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Not Knowing What You With Certainty Can Know Is True and Knowing What You Can’t Know Is True
What you can know with certainty is anything that God says. You know the Bible is true. God said it. It’s true and you can know it with certainty. More than ever, what God says, people don’t know. They treat what God said like they can’t know it.
Scripture talks about treating what you can know like you can’t know it. It’s not about knowing. It’s about wanting. Someone doesn’t want to do it, so he eliminates it by not knowing it. He can know it and he does know it. He says he doesn’t know it.
What I’m writing about is like a little child who “forgets.” A parent asks if the child knows. The child nods, “No,” shaking his head back and forth, when the child knows. Not knowing is an excuse for not doing. He does know. With a very large sample size, I can say that children know more than what they act like they do.
Very often, for what people can know, they stay ignorant. They could know, but they don’t want to know. They like what they’re doing. If they don’t try to find out, then they won’t know. If they don’t know, they won’t have to do.
Knowing what you can know with certainty very often isn’t popular. It’s easier just to say that you don’t know.
On the other hand, people treat the Bible like it can’t be known. It’s just opinion. It is a story book of preferences. If it makes you feel good, sure, go ahead with it, but don’t treat it like something you can know.
An example of not knowing what you can know occurred recently in the Senate hearings for confirming the Supreme Court justice, when a Senator asked her to define a woman. She said she didn’t know that. She could know, but wasn’t willing to know.
Very often what the world knows is that it can’t know. It knows with certainty that it can’t know. The unknowability provides freedom. You’re not to judge what you can’t know, so you must not know. That way no one can judge. Then you get to live like you want.
Unwillingness to know becomes a basis of toleration. You’re in trouble if you judge something wrong, because you’re saying you can know, when you can’t. You’re left with tolerating wrong things. It’s required. The judgment itself becomes what’s wrong. An irony is that you can know when someone else can’t know.
I’m not saying, however, that people don’t say they know things. They know what’s wrong with their meal at a restaurant. These people write a bad review with complete conviction of their own knowledge. They know if they got bad service from someone. They know when someone offends them because it’s what they feel.
People know evolution is true. Evolution is still a theory. That status hasn’t changed, but men now know men evolved. This theory promotes naturalism. Knowing it frees men from their accountability to God, when they don’t know it. It’s a theory. It’s a theory that we actually know is not true.
Critical theory poses as knowledge. People know your motives. They know you’re racist. Climate science says it knows the world will end by global warming. Man causes the end of the world through natural means. God tells man how the world will end. That we know.
Churches are more and more worldly because of more and more preference, a lack of knowledge about scriptural things that were once known. They are still known, but treated like they are not. What distinguishes the roles of men and women, what were once known, now not known. The psychology behind overturning scripture, creating victims, who are not victims, this is now known. People are sure of this.
What I’m describing is leaning on man’s understanding and not on God’s. God is always right. Man is rarely to never. Living by faith, which pleases God, is living by what man can and should know, not by what he knows, but that he really cannot.
How should someone treat willful not knowing or rebellious knowing? He should tell the truth. He should embrace knowing what he can and should know. As the psalmist wrote in Psalm 118:6, “The LORD is on my side; I will not fear: what can man do unto me?” He should also stand against what he knows men cannot know.
Choosing Faith or Religion Like Choosing A Wallpaper Pattern
During graduate school, for a short while I worked at a paint and wall covering store. Of varied responsibilities, I performed the job of organizing the wallpaper books. They filled the tops of two large tables and I kept them in some kind of order based on style. I could at least direct someone according to the taste of a customer.
Philosopher Ernest Gellner wrote that under relativism choosing a religion is akin to choosing a wallpaper pattern. In other words, considering faith or religion you can act on personal taste or feelings, like someone picking out a style of wallcovering. In general, truth then doesn’t apply to faith or religion, not like the physics of airplane travel or the engineering of a bridge.
You can live in a house without wallpaper on the walls. Wallpaper itself is a total convenience. Are faith or religion or moral laws such a convenience?
Men have become convinced by many various ungodly means that religious knowledge, the truth as a basis for faith, is of a different, lesser quality. First, you choose what you want to believe. What you’ve chosen might be something different than mine. I like something different, and it doesn’t matter that they disagree or even contradict. People might treat scripture like it is just a vessel to conform to whatever they want, but it isn’t. However, they are doing this now.
Second, many varied religions compare in what’s important. It’s better just to look for common ground. Everyone has free will and you won’t convince anyone by trying to force them. These similarities, kindness, treating other people like they want to be treated, the golden rule, are what’s important. Those are the common ground, hence the truth. The Bible says nothing like this either.
Third, the truth is really just what you feel in your heart. Follow your heart. That feeling that you feel is something God wants you to know. Are you going to deny that God doesn’t want you to know what you need to know? God’s Word says to try these feelings, this intuition, using God’s Word.
Fourth, the very existence of so many religions says that it’s near to impossible to be certain on the truth. So many people couldn’t all be wrong. It’s proud to think you do know.
