly, there is no single
worldview true for everyone. There are no metanarratives, only local ones.
3.2 Assessment of Postmodernism
In some ways, this entire book is a critique of and an alternative to
postmodernism, so there is little need to develop a detailed critique here. In
chapter two, basic principles of logic and reasoning were stated and
defended for their universal validity. In chapters three and four, the nature
of knowledge was clarified and defended against various forms of
skepticism. In chapter five, foundationalism was discussed and defended,
and it was seen that the main arguments for foundationalism have little or
nothing to do with the quest for Cartesian certainty. Foundationalism just
seems to be the way that people actually and appropriately go about
justifying their beliefs. In chapter nine the nature of existence will be
discussed, and it should become obvious that people must enter that debate
by starting with the real existence of particular things they are trying to
explain. In chapter ten the existence of universals will be defended against
different versions of nominalism, and chapters eleven, twelve, thirteen, and
fourteen include a defense of the claim that consciousness and the self are
real and individual, not merely social constructions. In chapters twenty-five
through thirty, topics will be included that justify the claim that Christianity
is a metanarrative, a worldview true for everyone. To be sure, the items
treated in the chapters just mentioned do far more than defend the theses in
question, but they do include such a defense and, as such, provide grounds
for rejecting postmodernism. Earlier in this chapter, the correspondence
theory of truth was defended, as was the claim that one does not need to
think in language. And the phenomenological argument for the
correspondence theory of truth also supports the
referential use of language
and a critical realist theory of perception.
While a detailed critique of postmodernism is not necessary in light of
all this, two objections to postmodernism should be raised as this chapter
comes to a close. The first has to do with the postmodern rejection of
objective rationality on the grounds that no one achieves it because
Moreland, J. P., & Craig, W. L. (2017). Philosophical foundations for a christian worldview. InterVarsity Press.
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everyone is biased in some way or another. As a first step toward a response
to this claim, we need to draw a distinction between psychological and
rational objectivity. Psychological objectivity is the absence of bias, a lack
of commitment either way on a topic.
Do people ever have psychological objectivity? Yes, they do, typically
in areas in which they have no interest or about which they have not
thought deeply. Note carefully two things about psychological objectivity.
For one thing, it is not necessarily a virtue. It is if one has not thought
deeply about an issue and has no convictions regarding it. But as one
develops thoughtful, intelligent convictions about a topic, it would be
wrong to remain unbiased, that is, uncommitted regarding it. Otherwise,
what role would study and evidence play in the development of one’s
approach to life? Should one remain unbiased that cancer is a disease, that
rape is wrong, that the New Testament was written in the first century, that
there is design in the universe, if one has discovered good reasons for each
belief? No, one should not.
For another thing, while it is possible to be psychologically objective in
some cases, most people are not psychologically objective regarding the
vast majority of the things they believe. In these cases, it is crucial to
observe that a lack of psychological objectivity does not matter, nor does it
cut one off from presenting and arguing for one’s convictions. Why?
Because a lack of psychological objectivity does not imply a lack of rational
objectivity, and it is the latter than matters most, not the former.
To understand this, we need to get clear on the notion of rational
objectivity. One has rational objectivity just in case one can discern the
difference between genuinely good and bad reasons for a belief and one
holds to the belief for genuinely good reasons. The important thing here is
that bias does not eliminate a person’s ability to assess the reasons for
something. Bias may make it more difficult, but not impossible. If bias
made rational objectivity impossible, then no teacher—atheist, Christian, or
whatever—could responsibly teach any view the teacher believed on any
subject! Nor could the teacher teach opposing viewpoints, because he or she
would be biased against them!
By way of application, a Christian can lack psychological objectivity
regarding the existence of God, the resurrection of Jesus, and so forth, and
still have and present good reasons for the empty tomb, the reality of God,
Moreland, J. P., & Craig, W. L. (2017). Philosophical foundations for a christian worldview. InterVarsity Press.
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and the like. Rational objectivity is possible even if psychological
objectivity is not present, and this is what makes civil debate, rational
dialogue, and the development of thoughtful convictions possible. When a
Christian, Sharon, for instance, tries to present objectively good reasons for
a position and is greeted with a claim of disqualification on the grounds of
bias, the proper response is this: Tell the other person that she has changed
the subject from the issue to the messenger, that while the Christian
appreciates the attention and focus on her inner drives and motives, she
thinks that the dialogue should get refocused on the strength of the case just
presented. Perhaps at another time they could talk about each other’s
personal motivations and drives, but for now, a case, a set of arguments has
been presented and a response to those arguments is required.
Here is the second objection. Put simply, postmodernism is self-
refuting. Postmodernists appear to claim that their own assertions about the
modern era, about how language and consciousness work, and so forth are
true and rational, they write literary texts and protest when people
misinterpret the authorial intent in their own writings, they purport to give
us the real essence of what language is and how it works, and they employ
the dichotomy between modernism and postmodernism while claiming
superiority for the latter. In these and other ways postmodernism seems to
be self-refuting.
Postmodernists do have a response to this argument. For one thing, they
can claim that critics misrepresent postmodernism and defeat a straw man.
For example, some postmodernists defend their rejection of the objectivity
of truth in the following way: to say that truth is not objectively “out there”
in the real world is to say merely that where there are no sentences there is
no truth, that sentences are elements of human language, and that human
languages are social constructions. Unfortunately, this defense is not only
false but, understood in a certain way, also fails to avoid the problem of
self-defeat. The defense is false because it assumes that the proper truth-
bearer is language. But as we saw earlier, a more adequate candidate is
propositions. Moreover, there are numerous truths, such as mathematical
truths, that have never been and may never be uttered in language, but they
are surely “out there.” The defense may not avoid self-defeat because if the
argument assumes a relativist notion of truth, then if the argument itself is
presented as an objective truth in the nonrelativist sense, it is self-refuting.
