In addition to the empirical method of knowing truth — which I assume we all agree on — and other rationally based methods such as the legal/historic method, I have suggested two other ways of knowing; intuition and revelation. I will begin my explanation of these other methods with intuitive knowledge because I think it will be easier (and less controversial).
Intuitive knowledge consists of the knowledge we have that seems to be innate. No one taught us these things, we just know them. They seem to be part of our standard intellectual equipment. While there is debate as to which things are intuitive and which are learned, I think there is little doubt that we have some measure of intuitive knowledge.
Kant gave a simple two-part test that I think is useful in determining whether a piece of knowledge is intuitive or not; Universality and Necessity. In other words, the knowledge needs to be cross cultural and cross historic, something we observe in all people (except those born with severe brain damage) in every culture and in every age. For necessity I will use the definition from the Encarta Dictionary: Something that is essential, especially a basic requirement.
For example, take any new born baby from any culture in any period of human history and gently touch its cheek with the tip of your little finger and he or she will respond exactly the same way. The infant will immediately turn, open its mouth to receive it and try to suck it (they will suck it if you let them).
I was told about this before my our first child was born. So as soon as they cleaned him up and handed him to me I decided to see if they were telling me the truth, and sure enough they were. Now, who taught him that there would be a conveyance approximately the size of the tip of my finger that would furnish him with the necessary nourishment to sustain his life, and that he would access this nourishment by sucking it? The answer is, he just knew it and that he would not have survived had he not known it.
This instinctive knowledge is, in the words of philosopher J. Budziszewski, one of those things we cannot not know. Christians have noted — with the help of divine revelation as well as empirical methodology — that there are actually quite a few of these things we cannot not know.
Plato offers us an example of this in his record of Socrates conversation with Meno the Sophist. Meno begins his conversation with Socrates by asking whether virtue is gained through teaching or practice, or — as I will be proposing — it resides within us as one of those things we cannot not know.
According to Daniel Robinson, Professor Emeritus at Georgetown and an member of the faculty at Oxford, Meno is trying to ask; In what sense we can say that anything can be said to be known? Like a modern skeptic, Meno is asking how a moralist such as myself can speak so confidently and in absolute terms of right and wrong? How I can be so dogmatic? He’s asking; what is the source of our moral sense and how it is to be understood?
These are good questions. Meno’s answer is that if we don’t know it by direct experience we have no way of discovering it (empiricism).
Socrates, as he often does, takes his, “How would I know, I’m the dumbest man in Athens?” posture. But Meno presses his advantage, “How will you inquire, Socrates, into that which you do not know? What will you put forth as the subject of inquiry? And if you find what you want, how will you ever know that this is the thing which you did not know? As Robinson points out, “This is still the stock Sophist challenge to one who claims to search for the truth.”
In response, Socrates begins to ask a series of questions to Meno’s young, uneducated servant boy, and through probing questions and gentle guidance — but without giving him the answer — he demonstrates that the boy knows the Pythagorean Theorem even though he never studied the subjects that would have given him that knowledge. So, how did he know it? Socrates’ answer was that “he always knew it and, under the proper guidance, remembered it.”
In the same way, Christians argue that there is a law written on the hearts of all men and women. We may forget it, we may deny it, but under proper guidance, the right Socratic questions, we will recall it.
In his book, What We Cannot Not Know, J. Budziszwski, a former atheist, and a professor of philosophy and political science at the University of Texas, demonstrates to my satisfaction that the moral sense is one of those things we cannot not know and that the moral sense we all share bears a remarkable resemblance to the ten commandments. He demonstrates that the human need to rationalize away their violations of this code is evidence that they know that what they are doing is wrong. After all, we don’t have to rationalize good behavior, do we?
For example, one of the things we cannot not know is that we should not murder our fellow human beings. But throughout history various individuals and tribes have violated this commandment. They still do. But never without rationalizing the behavior. A tribal group, for example, may call itself “the human beings” to justify killing the non-human beings in other tribes. Even the Nazis had to dehumanize their victims to justify their mass extermination policy, and every war that has ever been fought has come with rationalizations. The euphemisms defenders of abortion use to dehumanize the unborn is an example of the same thing.
Let me state the principle again; you know someone is doing something they know is wrong when they begin to rationalize, because we never have to rationalize what we know to be right.
In addition to the sixth commandment, there are other moral principles we just know, or rather, that we cannot not know. We may forget or even suppress these things, but they are there nevertheless.
