KNOWLEDGE
The Biggest Question(s)
- How do we know what we know?
- What does the world tell us?
- Is there more to know than what our senses can reveal?
How do we know what we know?
This is a really old question, and we use a strange word “epistemology” which means how we know what we know. So, let me ask you the question, “how do you know what you know?”
Let’s start with a really simple truth that you know, something so absolutely truthful, so fundamentally true, that there is no questioning it. Maybe your name or the color of your shirt. What’s your name? How do you know that’s your name? because you’ve always answered to it, or is it because the people who raised you told you that was your name? How about the color of your shirt? How do you know that your shirt is that color? It’s because you can see it, right? Your eyes see it and your brain “translates” the input from your eyes into the name(s) of the color(s) someone has given to them years before. We know what we know because our knowledge has been given to us somehow. Either by a person teaching us, telling us, or in some other way giving us that knowledge; or through our senses, which end up being “translated” by our brains and put into words that were previously given to us. We know what we know because it has been revealed to us in some way.
What does the world tell us?
We have to start by defining the word “world”. I’m using the word “world” to describe what we can perceive with our senses. Whether we need special instrumentation (for instance, telescopes or microscopes) or not, I’m speaking of the most general type of knowledge available to everyone. Of course, some people are handicapped and don’t have the same use of all of their senses, but the knowledge available is still knowable, just maybe not in a way that they can perceive it.
Like we did under the first question “how do we know what we know”, let’s consider what the world can tell us in its absolutely, indisputable, truth. 1. The world is big, and we are small. In the great order of things, taking into account the vastness of earth itself and beyond earth into the galaxy and beyond, humanity is very small. 2. Since we know the world is so big, we can say we don’t know everything there is to know about the world. 3. Since humanity is so small, but has done so much to harness the power of the world (sometimes for good, sometimes not, sometimes our intentions were evil, sometimes our intentions were good but there were unintended consequences that turned out poorly) we can say humanity “punches above its weight”, meaning that we exert a much greater influence on the world than we should based on the size difference. 4. Death is a universal truth for all living things. As much as we’ve been able to change the course of the world, and to understand it, and to harness its power, we haven’t been able to fix its fundamental flaw: death.
The world has so much to tell us, much more than we can cover here, but at the most basic level when we consider what the world reveals, we’re left in awe of its vastness, humbled by our smallness, impressed with our ability, but in the end we’re left with the reality we are powerless to change death. It’s finally hopeless.
Is there more to know than what our senses can reveal?
People sometimes deny there’s more to know than what our senses can tell us, but that’s easily proven wrong. For instance, let me pose a few statements and questions to you. We start with a person named Sally. Sally only wears blue. She wears blue pants, blue shirts, blue skirts, and blue dresses. Her wardrobe is really, utterly, boring, and constantly lending itself to a dad joke. “Sally, are you ok, today? Because you’re looking a little blue.” But, based on this information, if Sally were to receive a red dress for her birthday, do you think she would wear it? Of course not. Why not? Because she only wears blue, everything she owns in terms of clothing is blue. You know this based on the statement of fact at the beginning and when I asked the question about the red dress you knew it didn’t align with the fact I gave you at the start. You used logical deduction to formulate your response. So, logic is real, it exists, we all use it everyday but none of us have ever seen, smelt, touched, or heard logic. Logic’s existence proves there is more to know than just what we can perceive through our senses.
When we consider death as revealed by the world we live in, logically we should agree that death has many forms, but there must be a universal cause. Why should there be a universal cause? Because death, life ceasing, doesn’t make sense. We’ve learned to accept it, because it is a fundamental truth of the world, but like Sally always wearing blue, it doesn’t really make sense. All of what is needed to sustain life is still available to every living thing. In general, life is suited for this world and the world is suited to provide life and provide for life continuing. But, whether it’s due to an accident, disease, bodies wearing out because of old age, or so many other possible causes, death comes to every. living. thing.
There is no answer to death and there is no reason for why death happens. There must be more to know than what we can perceive. This knowledge, this revelation, has to give ultimate answers that deal with this most ultimate of questions. For the answer to be valid, it has to be consistent with itself—it can’t say one thing and then say another and say that both are true. No one thinks that makes sense.
There is one source in all of the world that deals with ultimate question of death, and it does so with internal consistency, this source is what people have called “Special Revelation” for over two thousand years. If we consider what we know, we know it because it was revealed. And what we know from the world is available to everyone simply by living in it, that’s “General Revelation”. And this last classification, “Special Revelation”, deals with the answer to death and this answer is in the Bible, the 39 books of the Old Testament and 27 books of the New Testament.
The Bible explains that death is an imposition into God’s good world. Death wasn’t part of the original design, but it is fixable through God’s grace and power. This world isn’t hopeless if you know the person, and yes God is a person and not an impersonal force (that’s amazing news!), who can fix it. We’ll look more into God’s truth as we move forward, I hope you will join me.