No Context, No Knowledge

At a recent dialogue I again encountered a phenomena that one sees frequently in Christian circles. At issue was what Jews and Christians understand by the idea of God as Father. I was talking about Christianity and a well known Orthodox Rabbi was talking about Judaism. 

When time came for Q&A a person in the audience proceeded to read a text from the Christian Old Testament, the part the Jews call the Torah, and then told the Rabbi that because the text says that the children of Israel were afraid (the scene is at Sinai) then Jews must be afraid of God. 

No amount of persuasion could convince this person that Jews interpret the text differently, that the Talmud and not merely the Torah is a critical part of a Jewish consciousness, and that the rabbi wasn’t just being obstinate. If the rabbi's understanding of Judaism was different from what the scripture clearly said about Judaism then the rabbi must be wrong. God said it, I believe it, that settles it.

You’ll see what was going on here. The person questioning the rabbi believed that the information in the Bible is context-free. It could be derived simply by reading the words without asking about the history of Jewish interpretation and without recognizing the influence of Christian interpretation. (She was clearly unaware that she was reading through the lens of the Book of Hebrews) 

The idea that knowledge is context-free took on overwhelming cultural force in the Enlightenment. During the Enlightenment and the years that followed subjective human experience, as found in the old Ptolemaic universe, was replaced by objectivity. Through science and the language of mathematics humans step out of the center of the universe so they can observe it whole. They can, and I quote Stephen Hawking's introduction to A Brief History of Time know the mind of God. Because they have taken God's perspective on the universe.

What makes this idea sustainable in the face of our obviously limited powers of observation is the assumption that the laws that govern all the things we can’t see are identical to those we can see. Only this allows us to speak about the universe and not that limited perspective that Hawking (I believe) calls our "light cone;" the bounded area of space time accessible to us to observe. The assumption that there is a single structure and law makes the universe a uni-verse, a single thing about which we can meaningfully speak. Whether the observers' context is Earth or some planet circling Alpha Centuri the necessary assumption of modern science is that they will see the same thing. 

What the questioner of our rabbi, who claimed a PhD from Liberty University, was doing was applying this assumption to the Bible. The words of the Bible, if true, should mean the same thing at Sinai, in 1st century Palestine, in medieval Spain, and in a contemporary UMC chapel. Because truth must be context-free to be truth in an enlightenment epistemology.

Needless to say there are a some problems here. First, and lets be bold, the Enlightenment project of creating objective scientific knowledge turns out to have serious limits. All contemporary cosmological theories acknowledge not merely the possibility but the probability of multiple unobservable universes with differing structures and laws. The laws that govern our universe are in fact subjective in the sense that only we (as far as we know) are subject to them. It turns out the Ptolemy was kind of right. We are the center of our universe.

This doesn’t mean that the law of gravity is subjective, or that the results of scientific research are really just cultural framings of reality. But it does mean that gravity affects you more or less depending on where you are located in space-time and that human comprehension of the meaning of climate change will be shaped by culture. 

More importantly all efforts to gain and exchange knowledge about reality are caught up in the fundamental human enterprise of meaning-making and meaning-sharing. Science never was and never has been about simply exchanging information necessary to develop ever more sophisticated models of the universe. Scientists aren’t computers connected by high speed digital data busses. They are people. 

You can see this by the vast amount of energy scientists pour into writing popular books describing their work to lay audiences that cannot possibly grasp the information scientists go to such efforts to gather, or offer any useful information in return. Sagan, Weinberg, Hawking, DeGrasse Tyson, Frank, and hundreds of others have turned from their calculations to try and explain what they mean. I know, I have all those books. And in the end they wax philosophical rather than cosmological

And this observation about meaning-making and meaning-sharing is true of the Bible as a book. Because like all books it is intended to convey meanings and not merely information. Because human language is never simply an objective report of the truth in clear terms. Human language is always about the meaning of what is being reported for an intended audience. We don’t deploy language to merely share information. We deploy language to share meaning.

And that meaning is always determined by the context of the communicative act. If you don't know it, or you ignore it, you don't know what the Bible means - even if you have a PhD.