Confident Belief: What Does it Mean to Know Truth?
Modernism: The Enlightenment Search for Knowledge
Modernity was the era which had its roots in the Enlightenment of the 17th and 18th centuries, and which continued until recent years. Although postmodernism seems to be the order of the day, one worldview doesn’t come to a screeching halt one day and another pick up the next. Thus, there are still many people who view life in modernist terms.
Modernists believe that reason is the only truly reliable source of knowledge. Revelation is set aside. Since reason is the authority, only that which has logical or mathematical certainty can be accepted as true knowledge. Anything less can only have some level of probability. The attacks of empiricists such as David Hume apparently rendered Christianity highly improbable.
Lesslie Newbigin argues that this demand for indubitable knowledge gave rise to the skepticism of our day. In fact, postmodern skepticism is a sharp rejection of Enlightenment thought.
Let’s look briefly at the Enlightenment ideal of knowledge.
René Descartes and the Search for Certainty
In response to the skepticism of the 17th century, mathematician/philosopher René Descartes accepted the challenge of providing an argument for the existence of God which would be beyond doubt.3 Descartes’s approach was to use the tool of the skeptics—which is doubt—as his starting point. He threw out everything that couldn’t be known indubitably, and was left with one idea which he couldn’t doubt: I think, therefore I am. He developed his philosophy from this starting point.
Two important points are to be made about Descartes’s method. First, he made the break from starting with God as the measure of all things to starting with the individual person. Human reason was now the supreme arbiter of truth.4 Second, Descartes established doubt as a principle of knowledge.5 In modern times, critical thinking doubts everything until it is proved true.
On this basis, Western man devoted himself to knowing as much as he could about his world without any reference to God, and with the idea that knowledge had to be logically or mathematically certain.
Knowledge is quantifiable; one must strip away anything other than brute, objective facts which can be weighed, counted, or measured or deduced from facts which can be so quantified. Knowledge was to be objective, certain, and dispassionate—not subject to personal feelings or values or faith commitments. As theologian Stanley Grenz says, “The new tools of research included precise methods of measurement and a dependence on mathematical logic. In turning to this method, Enlightenment investigators narrowed their focus of interest—and hence began to treat as real only those aspects of the universe that are measurable.”6
On the heels of Descartes came Isaac Newton who gave us a vision of the cosmos as being an orderly machine, an idea in keeping with the rationalism of Descartes. The universe could be understood once its laws were understood. Although Descartes and Newton believed their ideas gave support to their Christian beliefs, they were subsequently used for just the opposite. “The modern world turned out to be Newton’s mechanistic universe populated by Descartes’s autonomous, rational substance,” says Grenz. “In such a world, theology was forced to give place to the natural sciences, and the central role formerly enjoyed by the theologian became the prerogative of the natural scientist.”7
Category: Fall 2007, Living the Faith
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