1. Introduction

1.1 The Foundations of Philosophy—and the Epistemologically Self-Conscious Project

This book argues for the necessity of Christian belief as the presupposition for the intelligibility of philosophical and scientific thinking:

We give a description of reality and its constitution, our metaphysics.
We give an account of reality and the processes of nature, that is our theory of knowledge or our epistemology.
We then establish what is argued as the only appropriate basis of conduct within our worldview, our Christian ethics and how this understanding can then be applied to the political arena.

Agreeing formally with Mahon we assert, “philosophy [is] properly philosophical only when edifying and transformative”[1] (emphasis original). The transformative process we label “epistemological self-consciousness.” The following are our areas of exploration:

Philosophy is conceived of as the entire system of human knowledge rather than a specialized addendum to the normal curriculum undertaken only by those with a penchant for abstract intellectual activity.
Christian theology is argued to be the only system that will lend philosophy so-conceived an intellectual coherence.
The parameters for this are both pluralistic in scope and particular in application without contradiction. That is, it corresponds with the world and is internally coherent.
The defense of the existence of the Christian God as not only justified or warranted but as objectively defensible, rational, and
Competing worldviews or “forms of life” can only be judged as incoherent when subjected to transcendental analysis.
A worldview is not just a “conceptual scheme” but a much stronger articulation with ontological significance. This helps us overcome some of the traditional problems with transcendental arguments.

In summary, we posit a metaphysic from scripture, we posit a transcendental foundation for knowledge in the transcendent Trinity, and we posit an ethic which we can then apply to the exegetical and practical problems of philosophy. In other words, we then have a philosophical toolbox which will then inform our political practice.[2] This work aims to articulate the orthodox, biblical Christian worldview as the only system of thought capable of providing the foundations of intelligibility of reasoning and rationality, in both the private and public spheres of life.

1.2 The Skeptical Challenge

This book stands intelligently but strongly opposed to the skeptical view, except in a strictly qualified sense as an issue of methodological research and believes that we can live our lives certain of the most important truths regarding the universe. That is, that there are values immanent within all creation that allow us to live in complete harmony within it and with one another. To that end we argue that there are no “brute” uninterpreted facts of the universe (or nature),[3] but all our conceptions and perceptions about the world, how we interpret and evaluate the actions of other external entities alike and unlike ourselves, will be theory-laden and, most importantly, value laden. This might seem initially implausible until we consider how naturalism excludes as a matter of theoretical principle that ‘nature’ is the work of a personal God and makes the ethical observations that deny this God cares about this ‘nature’ and that the relations of this ‘nature’ reflect God’s own character.

In contrast, one of our basic positions is that how we relate to the world around us is at base an ethical question, and we are arguing that only a Christian ethic ever allows us to properly understand the world around us. We recognize that there is a fundamental difference between employing skepticism as a methodological tool of analysis where we systematically evaluate our assumptions with a view to improving our understanding and technological applications of our knowledge, and a skepticism that is a basic metaphysical orientation that reality is contingent, disordered, chaotic, and our reasonings are arbitrary, physiologically, or psychologically conditioned responses of our evolutionary history. Indeed, we argue in this work that one of the central purposes of philosophy is really to address this challenge of skepticism in the latter sense, and we devote substantial space to the various responses to this challenge whilst presenting our own vision.

1.3 Apologetics

1.3.1 Apologetics as the Rational Defense of Christianity

Apologetic philosophy or more simply “Apologetics” [4] is normally conceived of as being concerned with the rational defense of the Christian faith against those who oppose it. It was “the defense of the Christian philosophy of life against the various forms of the non-Christian philosophy of life.” [5] The definite article emphasizes the fact that there are non-negotiable foundations to any worldview that claims to be Christian. Part of the argument of this work will be that there may be a great diversity of kind but there remains an objective basis for any category claiming to be of that kind. As J Gresham Machen argued in his Christianity and Liberalism (1923), “Liberalism,” despite its reuse of the scriptures, was fundamentally a different religion distinct from Christianity because it did not accept biblical doctrines on their own terms but reinterpreted them to fit the post-Darwinian zeitgeist. In that respect, we will explicate and explore the Kuyperian conception of the fundamental antithesis between the Christian and non-Christian worldviews, Van Til’s development of it and our own specific instantiation.

Thus, this work is essentially an apologetic work. It is, depending on your presuppositions regarding the subject, a particular branch of either philosophy, philosophical theology, or theology proper. For example, Richard Rorty, the self-identifying “secular humanist” stated that apologetics “fell off” philosophy in the early years of the 20^th century with “no consequence,” i.e., it was completely irrelevant,[6] though Rorty was being slightly disingenuous as he elsewhere acknowledged the seminal importance of Christian thought to the West.[7] In contrast, we will be arguing that without apologetics, there can be no possibility of the intelligibility of any human predication, so it is completely relevant; indeed, logically necessary and lays the foundation for philosophy.

