Certainty

The importance of modernity is because of man's place as the axis of all beings and existents like God and the World, and they get their meaning and validity in the light of him. Although man has reason and freedom and he is the noble master of all creatures, in the meanwhile, he has many defects in his existence, and his accomplishments have been gradually increased during the centuries. Hence, we can say that man actually and absolutely does not have any perfection, and he cannot get his achievements perfectly. However, with changing in the relationship between man, God, and the world during the modernity age, the whole of man's approaches to God and the world changed, and this brings about some basic problems and crises. In this process, man gained and acquired a kind of genuineness and principality towards God and the existents of world that their place and importance, especially divine truths like God, were defined in the light of human epistemic abilities and their validity were depended on human knowledge. Hence, the place of divine truths was lowered to the limits of human understanding, which I call it the humanization of divine truths. On the other hand, because of his weakness for understanding the divine truths, man has gradually put them aside from his philosophical thought, and has recognized them meaningless. In the meanwhile, he has tried to understand the empirical world and its managing without considering what is beyond it. I call this demystification of the existents by the other areas such as ethics, politics, and even science, which all of them have been depended on the human being. Consequently, certainty and truth became humanistic, that is, man became as the axis of certainty and truth, which the most important result of that is the relativity of certainty and its restriction to human knowledge, will, and ability. This paper tries to discuss the above subjects, considering some of the important thinkers of modern and postmodern philosophy like as Descartes, Kant, Nietzsche, Sartre, and Heidegger. It also attempts to show that although Heidegger complained to subjectivism and modernistic approach of truth, his effort to redefine truth and certainty was not successful and could not rescue it from a crisis. That is because he could not go beyond human understanding to reach a holy and absolute certainty and truth, while – according to this paper – the only real way is paying attention to divine certainty, revelation, and God.

Early Muslim philosophers, theologians, logicians and experts in jurisprudence understand knowledge as “firm true belief supported by evidence”. They consider conjectures as a kind of ignorance, the domain of certain knowledge confined in necessary truths; and the domain of uncertain knowledge limited to contingent facts. From their definitions and postulates, we can conclude that they took “having appropriate source” as the criterion of knowledge. For this reason, they included the qualifications “firm” and “immutable” in their definition of knowledge in lieu of distinction between the definition and the criterion of knowledge and separation of cognitive characteristic features of beliefs from the non- cognitive ones. Their approach in epistemology is externalistic but it accommodates foundationalism and fallibilism while evading epistemological relativism. In this approach, knowledge is defined as true belief with proper source. Having proper source is a criterion for knowledge which is not explicitly stated but is implied by different qualifications introduced by them. A source of belief is proper iff it bears a causal relation of some sort to the state of affairs the belief depicts.

Although cynicism is generally considered anti-religious, in fact, it is inseparable from the true faith of religion. There are two types of cynicism: the first one is being faithful and the second one is being atheistic. An epistemological and psychological study of faith have viewed the essential element of faith. True religious faith is the wisdom of restlessness. Cynicism is what energizes the faith. In this article with library method it is shown that faith expands with faith. Cynicism is neither offensive nor erroneous nor a guilt; rather it is a component of religious faith.