certainty and arrogance dean velasco quoted a letter from james m stowell president of moody bible institute the other day i was at the dry cleaner and the radio was playing it caught my attention because a talk show guest was criticizing evangelical christians saying we believe in absolutes and think we are the only ones who know what the absolutes are we affirm the absolutes of scripture not because we are arrogant moralists but because we believe in god who is truth who has revealed his truth in his word and therefore we hold as precious the strategic importance of those absolutes there has been a lot of discussion but so far nobody seems to have hit on exactly what the criticism of arrogance is aimed at the arrogance being attacked is that we think we are the only ones who know what the absolutes are in short many evangelicals claim that they are infallible on the matter of religious texts in particular the problem is one of epistemology as a shorthand you can think of epistemology as how do you know that question it turns out is a very troubling one the problem with absolute certainty is that at the bottom at least some of the thinking goes on inside your own head unless you can be certain that everything which happens in your head is infallible the reasoning you did to discover a source of truth is in question and that means you do not have absolute justification for your source of authority which means you do not have absolute certainty let s take the specific example of biblical inerrancy and a fictional inerrantist named zeke the following arguments applies to the idea of papal infallibility too zeke has we presume spent some time studying the bible and history and several other topics he has concluded based on all these studies and possibly some religious experiences that the bible is a source of absolute truth he may be correct but even if he is he cannot be certain that he is correct his conclusion depends on how well he studied history he may have made mistakes and the references he used may have contained mistakes his conclusion depends on how well he studied the bible he may have made mistakes his conclusion depends on his own reasoning and he may have made mistakes noticing a common thread yet everything about his study of the world that he did everything that happened in his own head is limited by his own thinking no matter what he does to try and cover his mistakes he can never be certain of his own infallibility as long as any part of the belief is based on his own reasoning that belief cannot be considered absolutely certain zeke believes that he has found a source of absolute truth but that belief is only as good as the quality of the search he made for it unless he can say that his own reasoning is flawless his conclusions are in doubt any belief that you hold about absolute sources of truth depends in part on your own thinking there is no way out of the loop only an infallible thinker can have absolute certainty in all his beliefs this is easy to demonstrate let s go back to our shorthand method of doing epistemology how do you know imagine a hypothetical discussion a the bible is a source of absolute truth b how do you know a i studied history and the bible and religious writings and church teachings and came to this conclusion b how do you know you studied history correctly a well i double checked everything b how do you know you double checked correctly a well i compared my answers with some smart people and we agreed b just because some smart guy believes something that doesn t mean it is true how do you know they studied it correctly a and as you see b will eventually get a to the point where he has to say i can t prove that there are no mistakes and as long as you may have made a mistake then you cannot be absolutely certain there is no way out of the loop this is where the arrogance of christians arises many people believe that their own personal research can give them absolute certainty about the doctrines of christianity they are implicitly claiming that they are infallible and that there is no possibility of mistake claiming that you cannot have made a mistake and that your thinking has led you to a flawless conclusion is pretty arrogant people who want to see this argument explained in great detail should try to find the infallibility of the church by george salmon he is attacking the idea that the pope can be knowably infallible and he does so very well but the general argument applies equally well to the idea that the bible is knowably inerrant darren f provine kilroy gboro rowan edu at the core of all well founded belief lies belief that is unfounded ludwig wittgenstein
