A Theology of Truth, Information, and the Love of Knowledge

The following article is an outline of my beginnings of a solution to a multifaceted problem that may seem obscure to the average Christian. However, it is very important. The fact that we do not love knowledge is a measure of two things. First, it is a measure of how much we love God. Second, it is a measure of doctrinal troubles to come in the church.

I openly invite any and all to criticize this article. Examine it critically. Do not spare my feelings. I am still in process of synthesizing its final form. I especially invite those of you that are theologically trained, philosophically trained, or just good critical thinkers. I will take correction. The only ones that I do not wish to hear from on this particular blog are the postmoderns. I am not being mean. It is just a simple fact that their thoughts will be irrelevant because of their worldview.

I will be expanding on the individual sections in upcoming blogs.

Thanks. Phil Perkins.


A THEOLOGY OF TRUTH, INFORMATION, AND THE LOVE OF KNOWLEDGE
Why Christians Are Obligated To Achieve Mental Excellence
Why Christians Are Obligated To Be Propositional Thinkers

What is the proper role of knowledge in the life of a Christian? Christianity is primarily spiritual, not intellectual, isn’t it? Doesn’t the Bible teach us that “knowledge puffs up?” We are to be humble, simple folk, right? After all, Faith is the opposite of Reason, right?

It will come as a soft surprise to many Evangelicals that the answer to all the above questions after the first one is a biblical NO. Unfortunately, the view of knowledge in much of the Evangelical church is very unbiblical and spiritually harmful in a multitude of ways. It has left us vulnerable to the attacks of those that claim that all that counts is science and to the attacks of the New Age (aka old paganism) that has come into our churches at the hands of men like Henry Blackaby, Karl Barth, Robert Schuller, Rick Warren, Ken Blanchard, Benny Hinn, and many, many more. The latest consequence of our nonchalance toward knowledge is the Emergent heresy, in which the leaders make outlandish statements, such as sodomy is not necessarily a sin (a la Brian McLaren) and then turn right around and say they believe in the authority of Scripture. (Specifically, this is postmodernism, which is an eschewal of absolute truth, which is really just another way of getting along without paying much attention to truth at all so that one may feel righteous in one’s debauchery.)

I. We will start with some definitions. We will use these definitions because it is best to be precise.

A. Truth is how things really are, were, or will be. It is objective. This is the biblical definition, but it is not the usual definition.

1. Dictionary definitions of truth usually describe it as accuracy. The problem with this definition of truth for Biblicists is that it limits truth to residing in a description of the way things really are or in the mind of the describer or perceiver. This is not reflective of a Biblical world view. For one thing the Bible always places truth outside of us and our language. That is to say, it is objective. Placing truth in language or in our minds makes it subjective and then the postmodernists are right in their statement that there is no absolute truth. (I am ignoring the logical weirdness of asserting that the absolute truth is there is no absolute truth. I suppose they really mean there is no absolute truth but that one, which leads one to ask by just what principles they discovered this no-absolute-truth principle since no other principles could possibly exist.)

2. Truth is objectively existent in God’s mind and in the rest of reality by way of God’s acts of creating and sustaining all that is outside of Him.

3. Truth is also objectively existent in God’s Revelation. That is to say, His words, whether written as part of Scripture or unwritten prophecy is truth. This is different than any created being. A created being can only say things that are true. They cannot create truth.

B. Information is a representation or description of truth. It consists in differences. More on this later.

C. Falsehood is a description of things as they really are not, were not, or will not be. It is misinformation.

1. Falsehood may be accidental from simply being mistaken.

2. Falsehood may be intended to mislead others.

D. Lying is the use of falsehood to intentionally mislead others.

E. Knowledge is the perception, memory, and use of truth represented in information.

F. True is an adjective that means accurate with respect to a representation of truth.

G. Objective is an adjective here used to describe truth. By this we mean that truth has its origin and it’s truthness outside of any sort of human perception, perceiver, knowledge, knower, communication, or communicator. In other words, it depends on no human. It is true no matter what you or I think or say.

H. Subjective is an adjective used here to indicate the state of a propositional statement having its origin in the mind or emotions of a human or group of humans by consensus or convention.

I. Propositional statement denotes a statements that the speaker or writer presents as true in declarative sentences.

J. Faithfulness is the act of doing what correlates with the truth or the state of being true.

K. Faith is the quality of acting faithfully.

II. Truth comes from God.

A. God decides what is true in all areas of life: morality, history, and science. These are the three overlapping spheres of reality and our knowledge of it.

1. Morality, the first sphere of knowledge, is God’s Personality.

a. Inner morality is what one knows of God’s Personality. It is innate, learned from nature, and learned from Revelation.

b. Outer morality is God’s Personality imitated. This is called obedience to God.

2. History, the second sphere of knowledge, is what happens, past, present, and future, material and spiritual.

3. Science, the third sphere of knowledge, is how things are, how God acts as He sustains the material universe. For the purposes of this article we will place math and logic under the umbrella of science. So we refer to science in the older sense of the word. Whether math and logic flow directly from God’s mind or from His activity, this writer currently cannot ascertain.

B. Therefore, the central aspect of God’s godness (the biblical term is holiness) in character is truth, holiness being the state or characteristic of being wholly separate from all that is created, that is, being like God, which He is. Truth and holiness cannot be separated. (The central aspect of God’s godness in capacity for action is power, but that is not our subject here.)

1. Obedience to God is obeying truth.

2. Love is the application of truth to how one acts towards others and God.

C. The dichotomy between faith and reason is false.

1. The idea that faith and reason informed by objective observation of the universe and Revelation are opposite is a mistake on the part of some, a lie on the part of others.

