Let’s say the quiet part out loud: the moment science calls itself “a body of knowledge,” it has already walked out of the room it claims to run.
Knowledge is invisible. You cannot weigh it, photograph it, or run a control group on it. It is not a sensation. It is a conceptual relation—propositions that are true and justified. Falsifiability, the favorite bouncer at the door of modern science, checks IDs for empirical vulnerability. Knowledge does not have one. So the claim that science is knowledge fails the very test science likes to apply to everyone else. That is not a minor bookkeeping error. That is the house declaring that the foundation does not meet the building code.
Scientists use a whole parade of non-falsifiable things in every paper, every sentence, every syllable. The three laws of logic—identity, non-contradiction, excluded middle—are treated like sacred ordinances. You do not get to contradict yourself in a lab report and then shrug. The reason logic is not falsifiable, in any context, is because logic is self-justifying as a logical law. Something that is self-justifying is not falsifiable. To use it or deny it, you use it. Scripture is similar.
The three laws of logic are easy to demonstrate this way, such as by asking a person to deny their existence without using them; or deny the law of contradiction without using the law of contradiction. Other presuppositions might not have the same super easy and tight demonstration as contradiction does to show its self-justifying nature, but other presuppositions have a similar aspect. For example, knowledge itself is not corporeal; it is incorporeal. Thus, it is not testable, and so not falsifiable. In addition to this, if you deny knowledge, you must use knowledge to deny knowledge, and so it is self-refuting. You must use it to deny it.
How about other presuppositional things? Motion is not something a camera captures raw; successive patches of light do not contain the concept of a boy throwing a ball. The concept is smuggled in so the data can mean anything. Causality is not photographed either. Difference, time, number, relation, intelligibility itself—none of these are sensations. None of them can be falsified by looking harder. Yet every scientific statement deploys them as if they were settled law. They are used like gods that must not be trespassed. Then the same people turn around and inform the rest of the world that if a claim is not falsifiable, it is not serious. The selectivity is so clean it almost looks intentional.
This is not a complaint about practical work. Pragmatic utility is fine. A model can be incomplete or even false about the deeper structure of reality and still be repeatable enough to build bridges, design engines, or point a rocket in roughly the right direction. Popper was relatively careful on this point: theories remain conjectures. Survival under testing is not the same as having secured knowledge of how things actually are. Stay in that lane—useful procedures that continue to work under the conditions tried so far—and the falsifiability talk can function as a practical filter without collapsing. The moment the language shifts from “this continues to work” to “this is knowledge,” the standard has been left behind. Knowledge was never going to clear it.
So as long as science admits upfront that it is not logical, that it has no knowledge, and that it is only for pragmatic utility—and that falsifiability is only useful in this narrow sense—then science’s output is falsifiable. But the moment it goes beyond this to say it is logical and has knowledge, it denies the principle it preaches. And in doing so, science loses all justification to demand a falsifiable standard that it already denies.
The same problem reappears when the conversation turns to aliens. Parts of media and official culture have shown a preference for an advanced-alien residual over a demonic or fallen-angel residual for certain UAP phenomena. The demonic reading, in the form advanced by people such as Pastor Troy Brewer and others, treats the encounters as subject to the authority of Christ. That points toward the biblical God. The alien residual can be framed as a remote scientific possibility that does not immediately require that step. Yet when the topic is the foundations of knowledge, logic, and intelligibility, the alien option does not help. An advanced alien intelligence operating inside a naturalistic frame still cannot ground non-sensory categories in sensation or material processes. Any explanation that stayed strictly naturalistic would leave the same categories unaccounted for. Any explanation that treated them as real and non-derived would have stepped outside naturalism. Looking to aliens for a naturalistic answer is not a solution. It is a relocation of the problem—one more kick of the can down a road that still ends at the same wall.
Sensation and observation are not a true starting point for knowledge. They are occasions that already require prior conceptual structure in order to become data at all. The structure is not extracted from the sensory field; it is brought to it. Science, when it claims knowledge, borrows that structure constantly while refusing to account for it on its own terms. The demand for falsifiability is then applied most vigorously to claims that would force an acknowledgment of the dependence. The irony is not subtle. The thing science claims to be is not falsifiable. The tools it uses in every publication are not falsifiable. And the preferred alternative residual for phenomena that might otherwise point beyond naturalism does not fix the accounting either. What remains is a set of useful procedures that can continue to work, and a set of foundations that the procedures never justified.
