Goldsworthy on true and exhaustive knowledge

Graeme Goldsworthy in his book Gospel and Wisdom (part of the Goldsworthy Trilogy, Paternoster, 2000), which i’m reading for a course in Old Testament Poetry and Wisdom Literature, presents the following brief and helpful discussion of the relationship between true and exhaustive knowledge, and how this applies to the Christian and non-Christian.

[T]he empiricist or humanist will claim to know things truly while not knowing exhaustively. In this he is inconsistent. No humanist would say that things exist in total isolation from each other.  For a start he couldn’t investigate them if they did, for they would also be isolated from him. And there could be no such things as natural laws, or complexities of matter, for there would be only random particles. There would be no organisms, no people to become humanists! Once we recognize this, we will see that what things really are includes their relationship to everything else. When the humanist claims to know something truly, he is saying that he knows how it relates to everything else in existence. In other words, to know even one thing truly he must know all things exhaustively.

We can summarize this discussion by a contrast of three positions. First, the atheistic humanist claims to know enough to say that God does not exist. This is a claim to know everything, for if he admits that he does not know everything, how does he know that God is not included in what he does not know? Secondly, the agnostic humanist things to avoid the problem of the atheist by saying that we cannot know if God exists or not; he may or he may not. But this is also to claim exhaustive knowledge, for how can he know that God’s existence cannot be known other than by knowing everything there is to be known? The last thing left for him to discover may be the evidence that God either exists or does not exist. Finally, the Christian knows that he does not have exhaustive knowledge. But he knows also through revelation that God does have exhaustive knowledge and can therefore define for us what reality is. By the same revelation this God has told us all that we need to know in order to know truly. The Christian can know God truly. He can know man truly, and the created order truly. He knows none of them exhaustively, but he does know them truly.

(Goldsworthy, 2000:369-370)

Tolerance

In the past, tolerance meant respecting people and treating them well even when convinced they were wrong. It meant treating people as people, with dignity, even when one disagreed with them. In post-modern society today, “tolerance” means never regarding anyone’s opinions as wrong. Instead of tolerance for people, we have tolerance for ideas. Instead of love for truth and love for people, we have denial of truth and fear of offending people. Post-modern tolerance is cheap.

Happy birthday, Charles Darwin! (Thoughts on the dialogue between science and Christianity)

February 12 was the two-hundredth anniversary of Charles Darwin’s birth, and 2009 marks the one-hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary of the publication of his seminal work, On the Origin of Species.  Perhaps no-one has influenced science more in the past century than has Darwin with his theory of evolution by natural selection.  Perhaps no-one since has been as misunderstood or maligned, or to such a degree been both hailed as a hero and condemned as a heretic.

But i don’t intend to discuss Darwin or evolutionary biology per se at any length.  i have long been concerned, frustrated, and angered at the attitude many Christians adopt among themselves and in public when discussing apparent conflicts between science and Christianity, especially in the area of creation and evolution.  i do not mean to say that Christians should not stand for truth – we must! – yet it does seem that so little debate in in this area has been edifying or served the gospel; indeed, much of the debate has been characteristically un-Christian: unloving, disrespectful, and antithetical to the gospel.