KNOWLEDGE AND "KNOWLEDGE"
229
The most important piece of knowledge allegedly gained by
metaphysical rather than scientific method is, of course, the existence
of God- most important only if God
is
conceived as having Per–
sonality or Mind.
If
God lacked Personality or Mind and was just
another item in the catalogue of cosmic entities, then no matter how
vast its dimensions it would still lack value for man. According to
Maritain, whom I quote as representative of a type of thinking, we
can have
demonstrative
knowledge that God is an "infinite per–
sonality" and "absolute subject." "... For we know by certain
knowledge, more certain than that of mathematics, that God is simple,
one, good, omniscient, all-powerful, free. . . . Weare more certain
of the divine perfections than of the beating of our own hearts."
Since we cannot be certain that any existing thing has any properties
unless we are certain that it exists, we must have demonstrative
knowledge that God exists.
This calls attention to a fatal ambiguity in the meaning of
"demonstrative" and "empirical" in much discussion of the argu–
ments for the existence of God.
If
"demonstrative" means the use
of a deductive method which draws from
a priori
or tautological
statements certain implications, then we cannot have demonstrative
knowledge of anything but the concepts or meanings of pure logic
and mathematics.
If
one rejects the ontological argument for the
existence of God, it is difficult to see how anything can be demon–
stratively known to exist with a greater certainty than the truths of
mathematics. And although under special conditions I can hear the
beating of my own heart, I am more certain that "twice three are
six" than that "it is my
heart
I hear beating" or that "it is
my
heart
that is beating." It is more likely that I may some day be compelled
by evidence to withdraw the latter statements than to deny the
former one.
If
by "empirical" we mean that we start from the facts of ex–
perience, then any explanation of these facts which postulates a
transcendent cause is arbitrary, because it is a fact of experience that
all
other
causal explanations of the phenomena of experience operate
within the realm of experience. The finite
is
explained by the finite,
what is in time now by what was in time then, and so on indefinitely.
This
seems to me to be true independently of the nature of our
analysis of the concept of cause, whether we interpret it as a form
