Speculation Versus Factuality: An Analysis Of Modern Unbelief

By John Warwick Montgomery

[John Warwick Montgomery is Distinguished Research Professor of Philosophy and Christian Thought, Patrick Henry College, Purcellville, Virginia.]

“Facts, facts, facts” insisted the great detective, Sherlock Holmes. “It is a capital mistake to theorize in advance of the facts.”[1] “I can discover facts, but I cannot change them.”[2] The theme of the present essay is remarkably simple, even though the arguments and illustrations supporting it are occasionally complex and difficult. It is this: Modern unbelief departs from factual reality in favor of unsupportable speculation, leaving its advocates in a never-never land without hope either in this world or the next.

The examination of this theme is restricted to the modern secular era, which may be viewed as having begun in the eigh-teenth century with the rise of modern secularism in the so-called “Enlightenment.” But substituting speculation for factuality did not begin there. An example is the great Marburg debate between Martin Luther and Ulrich Zwingli. The Swiss reformer argued that Christ could not be present in the Lord’s Supper. Why? Because, he argued, bodies can have only one location, and Christ had ascended into heaven, so that His body is located at the right hand of God. To this metaphysical speculation as to what Christ’s body could or could not do, Luther responded simply by writing again and again in chalk on the table, Hoc est corpus meum (“This is my body”).[3] In his writings Luther was prone to assert that “metaphor is the Devil’s tool.”[4]

Speculation has indeed been one of the enemy’s chief instruments in modern times. This article surveys the major areas of modern thought that illustrate this fact—the fields of philosophy, science, theology, literature, and legal culture. Then the article discusses why speculation is so dominant and what can be done to counteract it.

Areas Of Modern Misery

Philosophy

Central to what Thomas Paine termed the “Age of Reason” was the deistic conviction that God, having created a perfect world, would never intervene to perform miracles, much less undergo the Incarnation. David Hume asserted that it is always more probable that one reporting a miracle is a deceiver or mistaken than that the miracle actually occurred. So he said it is a waste of time to investigate any miracle claim. What trumps miracle evidence is “uniform experience against the miraculous.” He wrote, “It is no miracle that a man, seemingly in good health, should die on a sudden. . . . But it is a miracle, that a dead man should come to life; because that has never been observed in any age or country.”[5] The problem with this speculative argument is the brute fact that at least one dead man has returned to life and was indeed seen alive—in Palestine in the days of the Roman Empire. According to Hume speculative reason is permitted, in fact encouraged, to replace factual investigation.

The history of nineteenth-century German idealistic philosophy is the story of metaphysical speculation gone wild. Georg Hegel is the most egregious example. He held that the Weltgeist—the immanent world spirit of reason—is moving humanity to higher and higher levels and would eventually produce a state of perfect freedom.[6] Søren Kierkegaard rightly observed that such confidence in knowing the “essence” of the universe constitutes mere hubris, for no human being has the perspective to see the cosmic process in its totality. There is no way factually to justify such a viewpoint.

F. H. Bradley, the English Hegelian idealist, spoke along the same lines. “The Absolute enters into, but is itself incapable of, evolution and progress.”[7] How could such a claim be justified? As Woody Allen wrote, “Can we actually ‘know’ the universe? It’s hard enough finding your way around in Chinatown.”[8]

Twentieth-century atheistic existentialism is often regarded as a corrective to German idealism. Epistemologically, however, it commits the same overarching fallacy of speculating without concern for evidential support. As Martin Heidegger wrote, “What is to be investigated is being only and—nothing else. . . . Does the Nothing exist only because the Not, i.e. the Negation, exists? Or is it the other way around? . . . What about this Nothing?—The Nothing itself nothings.”[9]

Some are asserting that the world is entering a time of “metaphysical recovery” as a result of linguistic philosophy. If this means that cosmic speculation has been rehabilitated, that claim is doubtful. The central issue remains: Does ontology (one’s worldview) determine epistemology (the search for truth), or is it the reverse? In one sense ontology is fundamental, since when one commits to a method of investigating the universe, one starts with the unprovable assumptions that the world exists, and that the inferential functions of the human mind (deduction, induction, abduction) are valid. But those who start with substantive metaphysical views on the nature of the universe (deistic “Reason,” the Hegelian “world spirit,” existential “angst,” etc.) are setting forth mutually incompatible and unprovable pictures of the universe.

Facts need to determine the legitimacy or nonlegitimacy of worldviews, not the reverse. The story is told that when a student objected to Hegel with the comment, “But the facts disagree with your view,” Hegel replied, “Then the facts be hanged!” The story is doubtless apocryphal (it is also told of Immanuel Kant), but it well describes the staggering consequences of allowing metaphysics to swallow up an epistemological determination of the factual nature of things.[10]

Science

Close to philosophy lies the domain of cosmology. At University College Dublin, the present writer debated atheistic cosmologist Sean Carroll. When Carroll was confronted with the implications of the second law of thermodynamics, that the universe must be finite (and must therefore have been created), he responded that he was working on a repeal of the second law![11] The fact of entropy did not compel Carroll, as it certainly should have done, to find a more satisfactory route than the eternal existence of the universe; he preferred utterly unsupported speculation.

Non-Christian cosmologists have also appealed to the notion of “multiverses,” arguing that the universe may be only one of many and that other universes may obey totally different laws (and thus presumably, not be subject to the second law of thermodynamics or the equivalent, and so they do not need a creator). However, multiverses are pure speculation. Even if such universes existed (for which there is not a shred of evidence), their “laws” would either be the same as those in this universe, or if not, no one would be capable of comprehending them anyway. And there would need to be a “multiverse generator” to account for all of them, which again would need to be governed by physical laws or if not, they would be entirely incomprehensible and therefore a nonsensical subject of discussion.[12] Atheist-turned-deist Anthony Flew stated that the multiverse speculations are little more than “escape routes . . . to preserve the nontheist status quo.”[13] One is reminded of what physicist Wolfgang Pauli wrote in the margin of a colleague’s paper: “This isn’t right; it isn’t even wrong.”

