4: Elusive Certainty, Certain Faith

If I were to sum up chapter four of Daniel Taylor’s book, The Myth of Certainty I would say this: the only thing we can know with absolute certainty is that there is nothing absolutely certain.

Taylor proposes that a core desire in human beings is a search for truth. This search, he writes, travels two well-worn roads: faith and reason. I would have thought that he’d had enough to say about reason and its limitations in the previous chapters but he returns to the subject here with a great deal more illumination.

Early on, Taylor describes two different forms of Christian apologetic that compete for our attention. One, he writes, rejects reason altogether, consigning it to things of the fallen human or worse, Satan. The other elevates it perhaps seeking to use the favored tool of secularism against it. Taylor suggests that a fundamental problem with both apologetics is that they fail to recognize reason as only one of many processes that shape what we believe. Still reason should not be rejected as a tool for knowing and probably cannot be because to do so would require reason (we would have to submit reasons for rejecting reason).

But it is understandable why both subcultures identified by Taylor, Christian faithful and secular intellectual, would want to elevate reason to a place of dominance. It truly has served us well in the past few centuries. With the application of scientific method, a particular kind of reasoning, human beings have accomplished some truly amazing things. Yet these accomplishments have given us an unrealistic and overly optimistic understanding of reason as a tool. Taylor wryly notes the phrase, “If we can land a man on the moon we ought to be able to…” The blank is filled in with any number of intractable human challenges. The problem is that all of these challenges, war, poverty, bigotry, materialism and many more are rooted in the flaws of human nature, flaws that reason is ill-equipped to eliminate if it can address them at all.

In the most crucial of all human activities reason does not serve us well. It cannot help us understand why we love or fail to love, why we consider some things beautiful and other things ugly, why some things are good and valuable and other things are worthless. No “reasonable” person would consider reason an effective tool to use in a relationship and this is all the more true of a relationship with the divine.

But Taylor is at his best when he moves to contrast the pursuit of truth with the pursuit of certainty. When we seek an unquestionable foundation upon which to build Christianity we set people up for failure in false dichotomies like “either you believe this or you’re not that.” Taylor pities the poor reflective Christian who seems weak compared with the false prophet who offers a path to absolute certainty.

However, knowing absolutes is something impossible for human beings because by definition absolutes “partake of infinity.” As finite beings we can only have a finite understanding of things, particularly infinite things. Moreover, Taylor writes, our knowledge of the infinite is not only limited it is distorted. It is ironic that, while some Christian apologetics are based on premises of absolutes, Christian orthodoxy holds that our very ability to perceive all that exists around us (divine and created alike) is flawed by our fallen nature. The notion of absolutes is a human attempt to explain God to ourselves, not a divine revelation.

Yet the reflective Christian should take comfort in doubt, Taylor tells us, because doubt is what gives faith its being. He concludes with a hopeful thought: while certainty is beyond our reach, meaning, something far more valuable, is not.