The reason I selected this particular topic is partially apologetic and partially personal. The personal reason why I selected this topic will have to be addressed in another paper; it would take too much room to address it here. As far as the apologetic reason is concerned, this paper is a philosophical response to epistemological attacks from certain schools of thought against the truth of the Christian faith. There are many of these schools of thought, if they can properly called schools of thought that have attacked the truth of the claims of Christianity or theism in general. Some of the major players are Postmodernity (1), Atheism, Skepticism, and the Modern Scientific community. The common or unified attack coming from all these groups may be more properly understood as a challenge; their challenge is an epistemological one in that they request that we ‘prove’ to them that the claims of Christianity are true, or at least offer them sufficient evidence to validate the same.
What, in essence, are they asking? What do they mean when they say, ‘prove it’? At first it appears that what they want is, in general, about the same amount of evidence that they accept for validation of one of their scientific or academic propositions. It could also be that they want about the same amount of rational (or logical) arguments that they accept to validate the varied propositions of their various ‘schools’ of thought. Neither of these will do though, for no amount of evidence, no pile of arguments will give them the ‘proof’ they want and require of us. What they want is proof beyond doubt. Their challenge to Christianity is for the Christian intellectuals to do whatever it takes to show them that the claims of Christianity can be held in absolute certainty.
In a very subtle way, their attacks are inconsistent. They ask of Christianity what they cannot offer for themselves concerning their core beliefs. According to David Hume, no amount of evidence (physical or logical) will give any person justification for believing anything beyond doubt because all knowledge is founded on perception of cause and effect and no mind can find the effect in the supposed cause. (2) The inconsistency that pervades the assault is that they request something to be done that they do not even believe (or better, cannot logically believe) can happen. My contention is that for the Postmodernist, the Atheist, the Skeptic, and the Modern Scientist to be consistent with there own worldview, they cannot believe in absolute certainty or belief beyond doubt. Absolute certainty is sufficient but not necessary for knowledge; however, absolute certainty is impossible under a naturalistic metaphysic. It is prerequisite in understanding the first part of my argument, of course, that I am contending this part under a supernatural metaphysic, the second part of the argument, is to show that under a naturalistic metaphysic, absolute certainty is not possible at all.
Finally, the stage is now set to address this issue. First, we will set out to make a distinction between certainty in general (which I will call mere certainty) and absolute certainty: what I mean when I say each and how they are different in essence, cause, and effects. Second, we will turn our attention specifically towards absolute certainty, and particularly, how it cannot fit into a naturalistic metaphysical view.
Certainty
Certainty, according to simple definition, is the state of being free from doubt. (3) This definition will not be very helpful in our purposes here, for it is plain, based on experience, that certainty comes in degrees. It makes perfect sense for me to say, ‘I am fairly certain that my birthday is in February’ or ‘I am very certain that my name is Joshua Shirey’, or even ‘I am somewhat certain that George Washington was the first President of the
According to the argument above, doubt is not the enemy of belief, per se, but it is a natural part of human cognitive faculties. It is part of a person’s epistemic duty to doubt things, particularly, things or propositions that are not true. (5) As doubt relates to true beliefs, it is perfectly rational to doubt things or propositions that are true. If a person who I knew to be a habitual liar and prankster came into my room and told me that the building was on fire, I would have good reasons to doubt the truth of his statement. However, it may indeed be true that the building is on fire, but I have no good reason to believe, without further investigation, that the building is in fact on fire, because of my knowledge of the individual. It may be helpful here to differentiate between belief and certainty. Belief is simply that act of holding something to be true, certainty is the strength of our trust that we are justified or warranted in our belief, which is proportionate to the doubt that we have in regards to our holding something as true. This is why it makes perfect sense to say ‘I believe this and such, but I have my doubts.’ Therefore, doubt and certainty are different from belief and unbelief.
It follows from the argument above that evidence effects the degree of doubt and certainty. Upon further investigation, I might find that, indeed it is true that the building is on fire, and I would found this belief on things like seeing the flame and smoke, hearing the fire alarm, being asked by an authority to evacuate, etc. However, no amount of evidence can completely remove all possibility of doubt. What if the whole fire scenario were a dream? While I was having the dream, there would be a lack of evidence present to convince me that the building was not on fire (after having seen the flames and smoke) unless of course I became aware that I was dreaming, in which case all evidence in the dream would loose power of influence on my cognition. In fact, it seems to be the case that when a person experiences extraordinary events, one of the first things that he questions is if he is dreaming. Most of the time, we humans hope that we are dreaming when extremely bad things happen, and conversely we sincerely hope that we are not dreaming when extremely good things happen. Thus, based on these examples, it is clear that evidence greatly affects the degree of certainty, but cannot remove all possibility of doubt. However, in all these cases, the dreaming person and the person in the middle of an extraordinary event, still believes that the particular thing is happening, though he may doubt it due to its extraordinary nature.