1.3.2 Classical and Evidential Apologetics

There have been many iterations of apologetics using very different presuppositions. The old Princeton tradition called for a rational defense of the faith against the claims of unbelief. Thus, this was principally a negative or reactive apologetic that wants to duel with the unbeliever using their own terms and presuppositions. The Princeton founders themselves put it this way:

“[T]o fit clergymen to meet the cultural crisis, to roll back what they perceived as tides of irreligion sweeping the country, and to provide a learned defense of Christianity generally and the Bible specifically.” [8]

This tradition is also sometimes called “classical apologetics” or “evidential apologetics” though there is an important distinction between these terms. Technically, “classical apologetics” is more correctly thought of as the apologetic tradition originating from the work of St Thomas Aquinas, specifically his cosmological arguments. “Evidential apologetics” deals with evidential issues such as evidence for the resurrection and the accuracy of the biblical manuscripts. However, the two have become somewhat conflated as they are both variations on the theme that reasons are required for the justification of belief and that justification comes from evidence (which is primarily empirical). Thus, some within the Reformed community have grouped them together.[9] Similarly, Warfield in his apologetics asserted that the non-believer must have the scriptures demonstrated and validated as the Word of God by the appeal to “right reason.” Once this had been demonstrated, then the scriptures themselves could be believed, the autonomous person relinquishes their autonomy, and they accept the absolute authority of scripture and its claim as the authoritative Word of God. The negative nature and defensive posture of this apologetic model should be clear.

1.3.3 Presuppositional Apologetics

The classical and evidential methods have historically been the most influential schools of apologetics until Van Til was credited with a “reformation” of apologetics during his time as professor of apologetics at Westminster Theological Seminary[10] Van Til’s critique argued that the evidential methods have some basic flaws: [NL 1-3]

It assumes the unbeliever is capable of “right reason,” i.e., that the noetic consequences of sin do not substantially interfere with the ability to reason.[11]
It assumes there is common, neutral epistemological ground between believer and non-believer upon which each can meet and “follow the argument” [12] where it leads.
It makes the Christ of scripture and any of His claims always subject to a standard external to scripture itself. Scripture is no longer the final authority but is subject to the judgment of human reason. This external substantiation always needs to be satisfied before the claim can be accepted as authoritative and binding on the believer. [/NL 1-3]

We note further:

The assumption of (1) cannot be sustained by reference to the text of scripture it is trying to justify. Scripture, particularly the discussion in Romans 8, presents the human person who has not been regenerated by God’s grace as incapable of right reason.[13]
The possibility of (2) is thus negated by the failure of (1)—the believer and non-believer construct antithetical sciences and as Kuyper explained, “refuse to grant to one another the noble name of ‘science’…” [14] Neutrality is a myth as it begs the question by assuming the unaided and an unregenerate human reason is capable of judging the claims of scripture.
The logical defect of (3) is similarly conspicuous. By implication, if what scripture asserts is correct, the authority of God is absolute, primary, and self-validating. If scripture really is God speaking as it claims to be (2Tim 3:16) then it must logically be the absolute and final authority; it is self-validating as all ultimate authorities are, there can be no appeal to a higher authority.

Hence, in contrast to the classical or evidential mode of thought, Van Til from the late 1920s onward argued that Christian philosophy (and thus apologetics) can and should be articulated on a Christian basis, intellectually consistent with the faith it is defending. He was joined three decades later in this by Alvin Plantinga who was credited as restoring an academic credibility to Christian philosophy that had been lost in the post-Darwinian era of liberal Christianity.[15] Since the late 1950s, Plantinga dealt in a rigorously analytic method and progressively focused from the mid-1960s on the concept of evidence and its relation to belief, arguing that evidentialism rests on a classical foundationalism, which had been categorically demonstrated in the 20^th century, both from within and without the Christian community, as a naïve and an arbitrary position. Whilst historically there have been some attempts to draw from both philosophers, the perceived tensions between their positions and the dismissive attitude of many analytical philosophers, including those identifying as Christian and ‘Reformed,’ towards Van Til has meant not enough attention has been given to the important links that can be drawn between them.[16] This work attempts to draw out the complementary nature of their work.

