Considering Christianity: How Do We Know What We Know? Critical Realism as a Christian Epistemology

This is a preview of a course I'm creating. It's about how to believe in a Secular Age (Charles Taylor's term).

In this video, I discuss why kids believe in Santa and why those same kids stop believing in Santa. It all comes down to sources of authority. We believe claims when we think there are adequate grounds for believing them. When we don't think there are adequate grounds for believing certain claims, we stop believing.

In contrast to an Eastern conception of reality, which postulates life as an illusion, Christianity puts forward the idea of realism: the belief that we experience reality as it is. However, our confidence must be tempered by two factors: finitude and fallenness. These factors cause us to be critical of our sense of realism. This is known as Critical Realism.

So, how do we know what we know? In the end, it comes down to the sources of authority that we trust. When people disagree about a matter, it's usually because they're assigning different weights and degrees of trust to different sources of authority.


This course is based on the book, Considering Christianity by Trevor Hamaker. Get your copy on Amazon: https://amzn.to/2UeIkEn

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