Does it follow from what has been said that certainty is sufficient for knowledge? Let us suppose that instead of a habitual liar, a person I regarded as upright and honest came into my room and told me that the building was on fire. In this case I would be fairly certain that he was telling the truth, and consequently, that the building was on fire. Now, it could still be case that the building was not on fire, for suppose that this upright and honest person, unbeknownst to me, was sleepwalking while he dreamt that the building was on fire. By the nature of the situation, I would be inclined to believe him, being fairly certain that he was telling the truth, but that certainty would not be sufficient for me to have true knowledge. There are of course many daily examples of the fact that certainty is not sufficient for knowledge, if true belief is a prerequisite for knowledge. (6)
We can see that certainty is not sufficient for knowledge, (7) but is it necessary for knowledge? There is a sense in which a person must be certain to some degree if he has knowledge. If the degree of certainty is directly proportionate to the degree of doubt, then it follows, necessarily, that one will have a degree of certainty accompanying every belief he holds. Thus, whenever a person has belief, certainty will be present, but certainty does not come before belief, they appear simultaneously. However, while it is uncommon, a person may have more doubt accompanying a particular belief than certainty, and yet he may still have knowledge. For example, I can believe that a person I know is innocent of a certain crime, but at the same time, I can have a strong feeling of doubt that he is innocent. If the majority of the evidence points to him as the perpetrator, I would doubt, to a degree, that he was innocent, but I would sill maintain enough certainty to testify to his upright character based on one sliver of evidence that would prove him innocent. At this point, we could delve into the complexities of the human mind and illustrate that, because of emotions, mental malfunctions, bad food, or whatnot, humans can sometimes doubt, for no good reason, that certain beliefs they hold as true are false. We simply do not have space here to fully expound on these issues, but let it suffice to say that there are instances in a person’s life and cognitive activity that doubt exceeds certainty relating to a particular belief which is held by that person to be true. However, this doubt does not destroy, by itself, his holding that belief to be true.
Therefore, mere certainty, as I am defining it here, is neither sufficient nor necessary for knowledge. Mere certainty is not necessary for knowledge in that the degree of certainty has little or no effect on weather or not the person believes the particular proposition in question to be true of false. In addition, certainty is not sufficient for knowledge because mere certainty does not validate a person’s beliefs. (8) It is important to understand these things about mere certainty in general in order to make a proper contrast with absolute certainty.
Absolute Certainty
Because so much has been said about mere certainty, far less enumeration will be needed to define absolute certainty. Thus, it will suffice to make three particular remarks about absolute certainty, then we will be ready to see whether or not it is necessary or sufficient for knowledge. First, absolute certainty, in contrast to mere certainty cannot be held in degrees but is had by a person in relation to a particular belief or it is not had at all. It makes no sense to say ‘I am fairly absolutely certain,’ rather; there is a consistent state of intensity regarding the certainty that accompanies the particular belief. Absolute certainty is not a issue of degree but of actuality.
Second, since it was established above that the degree of mere certainty a person has is related to evidence in support of the proposition, it follows that absolute certainty is not affected by evidence. Not that good evidence looses its power when a person holds a thing to be true in absolute certainty, but that there is no good evidence that works against the belief held in absolute certainty. An example of this kind of truth would be 1+1=2. It is beyond the minds comprehension to conceive of any way in which the truth of the above statement could be doubted. There are no contingent or conditional situations wherein a person could see himself coming to doubt statements like the one above. In the case of other kinds of truths, I could conceive of a conditional future situation where I would doubt the truth of a belief that I hold right now in a high degree of certainty. For example, I believe with a degree certainty that it is, let us say, noon right now; if I were to discover that my watch had stopped, then I would doubt, to a degree, that the time of day was in fact noon. However, I cannot conceive of any situation, contingent or conditional, past, present, or future, in which I could reasonably doubt that 1+1=2. Thus, there is no evidence that can affect things that are held in absolute certainty.