[See Vincent Cheung, “Paul and the Philosophers,” which helped me better understand some of the presuppositional points I make here about motion, logic and cause, and of course, my understanding of biblical presuppositionalism I preach in all my materials.]
Empiricism walks up to the Knowledge Club door holding one chip. Sensation. A color. A pressure. A sound. That is the whole stake. Not revelation added later when the argument gets lonely. Not logic smuggled in as a house rule. If the starting point is sensation, the starting point is sensation. Think about that for three seconds. If sensation is the starting point, then that is all the starting point is. Anything that shows up in the conclusion and was not in that chip is a void. Not a hunch. Not “it feels solid.” A missing license.
A newcomer can get lost in the word epistemology. Forget the word for a second. A starting point for knowledge has one job. It has to license the first claim. A claim, here, is a sentence that can be true or false. “This is a mountain.” “The cup is on the table.” “I am sensing.” Those have a thing, and something said about the thing. A color event does not. It happens. The ticket booth at the door wants a sentence for the ticket to be valid. The chip is a patch of gray. Already the transaction looks funny. The booth attendant holds it up: “Where’s the sentence? This happens. It doesn’t say anything.”
People hear this and reach for the lights coming on, the cup where the hand expected, the plane that landed. Those are great stories about feelings of confidence. They are not evidence. A long streak of confident feelings is still a streak of feelings. Confidence and feelings are not subjects and predicates; they are not invisible premises of true or false. The question is whether the sensation contains the conclusion. It does not. The logical voids are still there. I will be using “logical void” and “hole” as the same.
Logical Void One: a sensation cannot justify a sensation
Vincent Cheung puts the knife in with a plain question (Sermonettes, Vol. 1: Questions for Empiricists), the kind a newcomer can ask without a philosophy degree. If information comes from sensation, how do you know you are having a sensation? Do you sense the sensation? Then do you sense the sensation that senses the sensation? If the answer is always another sensation, the stack never lands. This is a true definition of being circular or begging the question. You are looking for the bottom of a pile of mirrors and calling it a foundation. Cute. If the answer is not another sensation, you have already left the foundation of empiricism to certify empiricism with a different foundation. You stepped outside the sensation to stamp the sensation as valid. When this is done, sensation is no longer a starting point.
Try it in the kitchen. The light is on. You want to know that you are seeing the light. If seeing is the only way to know, then you need a seeing of the seeing. Then a seeing of that. The light itself never said, “You are seeing me.” That sentence was extra. You do not even get to name the method. “Sensation” is a word. A word is not a color. Naming the method was a non-sensation doing the work the sensation was supposed to do.
The absence is worse, and this is the part that gets ridiculous. Do you ever not have a sensation? How do you know that? A lack of sensation is not a sensation. The report “I am not sensing that” is a non-sensation licensing a claim about sensation. You cannot sense “not doctored,” “not an atom,” “not a second moon,” or “I do not know this.” There is no color of absence. There is no pressure shaped like “not.” The moment you know an absence, is the moment sensation stopped being foundation.
That is begging the question in the strict sense. Not the loose sense of “I don’t like your tone.” The thing to be proved — that sensation can justify — is assumed in the attempt, or dropped the moment the proof needs a non-sensation. Sensation cannot pay for its own admission. It cannot pay for the sentence “this is a sensation.” A start has one job: make knowledge possible. This one cannot even introduce itself. The chip looks for the bottom of a pile of mirrors and still gets bounced at the window.
Calling the sensation patch “data” is the same loan, taken out early, with a nicer font. Data means something that counts, that differs from noise, that can be read. A color event does not contain “this is data or information.” The word already imported intelligibility, difference, and “this one counts.” The patch never issued those. If you need a non-sensation to know that you are sensing, the sensing was never the start.
