Thoughts on Epistemology

What follows are my recent thoughts on epistemology and the psychology of the human spirit—to be refined and expanded later.

To be a spiritual being is to have a spiritual cognizance of God’s presence and of morality—both are expressions of the same fact. Unlike angels, humans have their minds—heads—buried in this fallen world similar to the Matrix; but their spirits are cognizant of God’s presence and of right from wrong. Spiritual cognizance for the angels—like God—is synonymous with their normal thinking. But for humans, the mind encompasses both the spirit and the brain with its developing thought patterns and imperfect accumulated knowledge. This necessarily renders spiritual cognizance in humans as a foundational level below consciousness that is the fountain of higher level thoughts and actions, whether rebellion, fear, worship, joy, guilt, love, etc, without actually breaking into the consciousness except under extremes such as crisis.

This level of cognizance is the same level where a kind of residual memory exists—where the spirit is cognizant of the union that it once had with God while still in Adam prior to his sin (as Van Til hinted at); but it is not limited to the past. It operates continuously as God is continuously present and revelational. It is the sensus divinitatus. It is at this level that the spirit communes with and is aware of the Christ now in him.

Such prescribed outward physical actions as baptism and the Lord’s Supper are more than commemorative—they are experiences that are divinely designed to reach past and through the human mind to touch that deepest level and strengthen it by reaffirming viscerally what has happened spiritually.

By the Holy Spirit’s power and grace, with the power of Scripture in speaking to that deepest part, we are enabled and helped to renew our minds and called to exercise our hearts and minds through prayer and contemplation to access that deepest part and commune with the God in us. This is not like “navel gazing,” because the God who is in us is God who is everywhere; and without his spirit in us we have no channel of spiritual communion with the God external to us. That is the intimacy of our relationship, that to seek his face is not to seek him outwardly as if he was only external, but to seek him is to seek to access communion with him in our deepest being.

Even Adam and Eve—mankind as created— was supposed to live in continuous volitional cognizance of God’s revelation. The physical veil over their spirituality was not an impairment but a point of obedient faith whereby they chose every moment to look beyond the veil and not embrace a faithless physicality of spiritual blindness. They were to interpret all of the physical through the spiritual.

This is why Jesus taught in parables. We have the same veil of physicality except that with us it is an impairment. But for those who genuinely seek God, that spiritual attitude enables us to glimpse the truth in parables; whereas the usual rebellious embrace of physicality precludes understanding them. So by using parables, Jesus could separate the wheat from the chaff and get his message through to those with ears to hear but hide it from the others.

I’m convinced that the serpent spoke to Eve from a branch in the Tree of Knowledge, biting into the fruit as he said, “You will not surely die…” She focused on the physical and lost the revelation of spiritual death, etc. Their sin involved exchanging the truth for the lie, and interpreting the spiritual through the physical—a kind of epistemic inversion.

Even the disciples had to be continually reminded: Jesus claimed to have food that they knew not of, and they mumbled about “who gave him food?” Jesus said to beware of the leaven of the Pharisees, and they said, “it’s because we brought no bread.” Time and again he spoke of the spiritual and they were so dense in their physicality that they misunderstood. And today we have the same in the form of the belief that the bread and wine contain the literal body and blood, missing Jesus’ point entirely.

The seat of sin is in the spirit. Morally speaking, where the Spirit goes the mind will follow. While the mind of the sinner does suppress the truth, it does so because the sinner’s spirit finds the truth unbearable and so the mind defends the spirit—at least it tries to. But the word of God is a two edged sword… And when men are “cut to the heart,” they will either repent or violently reject.

Ken Hamrick, 2026