Thirdly, by definition, a person who has absolute certainty regarding a particular proposition will believe that it is true. This statement seems obvious and simple, but it is important to point it out to make a clear distinction between mere certainty and absolute certainty. We have already established above that certainty is not strictly related to belief, particularly, that a person could have a high level of certainty and still not hold the proposition to be true, and conversely, that a person could have a very low degree of certainty and still hold the proposition to be true. In contrast, if a person has absolute certainty regarding a particular proposition, he will necessarily hold that belief to be true. However, it is apparent that the two are not causally related. It is not that I believe a particular proposition to be true and that causes me to hold it with absolute certainty. Nor is it the case that I have absolute certainty regarding a particular proposition and that causes hold it to be true. It would take more space than we have here and more skill than I have in these matters to show exactly how belief and absolute certainty relate, but it serves our purposes here to establish that if a person has absolute certainty regarding a belief, he will hold it to be true. However, if a person holds a proposition to be true, he will not necessarily hold it in absolute certainty. It seems it depends on the nature of the proposition to determine whether or not a person will hold it in absolute certainty.
This now leads us to discus whether absolute certainty is necessary or sufficient for knowledge or not. In the same way that mere certainty was analyzed above to see if it was sufficient or necessary for knowledge, absolute certainty will be analyzed in order to determine the same. The order in which these are here addressed will be reversed from the order used above. The order above was used intentionally for the sake of the flow of the argument; here, the reversed order must be used because the discussion concerning whether absolute certainty is sufficient for knowledge will lead us directly into the next major point in the whole argument of this essay.
Therefore, the first question we will address under this head concerns whether or not absolute certainty necessary for knowledge. In much the same way that it was shown that mere certainty was not necessary for knowledge, it can be shown that absolute certainty is also not necessary for knowledge. The augmentation above showed that people can know things while having doubts accompanying their belief that the proposition they know is in fact true. Therefore, if mere certainty is not necessary for knowledge, one could hardly claim that something as strong and rare as absolute certainty was a prerequisite for any knowledge. In addition, it could also be shown that since absolute certainty and a person’s holding a proposition to be true are not causally related (as was shown above), that absolute certainty and knowledge are not causally related. It is not that a person has absolute certainty regarding a particular proposition and this leads him to hold it to be true; nor is it that a person knows particular propositions and this causes him to hold them in absolute certainty. It is my contention here that anyone who has absolute certainty regarding a particular proposition will at the same time have knowledge regarding that same proposition. This takes us to the next question.
The second question concerns whether or not absolute certainty is sufficient for knowledge. Being consistent with the argument immediately above this paragraph, my question does not concern whether or not having absolute certainty alone will being about knowledge, we have already shown that this must be false. My question here concerns the argument introduced at the end of the preceding paragraph, namely, will someone who has absolute certainty regarding a particular proposition at the same time have knowledge regarding that proposition? More specifically, the question regards the possibility impossibility of having absolute certainty without having knowledge. We have already established that a person having absolute certainty regarding a proposition will at the same time believe that proposition to be true, but it des not immediately follow from this that he has knowledge. It could be the case that someone has absolute certainty regarding a false proposition, but if this were so, how would he ever overcome such a strong, incorrect bias? According to our definition of absolute certainty, it is to hold a proposition is such a manner that it is impossible to doubt the truth of the proposition. In addition, holding theses propositions in this particular manner is not dependant on evidence but on the nature of the proposition in that once one understands or sees what the propositions is, he will not doubt the truth of it thenceforth. The example I gave of this type of proposition is 1+1=2. (9) Therefore, if I am to be correct when I hold something in absolute certainty, it depends on 1) the proposition being true, 2) the proposition being of the sort that can be ‘seen’, 3) my cognitive faculties must be functioning properly in order to ‘see’ the truth of the proposition, and 4) the proper function of my cognitive faculties is to obtain truth. (10) Here is where the problem enters; Alvin Plantinga points out this problem when he discusses proper function. The problem is this: if there is no designer of our cognitive faculties, there can be no proper function of our cognitive faculties. If our cognitive faculties have no proper function, the things we hold to be true, whether in mere or absolute certainty will not be warranted, and most likely will not be true. Thus, the answer to the question we set out to answer concerning whether absolute certainty is sufficient for knowledge or not is this: absolute certainty is evidence of true knowledge if and only if the four conditions are met concerning how the person came to be certain in this way.
