Articles
No Knowledge without God
No Knowledge without God
Here’s a question all humans must answer: how do we know what we know? Let’s take God out of the equation and assume the universe came from nothing and humans evolved over millions of years of unguided, unintelligent, chemical reactions. In that case, the only way to know what we know is through our 5 senses and reasoning. But in a Godless universe, how can we know we can trust our senses and reasoning? If we evolved from primordial soup in a time and chance universe unguided by any intelligent force, how can we trust our intelligence? Someone might say, “We can trust our senses and reasoning because science shows we can.” But we have to use our senses and reasoning to do science, so that doesn’t work. We can’t prove we can trust our senses and reasoning by using our senses and reasoning. In fact, any answer someone gives has to come from their senses and reasoning, because that’s all we have in a Godless universe. Honest atheists, agnostics, and worldly philosophers must admit they can’t know for sure if their reasoning is working properly. They can talk about being relatively certain or drawing reasonable conclusions, but to know for certain is not possible.
Here’s the problem: if you hold that view, you’ve given up knowledge because you could be wrong. If a pilot says to his passengers, “It’s reasonable to believe that this plane has enough fuel to make this trip, but I can’t be certain and I could be wrong” he doesn’t know! He’s guessing, and maybe it’s an educated guess, but if he can’t be absolutely certain, he can’t know and the passengers are probably going to switch planes! In a world without God, there is no absolute certainty, and therefore no knowledge. If we can’t know anything for sure, it means we could be wrong about everything we claim to know.
In the Christian worldview, however, we can have certainty and knowledge. Why? Because God, who is the source of all wisdom and knowledge, created us in His image with our reasoning and senses to accurately process the world around us. We know our senses and reasoning are trustworthy because they were designed by a trustworthy, intelligent God. Not only that, but God has revealed His knowledge to us in the Scriptures so we can know what He knows. It’s impossible for God not to exist, because if He didn’t we could not know anything at all. To remove God is to give up knowledge and be reduced to absurdity in our thinking.
“The fear of the LORD is the beginning of knowledge.” (Prov. 1:7a). “For the LORD gives wisdom; from His mouth come knowledge and understanding.” (Prov. 2:6) “In Christ are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge.” (Col. 2:3). “We are destroying speculations and every lofty thing raised up against the knowledge of God.” (2 Cor. 10:5a). [Credit to Sye Bruggencate, Jeff Durbin, and Greg Bahnsen for pointing this out to me]
