The Ancient Tradition

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Music

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You’re listening to The Ancient Tradition. A Wonk Media Production. Music provided by Joseph McDade. He is your host, Dr. Jack Logan.

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Welcome to the Ancient Tradition podcast. I’m your host, Jack Logan. It’s great to have you back and welcome to all of our new listeners. Before I jump into today’s episode, I wanna let our listeners know about our website. This podcast has companion website, theancienttradition.com, where you can learn more about the evidence that I’ll present in today’s episode. If you go to theancienttradition.com, click on evidence, and then in the dropdown menu, you’ll see a page that’s dedicated to today’s episode.

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where you can find pictures and links, the ancient accounts, and full citations for everything discussed in this episode. Today’s episode is Exorcising the Ghosts of John Locke, David Hume, and Immanuel Kant. I love the title. I adopted it from a book written by a fellow by the name of John Rosner. You can find that on the website as well. We’ll get into why it’s critical that the ghosts of these gentlemen be exorcised.

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in a podcast that’s dedicated to reconstructing the religious tradition that was imparted to human beings in the beginning. So the best way to jump into this is to begin by telling you a little bit more about my background. I’m coming at this from a hybrid background. In terms of my formal education, I have a master’s and a PhD in the social sciences.

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and I teach at one of the best universities in the United States. And I’ve been teaching in higher education for a couple of decades. So I’ve been thoroughly trained in the scientific method, the language of academia. But at the same time, I grew up in a home full of faith and love for God. And I can’t even remember, I’ve tried, but I can’t even remember a time in my life where I didn’t know deep inside that I was.

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connected to a supreme being who loved me beyond my comprehension and Loved me perfectly Now I recognize not everybody knows that or feels that but it’s something of which I’ve always had a certain knowledge So this begs the question. How do I know this? How do I know with such certainty that there is a supreme being who loves me?

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And what we’re talking about here in academic speak is called epistemology, or the study of what can be known. What is knowable and how is it known? And as you might guess, there’s a lot of debate in academic circles and in religious circles over what can and can’t be known. And many in the academic community would argue that there’s just no way that I could know that there is a supreme being who loves me.

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They’d argue it isn’t knowable. And when I say that to myself, and I tell myself that it’s not something that I could possibly know, I still know. It doesn’t go away. It’s always there. I still know deep inside of me that there’s a Supreme Being who loves me. It’s a knowledge I have that’s apparently a permanent part of my knowledge set. It’s sort of like knowing that the sun is a blazing ball of gas. I can’t…

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unknow it. I just know. And so why does academia reject the knowledge I have of a loving supreme being? Well you can blame that, you guessed it, on John Locke, David Hume, and Immanuel Kant, among others like René Descartes and Francis Bacon. These philosophers beginning in the 17th and 18th century argued that reason and sensory knowledge were the best and later the only methods

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by which one could acquire knowledge or know something for sure. In other words, they argued that the only things that could be knowable were things that were acquired through reason and the senses. Everything outside of reason and the senses could not be known. What they did was essentially convince the world that nothing could be known unless it was according to the methods that they deemed capable of producing knowledge. And in two short centuries, they convinced the world.

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that all other methods of acquiring knowledge outside the methods they privileged were incapable of producing valid knowledge. Their epistemological movement is known as rationalism, ratio being the Latin word for reason. And rationalism is alive and it’s thriving all over the world. In fact, it’s so deeply embedded in society that we could even refer to it as a…

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Weltanschwang, which is the German word for a profound philosophical worldview, one that’s so comprehensive it permeates and shapes a person’s entire conception of the world. Locke, Hume and Kant’s rationalist Weltanschwang is so powerful that it’s socialized into every rising generation. We reinforce it every day in the ivy towers and academic halls all over the world.

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And John Rochner, who I mentioned earlier, he says, quote, schools, colleges and universities and nearly every major social institution presented in the lives of Western people have inculcated enlightenment principles, either overtly or subliminally. And for the most part, they’ve discouraged belief. And he’s talking about belief in God. All right, so rational conditioning is so much a part of our daily perception.

