Is Revelation A Source Of Knowledge?

This is not about the Book of Revelation, though as I typed it I realised it sounded like I was about to do some exegesis on the last book of the Bible. No, it means revelation in the sense of an experience of divine origin. The other thing is, this is something which I’ve been trying to sort out in my own mind for about fifteen years.

This may actually be quite a short post as it merely aims to pose a question, not to answer it.

I’ll start with a popular analytic definition of knowledge as justified true belief. A re-statement of this is that knowledge is belief which cannot rationally be doubted. There seem to be two sources of knowledge at this standard. One is direct experience. That is, although one might be dreaming, one cannot deny that one is currently experiencing a particular sensory quality when it’s happening. These are known as qualia: qualities or properties as experienced or perceived by a person. The singular is “quale”. Although the ringing in one’s ears may not reflect an actual sound and the odour of burning may be the result of an imminent stroke, the fact remains that one does have the relevant experience. This is not in doubt and cannot in fact be doubted rationally.

The other source of knowledge is logic and mathematics, or at least it seems to be. For instance, 2+3=5. This can be known. It can also be known that if it’s raining then it’s raining. One might also go on to claim that two parallel lines never meet by definition, but this is where a possible flaw in this source of certainty emerges, because it famously turned out that this was not so. Euclid’s Fifth Postulate, which attempts to establish this fact through logic, is oddly wordy and unwieldy, and this is because it turned out that the parallel line claim was not axiomatic but based on observation, and it further turned out that in actual physical space, parallel lines don’t always stay the same width apart and do in fact tend to meet at an enormous distance. Likewise, logic’s reliance on bivalent truth values may be a similar flaw as these may not be enough. There might be meaninglessness, for example, or tense-based truth: something might be true now but false in the future. All that said, logic and mathematics seem to be a good basis for certainty independent of experience: multivalent logic exists and so does non-Euclidean geometry. Incidentally, it’s worth noting that the number of things which can be known from this source alone is infinite, so it isn’t true that a fairly extreme form of scepticism leaves one with knowledge of almost nothing.

Suppose, though, that you believe in an omnipotent source of reliable knowledge such as God. It doesn’t have to be God but I am of course theist myself. If you’re not, this will probably sound highly arcane and theoretical to you but you could look at this more as a thought experiment or perhaps something that can be applied to another force acting on consciousness and it may mean that it’s logically possible that what I’m about to suggest can happen. Anyway, here it comes:

If an omnipotent and omniscient entity exists, that entity would be able to create knowledge in the human mind. Henceforth I’m going to call that entity, theoretical or otherwise, God. Putting it simply, God can do anything, so God can make people know things. That means that God can remove doubt when something is true, and if there is a God, revelation can be a source of knowledge.

However, there’s a caveat here. God doesn’t do everything God can do. When I was a child, I saw a graffito on a fence post saying “I hate you”, and for some reason interpreted it as God’s message to me. Don’t ask me why. I rushed home rather distressed and came into the kitchen, where my mother was listening to a song on cassette called ‘Our God Reigns’. In my perturbed state I heard this as “Our God hates”. I asked her if God hated me and she laughed, replying, “No! God is incapable of hate!”. This didn’t reassure me much because I was aware that the concept of God included omnipotence, meaning that if God so chose, God could indeed hate. This is the prototype of a belief about God I have today that God is capable of anything, but doesn’t invariably act on that capacity. Hence God can hate but doesn’t, or at least God chooses not to hate humans. Applying this to the matter at hand, that would mean that God might be able to force us to know things but does not choose to do so. Hence we are left with confident belief at most rather than actual knowledge in the sense that God provides us with anything it’s rationally impossible to doubt.

To me, it seems quite invasive and controlling for God to cause this to happen in one’s consciousness. It seems to violate the principle of free will. However, it could be that God would respond to one giving consent to bring this about in some way. “God I believe: help my unbelief.” Would it happen then? Prayers are not always answered the way one might expect. It’s undoubtedly also true that omnipotence means God could create a feeling of complete confidence in something which isn’t so, which is not knowledge.

