Toward A Christian Worldview - Faith Presbyterian Church Reformed

Chapter 2: Christianity and the Basic Elements of Philosophy
SECOND, empiricism maintains that all knowledge originates in
the senses. According to the empiricist, ordinary experience from our
physical senses yields knowledge. In empiricism, the scientific
method of investigation is stressed. Surely, it is alleged, the numerous
triumphs of science in the modern age demonstrate the truth of the
empirical method. Science, of course, is based on observation, and
repetitive and supposedly independent observation is emphasized.
The idea being, that with repetitive observation, knowledge and certainty
are increased.
In a consistent empirical epistemology, the mind is considered to
be a tabula rasa (“blank tablet”) at birth. It has no innate structure,
form, or ideas. Therefore, all knowledge must come through the
senses.
While rationalists proceed by deduction, empiricists use inductive
reasoning as well. One collects his experiences and observations and
draws inferences and conclusions from them. This empirical knowledge
is aposteriori, i.e., it comes after and through experience. One
must be able to smell, taste, feel, hear, or see something in order to
know it. Once something is experienced (or “sensed”), then the mind,
which is a blank tablet prior to experience, somehow remembers,
imagines, combines, transposes, categorizes, and formulates the sensory
experience into knowledge.
The philosophical problems with empiricism are legion, some of
which will be exposed here. First, all inductive arguments are formal
logical fallacies. In inductive study, each argument begins with particular
premises and ends with a universal conclusion. The difficulty is
that it is not possible to collect enough experiences on any subject to
reach a universal conclusion. Simply because the system depends on
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