I take knowledge seriously. I take seriously the problems we human beings have in gaining data, checking it, putting it into some sort of shape where it can be considered information and maybe even knowledge. After all, we human beings as individuals and communities are finite creatures biased to survival and reproduction; our individual and communal talents in measuring the movements of stars and then building models of the development of the observable universe seem to be something of a miracle from a Darwinian viewpoint. Serious knowledge should be taken seriously—respected and treasured. That statement covers even a lot of knowledge which proves eventually to be false knowledge, such as the Ptolemaic model of the solar system.
Knowledge is good. We should gain it. We should shape our minds to it, thus acquiring the skills and understanding of carpenter, music composer, or organic chemist. Most importantly, we should shape our minds to the Creator’s work that we might come to share His thoughts, to think as He thinks. Yet, I have often denied epistemology as a valid part of metaphysical thinking, that is, thinking about created being or even (sort of) thinking about the (sort of purely) relational being of the Triune God, the God of Jesus Christ.
This is how the 1913 edition of Webster’s dictionary defines epistemology:
The theory or science of the method or grounds of knowledge. [1913 Webster]
I don’t object to the method business, though I consider that to be the primary domain of others than philosophers. Philosophers should be aware of what brain-scientists and other empirical investigators have discovered about our acquisition and use of facts, data, knowledge and so on. Philosophers can comment upon that good knowledge about knowledge and use it as they use the more direct results of physicists and historians and geneticists, but those philosophers should then move on to speculation about created being, using empirical knowledge which has been corrected and supplemented through the various efforts of various empirical researchers and doers.
As to “grounds of knowledge”? I object strongly. Our knowledge comes from created being through our perceptual organs or our conceptual organ (brain)—each of those organs being also created being. If we can’t trust our senses, though admitting them to be limited and imperfect even in their range, then how could we ever know anything? The grounds of human knowledge are singular: being as it presents itself to us.
In other words, I take being far more seriously than knowledge. Being is primary and knowledge is certain effects of being upon our brains and—to a somewhat lesser extent—other bodily organs. Valid knowledge is some (typically imperfect and incomplete) encapsulation of true being—meaning not just actual being, but also possible being with some direct connection to what actually is. There is no Gnosis, that is, knowledge that comes to us “in the spirit” or as a pure revelation. We have no sensory organs to receive such (allegedly) pure knowledge. We have no minds but those which are formed by our embodied selves responding to what is inside and outside of those selves, minds which can handle facts and other thoughts which are reconcilable with our raw perceptions of this world.
Knowledge comes to us mortal creatures when created being presents itself and we properly respond to it. God created us so that He must come to us through His effects upon Creation—as Scholastics might put it. God must come to us through a more direct manifestation than `hidden Creator’, leading to human responses which bring about some of that knowledge.
Those who think of abstractions, of knowledge of species of trees and also the Pythagorean Theorem, as separate from created being are always in danger of losing themselves in the mazes of their own minds, or the minds of a misunderstood Plato or a more truly understood Spinoza or Kant or Heidegger.
St Thomas Aquinas and other moderate realists were right: we have no choice but to accept what comes to our senses as true knowledge of created being. It might be defective or incomplete knowledge, but the correction of that knowledge isn’t a proper task for philosophers but rather proper tasks for biologists and experts in use of instruments to extend or correct our perceptions and various other specialists in various aspects of empirical reality. Philosophers, those who study created being in its more fundamental aspects, can try to make sense of human beings and of Creation in light of the corrections to our perceived knowledge which come from the specialists in human visual and memory systems, from opticians, from physiologists, and from others. They might well find it useful to explore the details of those empirical investigations as philosophers of science often have substantial knowledge of quantum physics and evolutionary biology and the use of science in technology and so on.
Philosophers have no warrant to comment upon knowledge as being separate from created being; even theologians have to be careful to deal with divinity by way of God’s effects in His Creation. To do otherwise is to separate one’s thoughts from Creation, the work of God; to do otherwise is to wander into a humanly imagined world. To wander from God’s Creation, in our thoughts about flesh-and-blood human beings or in our thoughts about the Creator, is to enter psychotic—nightmarish—realms, realms outside of what exists. And all forms of psychosis lead to nightmares, even if they start as sweetness and sunlight on a meadow of spring grasses and early wildflowers.
We set out on a wrong path, we imagine we have the ability to imagine a better world, when we begin to separate ourselves from what is around us, when we—motivated by religious or anti-religious beliefs—think that we are creatures somehow able to judge our knowledge of created being and then move on to judge created being and its Creator.
It’s God who has the imagination healthy enough and powerful enough to see the way to a world which can be endlessly wonderful. We do well enough to learn about the results of God’s chosen acts-of-being and to participate in the shaping of the forms of created being which are those results. Sometimes we even do well by straying away a little from empirical reality to produce variations upon what God has done—in our music and our poetry and our visual art.