Video Transcript: The Beginning of Knowledge

How do you know that you know anything? How do you know that the things you think you know are real? Movies have had some fun with that kind of question.  The movie Inception, for example, asks the question, are your experiences just  a dream? There are a lot of things that are shown in that movie that turn out to  be just dreams, and by the end of it, you wonder if any of it was real. And  beneath that kind of question that the movie asks is a question that philosophers have been asking for a very long time. How do you know that your experiences  are actually experiences of a reality outside yourself, and not just a dream. Or  how do you know your memories are real? The movie Total Recall has someone who, by certain scientific means, has had all kinds of memories, a whole  lifetime, of memories implanted in his brain. So he thinks he's had that kind of a  life, when, in fact, he has not. How do you know that what you think you  remember was not just all implanted in your mind 45 minutes ago? It's pretty  hard to say exactly why we trust our memories, but most of the time we do, just  as with dreams, we think that we can tell once we're awake, what's real and  what's not. Another question, are your senses putting you in touch with realities  outside yourself? You may think you see things, you may think you hear things.  What if those are all just sensations being fed into you? That's the question  raised by the matrix, another one of these science fiction movies, a bunch of  humans are attached to a system of machines and computers, and the  computers are just feeding experiences of a life into these humans who are lying inert in a vat, and the machines are feeding off of the heat and the electrical  impulses of the human bodies. So again, this is not just a clever notion of some  modern movie. For many, many centuries, philosophers have been asking, how  do we know that those inner experiences that we have are in touch at all with a  world outside of us. There are entire systems and religions you know who teach  that the answer to that is they're not. There is no real world. There are no  sensations that are putting you in touch with a physical reality. Most of the  Eastern religions teach that everything that you take to be physical and every  sensation that you experience is really just an illusion. So it's not far fetched to  ask questions like this, when entire religions are devoted to saying that you don't really experience a real world, and when philosophers have sometimes been  scratching their heads trying to figure out how they can be confident that they  know anything about the world outside themselves. The fact is, if you're going to know anything about the world outside yourself, you first have to have a Knower. Does your mind have the ability to know things that are outside itself? You need  a mind that's capable of knowing and then you need a world that's capable of  being known. Is the world real? If it's real, does it have features that are  knowable by human minds? Now some of you might say, well, of course, why  even think about that? As I've already said, it's not quite so simple. There are  entire religious viewpoints that have said the world is an illusion and your own  mind is not reliable at all. In fact, the most popular way of looking at the world in 

educated Western societies today is materialism, a way of looking at the world  which has a very, very hard time answering the question, how does your mind  have the ability to know things outside itself? And a very hard time saying that  the world has patterns that the human mind can know. Materialism, also called  

naturalism, is basically the idea that physical things are the only things that  exist. There is no spirit world and the mind. The human mind is just an  accidental byproduct of a mindless material process. Now, if that's what the  human mind is, is there any reason to think that we have real intelligence and  materialism also says that the universe is a bunch of random interactions of  matter flying through space. Now, if that's what the universe is, if it's just all  random and accidental, how can there be any intelligible, understandable  patterns? We have no basis for confidence that our minds are intelligent and  that the world is. Intelligible if we believe in materialism, and that is the basic  standpoint of atheism, that there is no God, no divine mind, and physical reality  is all there is. But once you have said that there's nothing but atoms flying  through space and that the human mind is just an accident, you have lost all  basis for thinking you know, anything whatsoever. Don't take my word for it. Take the word of a few atheists. Arthur Schopenhauer was not a Christian. Did not  believe in a personal God, and yet he knew there was a problem in just  believing in materialism. He said, materialism is the philosophy of the subject  who forgets to take account of himself. Materialism cannot account for human  thinking. The scientist JBS Haldane said, If my mental processes are  determined wholly by the motions of atoms in my brain, I have no reason to  suppose that my beliefs are true, and hence I have no reason for supposing my  brain to be composed of atoms. If you think that your brain is just atoms  randomly interacting, then you really have no reason to think your brain is made  of atoms, because you have no reason to have any confidence in any notion,  any idea, any belief that occurs in that random jumble of atoms at all. Karl Marx  is another atheist famous for his economic theories, for his pushing towards  socialism and communism. He believed that almost everything about humans  can be reduced to economic structures and economic laws. He claimed that this dictated all ideas about truth. Well, if so, then Marx's own ideas were not  actually truths either, but they were just accidental byproducts of an economic  setting, and they had no basis in rationality or truth. What Marx said about  others would have to apply to his own thinking as well. It would just be an  accident of economics. Sigmund Freud, one of the great founders of psychology, another atheist, claimed that our minds are dominated by unconscious, primeval urges in the unconscious that we really don't understand any of you is on to  certain things that that really are dynamics in us, but if that's all the mind is, then we don't have much reason to trust it. Now, wishes can be a factor in our  thinking, but if all thinking is nothing but mental states prompted by our wishes  and our adaptation for survival, then Freud's own theory would also be wishful 

