Saturday, May 22, 2021

James 4:13-17 And Skepticism Of The Future

The future is unknown.  Of this, most people seem aware enough to admit it when pressed.  What this truly means, and what might not be realized in any thorough sense, is that the future is unknowable.  For various reasons, such as the unprovable nature of inductive reasoning, the possibility of scientific laws changing, and the fact that people can decide to behave in random or abnormal ways, there is not a single future event that must happen.  While it can still be known that logical truths must hold in the future because they are necessary truths, everything else about the future is unprovable.  Rationalistic skepticism will inevitably lead someone who reflects on the epistemology of the future to this truth.

A particular New Testament passage goes so far as to admit that people who truly believe they know what tomorrow holds for them have deluded themselves.  In James 4:13-17, the author writes that God might not will for the plans of a given person to come about, comparing human life to a mist that briefly appears and then vanishes entirely.  Verse 14 explicitly says that "you do not even know what will happen tomorrow."  Shortly after, James states that God could allow or disallow certain events to occur regardless of one's intentions, adding that this leaves humans who believe that their plans for "tomorrow" must be fulfilled simply because of personal expectations in a state of ignorance and arrogance.

James 4 actually agrees with a thorough kind of skepticism of future events--not that the Bible contradicts strict rationalism anywhere else.  It is just that this is a particular example of the Bible specifically affirming that future events are not ultimately knowable by humans.  We can have expectations and hopes, which are not necessarily irrational, as they might reflect nothing more than subjective preferences, but to believe that one knows anything about the future other than that logical truths will remain true (which does break down into awareness of multiple truths, except all of them strictly pertain to necessary truths and what follows from them).

The final verses of James 4 assess the uncertainty of future events in human life from a theological standpoint, rightly stating that it is foolish and potentially arrogant to truly believe that one knows what tomorrow will hold for one's life.  Arrogance is thinking of oneself more highly than one's nature merits, and thinking one can know something in a category that is inherently unknowable for humans is therefore arrogant precisely because it entails belief beyond what one's epistemological, metaphysical nature allows one to know.  That the Bible itself not only does not contradict this but directly concedes it is yet another way that the Bible connects with rationalistic philosophy in unexpected ways.

Even the future events predicted by the Bible are not clarified down to their actual date in history, so there is nothing contradictory about the Bible prophesying specific events and simultaneously acknowledging that humans do not know what will come next.  Of course, even if each Biblical prophecy about specific occurrences did involve details about the exact time, one cannot know if the prophecy will actually be fulfilled as promised just by reading about it!  That is the very nature of the future.  Prophecies provide events to look out for as evidences of divine revelation; they are not able to refute skepticism of the future within the Biblical worldview, which makes the epistemological idea behind James 4:13-17 one of many ways that a Biblical passage that might even be familiar to some typical Christians and churchgoers overlaps with strict rationalism.

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