Positivism — The Epistemological Challenge

by E. Herbert Nygren

The investigation into the origin and the nature of knowledge has its roots in the earliest writings of the ancient philosophers of Greece. The epistemological controversy between empiricism, always pointing to sense perception as the origin of ideas, and rationalism, always insisting that the mind contributes ideas not derived from sensory experience, can be traced at least as far back as the Grecian Academy six centuries before Christ. Plato taught that reason can attain to the immutable, that the ideas of men are related to actually existing ideas which ultimately were not material or dependent upon sensory perception. Rene Descartes was later to comment: “I was delighted with mathematics because of the certainty of its demonstration and the evidence of its reasoning.”[1] He concluded that whatever else one can doubt, one cannot doubt his process of doubt.

Empiricism, on the other hand, had its roots more firmly fixed in the Aristotelian emphasis upon the sensory perception of the singular datum, rather than upon the universal idea. One can go back even prior to Aristotle and find in the writings of Democritus (5th century B.C.) a teaching that ultimate reality is to be found in one’s sense experience. This reality, he taught, consisted of atoms moving in all directions in a void. These atoms, in turn, were believed irreductible, indivisible, and quantitatively characterized. They were neither created nor could they be destroyed. Two centuries later, Epicurus was to adopt and expand that Democratean cosmology of infinite atoms in an infinite void. He was convinced that the universe was not from nothing, but was at all times a transfer of preexisting material. Man was construed to be just another product of natural sources with life simply the span bounded by birth and death.

This method for the attainment of knowledge reached a climax in the writings of David Hume, who radicalized sensory experience as the one source of human awareness. He insisted that the origin of all ideas was in sense perception. The mind, he was forced to conclude, was no more than a collection of perceptions. Auguste Comte, the nineteenth century writer of Positive Philosophy, was to systematize the implications of empiricism. He felt that he must reject all prior philosophy. He envisioned men passing through three stages: theological, metaphysical, and scientific. These he analogized by calling them respectively childhood, adolesence, and adulthood. In the theological stage, man explained the unknown as acts of fictitious beings, whose existence could not be confirmed. In the metaphysical stage, personalized agencies were abandoned in favor of essences, substances, a prioris. At his time, Comte boasted, the phenomena of experiences could be accepted as positive data. The scientific stage was at hand.

Epistemology, then, is the study and the analysis of man’s attempt to come to grips with reality, of his striving to reach the point in his intellectual development when he can say, with reasonable confidence, “I know;” “I am convinced;” “I believe.”

With this in mind, let us turn our attention to the Fourth Gospel. The writer had come to the firm conclusion that Jesus was the Christ, the Son of God. His purpose for recording the life and the teachings of Jesus was to persuade his readers to believe in Him also. Therefore, he readily admits his selectivity in the inclusion of material about Jesus. “Now Jesus did many other signs…which are not written in this book; but these are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ …”[2]

On the basis of these words, its seems a justifiable hypothesis to assume that John intentionally selected his data because of their potential convincing power over his readers. Why then did he include the story found in chapter nine? One needs to search for the epistemological reasons for its inclusion.

We read that Jesus and his disciples pass a man who, according to the prior awareness of the disciples, had been blind since his birth. They attempt to engage Jesus in a theological discourse concerning the reason for his blindness. Convinced, as had been Job of old and his three friends, that all human suffering must be the result of sin, the disciples ask whether the man is being punished for his parents’ sins or perchance for some antenatal sin of which he himself might have been guilty. In his response, Jesus rejects their theorizing that sin on the part of anyone was the cause of man’s blindness.[3] Moreover, he is unwilling to be engaged in lengthy debate, but turns immediately to the blind man. He makes clay out of spittle and dirt, places it upon the man’s eyes, and says to him, “Go, wash in the pool of Siloam.” Upon his return from the pool, the man’s eyes possess the power of perception.

This phenomenon led to an investigation by a group of the religious leaders of the day. Those who first attempted to evaluate the situation apparently had no hesitance in accepting the evidence that there indeed was a man who had been blind but now stood before them with eyes open to the light of the sun. It would seem that they were ready and willing to accept the testimony given by the man as indicative of some sort of a miraculous performance. A strange and mighty work had transpired in their midst. How was it to be explained?

