Thoughts from Mark "Hat" Rackley

Send one of your number to get your brother; the rest of you will be kept in prison, so that your words may be tested to see if you are telling the truth. If you are not, then as surely as Pharaoh lives, you are spies!”

• Genesis 42:16

Then the woman said to Elijah, “Now I know that you are a man of God and that the word of the Lord from your mouth is the truth.”

• 1 Kings 17:24

To the Jews who had believed him, Jesus said, “If you hold to my teaching, you are really my disciples. Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.”

• John 8:31-32

Jesus answered, “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.

• John 14:6

“Born near Verdun, France, Nicolaus of Autrecourt studied theology at the Sorbonne in Paris. Unusually for a philosopher of the medieval period, he explored the logic of skepticism, concluding that truth and the truth of its contradiction are not logically compatible, so that absolute truth or knowledge, and the causal links between events or reactions, cannot be uncovered by logic alone. In 1346, Pope Clement VI condemned his ideas as heretical. He was ordered to recant his statements and his books were burnt in public. With the exception of his Universal Treatise and a few letters, little of his work survives.”

• Sam Atkinson (senior editor), The Philosophy Book, Big Ideas Simply Explained

Nicolaus of Autrecourt (1298-1369) was a French medieval philosopher and Scholastic theologian.  He was possibly the only philosophical skeptic philosopher of medieval times.  Thus, the Pope felt his views of being skeptical about foundational truths should be silenced.  Very little of his works remain, oddly many in the court proceedings of his trial for heresy.  Thus, it is not clear whether Nicolaus inspired the philosophical skepticism of David Hume or Rene Descartes.

Philosophical skepticism is found in two forms: denying the possibility of true knowledge or suspending any judgment of true knowledge until more evidence is provided.

But as for the truth of a contradiction of truth, one cannot logically get to that point.  A contradiction of truth is when the truth is true, but the exact opposite of that truth is true.  It is obvious that the conclusion of Nicolaus is true.  You cannot get there logically.

An example of a contradiction of truth, as one defining source puts it, can be found in the following sentence.  “This sentence is false.”  For the sentence to be true, the sentence must be a contradiction of the truth.  But the sentence violates the basic principles of logic.

But, the skepticism of Nicolaus stems from the second half of his argument, but there is context left out in this short comment about his philosophy.

To provide context, I will tell a story from my early childhood.  My mother would drop me off at my grandmother’s house when I was in the second grade.  When it was time to walk to school, I would walk the mile to the school complex.  These days in Mississippi, they call it an attendance center when elementary, middle school, and high school are on the same campus, but in my day, all I knew was that I walked to school.  I walked to the street.  I turned left.  At the bottom of the hill, I turned right.  After walking almost all of the mile, I came to a gasoline station and one of the few traffic lights in the town.  I turned right again.  The high school was on the left, just past the county library, but I had to walk to the crossing guard to cross the busy Main Street in town.

Okay, that is what I did almost every time.  But one time, they let out school early due to a tornado warning.  The turns were reversed on the way home, but that day, I was scared.  Instead of walking to the bottom of the hill and then turning left onto my grandmother’s street, I turned left one block earlier.  I knew there was an empty lot – really a lot big enough to build two or three houses – and I thought I could shave a minute off my walk by cutting through those empty lots diagonally.  I did not count on almost everyone on my grandmother’s street having fenced backyards.  One very old house diagonally across the street from my grandmother’s house was my one escape from the prison I had put myself into.

It is logical to walk the same way everyday.  You know the route.  It gets you where you are going efficiently, but then human nature gets in the way, and you change things.  It is not logical to change what works and works well, but it can happen.

Thus, Nicolaus adds skepticism to his logical conclusion, but he knows human nature and the illogical might happen.  Thus, do we really know anything?  After the same thing happens hundreds of times, could the next time lead to a frightened little second grader who takes a shortcut and almost finds himself trapped – so close to home and safety, but there is a fence in the way.

By the way, that was a very true story, and the superintendent and the principles of each of the schools got a lot of letters in that the school was a better place of safety, huddled under each little desk, than on the road, walking home.  In those days, we had nuclear fallout drills.  You did not even need to tell the children that there was a tornado bearing down on the school, just call for a nuclear fallout drill and have everyone sit underneath their desks for a while.  Make it a game.

As for the tornado, it lifted into the cloud and there was no damage to any homes, just a lot of scared elementary students.  And tornadoes are famous for leaving odd patterns of destruction.  It defies logic that a tornado will take a straight line of destruction but then spare one house in the middle of all the destruction.

And that, according to Nicolaus would be another instance where logic did not prevail, and thus, do you know what the superintendent of schools will decide the next time?  Do you know whose house will be destroyed by the next tornado?

But the pope was probably right in this case.  Philosophical skepticism can get so strange that you even question foundational truth.  As C.S. Lewis said about that, “if their minds are open to such things, at least they should keep their mouth shut.”  And so it was with the pope, he forced the books of Nicolaus of Autrecourt to be burned at the stake instead of Nicolaus himself.  But he made Nicolaus mute on the subject. To have freedom of speech, we must allow differing viewpoints, but in scholastic institutions, can we survive by teaching the next generation that there is no such thing as objective truth? Our entire society will collapse as a result, but maybe that is the goal of many of these so-called teachers who teach the contradiction of truth.

If you like these Tuesday morning essays about philosophy and other “heavy topics,” but you think you missed a few, you can use this LINK. I have set up a page off the home page for links to these Tuesday morning posts. I will continue to modify the page as I add more.

Soli Deo Gloria.  Only to God be the Glory.