I started by reading a book by James Smith on Derrida. Now, I am finding he is a type of critical realist. He calls it perspectivism. I thought he was wrong about Carson, as Carson explains in his new book. But, anyway, Smith is amazing. What a new perspective on Postivism. Postivism's epistemology was not only wrong, but idolatrous. What does that say about much of our systematics which has used the same epistemology? Following is Smith on perspectivism and Romans 1.
Now, I want to make the claim that a Christian understanding of what it means to
“know” the world—even as an object of scientific study—entails something like
the perspectivalism I just described. Let me begin with St. Paul: according to
Romans 1, there is a deep sense in which the structure of the world (“the-way-
things-are”) is nevertheless not perceived as such. Recall that Paul does claim
that “since the creation of the world [God’s] invisible attributes are clearly seen,
being understood by [or through] the things that are made” (Romans 1:20). So
the world has a structure about it which points to its Creator, and there is even a
sense in which this referential structure is “clearly seen.” However, Paul goes on
to emphasize that this structure—though it continues9 to inhere in “the-way-the-
world-is,” is nevertheless not perceived by all who “see” it. Because their “foolish
hearts were darkened” (1:21) their “world”—their construction of the “world,” we
might say—does not conform to “the-way-the-world-is.”
Now, this would seem to prove Plantinga’s point: only darkened foolish
hearts “construct” the world! But on a closer look I don’t think that’s the case.
The fact that we perceive the world through the lens of our particular
commitments—or within “horizons” of perception—is not a result of the Fall, but
rather constitutive for finitude.10 See the world “the-way-it-is” is not a matter of
escaping such horizonality or structures of perception; rather, what is required
for us to “see” the structure of the world for what it is (a structure which refers to
the Creator), it is necessary that our perception be redeemed. Enter Augustine.
In De vera religione, Augustine emphasizes that our perception of the
world is distorted because the “eye of the mind” is diseased and must be healed;
and for Augustine, this is a moral matter (we can’t separate his epistemology
from his ethics). Thus Augustine offers us what we would not call, following
Zagzebski, “virtues of the mind”: “the mind has to be healed,” he concludes, “so
that it may behold the immutable form of things which remains ever the same”
(De vera religione iii.3). Redemption or healing is the redemption of our
(conditioned) perception, not a redemption from perception.
[This same point—in the line of Augustine—is emphasized by Abraham
Kuyper in his lecture on “Calvinism and Science.” First, in contrast to an
idolatrous “empiricism,” Kuyper remarks that “[e]ven the minutest microscopic,
the farthest reaching telescopic investigation is nothing but perception with
strengthened eyes.”11 This enters into “science” when these perceptions are
organized into an account of the world (in other words, when we try to explain
them and their interconnection with other phenomena). And for Kuyper, such an
account or explanation of the world is rooted in a religious commitment
regarding fundamental characteristics of the “world” being described. Kuyper
thus concludes: “Notice that I do not speak of a conflict between faith and
science.12 Such a conflict does not exist. Every science in a certain degree starts
from faith.”13 Kuyper goes on to link these fundamental faith commitments to
what we would likely describe as “paradigms” today.]