Also secular endeavors seek to dispense with intelligent design, in spite of the impressive scientific evidence marshaled on its behalf. Orthodox evolutionism admits that there is no such thing as a single missing link, and that there is no way ever to provide such. Full-blown evolutionary theory depends on unlimited time periods for the required developments and transitions to occur. Yet time is not a causal concept: mere passage of time cannot bring about event x rather than events y or z. Given infinite time, anything can theoretically occur—including proof of the falsity of Richard Dawkins’s Blind Watchmaker scenario![14] “Huxley’s notion that monkeys typing at random long enough will eventually produce literature (‘the works of Shakespeare’) has been tested at Plymouth University, England: over time, the monkeys (1) attacked the computer, (2) urinated on it, and (3) failed to produce a single word (AP dispatch, 9 May 2003).”[15]

Another stimulating example of the pervasiveness of speculation versus factuality lies in recent attempts to understand computers as “minds.” John Searle, in his celebrated Chinese Room Argument, argues against what he calls “strong Artificial Intelligence”—the claim that an appropriately programmed computer has cognitive states such as understanding and is therefore necessarily a mind. Even if computers do not now seem to have arrived at the point of mind, all that is needed is to add something to them to achieve this. The theory is that “one need only find out what necessary additional properties come with what sorts of programs, and then on the basis of that knowledge design the Right Program that could not be run without producing mental states.” Searle correctly replies to this idea of brain simulation that “our current knowledge of the brain does not give us any clue as to what to simulate, and the hypothetical future knowledge might turn out to exclude the possibility of computational simulation.”

This response is correct, since the entire strong AI (Artificial Intelligence) position is based on nothing but pure speculation. Searle’s own position of biological naturalism seems in tension with his eminently sound assertion that “anything else that caused minds would have to have causal powers at least equivalent to those of the brain.”[16] Following this factual route, one would seem to arrive at a rational source of human rationality, that is, an Intelligent Designer.

Modern thinking moves so far from the realm of factuality that attempts have even been made to argue that scientific activity is really not the product of factual investigation of the nature of things but is the result of the metaphysical presuppositions, commitments, and Weltanschauung of the scientist. The most prominent example of this is the celebrated “Kuhn thesis.” Thomas Kuhn’s argument is that one major scientific paradigm replaces another because of a shift in metaphysical orientation, not because increased factual knowledge leads to a better understanding of things.[17] Granted, changes in the ideological climate may contribute to movements in scientific theory, and questionable scientific notions can arise or succeed because of the Zeitgeist (evolutionary theory was readily accepted because of the nineteenth-century myth of inevitable progress). But good science moves from one paradigm to another as a result of “crucial experiments.” For example Albert Einstein’s special theory of relativity, which reduced Newtonian physics to a special case within relativity theory, was ultimately accepted when the Michelson-Morley experiment used “ether” as a universal medium for the transmission of electromagnetic waves.

Where the subject-object distinction is discarded or weakened, meaningful scientific investigation disappears. “Bohr has emphasized the fact that the observer and his instruments must be presupposed in any investigation, so that the instruments are not part of the phenomenon described but are used.”[18] One thinks of humorist Robert Benchley’s story of his (anything but scientific) experience in his college biology course. He spent the term carefully drawing the image of his own eyelash as it fell across the microscopic field. And one recalls the suspicion that Italian astronomer Schiaparelli’s canals on Mars were in part the result of an incipient cataract in his own eye.

Werner Heisenberg’s indeterminacy principle does not break the subject-object distinction, since any possibility of the validity of that principle requires presupposing the subject-object distinction. Were Heisenberg himself interlocked with his data, his formulation of the principle would not necessarily reflect physical reality but rather his personal perspective on the world.

Michael Polanyi’s position in this regard is not entirely clear, but his notion of “personal knowledge” does not, as some have suggested, “overcome the subjective-objective divide.”[19] True, as Polanyi says, the scientist is “passionately interested in the outcome of the procedure,” but Polanyi is equally correct when he observes that the scientist functions “as detective, policeman, judge, and jury all rolled into one. He apprehends certain clues as suspect, formulates the charge and examines the evidence both for and against it, admitting or rejecting such parts of it as he thinks fit, and finally pronounces judgment.”[20]

Theology

Since the onset of modern secularism liberal theology has offered a series of truly wild speculations on which ecclesiastical edifices can supposedly be built.

Starting from eighteenth-century suggestions that the early books of the Bible might be later, editorial compilations, German nineteenth-century “higher criticism” (Graf, Kuenen, Wellhausen) speculated that the Pentateuch was actually a tenth-century B.C. and later “paste-up” of four sources: J (using “Jehovah/Yahweh” as the word for God), E (using “Elohim” as the word for God), P (the priestly, or sacrificial, material), and D (the legal material). No such subdocuments have ever been found. The theory is based entirely on the assumption that literary variations in style and vocabulary prove multiple authorship. By the mid-twentieth century the number of alleged sources had multiplied. Matthias Morgenstern of Hebrew Union College was dividing the hypothetical K source into K proper and K1. A “Polycrome Bible,” projected to display these sources by diverse colored typefaces, was never published. This was because the critics could not agree on the sources or where one started and another left off.

