{"id":1727,"date":"2011-01-12T13:45:00","date_gmt":"2011-01-12T20:45:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.tgdarkly.com\/blog\/?p=1727"},"modified":"2011-01-12T13:45:00","modified_gmt":"2011-01-12T20:45:00","slug":"ephemeral-epistemology","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/2011\/01\/12\/ephemeral-epistemology\/","title":{"rendered":"Al Mohler's Ephemeral Epistemology"},"content":{"rendered":"

James Kidder, a Christian paleontologist, comments on Al Mohler’s most recent critique<\/a> of BioLogos.\u00a0 Mohler’s view of science seems to rest on an “appearance of age” argument.\u00a0 According to Mohler, “given a plain reading of Scripture, there is every reason that Christians should reject a uniformitarian presupposition.”<\/p>\n

Big words like “uniformitarian” and “presupposition” make this idea sound smart.\u00a0 It is, however, profoundly anti-intellectual.\u00a0 I mean “anti-intellectual” here not in the sense of opposing the “academic elite” as a class.\u00a0 I mean it literally: adopting Mohler’s epistemology destroys our ability to “known” anything.\u00a0 It is, in fact, a relativistic, Gnostic and nihilistic world view, which is not at all compatible with Christianity.<\/p>\n

Mohler effectively sells out a Christian realist view of the universe to Descartes’ Demon.\u00a0 Descartes was troubled by empiricism.\u00a0 How can I really know for certain, he wondered, whether the things I observe with my senses are “real?”\u00a0 I can’t prove, he reasoned, that the apparent reality I observe isn’t just an illusion created by a malevolent demon to keep me deluded.\u00a0 After all, whatever proofs I might offer would be part of the illusion.\u00a0 Thus he resolved to the one fact he thought could not be an illusion without self-contradiction:\u00a0 that of his own existence.\u00a0 “I think, therefore I am.”<\/p>\n

Mohler’s epistemology says that Descartes was right to be afraid after all.\u00a0 The world that we think we observe, with its distant starlight, its layers of fossils, its rates of radioactive decay, and so on, is illusory.\u00a0 It may “appear” to be very old, but it is in fact something very different.<\/p>\n

But, Mohler would say, Descartes’ Demon is vanquished because a “plain reading of scripture” tells us what really happened.\u00a0 Here is the insurmountable problem:\u00a0 a “plain reading of scripture” depends on “uniformitarian” assumptions about history.\u00a0 It assumes that the text we now have is really an ancient text, created thousands of years ago.\u00a0 It assumes that there really was a Jewish community and subsequently a Christian Church that existed in the past and preserved and handed these documents down as scripture.\u00a0 It assumes that people in the past used certain words that have meanings that can be known with a high degree of certainty through historical study.<\/p>\n

If Mohler’s view of history is correct, then all of his assumptions about scripture are up for grabs.\u00a0 Absent a “uniformitarian” view of history, there is no way to be sure that what we now think of as “scripture” wasn’t poofed into existence with the “appearance of age” only moments ago.\u00a0 There is no way to know with any certainty what the “plain meaning” of these documents might be or whether there is any “language” with meaning at all.\u00a0 Indeed, there is no way to know whether Jesus really lived and truly rose again.<\/p>\n

If your world view causes you to deny that history is real, that is a sure sign of trouble.\u00a0 Without history, there is no meaning.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

James Kidder, a Christian paleontologist, comments on Al Mohler’s most recent critique of BioLogos.\u00a0 Mohler’s view of science seems to rest on an “appearance of age” argument.\u00a0 According to Mohler, “given a plain reading of Scripture, there is every reason that Christians should reject a uniformitarian presupposition.” Big words like “uniformitarian” and “presupposition” make this […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[9,50],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1727","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-epistemology","category-science-and-religion"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p824rZ-rR","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1727","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1727"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1727\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1727"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1727"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1727"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}