thinking. You get the point. If you say all thinking is thus and such, and you  reduce all thinking to unconscious urges or whatever or wishes, then you can't  exempt your own thinking, and you destroy confidence in your own theory by the very theory that you're promoting. Friedrich Nietzsche was a famous  philosopher. Lived at the end of the 1800s he said that claims about truth and  morality are just expressions of somebody's own agenda, their desire to control  things outside themselves. Now no doubt people do have an agenda sometimes when they're saying things about truth, but if everything we say and believe  about truth is just pushing for power, then we have no reason for confidence that we're in touch with truth. Human thinking does not aim for truth, said Nietzsche,  but merely expresses this will to power, this desire to manipulate others. And so  the only way to answer that is, okay. Nietzsche, that tells me a lot about you. It  tells me that your thinking is an attempt to manipulate others, because that's  what you say all thinking is. So we'll at least take your word for it that your  thinking is entirely manipulative and not in touch with truth. You see how, in one  case, after another, after another, if you're going to reduce all human thinking to  economics or psychological urges or a will to power which is not actually in  touch with truth, then you have no basis for confidence in your own mind and in  your own thinking whatsoever. Let's turn to Charles Darwin, the famous scientist and promoter of evolutionary theory, according to his theory, and current  Darwinists who follow that theory of evolution, the human brain is an accidental  byproduct of a mindless process. Your brain is a randomly evolved piece of  meat with various electrical impulses in it, and that's all it is. Now, if your brain is  just a piece of meat with electrical impulses in it, do you have any reason at all  to think that any of your beliefs are in touch with reality, that you know anything  at all about the world? Darwin himself put it this way with me, the horrid doubt  always arises whether the convictions of a man's mind are of any value or at all  trustworthy. Would anyone trust in the convictions of a monkey's mind if there  are any convictions in such a mind? Now, if you have a theory that says all  human thinking is random, or the vibrations of a monkey's mind, then you have  no reason to believe anything, including your own theory. Now do we then say  all human thinking is hogwash and we know nothing? Or should we instead say,  well, those theories which claim to be so wise destroy all basis for confidence in  human thought. And therefore, rather than giving up all confidence in human  thought, we should give up those silly theories. Try that one on for size. Maybe  we should give up Freudianism and Marxism and Darwinism and all those other  isms that try to reduce the human mind to being just a byproduct, totally of  something else. Richard Rorty, the foremost postmodern philosopher in America for a number of years, was a follower of Darwin in his philosophy. And Rorty said the idea that one species of organism, humans is unlike all the others, oriented  not just toward its own increased prosperity, but towards truth, is as unDarwinian as the idea that every human being has a built in moral compass, a conscience. 

You see what Rorty is saying, You do not have a real conscience that puts you  in touch with real standards of right and wrong, you do not have a real rationality that puts you in touch with realities outside yourself and with truth. It's  unDarwinian to think that way. Now these are the friends of those theories who  are saying these things. I'm not yet introducing you to the Christians who are  critiquing naturalism and atheism for being totally irrational. These are the  friends of materialism, the friends of rationalism, who say we have no basis at all for thinking that humans are wired towards truth or goodness, GK Chesterton,  the Christian writer, said it is idle to talk always of the alternative of reason and  faith. It is an act of faith to assert that our thoughts have any relation to reality at  all. If you're merely a skeptic, says Chesterton, you must sooner or later, ask  yourself the question, why should anything go right with our thinking, even  observation and deduction. Why should not good logic be as misleading as bad  logic? They're both movements in the brain of a bewildered ape. If all of our  thinking is movement in the brain of a bewildered ape, then all we can be is  bewildered. And yet, those who hold this view of the human mind actually claim  to know things that happened billions of years ago and billions of light years  away, and to know vast amounts of things, and they cannot explain why they  would have confidence in one belief of their own mind. If minds are wholly  dependent on brains, and brains on biochemistry, and biochemistry in the long  run, on the meaningless flux of the atoms, I cannot understand how the thought  of those minds should have any more significance, said CS Lewis, than the  sound of the wind in the trees. It's just kind of blowing around. Your thoughts are just random, blowing here and there. Well, let's admit it. You know, in our bad  days, we are pretty confused, and our minds are not entirely reliable. But do we  really want to say that our thoughts have no more significance than the sound of the wind in the trees? CS Lewis says the whole picture of naturalism professes  to depend on inferences from observed facts. You always hear how factual  people are. We're being so scientific, and everything we have is based on our  observations and our deductions from those observations, but they haven't told  you why you can count on observation, nor why deductions or inference should  be reliable unless inference is valid, says CS Lewis, the whole picture  disappears. Unless reason is an absolute all is in ruins. Yet those who ask me to believe this world picture of naturalism also ask me to believe that reason is  simply the unforeseen and unintended byproduct of mindless matter at one  stage of its endless and aimless becoming. Now, supposing there was no  intelligence behind the universe, says Lewis, no creative mind. In that case,  nobody designed my brain for the purpose of thinking. It is merely that when the  atoms inside my skull happened for physical or chemical reasons, to arrange  themselves in a certain way. This gives me as a byproduct the sensation I call  thought. But if so, how can I trust my own thinking to be true? It's like upsetting a milk jug, says Lewis, and hoping that the way it splashes itself will give you a 

map of London. But if I can't trust my own thinking, of course, I can't trust the  arguments leading to atheism, and therefore have no reason to be an atheist or  anything else unless I believe in God. I cannot believe in thought. So I can never use thought to disbelieve in God. That's an interesting way of saying it, and it's a very hard way thing to refute Lewis says, Unless I believe in God, I cannot  believe in thought. So I can never use thought to disbelieve in God. An open  mind, says Lewis, and questions that are not ultimate is useful, but an open  mind about the ultimate foundations, either of theoretical or practical reason, is  idiocy. If a man's mind is open on these things, let his mouth at least be shut.  Lewis says, if you're not going to trust theoretical reason, that is your ability to  think clearly and logically at all, and practical reason, the ability to know how to  behave morally in particular situations. If you don't believe you have a mind and  a conscience and that those things have at least some contact with reality, you  have reduced yourself to an idiot, and then you should just be quiet. If your mind is open to the thought that all minds are nonsense, then you've reduced your  own mind and your own thoughts to nonsense, and you've become so open  minded that your brain has fallen out again. To know anything, your mind must  have the ability to know things outside it, and the world must be real and must  have features that are knowable. Now, in order to do that as just to review again, we need intelligence, that is the abilities of our mind, and we need intelligibility,  the way the world is put together. With intelligence, people have certain faculties that enable us to know things outside ourselves. We're intelligent. We're capable of knowing reality. And intelligibility means there are knowable patterns in the  world. The world and other persons are real, and they can be known to some  degree. Reality is intelligible. Those are the two absolute essentials for  knowledge. That's the beginning of knowledge. We need that to be able to begin to know anything. And how can we be confident that our minds are intelligent  and that the world is intelligible? Well, Albert Einstein said, The Eternal mystery  of the world is its comprehensibility. How can it be that mathematics is so  admirably appropriate to the objects of reality? Isn't it an amazing thing that  people could put together a system of symbols such as mathematics is and  have it correspond so closely to things in the universe, to the degree that we can predict and control many things by the power of mathematics. It's a tremendous  mystery how that could be, says Einstein, or maybe not so much of a mystery, if  we're willing to pay attention. Mary Midgley is a philosopher who's not a  committed Christian, but she knows too that materialism just can't account for  mind and doesn't provide a basis for scientific thought. Midgley says science  cannot stand alone. We cannot believe its propositions without first believing in a great many other startling things, such as the existence of the external world,  the reliability of our senses, memory and informants, and the validity of logic. If  we do believe these things, we already have a world far wider than that of  science, you need to believe in your faculties, and you need to believe that the 

