Most people believe they can know the truth about many things, such as what is right and wrong, what God is, and that science is correct. They are wrong. This is the view of Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), a German philosopher of the Enlightenment, renowned for his discussions of logic and empiricism and for his view that we cannot know the actual truth about anything. I agree with his view on whether we can know the truth.
There were two opposing philosophical views during his lifetime about how we know things. One position, which is often attributed to rationalists like René Descartes, considers our rational thinking as the source of all knowledge. Our senses might betray us, but our logical mind is reliable, perhaps because a higher power created it.
An opposing view, generally associated with empiricists such as David Hume, holds that our minds are somewhat empty. Everything we know must enter our five senses first. We must observe the external world to learn what is occurring. The five senses are sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch.[1]
In short, rationalists think that our mind is built to understand the world through rational thinking, from the inside. Empiricists believe that we learn about the world through observation, from the outside.
Both groups assume that the mind adjusts to the world around it.
Immanuel Kant turns this around. He says it’s not our mind that adjusts to the world; the world is adjusted by our mind.
In other words, how we see the world is shaped by what we sense and think about what we sense. We cannot know the world as it truly is because we can only experience it through our own senses and thoughts based on these senses.
In his book Critique of Pure Reason, Immanuel Kant argues we can only gain some knowledge of the items in the world through experience derived from our senses and understanding of the senses. But our senses and the thinking based on them are unreliable.
Our five senses are limited. Animals have far better senses than humans. Dogs, for example, can detect smells humans cannot. Other animals can hear, see, and use their other senses better than humans. Human senses cannot perceive everything that exists; therefore, human intelligence cannot know the truth about the world.
Let’s examine the foregoing.
When we read what scholars say about God and the world, we should recognize that their claims may not be true. There are several problems. (1) We can know nothing about God. (2) We know very little about things on earth, and the little we know may be misleading and even wrong because our senses are limited. (3) Most of what we know, even science, is based on statistics, and statistics only indicate what “might be correct.”
We can know nothing about God
People are told by priests, ministers, rabbis, and others to believe in God. They think that what they “believe” they “know.” This is not true. A definition of belief is “a conviction or opinion that people accept as true even though there is no proof that what they believe is true.” This is a mental state in which one takes a proposition or idea as fact, even without absolute proof, and it influences values, behavior, and worldview, ranging from personal ideas to religious tenets. They are subjective and personal, shaping how individuals interpret reality and interact with the world. Beliefs are not true facts.
In the Apology, Socrates’ student, Plato (roughly 428-348 BCE), reports on Socrates’ trial, defense, and death in 399 BCE for allegedly corrupting Athenian youths. Socrates tells how his friend Chaerephon asked the Oracle at Delphi if anyone was wiser than Socrates. The Oracle replied that no one was.
Socrates, believing he was not wise, was perplexed by this proclamation. He set out to find someone wiser than he to prove the Oracle was wrong. He questioned wise people and discovered that they thought they knew things but did not actually know them. He concluded that while he, too, lacked true knowledge about things, he was slightly wiser in one respect: he was aware of his own ignorance.
He states in the Apology:
“I am wiser than this man, for neither of us appears to know anything great and good; but he fancies he knows something, although he knows nothing; whereas I, as I do not know anything, do not fancy I do. In this trifling particular, then, I appear to be wiser than he, because I do not fancy I know what I do not know.”
He understood that the Oracle wasn’t praising his knowledge but was saying that the wisest human beings are those who, like Socrates, recognize that human wisdom has limits and is worth “little.”
Once we also realize that “truth” requires us to reveal all that exists about what we are describing and that we are unable to do that, we will recognize that it is impossible today to say that anything is “true” simply because even in the twenty-first century, there is much that we do not know about the universe.
We know that a table is a structure that can be used to eat from, but we do not know all about what it is; we do not know all that we should know about the molecules or atoms, the basic items from which a table evolved.
Doctors “practice” medicine. They do not give their patients all the care they need because doctors do not know enough about the human body. In fact, scientists recognize that all science is based on statistics.
Statistics is a science that recognizes that we do not know enough about things to really understand them. Statistics do not reveal what a thing actually is but what it “might be.”
It is the same with history. The historian cannot know everything that happened in the past. At best, history, like statistics, is about what might have happened.
We cannot know anything about God
Because we cannot experience God with our five senses, we are also incapable of knowing anything about God. All that we like to think we know, such as that God is all-knowing, is helpful, and punishes people who act improperly, is only wishful thinking. The Bible tells us this.
