Presuppositions and Lordship

What do Reformed apologists mean by a presupposition? Too often it is mistakenly believed that Van Tillian or presuppositional apologists use the word ‘presupposition’ to refer to either a starting axiom or a mere assumption. John Frame helpfully parses out the nuances of a Van Tillian usage of the term:

A presupposition is a belief that takes precedence over another and therefore serves as a criterion for another. An ultimate presupposition is a belief over which no other takes precedence. For a Christian, the content of Scripture must serve as his ultimate presupposition…This doctrine is merely the outworking of the lordship of God in the area of human thought. It merely applies the doctrine of scriptural infallibility to the realm of knowing. – The Doctrine of the Knowledge of God (Phillipsburg: P&R, 1987), 45.

Frame elaborates further:

The lordship of Christ is not only ultimate and unquestionable, not only above and beyond all other authorities, but also over all areas of human life. In 1 Corinthians 10:31 we read, “Whether you eat or drink or whatever you do, do it all for the glory of God” (cf. Rom.14:23; 2 Cor. 10:5; Col. 3:17,23; 2 Tim. 3:16-17). Our Lord’s demand upon us is comprehensive. In all that we do, we must seek to please him. No area of human life is neutral. –Apologetics to the Glory of God: An Introduction (Phillipsburg: P&R, 1994), 7.

Faith and Reason: Is There a Sharp Divide? (Part 11)

The problem with all these theories is that they didn’t truly understand how man actually reasons. We all have worldviews: which is an interconnected web of beliefs that make up a system. This system is supported by supreme norms of thought that serve as an ultimate standard of truths. These standards are not proven by the system of thought rather the system is dependent upon them. These supreme norms are held by faith. This is true of all worldviews. To quote John Frame,

[C]ircular argument of a kind is unavoidable when we argue for an ultimate standard of truth. One that believes that human reason is the ultimate standard can argue that view only by appealing to reason.

The standard of judgment, method of argument, and conclusion are always involved in one another. Every argument contains its conclusion in its starting premise. Here’s a simple example: to argue that the Bible is not the Word of God you have to first assume that it is not the Word of God (i.e. that you have the ability to question it and have the authority to pick what is true in it and what is not).

Another major thinker in the faith/reason discussion is Cornelius Van Til. I believe that his line of thinking bring faith and knowledge into Biblical balance. Here I’ll end this series and pick up with a short series on the major contours of Van Til’s thought.

Faith and Reason: Is There a Sharp Divide? (Part 10)

Logical Positivism. Those who have been paying close attention will notice history repeating itself with the movement known as Logical Positivism. Once again we have a movement, this one started out very aggressive, that has as its goal the elimination of all metaphysical speculation. This means assumptions about the nature of reality. As we have stated before, morality cannot be derived from empirical observation, so ethics is done away with, it is labeled meaningless.

The verifiability principle was the standard that was used by the Vienna Circle to decide what is meaningful and what wasn’t. Roughly stated, this principle states, “for a statement to be meaningful it is in theory verifiable/provable by observation, either directly or indirectly.” This was the sword that they used to cut ethics and religion from meaningful conversation (they were relegated to the realm of “faith”-irrational belief- not “reason”- that which is testable). But this sword did something unexpected; it turned around and destroyed the movement itself! The Verification Principle could not be proven by observation so therefore it isn’t meaningful. It could not meet its own standards.

Faith and Reason: Is There a Sharp Divide? (Part 9)

Kant’s Effect on Theology. Kant’s phenomenal/noumenal distinction had a profound effect on theology. Many theologians sought to refashion their approach to scripture in line with Kant’s philosophy. If we can’t know God through the faculty of human reason, then how can we know him? Søren Kierkegaard placed an emphasis on the subjectivity of faith, i.e. our own personal feelings. He didn’t argue much for Christianity based on what happened in history: he taught that to truly believe, a leap of faith is needed.

Karl Barth and the Neo-orthodox movement followed the example set by Kierkegaard by declaring that God is not known through nature (they denied the effectiveness of what’s called general revelation). So, if God is not clearly revealed in nature, no natural theology can be constructed. That is the opposite of what Thomas Aquinas said, remember? Barth argued that God is truly revealed in the person of Christ, and for us the key place of that revelation is scripture. According to Barth, while the Bible is not the objective word of God, it is nonetheless the instrument, the vehicle that God uses to cause us to have an encounter with Christ in it’s pages.

Faith and Reason: Is There a Sharp Divide? (Part 8)

Kant. Immanuel Kant is a profound force in the history of philosophy. But, while much of philosophy and theology is still effect by his thought, we can only briefly run through his contribution to the faith/reason discussion.

