Writing of Writing and Thinking of Thinking: Beat The System

False theories and knowledge just go together. This sentiment is bound to surprise many, especially coming from the e-pen of a Christian, since people know them to be on about "objective truth" more often than not.

A simple distinction or two can help a great deal here. There is a very important difference between the way you go about learning something (let us call it some truth "X") and how one might go about justifying the alleged truth of X.

I have suggested (and maintain incorrigibly) that one might learn the truth of X from several different possible methods. A few scientists even came up with some of their more interesting theories from dreams they had, some quite frightening. James Clerk Maxwell did this. Ernst Mach pulled some fairly interesting stunts to come up with theories too. He was a scientific anti-realist and didn't care. But Christians acknowledge only one way in which a person may ultimately justify the truth of any claim, including our pet view called "X."

So the claim "I learned the truth of X by doing Y" is not at all interchangeable with the claim that " I justify X on the basis of Y." This has great importance for questions of how we learn what our Bible teach, and how we justify what we learn by whatever means we so learn.

For example, one might learn the Bible truth that "There is but one God, and one mediator between God and man, the Man Christ Jesus" by being taught this in a catechism class by ones parents, or he might simply stumble across 1 Timothy's passage cited above, or he might hear a minister quote it during a sermon, and proceed to expound upon its meaning.

These ways of learning differ greatly. But once learned, the means for proving the truth of this claim (ultimately) will look identical. And a person almost always learns any truth X, before he learns the proper justification pattern for proving the claim. I knew that "2 + 2 = 4" long before I could PROVE it in terms of base ten math. Thus, learning and justifying represent (in most cases) different kinds of actions.

Second, people today often think of knowledge in terms of "true theories" or "proven theories." This overlooks the basic Christian claim that not all knowledge is theoretical in nature. Divine revelation for instance cannot be erroneous or mistaken. Theoretical claims can. And even when they turn out to be true theories, they could have been mistaken (but weren't). Theories never have an infallible source because God does not theorize. And he alone is infallible. Scientists will be the first to tell you they make mistakes. Trial and error is part of the job description, in fact.

God is not like this. He does not learn. He simply knows all things -- possible and actual eternally (not just at this particular moment). Thus, when He speaks and transmits information, He cannot err. It is not the case simply that he DOES NOT, but cannot err. "He cannot deny Himself," meaning that His perfect attributes set borders around his abilities, since He cannot degrade his own perfect character. God, for instance, cannot violate his own law (sin), nor can He alter his character in any fundamental way. Since one (by definition) cannot improve upon perfect, any substantial change in any one attribute would require a demotion of sorts (so to speak).

Thus, the Word of God ascribes to itself the incommunicable attributes of deity. It is eternal, incorrigible, invincible, sovereign (frames human history), irrefragable (cannot be divided or degraded), and the like. No theory of man is like this, whether true, false or indeterminate.

Men do not reveal (original information), nor can they (save the God-Man Himself), for they are not deity. Thus, the word of God is not like true theories, even though both are true. They possess mutually exclusive basic attributes, and belong (logicians say) to complementery classes. True theories are contingently (not necessarily) true. The converse is true of divine revelation since it forms the foundations (the meta-transcendental) for knowledge.

So what is the point here? The point is this. Since one can (and may) learn revealed truths by many different methods or secondary sources, false theories (and theories of unknown truth value) can be skillfully used to determine the true meaning of some passage of the revelation of God. The Bible teaches that "to him who is clean are all things clean."

False theories are in the right hands, an extra set of tools one might use as lenses for looking at some data set from fresh perspectives not available without such "lenses." In other words, false theories can be (and I have used them successfully to this end many times) excellent ways of learning some truth of the Word or of the world - which is justified (I find out later) from this or that passage combination from the Word of God.

But I -- presumably -- would never have learned this from the Word (unless I had by Gods grace stumbled upon it by some other means) had I not borrowed the false-theory "glasses" and used them to look at the Bible this way just "for the sake of argument."

