Experience and Knowing: Why do we Believe?

I probably should have gone through this stage already... we all know the commonplace "The more you know, the less you know." Anyway, even if it's all old hat, it is probably useful to review, because it relates to how we talk about God and Christianity and the big things we believe. The short answer to the title question is that we just do. The long answer is below.

Our idea of knowing - it's kind of problematic. Some people had this idea (I think it was Locke that really picked up on this) that what we know for certain is only what we experience with our senses. Some other people worried that we can't actually know anything for certain because our sense mediate reality - so somewhere in the process of perceiving, we're transforming reality into something else. Still other people retorted that if we can't truly get at reality, then reality is our perceptions.

I'm going to go with Locke for now, because in the western world, we seem to have gone with him, and we value hard facts. We want evidence, right? Rational thought and reason are important too. We discover/develop a system (with heavy influence from Aristotle) that we call logic/reason, and we use it to sort and analyze our experience - the information that we get directly from our senses. So, assuming we use logic/reason correctly, and assuming that the system we've worked out is a good one, we can do a pretty good job of figuring out the world, right?

Maybe. The amount of sensory information you can take in during your lifetime is a drop in the bucket compared to the sensory information that is out there waiting to be perceived. We can't apply our reasoning to everything, because we don't have all the available information. So we have to rely on others for a sorted version of that information. Did they sort it correctly? We hope so. Sometimes, we don't think so. We develop a system that allows us to transfer more information and to get a rough estimate of how qualified people are to sort and analyze certain types of experience. A doctorate degree in botany means people are likely to trust the doctor's sorting/analyzing skills in all things plant-related.

But remember that our ultimate standard still seems to be one that highlights personal experience. Reading words on a page, even if they represent well sorted and accurately analyzed information, is not the same thing as directly experiencing the raw sensory info that went into the ideas, which were transformed into words and put on paper by someone else. We're at least at two or three removes from the actual experience. When we begin to rely on evidence that has been filtered through generations of experiencers, we are removed even further from the experience. This is not surprising: as I mentioned before, there are serious limits to what we can phsyically experience. And the proper sorting of some experiences requires prior knowledge that we just don't have time to gain independently. However, it is probably a good thing to examine the degree to which this second or third or fifth or tenth hand information is true.

What about experts who disagree? They invariably do (especially in composition theory). How do we know which expert is right? Is it true that the most well informed experts are always right, or can we only say that they are usually right? Think about online interactions for a second: Most internet forums involve some sort of debate. One thing that is noticeable is that appeals to experts are rarely, if ever, effective in silencing the opposing side.

I think this is because we are always removed from the actual relevant experience that would validate our claims, and sometimes at an incredible distance. When it comes to hearing some biker tell us about biking based on experiences he/she has had, there is usually a high probability that we can accept their sorting of experience as valid. In most cases, we can trust that they're being accurate. It isn't too specialized, and we can compare to our own experiences or the experiences of others we trust. We don't have to worry too much about testing this type of information. But when it comes to academia, we have to rely on all sorts of specialized people, who have in turn relied on other specialized people, who have...and so forth, to produce a very specific type of sorted experience.

All this requires a lot of trust, and when we read about things like the theory behind writing pedagogy, we hope that everyone has got it right, even though we argue all the time about experience, about truth, and about how things are, which means that somebody has got something wrong. Usually, somebody does mess up. Someone or a few someones sort experience incorrectly. In fact, most people do at some point. Think of the distortion a bad worldview (a medium through which experience is filtered) can cause.

Admittedly, I don't see an alternative to this system. We can hardly rely on personal experience for even a tenth of what (we think) we know. And yet when we try to apply our knowledge to certain things, like the truth of the Bible, or the truth of Creation, we ultimately fall back to relying on the experience of others, and we run into problems. To fully support the Bible with facts, you'd have to be an expert in a ridiculous number of fields. No one can know all the relevant information through personal experience at once.

And people don't trust that many removes from actual experience, because they know that somewhere along the line, somebody screwed up and sorted their information badly. There is also the possibility that we will never have all of the necessary information we need to get everyone to agree. So our own system defeats us. The scientific method is useful, but it can't account for the loss or distortion of knowledge through hundreds or resorting and reanalyzing attempts.

I think this explains why I'm not satisfied by writers like Lee Strobel who try to convince others about the truth of Christianity through scientific facts. By emphasizing facts, he's appealing to a system that generates uncertainty. To his credit, he tries for personal experience. He works to test his facts and minimize uncertainty. And we're partially at fault for his approach, because we demand facts. But I keep thinking It isn't enough. The Bible is too big - it involves too many fields. There will always be people who question Expert X's opinion, and they will always have some grounds to do it. Strobel just can't dig that deep. He'll only live to 125 or less. He doesn't have time, and neither do we. It's not even guaranteed that we've found all the necessary information to verify the facts.

At bottom, we believe things on faith. If some of us believe in the goodness and rightness of our system of logic and reason (if it has flaws, they probably originate in us as imperfect users), we believe it on faith. And if some of us believe the Bible, we believe it on faith. Scientific facts, to me, seem a lot more like probabilities than we're letting on. When we appeal to facts, we do it because of our faith in the system that we have for organizing and packaging reality. Believing in the Bible and being a Christian is not crazy if believing in the goodness and rightness of our system of reason isn't crazy. I don't think we should rely on facts to show it.