TIP of the day (logic): Knowing - the first step of apologetics

Christians often get off on the wrong foot when confronting the New Atheism because they don't get the "rules of the game". Forcing the New Atheism to define itself more precisely often opens a number of methods of attack. What follows is an extremely brief introduction to epistemology and how to turn it to your advantage. Absolutely everything I say is denied and present in an alternative way by other theorists.

1. Let's start with a Venn diagram "defining" knowledge:

wikipedia: belief said:

In this view, knowledge is the intersection of what you believe and what is actually true. However, this allows things that happen to be true that you believe for totally incorrect reasons to be treated as "knowledge" It allows for absurdities such as "I know God exists because I read it in my tea leaves on April 1, 2000." This is obviously not what we want to use with a New Atheist.

So Edmund Gettier in a paper titled 'Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?' modified the diagram to this:

wikipedia: belief said:

This limits our knowledge to the portion of the intersection between our beliefs and truth that we can justify. We'll look at the approaches to justification in part 3.

2. The second issue is what kind of knowledge we are talking about. For my purposes here I want to distinguish 3 types:

• knowledge that is the propositional knowledge that is most often meant in discussions of human knowledge
• knowledge how to do something
• acquaintance knowledge - know by being acquainted with

Of these, most Christians (at least in theory) base their knowledge on both knowledge that and acquaintance knowledge. But in the context of speaking to a New Atheist, they will need to ignore acquaintance knowledge although personal experience may slip in through the choice of means of justification.

Note you will also frequently run into the distinction made by Bertrand Russell that slides nicely into an empiricist's stance:

wikipedia: Knowledge by acquaintance said:

knowledge by acquaintance is obtained through a direct causal (experience-based) interaction between a person and the object that person is perceiving. Sense-data from that object are the only things that people can ever become acquainted with

. . .

(knowledge by description) when one is not directly and immediately acquainted with a fact, . . . but knows it only indirectly by means of a description, one arguably is not entirely justified in holding a proposition true.

3. Which brings us to the last issue - how do we justify a belief to make it knowledge, assuming it is true?

There are only a few common ways people think of justifying their beliefs (again greatly simplified)

• empiricism - knowledge is focused on experience, especially perceptual observations
• idealism - knowledge is primarily innate or discovered via a priori processes (think Plato and Kant)
• rationalism - knowledge has three elements: empirical, theoretical and abstract
• constructivism - knowledge is a human construct not objective

One additional concept from rationalism (Bachelard) should be mentioned:

wikipedia: Gaston Bachelard said:

He compared "scientific knowledge" to ordinary knowledge in the way we deal with it, and saw error as only illusion: "Scientifically, one thinks truth as the historical rectification of a persistent error, and experiments as correctives for an initial, common illusion (illusion première)."

Now most New Atheists are radical empiricists and will admit it quite clearly. This leaves them open to arguments for God along the lines of my argument for ghosts.

• the human experience of "ghost" is sufficiently common world wide, that languages have a word for that experience which conveys meaning to the listener.
• I may not know what a ghost is - whether it is a response of the mind to particular stimuli, whether it is outside the mind and possesses unusual circumstances for perception,. . .

People knew that the sun created a mysterious burn by experience long before they understood various wave lengths of radiation that interact with our skin causing a burn. One needs to grant the same latitude for "ghost" ... and for God.

To the response that people could replicate the experience of a sunburn, the answer is clearly that we also have manuals on how to replicate the experience of God. For the empiricist development of this approach, see Frits Staal's Exploring Mysticism: A Methodological Essay

This line of argument, often succeeds in getting the New Atheist to admit they have insufficient interest in the topic to follow any of the instructions on replicating the experience of God. And you have avoided allowing them room for the "I can explain X without reference to God" style arguments. Put another way, you have leveraged their reliance on experience into sliding their arguments against God out of the knowledge category.