Faith's Knowledge

Paul Tyson

Description

Can we know truth even though certain proof is unattainable? Can we be known by Truth? Is there a relationship between belief and truth, and if so, what is the nature of that relationship? Do we need to have faith in reason and in real meaning to be able to reason towards truth? These are the sorts of questions this book seeks to address. In Faith's Knowledge, Paul Tyson argues that all knowledge that aims at truth is always the knowledge of faith. If this is the case, then--against our modernist cultural assumptions about knowledge--truth cannot be had by proof. Yet, if this is true, then mere information and simply objective facts do not (for us as knowers) exist. Knowledge is always embedded in belief, and knowledge and belief is always expressed in relationships, histories, narratives, shared meanings, and power. Hence, a theological sociology of knowledge emerges out of these explorations in thinking about knowledge as a function of faith.

Sujets

• Philosophie
• Philosophie de la religion
• Religion
• Christianisme
• Christianity
• Philosophy of religion
• Theology
• Paul Tyson
• Philosophy
• Philosophie et théologie
• Religious
• Christian Theology

Informations

• Publié par: Wipf and Stock Publishers
• Date de parution: 02 mai 2013
• Nombre de lectures: 1
• EAN13: 9781621896661
• Langue: English

Extrait

Faith’s Knowledge

Explorations into the Theory
and Application of Theological Epistemology





Paul G. Tyson
Faith’s Knowledge
Explorations into the Theory and Application of Theological Epistemology
Copyright © 2013 Paul G. Tyson. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 199 W. 8 th Ave., Suite 3 , Eugene, OR 97401 .
Pickwick Publications
An Imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers
199 W. 8 th Ave., Suite 3
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isbn 13 : 978-1-61097-818-7
eisbn 13: 978-1-62189-666-1
Cataloguing-in-Publication data:
Tyson, Paul G.
Faith’s knowledge : explorations into the theory and application of theological epistemology / Paul G. Tyson.
viii + 202 pp. ; 23 cm. Includes bibliographical references.
isbn 13 : 978-1-61097-818-7
1 . Philosophical theology. 2 . Knowledge, Theory of (Religion). I. Title.
bt40 t97 2013
Manufactured in the USA
Four of the chapters in this book have already appeared in print and I am very pleased to acknowledge those publications here:
“Transcendence and Epistemology” was published in Modern Theology 24 / 2 (April 2008) 245 – 70 © Blackwell.
“Plato against Ontotheology” was published as chapter 17 in Belief and Metaphysics , edited by Conor Cunningham and Peter Candler Jr. (London: SCM Press, 2007) , 393 – 412 .
“The Iron Cage Closes” was published in Quadrant 51/7– 8 (July–August 2007 ) 55 – 58 (Sydney) .
“Australian Universities in Transition” was published in the Australian eJournal of Theology 13 (March 2009) .
Acknowledgments
F irstly I want to thank Paul Harrison and Gavin Kendall for their constant encouragement, assistance, and long conversations over the course of writing this work. It is a curious fact that these two simply beautiful paragons of humanity and scholarship are both ex-Catholic atheists and I could not have had better supervisors, though this work is entirely situated within Christian theology. Then there is the cricket-mad and astoundingly generous King Arthur of Nottingham (John Milbank) and his dazzling queen (Alison Milbank), the always merry Sir Gawain of the pure heart (Conor Cunningham) and his better half (Crystal Cunningham), the yet to be unveiled Sir Percival (Eric Lee), and—to badly mash my literary metaphor—the Lady Galadriel of Cambridge (Catherine Pickstock) from the ‘Radical Orthodox’ Camelot in that distant isle. Without your voice, your generous engagement and your friendship I would have felt very intellectually alone in the world. Many thanks. To Nathan Kerr in the United States, thank you very much for your ever-thoughtful engagement with my work. In Australia: Jo Rose, Catherine Althause, Matthew Tan, Ben Tarren, Tracey Rowland, Scott Stephens, and Richard Colledge have been wonderful intellectual friends. To Dave Andrews, Charles Ringma, and Ray Overend—many thanks for your pastoral care of my head/heart/hands. Most significantly, Annette, Daniel, Hannah, Claire, Aurora, Francis, Lucy, and Emma Tyson have all put up with my study for years with extraordinary good grace—thank you. To Karl and Ursula Wiethoff, many thanks for your generous assistance over the course of my studies. To Graham and Andrew Tyson, many thanks for your love and goodwill. To Peter Orchard, thank you so much for the many hours you put into formatting and preparing this work for the publishers. To Christian Amondson, Patrick Harrison, and Robin Parry at Wipf and Stock, many thanks for your encouragement and labors. To Nicola Barnett, many thanks for your sharp-eyed help with the text.
Introduction