Fifth, two plus two equals four. That’s knowledge. Faith is categorically different, not knowing in the same way as math. Math is real. Twelve divided by three equals four. If religion was the same as math, then you could say that you know it. Religion, faith, has much more variation, because it isn’t so sure. Whatever someone happens to feel or think about religious matters is as good as what anyone else says. It’s very personal, unlike math. Two plus two means the same thing to everyone. Religion and faith are different, more like choosing a wallpaper pattern.
None of the reasons or explanations I’ve given here are true. Man walks according to his own lust and his view of faith, religion, knowledge, and the truth conforms to that. What’s real is what’s out in the world, the people he knows, his dreams, what he wants to do. Faith and religion can be modified to fit that. In the end though, God will still judge them to fall short of a biblical plan of salvation.
Burk Parsons tweeted yesterday (Sunday): “Saying you’re a new kind of Christian with a new kind of Christianity is basically saying you’re an old kind of heretic.” You can want people to include you in Christianity, but your new kind of Christianity isn’t really or truly Christian.
Not just the world, but churches today in rapidly growing fashion coddle relativism.
The Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, Postmodernism, and Critical Theory
People in general don’t want to be told what to do. This arises from the sin nature of mankind, a cursed rebellion passed down from Adam. So people won’t have to do what an authority tells them, they disparage the credibility of it. They especially attack God in diverse manners so He won’t hinder or impede what they want.
Premodernism, Modernism, Postmodernism, Critical Theory, and Epistemology
The premoderns, even if some did not view themselves or the world correctly, related everything to God. Truth was objective. They knew truth either by natural or special revelation of God. If God said it, it was true, no matter what their opinion. Many invented various means to deal with their own contradictions, but God remained God.
Modernism then arose and said revelation wasn’t suitable for knowledge. Modernists could point to distinctions between religions and denominations and the wars fought over them. Knowledge instead came through scientific testing, man’s observations, consequently elevating man above God. Man could now do what he wanted because he changed the standard for knowledge. Faith for sure wasn’t good enough. With modernism, faith might make you feel good, but you proved something in naturalistic fashion to say you know it. Modernism then trampled the twentieth century, producing devastation, unsuccessful with its so-called knowledge.
Premoderns had an objective basis for knowledge, revelation from God. Moderns too, even if it wasn’t valid, had human reasoning, what they called “empirical proof.” Postmoderns neither believed or liked scripture or empiricism. This related to authority, whether God or government or parents, or whatever. No one should be able to tell somebody else what to do, which is to conform them to your truth or your reality. No one has proof. Institutions use language to construct power.
Postmodernism judged modernism a failure, pointing to wars, the American Indians and institutional bias, bigotry, and injustice. Since modernism constructed itself by power and language, a postmodernist possesses his own knowledge of good and evil, his own truth, by which to construct his own reality. No one will any more control him with power and language.
Critical theory proceeds from postmodernism, but is ironically constructed to sound like modernism. It’s not a theory. Theory is by definition supposed to be rational and associated with observations backed by data. Critical theory criticizes, but it isn’t a theory, rather a desire. People desire to do what they want and don’t want someone telling them what to do, so they deconstruct the language to serve their desires and change the outcome. In the United States especially, theorists criticize white males, those who constructed language and power for their own advantage. According to their theories, white men kept down women, all the other races, and sexual preferences.
The postmodernism behind critical theory procures its knowledge with total subjectivity. Those proficient in theory based on their own divination know what’s good and evil, making them woke to this secret knowledge. They have eaten of the tree. White men are evil. The patriarchy is evil. Anyone contesting gender fluidity and trangenderism is evil.
Epistemology is a field of study that explores and judges how we know what we know and whether we really know it, that it is in fact knowledge. What is a sufficient source of knowledge? You can say you know, but do you really know? The Bible uses the term “know” and “knowledge” a lot. Biblical knowledge is certain, because God reveals it. You receive knowledge when you learn what God says. You can’t say the same thing about what you experience or feel.
The Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil
In Genesis 2 (vv. 9, 17), what was the tree of the knowledge of good and evil? In the same context, Genesis 3:5-7 say:
5 For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods,, knowing good and evil. 6 And when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be desired to make one wise, she took of the fruit thereof, and did eat, and gave also unto her husband with her; and he did eat. 7 And the eyes of them both were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together, and made themselves aprons.
If Adam and Eve depended on what God knew, they would not have eaten of the forbidden tree. Instead they trusted their own knowledge. The tree wasn’t the tree of the knowledge of good. God provided that knowledge. Just listen to Him. Eating of the tree brought the knowledge of evil. The knowledge of evil, what someone might call, carnal knowledge, reminds me of three verses in the New Testament.
1 Corinthians 5:1, It is reported commonly that there is fornication among you, and such fornication as is not so much as named among the Gentiles, that one should have his father’s wife.
Ephesians 5:3, But fornication, and all uncleanness, or covetousness, let it not be once named among you, as becometh saints.
Romans 16:19, For your obedience is come abroad unto all men. I am glad therefore on your behalf: but yet I would have you wise unto that which is good, and simple concerning evil.
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