(20) Knowledge Has Two Levels

Knowing seems to be a very common, ordinary, and understandable experience. We all "know" when we know something or someone. For the most part we never give a second thought to our knowing, assuming comfortably that what it means to know is perfectly obvious and therefore not very important.
We who live in the Western World suffer from a further handicap in regard to knowing. For the past several hundred years our culture has assumed with increasing inflexibility that the only way to know for sure is through empirical or sense experience and logical, analytical thinking. This is what is called the "scientific method." Unless a proposition has been arrived at through an experimental process which can be repeated by anyone at will, it is assumed that personal knowledge involved is biased, feeling-oriented, personal, and untrustworthy. The extreme reliance of the media upon science as the only authority on human affairs attests to this development. In recent years, especially at the upper levels of scholarly thought, serious defects have surfaced in this formerly solid trust in science as the only way to know. Polanyi’s book, Personal Knowledge, is an illustration of the trend. But at the popular level, science is still devoutly regarded as the only route to reliable knowledge.
Strangely, people who claim to accept the Bible seriously and to direct their lives by it, have not taken issue, in an intellectual way at least, with this modern trend. They have reacted most commonly in one of two ways. One way is to assume an anti-intellectual stance. Christians often disparage careful thinking as unspiritual and retreat into a dogmatic and/or highly emotional experience and attitude as an escape from the seemingly unbreakable grip that science has on modern life. Without being critical of or negative toward the experience of tongues and other ecstatic experiences associated with the characteristic renewal, it is fair to say that a good many in that movement are at least in serious danger of an anti-intellectual stance and that they assume that stance to counter the claims of a rationalized scientific method as the only reliable guide for modern man.
The other reaction is one of assimilation or synthesis. It is accomplished by supposing that life can be divided into two layers with a complete barrier between them. One level is spiritual life, where one knows God, reads the Bible, prays and witnesses. The other is the level of ordinary life – of business, physical life, research, education, politics, labor, etc. The first level is private; the second public. Many Christians seem to think they can live effective Christian lives by adopting this stance and changing their way of knowing as a chameleon changes his skin color depending on which environment they are active in. They can be thoroughly secular scientists or businessmen or politicians in the areas of research, economics or government, and at the same time good Christians in the church and in their private Christian moral lives. The problem of serving two gods that is involved in this stance has been discussed above and need not be treated again here.
A Biblical answer to this problem is to recognize that human knowing occurs on at least two levels, a scientific and a pre-scientific or foundational, life level. The term "pre-scientific" is not a pejorative term, as if it referred to a kind of knowledge that is crude, mythical, undifferentiated and untrustworthy. On the contrary, it is fundamental, reliable, important, and absolutely necessary for the development of scientific knowing. Without it, scientific knowing could never have developed.
Scientific knowledge is always extracted from the whole, lived-in context of ordinary human life as we experience it daily. Scientific knowing is impersonal, generalized, abstract, value-free information. There is a genius about it that gives it tremendous power. By isolating, measuring, analyzing and evaluating one specific method has demonstrated an amazing capacity to explain and hence dominate the physical world. In endows us with answers and traces relations never before accessible to men. It gives answers and traces relations never before clear to men. Its success level in the material realm has led to the effort to duplicate its effectiveness in the human realm. Here it has been markedly less successful, but the measure of confidence it inspires in modern people is nothing short if religious. However, scientific knowing is always abstractive knowing. It is always pulled out of an integral life experience.
What is this integral life experience out of which the material to be analyzed is abstracted? It is also a kind of knowing. It is so habitual it is rarely thought of as knowledge. Like a pair of glasses forgotten in the seeing, or respiration unnoticed in the living, our holistic knowledge of reality around and within us has escaped our notice almost entirely in our absorption with the challenge and the success of the scientific method.
But it is there – personal, concrete, experiential and value-laden. We experience, or "know" life and reality in an integral, meaning-filled manner that is the rock substratum within which the mines of science tunnel. This knowledge is a rich mixture of reason, emotion, faith, will, and action. The fact that modern philosophy has, until very recently and then only tentatively, dealt with it does not argue for its non-existence but for the fallibility of science when employed as the exclusive route to knowing. This is the knowing of which the Bible speaks, "This is life eternal, that they might know Thee, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom thou didst send," (John 17:3) or " . . . let him that glorieth glory in this, that he hath understanding and knoweth me, that I am Jehovah . . ." (Jeremiah 9:23).
This is the knowledge out of which all men, scientists included, must live. It is rooted out of faith, a heart commitment to the true God in Jesus Christ or to some idol, some element in the created order which has been elevated to the place which only God can really fill. When some part of the creation like economics in Marxism, psychology in Freudianism, or relative, changing customs in historicism, is regarded as the foundation of human life, all the other elements in experience are inevitably wrenched out of focus and human life experiences the frustration of having its gods fail it.
Scientific knowing is valid – indeed it is a divinely commanded sort of human activity. But it can never stand on its own. It always serves some deeper commitment in the pre-scientific or holistic knowing of the human being. That kind of knowledge is heart knowledge. Of it the Bible speaks when it says, "Guard thy heart with all diligence, for out of it are the issues of life." (Proverbs 4:23).
The distinction between these two levels of human knowing is an important part of the Christian mind. There may well be other levels on which knowledge comes to us: aesthetic knowing, intuitive knowing, extra-rational knowing as in dreams etc., but these lie beyond the purview of the present article. Perhaps they can be pursued at a later time.

(21) Knowledge Is Multi-Faceted

Human experience or knowing presents itself to our consciousness in an integral, undivided manner. But it is susceptible, on analysis to the division into a number of facets or aspects. Every experience we have turns out to include a whole series of sides that regularly appear and can be logically, if not experientially, distinguished. It is from these sides of experience that the subjects in the elementary and secondary school and the departments in the university take their origin. They are scientifically abstracted sides of our rich and integral experience of life.
These aspects of experience have been recognized in different ways of knowing. Phenix calls them realms of meaning and recognizes six: symbolics, empirics, aesthetics, synnoetics, ethics, and synoptics. (see footnote 1). Taylor calls them: moral, aesthetic, intellectual, religious, economic, political, legal, and etiquette, or custom. (see footnote 2). Dooyeweerd, the Dutch Christian philosopher, identifies fifteen:

• Pistic, or confessional-Analytic
• Ethical-Sensitive
• Jural-Biotic
• Aesthetic-Physical
• Economic-Movement
• Social-Spatial
• Linguistic-Numerical
• Historical

Some of Dooyweerd’s followers re-arrange the order he established, or remove some of the aspects and make them umbrella areas that apply to all of life. Whatever the arrangement, they represent sides of our pre-scientific knowing which, when logically abstracted, open out into various scientific disciplines. The ease with which the various lists can be aligned with each other testifies to the verity that human experience does indeed present itself to us under a variety of aspects.
To the Christian mind, the important thing is that each of these aspects is the creation of God’s Word. (John 1:1-3; Hebrews 1:1-3, etc.) The figure of a prism has been suggested at this point. It is as if a bean of white light (God’s Word, His powerful self-giving or self-revelation in and to His creation) is refracted through a prism to fan out into the rich, iridescent, meaningful "peacock’s tail" of human experience God gives us to experience His world in this unified and yet diverse way. And into each of the aspects of experience God has built His law or His word for the creation. Within the guidelines of the revealed and infallible written Word of God, the Bible, we are called to search for the norm of God in each area of experience and to incarnate it in loving service to God and man.