The leaders of this group began to reflect upon the teachings of Judaism which might be applied to this situation. In Judaism a miracle could be construed as an event in which one could discern the revelation of God. That norm of all Jewish religion, the Pentateuch, suggested that the miraculous was to be considered a sign or a wonder from God. But the Jews also saw in the miracle the possibility of outward evidence of the practice of magic and sorcery under the inspiration of strange and foreign divinities antagonistic to Yahweh. To the Jews magic in any form was forbidden; its practioners were put to death. The Scriptures associated sorcerers with the perverters of religion who practiced human sacrifice.

This group of investigators also noted the fact that the miracle had occurred on the Sabbath; therefore, they reasoned, the performer of the miracle could not have come from God, or he would not have violated the law of the Sabbath. This man must be a sorcerer.

This first group of investigators into the phenomenon was the counterpart of the epistemological rationalist. In the words of Gerhard Szczesny they were convinced that “only…rationally grounded intellectuality is able to find a secure point of departure for ventures in the…unknown.”[4] The truth of the matter was that the investigation of these “rationalists” was not open-minded or free from prejudice. Reinhold Niebuhr well describes the weakness of such a position: “A careful scrutiny of the processes by which we arrive at this conclusion must lead to the conviction that the presupposition…was subtly involved in the reason by which we arrived at the conclusion.”[5] Again, in the words of Michael Novak, “It is a mistake to think that…any…view of life is a conclusion to philosophic reasoning; it is rather a horizon already determined by the starting place, the point at which one had decided…to begin.”[6]

The rationalism of these investigators began with the presupposition that a Sabbath violation (as defined by themselves) was antagonistic to the worship of Yahweh. Having observed that Jesus violated the Sabbath, they concluded that he must have been inspired and empowered not by Yahweh but by demons and was, in fact, a practitioner of sorcery deserving death.

Behind their reasoning was their conception of religion as an inheritance to be preserved, an inheritance of ceremony, ritual and dogma. To deviate even a little as a result of some new disclosure would have been to them as unthinkable as trying to change one’s ancestry. On the ground of their speculation they were denying the possibility that God had in reality come in flesh. It was John Calvin who observed: “The restoration of sight to the blind man ought undoubtedly to have softened even the hearts of stone; or, at least, the Pharisees ought to have been struck with the novelty and greatness of the miracle, so as to remain in doubt…until they inquired if it were a divine work …”[7] The author of the Fourth Gospel is implying that rationalism as a means for the discovery of truth does not always lead to belief in Jesus, for the one using that method is guilty of assuming hypotheses which bias his thinking.

The text continues by suggesting that another investigation was conducted by the Religious Leaders. It appears that these investigations were skeptical about the truth of the whole incident. They refused to believe that a miracle had in fact occurred. David Hume wrote: “All probability, then, supposes an opposition of experiments and observations, where the one side is found the overbalance the other…” So—“no testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind, that its falsehoods would be more miraculous than the fact, which it endeavors to establish.” Since a “miracle is a violation of the laws of nature: and as a firm and unalterable experience has established these laws, the proof against a miracle, from the very nature of the fact, is as entire as any argument from experience can possibly be imagined.”[8]

These religious investigators doubted that the man had really been blind. They suspected rather that a ruse was being perpetrated at their expense, that fraud or collusion was obviously present in the whole incident. These men, John would suggest, illustrate the empirically oriented. They insist that blind men don’t see; the man standing before them is obviously in possession of his sight; therefore he must be guilty, along with Jesus, of perpetrating a plot to make them, the Pharisees, look foolish before the people.

The twentieth century has marked the development of logical positivism and its daughter linguistic analysis. When logical positivism moves upon the scene, one sees the attempt to secularize Christianity, as the value of a religious affirmation is not conceptually significant. It is functionally significant if it is therapeutic, meeting a psychological need. Religious affirmations are said not to be true, only helpful, for affirmations about the supernatural are not verifiable.

