Reconstructing Ice Cubes

Imagine you find a small puddle of water on your kitchen floor. Maybe there are a few unique contours or pieces of dust. You wonder how it got there, and it occurs to you that one of your kids probably filled a glass with ice and dropped a piece. A quick survey of the kitchen reveals a glass full of melting ice cubes and the obvious purple color of grape Kool-Aid. What was the exact contour of the ice cube that dropped onto the floor? If you open your freezer, you’ll notice the shape of the remaining cubes, approximate their volume and determine with confidence that the puddle on the floor is indeed the remains of one of your ice cubes. Because of the evidence in front of you, you can form a piece of knowledge: a justified, true belief about how the water came to be on the floor. Your knowledge is justified because you have good reasons to believe what you see: the empty glass, the size of the puddle, the ice in your freezer and the urchin with the Kool-Aid moustache. You believe you know what happened based on this evidence and when you confront your child and the little tyke confesses (unlikely, but it’s a thought experiment, roll with it) to dropping the ice you have confirmed the truth of your belief. You know what happened. 

But imagine for a minute that inside your freezer is the entire world of frozen water. On one side are pieces of formed ice: cubes, chips, chunks, shaved ice, semi-circles, and whatever else you can imagine. On the other side are all the various forms of snow: ice balls, big flakes, medium flakes, flakes like dust, sleet, freezing rain and hail. And let’s not forget natural ice: icicles, frozen ponds, ice floes, and icebergs. Now the complexity of your identification of the exact frozen material that formed the puddle on the floor has gotten quite a bit more difficult. While the size suggests one of the semi-circles, it could just as easily melted from a small mound of snowflakes. The harder you peer at the puddle, the more you realize that answering the question has become much more difficult. Especially if there is no errant child with a Kool-Aid moustache running about. You eliminate many of the natural ice formations as too large to create such a small puddle, but you are still faced with too many choices. You simply don’t know what ice formed the puddle. You can reconstruct any number of possible scenarios which explain the puddle, but you cannot say that you ‘know’ what happened because there is a not enough evidence to narrow your options. You can have good reasons, but not believe them. You can have strong beliefs, but weak reasons. You might even hold the truth, but have neither good reasons nor strong beliefs. Such is the conundrum of knowledge. 

Applied to Biblical studies, this problem of knowledge creates a lot of tension within Christianity. Some of the questions we ask just don’t have enough evidence to provide a confident response. I remember my Pentateuch students peppering me with question after question: Do you think dinosaurs were in the Garden of Eden? Do you think Moses wrote the Pentateuch (see Michael’s earlier post)? What about the flood, was it local or universal? My answers go like this: yep, most of it, and universal. Now ask me: why do you believe these things? You see we have moved from my belief to my justification for that belief. The nagging question is: are my good reasons enough to make my belief a statement of knowledge? Is it actually true? Well, even though I have good reasons and I’m probably right (you agree with me, don’t you?), I don’t feel comfortable calling at least one of the above assertions ‘knowledge.’ This is the curse we face when positing a reconstruction of history, there are some things you don’t have enough information to say that you know what happened. You see, the wise believer learns that there is more than one way to reconstruct the historical situation from the ‘puddle’ of evidence which we have before us. He or she learns to make arguments based on good evidence, but to also recognize the difference between knowledge and belief. He or she also learns the difference between a good question (one for which there is enough evidence to form an opinion) and an interesting question which simply does not have an answer. For example: did Adam and Eve have navels? Believe what you want friend, but they didn’t. I know it.