2. The Evangelical idea that worship is to be primarily emotional, not intellectual is paganism.

3. The valuing of devotional reading of Revelation over intellectual reading and critical analysis is pagan. What a passage means to you is of no importance. What God intended to communicate is what matters.

D. Morality flows from God’s heart. Morality is true because that is what God is like. He is truth, so don’t lie. He is love, so don’t steal or commit adultery. He is sovereign, so take the proper authority God has appointed to you in whatever roles you fill, submit to those in authority over you, and own things.

E. History flows from God’s mind. (Let there be light…) The things that take place are history. This is not formal history like history class or the history that is written by historians. That kind of history, in so far as it is true and not a part of the historian’s agenda, is a very small part of general history, as we are using the term here. All that happens is what God has planned for ages.

F. Science flows from God’s activity, ordered by God’s mind. It is a subset of history, but it is so important in our world that we categorize it by itself in our minds and in our academy.

1. God sustains all material things.

2. The laws of science are patterns God has decided to follow.

3. Being the Sustainer of the entire universe, God has His hand on all things at all times.
Therefore, gravity works because He does it. Electricity works because He does it.

4. God can make exceptions to the usual patterns of His work in matter. These exceptions are commonly called miracles.

5. Prayer is asking God to surprise us.

III. Because truth comes from God, information and knowledge cannot be divorced from God.

IV. Information is differences in perception and language that encode differences in reality (truth.)

A. Sensory input is always differential.

B. White noise and monochromatic visual fields are the closest we can come to non-differential sensory input. Uniform, or non-differential, sensory input leads to sensory break down, the inability to perceive anything. Prolonged exposure to it can lead to hallucinations.

C. Perception is the recognition of differences.

D. Data in a computer are binary choices.

1. Data to the eye are differences in light’s intensity and hue.

2. Data to touch are texture, the differences of surfaces and shapes.

3. Data to the ear are differences of air pressure (vibrations) and differences in the frequency and harmonic patterns of those differences of air pressure.

E. Data in morals are differences in good and evil.

F. Knowledge is the memory of these differences. See the definition section.

G. Evil consists in the purposeful confusion or denial of these differences in thought or action. This is a way of denying God by denying His wisdom, work, and authority.

H. Therefore, it is natural that the godly value knowledge and that a measure of the ungodliness of the ungodly is their disdain for knowledge of God and that disdain eventually extends to disdain for knowledge in general.

V. Knowledge is possible only because God directly causes us to know.

A. God has given truth that we can know.

1. God has given us the physical universe to perceive and ponder. This is God’s objective truth for us to see, taste, smell, hear, and feel with our skin.

2. God has given us the Revelation to perceive and ponder. This is God’s objective truth for us to read, hear, and teach others.

B. God has given us the capacity to perceive and ponder.

1. He has given us our five senses.

2. He has given us our conscience, or the innate knowledge of God’s Personality.

3. He has given us our intellects.

VI. Love of knowledge is part of love for God.

A. The Shama in Deuteronomy 6:4-5 requires that we involve our whole being in pursuit of God. This includes our minds.

B. I John 4-5 and the test of truth….The Spirit is Truth.

C. Exodus 33:13. Knowledge is both a reward from God for obedience and an aid to further obedience in order to find further favor with God.

D. Thy word is truth.

VII. Hatred of God leads directly to hatred of knowledge.

A. Romans chapter one indicates the strong link between the rejection of God and the rejection of knowledge.

B. Proverbs indicates that foolishness is ungodliness.

VIII. Communication is the ability to use differences to encode differences.

A. Language, oral or written involves differences.

B. Language is information encoded.

IX. The Fallacy from Incomplete Knowledge is an excuse for mental laziness and other sins.

A. Some claim that because we cannot know anything with complete accuracy that we then must assume that there is no absolute truth. This is a sham. The argument will start by asking deep questions. The answers will show that various people will give various and even contradictory answers to difficult questions. The wag will then assert the nonsequitor. Namely, no truth really exists.

B. This is easily demonstrated to be nonsense. Once upon a time, no one knew lightning was electricity. But it was. The lack of knowledge by humans simply means that we are not as smart as we would like to be. This is only a clever argument meant to intimidate the easily bent among us.

X. The Fallacy from Inaccurate Language is another excuse for mental laziness and other sins.

XI. The Fallacy from the Arbitrary Nature of Language is still another excuse.

A. Another argument for the denial of absolute truth is illustrated by a recent radio ad touting the need to educate girls. A young girl asks her father, “Daddy, did you know that the concept of odd and even is a philosophical illusion?” Besides the bigotry of valuing the education of girls over that of boys, the big sounding assertion that her father, being a stupid male, could not possibly have known is wrong. It is based on the idea that numbers are the invention of man.

B. Language is arbitrarily designed to encode information. However, that does not mean that which is encoded is not real, subjective, or arbitrary. For instance, if Morse code were used to indicate a delay in a train’s arrival, the fact that Mr. Morse chose what patterns of dots and dashes indicated what letters will not make the train arrive on time.

XII. The Fallacy from the Certainty of Scientific Knowledge.

A. The seeming certainty of knowledge gives rise to another sort of fallacy. This fallacy does not deny the existence of knowledge. No, in fact, it is the opposite. It gives us the idea that we can know so much more than we really can. I posit that we cannot really actually understand in an absolute sense.

B. What we call scientific knowledge is nothing more than a more detailed description of what we observe.