There is nothing so far as I know which, either in the Word or in the teachings of men like Cornelius Van Til, which suggests that this is improper. But much the contrary. This is precisely the perspective a Christian apologist IS to take of a worldview he does not share for the sake of conducting an analysis where he snoops about for dialectical tensions.

I have simply adapted the VanTillian "hypothetical snooping" method to views outside apologetics and pressed them into the service of research. Adapt, improvise, and overcome. Its the postmillenial thing to do.

So let me make my recommendation for the good of all research animals everywhere. First, I believe in doing research only biblically. Not every philosophy of research is acceptable to God, but only the theonomic one. This is the one I am recommending. Those who have read my book on theoretical instrumentalism as the biblical philosophy of science will recognize at once that what I have done there by exegesis to show instrumentalism sound in the faith of Jesus, I have here extended into the philosophy of research.

What is THE biblical philosophy of research? Answer: theoretical construction used as heuristic devices to look at data from unique perspectives to gain insights, which if true, can then later be justified by the Word. And if not, we simply discard them as "nothing more than tools for learning" what the Bible alone would have justifed if true.

But the usefulness of theories -- false or true (or indeterminant) for gaining real insights into the word of God -- or into sources warranted by the word of God (as with extrabibical historical sources confirmed by the consistent testimonies of two or three eyewitnesses) -- enables us to learn things about the Word in a highly efficient manner which do not necessarily come FROM the Word. Yet to justify them ultimately, we must needs lean to the Word of God alone.

Therefore, given these very important qualifications, I am maintaining here (for the first time) that the biblical philosophy of research necessarily includes -- but is not limited to -- the use of theoretical constructions known to be false, or at least NOT KNOWN to be true (in many cases), which I may therefore properly call "research theory-instrumentalism." Surely, I will be able to come up with a better name for this approach later.

Here, the bottom line is this: do not fear to construct theories freely -- even ones a bit absurd if they serve the purpose of aiding information management (analysis, sorting, classifying, etc) -- in the research process. Use them, even more than one at once if you like, to compare and contrast competing notions of cause, source analysis, and the like.

Have confidence that bad theories will be ganged up on by harsh and unruly facts soon enough, and will take the beating they have coming to them. This will require new formulations of the old one, or else a new idea altogether, perhaps equally bad. Well done. At least now you have a REAL false theory, one which manly explains things, and perhaps even makes predictions about future likely findings -- to be confirmed or else used to revile the false prophet in your notes.

You can stone them with many hard facts later. But they may well serve many excellent didactic services by the time their usefulness has expired.

So, given the biblical doctrine of theory construction (instrumentalism) applied to research -- more efficient research, I will also proceed to misquote Friedrich Nietzsche, but just barely, to shock the Christian intellectuals just a bit more --

The falsity of a theory is no objection to it.

[It's a theory. Men made it up. We already knew it was false, or at least rightly suspected it]. Hang that man-made tradition, and then give it a fair trial. (Are we not Presbyterians?) But first, let's see what we might learn from it.

Besides, the history of the sciences are filled with false theories that were very fruitful in the development of technology, and some of them are so helpful, they continue teaching them in the public schools even though they have long known about their "veridically-questionable" status (i.e. they might be dead wrong). Newtonian mechanics provides just such an example. Newton postulated that time was invariant, and space absolute. Einstein said space is curved, and time dilates when you approach C (the speed of light).

Most scientists opt for Einstein, implying (but never saying) that Newton was out to lunch. They can't have it both ways. One of those intellectual behemoths was wrong wrong -- say it with me -- WRONG. And yet both theory sets provide a fair basis for judging the physical behaviors of a wide variety of objects at different speeds and magnitudes. They are even mathematically, well nigh interchangeable.

But they specify contradictory characteristics for the world -- mutually exclusive metaphysical views (about the nature of space, time, speed, matter and energy to name a few
such elements).

Okay then, once more. "The falsity of a theory is no objection to it."
And Christian researchers will do well to remember this principle in evaluating historical sources, so long as they also recall that the Bible contains revelation -- which is not theoretical. It never says anywhere, "In the beginning was the hypothetical formula."

And sometimes, it's okay to say, "Amen" in the library. And now for 7 final words: "Outside the box," and "sake of argument."