Review Essay, Keeping the Balance
Dealing with scepticism and arriving at certainty In response to the challenge of scepticism, Williams identifies two routes we may take to respond to it. The first is to “ask whether quite generally, our scepticism is warranted”. The second is to ask whether religion itself has any resources to respond to it.
In considering the first question, Williams looks at the world of moral notions. Are they arbitrary, or can we know that something is right or wrong? Responding to moral relativism, he observes that the statement that all moral truths are relative is a dogma, and asks why we should accept a dogmatic assertion that all truths are relative. He notes that people who are relativists in theory do not adhere to it consistently in practice. A majority share certain practical convictions, and it seems reasonable to maintain that we have some moral knowledge. The denial that we have any would appear to rest on two false notions: firstly, “an unduly restrictive notion of what counts as knowledge”, and secondly, the idea “that knowledge is the kind of thing we need to justify intellectually, whereas doubt is always intellectually respectable unless we can argue someone out of it”. Williams suggests that “the reasons for seriously doubting the wrongness of torture are far weaker than the reasons for accepting the correctness of our moral apprehension.”
In considering the second question, Williams observes that if indeed nothing can be known by us, this places a restriction not just on human abilities but upon God’s. “If we say, ‘We can know nothing’, what we are really saying is that ‘there is no God with a capacity for communicating anything to us so that we can know it'”. Consequently, “scepticism turns out to be dogmatic not just in general (when someone says that nothing can be known) but in religion in particular (there is no God of this kind)”. Noting that the issue would seem to turn then on whether we have grounds for supposing there is such a God, and that this is what we have tried to indicate, Williams argues further that if we have “knowledge of things invisible” in the moral sphere, “we cannot rule out such knowledge in religion …just because it trades in thing not provable by the senses”. Moreover, in Christianity, the source of moral knowledge and our conviction is God, and clearly, “what we apprehend when God communicates something has every entitlement to be labelled ‘knowledge'”. According to the biblical witness, “assurance and knowledge come from God himself by the Spirit”. This does not mean we are adopting an “irrational or supra-rational ‘anything goes'” mentality. Rather, we are recognising “the distinction between the logical grounds for our belief and the existential cause of our certainty”. Reason, on its own, can only show that our claims to revelation are probably true—it cannot very easily produce certainty. So this is how we do our epistemology: “we should hold together the grounds and reasons on the one hand and the certainty on the other”. “We conclude simply this. It is through the Spirit that we may be assured and know the truth of what we believe as we reflect on the biblical witness. We can have faith and certainty”.
Category: In Depth, Spring 2006
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