By the twentieth century the higher (or redaction or Formgeschichtliche Methode) critics had moved on to employ this same approach to the New Testament. The four Gospels were said not to have been written as unified documents by their traditional authors, but were held to be compilations of earlier source material. The early Christian communities were supposed to have done the editing—in a manner to convey their diverse “faith experiences” through the pictures of Jesus they created. Again no documents have ever been found to confirm such a thesis, and the earliest postbiblical Christian writers say just the opposite; they maintain that their teachings represent a fixed apostolic tradition derived from the actual words and deeds of the historical Jesus.

Rudolf Bultmann, one of the most influential higher critics of the New Testament, asserted that the historical details of Jesus’ life were of no consequence anyway, since one’s personal, existential experience of Jesus is all that counts theologically. What is needed biblically is just the Dass—the “thatness” of Jesus—that someone by that name existed. The contemporary Jesus Seminar now votes on the historical value of the Gospel materials, using colored balls to represent the varied materials, ranging from what the early church added (virtually everything) to what can in fact be attributed to Jesus (very, very little).[21]

These conclusions are entirely the product of stylistic judgment and the identification of supposed inconsistencies in the Gospel accounts. None of the dismemberments or dehistoricisings by liberal biblical critics depends on actual manuscript sources preceding the New Testament documents. As already noted, the very existence of such materials is entirely speculative.

Interestingly these critical methods have been found wanting in classical scholarship (Homeric criticism), in parallel Near Eastern studies (Ugaritic literature), and even in the study of the English ballad tradition. C. S. Lewis pointed out that when reviewers tried to use the same kind of subjective, stylistic analysis to uncover the true sources of his Narnian stories, they never succeeded—and they were operating in Lewis’s own time, in his own language. How then, asked Lewis, do critics think they can succeed on a similar basis with biblical materials preceding them by two thousand years and deriving from cultures and languages alien to their own?[22]

Once the biblical documents have been dismissed as unhistorical, theological doctrine inevitably becomes a matter of speculation as well. Karl Barth desperately wanted to hold to the gospel of Christ’s death for mankind’s sins and resurrection for the believers’ justification, but he also wanted to accept the so-called “assured results of modern biblical criticism.” He hit on Martin Kähler’s distinction between “ordinary history” (Historie) and “suprahistory” or “salvation history” (Geschichte). The latter included the miraculous events recorded of Jesus, such as His resurrection, which happened, he said, not in ordinary, verifiable history, but in the realm of suprahistory, accessible only by faith.[23] To this Bultmann countered, and with good reason, “Then why regard such events as historical at all?” Thus the saving events of Christ’s life were walled off from historical criticism—but at the expense of no longer being part of normal history.

Paul Tillich stated early in his career that he was attempting to find a basis for Christian theology that could stand even if the very existence of the historical Jesus became improbable.[24] Tillich’s solution was to try to lay a foundation for theology in “Being Itself”—in Friedrich Schelling’s philosophical ontology. But did this mean that God is coterminous with the world (i.e., is He a pantheistic Deity?) or just that God is the “Ground of All Being” (in which case His existence would still need factual support)? Tillich never answered this. Christ becomes the source of the “New Being,” but without any necessary biblical or historical support. The “Protestant Principle” is set forth: every theological idea must be subject to criticism, otherwise it becomes idolatrous. But would this not mean that Tillich’s own ontological theology can be subjected to the same critical negation? The death-of-God theologians of the 1960s (especially Thomas Altizer) thought so, and thus within the framework of mainline liberal theology God Himself died.[25]

Literature And The Arts

Postmodern literary interpretation, as exemplified by Jacques Derrida, maintains that the meaning of a literary work resides in the interpreter. Works of literature are therefore not to be understood as having an objective, factual meaning residing within them, capable of being discovered by careful exegesis. Rather they are open to creative deconstruction by the sensitive critic.

Literary scholar Frederick C. Crews “analyzed” A. A. Milne’s children’s classic Winnie the Pooh through assuming the guise of “several academicians of varying critical persuasions.”[26] Here is a series of hilarious examples of what invariably happens when interpreters allow themselves total personal latitude in the handling of their texts. “Harvey C. Window,” author of a dehistoricizing casebook writes on the “paradoxical” in Pooh; for him “all great literature is more complex than the naive reader can suspect,” the literal meaning is to give way to “multivalent symbolism,” and when the events of the book do not fit his paradoxical categories, they are reinterpreted until they do so.

“P. R. Honeycomb,” a poetical contributor to the “little magazines” who engages in “intensely personal criticism,” brings his existential stance to bear on the text: “In wondering what I shall set down next in these notations, I am reminded of Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle. The only thing that is certain is that I am uncertain what to set down next, and in this I typify the whole modern age and the collision of elementary particles in particular, a fact I find peculiarly comforting.” “Myron Masterson,” a distinguished “angry young man” writes on “Poisoned Paradise: The Underside of Pooh,” employing as his guides Karl Marx, St. John of the Cross, Friedrich Nietzsche, Sacco and Vanzetti, Sigmund Freud, and C. G. Jung; he rejects those finicky “experts” who have said that “there exist differences of opinion among these thinkers,” for, after all, “each of them has helped to shape my literary and moral consciousness.”

“Woodbine Meadowlark,” a perpetual graduate student romantically overwhelmed by the Angst of existence, paints a “poohological” picture in exact conformity with his worldview.

The most perfect emblem of ignorance is contained in the “Woozle” scene, which has Pooh and Piglet (ethereal, pure-hearted Piglet, the real hero of the book) wandering helplessly in circles, following their own darling little tracks and misconceiving their goal ever more thoroughly as they proceed. Is this not the very essence of modern man, aching with existential nausée and losing himself more deeply in despair as his longing for certainty waxes?