Thus, in lieu of the criticisms of these men, we too must advocate for an alternative model of apologetics, the presuppositional model. In other words, this is a positive apologetic concerned with presenting Christianity on its own terms, using its native assumptions and presuppositions. However, it immediately needs qualification as to what we mean. Often “presuppositional apologetics” is set against a grouping of all the non-presuppositionalist views,[17] but that is a basic error—“evidentialists” still have presuppositions (often a naïve empiricism) and “presuppositionalists” still use evidence and historical-critical arguments. Van Til was explicit on this last point, recognized also in the philosophy of science, maintaining one must consider the philosophy of facts in the apologetic system, facts are “theory laden.” [18]

It should also be noted that other positions commonly labelled “presuppositionalist” are very different to Van Til’s position, and sometimes stand in opposition to it or have far more in common with the classical and evidentialist positions than with Van Til.[19] Van Til’s presuppositionalism was founded on his philosophical transcendentalism,[20] and thus he was often characterized as offering a transcendental apologetic. This transcendental approach makes it possible to argue for an objective proof even when “forms of life” attempt to isolate themselves within an internal language game. We will be arguing in a similar, transcendental fashion which is characterized as analyzing what must be true for there to be knowledge of objects at all, or as arguing indirectly through the impossibility of the contrary; as opposed to direct, discursive arguments.

Thus, this is a strong, positive apologetic approach seeking to argue for Christian philosophy on its own terms and we will clarify and develop our understanding of presuppositional apologetics as we move through this work. We will seek to demonstrate that it is theologically illegitimate and unfaithful to the testimony of scripture to attempt to use the methodologies, metaphysical and epistemological assumptions of unbelieving humanity to present a rational defense of Christian faith. In summary, the defense must be presuppositional and the proof of Christianity transcendental.

1.3.4 Subjective Apologetics and Religious Experience

Before we move on to unpacking the concept of epistemological self-consciousness, we should make mention of the importance of the subjective schools of apologetics and the role of religious experience. This is perhaps expedient because of the revival of its influence in the wake of the Pentecostal revival in the first two decades of the 20^th century, the charismatic revivals after WWII, the Christian appropriation of postmodernism in the 1980s, and the “prophetic” mysticism of our contemporary period.[21] In some quarters, this irrational or “transrational” mode of apologetics is considered the defense of Christianity to which has the greatest claim to authenticity. That is, these “subjective” or “irrational” schools of apologetics defend the idea that ‘religious experience’ rather than reasoned argument should be, i.e., to be ethically faithful (or authentic), the basis of the defense of the faith. This is technically known as “fideism” [22] (though we do want to qualify that designation somewhat below); fideism generally denies an abstract or common rationality (known to all humanity) can express spiritual truth; we must instead receive it irrationally or intuitively “by faith” or “with a leap of faith.” We find Plantinga and Van Til in broad agreement with each other in asserting that the fideist position has little to commend it apologetically:

“Faith is not blind faith…Christianity can be shown to be, not ‘just as good’ or even ‘better than’ the non-Christian position, but the only position that does not make nonsense of human experience.” [23]

“[The] main competence [of philosophy] … is to clear away certain objections, impedances, and obstacles to Christian belief.” [24]

Notwithstanding, fideism has had some highly skilled and passionate defenders throughout Christian history. For example, the ancient apologist Tertullian was famous for this declaration:

“What indeed has Athens to do with Jerusalem? What concord is there between the Academy and the Church?… Our instructions come from “the porch of Solomon” …Away with all attempts to produce a mottled Christianity of Stoic, Platonic, and dialectic composition! We want no curious disputation after possessing Christ Jesus…!” [25]

For Tertullian, the “possessing of Christ Jesus” was not something that could be even a possibility that could be reached in the reasonings of the Academy. Similarly, Kierkegaard is the most famous example in the 19^th century where the labels ‘subjective individualism’ and ‘protoexistentialism’ have been applied equally to him; central to his thought was the utter inadequacy of “Reason” in dealing with religious experience:

“But what is this unknown something with which the Reason collides when inspired by its paradoxical passion, with the result of unsettling even man’s knowledge of himself? It is the Unknown. It is not a human being, in so far as we know what man is; nor is it any other known thing. So let us call this unknown something: the God. It is nothing more than a name we assign to it. The idea of demonstrating that this unknown something (the God) exists, could scarcely suggest itself to the Reason. For if the God does not exist it would of course be impossible to prove it; and if he does exist it would be folly to attempt it.” [26]

So, in such cases, it is arguably a legitimate expression of genuine faith, rational within the language game of a community, rather than an irrational intellectual impulse in the face of intellectual challenges.[27] Thus, there is arguably a distinction between fideism and some forms of subjective apologetics. That is, the Christian apologetic system needs to address “the claim Jesus seems to be making is not that he holds a worldview which is true and corresponds to reality, but rather that he himself is the truth.” [28] This would seem to make our knowledge of the truth intimately bound up with our knowledge of the Truth himself, and thus, our religious experience.