Logical Void Two: the categories are not in the patch
Suppose, for the sake of argument, the first hole is ignored and a patch is simply had. Be generous. Hand the empiricist the gray slope and do not ask how he knows he has it. Knowledge still does not start. Knowledge is a premise that can be true or false. A subject, a predicate, a copula. “This is a mountain.” A sensation is an event. Events are not true or false. They happen. Rain happens. A sentence about rain can be wrong or true. Knowledge about the event is not the event itself. Not the same categories. The sentence is invisible. The look is not invisible. One is incorporeal, the other is corporeal. One is non-data, the other is data. One has meaning and the other has no meaning.
The gray slope in the eyes is not the mountain. This is the copy problem, and it is not a trick. What you have is the sensation; a momentary transient non-data patch. The mountain, if there is one, is a different item. Sameness between picture and object is a relation. No shade of gray is that relation. Dream-slope and valley-slope can wear the same colors. A heat haze can wear them too. Nothing in the colors stamps one of them “real” and the other “nice try.” If the patch is all you have, the patch does not tell you which world you are in. The booth wants a sentence that can be true or false. Your gray patch is just an event. Rain happens. “This is rain” is a different category the chip never issued.
Two slopes in a row are not “the same mountain.” Blink. A cloud passes. New shade of gray. Each moment is a new event. Nothing in the new event is stamped “still the mountain from five seconds ago.” That is not data; an event is not data. That is meaning; sensation is not meaning. Continuity is added. You brought the idea of one persistent thing. The colors did not sell it to you. Slope, then moving leaves, is not “the wind caused it.” You got order. You did not get production. The “makes it happen” is not a color and not a sound. Ball touches ball, second ball rolls. The push-power is not in the picture. One is not knowledge, the other is. One has no meaning, the other does.
This slope is not “mountain” as a kind, and not “all mountains.” One occurrence does not contain the unseen cases. A universal is not a very large particular. No pile of patches, however tall, contains the “all.” Some is not all. Grace is not works, and works are not grace. And the slope is not the law that a thing is what it is, or that it cannot both be and not be a mountain. Turn the light off and the colors go. Those relations do not go with them. They were never in the patch. Cheung’s question lands here too. How did you sense the law of contradiction? If you used it to keep sensations from being nonsense before you “learned” it, it was not learned from them. You were already using it to keep the patch from meaning everything at once.
So the order is this, and a newcomer can keep it on a napkin. First the standard fails on its own ground. Sensation cannot justify a sensation, and cannot justify the lack of one, without a non-sensation. Then, even granting the non-data patch, identity, difference, cause, motion, sameness over time, and a subject and predicate that can be true or false are different categories not in the non-data patch. They have to come out of the “sensation gave me this” column before a knowledge claim is possible. After both removals, what remains is a non-data patch. A patch is not a premise. Without a premise there is no knowledge, only an event somebody later narrates with tools the event did not contain. No ticket. No entry.
“Reliable enough” is not a middle
The soft exit sounds modest, which is how a lot of fake tickets get past the ticket booth. Sensation does not have to be certain. It is reliable enough. It predicts. The cup is where the sensation said it was. So it gives knowledge, or close enough that mentioning the difference is rude. Handing over a sticky note that says “usually works” is not a valid ticket.
Modest is not a license. If the senses are less than infallible, you need a standard that cannot fail, to judge each instance. You cannot know by sensation which sensation is the correct one, or how reliable this one is. A mirage is a perfectly ordinary visual event. A stick in water looks bent, and the bent look is a perfectly ordinary visual event. “Usually right” is a story about other days. It does not label today. The non-data haze does not come with a flag that gives the data “this is one of the bad ones.”
Cheung’s line is the sharp one, and it is worth hearing slowly. Even if seeing a mirage is “properly basic,” it is properly useless unless you can know by sensation that it is a mirage. Properly basic reliability is not enough. The empiricist needs properly basic infallibility. He does not have the weaker thing either, because he cannot know by the sensation how reliable the non-data patch is.