“Simon Lacerous,” editor of the quarterly Thumbscrew, describes Pooh as “Another Book to Cross Off Your List” and terminates his acid analysis by completely losing the subject-object distinction between the book and himself: “The more I think about it, the more convinced I become that Christopher Robin not only hates everything I stand for, he hates me personally.” Finally, “Smedley Force,” a spokesman for “responsible criticism,” completely submerges the text by his interest in literary antecedents, conjectural emendations, and the “discovery” of errors and inconsistencies in the book. Such endeavours, he is convinced, place humans “on the threshold of the Golden Age of POOH!”

The point of Crews’s volume is simply that if interpreters are allowed this kind of existential, postmodern latitude, all meaningful interpretation collapses and no one will understand the meaning of any text under analysis.

Fortunately the desire to avoid just such a “golden age of Pooh,” has led more and more responsible literary critics to reject the so-called “hermeneutical circle”—the claim that the interpreter and the object of interpretation are inextricably locked together so that not only does the object influence the interpreter but also the interpreter colors what he or she interprets, thus making objective interpretation impossible in principle. The path out of the “Pooh perplex” is exemplified by Elder Olson’s “Hamlet and the Hermeneutics of Drama,”[27] in which Olson defines a perfect interpretation as “one which is absolutely commensurate in its basic, inferential, and evaluative propositions with the data, the implications, and the values contained within the work.”[28] But to follow that route would, of course, mean a return to a world in which literary works have a factual meaning of their own, apart from the speculations of their critics.

Literature is not by any means the only cultural area in the modern secular world where factual reality is ignored. For example Magritte’s celebrated painting declares both that reality has no objective meaning and that language and reality are entirely disconnected.

The fields of music and photography are likewise not exempt from the secular effort to make imaginative creation the only reality. No longer bound by the traditional rules, composers were forced to create their own. Schoenberg, Webern, and Berg explored serialism, Cage threw out the bathwater (and some would say the baby), continuing with the chaos of his own imagination. . . .

So too with photography: through the discipline’s history, artistic photographers have been limited by images in the physical world—even with burgeoning manipulations, they have depended on existing images as starting points. No longer. Today, photographers are almost completely free of the rules imposed by the real world.[29]

Conservative Roman Catholic essayist and novelist Georges Bernanos, while properly condemning the evils of twentieth-century materialism and technocracy, went much too far when he declared: “On ne comprend absolument rien à la civilization moderne si l’on n’admet pas d’abord qu’elle est une conspiration universelle contre toute espèce de vie intérieure.”[30] (“One understands absolutely nothing about modern civilization if he does not admit in the first place that it is a universal conspiracy against the inner life in all its aspects.”) In fact one understands absolutely nothing about modern civilization unless he starts by admitting that it is a global conspiracy against every sort of extrinsic, objective factuality—and an idolization of the subjective, inner life.

Law And Society

One would think that the legal treatment of constitutions, statutes, judicial decisions, contracts, wills, and the like should follow standard interpretive canons. And this has indeed been the case through the history of the Anglo-American and the European civil law traditions. Such rules of “construction” as the so-called “literal rule” have been sacrosanct: words are to be given “their ordinary and literal meaning.”[31] Lord Bacon put it aphoristically: “Non est interpretatio, sed divinatio, quae recedit a litera” (Interpretation that departs from the letter of the text is not interpretation but divination).[32] One only employs other canons of interpretation, such as the “mischief rule” (finding the purpose of the enactment, decision, or text) when literal construction would lead to absurdity.

But in contemporary American jurisprudence another very different approach has come on the scene: the so-called Critical Legal Studies movement.[33] CLS, as it is popularly known, appeared on the American law-school scene in the 1970s; it has since become an important influence in British legal education as well. The two most noteworthy advocates of the position are Roberto Unger and Duncan Kennedy, whose emphases and concerns, while differing in certain respects, are fundamentally the same.[34] These thinkers build on the pragmatic, social orientation of American legal realism, and carry to a far greater extreme Llewellyn’s view that formal legal judgments are little more than rationalizations of social practice. For CLS, the law is to be viewed from the standpoint of radical skepticism, and all legal judgment is a matter of choosing one set of values over another. That being so, the purpose of legal activity is not a search for principles of justice embedded in and developed by the legal tradition, but the conscious advancement of a political vision. The law is inherently indeterminate; its literature has no single and objective meaning, being capable of virtually any interpretation; legal principles are contradictory; in the final analysis the law is but a tool generally serving the interests of the powerful and the maintenance of the status quo.

This approach subordinates the meaning of legal texts to the interests (political, social) of the interpreter, and thus has strong affinities with the deconstructionist literary schools discussed earlier. Even though American judges would not generally want to be identified as adherents of CLS, they quite regularly handle their cases in a pragmatic, sociological fashion. The most egregious—and tragic—example is surely the 1973 U.S. Supreme Court abortion decision in Roe v. Wade, in which the Court refused to be influenced by the objective fact that the entire genetic-chromosomal pattern of the human person is created at the moment of conception, and instead the Court let pragmatic, instrumentalist issues determine the legal outcome.[35] Here untrammeled speculation and legal theorizing in the face of scientific fact have led to the loss of millions of human lives.[36]

On the social scene one encounters a remarkably similar phenomenon: the substitution of a personally constructed reality for the world as it actually is. A perceptive recent analysis—albeit touched by some outmoded leftist ideas—is Barbara Ehrenreich’s book Bright-Sided.[37] Speaking of the current economic turndown and the subprime catastrophe, she says, “American corporate culture had long since abandoned the dreary rationality of professional management for the emotional thrills of mysticism, charisma, and sudden intuitions.”[38] The root problem? One reviewer describes her argument as follows.

