Category Archives: Christian Faith

Thoughts of a Solitary Walker VII: Why Christian Universities Should Seek Understanding

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In the previous essay I argued that Christian universities should not include the “search for truth” in their academic missions. Though Christian colleges may think slogans about truth seeking will provide good defenses against accusations of dogmatism and relativism, eventually they will subvert the Christian identity of the college. Inevitably, searching replaces finding, keeping, enjoying, and communicating truth.

In this essay I want to explore briefly the meaning of truth, being true, reality, certainty and understanding and argue that Christian universities should define their academic missions as “seeking understanding” rather than “seeking truth.”

What is Truth?

Definitions

TRUE: The word “true” names a relation of adequacy between a proposition and the reality to which it refers.

TRUTH: We use the word “truth” to refer to the content of a true proposition, the particular thing it asserts. Truth is the adequate representation or a formal duplication of a real thing in a finite mind.*

REALITY: Reality is the thing in itself as it exists apart from being known by a finite mind.* To say that a thing is real—as opposed to being nothing—is (at least) to say that it possesses causal power and can be known by some mind.

KNOWLEDGE: “To know” refers to the way a finite mind possesses a true proposition. Even if you believe a true proposition, you may not “know” it. You may have guessed correctly or acquired your belief in some other irrational way. Knowledge requires more than true belief. You need good reasons for holding that belief.

CERTAINTY: Certainty is the subjective strength with which one holds a belief. Certainty is compatible with false belief.

The Illusive Nature of Truth

It is important, then, to distinguish between truth and reality. We use the word “real” of things and the word “truth” of the content of propositions that refer adequately to real things. To oversimplify matters a bit, we can say truth exists inside the mind and things exist outside the mind.* But if truth exists in the mind and things exist outside, how can you ever know that your beliefs are true, that is, that their relation to the thing is adequate? You cannot stand outside your mind “to take a look.” It is one thing to define knowledge as “true belief held for good reasons” and quite another to know that a particular belief is true. At best, we can trust that the belief-forming mechanisms with which we are endowed work under normal conditions to form true beliefs or at least good approximations of true beliefs.

The Quixotic Search for Truth

Now we can see clearly why a Christian college should not include searching for truth in its academic mission. To seek truth directly is to seek to duplicate reality in the mind through a critical use of reason. But this is a task for which we are not equipped. As I said above, we cannot leap outside our minds to judge the adequacy of our beliefs to things in themselves. If our ordinary belief-forming mechanisms do not have producing true beliefs as their proper function or if they are incapable of doing so, scientific or critical reason won’t help us; they are even less capable. It is one thing to possess a true belief and another to prove that belief true. The former is possible but the latter is impossible.

The slogan advocating the “relentless pursuit of truth” asks us to set about proving our beliefs true or false, adequate or inadequate to things in themselves, as they are outside our minds. On first hearing the slogan one imagines that we are embarking on a noble task, marked indeed by self-sacrifice and toil but with hope for progress that will lead from pursuit to possession of truth. But this vision is an illusion, and seeking to realize it is quixotic. Its practical result is to render all the college’s Christian beliefs and moral principles moot, subject to perpetual debate and revision. Demands for academic freedom and free speech unrestricted by the school’s founding religious and moral beliefs are sure to follow. The university’s efforts to enforce doctrinal and moral standards will appear arbitrary and dogmatic. The adjective “Christian” in the designation “Christian university” has become meaningless.

The Search for Understanding

So far, I have argued that Christian colleges should not define their academic mission as “seeking truth.” In the second part of my argument, I will maintain that they would be better off to define it as “seeking understanding.” Above, I defined truth, being true, and knowledge. What is understanding, how does it differ from knowing, and what makes it a better fit for the Christian college?

UNDERSTANDING: To understand is to receive something given to our consciousness under categories native to our minds. Among the categories are cause, substance, quantity, quality, relation, etc. Aristotle proposed ten categories of understanding while Immanuel Kant proposed twelve. Our power of understanding organizes our raw perceptions into intelligible objects of thought.** It enables us to think what otherwise would only touch us in a brute way.

What, then is the difference between seeking understanding and seeking truth? To understand is to make sense of what appears to us, what impresses itself on us. To seek truth is to seek to know, and know that we know, the truth; it is to wish to rise above our minds and think the hidden causes of what appears to us, that is, things in themselves apart from our experience of them. To set our aim directly on truth—to know, and know we know, the truth—dooms us never to arrive, to be forever unsatisfied, unable to enjoy the truth.

To understand is a more modest and realistic aim. It aims to make sense of what actually impresses itself on us–nature, human actions and words, our mind’s experience of itself, and other appearances. It is content to live within the limits of our minds. It does not dream of leaping outside of our minds to get a God’s eye view of the inner reality of things.

Are we, then, to give up on possessing truth? By no means. We can still believe that the reality of things impresses itself on our perceptive powers in ways that fit our native belief-forming mechanisms to create true or approximately true beliefs. But why believe in this fit? Perhaps one does not need a reason to believe it. It is just what we do and can’t avoid doing. But I also find that my belief in God who is the creator of nature and my mind reinforces my belief that our minds are made for truth. But if I attempt to attain direct knowledge of the reality of things apart from these two beliefs—the fit between the mind and things and the activity of the Creator—my quest ends in futility! Don’t miss this: enjoying truth begins in faith!

