Jason Lisle on Sensory Experience and Epistemology

Nearly a decade ago now on this blog I interacted with writings by one Dr. Jason Lisle, a Christian astrophysicist who operates the Biblical Science Institute which, according to its own about page, is a “creation-themed science ministry” which “exists to help you rationally defend the Christian worldview against those who claim that the Bible is unscientific.” Now who could possibly make such a claim as that? Lisle is a proponent of presuppositionalism, and my past interactions with can be found here, here, here and here.

I recently came upon a blog entry by Lisle in which he makes some comments about sensory experience, a topic I explored in my previous entry. My 2014 posts which I linked to above themselves contain links to Lisle’s old blog; those links seem not to work any more – my machine gives me warnings when I click on them, so I’d suggest not trying to visit them. Lisle seems to have moved his blog to his “institute” website. The present entry I found is here: How do I Know that I Know? – a Response (Part 1).

It’s always curious to me that apologists can seemingly devote much attention to epistemological questions beginning with “how” and yet never identify any replicable steps that they took to achieve the knowledge they claim to have about divine matters. I always get the impression that if their steps were in fact articulated, we might get something like the following:

1. My parents told me to believe over and over again 

2. Other family members also told me to believe over and over again 

3. People at church made me fear not believing over and over again 

4. I read stories which depicted fantastical things over and over again 

5. I imagined the things those stories depicted over and over again 

6. I acquired the habit of ignoring the fundamental distinction between what is real and what I imagine 

7. I expect you to do the same, or I’ll ridicule you over and over again

But Lisle does not treat the matter with such candor. Instead, he recaps some points of disagreement he had in an exchange he had years ago with a Dr. Richard Howe – “a biblical creationist” who “argues against presuppositional apologetics in favor of classical apologetics.” They disagree on the role of sensory experience in the foundations of knowledge.

Lisle states that he “maintain[s] that all knowledge ultimately stems from God and that human beings can only have knowledge by revelation from God. This is not to deny proximate means such as sensory experience – that’s one of the ways God has revealed information to us.” So if one claims that he has received a revelation that he needs to drown his children in a bathtub (cf. Andrea Yates), it’s difficult to see how Lisle could contest such a claim as knowledge given that it is said to have come by means of revelation. If biblicists object to such claims qualifying as revealed knowledge, the onus is on them to spell out the tests for legitimate revelation. Presumably those tests could not be based in knowledge reducible to sensory evidence since sensory experience is only “one of the ways God has revealed information to us.” I also wonder how one could reliably distinguish between said “revelation” and one’s own preferences, hopes, desires, predilections, inclinations, presumptions, etc. Typically believers do not elaborate on such concerns.

Lisle claims that “we can only have confidence in such proximate [as sensory experience] means if the universe is actually the way the Bible says it is.”

So here we must ask: What does “the Bible” say about the way that the universe actually is? To explore this, I performed a search of the keyword ‘universe’ at Bible Gateway. In the NIV version, there were four results: I Corinthians 4:9, Ephesians 4:10, Hebrews 1:2 and Hebrews 11:3. The first two of these are not helpful in addressing this question, but the second two provide us with a little more substance on what the biblical view of the universe might be. Hebrews 1:2 states that the Christian god “made the universe,” apparently having made it “through” “his Son.” It’s unclear what it means to say that a being “made the universe… through… his Son” – perhaps it’s like outsourcing labor to a contractor, but the important take-away here is that, according to what Christianity teaches, the universe – that is, everything that exists – is the product of some act of agency. (Presumably the agent itself thought to be responsible for making the universe is excluded from the totality produced by its act, since Christians typically hold that their god is itself not created while insisting that everything else needed to have been created, perhaps because things can’t just create themselves.) No indication of how this was achieved – the passage in question does not describe the act which could produce galaxies, stars, planets, dirt, dust, gases, minerals, atoms, etc. But we’re assured nevertheless that this is what happened.

Hebrews 11:3 sheds a little more light. It states:

By faith we understand that the universe was formed at God’s command, so that what is seen is not made out of what was visible.

Again what’s in mind here is that the universe is the product of some prior act by an agent and presumably this act was executed at some point in the distant past, an action that no human being could have witnessed, but one which we “understand” happened “by faith.” This last part is critical: it does not state that we can understand any of this by means of reason, or discover this by means of objective investigation, or by scientific research on items we find in the universe. As I’ve pointed out before, I can pick up a pebble from my backyard and put it under a microscope, looking at all its surface features, or subject it to all kinds of tests to determine its chemical make-up, but I’m quite confident that nothing I find by such means will at all suggest to me that it was brought into existence by a supernatural agent. But “by faith” we apparently can “understand” that it was.

