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Spirit Epistemology
Introduction/Expostion
At the end of the chapter “The Nicodemian Modus Tollens”, Morris, in his work The Logic of God Incarnate argues that “A full account of the epistemic status of Christian doctrine would be quite complex and would require, at its core, what we might call a Spirit Epistemology.” It is not Morris’ intention in this book neither to fully explicate the schema of a “Spirit Epistemology” nor to explore what it entails. However, I would like to discuss in this paper what I believe he means by the phrase and to explore what its implications are in a distinctly philosophical and likewise a distinctly religious paradigm. The immediate problem I intuit is that a “spirit epistemology” demonstrates incommensurability between the philosophical and the religious paradigms. It will be my position in this paper that there is no solution that reconciles the two paradigms while simultaneously leaving them in tact.
I believe what Morris means by Spirit Epistemology is this: a philosophy of knowledge and belief that includes as its assumptions both the truths of his religion (in this case orthodox Christianity) and the employment of the logical axioms of philosophy. I believe that it is fair to his position and to the overarching theme of The Logic of God Incarnate to say that it is his belief that the two are reconcilable and that the two work together as a truth-conducive system.
For Morris, I believe a Spirit Epistemology functionally employs the triune God as the final and immutable authority in keeping with orthodox Christianity, and holds that logic is a means by which we understand truth and the nature of truth. A demonstration of Spirit Epistemology in practice might look something like The Logic of God Incarnate. In the preface Morris states “I have come to see that a few metaphysical distinctions and a solid dose of logical care will suffice to explicate and defend the doctrine [of the Incarnation] against all extant criticisms of a philosophical nature.” I infer that what he means is that the doctrine of the Incarnation is in some sense reducible to propositions that form a logical argument and that defending the religious doctrine of the incarnation via a philosophical schema is a valid and appropriate way to accomplish his goal.
But, is it the case that philosophical paradigm is appropriate, let alone, capable of answering questions concerning the incarnation? It seems to me that philosophy and religion will depart in at least two areas that will render discussion concerning a topic native one incommunicable to the other. It is firstly the inherent assumptions and secondly the acceptable authority/authorities native to each that brings about incommensurability between the paradigms.
Assumptions and Authorities
For philosophy to function independently as a truth-conducive system it must also make certain assumptions about itself and about the human faculty of reason. Firstly, it assumes that it is in fact a truth-conducive system. Verifying this assumption is a particularly difficult process, one that may prove fruitless. It seems that the process of verification already is making appeals to branches of philosophy that are yet unsettled. A major problem for verifying the reliability of the philosophical paradigm is one addressed by Chisolm called, “The Problem of the Criterion”. Chisholm articulated the problem like this,
“To know whether things really are as they seem to be, we must have a procedure for distinguishing appearances that are true from appearances that are false. But to know whether our procedure is a good procedure, we have to know whether it really succeeds in distinguishing appearances that are true from appearances that are false. And we cannot know whether it does really succeed unless we already know which appearances are truth and which ones are false. And so we are caught in a circle . . . What few philosophers have had the courage to recognize is this: we can deal with the problem only be begging the question.”
I will let the problem of the criterion stand as a problem for philosophy in general and move on. Disregarding the problem of the criterion one might offer an abductive account for the reliability the philosophical paradigm, but abduction has problems and meta-problems as well. For example, using abduction assumes that abduction is truth-conducive. It does not seem feasible that one can get to the conclusion that abduction is truth conducive via abduction. One might try to verify abduction using induction, but this seems equally absurd because induction can only be verified either by abduction or again by induction. Effectively we are left with either a vicious cycle or an infinite regress. I am not immediately aware of any a priori arguments for the truth-conduciveness of a philosophical system.
