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This series is titled: Praise God for Christianity: No Intellectual Progress Without It!Part 1 can be found here, Part 2 here, and Part 3 here.

There may not be a presupposition more fundamental to human existence than the basic reliability of sense perception. Although inherently phenomenological in nature, sense perception is one of the primary mediums through which man experiences and interprets reality.[1] As such, it is impossible for humans to function without assuming their senses of hearing, sight, smell, taste, and touch to provide viable information about the extramental world. Two examples are in order to prove the validity of these assertions:

1. Over the duration of a common man’s lifetime, it is unlikely that ample thought will be devoted to discerning the extent that sense perception can be trusted. Nonetheless, a macrolevel canvass of ordinary human life illustrates the inseparability between intelligible experience in reality and presupposing the basic reliability of sense perception. Broadly considered, the overwhelming majority of people believe, at least in practice, that other human beings are real people, with real emotions, and real memories. When encountering a chair in a room, most individuals don’t begin doing a thorough investigation to prove that the chair is not an illusion; rather, they assume their eyesight and sense of touch to be generally reliable. In the final analysis, regardless of their worldview or ideological persuasion, the average citizen’s life will showcase a priori assumptions about the basic reliability of sense perception for understanding the cosmos.
2. Despite the remarkable advancements that continue to be made in the realm of scientific academia, the basic reliability of human sense perception remains a central—and immutable—presupposition. This observation is succinctly delineated by Nancy R. Pearcy and Charles B. Thaxton in their volume, The Soul of Science: Christian Faith and Natural Philosophy.

Whatever philosophers of science may say, most working scientists remain realists[2]—not only in regard to the ontological status of the quantum world… but also in regard to scientific knowledge. The realist believes that theories aim to describe the world and therefore can be true or false, not just useful, and that science consists largely of discovery, not just construction. These concepts are the stock-in-trade of every scientist. As Barbour notes, “scientists usually assume realism in their work.”[3]

Since the basic reliability of sense perception must be assumed in order to evaluate whether one’s senses are accurate, it is foolish to dismiss this paradigmatic element of human experience. Inevitably, even in the act of conducting an experiment on the human senses, the results would have to be ascertained through the senses themselves in order to determine their accuracy:[4]

• How can one have their hearing competency tested without utilizing another listener to measure their effectiveness?
• How can one test the quality of their sight without depending on another person’s eyes to evaluate the results of the test?
• How can one examine their capability to smell, taste, or touch without drawing comparisons to the capabilities that are embodied by others?

In practice, every human being presupposes the basic reliability of their senses. Thus, when pressed to do so against the backdrop of their daily behavior, every human being will acknowledge this philosophical distinctive as a precondition for intelligibility in the universe. However, a consensus on the fact of the basic reliability of sense perception will certainly not entail unanimity on the basis for why man’s senses are generally trustworthy. While there are many hypotheses that seek to explain the reason and purpose undergirding sense perception,[5] it is the author’s contention that the Christian worldview offers the most objective and persuasive explanation for this facet of human experience. In his synthesis of Van Til’s Apologetic, Greg L. Bahnsen reveals how human sense perception finds its origination within the framework of biblical Christianity.

[The Bible teaches that] God created man with eyes, ears, hands, etc. in order that he might experience His glory, wisdom, and power as it is manifested through the creation (see, e.g., Pss. 8:1; 19:1-6), and also that he might learn about the creation in order to exercise dominion over it in serving God’s ends (Gen. 1:26-28; 2:15, 19-20; Ps. 8:6-9). Man’s possession of this [ability] is specifically tied to his being “the image of God”… Scripture always takes for granted that men were given their senses to gain knowledge [of the world] (Prov. 20:12; Ps. 94:9-10; Matt. 24:32; cf. 7:20; John 13:35; Acts 2:22; 12:4; 15:7; 26:3, 26)… Because God has already thought out or planned the details of nature and the events of history, there are casual connections, meaning, and purpose to be discovered by man when he uses his powers of observation and applies his intellect to what he finds. Except where God has verbally revealed things about the natural order or the course of history, man cannot determine God’s thoughts regarding them and so must “look and see” with his senses… [Therefore], empirical methods of knowing can be made intelligible only within the Christian worldview. This is especially obvious when one considers that such methods assume that nature is uniform and that the knower’s powers of observation correlate with or adapt to the extramental objects of knowledge. [Non-Christian] worldviews cannot make sense of the possibility of empirical knowledge.[6]