The positivistic position goes like this:

All cognitively meaningful language is either definitional or empirical in nature; no religious language is either definitional or empirical in nature; no religious language is cognitively meaningful. Such “methodological assumptions constitute an unnecessarily thick smoke screen,” writes Geddes McGregor.[9]

According to the author of the Gospel, like their rationalist counterparts, these investigators based their observations not upon the evidence alone but upon a prior commitment to an underlying metaphysical assumption along with an epistemological standpoint which was simply incompatible with the acceptance of the possibility that men born blind might gain their sight. Their hypothesis would have been: A miracle like that just does not happen, for never have we been confronted by one which was verifiable. “There is a certain arbitrariness about the criterion,” suggests McGregor.[10] The empiricist simply ruled out the possibility of any occurrence which could not be explained through sensory perception. They forgot that man cannot come to new knowledge unless he is willing to declare his preference for accuracy as opposed to personal interest in the outcome of the investigation. As an historian or a scientist per se one does not know if the presence of the supernatural might be just such a new factor in the situation as might make an alteration not unacceptable but actually acceptable. As C. S. Lewis often suggested: Natural Law is true only when one considers “Nature uninterrupted.”[11]

In passing, one might mention Rudolf Bultmann who has been concerned with the miraculous. He has classified the supernatural as mythological. He has taught that the Biblical accounts of the supernatural do not give objective truth about God, but promote our self-understanding. This conclusion leads to a minimizing of the importance of the historical aspects of the life of Jesus. Bultmann emphasizes the Apostolic preaching and seems to make of little importance certain events, e.g. the resurrection. What matters, according to his view, is that this was a meaningful message proclaimed by the church.

Edwin Lewis, some years ago in his Philosophy of Revelation, put it thus: To say that we will not accept until we have been made certain is as though a man in danger of drowning should refuse to grasp a rope thrown to him until he was assured it would bear his weight. He can prove the adequacy of the rope only by trusting himself to it.”[12]

John Hick has described the dilemma of the empiricist: “…the ways in which we act and react within the circle of our immediate experiences depend upon our beliefs as to what lies beyond that circle. The emotional tone and color of our consciousness is finally determined by the basic ‘ground plan’ of our system of beliefs.”[13] Michael Novak further pinpoints the empirical weakness: “It is the knower who decided what he accepts…”[14] It is like the story told of the psychiatrist who was confronted by a patient who was convinced that he was dead. Nothing the psychiatrist could say would alter the man’s opinion of his state. The psychiatrist, seemingly in a burst of inspiration, turned to the man and asked, “Tell me, do dead men bleed?” “No!” responded the patient quickly. Suddenly the psychiatrist took hold of the patient’s finger and pricked it with a pin. After recovering from the initial shock, the patient held his finger, watched it closely, and finally declared: “Well, what do you know, dead men bleed!”

The first century “empiricist” refused to accept the possibility that a miracle had in fact occured. He joined his “rationalist” counterpart, and they cast out of their presence the man in question. Their slogan seems to have been: When in doubt, the best thing one can do is to destroy the evidence, thus avoiding clutter in the stage of inquiry. Or as a humorous anecdote puts it: “Don’t bother me with the facts; my mind’s already made up.”

Plato once commented that only if a teacher should be sent to him from the gods could he hope to reach beyond where his mind at last must stop.

The Christian claim is that this wider knowledge has been disclosed in Jesus of Nazareth. The Christian Faith declares that there is more to existence than the correlations of the senses; there is more to truth than reason can comprehend. Alfred North Whitehead was to muse that when one understands all about the sun and all about the atmosphere and all about the rotation of the earth, one may still miss the radiance of the sunset.

David Cairns wrote: “Assuredly, the assumption that the whole vast natural universe must be ‘orderly’ is seen to be an adventure of singular audacity when we think of the tiny little ‘home-form of earth’ which is our abode, and the enormous universe of which it is an infinitesimal fraction.”[15]

The Fourth Evangelist then tells the .reader that Jesus came upon the man and asked him: “Do you believe in the Son of Man?” He answered, “And who is he, sir, that I may believe in him?” Jesus, said to him, “You have seen him, and it is he who speaks to you.” He said, “Lord, I believe.”

