Experience, Matter, and Causation

Ever since modern science began to progress rapidly in the seventeenth century, three operating assumptions have become increasingly popular within western culture: empiricism, materialism, and determinism. We'll take a quick look at each and briefly discuss how it relates to Christian belief.

Empiricism, as we are using the term, has to do with how knowledge is acquired. It is sometimes helpful to think of two kinds of empiricism, one soft and the other hard.

The hard version, metaphysical empiricism, insists that all knowledge comes through the senses and only what can be physically demonstrated, directly or indirectly, qualifies as knowledge. Metaphysical empiricists freely acknowledge that some of the most powerful ideas ever formulated, from the laws of planetary motion to the dictum that doctors and nurses wash their hands to prevent the spread of infection, cannot be directly demonstrated. But they demand that, to reflect genuine knowledge, ideas must be consistent with what can be observed and replicated.

A nuclear physicist may not be able to see quarks or leptons but, based on experimental findings, nonetheless concludes they exist at least as working models. Abstract thinking is involved in making sense of experimental results and also in coming up with testable hypotheses that support or challenge the scientist's interpretation of observed data. But such thinking must always be firmly anchored to that data. Proponents of hard empiricism argue that no knowledge of anything is attainable except through replaceable physical findings. This includes knowing anything about the nature or existence of God

The soft form, methodological empiricism, accepts that the hard empiricist is correct when it comes to natural science. No one would be regarded regard any contemporary scientist as legitimate unless that scientist agreed that all scientific findings and the theories based on them be physically replicable, or in the case of astronomy consistent with all available measurements.

As even a quick search of the internet will demonstrate, many celebrated scientists are Christians and methodological empiricists. Where they part company with metaphysical empiricists is in their refusal to accept that knowledge comes only through the senses. Christian scientists insist that there are other modes of knowing and that a human being may know many things that are incapable of physical demonstration. They would point, for example, to love and joy, and how even if we knew everything there was to know about what goes on in the human brain when people report feeling them, this would not yield knowledge of the experience of either. Given that the origin of the word empirical means deriving from experience, these Christians might argue that, since they are open to intuitive knowledge, they are the true empiricists.

Closely related to the empiricist motif in western thought is materialism, but before we go into this, we want to mention the difference between explanatory and eliminative reductionism. An explanatory reduction reveals the underlying processes

which like empiricism comes in two forms, one called eliminative