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about what can and can’t be known in the world that very few of us ever question, whether rationalism itself is a valid view of what can and can’t be known, or whether rationalism is the only way one can come to know something. What’s extremely important to point out here is that the ancients had a completely different view of what could be known.

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So for 5,600 years of documented history before these rationalist philosophers arrived on the scene, the ancients were really uncompromising in their claim that we can find in the ancient records, mythologies, liturgies, and symbols that there was a spiritual reality outside of this one, a reality which could be known to human beings.

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the ancients hadn’t been socialized into the limitations of Lockean, Humean, Kantian rationalist epistemology. And so the ancients, if they lived today, they would outright reject the notion that knowledge was limited to these analytical or sensory functions. Now, I wanna stop here for just a second and just say like, I love science. I’m not, this is not about…

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Bashing science because I love science. I love I love learning about science and teaching science I love all the wonderful things that science has taught me, especially in things like astronomy I just I’m kind of a little bit of an astronomy nerd So I really do appreciate science. The point here is is that science is limited and Having taught the scientific method quite a bit in my career. I have a pretty healthy understanding of these limitations

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So I wanna take a moment and outline those limitations. And this is not about throwing the baby out with the bath water, as I mentioned, I love science and all that wonderful knowledge that I’ve gained. But it’s about challenging the unwarranted dogmatic position that scientists take, that science is the only method by which something can be known. In fact, the word science itself is derived from the Latin word

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scientia which means knowledge. And as one scholar said it, quote, to define science as knowledge has its own problems. It gives the impression that science is the totality of knowledge and the totality of science is knowledge. So they use knowledge as the word for science to convey that they are kind of one and the same. And this gives the impression that anything that is not

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it invalidates any knowledge that has not come via the scientific method, which of course is an extremely dogmatic statement. What most in academia won’t tell you is that rationalism, which led to the scientific method, is itself a social construct. And in many ways, rationalism and the scientific method are built on less stable ground than most people think.

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And I wanna take a moment here and walk you through some of those philosophical, metaphysical, evidentiary and technological limitations of science. All right, so number one, science and the scientific method were invented by philosophers. Quote, scientific method was formulated by philosophers, the preeminent dealers in ideas. These philosophers not.

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scientists are responsible for the package of ideas now called scientific method. Scientific method was not divinely given to scientists on stone tablets. And that’s taken from a book called What’s Behind the Research and I’m going to quote them a couple more times as I out like this because they do a really nice job of articulating some of these points. What’s important to point out is that when students are taught the scientific method, it’s usually taught as if

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it were given to philosophers and scientists on stone tablets. Imagine the irony in that. But students are left with the impression that the scientific method is infallible, that it’s the ultimate culmination in evolutionary thinking that we’ve arrived in some way in our quest for finding a method that will lead us to absolute truth, that there’s no other

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epistemological frontiers left for us to explore or find because we’ve already found it. Very few students leave with the impression that what we call science and the scientific method is actually a social construct, the product of philosophers, invented by philosophers and advocated by philosophers.

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Thomas Kuhn argues in the most widely cited article in Social Science, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, that science is a socially constructed paradigm of knowledge. It’s a subjective consensus about how truth is achieved and defined. Number two, the scientific method is a theory.

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This is from what’s behind the research, quote, science itself is based on theories or speculations. The method used to support or disprove other theories is itself a theory about how this supporting and disproving is done. There’s no foreordained or self-evident truth about how science is to be conducted or indeed whether science should be conducted at all.

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So when we understand this, that what we call science and the scientific method is really just a theory about what constitutes knowledge and how that knowledge is obtained, we can see that there is the possibility that this theory could be mis-defining knowledge or it could be too narrow or it could be flat out wrong. It’s a theory after all, which leads us to the next limitation. Number three.