Apart from the Christian worldview, there is no basis for believing in the reliability of human sense perception because there is no other worldview that grounds intelligible experience in reality as the direct byproduct of being fashioned in the image of reality’s Creator.[7] When viewed through a non-Christian lens, the extramental world could ultimately be nothing more than a computer simulation or an assortment of random chemical reactions in the brain. As previously stated, the non-Christian worldview can recognize the fact of the basic reliability of sense perception, but it cannot provide the basis for why man’s senses are generally trustworthy. On the other hand, Christianity provides an external standard to clarify that each person’s sense perception is broadly satisfactory: the Holy Bible. Despite human nature and the created order being corrupted by the Fall—resulting in the inability for sense perception to function perfectly at all times (Gen. 3:17-19; Rom. 8:20-22)—Scripture still indicates that man retains the ability to adequately garner empirical knowledge about the cosmos.[8] Therefore, the Christian has a responsibility to graciously challenge the unbeliever to make sense of this unavoidable facet of their everyday life, and establish an objective (non-arbitrary) basis for the preconditions of intelligibility (2 Tim. 2:24-26; 1 Pet. 3:15; Jude 3). May God use such efforts to manifest the philosophical cogency of Christianity, and ultimately, to lead perishing sinners to saving faith in the One who is the way, the truth, and the life (John 14:6).

Soli Deo Gloria!

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[1] The author is well aware of the plentitude of scientific and philosophical debates surrounding the reliability of human sense perception, largely due the rise of Einstein’s “Theory of Relativity” and advancements made in the theory of “Quantum Mechanics.” Nevertheless, the debates surrounding those topics are inconsequential to the crux of this article’s thesis. Namely, human sense perception is basically reliable for acquiring and interpreting information in the world of phenomena. For more on the theories of Relativity and Quantum Mechanics, see Russell Stannard, Relativity: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008); John Polkinghorne, Quantum Theory: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002).

[2] As stated in Heidi A. Campbell and Heather Looy, eds., A Science and Religion Primer (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2009), “realists argue that we are justified in believing that the world exists independently of our ideas about it. Antirealists disagree, and they argue that it is reasonable to believe that the way the world is depends, at least in part, on our thinking about it… The majority of realists are scientific realists. They believe that the success of science justifies the belief that the theories of science are true and that the unobservable entities that science postulates exist” (188).

[3] Nancy R. Pearcey and Charles B. Thaxton, The Soul of Science: Christian Faith and Natural Philosophy (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 1998), 210.

[4] Jason Lisle, The Ultimate Proof of Creation: Resolving the Origins Debate (Green Forest, AR: Master Books, 2015), 102.

[5] Some of the more technical, philosophical treatments on the reliability of human sense perception are developed in the following resources: Tim Crane and Craig French, “The Problem of Perception,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Stanford University, August 18, 2021), https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/perception-problem/.; Nicholas Silins, “Perceptual Experience and Perceptual Justification,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Stanford University, December 10, 2021), https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/perception-justification/.

[6] Greg L. Bahnsen, Van Til’s Apologetic: Readings and Analysis (Phillipsburg, NJ: P & R Publishing, 1998), 242-244.

[7] For a flyover survey of the predominant worldview options that have arisen throughout history, see James N. Anderson, What’s Your Worldview?: An Interactive Approach to Life’s Big Questions (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2014).

[8] Cornelius Van Til, An Introduction to Systematic Theology: Prolegomena and the Doctrines of Revelation, Scripture, and God, ed. William Edgar (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R Publishing, 2007), 167.