In Exodus 33:18-23, Moses asks God, “Now show me your glory.” He is requesting God to reveal what God is: God’s nature, character, essence, and how and why God acts. God responds in Exodus 33:19 by declaring that He will pass before Moses while Moses is hidden behind a rock and cannot see Him, and that Moses will only see His back, meaning any signs that show He passed by.
In other words, all that humans can think they see is what God created or formed, but nothing about God Himself. But even this is uncertain; God may not have produced nature.
[1] An empiricist is a person who supports the theory that all knowledge is based on experience derived from the senses. Most scientists today are empiricists.
“He who knows nothing is closer to the truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods and errors.” Thomas Jefferson
I did not know this quote. It is a paraphrase of Socrates.
“Most of what we know, even science, is based on statistics, and statistics only indicate what might be correct.”
I also agree with this. Science is supposed to evolve and not be dogmatic. All the Biden people said, “Trust the science.” No, I don’t trust the science because if we trust the science, that’s the antithesis of science! Science is a contest set of findings put into a hypothesis, put into a theory, and then made into a law, and then they’re disproven later on. If we trusted the science, we would never disprove anything. We don’t know much of anything about space or even our deepest oceans. I think they say that only 1 or 2% of the ocean has been discovered. The Mariana Trench (for example) is over 36,000 feet deep. True, we’ll find out a lot more stuff as time goes on, but there’s so much we don’t understand, and if we’re pompous enough to think we understand it all, we’re just fooling ourselves. I’m not preaching for people to be ignorant, I’m just saying that we don’t know very much. Think about it! Just 200 years ago, we killed George Washington; we bled him to death with leeches. Now we have MRI machines, and we have robots that can do neurosurgery in just 200 years. So, we have to admit our lack of insight and our lack of knowledge. I want to share a quote by da Vinci. da Vinci was a rationalist. He had harsh words for fundamentalists who insisted that they knew the “truth,” saying, “They want to comprehend the mind of God, talking about it as though they had already dissected it into parts. Still, they remain unaware of their own bodies, of the realities of their surroundings, and even unaware of their own stupidity.”
I agree with you.
I like both the views of rationalists and empiricists. I am a fan of Hume and Kant. Interestingly, Hume was an agnostic and not an atheist. In fact, he is regarded as the great agnostic. Hume denied supernatural miracles, etc, and he is partly the reason why we have less philosophers today. Metaphysics has, in effect, died since Hume and Kant. But I also agree with Aristotle and Maimonides regarding human reason. There is only one source of truth, and that is human reason. Even so I am very aware of the limitations of human reason. Jose Rizal taught that we cannot know the full truth.
We agree.
Human senses cannot perceive everything that exists; therefore, human intelligence cannot know the truth about the world.
Are humans inferior to God, the Almighty?
We know nothing about God.
Your reflection highlights a profound philosophical and theological perspective. It emphasizes the limitations of human perception and understanding when it comes to the divine. Since our senses cannot directly experience God, our knowledge about God remains uncertain and potentially speculative. The idea that what we think we know—such as God’s omniscience, goodness, or justice—is perhaps based on wishful thinking or limited interpretation aligns with certain skeptical or agnostic viewpoints.
Furthermore, suggesting that even the natural world, which we observe and interpret, may not necessarily be the product of divine creation invites a more agnostic or even atheistic stance. It questions the certainty of any knowledge about God, emphasizing humility in our claims and recognizing the boundaries of human cognition regarding the divine.
From a theological standpoint, dear Rabbi Israel Drazin, your reflections underscore the mystery of God’s nature and the limitations inherent in human cognition. They invite humility in faith, recognizing that divine truths may be ultimately beyond full human comprehension, and emphasize that our knowledge of God is mediated through divine revelation, faith, and spiritual insight rather than sensory perception alone. Best, stephen
You understood what I wrote.
“The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing.” I think that’s silly because we know some things.
My point is that we only think we now certain things, but much of what we think we know is just wishful thinking.
is our educated thinking merely guessing?>
Yes
is our educated thinking merely guessing?>
The problem with the quote where Socrates says that he knows nothing is that Socrates clearly knows quite a bit. I think Socrates was a Sophist.
Yes, Socrates was very smart and knew a lot, but he also knew he did not know everything about every subject. There was always something about what he was looking at or thinking about that he could not know. It is the same with us.