Tue 5/7/2024 9:31 AM
On May 7, 1711, three hundred and thirteen years ago today, Scottish philosopher David Hume was born in Lawnmarket, Edinburgh, Scotland. Hume is best known for his idea that all human knowledge comes only from experience—that we can know only what our senses impress upon us, not what our minds can understand from those experiences.
It led him to declare, for example, that it is no more reasonable to believe that the sun will rise tomorrow than to believe that it will not. Hume thought that just because something happened today, or even every day for the last thousand years, that does not tell us anything about whether it is likely to happen in the future—even though we may act as though it does.
This is a very different view of knowledge from that of the Bible, which declares that humans can have knowledge of God and His creation, precisely because God has revealed it to us. “For the Lord gives wisdom; from his mouth come knowledge and understanding.” It is why Ecclesiastes 1:5 can declare, unlike Hume, that “[t]he sun rises and the sun sets, and hurries back to where it rises.”
Hume’s theory of knowledge got me wondering about what he thought regarding his own words? Are they just a bundle of experiences too—just markings on a page that hit our eyes and give us an experience? Or are they more than that?
In any event, my question for you is this: What do you know? How do you know it? And how do you know that you know it?
Have a wonderful day.
