How we come to know the truth of things is a tricky business. People claim religious and scientific knowledge live in two entirely separate domains.
I don’t think the two are so different, both rely on logic, narrative, trust, faith, and a value system, as Michael Polanyi points out.
Science puts its raw data into meaningful metaphors and similes- DNA is *like a blueprint, X is *like a particle and like a wave etc
And science didn't take off until it was institutionalized into a formal tradition with value laden practices, to authenticate authorities.
Sure, “truth” is a slippery concept.
For Nietzsche, while their object of study is actually in mortem, they falsely believe that they are studying the living and complex reality in vivem:
“You ask me what is idiosyncratic about philosophers? . . . There is, for instance their lack of a sense of history, their hatred for the very notion of becoming, their Egyptianism. They think they are honoring a thing if they de-historicize it, see it sub specie aeterni—if they make a mummy out of it. Everything that philosophers have handled, for thousands of years now, has been a conceptual mummy; nothing real escaped their hands alive. They kill and stuff whatever they worship, these gentlemen who idolize concepts; they endanger the life of whatever they worship."
In critiquing the narrowness of evangelical notions of truth, Hicks says:
Despite this trend to reduce truth to something very narrow indeed, as human beings we do in fact find ourselves operating with a broad concept of truth. Each one of us regularly encounters and copes with many different types of truth: mathematical (“2 + 2 = 4”); logical (“If A then not non-A”); truth about the world around us (“There is a tree in the garden”); historical truth (“There used to be a tree in the garden, but we cut it down last year”); future truth (“This tree won’t last forever”); truth about values (“Every person should be free to exercise his or her human rights”); moral truth (“Destroying the planet through pollution is wrong”); relational truth (“My wife loves me”); religious truth (“The universe was created by God”); and so on.
If our epistemology, then, is going to be adequate for human experience in the real world, it will need to be broad in its interests and application, covering as fully as possible the whole range of the epistemological data.”
Eleanor Stump says, criticizing analytic philosophy,
“Theories of knowledge that ignore or fail to account for whole varieties of knowledge are correspondingly incomplete; . . . it will be incomplete at best in its descriptions of reality; those parts of reality made accessible to us in experience, especially the experience of persons and the knowledge of persons it generates, will be slighted.”
Truthful representation needs to include all forms of appropriate and sustained responses to the environment where intelligence is at work.
“Church doctrine”, Dru Johnson says in his book Biblical knowing, “will only yield fruitful understanding to the extent that ones lives the injunctions of those authorities. Analysis of “Loving your neighbor as yourself” (Lev 19:18) will yield some kind of knowledge about YHWH and his intentions only if someone actually practices the injunction.
As an illustration, one can learn something about the rules, the effort, and the skills required to play tennis, simply by observing a match. However, the mere observer and the tennis professional are seeing two different games when they sit next to each other at Wimbledon.
There is an existential understanding of what-it-is-like-to-play-tennis that is absent in the mere observer’s view.
Because of that absence, we cannot say that both the observer and tennis player saw the same thing when they watched the match, just as a doctor and layperson do not see the same thing when they look at the same X-ray.
Knowing requires participation, and theological knowledge requires enacting the life of a servant of YHWH or disciple of Jesus.
Clinical distance neither improves knowledge through objectivity nor renders knowledge that can be known only in fiduciary relationship (in contractum).
…there is no process that will render the meaning of these texts outside of submitting to them and participating in their injunctions."
Analyses Lesslie Newbigin summarizes his theological epistemology: “We need to learn to know God as he is. There is no way by which we come to know a person except by dwelling in his or her story and, in the measure that may be possible, becoming part of it.”
Johnson concludes, “The trio of trust (i.e., faith), hope, and love fit nicely here in the category of authentication. We are not importing Paul’s discussion into ours, but noticing that without reasons to trust the authority (faith), an expectation that a discernible skill will result (hope), and the commitment of both parties to each other and the act (love), good knowing is staved or truncated."
Of course, we wouldn’t expect as much precision in religion as science, for in life we find our desire exceeds our reason, and so, ultimately, the language adequate (ratio) to transcendent or moral truths are the primary categories of symbolism, imagery, and metaphor; while precise representation being secondary and derivative in the abstract categories of space, time, causality, and number.
Yes, religious knowledge is relational, the goal of knowing is not complete information; it is communion.
But very little of science can be mathematically exact, look at biology or sociology.
When learning to ‘read’ an X-ray, we trust our certified, and therefore authorized, instructor, and his accredited institution publicly acknowledged to be authorized to teach him, and we trust the testimony of the scientific community that the experiments this knowledge is based on has been carried out according to the values of the scientific method..
So, with both scientific and religious knowledge, it is by listening to accredited authorities, embodying the instruction, which leads to seeing and therefore knowing.
An X-ray contains no propositional “facts” in the sense that it cannot be true or false. Despite this, if you practice a certain way of looking at X-rays, under apprenticeship, learning to sift out particular things, notice what is significant, from the guidance of an expert radiologist, you will be able to see something in an X-ray film that you would never see apart from embodying the radiologist’s directions.
And within science there there are different schools, paradigms, for interpreting what these facts mean - it’s not just simply learning to see a result.
Knowledge begins in embodied ritual practices and grows to skilled discernment through ritual repetition in a community.
Just so, Christian sacraments have the same purpose: we practice rites to know.
By ritual, I simply mean a practice that is scripted (usually by an authority) and performed by a subject.
Judging Divine revelation, for example, involves 1) recognizing the docents through whom God speaks and listening to them alone, 2) embodying the actions they prescribe, and 3) looking at what they are showing us. When the people of God do all three to the extent required, then it is considered knowing. When we transgress any of these three, it is considered error (or, erroneous knowing).
In order to know what God is showing his people, God must authenticate an authority to them, and they must both acknowledge that authority and participate in the process specified.
The disciples are not called by Jesus in order to believe correct formal propositions; rather they are known by living a particular kind of life. By enacting this life (Mark 8:31–38), the disciples will see what is being shown to them.
Going further, Dru Johnson says real knowledge must be “sacramental” - where embodied actions are mediated through outward visible signs that are united to the thing signified.
For instance, because we have the skill that enables us to know that “2 + 2 = 4,” we can sacramentally exercise that skill by adding two pieces of pie to the two that we already have in order to reach a total of four.
This trite and provisional example becomes less parochial when one considers the possibility that all human activity is embedded in and expressive of our skilled knowing.”
More on Biblical knowing HERE
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