KNOWLEDGE AND "KNOWLEDGE"
223
of anything, man, rabbits or stars, must exclude some other assump–
tions about their nature. All assumptions, as
assumptions,
in this re–
spect are on a par. The question once more becomes: are our as–
sumptions arbitrary or reasonable?
Second, the answer may be that this conception of knowledge
does not arbitrarily and in advance rule out God, soul, immortality,
angels and devils as possible objects of knowledge. Many naturalists
have declared that statements asserting the existence of these entities
are doubtful or false, and such declarations could not have been
made if the very possibility of these entities had been ruled out in
advance as meaningless.
As
we have seen, if it makes no sense to
say that we have knowledge of the existence of what
is
meaningless,
it makes no more sense to deny the existence of the meaningless. To
most naturalists, in contradistinction to many supernaturalists, the
problem
is
not so much
what
God is as
that
he is. Further, there
are some who pledge allegiance to scientific method as the only
avenue by which knowledge can be gained who believe that the
existence of such entities
is
still an open question, or who are un–
abashedly satisfied that the logic of experimental science makes belief
in the existence of supernatural powers and entities at least as
plausible as belief in electrons, if not more so.
The third, and perhaps most crucial, answer to this objection
is that it can be shown that all human beings in their everyday ex–
perience are guided by the conception of knowledge as scientific
knowledge. To deny this is palpably insincere. A Platonist might in–
vidiously dub all empirical knowledge as "opinion," but no matter
what one calls such knowledge, one acts on it, and to achieve one's
ends one must necessarily act on it. The burden of proof rests en–
tirely upon those who assert that there exists another kind of knowl–
edge over and above technological, common sense, empirical knowl–
edge, and the scientific knowledge which is an outgrowth and
development of it. It is not enough to maintain that such a body of
knowledge exists because people claim they are guided by it to solve
specific problems. People do not always
do
as they say. It is not
even enough to establish that such a body of knowledge exists to
show that people
seem
to act on what they say, as do those who
profess to be guided by astrology, numerology, angelology and Chris–
tian Science. Some connection must be established between the dif-