In response, firstly, the question is certainly a pertinent one for the broad Christian tradition where the roles of faith and reason have periodically dominated attempts to articulate a coherent Christian philosophy. For example, Roman Catholicism has remained in some respects more open to the supernatural intrusions as a mode of knowing and the Catholic tradition has produced some of the most profound mystics.[29] It should also be recognized that primitive Celtic Christianity with its links to the ancient Nestorian church and thus Eastern Orthodoxy, had a strong mystical heritage. In contrast, the Reformed tradition has tended to denigrate the miraculous, particularly in the sense of continuing mystical experience in the wake of Calvin’s cessation-ism [30] and the Reformed tradition was frequently excoriated for its inability to celebrate the Arts and Creativity in contrast to the rich heritage and patronage of the Catholic church.

However, it should be noted that this is an inaccurate and uninformed generalization [31] and I would argue it was more a symptom of the degeneration of the Reformed position rather than implicit in it, being corrected to a large degree in the recapitulation of Calvinism in the work of Kuyper during the second half of the 19^th century up to his death in 1920.[32] Kuyper, in every sense a religious, political and social reformer,[33] wrote extensively on the Art and Sciences as possessing a modality of their own,[34] being a celebration of the character and nature of God, positioning the person and their relations at the center of philosophical theology to the degree that a recent biographer described his position as anticipating the postmodern a century before Lyotard.[35]

Thus, when during this work I emphasize the “Reformed” interpretation of the Augustinian position, it is not at the expense of these alternative conceptions of Christian thought which have given (and continue to give) us much, though I will argue that I believe the Reformed conception of Augustine, understood best and perhaps, provocatively, distinct from many of those denominations claiming that label, lends itself to the most apologetically satisfying model when developed along the lines we shall be arguing.

Secondly, it is also a pertinent question for me personally as I did not come to faith purely on the basis of being persuaded by rational argument of the legitimacy of the Christian worldview. It was very much an encounter with the “Truth” himself in a mystical vision of the journey to the mount of crucifixion.[36] As a convert to Christianity at 22, I attended a Pentecostal church which was “charismatic” in the literal sense, practicing spiritual gifts such as spiritual deliverance, healing, and prophesy; all of which remains part of my praxis and experience. For over 20 years I attended a fellowship which was predominantly irrational in its approach to the relation of faith and reason, denigrating the latter in deference to the former. Thus, nothing I say in this work should be construed as me being apostate from believing in a living and vibrant faith; it is rather an appeal to an intelligent, living, and vibrant faith.

That is, what I came to value and understand, was that the minister of the first church though Pentecostal and charismatic, believed in apologetics proper and dealt seriously with church history, addressing the theory and practice of apologetics; she also suffered the distinction of being labelled a “Pelagian” by critics. Faith needed an intellectual articulation, and it was perhaps inevitable, given my philosophical convictions, that my continued participation in the latter fellowship became impossible regardless of the authentic spiritual experience I enjoyed there and my enormous respect for and appreciation of the leaders. That is, I fully acknowledge the importance of a continuing encounter with the Truth rather than arguing I have perfected my dogma at your expense, as symptomatic of the most distasteful fragmentation of the Reformed community in 1930 Presbyterian America. Indeed, this work would most certainly be characterized as “post-Reformed” because of the recognition above of spiritual gifts as intended and necessary for the church today.

Thirdly, it is indeed somewhat paradoxical that objective clarity is mediated through the deepest subjective experience of the Truth himself. However, this paradox I believe can be resolved to a degree by considering that the greatest mystical experience (and indeed the experience of my own conversion) came to me during a contemplation of the scriptures, rather than practicing a set of disciplines apart from the scriptures (valuable though such ascetic practices are with the scriptures). It should also be remembered that the goal of apologetics is not to bring about a spiritual reformation (which is in the purview of God alone) though it can certainly be a part of that process and Van Til’s transcendental terminus might indeed be considered a call to conversion, it is rather to provide a rational defense of our belief.

So, in summary, this work needs a focus, and that focus is on the area of strengthening a rational defense of the faith rather than an exploration of what might be called the phenomenology or spirituality of Christian life, equally important but not the central part of this study. However, in a sense, this categorical division is for analytical purposes only, we should never separate our doctrine from our praxis. This might well provoke many questions as to how our final conclusion is mediated with regards to religious experience, and it will be necessary to reflect on this when we draw the final conclusion of the study and to what degree this weakens our final position. However, we are proceeding on an apologetic basis that assumes a rational defense is warranted and mandated by scripture.

