How can you know a God that you can't detect through the 5 senses?
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- But wouldn't history or memory fall into some form of empirical knowledge, because at one time it was empirically experienced?
- How can we know that God exists?
- I don't think I need to get rid of scientific knowledge, because even though I am relying on past experiments, I could theoretically repeat the experiment again, and I would be able to verify that empirically. That's why scientific knowledge is the only reliable source of truth.
To get an answer to that, we just need to look at the history of empiricism. Empiricism was made popular by Scottish philosopher David Hume during the 18th century, but by the 19th century, there were some serious objections raised against it that demonstrated that empiricism was way too extreme.
In short, the problem with empiricism is that under that criteria, we would have to abandon almost everything we know.
For example, take logical knowledge. We know that if A=B, and B=C, then A=C. Well, we know that statement is true... but how do we know that? It wasn't through the five senses. Logical intuitions are not empirical.
Next, there's common knowledge, such as knowledge that other people are also conscious... that they are able to have thoughts and feelings. Well, how do we have this knowledge? Other people's consciousness is completely inaccessible to us. Again, that knowledge is not empirical knowledge.
Another big one is historical knowledge. How do you know that Abraham Lincoln was assassinated? All you have is documents, ink on paper, and all that you see, feel, or smell is the pages of your history books. Does the sense of the page on a text book give you any empirical data on those historical events? Can we verify it by testing it in a lab? The knowledge of history isn't empirical since all we have is historical records and we can't replicate a past one-time event. Yet, we think we can know history with a reasonable amount of certainty.
In fact, we don't even have to talk about history from long time ago. How about yesterday? Well, we remember what we did yesterday. But that would be relying on our memories, which is not one of the five senses, it's not something we touch, feel, hear, taste, or smell. But our memories become the foundation for almost all the knowledge that we have, because we trust our memories of what we learned from the past.
This is the crazy thing: Even scientific knowledge would have to be abandoned under empiricism. Why is it that? It's because much of science relies upon the records of past experiments and it's not like scientists re-do all the experiments, right? So, in a way, scientific knowledge actually relies on records from the past and our memories being more or less accurate, which we just talked about.
The final death blow to empiricism is that it's self-refuting.
Self-refuting statements are statements such as "there are no sentences longer than five words" -- the very statement refutes its own claim, and is therefore necessarily false.
Take a look at the claims of empiricism, that the only reliable source of knowledge is through the five senses… that statement itself is a philosophical statement, and it's not something that you can prove or show through the five senses! So it turns out that empiricism refutes itself.
So for the reasons stated, strict empiricism has largely been refuted.
So now what? How can we know anything? I would appeal more to "reasonable knowledge", in which we could use logic, rationality, philosophy, and history to deduce -- not to have 100% certainty, but to a reasonable degree of certainty. Interestingly enough, the reliability and trustworthiness of the Christian faith yields to research and evidence in these areas.
*Many people have pointed out that we technically do have more than just these five senses, but expanding the senses available to strict empiricism does not really help its case.
Dig Deeper
- But wouldn't history or memory fall into some form of empirical knowledge, because at one time it was empirically experienced?
- How can we know that God exists?
- I don't think I need to get rid of scientific knowledge, because even though I am relying on past experiments, I could theoretically repeat the experiment again, and I would be able to verify that empirically. That's why scientific knowledge is the only reliable source of truth.