She begins with a look at where positive thinking originated, from its founding parents in the New Thought Movement (inventors of the law of attraction, recently made famous in books such as The Secret) through mid-twentieth-century practitioners like Norman Vincent Peale and Dale Carnegie, to current disciples ranging from Oprah Winfrey to the preachers of the prosperity gospel. We’re not talking here about garden-variety hopefulness or genuine happiness, but rather the philosophy that individuals create—rather than encounter—their own circumstances. . . . Positive thinking, in Ehrenreich’s view, has become a kind of national religion.[39]

Here reality disappears. Through “positive psychology” the individual and the nation can make of the status quo an illusory ideal, or construct it in any fashion whatsoever, since all is plastic and open to re-creation.

A Suggested Corrective

The manifold problems just discussed have a common denominator: the disregard of fact and the substitution of speculation for reality. The following suggests a way out of this morass and offers a short analysis of why modern culture entered this quagmire in the first place.

The Proposal

The formal error in secularist speculation is epistemological; it relates to how one arrives at truth. If one believes that truth depends in the final analysis on one’s own stance, the problems described here will follow as night follows day. Philosophically one needs to distinguish the real world from one’s encounter with it. The subject-object distinction is the beginning of epistemological wisdom. As Sigmund Freud, of all people, put it, “If there were no such things as knowledge distinguished from our opinions by corresponding to reality, we might build bridges just as well out of cardboard as out of stone.”[40]

No one seriously questions that interpreters are capable of regarding the object of interpretation in an almost infinite number of ways, depending on the interpreter’s background, prejudices, and interests. The question is, Ought one to do so? Are there objective limits to interpretation, created by the factual nature of what one is interpreting, that should restrain the interpreter?

This question has long been raised in the field of constitutional interpretation. Does the American federal constitution, for example, have an inherent meaning that should bind future generations of legal interpreters and judges, or is it a document capable of infinite reunderstandings by each subsequent generation, according to present interests and needs? If the latter, does not the constitution lose all normative force? That is the judgment of those thinkers who argue (as did Chief Justice John Marshall) that texts must be understood in their original sense, not twisted to fit the interpreter's agenda. Robert Bork admits to the difficulty of psychoanalysing the founding fathers to discover what they really “intended” in framing the American constitution (the dilemma thrown up by liberal constitutionalists such as Laurence Tribe), and so he prefers the expression “original understanding” to the more common phrase “original intent.” “What we’re really talking about [is] not what the authors of the Bill of Rights had in the backs of their minds, but what people who voted for this thing understood themselves to be voting for.”[41]

If, however, trying to determine the “original intent” of the author over and above his text poses extreme problems (Sibelius, for example, was hopeless in trying to explain the true intent and significance of his Finlandia!), the same dilemma attaches to the original audience of the text; they too may have misunderstood it—for any number of personal, societal, or cultural reasons.

Thus the most sophisticated academic analysis of legal interpretation—or of interpretation in general—is surely the Wittgenstein-Popper approach: the analogy of the shoe and the foot. Interpretation is like a shoe and the text like the foot. One endeavors to find the interpretation that best fits the text (allowing the text itself to determine this). Here “intent” or “understanding” is decided by the text itself.[42]

Such an approach is another way of stating the principle that “the text must be allowed to interpret itself”—in the sense that when different or contradictory interpretations of it are offered, each will be brought to the text to see which fits best. Interpretations therefore function like scientific theories that are arbitrated by the facts they endeavor to explain: the facts ultimately decide the value of one’s attempts to understand them.[43]

In the Wittgenstein-Popper model the interpreter of course brings his prejudices (a prioris, presuppositions, biases) to the text, but it is the text that judges them also. And the meaning of the text is not to be established by extrinsic considerations, such as the background, prejudices, or stance of the interpreter, for that would yield an infinite regress. If the given fact or text has no inherent meaning and one must appeal beyond it to the interpreter for its true signification, then that must also be true of the extrinsic facts to which one appeals.

The Wittgenstein-Popper approach to texts has direct application to investigation of the world in general. People are to seek the best explanations of what they encounter, whether in literature, science, religion, history, law, or everyday life—that is, the explanations that best “fit the facts.”

One may notice a certain affinity here with the so-called “Scottish common-sense philosophy” of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries (represented by Thomas Reid and others), which is often regarded as simplistic.[44] And yet the principle of Occam’s razor is applicable also to epistemology, all things being equal: the simpler solution is better than a complex solution. If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, chances are that it is not a platypus.[45]

Does this approach militate against “faith”? Did not Augustine teach, “Credo ut intellegam”—that one must first believe in order to understand? If Christians take this Augustinian axiom to mean that truth can be found only through one’s personal stance, then they fall into exactly the same pit as secularists.

Augustine’s statement may be regarded in two ways, and they must be distinguished. First, the phrase can mean “all truth begins with prior faith”—or in modern parlance every worldview commences with unprovable assumptions. This is true enough, but this overlooks the fact that although all unprovable assumptions are equal, some are more equal than others. That is to say, it is vital to start with (admittedly undemonstrable) methods of investigation—deduction stemming from the law of noncontradiction, induction, retroductive inference—rather than with full-blown worldviews, none of which can be confirmed or denied if there is no commonly accepted methodology for distinguishing fact from nonfact.

