Part One: How Do We Know Anything?......1. How We Perceive The World

Epistemology starts by asking how, and by what means, and to what extent, we can gain not just opinion but true and certain knowledge of the world of things around us. And in that connection it asks if we can know for certain whether the world of human beings and things owes its existence to a Creator; and if so, can we know what he is like?[p 44] [p 45] How do we know anything? It might well seem a silly question to ask: 'How do we know anything?' when in fact we all know that we know ten thousand and one things and run our daily lives on the basis of knowing them. We know that the world is full of material things like houses and chairs, rocks and rivers, vegetables and machines. We know intangible things like 3 × 3 = 9, and the laws of logic and that other people have minds as we ourselves have. We know historical things, such as that Caesar Augustus was emperor at Rome, and that Hitler never succeeded in capturing St. Petersburg. We instinctively know some moral truths, such as that it is wrong to torture children; and we know from experience that not everybody is honest and tells the truth. We even know hypothetical things, such as what would happen if we were to drive a car at...