Two ways to try to know what can be known

Of late we have made significant progress with Anatheist.net's concession that "you could conceivably know that 'God loves me' through some inner intuition..." though unfortunately the rest of the Peanut Gallery is not yet willing to concede that much.

So let's take a step back to a crucial question burbling (or simmering) at the back of the stove: how does one decide which beliefs are the types of belief that could possibly constitute knowledge? This question is crucial if we are to render a judgment on whether beliefs about God could possibly constitute knowledge.

Fortunately our basic options are only two: the a priori approach and the a posteriori approach.

The a priori approach stipulates at the outset the kinds of qualities a belief must have in order to constitute knowledge. One popular view of the sources of knowledge beliefs is that they must be of things you can directly sense. That seems to be a popular view among some village atheists who declare that they doubt anything not available to their senses. Since God ain't available to the senses, you can't know anything about God.

Others take the a priori position that only beliefs of reason can be known. This was a common Greek (platonic) view which limited real knowledge to the unchanging forms. A few nerdy mathematicians today carry the torch for this highly rigorous approach to knowledge.

Another a priori approach stipulates not the source of what can constitute knowledge (e.g. sensible objects) but the qualities that a belief must have in order to be known. Among the claims here, some epistemologists have argued that only certain or infallible or indefeasible beliefs can be known. Others have argued that only beliefs which are verifiable or falsifiable can be known.

While epistemology is crowded with stipulative, a priori approaches to knowledge, they all tend to suffer from at least two crucial defects.

First, a priori approaches often have a difficult time justifiying the core criterion or criteria they propose. Here are a couple examples:

(1) sense perception criterion: knowledge is limited to things that can be sensed. (But can (1) be sensed? Because if not then it cannot be known and thus is self-defeating.)

(2) rational intuition criterion: knowledge is limited to claims that can only be denied on pain of contradiction. (But can (2) be denied only on pain of contradiction? Because if not then it cannot be known and thus is self-defeating.)

The faithful and attentive reader to this blog will observe that I have repeatedly pointed out these kinds of self-defeating proposals as they have popped up here at the Tentative Apologist.

The second problem is that these a priori nets tend to capture a lot of beliefs that do in fact appear to constitute knowledge. (For instance, when presented with what appeared to be a sense perception criterion a couple posts ago, I responded by pointing out another type of knowledge: rational intuition.)

Given these problems it is hardly surprising that most epistemologists today advocate an a posteriori approach in which we begin with the sources of knowledge we accept and proceeding from there. Thus we can include rational intuition along with sense perception as well as testimony, memory, proprioception (which does not fit into the five senses) and .... Well what else?

This brings us to God perception. My critics complained first that God perception is not like sense perception. Then when I added rational intuition they complained that it is not like that either.

Well in fact, all three are like the others in some ways and unlike them in others. In each case you take the putative source de novo without attempting to conform it to the procrustean beds of the others. You don't say that rational intuition must conform to sense perception in order to be legitimate. Neither do you expect that of God knowledge.

 That's what a posteriori, empirical approach to epistemology looks like. I'm sorry that this frustrates some readers, but if they have a convincing a priori theoretical proposal that excludes God knowledge I would be delighted to hear it.