No Good Reason To Be An Atheist: Part III - Pragmatism

Pragmatism basically says that we know something is certain if it gives us success in achieving our goals. In reality, pragmatists say “We don’t care about certainty. Certainty is just an intellectual game that’s been played in the history of Western philosophy. We don’t need what’s called epistemological certainty, all we need is success. We need success in building theories that will help us control our environment or achieve the goals that we set for ourselves.” So, let’s say you have epistemological theories X, Y, and Z and it turns out that only theory Y leads to success in what I want to do. If that’s the only one that will give me success or if it leads to more success than Z or X do, relatively speaking, then we prefer theory Y or methodology Y as it would be called for a pragmatist. So we give up the traditional questions of epistemology: “What is truth? What is certainty? How do we know what we know?” We give up those questions in favor of questions such as: “How are we going to get along best in the world? What method is going to gain for us the things we want to gain?” Now, to avoid arbitrariness and question begging, the pragmatist has to necessarily appeal to some external justification for their position, forcing them to go outside of epistemology and do what is called “naturalizing” their procedures to reduce epistemology to another branch of science. This justification for their position must be descriptive in nature claiming that a given agent succeeds in getting to his given goals if he adheres to a given system or method. And there are a number of possibilities. There are those who say that we must naturalize epistemology to psychology. Others say we should naturalize it to biology. Still others say that we ought to naturalize it to sociology. Some say we should naturalize it to anthropology.

Now, the trouble with all of these naturalizing epistemologies, all these pragmatic approaches (which reduce to one branch of descriptive science or another), is that they answer the request for a justification of science by skirting the question. Epistemology is a normative endeavor, it’s not simply a descriptive enterprise that says, “This agent using this method will achieve that goal.” The quest for justification is an evaluative quest just because the alternative goals need to be appreciated as to their respective values. In other words, if you tell me, “Use that method which gives you the best success in accomplishing your goals” then the question becomes, “Well, which goals should I have?” Should they be anthropological, biological, psychological, aesthetic? What are the proper goals in life? The pragmatist forces us to know what the meaning of man, the world, and life is. And yet, if anything, that is the theory that tells us, “All those are silly questions!” And so the pragmatist ends up without justification for knowledge either! And now, you may be saying, “What are we going to do? Nobody has any answers! Look, we have to have certainty. Relativism’s self-refuting, foundationalism is in disrepute, pragmatism ignores the question, so what’s left?” Well, by God’s grace, in part four of this series, I want to briefly offer an alternative, namely, Christian Transcendentalism.