world is real before you can even begin science. And so science is not the basis  of everything else. It needs to start on a different foundation. Acknowledging that matter is somehow akin to and penetrated by mind is not adding a new  extravagant assumption to our existing thought system. Midgley says it's  becoming aware of something we're already doing. The humbug of pretending  that we could carry on intellectual life in an intrinsically unintelligible world, an  unknowable world, is akin to the humbug of pretending we could live without  depending on other people. How in the world are you going to think about  anything if thought itself is a waste of time, and if the world is not patterned in a  way that corresponds to human thought, you might as well just shut off your  brain and go to sleep. You have to believe that matter has something like mind  all through it and patterns in it, unless says C S Lewis, unless all that we take to  be knowledge is an illusion, we must hold that in thinking we're not just reading  rationality into an irrational universe. We are responding to a rationality with  which the universe has always been saturated, a universe saturated with  rationality. But how do you get a universe that's saturated with patterns that are  rationally detectable, and a mind that has the rational ability to see those  patterns? Well, the world is saturated with rationality because a supremely  reasonable being created it. In the beginning, God created the heavens and the  earth. The Book of Jeremiah 10, and later on, in the book as well, it says, It is  He who made the earth, by His power, who established the world, by his wisdom and by His understanding stretched out the heavens. God's wisdom and God's  understanding are the source of the universe, and so wisdom and  understanding are embedded in the very nature of the way things are made, and that is why the world can be studied, because a great intelligence made it with  patterns that could be discovered. And why should we have confidence that our  mental faculties can discover some of those things and also other kinds of  wisdom? Because those faculties and that wisdom and that knowledge and  understanding comes from God. Proverbs 2:6 says, For the Lord gives wisdom  from his mouth come knowledge and understanding in Daniel 2, it talks about  particular young men, and then it talks about a general principle that God gives  wisdom to the wise and knowledge to those who have understanding. God is the source of knowledge and of understanding, and one of the wisest of all people,  the wisest King in Israel's history, certainly Solomon received his understanding  from God. God gave Solomon wisdom and understanding beyond measure. Our intellect, our intelligence, our mind is a gift from God to some. He gives a greater mind to some, not quite so great a mind, but all human minds are given some  degree of ability to understand and grasp reality, and that means that believing  in God and taking God as this supreme reality is the beginning of knowledge. In  Job 38:36, God asks Job this question, who has put wisdom in the inward parts  or given understanding to the mind? The answer, of course, is God Himself has  done that. God gives understanding to the mind elsewhere in Job. It says it is 

the spirit in man, the breath of the Almighty, that makes him understand. God is  the one who enables understanding. And that famous verse in Proverbs 1:7, the  fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge. Fools despise wisdom and  instruction. You begin in God. He is the foundation of all knowledge. And if you  ignore God, then you are also just despising wisdom and instruction. So the  basis for knowing God gives your mind the ability to know things outside it, And  God made the real world with features that are knowable, and that's why you  can be confident that the world you're thinking about is a real world, that the  mind you have is a tool for knowing that world without a world made by God and a mind designed by God, you have no confidence at all that your mind is in  touch with reality. Your mind is a total accident and the world a total chaos. We  have different faculties for knowing, and we can be confident in these, not fully  confident because we're limited persons. And these faculties, especially through  the fall into sin and some of the brokenness in our world, are not as good as  they would have been, but nonetheless, we have a reasonable confidence in  using them. We have senses, the ability to see, to hear, to smell, to taste, to  touch. These are all ways of receiving input from the world around us, and we  have the equipment we have, eyes, ears, nose, taste buds, nerve endings in our fingers, and a brain that knows how to interpret all those things that help us to  learn things about the world outside us and God designed it that way. Our  memory is not just something that's been implanted there by some evil  programmer. Our memory recalls real events, real experiences and yeah,  memory can be mistaken at times, but that's the whole point. The only way we  could say memory is mistaken is if we contrast that with those times when  memory is right. If we are naturalist, we just say that memory can't ever be relied on, because we have no basis for confidence in memory. Introspection is  another faculty for knowing things about my own inner state, how I feel, what's  going on inside me. Sympathy and here, this isn't just feeling sorry for others.  Here, it's used a little more technically, sympathy as a faculty for being aware of  what others think or feel or believe. Sympathy is thinking, you know, what other  people I have no guarantee that they're anything at all like me, but somehow I  just sense that humans are humans. And if I get punched in the nose and it feels a certain way, then when someone else gets punched in the nose, it hurts, and  that hurt probably feels pretty much like it feels when I get punched in the nose.  If they believe a certain belief, and I hold to the same proposition expressed in  the same words, then our beliefs are very, very similar. We have things in  common. Again, you can't prove that other people are even real. You just know  they are because you have a faculty of sympathy that other beings are there  and they're real. Credulity. Sometimes it gets knocked, but again, this is kind of  a technical term for believing what others tell us, and sometimes we're told that  it's irrational, unless you examine every last thing for yourself and only then  allow it into your belief system. But the fact is, more than 99% of what we 