The verse also states that “the universe was formed at God’s command.” So this supernatural agent, which we can not perceive by any objective means, apparently made some kind of pronouncement, which no human being ever heard, and that resulted in all this matter popping into existence. This is what must be meant by “formed at God’s command.” If this is not an example of wishing makes it so, what would be?

So accordingly, the Christian view of the way the universe actually is, is that the universe is a product of wishing – and throughout Christianity’s many tales we learn that the things within the universe conform readily and immediately to wishing, such as when Jesus wishes water into wine or the Christian god wishes to resurrect its son – and we “understand” this by means other than by reason. It is hard, I must admit, to distinguish “faith” as it is used in passages like this, from a devotional commitment to something one must be imagining. For I concede that while I do not observe reality being conjured into being by means of wishing or objects conforming to wishes, I can imagine such things happening, and yet I am careful not to ignore the fact that I am merely imagining.

Going back to what Jason Lisle states, he’s essentially saying that “we can only have confidence” in sensory experience if the universe is a product of wishing and that the things within it conform to wishing. And yet, nothing we find when we observe any actual thing in the universe suggests any of this. The metaphysics which Lisle promotes as necessary for confidence in sensory experience is completely at odds with what we discover in the universe by means of sensory experience. The inconsistency here is fundamental. Quite the contrary: the senses could only be reliable if the universe is not what the Christian religion implies it to be. Were the universe subject to the dictatorship of anyone’s wishing, no constants would obtain to support the reliability of any stable epistemological basis.

The problem is even worse for Lisle. If the task of the senses is to provide awareness of objects, then any instance of the sensory awareness of objects serves as evidence supporting their reliability. For the task of the senses is to give us awareness of objects. What is critical to note here, contrary to Lisle’s appeals to religious beliefs, is that the senses are in this way reliable regardless of what one believes about anything – whether it’s about the bible, the circumference of the earth, the floor count of the world’s tallest building, the time it takes to boil an egg at sea level, your boss’s salary, etc. One’s beliefs are irrelevant to the validity of the senses, for the function of the senses in no way depends on the content of one’s beliefs. We have sensory awareness of objects well before we’ve developed any beliefs. So not only does the reliability of the senses obtain in spite of Christianity’s teachings, its teachings can only undermine confidence in the senses because nothing we sense supports the cartoon universe assumed in Christian teachings and Christianity insists that we believe them in spite of their insubstantiability.

Contrary to his own position, Lisle is critical of the position held by Richard Howe. Howe holds that “sensory experience is the beginning of knowledge which is completed in the mind.” Now both Jason Lisle and Richard Howe have extensive educational backgrounds, each holding Ph.D’s in their respective fields – Lisle in astrophysics and Howe in philosophy. And yet, they have diametrically opposed views on a most fundamental aspect of epistemology: does knowledge begin with sensory experience, or with something else? How can two highly educated adherents of the same worldview hold such fundamentally incompatible views? If this dispute were settled by revelation, either Howe simply hasn’t received it, or Lisle is mistaken in claiming he has received it.

Reacting to Howe’s position, Lisle states:

One of the problems I see with Howe’s philosophy is that it is ultimately unjustified. That is, if all knowledge begins with sensory experience, then how do we know that sensory experience is basically reliable (true to reality)? This cannot be proved by sensory experience since this is the very issue in question. And if it is proved by some other standard, then sensory experience is not truly the foundational beginning of knowledge.

Here Lisle ignores the fact that the senses are self-attesting. One would not need to prove that what he sees is real, for one cannot see something that is not real to begin with; only real things reflect light which stimulates actual seeing. Moreover, if I see an object and then put out my hand and touch it, my hand touching what I see only reinforces my sight. Our senses are remarkably consistent, so much so that we take this consistency completely for granted – since in effect it is granted – it is part of what Ayn Rand called “the metaphysically given”, which she contrasted with “the man-made”:

Any natural phenomenon, i.e., any event which occurs without human participation, is the metaphysically given, and could not have occurred differently or failed to occur; any phenomenon involving human action is the man-made, and could have been different. For example, a flood occurring in an uninhabited land, is the metaphysically given; a dam built to contain the flood water, is the man-made; if the builders miscalculate and the dam breaks, the disaster is metaphysical in its origin, but intensified by man in its consequences. To correct the situation, men must obey nature by studying the causes and potentialities of the flood, then command nature by building better flood controls. (Philosophy: Who Needs It, p. 27)

Our senses are biological structures that are a natural part of our existence as living organisms. We have senses, not because we devised them and gave them to ourselves (so they’re not man-made), but because our genetic profile ensures that we develop them naturally along with other aspects of our biological make-up, such as bones, muscles, skin, teeth, digestive organs, lungs, circulatory vessels, legs, arms, fingers, toes, etc. So I see nothing wrong with taking the self-attesting consistency of the senses for granted. We really have no choice but to do precisely this!