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Science itself is not empirically provable. Science can’t validate itself. Quote, and this is again from what’s behind the research, scientific method cannot itself be experimentally tested. Scientific method has what some philosophers call the bootstrap problem. Just as those who wear old fashioned boots cannot raise themselves into the air by pulling on the straps of their boots,

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So practitioners of the scientific method cannot use its method to validate itself. In other words, you can’t use the scientific method to validate whether the scientific method, which we just established was a theory of knowledge, is valid or not. There’s just no way to test whether or not this scientific theory of knowledge is really giving us the correct understanding of what constitutes knowledge.

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or whether its methods actually lead to knowledge. We’re left with no way to verify science’s veracity. So what do we do? What does this mean? Well, that leads me to number four. Number four, belief in science and the scientific method requires faith. You heard that right. Since you can’t use the scientific method to prove the scientific method is a valid theory,

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on how to acquire knowledge or how to know something, it requires that anyone who uses it have faith that it does what it claims to do since there’s no way to prove it does. In other words, the scientific method is not built on sturdy pillars of established validity. It’s now sand, lots and lots of sand.

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We just have to take the scientist’s word that it leads to valid knowledge and we have to have faith in the scientists. But see, the scientists didn’t invent it, so we really have to have faith in the philosophers who invented it, which means we have to have faith in Locke, Hume, and Kant. So see how quickly we went from the wide-held perception that science equals valid knowledge, anything not using the science being invalid, to really, it’s all about faith.

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in particular philosophers. Now, how is that better than faith in a supreme being who is infinitely smarter than human beings? Number five, scientific success does not necessarily equate with validity. So now you’re probably thinking to yourself, well, what about all the great things we get from science, like the iPhones or vaccinations, airplanes, gene therapy? One scholar said it like this.

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The prestige that science enjoys today is no doubt attributable in large measure to the striking successes in the rapidly expanding reach of its applications. What’s behind the research say some people argue that many successes of science demonstrate its validity. However, this argument contains the same bootstrap problem. Siding success begs the questions.

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what one considers success and how one verifies success. Clearly these are speculative theoretical issues. Success may be in the eye of the beholder. All right so there’s a lot here. Basically Slife and Williams are arguing that we are back to how scientists define what constitutes knowledge and what that knowledge looks like. So if we define knowledge empirically

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then the scientific method is a roaring success. But if we define knowledge as something like, say, knowing that I’m loved by a supreme being, then science is an utter failure in finding that knowledge. You can’t successfully produce that type of knowledge, whether or not science is a success or a failure then, whether or not we deem it that depends entirely on how

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knowledge is defined. But who gets to decide how knowledge is defined? Well, now we’re back to Thomas Kuhn’s arguments where he argued that science is a subjective consensus on what constitutes truth. There’s nothing inherently true about defining knowledge as only the product of analytical or sensory functions. Which brings me to number six.

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Since science can’t empirically validate itself, it has to establish itself on metaphysical assumptions. So since it can’t validate itself, scientists have to start by making major assumptions about reality and what constitutes reality. We call these metaphysical assumptions. Meta meaning beyond and physics referring to the physical world. So beyond the physical or the science of things that

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transcend what is physical or natural. Some of you might already recognize there’s a problem here. Science, which is a theory of knowledge that rejects knowledge of a non-physical world, is now being built on assumptions which transcend what is physical or natural. So here we’re kind of on sandy ground again. Here are some of the metaphysical assumptions on which science is built.

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It assumes that reality is thing-like, that we can observe it with our senses. It assumes that reality is naturalistic or materialistic. And number two, it assumes because reality is thing-like, it’s possible to establish its objective reality. We can split ourselves from the object and find its true objective reality. And number three, it assumes that A precedes B in time.

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so that you can assert that change is caused. All right, the kicker here is that maybe none of these assumptions about reality are actually true. Maybe none of this is the real, real. You know, I was thinking of the movie, The Matrix. Neo assumes reality is thing-like, the world he’s in meets all of the sensory criteria, but it turns out that he’s actually living in a dream world. He’s hooked.