It becomes necessary now to return to the first encounter Jesus had with that man. It must be recalled that he had been blind from birth. Thus, visual perception of Jesus prior to that moment had not occurred. Moreover, there is no indication given in the text to indicate that he had any prior experience with Jesus before that singular confrontation involving the placing of clay on his eyes and speaking the strange words, “Go, wash.” John seems to be saying: Had this man been inclined to the epistemological position of the rationalist, he would have demanded a full-fledged explanation of the reasons why these strange things were happening. Had he done so, he would have become quite convinced that it was foolishness.

On the other hand, had this man been a thorough-going empiricist, he would have immediately considered the words of Jesus as meaningless, for never before had anyone heard of a man born blind having been given his sight. He would have insisted that there was no prior evidence to justify his responding to Jesus’ words. This was not the case. He first believed Jesus, and then came back seeing. “I see nothing arrogant in the notion,” penned Geddes McGregor, “that God might permit a man to discern him.”[16] The investigating Pharisees saw the man but refused to believe. The author of the Gospel is saying that there is a way to knowledge other than the way of rational procedure or empirical evidence. E. L. Mascall has suggested that intelligibility and not verifiability ought to be the base for knowledge, otherwise logic itself would not be demonstrable. He has suggested that the intellect not only reasons but also apprehends. One can discover; one can deduce; but one can also have truth disclosed to him. John Baillie has expressed it thus: When we say, “I know” we also say, “I am certain.” Is this certainty based upon epistemological evidence or rational analysis the only certainty one has? This illustration was used by John Baillie: I know that an object was made by a particular manufacturer; I believe that the giver of the gift acquired it honestly; I have equal certainty in both instances. The certainty of the Christian faith is more like the latter; to believe means to put faith in, and from this faith there comes immediate certainty.[17]

Contemporary relevance may be directed to modern man’s infatuation with the methodology of science. As a result of the discoveries of science, man has been exposed to many things which he cannot understand—the galaxies of the heavens and the millions of light years separating man from the distant stars, the potential powers of the sub-microscopic electrons, the strange mutations in altering life on his own planet. The advances made in the fields of scientific endeavor have held modern man in awe. In such an age there has been the tendency to imply that the methods of science are the only valid means for the discovery of truth. This view, by its very definition, excludes that which cannot be brought to the test of empirical verification. Exclusive emphasis upon scientific methodology has constructed a world of selected phenomena. The success of the scientist, writes Jacques Barzun, “blinds him and others to the fact that he began by assuming the conclusion which he now presents as having been found and demonstrated.”

Several other sentences from Barzun’s writings are suggestive at this point:

No scientist could survive half an hour outside his laboratory if he tried to apply his habitual tests to his common experience —analyzing, measuring, questioning such things as his neighbor’s truthfulness, his tradesmen’s honesty, his wife’s fidelity. A man’s relation with his family and friends would come to an abrupt end, his private pleasure would be destroyed, if he were even for a moment scientific about them.[18]

Karl Heim in his many writings has pointed out a basic flaw in the methodology of natural investigation. He says that it attempts to separate the object under investigation from the investigating subject. This, he argues, one cannot do and still have a thorough analysis of the situation. “When we leave out the subject,” he has written, “we have not given a complete description of the state of affairs.”[19]

He also says:

As soon as I have discovered this new space, I knew from the very first moment that this space has not just come into being in the hour in which it has been disclosed to me. I know, on the contrary,…that I have always been in it, but that I have been living like a blind man who gropes his way along with a stick, in the midst of a heavenly landscape which is suffused with radiant sunshine, because he does not see…Yet I know, from the very moment at which my eyes are opening to a new space, not only that I myself was always encompassed by this space, although I had hitherto been unaware of it, but also that all my fellow men, who are still stricken with blindness and, who therefore regard me as a visionary, are themselves standing in this space, just as I am, but that their eyes are still closed.[20]

Thus it was with the writer of the Fourth Gospel. There are times when “Believing is Seeing.” For the blind man, belief in the words of Jesus led to his “coming back seeing.” The epistemological implication is that at least on occasion, an experience of the heart may be brought about by revelation responded to by faith. Not to know God, not to know Jesus as the Christ, is a failure, not of the intellect, but of the heart.