Any degree of dependence on empiricism on that issue drops you into agnosticism about it. Not a softer knowledge. A blank. If a non-sensory standard stamps this instance “good,” then you accepted this new non-sensation standard as your new starting point. You did not accept the sensation as the source. There is no humble middle. Either the standard can fail, and you do not know whether this case is a hit, or it cannot fail, and the infallible item is doing the knowing. The booth does not do soft exits. Your percentage is a confident feeling wearing a number, hoping no one asks to see the receipt.
The twin question is just as empty, and newcomers skip it. How do you know that you do not know? A miss is not labeled inside the non-data patch. The same sensation that cannot certify a hit cannot certify a miss. A percentage you cannot audit is not knowledge with the edges sanded off.
For knowledge to be possible, you need to know what is true or false. If the standard does not give an infallible way to know what is true or false, then you don’t know what is true or false, and you fall into an agnosticism and skepticism that denies the law of contradiction. Some might argue with rhetoric like, “Only true or hard skepticism is a denial of the law of contradiction.” This is misleading. If the topic is your starting point of knowledge, then without the infallible standard it is skepticism and skepticism denies the law of contradiction. When knowledge never starts, you don’t have it. The starting point is not a small side issue about knowledge; it is the issue. If knowledge never started, then you don’t have the knowledge to say you have knowledge, and you don’t have the knowledge to say that you don’t have knowledge. Those are violations of identity and contradiction.
The fraction that was never finished
In Paul and the Philosophers, Cheung catches the rescue in the act. A theory that cannot be proved true gets called “probably true.” Sounds humble. Sounds numerical. Probability is a fraction. Favorable cases on top. All possible cases on the bottom. You must know both. Before you have knowledge you cannot know the denominator, the complete set of relevant possibilities. Without it you cannot calculate a probability at all. To have the denominator you would already need the knowledge the experiment was supposed to deliver, and you would have no need for the experiment.
Picture a chicken coop you have never seen. And Johnny says to you this afternoon, “I picked up six eggs this morning, therefore I have half of the eggs for today.” Half of what? If you do not know how many eggs there are, “six” is not a fraction. It is a story about six. Observation gives you the hits you happened to have. It does not give you every way the thing can go, including the failures you have not met, including the cases nobody has sensed. Particulars do not contain the “all.” That is the same logical void as “this slope is not all mountains,” wearing a lab coat. Probability without the full coop is like waving a half-stamped chip and saying “probably good enough for the VIP section.” Booth: “Show me the denominator or get out. Felt confidence isn’t a ticket.”
What people actually have is a feeling of confidence, or a pattern their minds have supposedly recognized, dressed in the language of numbers. Cheung’s line is the one to keep. Probability without a true denominator is psychology disguised as epistemology. A feeling that the next slice will be there is not the fraction.
Inside a closed toy — a die you have defined as six faces — someone can divide hits by the faces they stipulated. That is arithmetic inside an assumed box. Useful for board games. It is not a probability that corresponds to reality, and it is not a measurement of how reliable sensation is. The real denominator would include every unseen case and every way the non-data patch can fail. Observation never delivers that set. So no one has completed the reliability fraction. “Decently reliable” was never calculated. It was felt, then named. The badge was never issued.
If it is not the start, it is not the epistemology
Put the logical voids next to sensation and the starting-point claim collapses in plain sight. A starting point has to pay for the first claim. This one cannot pay for its own admission, cannot pay for the categories inside the claim, and cannot pay for the stamp that says this instance is one of the good ones. That is not an epistemology. An epistemology is an account of how you know. An account that cannot license a single premise is a mood of confident feelings; what it is not, is knowledge about anything.
Confident emotions are why people still talk this way. The cup was where the hand expected. The emotion of success got promoted into a theory of knowledge. When the claim on the table is “this is how knowing starts,” the streak is irrelevant. Success at finding the cup is not a proof that the patch contained “cup,” “same cup,” and “true.”
“Part of the process” is a retreat, and it should be treated as one. Even if that concession is granted — that sensation is part of the process — part of the process is not the same as the start. The start is whatever licenses the first premise. If sensation is not that, empiricism is not the theory of knowledge. Sensation is, at most, an occasion somebody else has to interpret with knowledge, meaning, logic, and tools sensation cannot supply. The later steps inherit the bankruptcy. They do not cure it.