Lisle’s entire gambit here constitutes a rejection of the axiom of consciousness. We do not need to justify our consciousness. The validity of consciousness is axiomatic. The call to justify or validate consciousness would be a call to use what’s supposedly in doubt to justify what’s supposedly in doubt. And yet a challenge to justify anything is something one would need to understand before he could contemplate how to answer it. Consciousness must be real in order for any understanding to be possible. So the call to justify consciousness itself presumes the validity of what it calls to justify. Thus it performatively contradicts itself. This is a classic example of a stolen concept fallacy.

I recall an instructive exchange I had with one apologist many years ago. He recited some statements of Van Til. I pointed out that just by making those statements, regardless of their actual truth value, Van Til was assuming the validity of his own consciousness. So I asked: How does Van Til validate his own consciousness without using his consciousness to validate it? The response was something to the effect of: “such circularity is unavoidable.” But in fact such circularity is avoidable entirely, if you have an objective starting point. Christianity does not have an objective starting point, so the self-defeating loop-pickle of the believer assuming the validity of something for himself that he simultaneously denies others is what is unavoidable, given the fact that what the Christian takes as his “ultimate presupposition” has no objective basis. What the Christian claims as his “ultimate presupposition” is not perceptually self-evident, so he cannot identify the means by which he supposedly has awareness of what he calls his “ultimate presupposition.” Hence he appeals to “revelations,” something one could have awareness of only by looking inward into the contents of one’s own imagination, for he has already discounted looking outward as the means of awareness of what is truly fundamental. And no matter what he does, no amount of looking outward will give anyone awareness of something that is only imaginary. My guess is that Richard Howe is just not as consistent with the fantasy-worship of Christianity as Lisle is.

Lisle continues:

To expose this inconsistency, I asked the question, “How does he know [on his professed system] that he’s not in the ‘Matrix’ and that his sensory experiences have nothing to do with the real world?” The movie reference is to a hypothetical world in which the vast majority of humans are actually contained in pods with an electrical interface to their brains producing an artificial simulated environment which the people believe to be reality.

So here Lisle insists that his opponent shoulders a burden to prove a negative, indeed a wholly arbitrary, fictitious negative at that. We might as well ask: “How do you know you’re not a fish swimming in a methane ocean on one of Neptune’s moons?” There is no such burden. Indeed, the whole ‘Matrix’ artifice doubles over on itself: “pods”? “electrical interfaces”? “simulated environments”? We are supposed to take these seriously, even though there’s no evidence that we are brains subjected to such conspiracies, and yet we cannot take the evidence of our senses seriously? It’s just more stolen concepts in service of defending the absurd. Lisle thinks he can “answer” his own subterfuge as follows:

The presuppositionalist can answer this by pointing to the biblical worldview in which God has designed our senses to inform us of the external world, and God is a God of truth, not of deception. But on Howe’s system, he must arbitrarily presuppose that his senses are basically reliable, an assumption that can never be justified on his system.

Here Lisle demonstrates his own lack of self-awareness by appealing to “the biblical worldview” while ignoring the fact that his own opponent, himself a professing Christian and thus adherent of “the biblical worldview,” disagrees fundamentally with Lisle’s own basic epistemological premises, namely on the role of the senses as the starting point of knowledge. Anyone who suspects that Lisle has been deluded, either by other human beings claiming to speak on behalf of a supernatural being or by supernatural beings proper, would not be very impressed by his claim that his “God is a God of truth, not of deception.” What Christian would deny his god’s ability to send a “deceiving spirit” (cf. I Kings 22:22-23) into the minds of any human being, including Dr. Jason Lisle? And what would prevent an evil spirit, a demon or emissary of Satan himself, from taking up residence in Lisle’s mind and deluding him on various matters, such as the role of the senses in epistemology?

Again, if the senses give us awareness of objects – and they do – then their validity is incontestable, for they are performing the very function that we expect of them, given their task, just as when our stomach and intestines digest the food we eat, we know that our digestive track is thereby valid. Recognizing this is not an “arbitrary presupposition,” but rather a sober recognition of a basic physiological process which makes the discovery of physiological processes and any other factual state of affairs possible. Lisle’s calls for justification are just more examples of the fallacy of the stolen concept.

I’m glad these aren’t my problems!

by Dawson Bethrick