believe is based on what we've been told by others. Just about everything you  know about science was not a discovery of yours. You're believing the scientists  who told you about it. Very much of what you learn about life is learn from your  parents, and that's not a bad way to learn. It's not an irrational way to learn.  Credulity is a valuable faculty, believing most of the time what other people tell  you, and then sorting through to make sure that it's correct induction, expecting  the future to be like in the past, in some sense, not exactly like it, but to say that  if something happens again and again and again and again, there's probably  something going on where you can expect it to happen again in the future. The  earth turns in a certain way, and the sun rises every morning, and we kind of  expect that it will rise tomorrow. There is no absolute logical proof that it has to  or that it will, but induction says, yeah, it probably will. Induction observes that  certain germs are present when a person gets sick. And you say, I think those  germs are causing those sickness, because I've observed in 8700 cases that  those germs were present just before a person got sick. The ability to learn from  experience is induction, and there are other faculties as well. Reason. Reason  can be used broadly for generally the process of thinking, but if we use it more  narrowly, it's grasping truths that are prior to or independent of experience. You  don't really need to see something to know it to be true. For example, once you  learn the meaning of 2+1=3, you just know that 2+1 can't be 5 simple logic  deductions that you make, if all Cats have whiskers and Princess is a cat, then  Princess has whiskers, because if all have it, then any one case of that has to  have it. We know that by logic, and sometimes we can see other logical  relationships and deductions, and they can become a lot more detailed and  sophisticated. But the point is that reason has this reliable ability because,  again, it's a faculty that we have from God. And conscience is a way of knowing  something inside us senses whether something is right or whether it's wrong.  And again, conscience can be damaged. It can be mistaken at times, but it is a  real faculty, and when it's working properly, it senses God's smile or God's frown on certain kinds of behavior, and it is a way of knowing moral knowledge is real  knowledge. Oh, and one more faculty that I want to mention in this talk, the God  sense we have, nearly all of us, an awareness, an intuitive awareness, that God  is there, that God is great, that somebody is awesome, that there is somebody  to whom we owe our life, that there is somebody who's created all these things  around us, and this God sense, when it's working properly, has awe at divine  reality. It doesn't need lots of logic and explanations to prove God. It just knows  in. Way that you know that another person exists. You just know he's there,  because this God sense knows him. And the things that God makes awaken that God sense. The Bible says God created man in His own image, and part of that  image is a correspondence to God, something in ourselves that fits with God, he has put eternity into man's heart, a longing for the infinite and the eternal. That's  part of the God sense. The spirit of man is the lamp of the Lord, searching all his 

think you know are real? Movies have had some fun with that kind of question. The m ovie Inception, for example, asks the question, are your experiences just  a dream? There are a lot of things that are shown in that movie that turn out t  be just dreams, and by the end of it, you wonder if any of it was real. A nd beneath that kind of question that the movie asks is a question that phi losophers have been asking for a very long time. How do you know that your exper iences are actually experiences of a reality outside yourself, and not just a d ream. Or how do you know your memories are real? The movie Total Recall has som eone who, by certain scientific means, has had all kinds of memories, a whole l ifetime, of memories implanted in his brain. So he thinks he's had that kin d of a life, when, in fact, he has not. How do you know that what you think  you remember was not just all implanted in your mind 45 minutes ago? It's p retty hard to say exactly why we trust our memories, but most of the time we do, ju st as with dreams, we think that we can tell once we're awake, what's real and w hat's not. Another question, are your senses putting you in touch with real ities outside yourself? You may think you see things, you may think you he ar things. What if those are all just sensations being fed into you? That's th e question raised by the matrix, another one of these science fiction movies,  a bunch of humans are attached to a system of machines and computers, and  the computers are just feeding experiences of a life into these humans who are lyi g inert in a vat, and the machines are feeding off of the heat and the e lectrical impulses of the human bodies. So again, this is not just a clever n otion of some modern movie. For many, many centuries, philosophers have been  asking, how do we know that those inner experiences that we have are in touch  at all with a world outside of us. There are entire systems and religions  you know who teach that the answer to that is they're not. There is no real  world. There are no sensations that are putting you in touch with a physic al reality. Most of the Eastern religions teach that everything that you take to  be physical and every sensation that you experience is really just an illusion.  So it's not far fetched to ask questions like this, when entire religions  are devoted to saying that you don't really experience a real world, and when  philosophers have sometimes been scratching their heads trying to figure  out how they can be confident that they know anything about the world outs ide themselves. The fact is, if you're going to know anything about the wo rld outside yourself, you first have to have a Knower. Does your mind have  the ability to know things that are outside itself? You need a mind that's  capable of knowing and then you need a world that's capable of being known. Is  the world real? If it's real, does it have features that are knowable by h uman minds? Now some of you might say, well, of course, why even think about that?  As I've already said, it's not quite so simple. There are entire religious viewp oints that have said the world is an illusion and your own mind is not reliab e at all. In fact, the most popular way of looking at the world in educated Western societ