The dismissal makes sense only if the attack is heard as “you do not have eyes.” That is not the attack. Eyes are not an epistemology. If someone offers sensation as the starting point, it deserves the question any starting point deserves. Does this actually give knowledge? Is it possible? Looking at the non-data sensation, no. There is no route from the event to the premise that does not spend money the event never had.
They already attacked a starting point
Here is the part that gets called weird, and it is the most ordinary move in the room. A scientist says the earth cannot be that young, so if the Bible says otherwise you should not believe the Bible. That is an attack on a starting point. Reliance on the text, they say, means you do not have knowledge. They treated your start as an epistemology and checked its ticket. Fine. That is allowed. In fact, as Christians we prefer to take the debate to the starting point level. If they attack our start, we are allowed to attack their start.
Science, if it claims knowledge, has a starting point too. Whatever it does later — instruments, models, long runs, very serious faces — it still has to get a premise from observation. Observation is sensation. If sensation never issued a premise, the later steps have nothing to inherit. Length of experiment does not mint a denominator the start never had. A hundred trials are a hundred patches. A thousand are a thousand patches. None of them is “all possible outcomes,” and none of them is “this premise is true.” Doing a bankrupt thing for a long time does not make it solvent. They checked the Bible ticket and said no knowledge. Cool. Now the sensation chip gets the same check at the same booth. Long runs of patches don’t mint a premise. Plane lands — utility is great. Knowledge is different. They crossed the line first.
Attacking sensation is not a dodge around the lab. It is the parallel question. They asked whether a claimed start, in our case the Bible, gives knowledge. Sensation is the start they have to defend. Showing that it does not give knowledge is the same kind of check.
Utility can stay on the table. This is the distinction that keeps the argument honest. The plane can land. The bulb can come on. Pragmatic utility is great and we use it; but it is not knowledge. Something can be pragmatically repeatable and still be a false claim against reality; thus it is not knowledge. The cup can be where the hand expected. Pragmatic success is a different claim from knowledge. They are the ones who crossed that line, when they said reliance on the Bible means you do not know. Turning around and checking their necessary start is not unjust, and it is not a change of subject. It is the ticket check they already ran on us, but now pointed at their own.
If sensation is not the starting point, then knowledge never starts for the scientist. If knowledge never started, then there is no knowledge for any point for the scientist. The booth stays closed. Meanwhile, God’s revelation doesn’t need a chip; He stamps the ticket Himself and opens the door. Only the Bible ticket clears it, because the God who issues it causes the mind to know it. Everything else is a void, a missing license, a bankrupt chip.
This is a good example to go over. It shows how the other side often does not even understand what a worldview is, let alone how to argue for one.
Oshea (replying to a video): “Christians usually respond by attacking metaphysics, which isn’t wrong. However, it is better to attack their starting point for knowledge. Attack it hard. Using sensations to prove sensation is circular nonsense. Without knowing, there is no knowledge about any aspect of their worldview.”
Johnny Billy: “How do you come to belief in God? Is it not with your senses? Doesn’t everyone have the same epistemic limits? Presupposing God to prove God is also circular nonsense.”
“How do you come to belief in God? Is it not with your senses?”
No.
That sentence already assumes your starting point and then demands I live inside it. That is the very thing under dispute. If that is how debates are won, then I can just say, “Since you read the peer-reviewed article using God’s innate knowledge, I win.” I know that is what happened in the causality of the thing — knowledge comes from God — but that is not a public argument in the context of a debate. It is me describing reality on my worldview’s terms.
A blank slate cannot interpret a tree. Look at the bark all day. What leaves the eye is not “tree,” “oak,” “living,” “outside me,” or “this is not a dream.” Those are universals and judgments. Universals do not leak out of particular sensations. To understand any datum at all you already need logic, self, space, time, difference, identity, motion, meaning, language, and causation. The data does not give you those. You bring them, or you do not have “data.” You have a twitch.
It is logically impossible to start with sensation in the premise and arrive at “logic, self, space, time, difference, identity, motion, meaning, language, causation” without jumping categories and breaking identity. Sensation is not logic. A color-patch is not the law of contradiction. A sound is not “therefore.”