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up to the matrix, which is a computer program that’s simulating the real. None of what he’s experiencing in the dream world is the real, real. So the point here is that philosophers like Locke, Hume and Kant made the decision to limit what was constituted as real to what was thing-like. So this assumption was made by philosophers.

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And they could be flat out wrong about this assumption. Maybe reality is not thing-like, or maybe some parts of reality are thing-like while others are not, or maybe none of true reality is thing-like. We just don’t know. But we don’t have to agree with the assumption made by philosophers that reality is limited to only that which is thing-like. We don’t have to take philosophers’ word for it.

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when we have real experience, especially when we have real experiences that contradict these metaphysical assumptions. One last note here, since metaphysical assumptions can’t be investigated by the scientific method, scientists are safely guarded against ever learning whether or not they are wrong. How convenient. But never forget that all of the metaphysical assumptions

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upon which science is built are unproven. When we apply a different set of assumptions, we get an entirely different picture of reality or what is real. Maybe not everything that is real is thing-like and maybe not everything that’s real can be observed through the senses. Number seven, science is in its infancy. Like I mentioned, I love astronomy. And so the field of astronomy is an excellent example.

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of the infancy of science. And although it’s really hard to believe it right now, we used to believe that there weren’t that many planets in the Milky Way galaxy, and possibly that they were only unique to our solar system. And this scientific belief was based primarily on the fact that we didn’t have any scientific instruments that could find these planets. Planets are dark, and if you place them against a dark sky, they’re virtually impossible to see. So…

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If we couldn’t see them, then they probably weren’t there. Just 30 years ago, astronomers searching for exoplanets, and exoplanets are planets outside of or external to our solar system. These scientists were ridiculed and ostracized because they believed that there were planets all over the universe. Two of these astronomers in the United States, two of these astronomers, Dr. Jeffrey Marcy and Dr. Paul Butler.

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despite being ridiculed for years, kept searching the night sky for planets outside of our solar system. But it was kind of rough going. Listen to what Dr. Marcy said about those early days. When I told older astronomers that I was gonna hunt for planets around other stars by this Doppler technique, I remembered that they would look down at their shoes and scuffle their feet a little bit and change the subject.

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They felt sorry for me that I was reaching for little green men and pyramid power and some sort of crazy metaphysical effect like, you know, planets and life in the universe that was akin to hunting for UFOs. It took Dr. Marcy and Dr. Butler eight years to build scientific tools capable of finding an exoplanet. And Dr. Butler says, quote,

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We were struggling without any roadmap. Nobody knew who we were. The few people who knew what we were trying to do also knew that our quest was quixotic at best and more likely just flat out laughable. But after all that perseverance, on December 30th, 1995, Dr. Marcy and Dr. Butler found their first exoplanet and it was a massive planet, about seven times the mass of our Jupiter and it was

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orbiting around the star 70 Virginis, which is about 60 light years away from us. And so that exoplanet is now known as 70 Virginis B. And by 2008, more than half of the 300 plus confirmed exoplanets had been found by them. So it’s pretty neat. But as the New York Times points out, just 30 years ago, quote,

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as science fiction in respectable academic circles. Now the primary reason for this was because no exoplanets had been found and why couldn’t they be found? Because our science and our scientific tools were in their infancy. We just didn’t have the scientific instruments capable of finding exoplanets. But thanks to the perseverance of astronomers like Dr. Marcy and Dr. Butler, today we do.

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and scientists have developed all kinds of scientific instruments in the past 30 years that are capable of finding these exoplanets. It includes things like transit photometry, radial velocity, reflection and emission modulations, gravitational microlensing, ellipsoidal variation, and relativistic beaming, to name some of them. You can get on the website and learn more about them if you’d like. But every day scientists…

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continue to develop these and refine these scientific instruments so that they can find more and more exoplanets. Now the first confirmed exoplanet outside of our solar system was PSR 125712b and that was found 30 years ago in 1992 by some astronomers in Europe. But since then more than 5,000 exoplanets have been found.