ies today is materialism, a way of looking at the world which has a very , very hard time answering the question, how does your mind have the ability to kn ow things outside itself? And a very hard time saying that the world has patterns  that the human mind can know. Materialism, also called naturalism, is basically  the idea that physical things are the only things that exist. There is no spir it world and the mind. The human mind is just an accidental byproduct of  a mindless material process. Now, if that's what the human mind is, is ther e any reason to think that we have real intelligence and materialism also s ays that the universe is a bunch of random interactions of matter flying through s pace. Now, if that's what the universe is, if it's just all random and accidenta l, how can there be any intelligible, understandable patterns? We have no basis for conf idence that our minds are intelligent and that the world is. Intelligible i f we believe in materialism, and that is the basic standpoint of atheism, that  there is no God, no divine mind, and physical reality is all there is. But on e you have said that there's nothing but atoms flying through space and that t he human mind is just an accident, you have lost all basis for thinking you know , anything whatsoever. Don't take my word for it. Take the word of a few ath eists. Arthur Schopenhauer was not a Christian. Did not believe in a persona l God, and yet he knew there was a problem in just believing in materialism.  He said, materialism is the philosophy of the subject who forgets to take account of hi mself. Materialism cannot account for human thinking. The scientist JBS Haldane said,  If my mental processes are determined wholly by the motions of atoms  in my brain, I have no reason to suppose that my beliefs are true, and hence  I have no reason for supposing my brain to be composed of atoms. If you  think that your brain is just atoms randomly interacting, then you really have  no reason to think your brain is made of atoms, because you have no reason t o have any confidence in any notion, any idea, any belief that occurs in th at random jumble of atoms at all. Karl Marx is another atheist famous for  his economic theories, for his pushing towards socialism and communism. He believed t hat almost everything about humans can be reduced to economic structures and  economic laws. He claimed that this dictated all ideas about truth. Well, if so,  then Marx's own ideas were not actually truths either, but they were just accide ntal byproducts of an economic setting, and they had no basis in rationality or  truth. What Marx said about others would have to apply to his own thinking as wel l. It would just be an accident of economics. Sigmund Freud, one of the great founde rs of psychology, another atheist, claimed that our minds are dominated by unco nscious, primeval urges in the unconscious that we really don't understand an y of you is on to certain things that that really are dynamics in us, but if that 's all the mind is, then we don't have much reason to trust it. Now, wishes ca n be a factor in our thinking, but if all thinking is nothing but mental states prom pted by our wishes and our adaptation for survival, then Freud's own theory would  also be wishful thinking. You get the point. If you say all thinking is thus a

nd such, and you reduce all thinking to unconscious urges or whatever or wishes, th en you can't exempt your own thinking, and you destroy confidence in your ow n theory by the very theory that you're promoting. Friedrich Nietzsche was a f amous philosopher. Lived at the end of the 1800s he said that claims about truth a nd morality are just expressions of somebody's own agenda, their desire to control t hings outside themselves. Now no doubt people do have an agenda sometimes when th ey're saying things about truth, but if everything we say and believe about tru th is just pushing for power, then we have no reason for confidence that we're in  touch with truth. Human thinking does not aim for truth, said Nietzsche, but  merely expresses this will to power, this desire to manipulate others. And  so the only way to answer that is, okay. Nietzsche, that tells me a lot about you.  It tells me that your thinking is an attempt to manipulate others, because that's  what you say all thinking is. So we'll at least take your word for it that your  thinking is entirely manipulative and not in touch with truth. You see how, in one  case, after another, after another, if you're going to reduce all human thinking to  economics or psychological urges or a will to power which is not actually in  touch with truth, then you have no basis for confidence in your own mind and in  your own thinking whatsoever. Let's turn to Charles Darwin, the famous scientist and promoter of evolutionary theory, according to his theory, and current  Darwinists who follow that theory of evolution, the human brain is an accidental  byproduct of a mindless process. Your brain is a randomly evolved piece of  meat with various electrical impulses in it, and that's all it is. Now, if your brain is  just a piece of meat with electrical impulses in it, do you have any reason at all  to think that any of your beliefs are in touch with reality, that you know anything  at all about the world? Darwin himself put it this way with me, the horrid doubt  always arises whether the convictions of a man's mind are of any value or at all  trustworthy. Would anyone trust in the convictions of a monkey's mind if there  are any convictions in such a mind? Now, if you have a theory that says all  human thinking is random, or the vibrations of a monkey's mind, then you have  no reason to believe anything, including your own theory. Now do we then say  all human thinking is hogwash and we know nothing? Or should we instead say,  well, those theories which claim to be so wise destroy all basis for confidence in  human thought. And therefore, rather than giving up all confidence in human  thought, we should give up those silly theories. Try that one on for size. Maybe  we should give up Freudianism and Marxism and Darwinism and all those other  isms that try to reduce the human mind to being just a byproduct, totally of  something else. Richard Rorty, the foremost postmodern philosopher in America for a number of years, was a follower of Darwin in his philosophy. And Rorty said the idea that one species of organism, humans is unlike all the others, oriented  not just toward its own increased prosperity, but towards truth, is as unDarwinian as the idea that every human being has a built in moral compass, a conscience.  You see what Rorty is saying, You do not have a real conscience that puts you 