1.4 The Status and Role of Scripture

One of the arguments made in this work will be for the ultimate and self-attesting authority of scripture in the matters of spirituality, doctrine, and ethics. However, it is one thing to state this, for such a statement is likely to be considered one of the cornerstones of a generic “evangelical” view of the Bible as succinctly summarized by McGrath.[37] It is quite another to express the implications of this in practice for our project here. For example, McGrath’s analysis focuses precisely on this issue, and he develops a distinctive moderate, evangelical programme through that work, critiquing previous systems (particularly the fundamentalist model and the analytic model associated with theologian Carl Henry) but his programme is very different to what we develop here.

This is not necessarily a threat to either of us, as scripture itself states, “there are different ministries, but the same Lord” [38] and people will come to different conclusions as to the meaning of scripture passages, with both claiming the same inspirational authority from “the Spirit.” That is, we must recognize that scripture itself did not come to us as systematic theology and it is capable of a diversity of interpretations even amongst those who have an equal commitment to its truth and authority, whether that commitment is conceived objectively, subjectively, or both. We must recognize that even some cornerstone doctrines such as the Trinity were inferences and emergent theological principles after some centuries of reflection.[39] Thus, whatever system we might derive from scripture has a degree of fallibility even if we believe it is incorrigible to us.

However, I maintain the position that though there might be many possible meanings of scripture, the authors had the intention of communicating something specific to us in their narrative (especially when it is written in a pastoral or exegetical genre); even if, with the benefit of hindsight, we might see the Lord communicating something to us quite apart from the intentions of the authors themselves. We see this in the polemical dispute between Paul and James which contrast the very different conceptions of “faith” and “works” with each author using the same scriptures but rendering the sense of them in a seemingly antithetical fashion.[40] Our resolution of the dispute with distance will appropriate the insights of both and conceptually distinguish “saving faith” as understood by say, Luther and faith demonstrating itself in our ethics as articulated by a John Wesley.[41]

So, a polyvalent scripture can still anchor our praxis, and the relevance of scripture is seen concretely later in our work in our section on Ethics where the theonomical position seeks to demonstrate how the principles embedded in culturally conditioned narratives remain relevant for us. We can further acknowledge the roles of different genres in communicating not just propositional knowledge but emotive content and poetic allusions; Proverbs is rich with aphoristic couplets and idiomatic constructions which make no sense or are contradictory when considered atomistically.[42] It might have even been the case the author layered the meanings within the text,[43] inviting us to discover those meanings but that is still distinct from denying the possibility of any objective meaning intended by the text. The apostle Paul clearly asserted that language’s principal power was the ability to carry meaning:

“There are probably many kinds of languages in the world, and none is without meaning [incapable of carrying meaning]. If then I do not know the meaning [power] of a language, I will be a foreigner to the speaker and the speaker a foreigner to me.” [44]

Thus, taking the Reformers as an example and the great modern Puritan expositors such as Lloyd-Jones,[45] it is possible to get to a place of strong confidence and certainty over the objective meaning of the narrative whilst permitting subjective “meanings,” senses or interpretations which might valuably be extrapolated from the text. A strong commitment to the propositional mode of knowing provided the strength to the Reformation and the subsequent scientific revolution that dovetailed with it after the stagnation in the physical sciences during the scholastic period.[46] If the Holy Spirit is to “lead us into all truth” and we “[are to] abide in My word…then you shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free” [47] (and the abiding here is in the “logos” rather than the “rhema”), the signification of scripture here would seem to indicate an objective sense and a normative function is implicit in the scripture. This would also be supported by the climax of the ‘Sermon on the Mount’ teaching:

“Therefore everyone who hears these words of Mine, and acts upon them, may be compared to a wise man, who built his house upon the rock. ²⁵ “And the rain descended, and the floods came, and the winds blew, and burst against that house; and yet it did not fall, for it had been founded upon the rock. ²⁶ “And everyone who hears these words of Mine, and does not act upon them, will be like a foolish man, who built his house upon the sand. ²⁷ “And the rain descended, and the floods came, and the winds blew, and burst against that house; and it fell, and great was its fall.” [48]

The “words” of Jesus again here are “logos.” What I mean here is that much is made in, say the Word of Faith movement [49] of the distinction between the “logos” (conceived of as the written Word of God) and the “rhema” (conceived of as the spoken Word of God); with the rhema conceived of as the Holy Spirit bringing specific words to the believer or the church through subjective, religious experience. This is conceived of as the individual or corporate “leading” of the Holy Spirit in the life of the believer or church. This distinction was employed in this fashion by Jesus in his discussion with Satan, “he answered, ‘It is written, Man does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.’” [50] where the “word” here is rhema. Satan had misquoted and misinterpreted Ps.91 to Jesus, and Jesus corrected the misinterpretation by appealing both to the objective “what is written” and the subjective “what is said.”

