Understanding Truth: Worldviews, Obsession, and Critical Thinking

The white whale, the albino whale that is the focal point of this obsession of Captain Ahab represents God. And you know throughout the story that Ahab dropped everything, all other concerns, the commercial venture of the Pequod, he abandoned that when he came upon a ship in distress searching for those who had been lost overboard the Rachel. [00:01:41]

Each person, ladies and gentlemen, had a completely different view of what that coin could mean to their lives until finally the little cabin boy whose name was Pip, he was crazy, he came and he danced around in front of the gold doubloon and he said, "I see, you see, we all see." [00:03:36]

Now, no two of us view the world in which we live from exactly the same perspective. We have our antennae. We have the grid. We have the patterns. We have our own personal history, all of which contribute to the way we interpret reality as we encounter it. [00:04:06]

This is what Socrates called the unexamined life where we just sort of respond to what's there, but a Christian, I'm convinced, is called to seek the mind of Christ, to seek an understanding of his or her world from the viewpoint of the eternal, to see things as best as we possibly can the way God would have us view them. [00:05:18]

But it's not by accident that language in our day has changed in this way because we live in a world where preferences have supplanted objective truth. Truth is now no longer considered to be a matter of cogent thoughtful understanding so much as it is a matter of personal feeling. [00:08:39]

So we've been very effective in training people to feel good about their poor performance, and so truth now becomes a matter of feeling rather than thinking. Now, the other thing I want us to observe about our guest here tonight who is called "The Thinker" is the pose. [00:10:08]

One of the principles of those involved in art, particularly in painting and in sculpture, is what the Germans call the principle of the fruchtbare Augenblick, "the fruitful moment." Rembrandt, for example, before he would paint one of his classic portraits of a biblical character would go through the process of rendering over a hundred various sketches of the person he was going to capture on canvas. [00:11:18]

His muscles are taut because deep thinking involves a kind of effort that is not only strenuous mentally, but it is actually a physical enterprise as well. He doesn't tell us what he's thinking about. Maybe he's thinking about thinking. Maybe he's thinking about thought. Maybe he's wondering if he can know anything for sure. [00:13:10]

Epistemology is a science that deals with the question, "How do we know what we know." What are the means human beings use to contact reality and to discern between truth and falsehood? Now, several methods of learning and of knowing have been examined and evaluated in the history of Western thought. [00:18:25]

Basically, rationalism says that the way to truth, the way to knowledge, is principally, if not exclusively, through the mind, through the processes of thought itself. And of course, one of the most important keys to rational investigation is the science of logic because the real is deemed to be logical, and among hyper-rationalists, the logical is deemed to be real. [00:19:22]

I mean, any epistemology that is going to be effective must include both the rational and the sensory. If we lock ourselves strictly into the mind and say only the mind can give truth then we have no access to the external world. The only way I can encounter the external world is through my body. [00:23:10]

Christianity is not rationalism, but it is by all means rational. And so, the Bible assumes both the importance of the mind and the importance of the senses as both are engaged in the enterprise. That's the introduction. That's all I'm going to say about epistemology at this point only to say I want you to think about thinking. [00:28:48]