"In order to assert something and mean it without qualification, I of course have to believe that it is true, but I don't have to believe that I could demonstrate its truth to all rational persons. The claim that something is universal and the acknowledgment that I couldn't necessarily prove it are logically independent of each other. The second does not undermine the first."-Stanley Fish, Harper's Magazine, July 2002, p. 34.

s an Adventist who believes that our message is true and universal (see Rev. 14:6, 7) and yet can't necessarily "demonstrate its truth to all rational persons," I love Fish's quote because it affirms a thought that's been flagellating my frontal lobe for decades: I can believe what I can't always prove, a helpful concept for someone whose worldview is founded, at the bottom, not upon equations, formulas, axioms, and laws, but upon that most wistful (yet powerful) force among fallen creatures, and that's faith.

How does one "prove" faith? One doesn't, because if "proved," it's no longer faith.

Fish's quote knits different threads into a single issue: What does it mean to "know," as compared with to "believe," something? Can fallen, subjective beings such as ourselves ever "know" anything, or are our indubitable certainties just extreme belief, intellectual fanaticism, nothing more? Do I "know" that Jesus died for my sins any more than a suicide bomber "knows" that he's going to heaven after the explosion, or do we both just "believe" these things?

I'm dawdling here, I admit, amid the muck of Western philosophical thought regarding the question of all questions: What is knowledge? After all, how can we know something if we aren't even sure what it means to "know" anything? In fact, in studying the act of knowledge itself, we run into the problem I bumbled through in last month's column about Kurt Gödel's incompleteness theorem. How do I know that what I know about knowledge is right, when my very criteria for knowing anything are what are being questioned to begin with? As the apostle Paul observed: "If any man think that he knoweth any thing, he knoweth nothing yet as he ought to know" (1 Cor. 8:2).

I believe (for instance) that the sun will rise tomorrow. But what "proof" can I present? All I have, really, are past experiences of its rising each morning and some knowledge of the laws of astronomy. But just because something happened with unceasing regularity in the past doesn't automatically mean it will happen in the future. Couldn't some unknown factor within the laws of astronomy cause the sun not to rise tomorrow? Of course, the God who created all nature could stop it from rising, couldn't He? Meanwhile, I'm aware of no logical or inherent contradiction in asserting that the sun won't rise. Thus, do I know the sun will rise, or do I just believe it?

In the same way, do I know that God has raised up the Seventh-day Adventist Church with a present truth message for the world, or do I just believe it? I might have many valid reasons for my position-everything from my own personal experience with the Lord (who brought me to Adventism) to the powerful testimony of the Bible (which affirms me in my Adventist belief). But having valid justification to believe something doesn't necessarily make that belief true; a person living 500 years ago at the bottom of an equatorial rain forest would have valid justification for believing that water could never be made so hard that one could walk across it, would he not?

The cross, Sabbath, the state of the dead, 1844, the sanctuary, all the truths in Jesus that make me an Adventist-though I can't say that I know them to be true (any more than I know the sun will rise tomorrow), I can say I know that I believe them to be true. And considering that "he who believes in the Son has everlasting life" (John 3:36, NKJV), maybe that's all I'll need to know, no matter my inability to "demonstrate its truth to all rational persons."

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Clifford Goldstein is editor of the Adult Sabbath School Bible Study Guide.