All you touch and all you see...

Are all your life will ever be

(Roger Waters, ‘Breathe’, from Pink Floyd, Dark Side of the Moon, 1973).

The problem with empiricism and with logical positivism (or logical empiricism as some would have it called) is exactly the one referred to by Pink Floyd. According to empiricism, all we touch, and all we see, hear and smell is all there is. It is not possible for there to be anything else, and everything we think about is derived from these things. We start as a blank canvas, as new-borns, and that canvas is filled in by our senses and then our memory.

In fairness, there is a lot to say for this point of view. Much of what we do know comes about from the senses, enhanced, one way or another, by tools. An experiment in physics is really a way of looking at the world enhanced by a set of tools, usually called apparatus. Whether the world acts as it does when we look at it at other times in, strictly, a bit moot. Experience tends to suggest that it does – the sofa in the living room will still be there when I return in the evening, as it was this morning.

There is a great deal that empiricism cannot cover, of course. I have mentioned such speech-acts as ‘I will pay you back the money tomorrow’. This may or may not be true. Your decision as to whether it is a truthful speech-act is based, in the now, on a variety of factors such as my reputation, reliability, general honesty over the time you have known me and so on. You do not really know whether the speech-act is true until I arrive tomorrow brandishing the money. You might believe I will come, and that belief might be well-grounded, but you do not know.

There is a clear link between knowing something and believing something, and whether it is true, but they are not the same. As I mentioned, a definition of knowledge is that it is justified true belief. There are holes in this definition, but it passes for everyday use. To borrow an analogy from Alvin Plantinga (and to make it relevant to a more international readership) I may believe that Northampton Town will win the FA Cup next season. You, of course, knowing the relative position of the Cobblers in the league, their lack of money and so on, will not think that this counts as knowledge; it is simply an ungrounded wild hope.

Suppose, however, that by some freak of the draw, of the results and so on, Town does win the FA Cup. Does my initial claim at the beginning of the season now count as knowledge? Of course not; my initial claim just happens to have been true, it was not foreknowledge. The belief, as it turned out, was justified and true, in that the world worked that way. It could not have counted as knowledge. After the fact, the statement ‘Northampton Town won the FA Cup’ is knowledge, it is a true belief, justified, if nothing else, by the club’s name on the trophy.

Something clearly was missing from my initial claim even though it was a justified true belief. Plantinga calls the missing bit ‘warrant’. Warrant, in this argument, is the missing bit between a justified true belief and its being knowledge. I have no warrant for my claim that the Cobblers will win the FA Cup. After the event, of course, I do. Something changed, in this case, the events of Northampton winning all their cup matches.

Plantinga’s argument is, of course, a great deal more complex and subtle than this example. But his point remains: we believe things as being true even if we cannot claim them as knowledge in any conventional sense. Plantinga’s main aim is the Christian faith. He argues that we can know that God exists without having to prove it. There is no reason for someone to have to provide arguments for the existence of God if they believe that God exists. In the jargon, belief in God is properly basic in the sense that we believe that two plus two equals four, and in the sense that we don’t believe that 1764 is the square of 42 (because most of us would have to sit down and work it out, rather than immediately believe it to be true).

Similar sorts of issues pervade life, of course. Physicists believe that electrons exist even though we cannot see them. They just make a lot of sense out of disparate data. I have no a priori argument for the existence of electrons; I cannot produce an argument that they exist. I can produce a whole load of data which suggests that they do exist, that physics since the beginning of the Twentieth Century has not been suffering a massive delusion, but so far as I know there is no argument starting from nowhere which proves that electrons are necessary. In that sense, they might well be properly basic beliefs in physics.

Is a properly basic belief in electrons the same as a properly basic belief in God? Here, of course, it depends on what you might count as evidence. There is a lot of experimental evidence for electrons existing, even though, in fact, alternative explanations for it exists in the annals of the philosophy of science (for example, the electron is just an organising ‘jingle’ for humans, not a real object in the world). Similarly, people can adduce evidence for the existence of God. As Plantinga notes, whether you can it as evidence for the existence of God tends to depend on your ‘pre-philosophical commitments’, that is, whether you already believe in God or not.

Is the existence of the electron true? We believe, at least as Twenty-First Century physicists that it is. Will Northampton Town win the FA Cup next season? Unlikely but not impossible. Does God exist?

For Plantinga see, among others:

Plantinga, A. (1981) 'Is Belief in God Properly Basic?', Noûs, vol. 15, no. 1, pp 41-51.

Plantinga, A. (2000) Warranted Christian Belief, New York; Oxford, Oxford University Press.