Studying Missiology with a Presuppositional Methodology

Abstract

Thomas Kuhn’s study, Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Kuhn 1970), helped spark a virtual revolution in the epistemology of science. Using a philosophically idealist, post-Kantian per­spective, Kuhn and others are attempting to demonstrate that there is no steady progress forward in knowledge in the natural sciences. Instead, movement comes often as a series of paradigmatic shifts, yet with no necessary implication of a forward direction. Using this framework, many have now come to believe that all types of scientific knowledge are paradigm dependent. There­fore, all scientific factuality is theory laden, and every fact is an interpreted fact. The result is, in the words of an old Simon and Garfunkel song, “Every man hears what he wants to hear and dis­regards the rest.” This article desires to point a Scriptural way forward, away from this post-modernist relativism and the naïve Realism of evangelicalism, bound as it is by modernity. I have included a glossary of terms at the end for those who may need to familiarize themselves again with the philosophical terms which I use.