Kant read the writings of David Hume and said that it woke him up from his “dogmatic slumbers.” He answered Hume by, in effect, saying that Hume was right. We don’t sense causation, nor do we sense the uniformity of nature. We don’t find these unifying principles in the world; instead we bring these assumptions to the world. By saying this, he turns Plato on his head. Instead of the forms being “up and out there” somewhere, they are in down here, supplied by our mind. Again, borrowing from Ronald Nash, think of our minds as the jelly jar that gives the jelly shape. Outside of the jar, the jelly would have no such shape. This means that everything we know comes from the conceptual categories of our mind, such as time, shape, space, causation, succession, etc.

According to Kant, everything we see is mediated, filtered by these structures. The implication of this is that we do not know, and in fact can never know, the world as it truly is. Kant calls the world as it appears to us the ‘phenomenal’ realm. The world as it is in itself, the unknowable world, is the ‘noumenal’ realm. God, according to Kant, if He exists, would be in the noumenal realm, unknowable to us.

Faith and Reason: Is There a Sharp Divide? (Part 7)

David Hume. David Hume was an empiricist. This means that he believed that certain knowledge can only be attained through sensory experience. So he set out to discover exactly what can the senses tell us about reality. We do not have sense experience of structure or unity. We categorize and organize our sense data by using principles such as causation and induction

Causation. We reason from cause to effect. When playing Pool, with but a swing of a stick we see a ball move, make contact with another ball, and then we see the other ball move. Immediately we interpret what we saw as one ball “causing” the other ball to move. Strictly speaking, what we actually saw was a succession of events. One thing happens and then another. Causation is a principle of organization that we intuitively use to make sense of what we saw, but causation, in and of itself, is not perceived by the senses. Why? Because causation is not a “thing” open to be tested by our five sense.

Induction. Not just science, but much of human knowledge relies on inductive reasoning. Besides what I mentioned before, induction relies on the belief that the past informs us of the future. The sun set yesterday at such and such time, so it will set tomorrow at such and such time. How do we know that? Nobody has ever had a sense experience of the future. I know what you are thinking, ‘We know this, because it has happened in the past’. But that is assuming that the past can tell you about the future. You would be assuming that which you are trying to prove, and that’s called begging the question, a logical no-no.

The is/Ought fallacy. The Is/Ought fallacy deals with morality. Can sense experience alone lead us to ethical judgments and values? How do we go from what is the case (the “is”) to what ought to be the case (a moral obligation)? We cannot derive moral obligation from mere observation. There has to be a law outside of us that we all are obligated to obey. If that is not the case, then moral values reduce to mere personal preference. “Murder is wrong” is becomes as morally significant as “I like chocolate.” The Marquis de Sade loved to torture women, I don’t. If sense experience is only way to truth, what makes him wrong, and I right? David pointed out this error in think, and it’s a great logical tool to keep in your back pocket.

Faith and Reason: Is There a Sharp Divide? (Part 6)

The Enlightenment.  Skipping now hundreds of years, we now turn to another revolutionary movement in the history of thought. Yet, in a strange way, this new movement that wasn’t too different from the old one, which lead to the birth of western philosophy. it was known as The Age of Reason; Man escapes from the darkness of submission to religious dogma and steps into the light of learning, studying, and experimentation according to the dictates of autonomous Reason (again, note the capital R). Autonomous reasoning is human reasoning that believes that it the ultimate standard of what is true and false, right and wrong, without having to consult an outside referent (such as God).

The Age of Reason is also referred to as the Enlightenment. Out of the intellectual darkness of the middle ages (which weren’t exactly dark at all, with such brilliant minds as Anselm, Boethius, and Ockham), these thinkers sought to break free from all authority structures such as: the Church, Tradition, and Nationalism. Autonomous reasoning, free from these controlling structures, must be its own Judge, its own Master. Followers of Enlightenment thinking believed that this autonomy of Reason could lead us unto perfect knowledge in not only the sciences, but in all areas of life. They applied the method of the physical science (biology, mathematics, etc)to the study of the social science (sociology, politics, religion, etc). In effect,  whether they consciously meant to or not, they aspired to the knowledge of God himself.

Philosophical Modernism. In time, the Enlightenment ushered in what has come to be known as Modernism. We are not talking about architectural modernism, or literary
modernism, etc. We are discussing Modernism, the worldview. It is characterized by overconfidence in reason and science. It does not take religion and the idea of a supernatural realm seriously at all. Two subdivisions of Modernism are: Scientism and Naturalism. Scientism is view that only those things that can be tested by the methods of science and be proven by the methods of science are capable of being true. Now this very principle cannot be proven by the methods of science, so therefore according to its own standard it is not true. Science is dependant on induction. Induction is the principle that we can arrive at generalized conclusions from the observance of specific instances. A faulty example of induction is:

Repeated observation: all geese I’ve ever seen are white

Inductive [faulty] conclusion: all geese are white.