Thus, by preferring logos to rhema, I would argue John is talking about something objective here (what I will call “worldview” in this work, originating from the logos upon which we are to build our foundation) rather than religious experience.[51] Spiritual experience is not discounted but is tested by scriptural foundations for authenticity; if we accept the biblical narrative, we accept we can be deceived by counterfeit spiritual experience and we need normative criteria to distinguish the two, as well as our inner light. It is on this basis this work proceeds, seeking a solid, objective, scriptural foundation whilst acknowledging the importance of religious experience in receiving the immediate knowledge of God’s will and direction in specific situations where we might have many options or we do not know how to proceed; celebrating the subjectivity and creativity that can flow from scripture that comes to us as narrative whilst maintaining that same narrative had an objective, intended sense.

1.5 Epistemological Un-consciousness and its Transcendental Critique

One of the aims of this work is not just to establish the validity of “epistemological self-consciousness” as a concept but also as a methodology to bring others to self-consciousness about their own epistemologies that they may judge their “worldview” against the standard of rationality and coherence argued herein. As intimated previously, this can only be conducted via a transcendental critique of the opposing worldviews for reasons which we will work out during this work. However, to clarify our aims with a negative example, we should immediately see that one possible logical implication of our posited category is that we are asserting that the opposing worldviews can be (and normally are) epistemologically un-conscious.[52] When we state that an individual is epistemologically un-conscious, it means philosophically, or at a basic cognitive level, that they are either:

Not aware of the full implications of their theory of knowledge.

For example, a consistent materialist would not be able to persuade us of the legitimacy of their worldview because the laws of logic, a prerequisite of argument, do not fit into the materialist view of the universe. This is because the laws of logic are non-material, universal and abstract.

Borrowing intellectual capital from those they mean to oppose.

We do not argue that an unbeliever does not know how to count, but rather they can only give a viciously circular account of their counting.[53] The fullest sense of knowledge is not just the how of an activity but the why of the activity. Our claim to ‘science’ fails I assert if we cannot justify why the process of science is successful.

1.6 Transcendentalist but not Kantian Creative Antirealism

The astute reader at this point might understand that “transcendental critique” suggests a broad Kantian approach is adopted as the philosophical basis of this work and would thus dismiss it as ‘unsafe’ on that basis, best left in its grave (for we are all analytic philosophers now.) However, this is only true in the most abstract sense and should be of no hindrance to the reader who is a realist or finds the Continental schools compelling. With respect to this important assertion, it is of note that Van Til, to whom this work owes its first intellectual debt, taught that our framework might be broadly considered as ‘idealist’ and our method as ‘transcendental’ but only when those words are understood with their Reformed or Augustinian Christian sense.[54]

That is, for Van Til, Kantian thought and idealism in the general sense found their final authority not in God’s Word but in the idol of human autonomy.[55] Van Til agreed with the general transcendental programme of Kant [56] which was concerned to discover what general conditions must be fulfilled for any particular instance of knowledge to be possible, but the Van Tillian a priori finds its ultimate referent in transcendent revelation, not in autonomous deduction of the categories of the understanding. Thus, Van Til considered Kant to have intensified the autonomous attitude of Descartes, who is said to have proceeded from the indubitable of his own existence and proceeded then to God and the world.[57] The mind of humanity even became the lawgiver for Kant, not the mind of God, and thus the procedure of Kant stands in direct opposition to that which is presented in this work, which is broadly Van Tillian. Similarly, Plantinga, to whom this work owes its second intellectual debt, also gives us compelling reason to reject any temptation to follow Kant:

“Did we structure or create the heavens and the earth? Some of us think there were animals-dinosaurs, let’s say-roaming the earth before human beings had so much as put in an appearance; how could it be that those dinosaurs owed their structure to our noetic activity…And what about all those stars and planets we have never so much as heard of: how have we managed to structure them? When did we do all this?” [58]

Indeed, in my basic orientation, I consider myself a realist as Christian philosophy (in which we include theology) is, or at least should be, concerned with the reality which is God’s world and in which we live and breathe as concrete persons. Plantinga’s epistemology might be considered an elaboration and an expert exegesis of that principle, and I draw heavily from his work in my own position. Fundamental to both our views is that our mind is connected to the world and tells us real information about the world because that is the way God created our minds to behave. This last sentence alone has “nuclear strength” in an apologetic contest, the fundamental philosophical problem of how to connect our concepts with the world is one of the chief problems of philosophy. Nevertheless, we must acknowledge the critiques of Hume and Kant and one task of this work must be to demonstrate how we unify concept and percept without succumbing to a naïve realism or a catastrophic skepticism. For Christians who are not primarily mystics, phenomena and noumena, mind and object, subjective and objective, should be categories resolved and unified in God, and we will be demonstrating a reconciliation of these basic philosophical tensions.

