Dangers of Requiring Complete Knowledge

by Luke Nix

The Lack of Knowledge
A while back I wrote a post regarding our lack of complete knowledge and how, rather than being a bad thing, it is actually a good thing. I’ve also written regarding the fact that our knowledge will never be complete, which is something that we must get used to and be comfortable with.
This is true regardless of which worldview that one holds. However, many people act as if that they require complete knowledge and understanding of a worldview before they decide to accept it as true. They argue that since they don’t want to blindly accept a worldview that may be false, they must not accept a worldview unless they have certainty that it does not contain any falsehoods. On the surface, this is being quite careful. But we must remember that while we are investigating one worldview, we are holding another- that we are not investigating (maybe we haven’t ever, maybe we have in the past). I’ve heard it commonly put that “the skeptic must be skeptical of his skepticism” to avoid being dishonest. Even skepticism must be investigated and justified.

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This Requirement Applied in Crime Investigations
However, this doesn’t really come up as an issue until someone possesses much evidence for the truth of the worldview that they are investigating but still do not accept it, due to some unanswered questions or some mystery that they want prior to acceptance. In chapter 6 of his book, Cold-Case Christianity, homicide detective J. Warner Wallace (of PleaseConvinceMe.com and Stand to Reason) compares this situation to his own investigations of crime scenes:

When we have overwhelming evidence pointing in a particular direction we may have to get comfortable with the fact that there is some ambiguity related to other items at the scene (pg 104).

Wallace goes on to explain that every detail of a crime cannot necessarily be known, neither will the detective be able to make sense of every item present, but that does not prevent the detective from concluding from the majority of the evidence at the scene that a crime took place, what crime took place, and who committed the crime…

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Faithful Thinkers: Dangers of Requiring Complete Knowledge