The second major assumption for the philosophical paradigm is the effectual omni-competence of humanity. For philosophy to attempt to answer questions about metaphysics, ontology, epistemology and the like it must first assume that we as human beings are capable of understanding all of the aforementioned things. But, when we say that a paradigm is truth conducive we are saying implicitly that the truth that it delivers is comprehendible. There seems to be an epistemological and metaphysical meta-question to ask first, namely, how do we know that our faculties of comprehension are capable of understanding truth. One might argue using the example of science that we know far more and more complex things about the nature of the external world than any other human beings have in accessible recorded history. This may be true but to argue that it will continue in this way is again an argument from either abduction or induction and jump right back on the circle as it were. This exploration into the reliability of philosophy is by no means exhaustive; rather, its purpose is merely to demonstrate our own difficulties in establishing what we hope are truth-conducive systems.
The religious paradigm (particularly the orthodox Christian paradigm that Morris holds to) differs from the philosophical with respect to its assumptions. Rather than rely on the faculties of human reason it relies on the authoritative statements of God as revealed in Christ and scripture (not to the exclusion of the church, traditions, and the individual via the Holy Spirit etc.). A common property to all of humanity, according to the orthodox view, is that we are essentially fallen. The ramifications of our falleness manifest themselves in our death (both physical and spiritual), the necessity of a savior, and, most relevantly for this paper, our faculty of reason.
St. Paul wrote saying, “The natural person does not accept the things of the Spirit of God, for they are folly to him, and he is not able to understand them because they are spiritually discerned” (1 Corinthians 2:14). No matter what your exegetical interpretation of this particular scripture happens to be, it reveals a key point for the religious paradigm: that man alone in incapable of understanding all things apart from God. St. Paul iterates another point later on in the epistle saying, “Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known.” Even when a man knows God, it is only when we are perfected that we understand fully. The combination of the authority of God and the fallenness of man in the religious paradigm are the operating assumptions for the religious paradigm and, I believe stand in conflict with the philosophical paradigm.
The Synthesis/Conclusion
Now that I have, I believe, sufficiently explicated what are the functional differences between a philosophical and a religious paradigm, I hope to show that a Spirit Epistemology does not synthesize the two in a satisfying way.
It seems to me that a synthesis of the religious and the philosophical paradigms denies their operating assumptions. A Spirit Epistemology, like the kind that I believe Morris is espousing, must either deny the philosophical assumption of man’s omni-competence in favor of the religious assumption of the opposite, or deny the authoritative claims and assumptions made by the religious paradigm (e.g. that God exists, that morality is absolute, etc.) in favor of the philosophical unrest and agnosticism concerning the same topics. To deny the omni-competence of man is to mitigate the philosophical paradigm in such a way as to diminish its respect as a science and render it functionally inferior. To deny the religious claims about morality, the ontology of God etc. is to deny the very premises that make the religious paradigm feasible. It seems to me when Morris speaks of a Spirit Epistemology that it would be a synthesis of the religious and philosophical paradigms that falls pray to the above dilemma. Either you embrace the authority of the religious paradigm or you embrace the authority of human reason, but not both. The kind of Spirit Epistemology that Morris seems to embrace would lean heavily in favor of affirming the assumptions of his religious paradigm and commits philosophical faux pas of accepting unproven assumptions with little to no justification . In the religious paradigm that is a valid move to make, but in the philosophical paradigm it is not. And so, the Spirit Epistemology is functionally a religious paradigm and not a philosophical one as I have explicated it.
1 Morris, Thomas V., The Logic of God Incarnate, Cornell University Press, Eugene OR, 1986, 204
2 Ibid., 9
3 Chisholm, Roderick “The Problem of the Criterion” as found in Pojman, Louis. The Theory of Knowledge. Belmont: Wadsworth Publishing, 2002.
4 The English Standard Version
5 Ibid.,
6 The justificatory status of accepting religious dogma is controversial insofar as the Secularists and the Christians disagree. Most Christians agree that it is reasonable to accept the dogmas of their paradigm.
7 I do realize the irony of philosophizing about philosophy and that the critique I have made concerning human intellect applies to the critique itself. And perhaps this argument stands, but it only stands based on the assumption that I have critiqued. Secondly, I apologize for my lack of theological eloquence as I lack the sufficient training. I appreciate the reader’s grace.