I think that’s the issue stated as clearly as I can, but there’s another approach to this based on the general use of language. In many cases, if we were to insist on exact meanings for words, they’d end up not referring to anything. Nothing physical is perfectly spherical, perfectly flat or perfectly smooth. Hence if I were to say something like “Here is a smooth one metre sphere resting on the flat upper face of a two metre cube”, it would fail to refer to any real situation because the “sphere” wouldn’t be perfectly spherical, exactly a metre in diameter or perfectly smooth, and it wouldn’t be resting on a perfectly flat perfect cube exactly two metres on an edge. Nonetheless I might seem to have referred to a situation correctly and usefully, and to be that nitpicky about language and reference is plainly silly. Now for the situation with God causing me to know something. Maybe my standard of what constitutes knowledge is too high with justified true belief. Maybe knowledge is just belief that is near enough to certainty that it would make no odds. Otherwise we’d be stuck with a concept of knowledge useless for a wide variety of practical situations.

So that is basically the question I’m asking and a few considerations related to it. It’s also something I asked a few times on Yahoo Answers of all places in the vain hope of getting a sensible answer. All I got in the long run was some legalistic moderator saying I shouldn’t ask the same question more than once, even though I asked it several years after failing to get a helpful answer. Ah well.

“Power”

When I was a child, I heard a school assembly radio programme which has stayed with me ever since. A man (it would be back then) decided to seek the most powerful person in the world. I can’t remember the details of the exact chain except that it ended with Jesus, which it would because it was an assembly programme in the days before they had fully embraced multiculturalism. That last bit didn’t particularly impress me as I was atheist at the time, although I do also see that given a theistic setting the idea that the Sovereign or other head of state is really at the top of the pyramid might be tempered in a healthy way by their own belief in God, that of the people around them or wider society. One aspect of theism which I think is often missed by anti-theists, and I won’t harp on about this because I don’t want to put anyone off reading this, which is in any case not primarily about religion, but still, is that it can act as a brake on arrogance and narcissism if the person involved genuinely believes rather than uses it to manipulate people.

Leaving that theistic aspect aside though, the chain can be illustrated fairly simply by a concrete set of examples. The Prime Minister can do nothing without her Civil Service and the mandate of the people, and perhaps also the Police and armed forces. They are ideally only upholding the law, and the law may be controlled by lobbyists and MPs with certain interests which defers power again to large companies. These in turn are controlled by their shareholders, which could be seen as a democratic aspect of economics except that many of them don’t act rationally or are, for instance, pension schemes constrained to maximise income and can’t legally make ethical decisions. Then there are the pensioners and employees, that is, ordinary members of society, who enable this situation, but we are ourselves persuaded not just by our own lives but also by the likes of the mass media. They in turn may have agenda but are also trying to sell advertising and papers, and the advertisers are promoting the interests of their companies and so on, in such a way that power and responsibility always seem to be absent from the location, away from oneself already, in which it is supposed to be situated. The buck doesn’t stop anywhere. Power and responsibility flee from the places you expect it to be.

There’s also the question of the people who appear to be in power. Alan Sugar, for example, wouldn’t have got anywhere if he’d sold good quality products which the public didn’t understand or feel a need for, and they could to some extent be manipulated to want it but there are limits. Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher are either blamed or thanked for a lot, but they were in different countries and were put there by social trends as well as propaganda. Their personalities were undoubtedly important but in another sense they were just people who happened to be in the “right” places and times. The policies they pursued had a lot in common because the time had come for those policies to be realistically implementable. It’s nothing to do with who they were, and this can be seen in the fact that they were leaders in different parts of the world.

And this is the heart of the matter. If all you can do when you get elected is enact policies which someone else would have had to if they had been, surely your power is an illusion? You can propose any policy you like before you’ve been elected, but if they deviate more than a certain extent from what other candidates are proposing, they will lose you the election, and if you get elected you are likely to find yourself unable to enact the policies you propose unless they’re even closer to what we’re all used to. Therefore, even politicians are just figureheads most of the time.

This is why Donald Trump puzzled me. It seemed to me that a billionaire ostensibly working outside the political arena has more freedom and power than a billionaire president of the United States, who has to work within certain parameters and is somewhat more closely scrutinised. Presidents and other heads of state only do what their bosses in the private sector tell them to. Therefore, Trump seemed to be voluntarily surrendering power when he ran for President. I can think of two explanations for this. One is that he never intended to win and didn’t know what to do when he got there, and also didn’t consider it in advance, and the other is that he may have felt he was able to make a difference, perhaps for himself alone but still a difference, because he didn’t understand the nature of the office.

Even a dictator is constrained into behaving in a certain way. Whereas his actions may be vicious and heartless, it’s the nature of the job and whereas it may fit their character and values, they may not be able to behave in any other way and avoid being deposed or assassinated.

This is not a long or sophisticated political or philosophical post. There isn’t really that much to say about it to be honest. It’s just an explanation for why I tend to put inverted commas around the word “power”. In fact nobody has any power at all. History just throws people into particular conditions and circumstances constrain their possible actions. That’s it.

