Introduction
Per my first commitment, I am committed to truth, and to evidence and experience as the best way to get at truth.
I’m going to attempt to unpack this some. But first, I need to acknowledge my own contextual situatedness, possible biases, and limitations. I write as a white, male, cisgender, heterosexual, able-bodied, and middle-class American. That is to say, I recognize that I come at this from a place of relative privilege. I also write as a former Evangelical who has now embraced a more progressive outlook.
I have been intentional about taking in other perspectives. I have done my best to be fair and follow the evidence to where it seemed to lead. But I recognize that my personal experiences and cherished perspectives inevitably influence me and that objectivity can only ever be achieved in imperfect degrees.
I recognize that I am not an academic philospher or cognition expert and that there may be relevent research or positions I am unaware of or imperfectly understand. I also recognize that there is no epistemological position that is completely neutral or without some tensions.
Nevertheless, I have read fairly widely on matters related to epistemology. I’ve done a lot of thinking and reflection on these things. I’m alway open to new information that might nuance or change my perspective. But based on what I know, I am convinced that what I will argue is in the right ball park. The reader will have to decide if my arguments are convincing. It is to those arguments I now turn.
Truth
I hope we can agree that truth should be absolutely bedrock to our thinking. What is the point of believing something or acting in a certain way if that does not correspond to reality, to the way things really are? Practically, disregarding truth leads to disastrous results for ourselves and others. Most worldviews see a commitment to truth as morally right and propagating falsehood as morally wrong. Many also warn of good or bad consequences (karma, rewards, punishments) that will result from knowingly following or deviating from truth, in this life or the next. And from a theistic and Christian perspective, seeking and speaking truth is honoring to God whereas propagating falsehood is dishonoring to God. The Bible certainly teaches this. Speaking personally, honesty, authenticity, and transparency fit my values, personality, and strategies for navigating the world. Finally, a commitment to truth is an appropriate baseline because it is, in principle, initially open-ended to any larger worldview being true. Thus, a bare commitment to truth is unbiased and non-partisan. It does not beg questions.
But if we can agree that truth should be a fundamental goal, the next question becomes what is the best way to get at truth?
Two Divergent Ways
To be a little bit simplistic, I see two main options: 1) the way of evidence and experience, and 2) the way of rigid presumption.
One simple way of contrasting these two paths goes like this. The way evidence and experience starts out holding its beliefs loosely, and as it goes out into the world it is willing to adjust them based on how they fit with the realities it discovers there. The way of rigid presumption, on the other hand, starts out holding its beliefs rigidly and dogmatically. As it goes out into the world it is not willing to adjust its views based on what it encounters. Instead, it twists what it encounters to fit its preconceived notions.
Obviously this dual contrast is a bit oversimplified. There is a wider spectrum of epistemological stances one could take. And of course what one means by such terms as “evidence” and “experience” is highly debateable. While much of what I will argue is intentionally general, I certainly have my own specific views on these matters. I would hope that the reader finds my more general points about the way of evidence and experience convincing even if they disagree with my more specific and debateable epistemological stances.
As another important qualification, no particular individual or group will fall purely into the camp of “evidence and experience” or “rigid presumption.” I am presenting these as idealized poles. We all mix the two and need to be open-minded and self-critical enough to recognize that.
However, I think setting up this duality between evidence and experience and rigid presumption still has merit. There really is a difference between these two as broad strategies. There really is a watershed parting of ways between them that is, in many ways, even more basic than our other disagreements about specific epistemological theories. Contrasting of what I call evidence and experience with what I call rigid presumption will also help explain what I mean by the former and why it is my most basic commitment.
Evidence and Experience
Let me explain a little more about some of the specific practices I see as connected to the way of evidence and experience. Then I will survey some positive and negative reasons to follow this path (so defined).
