Clarifying the Debate on Subjectivity and Objectivity

There have been a number of interesting posts recently on the objective and the subjective, most of which have been in response to John Loftus’ encouraging us all to take the Outsider Test for Faith.  (The OTF asserts that a religious adherent should judge his own religion in the way he judges other religions.  Sort of like, Do unto yourself as you do to others).

The issue is found somewhere amidst these questions:  How do we judge other religions?  How do we judge our own?  How do we decide what the truth is?  How do we know the truth?  Can we know the truth?  What is truth?  What is knowledge?

Let’s set aside Loftus’ own bias here for a moment (if we are culture-biased into our Christianity, then he is certainly cultured biased by Anglo-American rational empiricism into his atheism) and let’s see if we can grapple with, even discern, the issue.

Loftus is adamant that the best tool for decision and knowledge is science:  “[T]he only thing we can and should trust is the empirical sciences.  That’s our only hope.  Science is the best we’ve got and even science has it’s problems.”

Well, he got the last part right.  The history of western philosophy is the history of the failure of reason to grasp not only the metaphysical / spiritual but even the sciences.  I have described these failures in detail in my series, “An Overview of the Limitations of Reason” (click on “Limits of Reason” in the website header), so I won’t recap here except to say that philosophy has shown that reason itself, pure reason, tells us nothing about the world.  (Read about Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, for example, or what Wittgenstein says about logic and tautologies).   Reason must be joined with empirical data to say anything meaningful about the world.   We must determine what brute fact is to be joined with reason to establish science (which is exactly what the logical positivists tried to do and failed).

Victor Reppert nails the problem in his post “Some Reasons Why Christianity Makes Sense to Me“:  “[N]aturalism is self-refuting because it is inconsistent with the fact that human beings perceive logical relationship and act on that basis.  If they were purely physical systems in a purely physical world, this would not be possible.”  [Emphasis mine].    The brute fact is never “The world exists” but “I perceive the world exists.”   This is the problem the logical positivists ran into.   How do we bridge the gap between the ‘I” and ‘the world’?

We bridge the gap not with reason, but with assumption, faith.  We have faith that the perception is correct.  Thus, even science and  rational objectivism are shown to be based on faith.

But as I have argued with Loftus, is not the ‘I’ more certain than the world?   For I do not perceive myself through logic or reason.   I am aware of myself in a way that differs from the way that I am aware of the world.  I am within my awareness of myself; I am aware that I am outside the objects in the world.   There is no distance between myself and my awareness of myself; but there is a distance between me and the object.   I cannot doubt myself, though the world might be doubted.  Because of this chasm between myself and the objective world, naturalism and natural theology are demolished.

Note: Phenomenologist Michel Henry has done some great clarifying work on this.   Read my posts “On the Inward Truth“, “Greek Truth Denies Real Truth“, and “True Life and Biological Life.”

Reppert hints at this in his post “Understanding the Concept of Objectivity.”   When things are a matter of individual preference [that is, when the experience is inward] we are not inclined, as he says, to think that people who differ with us have false beliefs.   Bertrand Russell also made a somewhat similar statement concerning ethics in an essay Reppert linked to entitled Science and Ethics:  “I conclude that, while it is true that science cannot decide questions of values, that is because they cannot be intellectually decided at all, and lie outside the realm of truth and falsehood.  Whatever knowledge is attainable, must be attained by scientific methods; and what science cannot discover, mankind cannot know.”

You see that Loftus is trying to take his cue from the Anglo-American rational atheist Russell, which demonstrates Loftus’ cultural bias.  The rational atheism of Moore, Russell and the Logical Positivists pervades the culture of the Anglo-American intellectual elite.   These elites are so biased they forget about the failures of Russell - his realism failed, his attempts to ground mathematics failed, his attempts to ground science and ethics failed.

Russell’s mistake is to ignore the certain realm of the ‘I’.   There is the ground of certainty and it is there that Christ and Christianity makes its claim, for Christianity is essentially an inward encounter of the ‘I’ with the being of Christ; it is a transformation of the inward man.   It is to the inner man that the Gospel is preached, it is in the inner man that Christ is encountered an may be received.

I am well aware of the objections (now there’s a culturally biased word for you) to the basing of knowledge on the subjective.   But beware.  The term ’subjective’ is now pejorative because the objectivists have gained the upper hand and are dictating the terms.  Subjective now means arbitrary, whimsy, without true foundation or ground.   In fact, my inner man is the most certain fact I have.

The writer at The Chasm put forth the Principle of Metaphysical Adequacy:  “An agent with reason R cannot be justified in doing A as long as R is derived in principle from a false ontology.”   Can there be a more true ontology than the being of my own self?   See my post “The Starting Point of All Inquiry is the Human Condition.”   The Chasm writer indicates that “sources of revelation are derived from false ontologies” and I might agree with him if those sources are objective.   A subjective encounter is on much firmer ground than an objective one.