Moreland, J. P., & Craig, W. L. (2017). Philosophical foundations for a christian worldview. InterVarsity Press.
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If it merely amounts to the claim that people are not able to express a truth
unless they do so by way of language, then the point can be granted but it is
irrelevant in the debate over the adequacy of postmodernism as a
philosophical standpoint.
Sometimes postmodernists respond by denying that they take their own
assertions and writing to be true, rational, constituted by their own authorial
intent, and so forth. If these claims are correct, then they would, indeed,
save postmodernism from self-refutation. But for two reasons, this response
must be rejected. First, when one actually reads carefully postmodernist
writings, it is very hard to avoid the impression that they do present their
assertions as true, rational, and so forth. In this sense, when on the
defensive, a postmodernist may deny that his or her writings exhibit these
features, but an examination of those writings seems to undermine those
denials. Second, postmodernists would need to offer postmodernist
alternatives to truth, rationality, and so forth that make sense of their own
claims while avoiding these undesired notions. It would seem that such
alternatives have not yet been convincingly presented. But suppose they are
forthcoming. What should we then make of postmodernism? Since
postmodernism would not in this case be offering itself as true, rational, and
capable of being understood by way of careful interpretation of
postmodernist writings, it would not be self-refuting. But neither would
there be any reason at all for accepting it, since it would not be claiming to
be true, rational, or even understandable in a determinate way. It would be
hard to know how a postmodernist could recommend his or her views to
others or what the point would be in uttering them in public.
Does all this mean that there are no advantages to be gained from
postmodernism? No, postmodernists are right to warn us of the dangers of
using language to gain power over others, to recommend the importance of
story and narrative, and to warn against the historical excesses of scientism
and reductionism that grew out of an abuse of modernist ideas. But this
admission does not mean that Christians should adopt a neutral or even
favorable standpoint toward postmodernism, rejecting its problems and
embracing its advantages.
To see this, consider Nazi ideology. Surely, some aspects of Nazi
thought, say a commitment to a strong national defense and to solid
education for youth, are correct and appropriate. But for two reasons, it
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would be wrong to say that one was neutral or even favorable toward Nazi
thought, rejecting its problems and embracing its advantages. First, Nazi
thought is so horrible and its overall impact so harmful that its bad features
far outweigh whatever relatively trivial advantages it offers. Thus such an
attitude would be inappropriate toward Nazi thought. Second, none of the
advantages just cited (strong national defense and solid education) requires
Nazi ideology for its justification.
The same points apply to postmodernism. Its harm to the cause of Christ
and human flourishing far outweigh any advantages that may accrue to it,
and whatever those advantages are, they do not require postmodernism for
their justification. After all, the importance of narrative and story and the
need to be aware of the inappropriate use of power have been understood
long before postmodernism came on the scene. Moreover, the way to avoid
scientism and reductionism is to argue against them by using the very things
postmodernists deny. The only alternative to this argument is the use of
mere rhetoric or sheer politically correct public power to marginalize
scientism and reductionism, and this use of power is the very thing
postmodernists rightly abhor.
CHAPTER SUMMARY
The chapter began by supporting the claim that the correspondence theory
of truth seems to be an important part of a biblical understanding of truth.
Next, an absolutist or objectivist notion of truth was defended over against a
relativist notion, and deflationary theories of truth were rejected.
The correspondence theory of truth was defined and an analysis was
given of the three key entities relevant to it: the truth-bearer, the truth-
maker, and the correspondence relation. A phenomenological and a
dialectical argument were offered on behalf of the correspondence theory of
truth, and three objections to the theory were examined.
The coherence theory of truth was analyzed, and arguments for and
against the theory were presented. The phenomenological argument was
offered as a serious difficulty for the coherence theory. Next, a pragmatic
theory of truth was described, a distinction was made between epistemic
Moreland, J. P., & Craig, W. L. (2017). Philosophical foundations for a christian worldview. InterVarsity Press.
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and nonepistemic versions of pragmatism, and the strengths and
weaknesses of the view were briefly described.
The chapter closed with an examination of postmodernism. Seven
important aspects of postmodernism were clarified, and difficulties with
postmodernism were examined.
CHECKLIST OF BASIC TERMS AND CONCEPTS
absolute truth
Cartesian anxiety
coherence
coherence theory of justification
coherence theory of truth
correspondence relation
correspondence theory of truth
criteria for truth
critical realist theory of perception
deflationary theories of truth
dialectical argument
dichotomous thinking
epistemic pragmatism
essentialism
fact
idea theory of perception
intentional object
intentionality
Moreland, J. P., & Craig, W. L. (2017). Philosophical foundations for a christian worldview. InterVarsity Press.
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law of excluded middle
law of identity
law of noncontradiction
metanarrative
modernity
nominalism
nonepistemic pragmatism
objective truth
phenomenological argument
postmodernism
pragmatic theory of truth
proposition
redundancy theory of truth
referential use of language
relativism
self-presenting property
sentence
social construction
state of affairs
statement
truth conditions
truth-bearer
truth-maker
truth-maker theory
Moreland, J. P., & Craig, W. L. (2017). Philosophical foundations for a christian worldview. InterVarsity Press.
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truth-maker maximalism
Moreland, J. P., & Craig, W. L. (2017). Philosophical foundations for a christian worldview. InterVarsity Press.
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