(Rev Harry T Cook makes a lot of sense – http://www.harrytcook.com )

In my undergraduate days as a philosophy major, the area of inquiry stated in the title of this essay was dealt with in what was known as “epistemology” – studies of the theories of knowledge. All the way from Protagoras (ca. 490-420 BCE) down through George Berkeley (1685-1753) to G.W.F. Hegel (1770-1831) and forward into modern times to G.E. Moore and Richard Rorty, thinkers have debated the question of how human beings arrive at useful knowledge.

Putting it in a somewhat over-simplified but nonetheless accurate way would be to say there are those who have decided that knowledge comes through revelation and those who insist it comes through the process known as reasoning. The empiricists among philosophers have insisted that questions of causation, for example, can only be dealt with by subjecting experience and observation to objective analysis.

Galileo was unsatisfied with a number of “revealed” explanations that had been derived from literal readings of the Bible. Over time he was able to observe with the aid of a telescope certain celestial phenomena, leading him through the process of reasoning to quite different explanations for – and knowledge about – what human beings were actually seeing and experiencing as conscious parts of the universe. Galileo was not awarded a 17th Century version of a Nobel Prize for his trouble.

Some two centuries later a dilettantish naturalist named Charles Darwin, somewhat bored with his rural British existence, went to sea with a quixotic ship’s captain named Robert FitzRoy to see what he could see. He spent nearly five years observing nature – in particular the declivities associated with far-flung rivers and, of course, the sea tortoises his writings made famous. Darwin did not set out to upset the applecart of biblical religion and commonly held, if inaccurate, assumptions of causation.

But come 1859, the world was turned upside down with the publication of The Origin of Species. Darwin’s detractors quarreled then and quarrel still with what he observed and the rationalization that his observations produced. They did not and do not accept how he arrived at what he learned and came to “know.”

Neither Galileo nor Darwin came to their knowledge of natural phenomena by submitting to the revealed dogma of their religions. They came by it through observation and rational analysis. Especially in Darwin’s case, it was not the knowledge he eventually gained that he set out in the first place to learn. He came reluctantly to his Theory of Natural Selection because in a way he saw it occurring before his very eyes and could not deny the sight and sense of it.

That is how we know what we know. We observe phenomena, consider data arising from them, form some semblance of a hypothesis, rigorously test it to try to prove it (and ourselves) wrong, and at some point at which our refined hypothesis seems to be the best proposition currently available to explain a situation, cause or condition, we say that we “know” something.

Of course, hunches and bright ideas that seem to spring from nowhere occur to us, and sometimes their pursuit through the process detailed above leads us to “know” something. It is not helpful to attribute such hunches or ideas to “revelation,” as in something so unavailable to independent investigation as “an inner voice.” Our individual and shared experiences create a swirling sea of data that will sometimes spin off one datum or another that passes through one’s mind, one thing leading to another . . .

. . . which brings us to Kansas where voters have apparently decided that it is in their own self-interest to support the dissemination of knowledge arrived at by reason rather than revelation. In a recent election in The Sunflower State, several members of the board of education were voted off the island because they had supported the teaching of “intelligent design” in opposition to evolution in science classrooms.

A lot of Kansans are strong for biblical teaching in its raw fundamentalist form, which insists that what is to be “known” is that the god of the Bible created every last life form separately and distinctive from every other, and that it was all accomplished in a fairly short span of time (some say in six days) 6,009 years and nine months ago. This can be known because it is revealed in the Bible.

The trouble is that every known datum, every unbiased human observation and a mountain of accumulated rationalization – some of it carefully monitored scientific testing – clearly and firmly demonstrate that the Kansas fundamentalists are dead wrong.

Therefore, how we decide how we will know what we will know is a hugely important consideration. Its urgency has direct bearing upon every major issue before us today: public education, reproductive rights, stem-cell research, when life begins, whether Israel’s territorial claims were settled in antiquity by some god of its imagination, whether George W. Bush is right in saying that his foreign and domestic policies are in accordance with that same god’s will.