There is however, one important thing I would like to point out before we move on to address the next point in the argument. Although the concepts of mere certainty and absolute certainty use the word ‘certainty’ in their names, they are not very much alike at all. According to how I have defined mere certainty, it can only be had in degrees and it is affected by evidence; absolute certainty, on the other hand, is had or it is not had, and it is not affected by evidence, it is simply obtained. Thus, absolute certainty is not the superlative degree of mere certainty, but rather it is something entirely different.
Absolute Certainty in a Naturalistic Metaphysic
I do not intend to spend much time under this head because I think that one can already see why absolute certainty will not work in a naturalistic metaphysic or worldview. I would, however, like to point out one interesting contribution from C.S. Lewis on this topic.
In an naturalistic metaphysic, there is no god and there is no spiritual realm; everything is in the ‘box’ of the universe, there is nothing outside. In a very provocative way, Lewis proves that if naturalism is true, we humans are not allowed to say that this and that is true or that idea is false; thoughts and ideas, under a naturalistic metaphysic just happen. Naturalism has the mind and all of its functions as part of the martial, cause and effect bound universe. This makes all human reason and thought no different or gander that something as simple as a rock falling. Furthermore, this makes all rational thought and argumentation vain. I will let him say it with all of his candor:
“It follows that no account of the universe can be true unless that account leaves it possible for our thinking to be a real insight. A theory which explained everything else in the whole but which made it impossible to believe that our thinking was valid, would be utterly out of court. For that theory would itself have been reached by thinking, and if thinking is not valid that theory would, of course, itself be demolished. It would have destroyed its own credentials. It would be an argument which proved that no argument was sound—a proof that there are no such things a proofs—which is nonsense.” (11)
Not only does his argumentation show that naturalism does not leave room for rationality, but also that naturalism is self-refuting. Therefore, I conclude that absolute certainty, which depends on beliefs being true, is impossible under a naturalistic metaphysic because a naturalistic metaphysic cannot allow any belief to be true in an absolute sense.
Conclusion
Coming back to the very reason I took up this topic, I would like to point out the resolution of the problem. The opponents of Christianity, and theism in general, require us to 'prove' to them that Christianity is true; the problem with the request is two fold, 1) to be consistent with their own worldview they cannot believe in any sort of absolute certainty; they are contradicting themselves when they ask these questions. 2) When they ask Christians to give them proof, they are asking for evidence, but as we have seen, evidence cannot bring about absolute certainty. Evidence can assist in increasing mere certainty that a proposition is true, but it cannot bring about the rare and intriguing absolute certainty. (12)
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(1)J.P. Moreland; William Lane Craig, Philosophical Foundations for a Christian Worldview (
(2)Hume, David,
(4) Doug Blount, "What Has Certainty to Do With Knowledge?," 1997, unpublished paper (photocopy), Serials, W.A. Roberts Library, Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, Fort Worth, TX, Microfiche, p. 1-7, BD161.B46.1997A.
(5) Lesslie Newbigin, Proper Confidence (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1995), 24-25.
(6) Moreland & Craig, 73
(7) Blount, 4
(8) Blount, 7
(9) The truth of this proposition is understood or seen easily. With more complex mathematical propositions (say the Pythagorean Theorem of instance), a person might have more difficulty in comprehending or seeing the proposition in its entirety, but if he could (or once he does), he will not doubt the truth of it.
(10) Alvin Plantinga, Warrant and Proper Function (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 46.
(11) C. S. Lewis, Miracles (
(12) Author's Note: I feel that an explanation is due in order to excuse the slim number of references in the body paper. As well as I can remember, no author I have read has drawn the distinction between mere certainty and absolute certainty; therefore, there is a lack of material on this topic. I am not claiming originality, because this idea of mine has been heavily influenced be the authors of other works on epistemology. In preparation for this paper, I expected to have time to go further than I have here; I had planned to contrast the discussion on absolute certainty in a naturalistic metaphysic with a reciprocal discussion on absolute certainty in a supernatural metaphysic. I also intended to show how the Christian worldview is consistent in its truth claims and how believers can have absolute certainty in believing these truths. I simply did not have the space. I read many authors on these topics that I did not have space to talk about, but what they said influenced my view on the topics I did have space for, even though many of them were never referenced in the body of the paper. Therefore, there are not as many references as I had hoped for.
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