Reppert links to C.S. Lewis’ objections to basing morality on the subjective.  I’d like to deal with several of Lewis points.

Lewis, while admitting that “correct thinking will not make good men of bad ones” is concerned that subjectivism means that the scientist’s own logic “becomes merely subjective.”     But when I speak of the subjective truth, I am not speaking of logic.   I am not saying that my logic is my own and that my reason works differently from yours.  I am saying that reason is a tool evolved for the objective realm and that my ‘I’, as described above, does not belong to the objective realm.  Reason works well on mathematics and physical objects.  It does not have the capacity to grasp a person, which I am.  Reason cannot apprehend joy, hope, faith, mercy, forgiveness.

The truth is my own Self, which never, ever presents itself to the outside, objective world.  You have never seen inside me and never will.   How can you ever judge what I have experienced, seen and known?

By now, perhaps you see the question becomes, Can I judge others?

Lewis is troubled that “until modern times no thinker of the first rank ever doubted that our judgments of value were rational judgments or that what they discovered was objective.”  (Hey!  Plato, Aristotle, Hooker, Butler and Dr. Johnson were all rationalists in this sense - so we should be too!).  But it wasn’t until modern times that the inadequacies of reason have been demonstrated.  The chasm between the ‘I’ and the ‘world’ cannot be bridged with logical proof.   This is what is meant by the Fall of the Absolute.

Was Nietzche and Sartre correct then, that we must make our own values?   Lewis is thoroughly upset that this might have to be the case, for he sees it as “the disease that will certainly end our species…if it is not crushed; the fatal superstition that men can create values, that a community can choose its ‘ideology’ as men choose their clothes.”     Well, then, Lewis must show us how to bridge the chasm (other than resorting to “let’s all use reason because that’s what we’ve always done) or else face the music.

But I am thoroughly surprised that Lewis did not see the way out of this.   The answer for the Christian is the Holy Spirit.   Godel showed that no system can prove itself; it must have information inserted from outside.   We have such an insertion from the outside:  we have the Gospel of Jesus Christ as spoken by the Holy Spirit to our inner man.   We have the Holy Spirit within us and we need no one else to teach us. (1 John 2:27)

This means that rationality can not lead us to morality.   And I am glad of that, for I am not answerable to any man or creed.   Call no man master.  I am answerable only to the Holy Spirit.  I am trying to cultivate an ear to hear his voice, and follow the Lamb wherever He goes, follow where the Pillar of Fire leads.   What other men do is between them and God.     What’s it to you?  Jesus asks Peter, when Peter tried to stick his nose into the life of another apostle and ask, What shall this man do?   The other side of this is that I do not want them imposing their view of things on me; and in fact, they cannot.

Loftus is aching to be judgmental.  He wants the ability and moral authority to judge others.  “What do you do,” he asks Metacrock, “with people wo disagree on the essentials, like the King James only crowd?”   He is saying, “Help me understand how we can judge others.   How can we put them ito a little box and gift-wrap them with a bow?   The Gospel of the Cross says you can’t put a person or God in a box.   When you try to “pin them down,” they rise again.

Both Lewis and Loftus want the ability to make judgments on others, but reality does not afford us that ability.   We can only decide for ourselves based on the experiences of our inward man.  Thus, we are told, Judge not.  First get rid of the beam within your own eye and then you will be able to tell the other how to get rid of the mote in their eye.  You will tell them they must judge for themselves.  After all, there is only one true sin, blasphemy against the Holy Spirit - that is, to deny Him when He calls.

Lewis is concerned that, left to their own devices, someone may come up with their own scheme of morality or none at all, for “the Germans are as competent to create their ideology as we are to create ours.”  Precisely.   But if any man has not the Holy Spirit, whatever he decides is just man-made, “made-up” morality, doomed as the Tower of Babel to get to its destination.   This is part of the definition and consequences of being lost.  It is, as Lewis said, “like trying to lift yourself by your own coat collar.”   Man cannot save himself.

So all this flurry and anguish about “unless we return to the crude and nursery-like belief in objectives values, we perish” misses the mark.   The Sons of God are led by the Spirit of God.  The rest are as lost as they always were but it’s not up to me to convince them of that;  that’s the job of the Holy Spirit.

Now Reppert offers some reasons why he believes Christianity makes sense - miracles explain the intense faith of the apostles;  faith explains the continued existence of Israel, etc.  But while these objective facts may lend support to a inward stance, they are not convicting.    They do not and cannot produce a resurrection of the inner man.  As I have said before, Antony Flew may have concluded through reason that God exists it does not mean that Flew has encountered or knows God.   Only an encounter with God can provide that.   After all, we are told that it is the Spirit, not reason, that convicts.  (John 16:8).