Part 1.
For a while now I've been toying with the notion that one can read the New Testament like a post-modern. By "a post-modern" I mean the kind of person who is at least vaguely aware of the breakdown of Enlightenment ideals of reason and truth. For instance, consider the Declaration of the Independence:
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness."
The idea was that there are certain self-evident truths (in the case of the Declaration of Independence, they were truths about humanity), and that these could be discovered and agreed upon by all peoples universally. It would then be the task of Reason to build on these basic truths to discover ancillary or corollary truths (for instance, that "it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish" a bad government).
Similarly, in mathematics, it was self-evident that one plus one equals two, and from that we can reason our way to calculus! Or that geometry is conceived of on a flat plane.
Toward the close of the "Enlightenment experiment", these "self-evident truths" were being contested and even overthrown in almost every quarter. Mathematician David Hilbert's project to establish all of mathematics on a self-evident foundation came to an unsuccessful close when the work of logician Kurt Goedel and other mathematicians of the early 20th century proved that it was in fact impossible to establish such a foundation. Albert Einstein's stunning General Theory of Relativity crucially rested on the assumption of a curved geometry. And it became clear that different peoples in different cultures around the world had different ideas about the "self-evident" truths of humanity.
What did all of this mean? Among other things, it meant a rise in pluralism (which can be a very good thing in and of itself), in the belief that there are many truths on equal footing (even if some contradict others) and many kinds of reason, and in the authority of power as a replacement for (debunked) reason in molding social relations.
It also means, in a scientific sense, that the raw data of sense perceptions are the closest we can get to objectivity. Because each of us is admittedly shaped by our past, by our family and friends, by our culture, our perception of the world, and of what is truth, is colored by our experiences and by our expectations. What is truly objective, therefore, if anything, is the world itself. Every sensation we feel (with the five senses of sight, hearing, taste, touch, and smell), is a touch of bedrock. If reason is to be somehow maintained (and it's not clear that it can be), it must be built on this bedrock of sense-perception, for it is all that is universally available to every person.
But if truth is to be built on the bedrock of sense-perception, how can we share truth with each other when our sense-perceptions take in different objects? For instance, suppose someone in Africa sees and hears an elephant, and therefore believes that elephants truly exist. What is that to me? If I have never seen or heard an elephant, why should I believe in elephants, if the bedrock of my beliefs is my own experience?
This, I believe, is where language comes into play...
[To be continued...]