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And hundreds of these are found every year. I’ve been following them for a while, it’s kind of fun to watch, but now astronomers estimate that there are more planets in the universe than stars. Consider this, astronomers estimate that there are about 400 billion stars in the Milky Way galaxy alone, 400 billion, but between one and 10 trillion orbiting planets. So that…

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computes to between 2 and 25 times as many planets as stars. Unbelievable. Now, and if you times that by the estimated one to two trillion galaxies in the known universe, you have a number of planets that is not even comprehensible to the human mind. It’s just, the cosmos are just littered with planets. They are everywhere.

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Now, if you would have made that claim 30 years ago, you would have been thrown out for astronomical heresy. And I did kind of throw in that pun. With that many planets, the chances of life are actually enormous. And so today, exoplanet exploration is a worldwide phenomena. And NASA started the Exoplanet Science Institute at Caltech in 2008. Now the whole scientific community’s jumped on board.

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And if you’ve been watching the news just this week, NASA announced that the Webb Telescope had found its first exoplanet, LHS-475b. And it’s a rock planet, and it’s almost exactly the size of Earth. It’s pretty neat. But the point here is that what can be known via science is itself limited by how technologically advanced our scientific instruments are. If our instruments can’t find or see something,

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It may not be because it’s not there or it’s not real. It could actually be because our instruments are young and inadequate or incapable of finding it. And so in this case, the reason we couldn’t see in quotes or find those exoplanets was due to poor scientific instruments. So see the exoplanets were there all along whether our instruments were capable of finding them or not. And is it possible that the same could be said of a spiritual world?

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There is the real possibility that what the scientific method deems to be not real, the spiritual or supernatural, is only considered such because we just don’t have the scientific instruments capable of observing it right now. And who knows? One day our scientific instruments will become so refined that it could observe a spiritual realm beyond what is presently known. But because science invalidates or delegitimizes what it can’t find or see,

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it doesn’t necessarily mean that it doesn’t exist. I mean, just look at all those exoplanets. So as that old adage goes, the absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence. Number eight, science is limited by available evidence. So just as I mentioned, science is limited to the evidence that it can get its hands on. So if it can’t get its hands on the evidence, then it can’t be quote, no.

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but it’s a far jump to go from not known to doesn’t exist. And because of this, all of the conclusions that are made by the scientific method are inherently tentative. They’re subject to further evidence. So no absolute truths can be established then because there’s always the possibility that one might encounter more evidence or different evidence in the future that may contradict

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their original conclusions. So case in point, being previous to 1992, there were no exoplanets. And then after this new evidence came, there’s so many exoplanets in the universe that it’s not even humanly comprehensible. And that’s a big shift. So science can never prove anything to be absolutely true. There are no absolute truths it can find. It can only claim that the available evidence hasn’t disproven it yet. And as such,

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maybe it would behoove scientists to be just a little more humble about what they actually know and the tentative nature of that knowledge. Number nine, the sterile, almost cold, drab picture of reality described by rational and scientific methods isn’t representative of lived human experience. John Rossner notes, quote, for the most part,

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the more limited empirical sciences of today are still largely based upon a collage of already outmoded rationalistic materialistic a priori’s and perspectives, which are uncapable to cope with such vital human issues. So what vital human issues is he talking about? He’s talking about the lived experience of human beings. Love, hate, hope, meaning, morality, ethics, mystery.

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aesthetics, beauty, forgiveness, joy, all of these are a huge part of the lived human experience, but they’re inscrutable to science. So try and take a rationalistic scientific approach to a student who feels a deep sense of anomie, a student who feels completely rudderless, a student who doesn’t know

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what he should do with his life. He doesn’t feel like society cares what he does. He doesn’t even know if there’s any point to what he does. He’s completely lost. And I’ve met students like this and unfortunately there are lots of them. Science has zero answers, zero to this situation. Listen to this psychologist quote,

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The present outlook of science has all but destroyed the natural capacity of modern man to hope, to believe, to love. More and more of our patients complain of a sense of meaninglessness in life. More and more often the reason is the outlook of science, or what has become through them as the outlook of science. Sometimes it’s called reductionism.

