The Epistemological Failures of Unbelief

The Epistemological Failures of Unbelief

For those who take the time to study the major thinkers of history, on epistemology (How we know what we know) soon come to a conclusion that they can really tell us nothing about objective reality. As has been shown, once you reject God’s interpretation of reality and assume reality is meaningless all rational talk about the irrational becomes irrational.

Adam and Eve
Adam and Eve were the first irrationalist’s to try and interpret reality without God.
Eve decided that human reason alone was the standard to judge truth. Basing Truth on her opinions and reasons without acknowledging realties own interpretation.

The Greeks
None of the Greek philosophers even considered the theistic worldview as far as we can tell from their writings. Since the theistic hypothesis was excluded from the outset, Greek thinkers had the common task of explaining the world without references to the biblical God, that is of explaining the world by means of the world.

In Greek religion, the philosophical and religious absolute was fate. Fate was the ultimate power that guided everything. Fate is an impersonal force like gravity, which governs even the gods. Fate governs not only birth and death but also every part of life. The world runs on irrational chance and leaves history meaningless and human beings helpless. It also makes rational thought impossible as no thought has any more value or truth to it as all of them have no purpose or reason to correspond to reality.

A new movement began around 600 BC when some thinkers tried to understand the world without the help of religion. These philosophers rejected the gods and chose to look out at the world and reflect on it. They declared that human reason could explain reality. Reason must be autonomous, self-authenticating and subject to no other standards other than their own. If the world was impersonal then only reason could think about reality. They had to observe the world and place a theory on reality. The philosopher Thales lookout at the world and declared that all was water, and full of gods, Anaximenes declared that all was made of air. The problem with these views is that "All"goes far beyond any possible observation.

John Frame says, It is the language of a man sitting in an armchair, dogmatically asserting what the whole universe must be like. The "all" statements of those thinkers represent human reason vastly exceeding its limits. This is rationalism, an awe over the power of reason that turns it into a god.These thinkers had to make an absolute to have something to start with to define reality. If you don’t know what the basic substance of reality is how can you explain it in any theory? Again we have man labeling reality and claiming he has objective knowledge, which is false.

The Greek philosopher Heraclitus tried his luck at explaining the universe. He saw that the world was always changing, nothing stayed the same, but some how these changes occur in regular patterns (order is a structure of mind). Heraclitis came to the conclusion that we must have rational minds and that also there must be a rational aspect to the universe even if we cant prove it. Are we to believe that rationality floats throughout the universe? It would make sense to say that rationality lives in a mind and that there is a mind (God) behind the universe, but not that it is just an aspect of it. Again Heraclitis bases his conclusion on his own reasoning. For if everything was in constant change rational thought would be impossible.

The Philosopher Parmenides denied that anything changed in reality. He said that "being is’. "Being is" means that nothing can change from what it "is" to what it is not. Red cannot change to green, for then red would be changing into non-red, or non-green would be changing into green. And how can that be? Where does the green come from, if the previous state is non-green? Therefore change cannot be real; it must be an illusion. Therefore the very idea of non-being must be rejected.

Parmenides held that there is no difference between "what is" and "what can be thought". Therefore having determined what can be thought by human reason, he believed he had discovered the true nature of the world.

The next thinkers were the Atomists, they believed that the world is composed of elements and reality changes as these elements combine together. Again this was their assumptions after reflecting on the world. It is nothing different than those today who say that all that exists is matter in motion, materialism or the theory of evolution. These atoms move through space and collide with each other to form objects by impersonal fate. If random chemicals are making me do what I do in my brain then how can I trust my thoughts? As I have no choice in what I believe or think. This produces irrationalism as truth and error does not exist. For we are not even in control of our minds they are dictated by fate.

The Philosopher Pythagoras believed that the human soul was divine being imprisoned in the body. Our souls are divine because they are rational. For Pythagoras reason was ultimate. He had a fascination with mathematics and abstract numbers. He thought that "all" reality could be explained by mathematical formulas. Again he tried to impose mathematical abstract formulas on reality. But why should the universe be mathematical? In an impersonal world.
Frame says, The Pythagorean, however did not ask, so far as we can tell, where the formula came from. The existence of such would seem to be a remarkable fact. Indeed it should have suggested a personal creator, for the natural home of numbers and formulas is in the mind of a person. For Pythagoreans, numbers "just are". They exist as brute facts with no interpretation. For the Pythagoreans, like the other Greeks, they were unwilling to acknowledge a rational person higher than themsleves.10 Numbers don’t just live out there imposed in matter floating around. This again leaves Pythagoras using his reason to impose his interpretation on to irrational matter.

Next came the Sophists, these philosophers believed that truth was relative and there was no such things as absolute truth. This automatically kills rational thought and gives us no knowledge of the objective world. The Sophists were more interested in ethics and politics than really explaining the nature of reality.