Here’s an example that we believe holds true:

Repeated observation: everything I throw up comes back down

Inductive conclusion: what goes up must come down. (for more on induction, click here)

Science also assumes that its findings have universal validity. That whatever it “proves” is true for all, not just for group B. These assumptions cannot be proven by science itself, but must be assumed for science to have any legitimacy. These necessary assumptions are the philosophical underpinnings of science, that which holds it together. These are held by faith.

Here I borrow Ronald Nash’s notion of a box to understand naturalism. Nature is the box and everything in it has to be explainable by something else in the box. This leads to determinism, the theory that all observable events have fixed natural causes. A consequence is that all of our emotions, hopes, desires, and thoughts would be completely explained by chemical and physiological causes. The boomerang effect of this is that it serves to sabotage the very reasoning that came up with this theory in the first place. According to determinism, I’m not a naturalist because I reasoned my way to this position, I actually had no choice. Chemical collisions in my brain made it so that I had to say this….and this….and this….

Faith and Reason: Is There a Sharp Divide? (Part 5)

Aquinas. Thomas Aquinas held that faith and reason are separate and distinct, but that both have a place in leading us to knowledge. His position was that reason, apart from God’s word, could lead us to knowledge of God. Reason, unaided by faith, can prove, according to Thomas, the existence of God. This is called Natural Theology (NT). NT posits that there is much we can know about God by merely analyzing the world and nature. This is because nature is God’s creation and therefore would reveal some of his divine qualities. Aquinas does believe that there are things that NT cannot uncover, such as the Biblically teaching that God is a Trinity and creation out of nothing (ex nihilo), which means that the world was created out of nothing. These truths cannot be ascertained by what reasoning can discover from nature. These can only be believed by faith in Scripture.

Thus, on Aquinas’s view, in order to be considered “reasonable” one does not need to accept the teaching of the Bible (i.e. express faith in the Bible). Someone is perfectly okay within the realm of “reason” when is comes to “natural” (as opposed to “spiritual”) things. So, while Augustine believes that faith precedes understanding (giving faith the priority), Aquinas privileges Reason (note the capital R).

Faith and Reason: Is There a Sharp Divide? (Part 4)

After the spread of Christianity, many thinkers debated on how God could be known. Exactly, how does man make contact with God? Is He known solely through faith or can man’s rationality lead us to knowledge of God?

Augustine, one of the most important and influential Christian thinkers in history, believed that faith was instrumental in finding truth. Only by first believing can one ever start to truly understand God and his creation. Both he and Anselm of Canterbury, (who though born 600 years after Augustine, was very much influenced by his thought), held that it is faith in God that makes understanding possible. Once illuminated by faith, reason can now correct misunderstandings, such as misinterpretations of scripture. We need Scripture to guide our reasoning, because man is inclined to rebel and deny his Creator. This inclination comes from sin. And sin affects every aspect of our reasoning. The ethical is set against the metaphysical. By “metaphysical” I mean ultimate reality. By rebelling and refusing to submit to the God of Scripture, we do not see the world and ourselves as we truly are: created by God.

Faith and Reason: Is There a Sharp Divide? (Part 3)

Upon review, Plato and Aristotle, while more sophisticated then the pre-Socratics, were in fact trying to do the same thing. And what was that? They both tried to come up with an all important principle that unites elements of reality. This principle would provide the basis for categories that we use to make sense of individual things. They were doing this through reasoning; in order to start they had to assume that reality was a certain way. Plato assumed the existence of the Forms (Question: if forms were perfect is there a form of filth?). If you need the Forms to make sense of everything else, how can you prove the existence of the Forms? Aristotle assumed the existence of matter, but matter has no qualities apart from Form. So the question becomes, what is Form a form of? Matter, strictly speaking is nothing (no-thing) according to Aristotle.

Their unifying principles proved to be no more effective then the Pre-Socrates’ “all is…” It is important to keep in mind that their arguments were based on assumptions/foundational beliefs that were not proven but rather served as standards that were used to prove everything else. Plato believed in the Forms, the same way that Aristotle believed in the unmoved mover, through blind faith.

Faith and Reason: Is There a Sharp Divide? (Part 2)

Though it’s probably crazy to do this if we’re discussing the history of philosophy, for the purposes of keeping within boundaries of this presentation we’re going to skip over Socrates, who is an eminent figure in the history of philosophy, notwithstanding. We are going to go directly to two thinkers that understood what the Pre-Socratics were trying to do. These two philosophers took it up a notch: Plato, student of Socrates, and then Aristotle who was a student of Plato.

