A ladder with broken rungs

In a Christian forum where I spend some of my time, a Catholic apologist acknowledged that he didn't expect me to accept the Catholic Church's authority. When I asked why I should accept it, he recommended a book, Jacob's Ladder, by the Christian philosopher Peter Kreeft. Though I was confident that the book would not prove what my interlocutor thought it would prove, I wasn't going to buy it just to score a debating point. Fortunately, I found an excerpt, available online for free, of the first two chapters and a portion of the third. I wrote a critique of the excerpt, but it was rejected by the forum's moderation system, for reasons I could not ascertain. Lest my work go to waste, here it is.

The book is subtitled Ten Steps to Truth. That is unobjectionable. Unless we’re postmodernists, we should all want to know the steps to truth, though we may differ about how many steps there are. But Kreeft has a problem. From the chapter titles, it is apparent that he intends to show the reader a path, not to truth in general, but to the truth of certain Christian doctrines. That doesn’t have to be a problem, but it is fraught with risk—in particular, the risk of circularity.

It is not wrong per se to argue “If you really cared about knowing the truth, then you would accept conclusion X,” provided that X is the conclusion of a sound argument. But if X happens to be false, then no argument with X as a conclusion can be a sound argument. It must either be invalid or depend on at least one false premise. I will not here critique the validity of Kreeft’s argument. I don’t need to, because I think I can reasonably doubt some of his premises, and if it’s reasonable to doubt his premises, then it’s reasonable to doubt his conclusion.

On to it, then.

I have a passionate belief in the truth of biological evolution, but only because I have a prior passionate belief in the epistemological efficacy of the scientific method. It would be contrary to the scientific method itself to argue that the method must be correct because it leads us to accept evolution. For all we know at this time in our history, future discoveries could lead us to conclude, using the scientific method, that evolution is not true. We have to be prepared to accept that possibility, because the scientific method is not justified in terms of its current conclusions. It is justified in terms of the means it employs to compensate as much as possible for ineliminable errors in the way we humans perceive reality. It works by accepting human fallibility, not by trying to deny it. To the scientific mind, there is nothing we cannot be wrong about, but there are measures we can take to reduce the likelihood that we are wrong about some things.

To me, a passionate desire to know the truth is a desire to know the truth no matter what it is, and it means you will change your mind about what the truth is, regardless of your feelings, if confronted with a good enough reason to change your mind. If you are passionate about a belief because you think it is true and important, that’s fine. But if you think it is true and important because you are passionate about it, that is not so fine.

It is not quite clear to me what Kreeft intends this rung to comprise. The whole book is supposed to be about finding the truth, so if truth is to be a rung, it can only be the final rung. From the chapter’s opening, it looks like it might be an admonition to discard skepticism, or at least a certain kind of skepticism. Mother says, “So let’s take on skepticism today. Let’s look at the reasons for it.” OK, but how about first we get clear on what we mean by skepticism?

Skepticism, according to Mother, “contradicts itself. It says, ‘The truth is that there is no truth’, or ‘I know that I don’t know’, or ‘I’m certain that there is no certainty.’” Very well. There are people who say those things, and they call themselves skeptics. But as a critique of skepticism, it is about as relevant as the observation that there are people who handle snakes during church services and they call themselves Christians.

For many of us who are not religious, our skepticism amounts to nothing more than a persistent demanding of “Show me why” when we’re told we should believe something. We do not deny that there are truths, and we do not deny that we can and actually do know some of those truths. What we do deny, though, is that (with exceptions irrelevant to this discussion) we human beings can know anything infallibly. We do not define knowledge in terms of perfect, incorrigible certainty. We can justifiably claim to know something if our reasons for believing it are good enough. It may happen, notwithstanding our justification, not to be true, and in that case our claim to know it is mistaken. But it’s OK (within a slew of ceteris paribus parameters) to be wrong. What is not OK is thinking it’s impossible for you to be wrong.

Mother then goes on to criticize relativism, the notion that “Truth becomes ‘my truth’ or ‘your truth’”. That is not skepticism, or at least not a kind of skepticism that I was ever attracted to. And so on for the rest of the chapter: Kant, Nietzsche, etc. Skepticism is not just any of them, and it certainly is not all of them. When someone says, “I don’t believe what you say because I’m a skeptic,” your next question has to be, “What do you mean when you call yourself a skeptic?”

Kreeft quickly explains that he is talking here about the meaning of life. And, through Mother, he elaborates:

When we say ‘meaning’ here, we mean ‘purpose’, don’t we? Everything we do has a purpose, right? . . . So if each particular thing in life has a purpose, does life as a whole have a purpose or not? That’s the first question about the meaning of life: Is there one?”

I get it that meaning is related to purpose, but no, when I say "meaning," I don’t mean "purpose," and neither do people in general, so far as I can tell. To treat them as the same thing presupposes, I suspect, certain ideas from Aristotle’s metaphysics that I don’t accept.

And one of those ideas is that everything in the universe must have a purpose. But as I understand reality, purpose is a function of minds. We have no compelling reason to believe it can have any other source. And so whatever is produced by a mindless process has no purpose. This doesn’t mean it cannot be used for a purpose, but that purpose must originate in a creature that has a mind. I can pick up a rock and use it to crack open a walnut or kill an enemy. It is my purpose, not the rock’s purpose, to feed myself or defend myself. Likewise, I can choose a purpose for my life, or I can let others tell me what its purpose is, but in either case, the purpose is my choice. I don’t avoid the responsibility of choosing just by letting other people make the decision.

That was as far as I could read without either buying or borrowing the book, but it’s as far as I need to go to make my point. The first three rungs of the ladder won’t get me off the ground, so it doesn’t matter where the other seven could take me.

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(This page last updated on June 12, 2018.)