J,
You say, “Beauty is subjective. To answer questions of God’s existence, we need objective, factual evidence, not subjective experiences.”
A few responses.
- First, it is misleading to define subjective as “unreal, fanciful, partial, or variable between persons”. Subjective knowledge is simply knowledge that relates to a subject. Subjective knowledge is found within a subject. That does not mean it has no correspondence to what is real, and to what truly is.
- This means that all knowledge, in some sense, is subjective. That is, every perceiving human is a subject and must perceive knowledge through his or her own faculties. Objective knowledge exists, but it is impossible for a human subject to access this knowledge with erasing himself from the process of knowing. All objective knowledge must be known by subjects, and then, in some sense, becomes subjective.
- Some things are known only subjectively. For example, the knowledge of persons as persons. You cannot know another person objectively, without objectifying the person and dehumanising them. Knowing a person is not a matter of collecting scientific data about him, studying his movements, and analysing him dispassionately from a distance. Knowing a person involves mutual self-disclosure.
- Our knowledge of brute facts qualifies as objective knowledge. Pure, uninterpreted facts about the world are objective, so to speak. Our knowledge of right and wrong, virtue and vice, beauty and ugliness, is much more personal than it is objective. These things are realities, but they cannot be approached or known through the objective method. Even facts must go through a subjective grid of interpretation, rendering them part of our subjective knowledge.
- Christians believe the Fall has affected our knowledge. Because of our depravity, we can encounter all of the right facts and put all of the wrong constructs upon them. We invent a false grid and assimilate the facts into that grid.
- Truth is the overarching explanation that subsumes all the facts and renders them in their proper relationship to one another. If truth is the great explanation that rightly interprets all the facts, it is worthwhile to ask, who would possess a mind great enough to know all the facts in the universe and place the correct interpretation upon them all?