Second, Augustine’s phrase can mean “belief is the foundation of true understanding,” and that too is correct. Until one enters into a personal belief relationship with the object of one’s search for truth, one understands only from the outside. Interiorizing fact is the only way to comprehend it fully. Understanding marriage theoretically is a far cry from comprehending it from the inside, when one actually marries. The classical theologians rightly insisted that faith entails not just notitia (factual knowledge), but also public commitment to it (fides), and, most important, fiducia (a personal, living relationship with the Author of gospel truth).

But it is still of absolute importance to believe in what is indeed genuine factual knowledge. In religion the object of belief is paramount. “The magic of believing” can be dark magic. Belief as such saves no one. Anyone who believes in a false god or a false faith system will indeed “understand” it in the deepest way—but that will entail damnation rather than eternal life. So as the Scriptures say, one must “test the spirits” (1 John 4:1), not naively assume that any kind of belief is sufficient for the proper understanding of things. And non-Christians need to be helped factually to see that only Jesus is (as He Himself proclaimed) “the Way, the Truth, and the Life” (John 14:6), and therefore the only proper object of religious faith.

One must therefore start by investigating the world so as to arrive at factual truth. In religion this means investigating the case for the Word—both Christ, the living Word, and the Holy Scriptures, the written Word—and follow the positive results of that search with a personal commitment to Christ as Lord. When He said, “I am the Truth,” He was telling those who had seen Him heal the sick and raise the dead that they needed not only to accept those evidences of His deity but also to enter into a personal relationship with Him for time and for eternity.

Why Do Secularists Prefer Speculation To Fact?

Why have so many areas of modern life fallen under the sway of secular speculation rather than adjusting to the factual nature of things? Why would anyone prefer unfounded speculation to factual reality?

One explanation frequently heard in the history of ideas places the burden essentially on the social conservatism of traditional Christianity. Until the French Revolution, theology was comfortable absolutizing the political and social status quo. The “Great Chain of Being,”[46] as classically formulated in early medieval times by Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, related the “Ecclesiastical Hierarchies” (the structures of church organization on earth) to the “Heavenly Hierarchies” (the graduated tiers of angelic and demonic beings).[47] When combined with a notion of the divine right of kings, human social organization appeared to be an unalterable fact to which everyone must bow.[48] Thus when revolutionary thinking recognized quite rightly that social structures were but human constructs, not divine orders,[49] this placed a question mark over all accepted beliefs. Modern man then asked if perhaps the whole world was inherently pliable—open to speculation and manipulation in all respects.

There is certainly a point to the claim that professing Christians contributed, if inadvertently, to the secular move from fact to speculation. Indeed, whenever Christians have identified political and social conservatism with the will of God, great harm has been done; legitimate critics of the status quo have been led to believe that Christianity supports entrenched injustice.[50] But the reason today’s secularists prefer speculation to factuality goes deeper than historical considerations.

The trouble with facts is that one has to subordinate oneself to them—to succumb to them. The world is no longer plastic, able to be adjusted to fit one’s personal desires and interests. The attractive thing about speculation is that it places the speculator at the center; the world can be readjusted as he or she wishes. Speculation and autonomous self-centredness go hand in hand.

Martin Luther criticized Erasmus for treating the Bible as a “waxed nose” that he could twist in any direction he wished.[51] The secularist—the man without God—wants to create his own universe untrammeled by anything. Someone has rightly said, “First God created us in His image, and ever since we have been returning the compliment.” The secularist wants to become his or her own god, creating a world that will be maximally satisfying and personally undemanding.

This move seems particularly evident in the arts. Parallel with the speculative operations described earlier, the contemporary secular artist has eschewed attempts to represent the world or to plumb its depths as did Michelangelo and Rembrandt and has preferred in postimpressionism to give vent to personal expressions that leave the meaning of artistic works to the vagaries of each individual observer.

As Dostoyevsky recognized in The Brothers Karamazov, “If God doesn’t exist, then everything is permitted.” If there is no transcendent God who has revealed His will to humankind, then it follows inexorably that “anything goes,” and thus that any and all speculations are possible. From here it is a short step to the most bizarre explanations, such as Francis Crick’s naturalistic proposal for explaining the origins of life on earth. He said that the basic genetic structure of bacterial DNA was seeded from outer space—a theory without a modicum of empirical support![52]

Facts are a serious impediment to unbelief. The factual case for intelligent design is far better than the case for a godless, irrational universe. The evidence for the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, and thus the soundness of His claim to Deity, is far better than the speculative truth claims of other religions and the sects.[53]

The speculator is like the builders of the Tower of Babel. Without a fragment of evidence and against all reason, they attempted to erect a building that would reach to heaven. All they received for their Herculean efforts was a confusion of languages, the loss of meaningful discourse. And that is precisely the case with the modern world.

What is needed is more, not less, factuality. As Paul said to the Stoic philosopher Seneca (c. 4 B.C.–A.D. 65) in a recent French dramatic production, “It’s not a question of believing or not believing: it’s enough to open one’s eyes!”[54] People need to open their eyes to God’s facts, as embedded in the creation. They need to open their eyes to the facts of Christ, as manifested “by many infallible proofs” (Acts 1:3), the facts of His life, death, and resurrection. They need to open their eyes to the factual presence of the Holy Spirit, promised by Christ Himself, as He convicts the world of sin, righteousness, and judgment.