T he question “what is true knowledge?” is a meta-epistemological question. That is, the question upon which all epistemological endeavors are premised is a metaphysical or theological question. All epistemological investigations that ask “can you know for sure that what you think is true really is true, and if so, how?” arise from some meta-epistemological stance. They presuppose some working meaning for truth and knowledge so that they can then proceed to see if a knowledge of truth can be justified. Yet meta-epistemology is not simply presupposed by any given epistemological exploration, for meta-epistemology and epistemology are dynamically related to each other in a complex feedback loop. That is, the depth presuppositions of any understanding of truth and any understanding of knowledge which makes any given epistemological investigation possible are typically brought into question by that epistemological investigation. Further, this loop’s logic operates within the broader interpretive loop of culture which is shaped by relationships and powers that are embedded in space and time and by the evolving language and meaning narratives that structure and enliven collective and individual knowledge. Thus, all outlooks on truth and knowledge are a view from somewhere so the specific cultural, political, and relational contexts of knowers can never be separated from either epistemology or meta-epistemology. Thus theory and application, and epistemology and meta-epistemology are only notionally separable when it comes to any investigation of truth. 1
Knowledge, then, displays many life forms and the lives and behaviors of these strange creatures are themselves only comprehensible in relation to the larger cultural biosphere in which particular forms of knowledge live. Thus, meaningfully exploring the terrain of knowledge and of truth is very complex if, indeed, it is considered possible at all. For within such an exploration recognizing and accepting the particularity of the explorer’s own appropriation of truth aspiring knowledge—with all its idiosyncrasies, relativities and contextual contingencies—is unavoidable. Here an obvious problem arises. If universality, objectivity, rational purity, demonstrable certainty etc. are deemed necessary for true knowledge, then the task for epistemology does indeed seems hopeless. And yet, if we do not believe that the meaning of the words “knowledge” and “truth” have some context transcending validity, then we find ourselves being tacitly committed to epistemological nihilism, to the anti-metaphysics of irrealism and to the suspicious hermeneutic bias that arises from the inherently problematic attempt to uphold a belief-suspending stance. Yet, definitionally, irrealism in meta-epistemology cannot be true because if the word truth is deemed devoid of any significance relative to reality, then all meta-epistemological commitments to irrealism must be entirely without truth. So it seems that the commitment to irrealism is premised on a dogmatic existentially asserted absurdism. This absurdism is a prior commitment to the meaninglessness of the very notion of true knowledge for—explicitly—no reason. Hence any existential refusal of onto-epistemic absurdism—that is, any commitment to at least the aim of a reasonable knowledge of truth—requires one to maintain at minimum a stance of meta-epistemological agnosticism in relation to the possibility of human linguistic signification and reality having some true relation. Here, where our knowledge might hold open the possibility of some form of true relationship to reality, then it seems inherent to the existential commitment to reason to have faith in that possibility, for reason is valued precisely as a function of truth. So, if we are interested in reasoning about knowledge and truth at all then it makes sense that we should show at least some confidence (good faith) in this process and in the words knowledge and truth. The hopeful searcher after true knowledge then endeavors to gain some view of the broader culturo-politico-linguistic-relational landscape in which the knower is situated, looking for suggestions of truth which in some manner transcends the context that enables us to be truth seeking knowers in the first place. In such an endeavor reason hopes to find at least analogical gestures of larger truths that rise beyond the specificity and incompleteness of all human knowledge, even though our knowledge can never be epistemologically divorced from the particular and contingent limits of its ‘all too human’ context.
If we are prepared to approach questions of knowledge and truth with both hope and modesty, then, as never realized as such an endeavor is, the perennial fascinations of knowledge and truth need not be denied. And if, in full acceptance of their fragility and incompleteness, knowledge and truth are not denied, and are even taken up in good faith, then it is reasonable to believe that it is possible for even our all too human knowledge of truth to be sacraments of the kind of truth which is always embodied within human knowing and yet transcends the limits of human knowing; what theologians call revelation. That is, unless some larger suggestion of meaning than any of our linguistic meanings can capture undergirds our attempts at knowing and understanding reality, then we are indeed cut off from true knowledge of any sort.
In terms of some larger suggestion of truth, this book explores the possibility that Western epistemology has fallen into a credibility hole—with disastrous cultural consequences—because it is not grounded in an adequate meta-epistemology, because it is grounded in an inadequate theology. Following John Milbank’s lead, this book seeks to ask the basic meta-epistemological question concerning what true knowledge itself is from within non-nominalist, somewhat Augustinian, orthodox Christian theology. From this explicitly theological epistemic view point, metaphysical and methodological assumptions about valid knowledge that pre-suppose some form of faith/reason dualism are considered neither Christian nor credible. That is, the outlook I seek to defend and develop maintains that rather than there being either