What’s wrong with foundationalism?

I’m reading a book right now that is hurting my brain. The book is Beyond Liberalism & Fundamentalism: How Modern and Postmodern Philosophy set the Theological Agenda by Nancey Murphy. I’m reading it in conjunction with an independent study for seminary on Emerging Church theologies. I know it’s full of tons of great information. It’s just hard to digest so much “head” knowledge at once. The first section of the book is all about the development of modern theology and paritcularly addresses the ways in which the church has developed two polar opposite responses to modern philosophy; liberalism and fundamentalism. The second part is all about postmodernity. As you can imagine, I’m enjoying the second half much more. Here’s the opening of that section.

Contemporary theology, like an empty pile in solitaire, is waiting for a new king to come along and get things started again.” So says, Jeffrey Stout. Stout is pessimistic about the appearance of such a kind, and I am too. but what STout fails to consider - and what will be the focus of the second part of this book - is the possibility that the rules of the game might be changed instead. If all the possible move have been tried within the limits set by modernity, this should be a cause for dismay only if we believe modern thinkiers have had the final word on the topics of knowledge, language, and the ultimate nature of reality. It is becoming more and more widely accepted that modern thinkers have not had the last word.

He goes on to this quote from Karl Popper who is writing in 1935.

The empirical basis of objective science has thus nothing “absolute” about it. Science does not rest upon solid bedrock. The bold structure of its theories rises, as it were, above a swamp. It is like a building erected on piles. The piles are driven down from above into the swamp, but not down to any natural or “given” base; and if we stop driving the piles deeper, it is not because we have reached firm ground. We simple stop when we are satisfied that the piles are firm enough to carry the structure, at least for the time being.

W.V.O. Quine who wrote, “Two Dogmas of Empiricism” which Nancey Murphy uses the publication date to mark the end of modernity writes this.

The totality of our so-called knowledge or beliefs, from the most casual matters of geography and history to the profoundest laws of atomic physics or even of pure mahtematics and logic, is a man-made fabric which impinges on experience only along the edges. Or, to change the figure, total science is like a field of force whose boundaries are experience. A conflict with experience at the periphery occasions re-adujustment in the interior of the field.

Finally, Murphy writes…

…beliefs that are useful for justifying other claims will always turn out to be indubitable, and in fact will be found to be dependent upon the structure they are intended to justify… What finally brought empiricist foundationalism to an end was the recognition that scientific facts are “theory laden.”

All quotes taken from Murphy, pp. 85-91.