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Thinking people tend to feel that science has cut man down. It’s explained away everything that matters. Religion then becomes nothing but wish-fulfilling fairy tales. Love is nothing but body chemistry. Art is nothing but a surge of conditioned reflexes. All color has gone and all hope is lost. Science has made everything hollow and pointless. I wouldn’t call it a flight from reason to look elsewhere than science for rescue.

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that’s thoroughly rational. So rationalism becomes irrational when it doesn’t match lived experience or human needs, when it dehumanizes us. A scholar by the name of Makali Kanu in the Journal of Humanities and Social Science wrote, quote, on the issue of the ultimate purpose of our existence or of the universe, science is lacking.

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The belief in purposes cannot be observed and therefore cannot be addressed by the methods of natural science, which are tied to observation. The fact that science does not make use of the concept of ultimate purposes in no way suggests that the concept is not meaningful or important to lived human experience. It is also argued that the method of investigation that is deliberately restricted to the naturalistic or the purely material or mechanistic

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will not be competent to deal with most of the fundamental questions of morality and value, psychology, theology and religion, philosophy and some other areas as well. I think one scholar said it best, he said it like this, man cannot live by science alone and I would concur. Although in modern society, there are a number of problematic issues associated with the

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scientific, Vilton Schwang. In this podcast, it’s the philosopher’s wholesale rejection of spiritual knowledge that is most problematic. And at the beginning of this episode, I mentioned that for my entire life, I’ve had a certain knowledge that I’m loved by a supreme being. And I don’t necessarily know how I know that, but I know, and it’s never wavered my entire life. Rationalists reject this

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when they say, how can you know there is a God who loves you? That’s not knowable. What they’re really saying by asking this is that my so-called knowledge of God doesn’t conform to the a priori assumptions of rationalist scientific epistemology. My so-called knowledge isn’t thing-like or observable. Therefore, it can’t possibly be knowledge. It must be some figment of my imagination or some chemical response, whatever it is, it’s not knowledge.

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And this is where the ancient world radically disagrees. The ancients declared that the spiritual realm was knowable, that it’s possible to have direct knowledge of the spiritual realm. The ancient record is rife with sacred writings, myths, liturgies, cosmologies, and symbols that attest to a knowable spiritual world, to a knowable God.

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And I’m not talking about secondary book knowledge here where one reads about the spiritual experiences of someone else. I’m talking about acquiring direct knowledge of spiritual truths and the spiritual world for oneself. This is where the ancient tradition comes in. The ancient tradition is unequivocal in declaring that the spiritual realm is knowable.

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Not only does it declare that it’s knowable, the ancient tradition emphasizes the absolute necessity of acquiring spiritual knowledge if one desires to reach their full potential. So for this reason, I hope it’s now evident why it’s so important to exorcise the ghosts of John Locke, David Hume, and Immanuel Kant who told the world that they couldn’t know God. The ancients

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exorcise those philosophers that tell us that we can’t. It’s one of the most damning philosophies of men. The ability to know God is one of, if not the most important gifts given to human beings. That wraps up this edition of the Ancient Tradition. To recap, we learned in this episode that the ancient record attests in stark contradistinction to 17th and 18th century philosophers.

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that the spiritual realm is knowable, that human beings can obtain direct knowledge of a supreme being. If you’re interested in learning more about the evidence presented in this episode, visit theancienttradition.com. Search for this specific episode under evidence, and you’ll find pictures and links and sometimes a bonus section. And near the bottom of the podcast page, there’s a button to subscribe to the podcast as well as a running countdown for next week’s episode.

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all of which you can share with your family and friends. Next time I’ll dive into the origin of the ancient tradition, who started it and where did it start? For now, remember in the words of William Shakespeare, knowledge is the wing we’re with, we fly to heaven. I’m Jack Logan, and I’ll see you on the next edition of the ancient tradition.

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You’ve been listening to the Ancient Tradition. A Wonk Media Production.