1.7 Epistemological Self-Consciousness as Augustinian Apologetics

By presenting the Christian worldview as the only possible one that maintains theoretical coherence and metaphysical correspondence,[59] this work is essentially an “apologetic” work in the Augustinian tradition where “faith” is considered as the grounding to right reason, rather than reason validating what of faith might be considered “reasonable.” [60] Both Van Til and Plantinga self-identified as being within the “broad tradition” of Augustinian philosophy, thus being those who have worked not just as Christians who happened to do philosophy but as those who desired to do philosophy in an authentically Christian way.^[61]

Whilst both men have specialized in epistemology, the term “epistemological self-consciousness” is owed most immediately to the work of Cornelius Van Til and to his major interpreter, Dr Greg Bahnsen (d. 1995).^[62] I am employing the term distinct from its strict Van Tillian sense as I also draw on the realism of Plantinga, but it is the position of this work that the solution to the problem of human knowledge and the resulting imperatives are argued to only be provided by the metaphysical foundation of an orthodox, Augustinian ^[63] Christian understanding and the ethical consequences for a political philosophy are then worked out. It mandates that one fully understands their theory of knowledge, its justification in metaphysical terms which then mandates its ethical consequences.

1.8 Epistemological Self-Consciousness as a Scientific Project

1.8.1 The Challenge of Perennial Naturalism in the Academy

In the interests of due diligence and with proper respect to the merits of the case, it must immediately be admitted that epistemological un-consciousness, as seen in the varieties of perennial naturalism, dominates the academy as a normal state of affairs, particularly within the sciences.[64] This immediate challenge requires addressing before we proceed but we can posit that it poses no threat to our thesis. We will demonstrate that its adoption and maintenance within most of the sciences is a result of the post-positivistic naturalism of the academy since the late 1950s which incorporated elements of the otherwise intellectually discredited earlier naturalisms of pragmatism, logical positivism and logical analysis that dominated Anglo-American philosophy in the second half of the 19^th and first half of the 20^th century. Thus, we will seek to show, that this incorporation, despite the sometimes-fundamental weaknesses repeatedly exposed in the critical literature (which we examine in detail when we consider the fallibilist perspective on epistemology in §2.6), is an example of prejudice and dogmatism, an attempt to preclude critical examination of the illegitimate philosophical assumptions implicit in the worldview that would otherwise render it obviously incoherent.[65]

Thus, in this work, I contend the exact opposite, that science, to be legitimately categorized as science, must necessarily ascend to the level of epistemological self-consciousness built on a robust metaphysics. Whether this should be considered as psychological necessity or logical necessity, with the latter obviously the stronger proposition, is a legitimate matter for debate. That is, we are not arguing that all science must be determined certainly to be considered as science, but I argue in this work that if we were to accept the philosophical implications of epistemological unconsciousness where the possibility of epistemic certainty is not considered necessary to science, using say the atheist worldview, our attempts at science and philosophy would be, on analysis, rendered incoherent and self-refuting.

1.8.2 The Status of Science—Preliminary Remarks

The discussion above regarding naturalism would immediately suggest that we have a profound definitional and methodological problem regarding what constitutes ‘science,’ which is of major importance to our discussion. We can mitigate this though by considering that the linguistic use of “science” was only altered primarily during the post-Darwinian period of the 19^th century and the opening decades of the 20^th century, when it became intellectually fashionable amongst the irreligious and anti-religious to cast “science” and “religion” as adversarial and opposing views of reality.

In contrast, when Abraham Kuyper, the great Dutch statesman, educator, cultural critic, reformer, and theologian[66] was writing at the turn of the 20^th century, he employed the term “science” to include theology, philosophy, literature, and political economy, in a usage much closer to the modern usage of the term “epistemology.” [67] Similarly, he described what we would call “evolutionary theory” (which is generally conceived as “scientific theory”) as “the deleterious philosophy and consequences of evolutionary naturalism” [68] (emphasis added). Likewise, Michael Faraday when he published his revolutionary theories of electricity published them in a journal of natural philosophy.[69] The attempt by naturalistic science to define science as that which is naturalistic in its assumptions and methods, demonstrates a principial prejudice.

Thus, I argue that epistemological unconsciousness is to be considered un-scientific because it fails as a rational explanation of reality which would then imply that naturalism and science are incompatible.[70] However, we have just admitted that the scientific academy views naturalism as normative and we all still stand in awe of the achievements of modern ‘science’ and furthermore, and rather more subtly, if I have a headache and take an aspirin, who cares what the aspirin is doing to my biochemistry if it removes my headache? Or if I merely drive my car, why should I be concerned with how the engine works? There seems a prima facie justification for epistemological un-consciousness both by the weight of the academy and a pragmatic justification by the means of any number of these unsophisticated constructions from everyday life.