As I see it, following evidence and experience means valuing my own personal experience, but also realizing that it is situated, limited, and prone to a number of cognitive biases. Because of that, it seeks out broader patterns of experience and approaches personal experience in a humble and critically discerning manner. In essence, I believe we should take what is known as a critical realist approach to knowledge.
Following evidence and experience means listening to my neighbors with an open mind. Not uncritically. But recognizing that they might know things that I do not and they might even be right about some things where I am wrong. In particular, it means listening to my marginalized and minority neighbors, knowing that their experiences of the world are often quite different from my own, but real, and important for me to learn lest my privilege blind me to some important truths about the world.
Following evidence and experience means intentionally seeking out other perspectives on various issues. And seeking out the best advocates and arguments from these perspectives; not just weak “strawmen” that are easy to knock down. I know from observation and experience that only taking in information from one’s own partisan camp is a faulty way of getting at truth. For example, I’ve learned that I can’t read either atheistic or theistic authors alone and come away with a representative understanding of what the other side believes or their reasons why.
Following evidence and experience means prioritizing science and expertise, as well as rigorous evidence-based approaches to knowledge. Many subject matters take a lot of study to grasp well. Some likely truths, which are backed up by an enormous amount of evidence, are complex and/or initially seem counterintuitive. A scientific approach to knowledge involves systematic observation, provisional/falsifiable conclusions, procedures that attempt to minimize or eliminate bias, and testing ideas and comparing them with one another. This methodology does not guarantee that a particular conclusion is right, but it has been proven to be a better method of arriving at truth than, say, intuition, tradition, or faith (though these other methods can also sometimes give us true insights).
Following evidence and experience means trying to evaluate all perspectives on the basis of their rational and evidential merits. Do they reason in a logically valid and sound way, avoiding known fallacies? Are their assertions backed up with evidence from reputable sources? What is the strength of that evidence? To some extent, what counts as “evidence” and how it should be characterizes becomes debatable. I have my own views on these matters. However, beyond the specifics, I believe a commitment to “following the evidence wherever it leads” makes sense, at least as an ideal for which to strive.
One modest place to start is to try to be honest about where the evidence seems to point to on a given matter as I encounter new information. It means doing this even if it does not seem to fit very well with my prior beliefs. This does not necessarily mean I immediately change my mind. I may need more time to look into the matter more fully. But at least I am honest with myself and others.
Finally, following evidence and experience means recognizing that there is sometimes a level of uncertainty or even ambiguity to where the evidence points and that tentativeness and humility are necessary corollaries from this. Things are not always black-and-white. We are finite beings who come from particular vantage points, with partial knowledge, biases, and cognitive equipment prone to misperception. On some issues, multiple different viewpoints may be compatible with each other and correct. On other issues, where there is legitimate contradiction, a variety of perspectives may have both strong-sounding arguments and legitimate weak spots. Some issues concern matters such as values, meaning, or invisible entities which are intangible and hard to evaluate. For many issues, absolutely certain conclusions are impossible. Instead, various claims may only obtain to varying degrees of probability or improbability. Beyond objective evidence, subjectively, there are intelligent and moral people from a range of perspectives who are quite evidently sincere in believing divergent things. This doesn’t mean there is no truth on these matters. But it means that figuring out what that is can be difficult. And it means that in these matters, I hold my beliefs more loosely and humbly and recognize that others may have defensible reasons for holding different views than my own (even if I ultimately disagree with those views).
I’m committed to following the way of evidence and experience (so defined) both because I see positive reasons to think it is our most reliable avenue to truth and negatively because I see that the way of rigid presumption leads to destructive results.
Positive Reasons
Positively, I follow evidence and experience for three main reasons.
First, I follow evidence and experience because they are fundamentally basic. That is to say, there is no way to “get behind” them. We can’t ultimately “prove” that our experience is (presumptively) trustworthy apart from reference to those various experiences themselves. We trust them when they intractably strike us as real, and we have no mitigating reasons to doubt their veracity.
