More Thoughts on Common Sense Realism

I wanted to follow up a bit more on one illustration Phil Steiger used in his post on foundationalism. Phil seems to advocate common sense realism, which he refers to as “soft” foundationalism. He criticizes a coherence view of truth with the following illustration:

There are things attractive about Coherentism, but it has at least one infamous flaw. In court, for instance, it is entirely possible to construct a case against a defendant in which all the evidence points to their guilt and no piece of the evidence contradicts any other piece. The catch, however, is that the defendant is actually innocent. What we have is a coherent but false belief that the defendant is guilty.

The problem with this illustration is that it betrays more problems with foundationalism than with a coherence view of truth. Let’s say, for example, that there were a revelation from God concerning the accused’s innocence. This revelation seems to contradict logic: all the evidence the court has been able to percieve logically points to the accused’s guilt. Common sense realism would tell us we must convict, because the sole foundation for real knowledge is logic and common everyday perceptions. A web-based view of truth, however, would allow for faith in a revelation from God as one anchor point for our web of truth. We’d then be forced to reexamine the assumptions underlying the “common sense” evidence, and perhaps come to a different conclusion about the accused’s actual guilt.

The essential problem with any kind of foundationalism for a Christian, I think, is that many basic aspects of our faith can’t be explained by simply logic and common sense. The Trinity and the relationship between God’s sovereignty and man’s free will come immediately to mind. If logic and common sense are the only foundation for truth — and this is what foundationalism of any stripe claims — we’d then have to reject the Christian faith’s truth claims.

I do, of course, share Phil’s concerns that many postmodern thinkers would accept all beliefs as equally “true” so long as they’re internally coherent. As Christians, we believe in real truth, which means some things, as coherent or attractive as they seem, are not true. But, as Nancey Murphey demonstrated in Beyond Liberalism and Fundamentalism, truth web claims can be tested against each other within a coherency model, in particular by examining the relative consistency of a given web against another and the relationship of the web to how we experience reality.

In many ways, I think is how the “worldview” concept originally functioned. Our aim in promoting the Christian “worldview” shouldn’t be so much to justify Christianity against the yardstick of reason as to show how the Christian worldview is the most internally coherent web with the best correspondence to human experience.