At the end of the chapter “The Nicodemian Modus Tollens”, Morris, in his work The Logic of God Incarnate argues that “A full account of the epistemic status of Christian doctrine would be quite complex and would require, at its core, what we might call a Spirit Epistemology.” It is not Morris’ intention in this book neither to fully explicate the schema of a “Spirit Epistemology” nor to explore what it entails. However, I would like to discuss in this paper what I believe he means by the phrase and to explore what its implications are in a distinctly philosophical and likewise a distinctly religious paradigm. The immediate problem I intuit is that a “spirit epistemology” demonstrates incommensurability between the philosophical and the religious paradigms. It will be my position in this paper that there is no solution that reconciles the two paradigms while simultaneously leaving them in tact.
I believe what Morris means by Spirit Epistemology is this: a philosophy of knowledge and belief that includes as its assumptions both the truths of his religion (in this case orthodox Christianity) and the employment of the logical axioms of philosophy. I believe that it is fair to his position and to the overarching theme of The Logic of God Incarnate to say that it is his belief that the two are reconcilable and that the two work together as a truth-conducive system.
For Morris, I believe a Spirit Epistemology functionally employs the triune God as the final and immutable authority in keeping with orthodox Christianity, and holds that logic is a means by which we understand truth and the nature of truth. A demonstration of Spirit Epistemology in practice might look something like The Logic of God Incarnate. In the preface Morris states “I have come to see that a few metaphysical distinctions and a solid dose of logical care will suffice to explicate and defend the doctrine [of the Incarnation] against all extant criticisms of a philosophical nature.” I infer that what he means is that the doctrine of the Incarnation is in some sense reducible to propositions that form a logical argument and that defending the religious doctrine of the incarnation via a philosophical schema is a valid and appropriate way to accomplish his goal.
But, is it the case that philosophical paradigm is appropriate, let alone, capable of answering questions concerning the incarnation? It seems to me that philosophy and religion will depart in at least two areas that will render discussion concerning a topic native one incommunicable to the other. It is firstly the inherent assumptions and secondly the acceptable authority/authorities native to each that brings about incommensurability between the paradigms.
Assumptions and Authorities
For philosophy to function independently as a truth-conducive system it must also make certain assumptions about itself and about the human faculty of reason. Firstly, it assumes that it is in fact a truth-conducive system. Verifying this assumption is a particularly difficult process, one that may prove fruitless. It seems that the process of verification already is making appeals to branches of philosophy that are yet unsettled. A major problem for verifying the reliability of the philosophical paradigm is one addressed by Chisolm called, “The Problem of the Criterion”. Chisholm articulated the problem like this,
“To know whether things really are as they seem to be, we must have a procedure for distinguishing appearances that are true from appearances that are false. But to know whether our procedure is a good procedure, we have to know whether it really succeeds in distinguishing appearances that are true from appearances that are false. And we cannot know whether it does really succeed unless we already know which appearances are truth and which ones are false. And so we are caught in a circle . . . What few philosophers have had the courage to recognize is this: we can deal with the problem only be begging the question.”
I will let the problem of the criterion stand as a problem for philosophy in general and move on. Disregarding the problem of the criterion one might offer an abductive account for the reliability the philosophical paradigm, but abduction has problems and meta-problems as well. For example, using abduction assumes that abduction is truth-conducive. It does not seem feasible that one can get to the conclusion that abduction is truth conducive via abduction. One might try to verify abduction using induction, but this seems equally absurd because induction can only be verified either by abduction or again by induction. Effectively we are left with either a vicious cycle or an infinite regress. I am not immediately aware of any a priori arguments for the truth-conduciveness of a philosophical system.