For example, take my experience that I am seeing a bicycle right in front of me. How do I know for sure that this is real? Well, I could do certain things to try to solidify my confidence in this perception. I could invite others over to see if they too are seeing the same bike. I could try looking at the bike from different angles to make sure I am seeing the same consistent thing. I could go away for a while and see if I still perceive the bike when I come back. I could try touching, tasting, hearing, or smelling the bike to see if it is also perceived by my other senses. Given that we can misperceive things and that our experience can mislead us (more on that in a minute), these things would not be unreasonable.
But what if I did all those things and these various experiences all consistently indicated a bike in front of me. Can I be sure that there really is a bike there? Perhaps not in an absolute sense. Philosophers like to play skeptical “what-if” thought experiments: what if I’m only dreaming? What if I’m simply a brain being manipulated in a vat by a scientist? What if an evil demon created the world six seconds ago, with false memories implanted in my brain? What if I’m trapped in a Matrix-like virtual reality world that is not, in fact, real?
All of these things are brute possibilities, but what reason do I have for actually thinking any of these things? So far as I can tell, my experience seems true. I depend on trusting experiences like this every day to function and survive in the world. (And if I choose to not trust them, I won’t survive for long.)
Further, if I were ever to gain a reason to not trust a particular experience (or class of experience), presumably this would be by reference to other experiences, or possible experiences, that I could have. And if there is something that exists that I could not experience, that is, something that could not effect me in any way – even in principle; that thing would be totally irrelevant to me.
Even worldviews that claim our physical perceptions are an illusion, do so by reference to spiritual experiences they have (and their interpretations of these), to which they assign more weight than our everyday experiences of the world.
In the final analysis, I can ultimately only appeal to a given experience itself as justification that what I’m experiencing is genuine. My reason for trusting an experience is ultimately the reality that I intractably seem to be experiencing that thing, and I have no mitigating reason(s) to doubt this perception.
Now, of course we sometimes do uncover reasons to doubt our experiences or perceptions. Philosophers note that we can see mirages, sticks can appear bendy under water (when we know they are not), peoples who habitually live in dense forests can misperceive far-away objects as small instead of distant, and so on. Further, there are a number of cognitive biases and other fallacious thought patterns we are prone to. So at least in principle, we need to be open to critical introspection and outside evidence that we are misperceiving something. But again, our presumption tends to be that we can trust our experiences, apart from evidence to the contrary.
I should note that “experience” here is understood in a prima facie broad way that does not a priori beg the question of what types of experiences are most trustworthy or which ways of analyzing them are best. For example, experience here prima facie includes sensory, moral, spiritual, and intellectual experience.
I do think that some of these types of experiences are more trustworthy than others, and some ways of analyzing experience more sound. I will say more about this later. But I would not want to pre-define experience in a way that smuggles in bias presuppositions or a priori rejects whole classes of experience as even possibly trustworthy or on to something true. To me, these things should be argued a posteriori, based on phenomenological considerations.
My undertanding of evidence – for example, scientific or historical evidence – sees it as simply a more rigorous way of interogating and extrapolating from experience. As with experience, our understanding of evidence can mislead us. But at its best, an evidential way of engaging the world faithfully builds off of experience. And it also bears a basicality and presumptive authority on that basis.
Secondly, I follow evidence and experience because they can be understood in a relatively neutral way. For example, as noted, “experience” need not be understood in a materialistic way that excludes non-physical types of experience.
Philosopher Kai-Man Kwan has argued for what he calls “Holistic Empiricism” which takes 1) experience of self, 2) sense experience, 3) interpersonal experience, 4) religious experience, 5) moral experience, 6) aesthetic experience, and 7) intellectual experience (e.g. activities of reason, such as rational intuition) as all properly basic, that is to say as all rationally accepted at face value, apart from evidence to the contrary.