How Free Are We Really?

The title of this post could be interpreted politically, and maybe it will be by the time I reach the end. As usual, this is not planned. I’m just setting down my thoughts as they come to me and splurging them out on the screen. But yesterday I made an interesting discovery which I feel impacts on my personal life and to some extent my identity.

As you doubtless know, I’m a herbalist. I have a whole blog devoted to that along with home ed. I qualified in 1999 CE at the age of thirty-two, having previously read for a humanities (philosophy) degree at Leicester University, and there were six years between graduating from my first degree and starting the herbalism course via the College Of Phytotherapy, during which I gained an MA in Continental Philosophy, got married and we had a child. This probably sounds like a fairly circuitous and unusual route for someone’s career path, such as it is, to take, and there are indeed not that many herbalists (there are probably still too many but that’s another story for another blog), so if you met a woman humanities graduate from Leicester Uni who is a herbalist, the chances are you’d think that was unusual. And there are also coincidences to be taken into consideration of course, and I’ve widened the scope of some of this to make it sound more plausible.

Now I don’t want to doxx anyone, so I won’t being, and therefore I’m going to have to be vague about this, but I can’t really pass over this without saying something because I’ve found something very interesting about which I previously had no idea: I am not the only woman who graduated from Leicester University in the late ’80s to early ’90s with a humanities degree and became a herbalist. I have somehow managed to avoid finding this out until yesterday. And we even knew each other at the time. We were acquaintances. Not friends, although we got on all right. We just didn’t know each other that well and didn’t have much to do with each other. There were five thousand undergraduates at that institution at that time, so it’s not that intimate.

It’s possible to do some stats on this, but before that it’s worthwhile reducing some of this down to some kind of testable hypothesis, along these lines. How probable is it that a woman graduating from Leicester University in the period 1988-91 with a humanities degree would later qualify as a herbalist? That’s five thousand students. Divide that by two and you have two and a half thousand. Divide that by the five faculties of the university and you get five hundred. Finally, there are currently four hundred and five medical herbalists of the kind I and this other person are in Great Britain plus the Isles. The population of Great Britain and the Isles is currently around 65 million, but was lower in the late 1960s when she and I were both born, so I’m going to go with the population in 1970, which was 55 million or less. The probability of being a woman humanities graduate of Leicester University in the period 1988-91 is therefore around 1 in 110 000. The probability of being a herbalist now from the population of Great Britain and the Isles (by the way, that last bit includes only three people and none of them are Orcadian or in Na h-Eileanan an Iar, which is a bit ominous), having been born by 1970, is less than one in 135 000. So far, this is just playing with numbers and not really statistics. There are probably quite a few variables involved, and the ones we can spot – gender, age, degree subject area, location – are quite possibly not the most important ones, but simply correlate with these.

I don’t want to turn this into a discussion of who becomes a herbalist because that belongs on the other, long abandoned, blog here, but a few things are worth mentioning. Herbalism, for most people, is what one now calls a “side hustle” rather than a main source of income. Some people can for whatever reason only find side hustles, which is Sarada’s and my position as a couple, and is rather unfortunate for our economic situation. I don’t know if this applies to the other herbalist, but there’s a tendency for this to happen more to women than men. Offhand, I’m not aware of any men at all who have one. I am aware of men who are dismissive and disrespectful of them and say they’re pretend businesses. These people should probably consider why people are in the position of not having work that pays better. Perhaps they’ve spent a lot more time doing unpaid work which enabled their male partners to go out and derive higher incomes? Or they may be socialised away from high wages.

When I was training in the 1990s, nine out of ten herbalists were women. It’s alleged that back in the ’80s, every single herbal student was female. I’m a little sceptical of this. Over this period, most herbal students were mature and already qualified in something else, such as pharmacy or nursing. Their attraction to herbalism was often characterised by frustration with healthcare as usually practiced, whether from personal experience or through seeing it in their paid work. Another factor may also be involved. In the case of myself and this other herbalist, we have moved from the humanities to STEM, although this particular kind of STEM field is perhaps a little unusual for such a profession. I suspect that this is related to an inherent bias towards women with aptitude in STEM ending up on humanities degrees and needing to “course correct” later. Another thing she and I have in common is that we chose to qualify in science subjects in order to meet the entry requirements for the course (which was the same one at the same institution), so there was clearly a reason, not necessarily the same one, for us not doing those qualifications at school age. It should also be noted that herbalism as practiced is unusual for a STEM field because it requires a high degree of empathy and interpersonal skills, and these are also expected by the clients, unlike some other fields such as allopathic medicine where the same would be equally useful but are not necessarily expected, particularly by people with a learned pessimistic view of healthcare. A possible major difference here is that I got the highest mark in chemistry for my year when I was thirteen and proceeded to give it up, which is an unusual thing to do. Therefore it might not be worth considering this in gender terms as much as what happens when someone with talents in science and technology ends up studying language or philosophy and needs to change direction later.

