The Justification of Knowledge and Truth, Part III

 Adding Zeroes to Zero

Unbelief has strained over the years to find a suitable and adequate justification for knowledge--the problem of knowing that what we know is true knowledge or truth.  Unbelieving thought--that is, philosophies which reject from the outset the existence of the Living God, His self-revelation in Nature, and the Scriptures--have struggled to find an adequate foundation for truth.  Every rational proposal collapses at some point into irrationalism.

We have seen this to be the case in two leading tendencies attempting to justify knowledge: rationalism and empiricism (see here, and here.)  The third tendency is subjectivism.  This offers the principle that all knowledge and truth is ultimately self-justified by the subject--that is, we who know.  Now there is a lot to commend subjectivism, as opposed to rationalism and empiricism at first blush.  In the first place, logical argument (the champion of the rationalists) often fails to convince.  John Frame describes the problem:

The Ugly Scientist

Fraud and Deception

Science trades under the mantle of objective, tested, authenticated conclusions.  It turns out, however, that in all  scientific endeavour there is a strong dose of interpretation and subjectivity.  This is not just the case for science; it is true of all human actions.

Larry Woiwode illustrates the principle:

No fact exists without an interpretation of it, as a philosopher by the name of Cornelius Van Til once said.  What he meant is if I say, "The Civil War", anybody who hears those words is stormed by sets of facts, some merely by naming it as I have.  If you view it as a war of northern aggression, you have facts to support that.  If another sees it as a conflict that installed commercial manufacture over agrarian interests, facts might well support that view.  If I say its genesis was slavery, I might well be closer to the truth, but I would have to summon my series of facts to support that. . . .

Take a step farther back.  If you believe trees are a result of random happenstance or believe they were ordained to look as they do, part of a design fulfilled, then your view of the tree and facts about it will differ, according to your ideology.  [Larry Woiwode, Words for  Readers and Writers (Wheaton, Illinois: Crossway, 2013), p. 33f.]

Modern science is presently dominated by a perverse ideology: scientism--which holds that the only reality, the only thing which exists, is matter.   It denies the subjective, ideological construction of all scientific endeavour.  It claims pure, brute objectivity. 

As a result, it perversely drives science into being a more ideologically bound and subjectively dominated enterprise.