Conscience; Fiducial Conscience

I read L. John Van Til's Liberty of Conscience: The History of a Puritan Idea. I can't say I followed it very closely, but it did introduce me to thinking about conscience.

My idea of conscience is that it is an intuition which in some way is the voice of truth or God, but isn't necessarily infallible. It could be the voice of God because a person has trained themselves to think the way that God does, so they naturally react the way he would. Or, it could be the voice of God because when they see something, God directly causes them to feel that way about it. It could be the voice of truth, because by thinking through and experiencing the way things are, we come to react to things intuitively according to how they really are. Or, it could be the voice of truth because some truths are conveyed intuitively, directly. (Or it could be that God or some other being tells us these truths directly.)

What is interesting about conscience is this ambiguity as to what produces it. Normally when we talk about conscience, we are talking about moral conscience (sometimes also intellectual conscience). Your moral conscience tells you that something is wrong. Should you do it anyway? There's some chance that your conscience is malformed. But it could be well-formed and thus in touch with reality. And it could be the voice of God telling you not to do something. It is never totally safe to ignore your conscience, although it may be fallible.

Another variant of conscience, beside intellectual and moral, which I am making up here, perhaps is new, is "fiducial conscience". We have a sense that certain things are trustworthy or not. It's an intuition, and thus it can't be fully justified in words. It is not necessarily irrational, as I define "rational", but it is not fully legible. It is produced by the same kinds of things as moral conscience. Should you trust your fiducial conscience? Probably, although it may sometimes be wrong.

Some matters may only be resolved by appeals to fiducial conscience. You sense that something is wrong but can't put its wrongness into words -- some people who trust your intuition based on prior experience should trust your intuition, and probably you should just on the basis of it being your own fiducial conscience. But this doesn't scale up as aptly as verbal, textual reasoning and evidence. It is less suitable for governing a nation or even a congregation of a church, although it is reasonably well-suited for governing an individual or group of close friends and family. (And, perhaps many of the individual votes that are cast in nations or churches depend on people's experiences and leadings from God that inform the "black box" of their conscience.)

The concept of conscience allows us to both trust and not overtrust intuition, and potentially have some idea that we can train it.

What the concept of conscience introduces is that everyone is a witness to the truth, in a way that they are uniquely qualified to be. They can experience intuitions that no one else does or can look into and debunk. However, these intuitions and witnesses are only binding on those who trust them, and by default the only person who (probably) should find them binding is the witness themselves. It is not the case that these intuitions are necessarily reflective of the truth, but they may be and it's hard or perhaps impossible in some cases to completely rule them out.

There is an absolute truth, and we can partially know it, and to some extent each of us is in a unique position to know the truth. I guess this could be a midpoint between "everyone has their own truth and perspective" and "there is one absolute, objective truth".