So no: I did not come to God by cataloging sensations and then inducting my way to the Trinity. The reason is simpler than a conversion story. If I start with sensation, I cannot know any term about anything in reality. Nothing. Not “God.” Not “no God.” Not “senses.” Not “Johnny.”
Vincent Cheung puts the wheel in the open in “Questions for Empiricists” (Sermonettes, Volume 1):
“What is a sensation? How did you learn the meaning of a sensation? How do you know when you are having a sensation? Do you sense the sensation to know that you have a sensation? If you sense a sensation, then how do you know that? Do you sense the sensation that senses the sensation? Then, do you sense the sensation that senses the sensation that senses the sensation? … If information comes from sensation, then how do you know when you are having a sensation?”
That is not a cute riddle. That is the start eating itself. If knowledge comes from sensation, then knowing that you are sensing is another sensation, and knowing that is another, and you never get the first justified term. You do not even get to name the method.
“Doesn’t everyone have the same epistemic limits?”
No. That is the whole fraud you bought.
Worldviews have different starting points. Different starting points do not have the same limits, because they are different. That is the law of identity, not a Bible tract. You assume an empiricist start, then act shocked that another start does not share your ceiling. The Christian start is God’s revelation. The causality of knowledge is defined by that same account of reality: God, not nerve endings. Very different start. Very different limits.
“Epistemic limits,”
is a polite way to say your starting point cannot justify knowledge and meaning. A start has one job: make knowledge possible. Empiricism fails that job and then calls the failure humility. What it actually yields is skepticism. Skepticism cannot even be stated without using the knowledge it denies. “I know that we cannot know” is a contradiction. So empiricism does not survive as a starting point. A start that makes knowledge impossible is not a limited start. It is a dead one.
Pretending we all begin with sensation is not humility. It is a failure to argue for a worldview. The whole point of a worldview debate is that the starts differ, and you are here to show yours can carry knowledge and the other cannot. Assuming we all begin as empiricists is like walking into a room of rival worldviews and saying, “Aliens gave us consciousness, so why do you believe the Qur’an?” That is not an argument. That is you treating your story as the weather. If aliens-gave-us-knowledge is your epistemology, it is your job to argue for it. It is not a human default.
And since Scripture contradicts empiricism, if I granted that I depend on sensation to know the Bible, I would be denying the worldview I claim to believe. I would be saying the start is sensation and the start is revelation. Those are not the same thing.
“Presupposing God to prove God is also circular.”
You are confusing empiricism with every other starting point. You are so used to empiricism’s circle that you think every axiom must be the same shape. That is sloppy on its face, because my start is not yours.
Every system has an undeduced starting point. That is what a first principle is. If you can deduce it, it is not first. Empiricism uses sensation to prove sensation. That is circular, it never terminates, and it dies as skepticism. Skepticism cannot be spoken without contradicting itself. You need knowledge to deny knowledge.
Scripture does not lean on premises outside itself. It is self-authenticating by the sufficiency of its own content — similar to the law of contradiction, rather than to a hamster wheel called empiricism. The law of contradiction is not “proved” by a second, backup law of contradiction. It is the standard: to use it, you use it; to deny it, you use it. Empiricism is not like that. To “prove” a sensation you need another sensation, and another, and another. That is infinite regress, not self-authentication. So yes: sensation, used as a start, is circular. Revelation, used as a start, is a first principle. Calling both “circular” is how you hide that only one of them can even speak.
You want to talk metaphysics? Fine. You still do not have knowledge. Using sensations to prove sensation leaves you with no start. Without a start, you have no knowledge about any aspect of your worldview — including the objection you just made. You borrowed logic, self, space, time, difference, identity, motion, meaning, language, and causation. You borrowed “circular.” You borrowed “limits.” You borrowed the demand for justification. Then you pretended those tools fell out of an empiricist start you also admit is defective and limited.
Empiricism does not yield any knowledge. That is the argument.
It was never “God exists because a sunset felt warm.” It was this: your method cannot know anything, including that sentence. You cannot even know to deny my stance on God, because on your start you have no knowledge.
