What is knowledge? Google defines it as "the facts, information, and skills acquired by a person through
experience or education; the theoretical or practical understanding of a
subject. Is that all to knowledge? No, Google only used the empirical sense of the definition. What's that? Empirical means knowledge learned through experiences, such as "Stoves are hot, or "Sound is a wave," things you would learn from experience or education. That's not all that knowledge is. It can be what's called Cognitive - knowledge that you already know, such as how to cry, or how to eat, things that you're born with. The last one is Revelation - this is knowledge that God would allow you to see about himself. Seeing as the last one does not relate to the immediate physical world, the majority of this world does not recognize it. This lead the first two parts of knowledge to be separated from Revelation into two distinct parts, the Upper Story - dealing with Revelation and spiritual matters, and the Lower Story - dealing with Empirical and Cognitive knowledge and the material world. The line between the two is called the Line of Despair, I'm not joking, it's described as a Line of Despair because of the trouble it caused philosophers trying to relate the two.
So you know how you know something, but how much do you know? 4 Greek philosophers attempted to answer this question. The first was Herodotus. He mused that the world was ever changing, you could not step in the same stream twice, people grow old, seasons change, basically the entire world is in flux, it's impossible to know anything, let alone everything. Parmenides had a completely different viewpoint. He believed that the world was static, that it never changed, and it was our senses that made people believe things were changing. He believed to find knowledge you must rely on reason and not the senses. Socrates believed that you couldn't learn anything, that those who believed they had knowledge were fools. Plato, a student of Socrates, believed that there were two sides of the world, one in which we perceive with our senses, and then a base layer made of the things that were in constant flux. Lastly is a student of Plato, Aristotle. He believed that Plato's base layer is connected with the sensible layer, thus allowing us to gain knowledge from observing with our senses.
These philosophies dominated man's thinking to about 1200 AD, when a man named Thomas Aquinas came around. He came up with the story model I gave above, the world having an Upper and Lower story. There are only 3 ways man can think according to this, 1. Focus on the Upper Story with a diminish on the Lower, 2. Focus on the Lower Story with a diminish on the Upper, and 3. Acknowledge the fact that they both exist and treat each equally (unified field of knowledge). Up until the Renaissance period, man focused on the 1st option. This is where the Church was a head of the government, paintings featured heavenly hosts rather than man, etc. In the Renaissance, around 1200 AD the thinking switched over to the 2nd option, this is where governments started taking root, artists such as Leonardo Da Vinci, and Michelangelo came around. It wasn't until the Reformation that the Upper Story was recognized again, but the leaders of the Reformation (Martin Luther, John Calvin, etc.) kept the Lower Story in view as well, creating a balanced sense of knowledge. Luther wrote about the Reformation: "If you read all the annals of the past, you will find no century like this since the birth of Christ. Such building and planting such good living and dressing, such enterprise in commerce, such a stir in the arts, has not been since Christ came into the world. And how numerous are the sharp and intelligent people who leave nothing hidden and unturned: even a boy of twenty years knows more nowadays than was known formerly by twenty doctors of divinity."
Why am I telling you this? Because it's a good thing to know where the philosophy of the day, the arts, and culture come from. Using the Upper Story - Lower Story scale you can determine someone's worldview easier and be able to make judgements about your own. One of the reasons Christianity and Atheism is so different is a different focus on the scale, Christians have more of a balanced view, whereas Atheists only pay attention to the Lower Story.
Until Next Time,
Conner