The Christian University Seeks Understanding and Enjoys the Truth

I hope this somewhat complicated argument helps you see why I argue that the Christian university should renounce the futile “search for truth” and embrace the fruitful quest for understanding. A Christian college can seek understanding even though in faith it presupposes the truth of Christianity as a given. The search for truth will not allow this. It insists that we treat Christianity as we treat any other truth claim, that is, as a proposal to be interrogated, doubted, and possibly rejected. And it implies that the faculty should have the academic freedom (for the sake of the search for truth!) to do this. I argue that a Christian university that ceases to take the Christian faith as a given to be understood and makes it a hypothesis to be proven or refuted has ceased to be Christian.

Ironically, by rejecting the futile search for truth, the Christian college can enjoy the truth given to it in the faith preserved in the Scriptures. It can seek with all rigor and without fear to understand what God has given us. It can explore all its presuppositions, implications and inner structures, and in this search, it possesses a well-founded hope of success!

*I am speaking here of finite, created minds. Nothing exists outside God’s mind because God is the creator and sustainer of everything that exists.

**The difference between Aristotle and Kant are significant. I am not taking sides in this debate, though to the philosophically trained I will sound sympathetic to Kant.

Thoughts of a Solitary Walker

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I take a walk almost every day. Not only is walking healthy for the body, it is good for the soul. It also stimulates the mind. In this series, I want to share with you some thoughts–philosophical, theological, moral, and political–I’ve had while walking.

Let me tell you first about my title “Thoughts of a Solitary Walker.” Years ago, in preparing a lecture for one of my classes, I ran across a book of essays by J.J. Rousseau by the title The Reveries of the Solitary Walker. Each chapter describes Rousseau’s experiences and feelings on a walk. Rousseau (1712-78) is known as the “father of the romantic movement.” I am amazed at his ability to describe his inner feelings and reactions to passing scenes. My admiration for him is limited to his gifts, however, not the use he made of them. Though brilliant and extraordinarily talented, Rousseau was a deeply flawed man. Like Karl Marx, Percy Shelly and other unemployed intellectuals that came after him, he was a narcissist, a moocher, and a grifter. He sponged off of his friends and abused them when they complained. He forced his mistress to surrender their five children to the local orphanage.

Nevertheless, to begin this series I want to give credit to Rousseau for my title and for the idea of the series. Below I quote Rousseau’s account of his fifth walk. In the lecture to which I referred above, I have students compare and contrast the experience Rousseau describes in this reading with the experiences Augustine describes in his Confessions, Books 9 & 10.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Reveries of the Solitary Walker (Fifth Walk)

“I have noticed in the vicissitudes of a long life that the periods of the sweetest joys and the most lively pleasures are not, however, those of which the memory attracts me and touches me most. These brief moments of delirium and passion, however lively they may be, are still, and by their very vivacity, only points scattered along the line of life. They are too rare and too rapid to constitute a state. And the happiness that my heart regrets is not composed of fugitive instances but is a simple and permanent state—a state which is nothing lively in itself but whose duration increases their delight to the point of finding there, at last, the supreme happiness.

All is in a continual flux on earth: nothing on it keeps a constant and fixed form, and our affections, which attach us to exterior things, pass and change necessarily as the things pass and change. Always ahead of us or behind us, they recall the past which is no longer or anticipate the future which often is not to be: there is nothing solid there to which the heart can attach itself. Also, here below one scarcely has anything but fleeting pleasure; as for lasting happiness, I doubt that it is known here. Scarcely is there in our most lively joys an instant when the heart can truly say to us: I wish that this instant would last forever; and how can one call “happiness” a fugitive state which leaves us with a heart still troubled and empty, which makes us regret something before or still desire something after?

But if there is a state where the soul finds a solid enough base to rest itself entirely and gather together there its entire being without having to recall the past or to step over into the future; where time is nothing for it, where the present lasts always, without, however, marking its duration and without any trace of succession, without any other feeling—of privation or joy, of pleasure or pain, of desire or fear—than that alone of our existence, and this feeling alone can fill it completely; [then] as long as this state lasts, whoever finds himself in it can call himself happy, not with an imperfect happiness poor and relative such as what one finds in the pleasures of life, but with a sufficient happiness perfect and full which leaves in the soul no void which it feels the need of filling. Such is the state where I found myself often on the Island of St. Pierre in my solitary reveries, whether lying in my boat which I let drift at the mercy of the water, whether sitting on the shore of the agitated lake, whether somewhere else on the edge of a beautiful river or of a brook murmuring on the gravel.

What does one enjoy in such a situation? Nothing exterior to the self, nothing except the self and one’s own existence. As long as this state lasts, one is sufficient to oneself, like God. The sentiment of existence, stripped of all other affections, is by itself a precious sentiment of contentment and peace which would be sufficient alone to make existence dear and sweet to whoever knows how to set aside from himself all the sensual and earthly impressions which ceaselessly come to distract us from it and to disturb its sweetness here below. But most men, agitated by continual passions, hardly know this state and, having tasted it only imperfectly for a few instances, keep only an obscure and confused idea of it which does not make them feel its charm. It would not even be good, in the present constitution of things, that, eager for these sweet ecstasies, they would be revolted by the active life for which their needs, always reborn, prescribe the duty to them. But an unfortunate who has been cut off from human society and who is no longer able here below to do anything useful and good for others or for himself can find in this state some consolations for all human happiness—consolations that fortune and men could not take away from him” (pp. 68-69).

Next Time: Is the world a material machine or a spiritual organism?