This method had its roots firmly implanted in the Sacred Scriptures of the Jews. Jeremiah, using the language of the prophetic spokesman for God, declared: “… I will make them know …my power and my might, and they shall know that my name is the Lord.”[21] Likewise, Ezekiel said, “… they shall know my vengeance, says the Lord.”[22] In a plaintive cry of sorrow at the lack of knowledge about God, Isaiah spoke these words:

The ox knows its owner,
and the ass its master’s crib;
but Israel does not know,
my people does not understand.[23]

One knows God by experiencing Him and by recognizing that He is the doer of all things.

To return to the account in the Fourth Gospel. The author used the Greek term pistis which has the general meaning of “to be persuaded of.” It has, however, a further religious reference, namely, “the conviction and trust to which a man is impelled by a certain inner and high prerogative and law of his soul.”[24] It is further suggestive that in the phraseology used in Jesus’ questioning of the man in their second confrontation we read pisteueis eis. Moulton calls attention to the fact that there is a distinction, though perhaps slight, between the use of the verb with the simple dative and with the preposition eis. Such a usage, Moulton has suggested, “recalls…the bringing of the soul into that mystical vision.”[25]

When the man barn blind was confronted by Jesus, he had an experience of the heart which convinced him that there indeed was power, revelation from beyond. Why was this incident in the Fourth Gospel? It depicts a man who believed, without having seen. An inner confrontation caused him to believe. “Thus,” writes John Hick, “the primary religious perception…is an apprehension of the divine presence within the believer’s human experience.”[26] Or in the words of Oscar Cullman, “A faith derived from things seen and nothing more is not true faith.”[27]

Notes

1. Descartes, Rene, Discourse on Method. (The European Philosophies From Descartes to Nietsche, edited by Monroe Beardsley.) New York: Modern Library, 1960, p. 9.
2. John 20:30, 1. Revised Standard Version. (Other Scripture references are to the Fourth Gospel unless noted. It is not the intent of this paper to engage in the controversy over authorship of the Gospel. The name John is used simply for clarification.
3. Cf. Barrett, C. K., The Gospel According to St. John. London: S.P.C.K. 1955. There is a helpful discussion here on the problem of sin and blindness. p. 294, ff.
4. Szczesny, Gerhard, The Future of Unbelief. New Yark: George Braziller, 1961. p. 135.
5. Niebuhr, Reinhold, “Religion and Action.” The essay is in Science and Man, edited by Ruth Nanda Anshen. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1942. p. 45.
6. Novak, Michael, Belief and Unbelief. New York: Macmillan, 1965. p. 60.
7. Calvin, John, The Gospel of John. Philadelphia: Westminster, 1916. p. 87.
8. Hume, David, Concerning Human Knowledge, X, Part I. (The English Philosophies From Bacon to Mill, edited by Edwin A. Burtt.) New York: Modern Library, 1939, p. 654.
9. McGregor, Geddes, God Beyond Doubt. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Co., 1966. p. 42.
10. Ibid., p. 41.
11. Lewis, C. S., Miracles. New York: Macmillan, 1948. Especially chapters II and III for helpful analysis here.
12. Lewis, Edwin, Philosophy of Revelation. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1940.
13. Hick, John, Faith and Knowledge. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1957. p. 25.
14. Novak, Op. Cit., p. 98.
15. Cairns, David, The Faith That Rebels. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1954. p. 116.
16. McGregor, Op. Cit., p. 48.
17. Baillie, John, The Sense of the Presence of God. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. 1962. Note especially chapter I, “Knowledge and Certitude.”
18. Barzun, Jacques, Science: The Glorious Entertainment. New York: Harper and Row, 1964. pp. 89, 79.
19. Heim, Karl, The Transformation of the Scientific World View. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1953. p. 55.
20. Christian Faith and Natural Science. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1953. p. 245.
21. Jeremiah 16:21.
22. Ezekiel 25:14.
23. Isaiah 1:3.
24. Thayer, J. H., Greek-English Lexicon. Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1953.
25. Moulton, J. H. Grammar of New Testament Greek, Vol. 1. Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1957. p. 68.
26. Hick, Op. Cit., p. 129.
27. Cullmann, Early Christian Worship. London: SCM, 1959., p. 44.