re certainty and arrogance in an earlier article i explained that what many people find arrogant about christians is that some christians profess absolute certianty about their beliefs and doctrines that is many christians insist that they cannot have made any mistakes when discovering their beliefs which amounts to saying that they are infallible impicitly claiming to be infallible is pretty arrogant most of us will probably agree in short the problem is that no matter how good your sources are if any part of your doctrines or beliefs rest on your own thinking and reasoning then those doctrines are suspect so long as your own brain is involved there is a possibility for error i summarised the problem by writing there is no way out of the loop someone called rexlex has claimed that there is a way out of the loop but he did not bother to explain what it was preferring instead to paraphrase sartre ramble about wittgenstein and say that the conclusion of my argument leads to relativism as i have explained to him before you cannot reject an argument as false because you dislike where it leads the facts do not change just because you dislike them rexlex wrote i disagree with dr nancy s sweetie s conclusion because if it is taken to fruition it leads to relativism which leads to dispair however as any first year philosophy student can explain what rexlex has written does not constitute a refutation all he has said is that he does not like what i wrote he has done nothing at all to dispute it there were two sentences in rexlex s post that seemed relevant to the point at hand there is such a thing as true truth and it is real it can be experienced and it is verifiable i do not dispute that some truths can be verified through experience i have for example direct experience of adding numbers i don t claim to be infallible at it in fact i remember doing sums incorrectly but i do claim that i have direct experience of reasoning about numbers however once we go past experiencing things and start reasoning about them we are on much shakier ground that was the point of the earlier article human brains are infested with sin and they can only be trusted in very limited circumstances it is only because of god s own revelation that we can be absolute about a thing but how far does that get you once god s revelation stops and your own reasoning begins possibility for error appears for example let s suppose that our modern bible translations include a perfect rendering of jesus words at the last supper and that jesus said exactly this is my body we ll presume that what he said was totally without error and absolutely true what can we be certain of not much at the moment he stops speaking and people start interpreting the possibility of error appears did he mean that literally or not we do not have any record that he elaborated on the words was he thinking of tran or con substatiation he didn t say we interpret this passage using our brains we think and reason and draw conclusions but we know that our brains are not perfect our thinking often leads us wrong this is something that most of us have direct experience of why should anyone believe that his reasoning which he knows to be fallible can lead him to perfect conclusions so given the assumptions in this example what we can be certain of is that jesus said this is my body beyond that once we start making up doctrines and using our brains to reason about what christ revealed we get into trouble unless you are infallible there are very few things you can be certain of to the extent that doctrines rely on fallible human thinking they cannot be certain that is the problem of seeming arrogant the non christians around us know that human beings make mistakes just as surely as we know it they do not believe we are infallible any more than we do when christians speak as if they believe their own reasoning can never lead them astray when we implicitly claim that we are infallible the non christians around us rarely believe that implicit claim witnessing is hardly going to work when the person you are talking to believes that you are either too foolish to recognise your own limits or intentionally trying to cover them up i think it would be far better to say what things we are certain of and what things we are only very confident of for example we might say that we know our sin for recognising sin is something we directly experience but other things whether based on reasoning from scripture or extra biblical thinking should not be labled as infallible we should say that we are very confident of them and be ready to explain our reasoning but so far as i am aware none of us is infallible speaking or acting as if our thinking is flawless is ridiculous rexlex suggested that people read he is there and he is not silent by francis schaeffer i didn t think very highly of it but i think that mr schaeffer is grossly overrated by many evangelical christians somebody else might like it though so don t let my opinion stop you from reading it if someone is interested in my opinion i d suggest on certainty by ludwig wittgenstein darren f provine kilroy gboro rowan edu if any substantial number of talk religion misc readers read some wittgenstein of the postings would disappear if they understood some wittgenstein would disappear michael l siemon