The second major assumption for the philosophical paradigm is the effectual omni-competence of humanity. For philosophy to attempt to answer questions about metaphysics, ontology, epistemology and the like it must first assume that we as human beings are capable of understanding all of the aforementioned things. But, when we say that a paradigm is truth conducive we are saying implicitly that the truth that it delivers is comprehendible. There seems to be an epistemological and metaphysical meta-question to ask first, namely, how do we know that our faculties of comprehension are capable of understanding truth. One might argue using the example of science that we know far more and more complex things about the nature of the external world than any other human beings have in accessible recorded history. This may be true but to argue that it will continue in this way is again an argument from either abduction or induction and jump right back on the circle as it were. This exploration into the reliability of philosophy is by no means exhaustive; rather, its purpose is merely to demonstrate our own difficulties in establishing what we hope are truth-conducive systems.
The religious paradigm (particularly the orthodox Christian paradigm that Morris holds to) differs from the philosophical with respect to its assumptions. Rather than rely on the faculties of human reason it relies on the authoritative statements of God as revealed in Christ and scripture (not to the exclusion of the church, traditions, and the individual via the Holy Spirit etc.). A common property to all of humanity, according to the orthodox view, is that we are essentially fallen. The ramifications of our falleness manifest themselves in our death (both physical and spiritual), the necessity of a savior, and, most relevantly for this paper, our faculty of reason.
St. Paul wrote saying, “The natural person does not accept the things of the Spirit of God, for they are folly to him, and he is not able to understand them because they are spiritually discerned” (1 Corinthians 2:14). No matter what your exegetical interpretation of this particular scripture happens to be, it reveals a key point for the religious paradigm: that man alone in incapable of understanding all things apart from God. St. Paul iterates another point later on in the epistle saying, “Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known.” Even when a man knows God, it is only when we are perfected that we understand fully. The combination of the authority of God and the fallenness of man in the religious paradigm are the operating assumptions for the religious paradigm and, I believe stand in conflict with the philosophical paradigm.
The Synthesis/Conclusion
Now that I have, I believe, sufficiently explicated what are the functional differences between a philosophical and a religious paradigm, I hope to show that a Spirit Epistemology does not synthesize the two in a satisfying way.
It seems to me that a synthesis of the religious and the philosophical paradigms denies their operating assumptions. A Spirit Epistemology, like the kind that I believe Morris is espousing, must either deny the philosophical assumption of man’s omni-competence in favor of the religious assumption of the opposite, or deny the authoritative claims and assumptions made by the religious paradigm (e.g. that God exists, that morality is absolute, etc.) in favor of the philosophical unrest and agnosticism concerning the same topics. To deny the omni-competence of man is to mitigate the philosophical paradigm in such a way as to diminish its respect as a science and render it functionally inferior. To deny the religious claims about morality, the ontology of God etc. is to deny the very premises that make the religious paradigm feasible. It seems to me when Morris speaks of a Spirit Epistemology that it would be a synthesis of the religious and philosophical paradigms that falls pray to the above dilemma. Either you embrace the authority of the religious paradigm or you embrace the authority of human reason, but not both. The kind of Spirit Epistemology that Morris seems to embrace would lean heavily in favor of affirming the assumptions of his religious paradigm and commits philosophical faux pas of accepting unproven assumptions with little to no justification . In the religious paradigm that is a valid move to make, but in the philosophical paradigm it is not. And so, the Spirit Epistemology is functionally a religious paradigm and not a philosophical one as I have explicated it.
1 Morris, Thomas V., The Logic of God Incarnate, Cornell University Press, Eugene OR, 1986, 204
2 Ibid., 9
3 Chisholm, Roderick “The Problem of the Criterion” as found in Pojman, Louis. The Theory of Knowledge. Belmont: Wadsworth Publishing, 2002.
4 The English Standard Version
5 Ibid.,
6 The justificatory status of accepting religious dogma is controversial insofar as the Secularists and the Christians disagree. Most Christians agree that it is reasonable to accept the dogmas of their paradigm.
7 I do realize the irony of philosophizing about philosophy and that the critique I have made concerning human intellect applies to the critique itself. And perhaps this argument stands, but it only stands based on the assumption that I have critiqued. Secondly, I apologize for my lack of theological eloquence as I lack the sufficient training. I appreciate the reader’s grace.