First principles: the easy way out.

While bouncing around a site that linked to an entry on Patrick Deneen's blog, I found a well-written post in which the author explains how he believes it is possible to be a Christian and to be “deeply suspicious of arguments from first principles.” The title is Why Jesus of Nazareth. It's been up for a while and there's no comments, so I'm gong to post a long excerpt in hopes of getting people to read the original post.

“[L]anguage is insufficient to adequately describe the world -- it is a shorthand -- and therefore that any attempt to reason from categorical propositions will necessarily not account for those distinctions language fails to make. Language is of course the best tool that we have, and it is a damn good tool, but it is important not to confuse the description with the object described.

“I draw analogy in the law. Roughly, Congress passes a statute saying ‘don't do X.’ The statute may be plain on its face. Nevertheless, there will always be marginal cases in which we are unsure whether some activity is X or not, even when we have all the facts. To make matters worse, we may not ever have all the facts.

“It seems to me that there are two possible responses to this problem: we can demand that Congress, when it drafts statutes, write an exhaustive description of X in all its dimensions, contexts, and durations. Or, we can accept that X is a shorthand, and institute a body of persons to determine whether a particular act is X in a particular case, whenever it seems particularly pressing to make that determination.

“I contend that the first possibility is not only wasteful of time and resources, but indeed impossible at the outset. There can never be a precise, exhaustive, self-interpreting proposition or set of propositions that describes the world. Not even purely formal systems, which need refer only to themselves, can be both exhaustive and self-interpreting. Language is, as I said at the outset, all shorthand. There will always be marginal cases.

“Thus, the prudent course is to apply pragmatic judgment to each case under consideration. This does not of course mean that we disregard what information we may have about previous applications of pragmatic judgment. It merely means that we bear the burden of making these
determinations. Very often, we will find that we are not dealing with a marginal case, but that does not allow us to abdicate our responsibility to make that determination.

“Very often also, previous applications of pragmatic judgment will guide our answers for the wiser. Nevertheless, these previous applications, hallowed by time and usage though they may be, are still contingent: there is no reason to believe that they are always true in all times and places. The presumption that they are true is ultimately rebuttable. It seems to me that reliance on first principles takes the easy way out by allowing us to accept the description without examining the thing described. This will often lead to grave error.”

There second half of the post is about how foundationalism does most of the work of nihilism, and why a sort of on-balance human flourishing argument is preferable to arguments from first principles.

One thing I have always liked about Kierkegaard is his emphasis that there are truths we can only know relationally, the way we know a person. For this reason, a Christian can claim to know the Truth without claiming to have the Truth in the sense of possession. That's why the Gospel is rhetorical proclamation, not dialectical proof. Along these lines, I really like the conclusion of the post:

“[M]y attraction to Christianity, if attraction is the right word, is not something that seems to me to conflict with the epistemological method I describe above. It does not seem to me that we may argue and reason our way to the foot of the Cross; indeed, all such arguments are in bad taste when confronted with suffering Savior, or the human suffering He came to relieve.

“In other words, I am not a Christian because Christian doctrine presents an unproblematic whole-cloth description of the world I inhabit, but for reasons much more autobiographical and, I daresay, more human. I am a Christian because I was born, I suffer, and I will die, and the God who Himself was born, suffered, and died speaks to me in a way that I cannot resist.”

But does this give away too much?