in touch with real standards of right and wrong, you do not have a real rationality that puts you in touch with realities outside yourself and with truth. It's  unDarwinian to think that way. Now these are the friends of those theories who  are saying these things. I'm not yet introducing you to the Christians who are  critiquing naturalism and atheism for being totally irrational. These are the  friends of materialism, the friends of rationalism, who say we have no basis at all for thinking that humans are wired towards truth or goodness, GK Chesterton,  the Christian writer, said it is idle to talk always of the alternative of reason and  faith. It is an act of faith to assert that our thoughts have any relation to reality at  all. If you're merely a skeptic, says Chesterton, you must sooner or later, ask  yourself the question, why should anything go right with our thinking, even  observation and deduction. Why should not good logic be as misleading as bad  logic? They're both movements in the brain of a bewildered ape. If all of our  thinking is movement in the brain of a bewildered ape, then all we can be is  bewildered. And yet, those who hold this view of the human mind actually claim  to know things that happened billions of years ago and billions of light years  away, and to know vast amounts of things, and they cannot explain why they  would have confidence in one belief of their own mind. If minds are wholly  dependent on brains, and brains on biochemistry, and biochemistry in the long  run, on the meaningless flux of the atoms, I cannot understand how the thought  of those minds should have any more significance, said CS Lewis, than the  sound of the wind in the trees. It's just kind of blowing around. Your thoughts are just random, blowing here and there. Well, let's admit it. You know, in our bad  days, we are pretty confused, and our minds are not entirely reliable. But do we  really want to say that our thoughts have no more significance than the sound of the wind in the trees? CS Lewis says the whole picture of naturalism professes  to depend on inferences from observed facts. You always hear how factual  people are. We're being so scientific, and everything we have is based on our  observations and our deductions from those observations, but they haven't told  you why you can count on observation, nor why deductions or inference should  be reliable unless inference is valid, says CS Lewis, the whole picture  disappears. Unless reason is an absolute all is in ruins. Yet those who ask me to believe this world picture of naturalism also ask me to believe that reason is  simply the unforeseen and unintended byproduct of mindless matter at one  stage of its endless and aimless becoming. Now, supposing there was no  intelligence behind the universe, says Lewis, no creative mind. In that case,  nobody designed my brain for the purpose of thinking. It is merely that when the  atoms inside my skull happened for physical or chemical reasons, to arrange  themselves in a certain way. This gives me as a byproduct the sensation I call  thought. But if so, how can I trust my own thinking to be true? It's like upsetting a milk jug, says Lewis, and hoping that the way it splashes itself will give you a  map of London. But if I can't trust my own thinking, of course, I can't trust the 

arguments leading to atheism, and therefore have no reason to be an atheist or  anything else unless I believe in God. I cannot believe in thought. So I can never use thought to disbelieve in God. That's an interesting way of saying it, and it's a very hard way thing to refute Lewis says, Unless I believe in God, I cannot  

believe in thought. So I can never use thought to disbelieve in God. An open  mind, says Lewis, and questions that are not ultimate is useful, but an open  mind about the ultimate foundations, either of theoretical or practical reason, is  idiocy. If a man's mind is open on these things, let his mouth at least be shut.  Lewis says, if you're not going to trust theoretical reason, that is your ability to  think clearly and logically at all, and practical reason, the ability to know how to  behave morally in particular situations. If you don't believe you have a mind and  a conscience and that those things have at least some contact with reality, you  have reduced yourself to an idiot, and then you should just be quiet. If your mind is open to the thought that all minds are nonsense, then you've reduced your  own mind and your own thoughts to nonsense, and you've become so open  minded that your brain has fallen out again. To know anything, your mind must  have the ability to know things outside it, and the world must be real and must  have features that are knowable. Now, in order to do that as just to review again, we need intelligence, that is the abilities of our mind, and we need intelligibility,  the way the world is put together. With intelligence, people have certain faculties that enable us to know things outside ourselves. We're intelligent. We're capable of knowing reality. And intelligibility means there are knowable patterns in the  world. The world and other persons are real, and they can be known to some  degree. Reality is intelligible. Those are the two absolute essentials for  knowledge. That's the beginning of knowledge. We need that to be able to begin to know anything. And how can we be confident that our minds are intelligent  and that the world is intelligible? Well, Albert Einstein said, The Eternal mystery  of the world is its comprehensibility. How can it be that mathematics is so  admirably appropriate to the objects of reality? Isn't it an amazing thing that  people could put together a system of symbols such as mathematics is and  have it correspond so closely to things in the universe, to the degree that we can predict and control many things by the power of mathematics. It's a tremendous  mystery how that could be, says Einstein, or maybe not so much of a mystery, if  we're willing to pay attention. Mary Midgley is a philosopher who's not a  committed Christian, but she knows too that materialism just can't account for  mind and doesn't provide a basis for scientific thought. Midgley says science  cannot stand alone. We cannot believe its propositions without first believing in a great many other startling things, such as the existence of the external world,  the reliability of our senses, memory and informants, and the validity of logic. If  we do believe these things, we already have a world far wider than that of  science, you need to believe in your faculties, and you need to believe that the  world is real before you can even begin science. And so science is not the basis 

of everything else. It needs to start on a different foundation. Acknowledging that matter is somehow akin to and penetrated by mind is not adding a new  extravagant assumption to our existing thought system. Midgley says it's  becoming aware of something we're already doing. The humbug of pretending  that we could carry on intellectual life in an intrinsically unintelligible world, an  unknowable world, is akin to the humbug of pretending we could live without  depending on other people. How in the world are you going to think about  anything if thought itself is a waste of time, and if the world is not patterned in a  way that corresponds to human thought, you might as well just shut off your  brain and go to sleep. You have to believe that matter has something like mind  all through it and patterns in it, unless says C S Lewis, unless all that we take to  be knowledge is an illusion, we must hold that in thinking we're not just reading  rationality into an irrational universe. We are responding to a rationality with  which the universe has always been saturated, a universe saturated with  rationality. But how do you get a universe that's saturated with patterns that are  rationally detectable, and a mind that has the rational ability to see those  patterns? Well, the world is saturated with rationality because a supremely  reasonable being created it. In the beginning, God created the heavens and the  earth. The Book of Jeremiah 10, and later on, in the book as well, it says, It is  He who made the earth, by His power, who established the world, by his wisdom and by His understanding stretched out the heavens. God's wisdom and God's  understanding are the source of the universe, and so wisdom and  understanding are embedded in the very nature of the way things are made, and that is why the world can be studied, because a great intelligence made it with  patterns that could be discovered. And why should we have confidence that our  mental faculties can discover some of those things and also other kinds of  wisdom? Because those faculties and that wisdom and that knowledge and  understanding comes from God. Proverbs 2:6 says, For the Lord gives wisdom  from his mouth come knowledge and understanding in Daniel 2, it talks about  particular young men, and then it talks about a general principle that God gives  wisdom to the wise and knowledge to those who have understanding. God is the source of knowledge and of understanding, and one of the wisest of all people,  the wisest King in Israel's history, certainly Solomon received his understanding  from God. God gave Solomon wisdom and understanding beyond measure. Our intellect, our intelligence, our mind is a gift from God to some. He gives a greater mind to some, not quite so great a mind, but all human minds are given some  degree of ability to understand and grasp reality, and that means that believing  in God and taking God as this supreme reality is the beginning of knowledge. In  Job 38:36, God asks Job this question, who has put wisdom in the inward parts  or given understanding to the mind? The answer, of course, is God Himself has  done that. God gives understanding to the mind elsewhere in Job. It says it is  the spirit in man, the breath of the Almighty, that makes him understand. God is 