My research has given me reasons to to either question the veracity of some of these or at least be much more modest in what we take away from them. But again, I would not want to pre-define experience in a way that a priori rejected any of them as even possibly trustworthy or on to something true. In other words, I would not want to characterize “experience” in a bias or question-begging way.
Although I have couched my understanding of evidence and experience in an empirical and realist way, I also see a prominent place for reason and logic. And as I note below, potentially one could make a case for a different epistemology from evidence and experience as understood in this prima facie broad way.
So evidence and experience are relatively neutral in being conceived of as prima facie broad enough to include a variety of kinds of experiences and also in initially being open-ended as to which kind is given preeminence, and thus, what kind of narrower epistemology one lands on (e.g. rationalism, empiricism, idealism, etc.).
But I also see evidence and experience as relatively neutral in the sense that they don’t presuppose or biasedly predispose one toward a specific worldview. For example, it is possible that evidence and experience end up lending supporting to atheism, Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, or so on. Or it could be that evidence and experience end up undermining these or another’s reasonability. None of this is pre-determined beforehand by choosing to follow evidence and experience. Judgments on these matters would follow only after and on the basis of our use of evidence and experience themselves.
Third, I follow evidence and experience because, in practice, they show themselves to be a reliable guide to truth. Especially as this way is humbly self-critical and self-correcting.
For example, we have reasons to think that our physical experiences of the world are generally accurate. They are vivid, continuous, and reliably consistent with the experiences of others. They work. And where they don’t, they are self-correcting. The sun rises predictably. And if that ever changes (or our confidence in this seeming-truth does), we will know that actual state of affairs through the new set of evidence and experiences before us.
Modern medicine and technology work. Various scientific conclusions, almost by definition, hold enormous explanatory and predictive power. Science holds a prestige around the world because of its undeniable results.
Mathematics and logic reliably work. It is difficult to conceive of a (possible) world without them. More debatably, our interpersonal experiences and experience of self seem generally reasonably.
Because I am not a materialists, I believe there are also truths we can learn from moral and spiritual experience. Both can have real, transformative effects on people. But for a variety of reasons (touched on below) I’m convinced that we should approach these types of experiences with more critical discernment and what we infer from them must be bounded by what we confidently know from science and broad patterns of empirical experience.
Regardless of if the reader agrees with my specific views on different types of experience, the more general point is that evidence and experience reliably lead to truth, especially when approached in a critical way that is open to correction.
The Negative Failure of the Alternative
Negatively, I follow evidence and experience because I see how unreliable and destructive the opposite way of rigid presumption is. You will recall that I characterized rigid presumption as holding its beliefs rigidly and being willing to twist what one encounters in the world to fit one’s preconceived notions. I’ve seen again and again how rigid presumption leads to falsehood, grossly unloving and unjust behavior, and (from a religious perspective) literal idolatry. In my other writings I have demonstrated this at great length.
For example, I pointed out how (many) Catholics and Protestants erroneously opposed emerging Copernican science about the earth revolving around the sun based on their dogmatic beliefs about the Bible. I pointed out how close-minded commitment to the truth and authority of The Book of Mormon led Later Day Saints to accept demonstrable falsehoods about American history (for example, that Native Americans are descendants of ancient Israelites). I pointed out how conspiracy theories, such as those held by people who are in denial about human-caused climate change, lead to destructive results.
I pointed out how rigid traditional Hindu beliefs about caste cause serious and unjustified harm to so-called “untouchable” people in India. I pointed out how fanatical fringe Islamacist beliefs, such as those held by members of ISIS, lead them to rationalize egregious things like terrorist bombings, forced conversions, torture, and sexual slavery. I wrote about how the Puritans justified genocide against indigenous Pequots based on Old Testament conquest narratives. I pointed to how convinced but factually wrong views on race led to the dehumanization, degradation, and death of Jews under Nazism and black and brown people throughout much of modern history. And to that last point, this was specifically justified on religious (and even “Biblical”) grounds.
