What is True Knowledge?
The limitations of philosophy.
Socrates began his inquiries into truth by assuming he knew nothing, then questioning those who claimed to know something and picking apart their claimed knowledge by applying ruthlessly forensic logic to their truth claims. This almost childish technique of questioning accepted knowledge, of course – like a child answering every answer with the question 'why?' – ended up irritating everybody who was anybody in Athens so much that the authorities sentenced Socrates to drink hemlock, a sentence he obeyed with the same alacrity as many modern Christians obeyed the government order to take the Covid mRNA vaccines.
He could have fled – for his friends had organised an escape into exile for him – but Socrates chose to stay and drink the poison, committing suicide because he believed society was divinely ordered and it would collapse if people disobeyed; he felt he had a duty to obey even an irrational government command, for the good of society.
St Augustine, the famous North African saint, had a different view, for he said "an unjust law is no law at all" (De libero arbitrio voluntatis, b. 1, s. 5., 1.5.11.33). Martin Luther King, who himself was a very well educated man and a great preacher, stated this position more forcefully in his letter from a Birmingham jail, "One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws."1
It is only through the works of Plato, of course, that we know anything about Socrates. Just as Samuel Johnson the enlightenment poet and philosopher had his friend Boswell to follow him around and write down everything he did, Socrates had Plato. I suspect the apostle Matthew may have fulfilled the same function for Jesus, actually, as the first century bishop Papias of Hierapolis claimed (Eusebius Hist. Eccl., III, xxxix, 16).
An atmosphere of youthful freshness pervades Plato's works, an air of freedom and joyous liberty, for Plato was writing in the morning of the West. Today there are many assumptions and prior truth claims that must be fielded or accepted in any modern philosophical or theological thought; we think of our civilisation as young and new, but it is not. No, intellectually speaking, the Western World has become like a bitter old man, nursing the grudges and slights of a whole lifetime of arguments and contentious disputes, a bitter old man, who has lost the faith he once had, for he argued himself out of it.
We might call Socrates's starting point for philosophy the assumption of ignorance.
The enlightenment philosopher Descartes also began with the assumption of ignorance; but his assumption was far more radical, existential and complete: Descartes assumed he didn't even know how he knew that he existed. This attempt to divorce himself from all external influences actually bordered on madness, I believe; and I think Gödel's theorem shows that the mathematical certainty Descartes preached as a substitute for incomplete knowledge is not certainty at all, but every supposedly complete system of argument or thought has the innate flaw that it is not constructed from a position of omniscience, and can therefore not rule out the inherent paradox.
Even Socrates, despite all the beautiful arguments and splendid reasoning in his dialogues, assumed that argument could actually establish truth.
But here's the thing: there are ways of knowing things that people can't always explain rationally.
For instance, as a young teacher I was once told not to write in reports, "this student puts a lot of effort into the subject," because, "how do you know they put effort in?"
The truth is, that one can see if a student is putting effort into their work. It is hard to say exactly how a teacher can know this, but it is to do with things like body language, how distracted they are, whether they focus on the work or look around all the time to see what's going on outside, whether they are looking at the clock longingly to see how close they are to the ending of the class, whether I have to speak to them to remind them to work on the task and not on something else, whether they show interest or are continually asking questions about things unrelated to the subject. If they are putting effort in, they concentrate, they work hard, they achieve a certain level of progress.
I am sure that if Socrates was to question me about how I could possibly have known back then that a student puts effort in, I could not have put that knowledge into words; today, I have thought it about it and I know that there is a way to tell, but even so, it is not easy to say how it works, for I look at a plethora of evidence and that leads me to an intuitive conclusion.
But at the end of the day, it's about knowing the student personally.
Christians believe in a God who is relational in eternity, in His very being, as Father, Son and Holy Spirit. How do we know the important things? How does a wife know her husband loves her? How do children know their parents love them?
How do we know God loves us? Only through a relationship with God the Father, through Jesus Christ, by the Holy Spirit.
The dreadful canker of doubt that Postmodern thought has brought to our own ability to think even about our own relationships has entered into every area of life today, to the point where all things are doubted, even our very capacity to know ourselves, and every human being in society who lives in the dark vacuum of doubt is vulnerable to the influence of agitprop, indoctrination, propaganda and manipulation. All of these have been applied to Western societies in the past two years in a highly scientific manner.
This pervasive disease of doubt cannot be cured by rationality or a return to an idealised rational past in Christendom, for wherever people are trying to do that we see bigotry and hatred return, such as the anti-semitism of Gab's Andrew Torba. Even so, there were many things Christians in the West agreed about, foundational assumptions that they were not even aware of, even when they were slaughtering one another in the many wars in Europe and the British Isles between Protestants and Catholics. But that didn't help them then and it won't help us now.
An intriguing article I found on the internet points out that the eye in the ancient world was the indicator of character, and that a good eye was the primary indicator of a good character. An interesting article A Contextualised Reading Of Matthew 6:22–23: ‘Your Eye Is The Lamp Of Your Body’ quotes Cicero:
Nature has so formed his human features as to portray therein the character that lies hidden deep within him; for not only do the eyes declare with exceeding clarity the innermost feelings of our hearts, but also the countenance, as we Romans call it, which can be found in no other living being, save man, reveals the character. (De Legibus 1.9.26)
It is the light of life we need so desperately: the life of Christ, the light that enlightens every human being (John 1:4).
We live in a society where the inability to see clearly and rationally is endemic.
But the only way to see clearly, is to have a good character, a good eye.
The eye is the lamp of the body. If your eyes are good, your whole body will be full of light. But if your eyes are bad, your whole body will be full of darkness. If then the light within you is darkness, how great is that darkness! (Mt 6:22–23)
But how do you get a good eye? Contrary to Rousseau and Voltaire, we are not born with a good eye. Repentance, seeking the Lord, living at peace with everybody insofar as it depends on you; in other words, know God the Father through the Word, our Lord Jesus Christ, the One Whom we can know through the scriptures we have received.
It may seem strange that we can come to know the living God through a book, the Bible, and how this happens is not something that is necessarily explainable, any more than it can be explained how we come to know a person. One could hardly explain this to a philosopher; for while living out in our lives the instructions we find in the scripture is part of it (James 1:23) it is not the whole. Trust is the more important virtue - trust in a loving Father. For the world is far more wonderful and greater than the strict scalpel of the philosopher can reveal; for rationality as often as not kills what it touches, whereas it is Relationship that brings the whole universe into being.
The scriptures give us the example of the Hebrew midwives, Shiphrah and Puah, Exodus 1:1-21, see my substack On the duty to lie . And concerning vaccines, the negative example of King Asa, who “did not seek the Lord, but sought help from physicians”, 2 Chronicles 14:12
As you state, when people are surrounded by doubt on their every side, they have no hope and they’re open to manipulation. The most horrible and frightening aspect of their vulnerability is the open door to demonic influence. We see the result all around us.