Another factor here is location. Leicester University was described at the time as “middle-class, middle of the road, middle of the country”, which is a fair portrayal and is probably still true. Overall it was right in the middle of British universities for academic achievement and long-term graduate earning potential. It’s decidedly not Nottingham. Nottingham is a kind of high-flying arts specialist university, in a way a bit like Kent at Canterbury but not to the same extent. A person in the “wrong” field is more likely to end up at Leicester than certain other places because their academic achievement in that field is likely to be lower. Hence these two variables, humanities changing to science and being in the “wrong” academic subject, may in fact be related. This might be reflected in a higher than usual number of women students in the humanities, but to be honest I don’t think that was so.

A further factor is that we both stayed in the English East Midlands. This could be to do with the characteristics of this region or a tendency not to go far geographically after graduation. The first thing that comes to mind when considering the East Midlands as part of Great Britain is its shockingly low biodiversity compared to other regions, and that might be expected to make it harder to practice as a herbalist. In practice, it does seem quite straightforward to grow and obtain the necessary remedies here, and this would in any case vary according to one’s choice of herbs. I’m unusual in trying to stick to herbs which are either native or grow well here and am in fact quite focussed on invasive species, which is probably unusual. I don’t think there’s anything particularly wonderful about the East Midlands that makes it suitable for practicing Western herbalism, and in fact I think that for England, it’s a particularly unsuitable area. Therefore our presence in this region probably reflects something about us. I can think of another CAM practitioner who is also a female humanities graduate from Leicester the same year as I, and she also lives in the East Midlands, but in her case there may be less connection to the ecological situation since she isn’t a herbalist. That, I think, eliminates herbalism per se as a factor.

The thing to consider here would be how likely someone was to move away from their university location after graduation, and why they might or might not do so. Having children is one factor, such that if you haven’t moved by the time you become a parent, you’re less likely to do so. I don’t know if this other herbalist is a mother, but it makes some kind of sense that if her career changed direction after a few years, it might lead to her becoming fixed in one area. It would also be useful from the viewpoint of social capital – you would build up more contacts in the immediate area which you could then use later in your practice. The other ways I think it could be made to work is either not directly practicing but doing mainly teaching, writing books or joining or taking over an established practice.

All of this, though, is a case study of a specific pair of people I happen to have noticed because I happen to be one of them. It helps me put my biography in context because neither of us were aware of the other’s life but we have ended up pursuing similar paths, even though to us they probably seemed like rational and free choices most of the time. The specifics of our situation are not that interesting to others. What is interesting is the question it raises about the nature of freedom. Many people do feel restricted in their choices, or they just are. Human trafficking and homelessness come to mind here, but it also happens in wealthier situations such as children entering the family business or expected to follow what their parents see as an illustrious profession. Those people are probably aware of their lack of freedom. As for the rest of us, maybe all we really have is the illusion of freedom. This is not quite the same as the idea that we are individually determined. I am pretty much convinced that on an ontic level there simply is no freedom, and that that is an illusion, substantially because both determinism and acausal events both mean one has no influence over them. However, the kind of freedom I’ve been discussing here is rather different, because it’s a little more like the idea of political liberty than the idea of free will. In fact, it’s intermediate. Whether or not you believe in free will, you will tend to have an opinion about the rôle of such things as free speech and the political franchise. That has no bearing on the issue. However, a governments also successfully manipulate the electorate in various ways, including but not limited to propaganda. That said, there’s no way they would be concerned about manipulating women into changing career direction from the humanities and becoming herbalists near their university towns. This is not only ridiculously specific but also only really doable in a “free” society like this one in broad strokes. It’s unlikely that anyone, anywhere, in government or the civil is attempting to socially engineer an increase in herbalists. They’re more likely to be doing the opposite. But this means that there are social forces operating on all of us anonymously, without purpose or intent, outside anyone’s consciousness, which are however just as deterministic as a centrally-planned political economy, and they are as detailed as those famous cases of identical twins separated at birth who end up living with the same breed of dog with the same name.

What are we to make of all this? I have no idea.