Month: May 2009

This is Part II of my review of Faith Thinking by Trevor Hart.  This text was assigned in my Missional Theology I class at BTS.

Hart’s critical realist approach is immediately evident in Chapters 2 and 3, “Faith and the Search for Certainty” and “Admiring the View from Nowhere.” In Chapter 2, Hart sketches the familiar story of how the search for certainty reached its apex during the Enlightenment with Rene Descartes. The Cartesian project sought to establish knowledge on indubitable rational foundations, and therefore separated “faith” from “reason” as ways of knowing. Echoing St. Augustine, Descartes reasoned that in virtue of being able to think he must at least have indubitable knowledge of his own existence (“cogito ergo sum”). It soon became clear, however, even to Descartes, that essentially nothing can be deduced with certainty from the fact of one’s own existence, because the senses can and often do deceive.

Hart notes that other Enlightenment figures, particularly John Locke and David Hume, recognized the weaknesses of Descartes’ “internalist” notion of rationality, and instead sought a sure foundation for truth claims in external empirical observation and verification. This move further ghettoized “faith” and paradoxically undermined the possibility of certainty. There were now “no universal and eternal truths of reason to fall back upon,” and the senses are not indubitably reliable, so the best a person can do is explain how things appear to himself.
Into this void stepped Immanuel Kant. As Hart notes, Kant sought to fuse Cartesian and empiricist epistemologies by suggesting that the human mind is preconfigured to shape the raw data of perception into a form accessible to “reason.” Human beings, therefore, can agree on public truth based on empirical observation and testing in conformity with the noetic limitations of the human mind as it encounters sense experiences. What human beings cannot do, however, is count as “truth” any concepts that are not immediately accessible to sense perception and reason. In particular, “religious” claims, which by definition transcend the material world, cannot constitute public truth.

Hart concludes Chapter 2 with a brief summary of the aftermath of the failure of the Enlightenment effort to achieve certainty. He alludes to the opposite poles of positivism, which demands “factual or logical evidence” before a belief can be deemed reasonable, and relativism, in which “there is no truth except that which each community (or in extreme cases each person) cretes for itself.”

In Chapter 3, Hart turns to contemporary efforts to recover the possibility of public truth without succumbing to the absolutist stance of positivism. These are represented, for Hart, by Michael Polanyi and Alasdair MacIntyre.

Polanyi sought to understand knowledge in more holistic terms than the positivists to which he often was responding. For Polanyi, knowledge is embodied and personal. Even in the rarified world of the natural sciences, most of what a researcher believes must be accepted on authority or learned through tactile experience; there is simply too much information for any person to verify. Human knowledge, therefore, is always involves some risky personal commitment.

MacIntyre emphasized the communitarian aspects of knowing. Knowledge, for MacIntyre, is located in “traditions,” meaning ways of thinking, being and living in the world that support human flourishing, incorporate particular virtues and practices, and extend through time. For both Polanyi and MacIntyre, there is no entirely “objective” stance by which competing knowledge claims can be neutrally and fully adjudicated. We must give up the quest for disembodied certainty and instead determine how to examine claims about reality from within the precommitted perspective of one sort of faith or another.