As Sherlock Holmes said, “We are suffering from a plethora of surmise, conjecture, and hypothesis. The difficulty is to detach the framework of fact—of absolute undeniable fact—from the embellishments of theorists.”[55]

Notes

1. From Arthur Canon Doyle, “The Adventure of the Second Stain.” Cf. also Holmes’s remarks in Arthur Canon Doyle, “A Scandal in Bohemia”; “The Adventure of the Copper Beeches”; “The Adventure of Shoscombe Old Place”; and A Study in Scarlet. In general see John Warwick Montgomery, The Transcendent Holmes (Ashcroft, BC: Calabash, 2000), 126.
2. Arthur Conan Doyle, The Problem of Thor Bridge.
3. See the scholarly reconstruction of the Marburg Colloquy by Herman Sasse, This Is My Body (Minneapolis: Augsburg, 1959).
4. John Warwick Montgomery, Crisis in Lutheran Theology, rev. ed. (Minneapolis: Bethany House, 1973), 1:66-70.
5. David Hume, Enquiries concerning the Human Understanding, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1902), 115. Cf. J. Earman, Hume’s Abject Failure: The Argument against Miracles (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000); and David Johnson, Hume, Holism, and Miracles (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999).
6. See John Warwick Montgomery, Where Is History Going? Essays in Support of the Historical Truth of Christian Revelation (Minneapolis: Bethany House, 1969), 18-19; and idem, The Shape of the Past: A Christian Response to Secular Philosophies of History, 2nd ed. (Minneapolis: Bethany House, 1975), 70-72.
7. See Montgomery, Crisis in Lutheran Theology, 1:26-27.
8. Woody Allen, “My Philosophy,” New Yorker, December 27, 1969, 25-26. See also Woody Allen’s, “Thus Ate Zarathustra,” New Yorker, July 3, 2006.
9. Martin Heidegger, Was Ist Metaphysik? (Bonn: F. Cohen, 1929), quoted in Rudolf Carnap, “The Elimination of Metaphysics through Logical Analysis of Language,” in Logical Positivism, ed. A. J. Ayer (Glencoe, IL: Free, 1959), 69 (italics are Heidegger’s). Carnap decimates this argument (ibid., 69-73).
10. But can language represent the real nature of things? Apparently Willard van Orman Quine did not think so (Word and Object [Cambridge, MA: M.I.T., 1964], 29-54). If a translator hears a native cry “Gavagai!” as a rabbit appears, this could mean the physical rabbit, but it could also mean “a rabbit is here momentarily,” or even just “the quality of rabbitness.” So allegedly there is no inherent correlation between things and signification or between language and reality (cf. Philosophie Magazine, November, 2009, 75). But it should be obvious that such an argument does not eliminate facticity or objectivity: (1) what appears is a rabbit and not a hippopotamus; (2) the range of meaning of “Gavagai!” does not extend beyond rabbithood; (3) no one is questioning the factual existence of the rabbit, the native, or the translator.
11. See John Warwick Montgomery’s writeup of the debate in “God at University College Dublin,” Modern Reformation 18 (January–February 2009): 32-34, 43, reprinted in idem, Christ as Centre and Circumference (Bonn, Germany: Verlag für Kultur und Wissenschaft, forthcoming).
12. Cf. Jeff Zweerink, Who’s Afraid of the Multiverse? (Glendora, CA: Reasons to Believe, 2009). Sadly, Stephen Hawking has succumbed to multiverse illogic, recently claiming that since there are a vast number of possible universes, some (including ours) would simply by chance have the properties needed for the existence of life. Indeed, “spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist. It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going” (Stephen Hawking and Leonard Miodinow, The Grand Design [New York: Bantam, 2010], 180).
13. Antony Flew and R. A. Varghese, There Is a God (New York: HarperOne, 2008).
14. Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker, new ed. (New York: Norton, 1996).
15. John Warwick Montgomery, Tractatus Logico-Theologicus, 4th ed. (Bonn, Germany: Verlag für Kultur und Wissenschaft, 2009), 3.86111.
16. See the valuable discussion in Josef Moural, “The Chinese Room Argument,” in John Searle, ed. Barry Smith (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 214-60.
17. Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 3rd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). The literature on the Kuhn thesis and its difficulties is considerable.
18. Victor F. Lenzen, Procedures of Empirical Science (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1938), 28.
19. Mark T. Mitchell, Michael Polanyi: The Art of Knowing, Library of Modern Thinkers (Wilmington, DE: ISI, 2006), 90-91.
20. Ibid.
21. The Jesus Seminar, noting that the nonpublication of the “Polycrome Bible” was because of a hopeless lack of scholarly unanimity on the critics’ part, has managed, by employing the Seminar’s voting system, to publish a color-coded edition of the Gospels (including the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas). See Robert W. Funk, Roy W. Hoover, and the Jesus Seminar, The Five Gospels: The Search for the Authentic Words of Jesus (New York: Macmillan, 1993). Their conclusions as to the historical accuracy (better, inaccuracy) of Jesus’ sayings and deeds are based not on any existing documents preceding the canonical Gospels, but solely on their personal speculations concerning the literary aspects—style, etc.—of the canonical material.
22. C. S. Lewis, Christian Reflections, ed. Walter Hooper (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1994).
23. See John Warwick Montgomery, “Karl Barth and Contemporary Philosophy of History,” in Where Is History Going? ed. John Warwick Montgomery (Minneapolis: Bethany House, 1969), 100-117.
24. See John Warwick Montgomery, “Tillich’s Philosophy of History,” in Where Is History Going? 118-40.
25. John Warwick Montgomery, The Suicide of Christian Theology (Minneapolis: Bethany House, 1970), 76-173. See also idem, La Mort de Dieu, 2nd ed. (Bonn, Germany: Verlag für Kultur und Wissenschaft, 2009).
26. Frederick C. Crews, The Pooh Perplex (New York: Dutton, 1965).
