The Epistemological Bottleneck And God’s Respect for Human Inquiry

Posted by Anthony on January 23, 2010

One of the enduring criticisms against Christianity is that it is anti-knowledge, education, and learning.  This blog has taken aim at this criticism before, most notably taking Richard Dawkins to task for his misuse of an Augustine quote ostensibly about ‘curiosity.’  I currently have an open challenge to Dawkins to repudiate his use of that quote.

In point of fact, these anti-knowledge criticisms really only began with the rise of the Fundamentalists and this in turn was spurred on by the rise of Darwinism.  Even the shallowest of research will reveal that Christians have been at the forefront of investigation, scholarship, and yes, even science.  (Dawkins answer to this:  “But if they had lived in our day, these Christians would have been atheists.”  What a chump)

The criticism has another angle, though, and it has to do with the relentless attack on the Bible as the ‘ancient writings of nomadic goat herders.’  Dan Barker would be a good example of an atheist presenting this attitude.  The basic idea here is that if the Bible was really written by God, then it should be amazing in its clarity and its insight would be, divinely, penetrating, and certainly it should at all points validate whatever science has claimed to have discovered, since God, being God, would of course know these things.  They would say, in short, that for a book supposedly inerrant and divinely inspired, it is a very human book.

Here is the brutal reality:  the Bible’s ‘human’ nature is precisely an argument in its favor.

By contrast, take two examples in history where a religion has taken aim at the human authorship of the Bible and sought to counter it by alleging that God himself has moved to deal with the problem personally, providing an authorized text.

In the first place, you have Islam, where we are told that Mohammed went off to be instructed personally by Allah through the angel Gabriel- an event unwitnessed by anyone else.  The information that Gabriel allegedly brought was then transmitted through a single man, Mohammed.

Secondly, you have Mormonism, where we are told that Joseph Smith was directed by the angel Moroni to the location of some golden tablets.  These, we are informed, were eventually witnessed by a small handful of others, but the translation and their ‘discovery’ was all transmitted through a single man, Joseph Smith.

How can you test these claims?  You can’t.  One doesn’t even have the ability to compare and contrast different accounts of the same event.  Likewise the texts themselves… Smith did Mohammed one better by at least allegedly producing some golden tablets, but of course they aren’t around any more to ascertain how accurate his translation was.

I call this an ‘epistemological bottleneck.’  This phenomena occurs when knowledge of any sort is funneled down through a single source.  This kind of thing happens all the time and is not inherently ‘bad’ but it is the kind of thing where, when important matters are afoot, you have to think about.   Alleged declarations from God would be such an example.

Note, however, that under the ‘new atheist’ point of view, verbatim transmissions of God’s word to ensure that there are no textual variants (ala Ehrman, etc) or corruptions of the manuscripts, etc, etc, are exactly what they would prefer.  However, seen as epistemological bottlenecks, Mormonism and Islam don’t seem to be all that superior, after all.

The nature and character of Christianity is completely different.  While the Bible does contain some instances of ‘bottlenecks’ we usually see that the more ‘extraordinary’ the claim, the more people are involved as witnesses.  Yes, we only have Abraham’s word that God came to him in a vision, but when Moses brought down the tablets from Mt. Sinai, the whole mountain was shaking and trembling and the hundreds of thousands of witnesses had only just seen the waters of the Sea of Reeds/Red Sea rolled back so they could escape on dry land.

Similarly, while Jesus did teach his disciples privately sometimes, he did much of it in public and his miracles, likewise, were usually in public, too.  He taught as one who had authority in the Sermon on the Mount, but on more than one occasion he fed all of thousands of his listeners at one time in their plain sight.  When he was resurrected, he did not only appear to the disciples, but to “500 at one time.”  (1 Cor 15)

Buffoons who go so far as to deny that Jesus even existed will often say that Jesus didn’t even do us the courtesy of leaving behind his own writings- as if this would have mattered to them!  It is often objected that what we know about Jesus comes to us primarily from those who knew him, and this is raised as a bad thing!  In fact, this is a good thing, as this way there were enough people familiar with what Jesus had actually said and done, if someone raised something spurious, the others would be knowledgeable enough to dispute and refute it.

You cannot read the New Testament without noticing that the disciples had no problem standing up to one another.  See Acts 15, and then compared and contrast Galatians 2:11-16 with 2 Peter 3:14-16.  We don’t see in the Gospels or in the early Church fathers any lingering concerns by any of the disciples about the factual content and accuracy of any of the other disciples.

Revealing Himself before humans and entrusting his message to them, and lots of them at the same time, speaks to an issue that I don’t think a lot of atheists have really thought through.  Just how does a transcendent and immanent entity reveal himself to people in a way that it is known that it is this entity and not an imposter (human or angelic)?

We know that merely revealing highly accurate scientific details or technology wouldn’t satisfy atheists:  here Dawkins has insisted that any such advanced technology would be seen as ‘divine’ by those who were not as developed;  in short, if God ever appeared and performed a demonstration, we’d be justified as believing it were highly sophisticated space aliens ala Sagan’s Contact as that it was God!

God’s solution to this dilemma is multi-faceted and I don’t mean to get into all of it here, but the fact is that the Bible is about as far away from being an epistemological bottleneck as one can get.  As the Bible is actually 66 books written by dozens of people over thousands of years, it is very hard to make the charge of ‘collusion’ stick.    These books are permeated with events that even highly evolved space aliens are not expected to be able to perform, whatever our science fiction authors suggest.  (ie, the feeding of the five thousand from a few loaves is as violent an overthrow of the law of conservation as we might hope for).

Christians, I am afraid, undermine this line of reasoning by constantly presenting the Bible as inerrant and inspired to unbelievers.   Our strongest arguments do not come from the Bible’s divine nature, but from its human nature, just as the incarnation of God in Jesus is God’s validation that it is not unreasonable, in the final analysis, for men to ask and receive for God’s Revelation in such a form as to be able to see it and touch it (1 John 1).  The Bible in the form we have is a continuation of God’s choice to ‘incarnate’ and so validate the human need for a solid epistemological basis for belief, ie, a reasonable faith.

Probably the highest representation of this same theme is God’s insistence to use messy humanity- in the form of the Church- to extend his kingdom.

Everything about Christianity is messy, and that is its strength.