Plato. According to Plato, the underlying unity that is necessary to make sense of things is not found in the world, i.e. in the world of sensory experience, what we can feel, eye, touch, taste, and hear. Senses can deceive us. In effect Plato split reality into two worlds; the world of the “forms” and the world of sense experience. The forms are perfect and without flaw; immaterial, you can’t touch, smell, hear, or taste them. They can only be grasped by the mind. They are changeless, stable so therefore all can be understood by reference to them. They act as the eternal, unchanging blueprints or receipt for all thing in the material, whether physical (like trees or dogs), or abstract qualities (like goodness, justice, redness, etc.). When things are similar, it is because they derive from the same form. The perceptual world consists of imperfect copies of the forms. Imperfect, so that they are not exactly the same as one another, but the similarity is based on the form that they are defective copies of.

Here’s a quick example: According to Plato’s doctrine of the the “forms” there exists in the eternal world a form of “treeness.” This form possesses all the necessary qualities that make a tree a tree. Every single tree down here in the physical world is patterned after this form of treeness. Down here, all tree are but imperfect copies of the form, and that’s why no two trees are exactly alike here in our world. Things in the perceptual world are perishable, because of their imperfection and changeability.

Aristotle. Aristotle does away with the platonic idea of the Forms. They are too other worldly for him. Forms, for Aristotle, are not found in a separate world, it is rather an element of a thing in the world. The form is not “out there” but instead, the form is found “in the thing” itself. Now he sees things in the world, through the category of substance. A substance is an individual thing, a person, chair, etc. These things, these substances, are a combination of form and matter. Form is what a thing is, the whatness of a thing. Matter, is what it is made of, the thisness, that which makes it this particular thing. Brad Pitt and I share the same form, the form of man. Matter is what makes him that particular man (a much better looking man).

According to Aristotle, only the unmoved mover (Aristotle’s deistic god) is pure form without matter. It is the one exception to his rule. The unmoved mover is not influenced by anything in the world, yet it is what causes all motion, all change. The unmoved mover is the final answer to that ever so popular question, with not only kids but also with adults, “what caused this to happen?” A is explained by B, B by C, you eventually get to the unmoved mover and nothing caused it to happen. Unmoved mover is an abstract entity not a person; it does not have personality characteristics.

Faith and Reason: Is There a Sharp Divide? (Part 2)

The birth of the discipline known as philosophy resulted in the utter rejection of mythology as an explanation for the world of our experience. Many of the ancient philosophers did not want to outright proclaim their disbelief in the Olympic/Greek gods, because they didn’t want to offend the people. More importantly they didn’t want to get in trouble with the governments that used mythology and superstition to keep the people in check (an oversimplification, but nonetheless true).

First philosophers were called the Pre-Socratics. They asked some pretty important questions like: (1) where does everything come from? (2) What is reality made of? (3) How do we explain the plurality of things found in nature?

So they were trying to find an underlying/foundational unity that would enable us to make sense of all the particular/individual elements of reality as we know it. While they came up with fails to impress us: all is water (Thales), all is fire (Heraclitus), etc, what strikes us as worthwhile in the long run are: (1) their questions. It is these questions that early on set the direction of philosophy and (2) their strong belief that must be a unifying principle, some unity, to provide categories that are necessary to identify any particular thing. (Categories that actually tell us about the world and are not merely constructs. We’ll talk more about this in upcoming posts).

Faith and Reason: Is There a Sharp Divide? (Part 1)

We begin our little survey by going back to ancient Greece where the start of western philosophy began. Western philosophy places a great emphasis on rationality, coherence and makes a strident effort to abide by the laws of logic. It claims to frown on beliefs based on feelings alone. Some of the laws of logic would be:

A) The law of non-contradiction- Something cannot be both A and non-A (it’s negation) at the same time and in the same respect.

B) The law of identity- A is A

C) The Law of the excluded middle: A is either A or it is not A, it cannot be both.

Approx. 600 years before the birth of Jesus Christ, a movement arose whose purpose was to develop an understanding of the world that didn’t depend on the ancient pagan religions. The members of this movement sought to interpret what was around them without reference to a Mind that was above and beyond them. They were called “philosophers”; that’s Greek for ‘Lovers of Wisdom’. The early Greek philosophers were quite diverse and held various views but there were common features to their thought. Those features are:

1) The supremacy of human reason (rationality). The human intellect is fully able, under perfect conditions, to construct a true-to-life system that properly interprets and explains all of life (i.e. an all encompassing and fully developed worldview). The chief failing of humankind is not moral (i.e. sin, or something like that), but epistemological and metaphysical (i.e. we’re finite and ignorant)

2) The acceptance of nothing on the sole basis of tradition. This develops are the first point above. Since humans are fit within themselves to understand reality, revelation or tradition isn’t needed in telling us where we came from or where we’re going. Stories can be true or false, but the facts of reality, so it was believed, are just that, facts.