the one who enables understanding. And that famous verse in Proverbs 1:7, the  fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge. Fools despise wisdom and  instruction. You begin in God. He is the foundation of all knowledge. And if you  ignore God, then you are also just despising wisdom and instruction. So the  basis for knowing God gives your mind the ability to know things outside it, And  God made the real world with features that are knowable, and that's why you  can be confident that the world you're thinking about is a real world, that the  mind you have is a tool for knowing that world without a world made by God and a mind designed by God, you have no confidence at all that your mind is in  touch with reality. Your mind is a total accident and the world a total chaos. We  have different faculties for knowing, and we can be confident in these, not fully  confident because we're limited persons. And these faculties, especially through  the fall into sin and some of the brokenness in our world, are not as good as  they would have been, but nonetheless, we have a reasonable confidence in  using them. We have senses, the ability to see, to hear, to smell, to taste, to  touch. These are all ways of receiving input from the world around us, and we  have the equipment we have, eyes, ears, nose, taste buds, nerve endings in our fingers, and a brain that knows how to interpret all those things that help us to  learn things about the world outside us and God designed it that way. Our  memory is not just something that's been implanted there by some evil  programmer. Our memory recalls real events, real experiences and yeah,  memory can be mistaken at times, but that's the whole point. The only way we  could say memory is mistaken is if we contrast that with those times when  memory is right. If we are naturalist, we just say that memory can't ever be relied on, because we have no basis for confidence in memory. Introspection is  another faculty for knowing things about my own inner state, how I feel, what's  going on inside me. Sympathy and here, this isn't just feeling sorry for others.  Here, it's used a little more technically, sympathy as a faculty for being aware of  what others think or feel or believe. Sympathy is thinking, you know, what other  people I have no guarantee that they're anything at all like me, but somehow I  just sense that humans are humans. And if I get punched in the nose and it feels a certain way, then when someone else gets punched in the nose, it hurts, and  that hurt probably feels pretty much like it feels when I get punched in the nose.  If they believe a certain belief, and I hold to the same proposition expressed in  the same words, then our beliefs are very, very similar. We have things in  common. Again, you can't prove that other people are even real. You just know  they are because you have a faculty of sympathy that other beings are there  and they're real. Credulity. Sometimes it gets knocked, but again, this is kind of  a technical term for believing what others tell us, and sometimes we're told that  it's irrational, unless you examine every last thing for yourself and only then  allow it into your belief system. But the fact is, more than 99% of what we  believe is based on what we've been told by others. Just about everything you 

know about science was not a discovery of yours. You're believing the scientists  who told you about it. Very much of what you learn about life is learn from your  parents, and that's not a bad way to learn. It's not an irrational way to learn.  Credulity is a valuable faculty, believing most of the time what other people tell  you, and then sorting through to make sure that it's correct induction, expecting  the future to be like in the past, in some sense, not exactly like it, but to say that  if something happens again and again and again and again, there's probably  something going on where you can expect it to happen again in the future. The  earth turns in a certain way, and the sun rises every morning, and we kind of  expect that it will rise tomorrow. There is no absolute logical proof that it has to  or that it will, but induction says, yeah, it probably will. Induction observes that  certain germs are present when a person gets sick. And you say, I think those  germs are causing those sickness, because I've observed in 8700 cases that  those germs were present just before a person got sick. The ability to learn from  experience is induction, and there are other faculties as well. Reason. Reason  can be used broadly for generally the process of thinking, but if we use it more  narrowly, it's grasping truths that are prior to or independent of experience. You  don't really need to see something to know it to be true. For example, once you  learn the meaning of 2+1=3, you just know that 2+1 can't be 5 simple logic  deductions that you make, if all Cats have whiskers and Princess is a cat, then  Princess has whiskers, because if all have it, then any one case of that has to  have it. We know that by logic, and sometimes we can see other logical  relationships and deductions, and they can become a lot more detailed and  sophisticated. But the point is that reason has this reliable ability because,  again, it's a faculty that we have from God. And conscience is a way of knowing  something inside us senses whether something is right or whether it's wrong.  And again, conscience can be damaged. It can be mistaken at times, but it is a  real faculty, and when it's working properly, it senses God's smile or God's frown on certain kinds of behavior, and it is a way of knowing moral knowledge is real  knowledge. Oh, and one more faculty that I want to mention in this talk, the God  sense we have, nearly all of us, an awareness, an intuitive awareness, that God  is there, that God is great, that somebody is awesome, that there is somebody  to whom we owe our life, that there is somebody who's created all these things  around us, and this God sense, when it's working properly, has awe at divine  reality. It doesn't need lots of logic and explanations to prove God. It just knows  in. Way that you know that another person exists. You just know he's there,  because this God sense knows him. And the things that God makes awaken  that God sense. The Bible says God created man in His own image, and part of  that image is a correspondence to God, something in ourselves that fits with  God, he has put eternity into man's heart, a longing for the infinite and the  eternal. That's part of the God sense. The spirit of man is the lamp of the Lord,  searching all his innermost parts. God gives us a spirit, but at the same time, 