Because religious people don’t hold a monopoly on rigid presumption, I also listed some secular examples. For example, I mentioned how millions of people died in the Soviet Union and China because they used disproven agricultural practices that were, nonetheless, pushed by Stalin’s “pet” agronomist, Trofim Lysenko.
I pointed out how when a putatively “authoritative” prophet, holy book, or institution is only human and demonstrably fallible; when people ascribe inerrant truth to it, this amounts to a sort of idolatry. Idolatry in the very literal sense of ascribing pure divinity to something that is man-made and fallible.
And it doesn’t matter if people claim that they’re just choosing to trust God’s truth or word. In reality, they are making a human judgment about what beliefs, body of truth, or prophetic figure or organization they believe has the pure corner on the divine. Only, in the case of rigid presumption, they are doing it without critical consideration of evidence, dialogue and comparison with other beliefs, or an openness to possible correction or change. Numerous holy books, self-proclaimed prophets, and religious institutions claim to be guided by God. These various sources contradict each other and often reality. The only credible way to approach them and their claims is through evidence and experience. The only credible faith is a reasonable faith, not a “blind” one.
An Ethical and Sacred Pathway
I used these and many other examples, as well as further analysis. But the bottom line is that basically everything that I care about, that which is most holy to me, is twisted by approaching it through the way of “blind” faith or rigid presumption. Even – and this is important – under the best of intentions. Enormous harm can be caused by well-intentioned “good faith” beliefs that are, nonetheless, based in stubborn ignorance or prejudice.
Because of all that, the way of evidence and experience isn’t just practical to me (though it is that), it is also deeply ethical and holy. I know I cannot love my neighbors well without it. And I cannot fully honor our God-of-all-truth if I arrogantly disregard the most reliable way God has given to me of apprehending God’s truth. I certainly cannot rightly honor God if I engage in idolatrous beliefs regarding fallible authoritative sources.
Although the dominate perspective of the Bible assumes a pre-critical, “blind” faith approach to religious truth; arguably a number of texts imply the importance of evidence and experience in regard to these matters. We see this, for example, in calls for people to test spirits and prophesy, texts where God is said to provide evidence that he is God or for God’s specific callings of individuals, in Jesus’ flexible approach to Sabbath laws based on if they (experientially) benefitted or harmed people, and so on. But I would strongly argue that evidence and experience is our best pathway to truth whether they were endorsed by the Bible or not. And while a bare commitment to evidence and experience is open-ended to potentially supporting the truth of the Bible’s claims, I’m convinced we must follow them even if they were to undermine such claims.
Concluding Thoughts
It is important to note that the rest of my core commitments and the relative priority I assign to them flow out of my commitment to truth and to following evidence and experience as the best way to get at truth. I also tend to weigh what kinds of experiences I see as most trustworthy in the following way: first physcial experience, then moral experience, and finally spiritual experience.
I explain more my rationale for doing this elsewhere. But briefly I’ll say that it is related to the relative consistency and pervasiveness of these types of experiences. Everyone experiences a physical world, and these experiences are reasonably consistent with one another.
Most people experience moral sentiments, but not all do and there is significant debate about the nature of morality and justice. In spite of this, there are some core moral agreements that transcend any one culture, religion, or worldview.
Religious or spiritual experience is even more inconsistent and varied. Not everyone has it and those who do experience a wide range of obstensible beings and states. Various religions (and those of no religion) also have sophisticated arguments for and against each others’ views. I certainly have my own beliefs on these matters, but I recognize that there is more ambiguity here and so I bound those beliefs by what we can know from physical and moral experience. Thus, my hierarchy of physical, moral, and then spiritual experience.
The reader will see this hierarchy reflected in the structure of the rest of my core commitments. For example, my next strongly held belief concerns a commitment to embodiment and our physical world, the one after that relates to core moral commitments concerning love and justice, and finally, my fourth and fifth core commitments concern spiritual beliefs regarding God and Jesus.
Post-conservative Orphan of God 