Faith and Knowledge

Alfred Tang

February 20, 2001 ©

Presented at the Christian Faculty-Staff Network at UWM

 

Introduction

 

            This paper is intended for Christian faculty to think about the issues of integration of faith and normal academic disciplines on a secular campus.  The separation of the church and state keeps us accountable for not mixing religion and academic politics.  It is a blessing in disguise because it forces us to critically think about the real intellectual issues per se and to hold us to a higher standard of professional competency.  In this paper, I wish to suggest some attitudes and actions that fit the unusual challenge of integrating faith and knowledge on a secular campus.

 

Faith based Knowledge

 

            Despite the caliber of their intelligence, most serious thinkers will sooner later experience despair or the end of reason.  This sentiment is expressed formally in Gödel Incompleteness Theorem.[1]  Michael Dummett summarizes its basic thesis,

By Gödel’s Theorem there exists, for any intuitively correct formal system for elementary arithmetic, a statement U expressible in the system but not provable in it, which not only is true but can be recognised by us to be true.[2]

Gödel Theorem can be extended to argue for the non-existence of rigid designator and is a formal expression of a source of intellectual crisis.[3]  Søren Kierkegaard proposed a leap of faith as a cure for despair.  Physicist Niels Bohrs succinctly expressed the essence of the existentialist attitude,

L [There are] two sorts of truth: trivialities, where opposites are obviously absurd, and profound truths, recognized by the fact that the opposite is also a profound truth.[4]

These statements suggest that analytic logic and formal system alone are inadequate to penetrate the deepest mysteries of reality.  Faith, taken as that dimension which transcends reason, is the foundation of knowledge.  As Solomon wrote, “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge” (Pr 1:7a).

 

Strange Loop Model

 

            John Oliver, professor of music at MIT and Yale, once said that a genius learns from himself. Many thinking people are intuitively aware of the reality and complexity of self-relationality.  According to the doctrine of Perichoresis, the Persons of the Trinity mutual penetrate each other.  Michael Polanyi used the Möbius strip to model the integrality of tacit (informal) knowledge and explicit (formal) knowledge in the mind.  Douglas Hofstadter refers to this kind of Möbius-strip-type self relationality as the strange loop.  James E. Loder and W. Jim Neidhardt formalize knowledge and relationality in the strange loop model.[5]

 

Against Time

 

            There are many processes in the economy of research universities that compete for our attention.  For one, faculty members are often required to align their researches with funding policies.  (As an example, one is never funded for research on the integration of faith and science.)  For two, the demand of time makes spiritual reflection on our work nearly impossible.  The former presidential science advisor George A. Keyworth, II comments on the time pressure in modern research,

In this new digital age we live in, it is no longer the ability to work that matters but, rather, how fast you do it.[6]

There is little time to reflect on the meaning and value of our work nowadays in research universities when the push is toward R&D.   The pressure of time is sometimes counter-productive.  Howard Gardner’s psychometric approach to analyze creative geniuses suggests that time is an essence to prospect periods of flow.[7]  In other words, we must react to the pressure of time by a disciplined effort to protect a reflexive prayer life.

 

Christian Worldview

 

            According to Ronald Nash, “a world-view is a conceptual scheme by which we consciously or unconsciously place or fit everything we believe and by which we interpret and judge reality.”[8]  The components of a Christian worldview are theology, metaphysics, epistemology, ethics and anthropology.  Our worldview influences our teaching and research and is a priority of our Christian duty.  For this reason, it is imperative that Christian faculty are educated in theology and philosophy in addition to their professional expertise in respective fields of specialty.

 

Conclusion

 

            Faith and knowledge are complimentary parts of a holistic understanding of God and His creation.