Most Christians, not to mention non-Christians, have no idea how epistemology, the study of our knowing, affects our faith. Even to say, “affects our faith” has some people automatically think, what does knowing have to do with faith! Lots. This consequence of the so-called Enlightenment, almost 400 years after it entered Western intellectual tradition, is ubiquitous, invisible, and pernicious. It is, and always has been, at war with Christianity, and it is imperative for Christians to understand this. You don’t have to be an “intellectual” either; just grasping the inescapable power of assumptions is all you need. That is, whatever is assumed to be true is accepted as true without question, things taken for granted instead of articulated. I’ll explain one of the most harmful in a moment, but I was struck just how harmful when I heard the story of two famous online guys I’d never heard of who had something now called, I gather, a deconstruction of their faith. Well, I’m going to deconstruct their deconstruction.
The two, Rhett McLaughlin and Link Neal, host a Youtube show called Good Mythical Morning. I learned about them from an Apologetics Canada podcast discussion about their faith leaving (Rhett and Link). These guys were obviously Christians, but as they discuss, over time their faith became increasingly less tenable to them, so they abandoned it. What stands out to me about most of these de-conversion stories is the straw men that accompany them. The straw man logical fallacy is misrepresenting the opponent’s position, in this case Christianity, as if it was the position, and then arguing against the distortion. These guys are a quintessential example of this.
They grew up in a type of fundamentalist Christianity where certainty is sign of godliness, and if you’re not totally certain about all aspects of your faith, something is wrong. Doubt is something to fear, not a natural part of existence for finite human beings, even Christian finite human beings. I feel sorry for people who experience such a version of Christianity because unless you are naturally the type of person not given to doubt, it can be unpleasant. Let’s talk about assumptions.
Where do you think this idea that absolute certainty is a requirement for the Christian faith came from? If you guessed the Enlightenment, bingo! This unfortunate lie of the Devil goes back to a pious Catholic French philosopher from the 17th century, Rene Descartes, who shows up a lot in this humble little blog. I won’t get into his argument yet again, but it had a significant influence on the unfolding of Enlightenment thinking, and on the schizophrenic nature of so much thinking in the 21st century secular West. Rhett and Link are perfect examples of this influence.
I came upon their deconstruction story as I’ve been reading, slowly, through a history of philosophy by Frederick Copleston. I’ve gotten to his assessment of Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), who is probably the single greatest influence on the modern-postmodern mindset of our secular age. That influence, and its deleterious effect on Christian faith, is far too broad and deep to get into here, but a short quote from Copleston makes my point:
[It] is an essential part of Kant’s attempt to harmonize the world of Newtonian science with the world of moral experience and of religious faith.
The “it” is not important, but influenced by Descartes, Kant thought it was possible for the human mind to gain a scientific certainty, as certain as Newtonian physics, in the realm of morality and faith (science can’t be absolutely certain either, but that’s for another post). He was to woefully fail at this harmonization. The assumption that we could have certainty in regard to morality and religion, led in due course to the conclusion that real knowledge about morality and religion is not even possible! The Enlightenment assumed absolute certainty was attainable and gave us modernism. When that rabbit hole proved empty, it morphed into post-modernism, where it is now assumed objective knowledge and any certainty at all is impossible; the subjective determines everything. So Rhett and Link are now self-described agnostics, which is the last refuge of the postmodernist. If we can’t know for certain, then I guess we just can’t know. Epistemology is not some esoteric intellectual exercise after all.
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