27. Elder Olson, “Hamlet and the Hermeneutics of Drama,” Modern Philology 61 (February 1964): 225-37.
28. Ibid., 227-28.
29. Garth Sundem, The Geeks’ Guide to World Domination (New York: Three Rivers, 2009), 151.
30. Georges Bernanos, La France contre les robots (Bordeaux: Castor Astral, 2009). Bernanos (1888-1948) is best known for his Journal d’un curé de campagne (The Diary of a Country Priest).
31. Cf. Lord Esher in R v. Judge of the City of London Court (1892), 1 QB 273.
32. See John Warwick Montgomery, Law and Gospel: A Study in Jurisprudence, 2nd ed. (Calgary, AB: Canadian Institute for Law, Theology and Public Policy, 1995), 24-26. See also idem, “Legal Hermeneutics and the Interpretation of Scripture,” in Evangelical Hermeneutics, ed. Michael Bauman and David Hall (Camp Hill, PA: Christian, 1995), 15-29.
33. Thankfully this movement has had practically no influence on European philosophy of law.
34. On CLS see the citations in John Warwick Montgomery, “Modern Theology and Contemporary Legal Theory,” in Christ Our Advocate (Bonn, Germany: Verlag für Kultur und Wissenschaft, 2002), 32-33.
35. See John Warwick Montgomery, Slaughter of the Innocents (Westchester, IL: Crossway, 1981).
36. In diametric contrast to CLS, Matthew H. Kramer, professor of legal and political philosophy at Cambridge University, argues extensively that “objectivity . . . is integral to every system of legal governance” (Objectivity and the Rule of Law [Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007], 232).
37. Barbara Ehrenreich, Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Pursuit of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America (New York: Henry Holt, 2009). See also Hanna Rosin’s parallel treatment of the prosperity gospel in her trenchant article, “Did Christianity Cause the Crash?” The Atlantic, December 2009, 38-48.
38. Ehrenreich, Bright-Sided, 184.
39. Kate Tuttle, “The Downside of Cheering Up,” Washington Post, November 15, 2009.
40. Sigmund Freud, New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, ed. and trans. James Strachey (New York: Penguin, 1973), 212-13.
41. Robert Bork, in “Bork v. Tribe on Natural Law, the Ninth Amendment, the Role of the Court,” Life, fall special, 1991, 96-99. For his position in detail see idem, “Neutral Principles and Some First Amendment Problems,” 47/1 Indiana Law Jour-nal (fall 1971); and idem, The Tempting of America (New York: Free, 1990). Cf. Ethan Bronner, Battle for Justice: How the Bork Nomination Shook America (New York: Norton, 1989).
42. Though Karl Popper developed this analogy in dependence on Ludwig Wittgenstein’s philosophical insights, the two were very uncomfortable with each other. See the brilliant treatment by David Edmonds and John Eidinow, Wittgenstein’s Poker (London: Faber and Faber, 2001).
43. Cf. Montgomery, “The Theologian’s Craft,” in The Suicide of Christian Theology, 267-313.
44. One should not forget that this epistemology was fundamental to the solid biblical theology and apologetics of Old Princeton theology (Archibald Alexander, Charles Hodge, Benjamin B. Warfield). Of their “Christian Baconianism” a careful scholar of the subject has declared, “The Princeton Theology . . . with its historical pillars resting squarely upon the Baconian Philosophy of facts, is an important bridge across which influences continue to stream from antebellum to present-day American religion” (Theodore Dwight Bozeman, Protestants in an Age of Science [Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1977], 173).
45. Contrary to Christian philosopher Nicholas Wolterstorff, Thomas Reid’s common-sense epistemology in no sense requires the rejection of classical foundationalism or one’s being left only with the issue of interpreting reality (hermeneutics).
46. Cf. Arthur Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being: A Study of the History of an Idea (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1957).
47. See Pseudo-Dionysius:The Complete Works, trans. Colm Luibheid, ed. Paul Rorem et al. (New York: Paulist, 1987).
48. Cf. John Neville Figgis, The Divine Right of Kings (New York: Harper, 1965); and Roland Mousnier, Les Institutions de France sous la monarchie absolue, 1598-1789 (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2005), part 1, chap. 15.
49. Even though any given sociopolitical order is not revelationally derivable or divinely inspired, this does not say that political order in general is purely a human creation. The Reformers were quite right in holding to Schöpfungsordnungen (“Orders of Creation”) imbedded in a fallen world by God to keep sinners from destroying themselves. See Emil Brunner, The Divine Imperative (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1947); and Werner Elert, The Christian Ethos, discussed in John Warwick Montgomery, The Shape of the Past (Minneapolis: Bethany, 1975), 358-74.
50. John Warwick Montgomery, “Evangelical Social Responsibility in Theological Perspective,” in Our Society in Turmoil, ed. Gary Collins (Carol Stream, IL: Creation House, 1970), reprinted in Christians in the Public Square (Calgary, AL: Canadian Institute for Law, Theology and Public Policy, 1994) and The Church: Blessing or Curse? (Calgary, AB: Canadian Institute for Law, Theology, and Public Policy, 2006).
51. Cf. Montgomery, In Defense of Martin Luther, 70-75.
52. Francis Crick, Life Itself: Its Origin and Nature (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1982).
53. Montgomery, Tractatus Logico-Theologicus, passim.
54. “Il n’est pas question de croire ou de ne pas croire, il suffit d’ouvrir les yeux!” (Xavier Jaillard, Après l’incendie: Saint Paul et Sénèque; pièce en 8 tableaux [Levallois-Perret: ACTE, 2007], 11). Paul and Seneca were contemporaries, though there is no historical record of their actually having met.
55. Arthur Conan Doyle, “The Adventure of Silver Blaze.” Cf. John Warwick Montgomery, “How Many Holmeses? How Many Watsons?” Baker Street Journal (summer 2002): 26-30.