that Spirit is God's own lamp inside of us. In the New Testament, the apostle  Paul talks about having the eyes of your hearts enlightened, because people  who have fallen into sin and fallen away from God have their eyes clouded.  Cataracts grow over those eyes, those eyes have become blinded, and we need our eyes, the eyes of our heart, this God sense, to be enlightened again, so that  we can perceive, so that we can see with our hearts the God who is there, the  God sense is very real, and God's reality can be sensed just as eyes aren't  going to do you much good unless light is shining on them, just as ears aren't  going to do you much good unless sound waves are coming at them. So a God  sense wouldn't do you much good unless God is sending signals at that God  sense and he is Romans 1 says, For what can be known about God is plain to  them because God has shown it to them for his invisible attributes, namely his  eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived ever since the  creation of The world in the things that have been made God's creation conveys  a sense of God's majesty and power and divine nature. Just as sound waves  convey something about a stream babbling over some rocks or a violin bow  being pulled on a string, the sound waves convey that, and so too the creation  conveys something about the Creator to our God sense, but but our other  senses and faculties have been distorted by the human fall into sin and by our  limits And our brokenness, but the God sense has been especially messed up.  We have it, and God is sending signals to it. But Romans 1 says, Men, by their  unrighteousness, suppress the truth. The truth can be known. The world is  sending signals at that God sense. But people suppress the truth, so they are  without excuse for although they knew God, they did not honor Him as God or  give thanks to Him. That's what the God sense is supposed to do. You say,  Wow, what a creator, and you worship Him and you thank him for making you  and making such a world. But when people don't do that, and when they stifle  that intuitive sense of God that they have, they become futile in their thinking,  and their foolish hearts were darkened claiming to be wise, they became fools.  Remember the fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge. But fools despise  wisdom and instruction. Fools despise what their own God sense is telling them, and they either manufacture gods of their own design, or more and more  commonly, they tell themselves there is no God at all except for themselves and  for their own wishes. We suppress the God sense. Suppressing the God sense  distorts our other faculties, and it destroys the real basis for confidence that we  know anything. Once you give up on God, as we've seen, you've just given up  on the notion that your mind has the capacity to know, and you've given up on  the notion that the world can be known the fool, not the genius. The fool says in  his heart there is no God, and that has an impact. Psalm 36 says there is no  fear of God before the wicked person's eyes, he has ceased to be wise and to  do good, For with God is the fountain of life. In your light, we see light. It's only in his light that we can see C S Lewis, when he was an atheist, became more and 

more certain that he had no basis for confidence in thinking at all, and as he  thought about it, more and more and more, he could not resist believing in a  creator. He said, unless I were to admit an unbelievable alternative, I must admit that mind was no late Come epiphenomenon. Mind was not just a byproduct of  other stuff. That's what epiphenomenon mean. It's not really mind. It's just atoms or economics or what have you. He says. Unless I were to just admit something  totally unbelievable, I had to admit that mind was not just some late Come  illusion. He had to admit that the whole universe was in the last resort, mental  that our logic was participation in a cosmic logos. Logos is the Greek word for  word or logic, and our logic, if it has any validity at all, has to be participating in a cosmic logos in the beginning was the logos says John 1 one in the original  Greek. In the beginning was the Word [repeated  in Greek] , and the Word was  with God. And the Word was God [repeated in Greek}. You hear that when Lewis  says participation in a cosmic logos, he's saying in the beginning was the Word  and the Word was with God, and the Word was God, that word is Jesus Christ.  He was with God in the beginning. Through Him, all things were made without  him, nothing was made. That has been made in Him was life, and that life was  the light of men. He's the logic of the universe, and his life is the light that gives  everybody else their intelligence and their life, the true light that gives light to  every man. Was coming into the world, the Word became flesh and dwelt  among us. Jesus is the great man of Nazareth and the miracle worker, but as  Son of God, Jesus has existed forever with God, and when God decided to  create it was the mind of Jesus. That was the Logos, the logic of the universe  and the power and the intelligence through whom everything was made. That is  why human minds work. That is why the universe can be understood. And this  logic of the universe became one of us to save us and to bring us back to  Himself. Jesus is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation. For  by Him, all things were created. All things were created through Him and for  Him, and He is before all things. And in Him, all things hold together. In other  words, Jesus is the eternal logos, the word the logic of the world and light of  human intellect. So to summarize, the beginning of knowledge is the fear of the  Lord, the realities we know about the world around us. It all began with God. He  is the source of all those realities. He is the source of their patterns. He is the  source of their purposes. And if you want to understand them, you've got to be  looking for what God was up to when he made them. Our ability to know begins  with God. He's the source of our mental faculties, and it is only because of his  great mind that we can have any confidence at all in the workings of our much  lesser minds. Jesus is the eternal logos, the logic of the world, the light of  human intellect, the second person of the Trinity, and so ignoring God inevitably  will darken and distort knowledge. It was belief in a Creator God and confidence  in human minds, which gave rise to the scientific revolution. It'll be interesting to 

see how long science can continue if cut off from its roots, scientists can  discover many great things without believing in God, but only because they're  working with borrowed capital. They're working with the idea that the universe is  rational and that their own minds are rational, they've lost any basis for thinking  that, but they continue as though it's true anyway. But it's only in knowing God  that we know why that's true. So taking God seriously enlightens our minds. It  sheds light on realities around us, the beginning of knowledge is the fear of the  Lord. And of course, not just having confidence, then in the workings of our  minds and in how we can know what we know, but also in supremely important  things coming to know the mind of God Himself, through our Lord, Jesus Christ.