We examine that this apparent paradox is resolvable because the naturalist is not, in practice, acting consistently with their naturalist principles. They borrow intellectual capital from the Christian worldview and deceive themselves that they need not acknowledge that. The emotive analogies too fare little better, being populist parodies of American Pragmatism (see §2.6.6), and are of course unsatisfactory or inadequate simply because:

Medical side effects are sometimes fatal even when the compound offers immediate relief (that is why vaccines historically have needed close to a decade to have been proven safe).[71]
Abuse of say combustion engines in service beyond their design tolerances can (and do) have catastrophic consequences.

Philosophically, or we might as easily say, “scientifically” (we shall justify further this collapse or merging of categories below), someone needs to understand the biochemical effects of drugs to ensure safe use of pharmaceuticals and the mechanical laws applicable under different conditions to design a safe machine.[72] Similarly, we argue that a science which proceeds on a purely pragmatic basis because it just “works” would quickly be unworkable for it begs the question as to why it should be useful to us, which must then be decided on a non-pragmatic basis. In other words, we most certainly need to be clear of what is meant by our critics when their “science” is showcased as the pinnacle of rationality.

1.8.3 The Problem of Induction

This brings us nicely to the self-contradiction in Hume, one of the fiercest critics. Hume had wanted to apply the empirical methods of Newton beyond physics to provide a basis for all of natural science but wrestled with what he saw as an insurmountable obstacle to the justification of inductive thinking, which he rightly saw was providing the basis for a comprehensive natural science in contrast to the metaphysical dogmas that he had counselled in his most famous passage, “should be cast to the flames.” [73] The force of his criticism was such that it has never been satisfactorily answered by secular naturalist thought but Hume also, importantly, realized he could not live consistently with his own skepticism. In the second of his famous passages, he announces that when the skeptical challenges threatened to overwhelm him, he hit the bar to play backgammon with his friends.[74]

Hume’s deconstruction of empiricism was lamented several centuries later by Russell and indeed it was a long, despairing, and sad lament, for Russell could offer no empirical argument that would refute Hume. Russell had encapsulated the rationality problem that Hume had identified as the “Christmas Turkey” problem of which I shall give a version of for I believe it is an excellent illustration of the forcefulness of Hume’s criticism of the rationality of induction:

Imagine you were a turkey in January, every day you hear a bell and you come to realize that is the dinner bell. You hear that bell and because you have discovered that your universe runs by the law of the bell, you receive food every day at the set time. However, on the 1^st of December, you hear the bell but instead of being greeted with food at the feeding station, the laborers cut your throat with a hatchet.

Your perception of your turkey universe as a uniform spatial-temporal continuum governed by certain scientific regularities came to an abrupt halt. It was merely a habit of the mind to see regularity and uniformity based on the empirical evidence of your senses, there was nothing of logical necessity in the experience.

However, the enormous progress of science in the 19^th and 20^th century, provides the backdrop as to why Russell temperamentally considered those that took refuge in Hume’s skepticism as “dishonest” because they would eat when they got hungry. Russell’s point was in essence a pragmatic one rather than a logical or philosophical refutation of Hume – if we took Hume seriously, we would reject that being hungry necessarily means that we should eat. That is, unless we are deliberately abstaining from food or have no food, everyone eats when they are hungry. In a similar vein, Ayer in his seminal work[75] introducing logical positivism to the English-speaking world (see §2.6.7), accused those who used Hume to question the logical status, or more exactly, the rational respectability of inductive thinking as guilty of “superstition.” Inductive thinking was clearly the basis of science and clearly getting results and that was all there was to it, “nothing else was necessary,” i.e., the success of the wider programme of “science” was a sufficient justification for Ayer.[76]

This too sounded a lot like the pragmatists with whom the positivists had competed with for the heart and soul of 20^th century philosophy. Dewey had concluded that no answer to Hume was possible, but it was not important to find that answer, it was merely a theoretical problem, a linguistic or psychological confusion that had no practical significance for our ability to solve our problems of everyday life and so should be ignored. Similarly, when the positivists sidestepped the issue by calling it a “pseudo-problem,” [77] a designation they began to employ for any problem within philosophy or science that seemed insoluble, it was methodologically analogous to the pragmatist dismissal of it as irrelevant. In effect, we will understand that neither could offer anything that would answer Hume. Thus, as we move into the post-positivist period precipitated by Quine’s devastating critique[78] of positivism, we will see that Quine himself could offer nothing better than an evolutionary justification of induction the inadequacy of which we will consider in detail later when we articulate his conception of a naturalized epistemology (see §3.3.5).

Thus, in summary, we will find that there remains no empirical or scientific justification of induction, but we witness a begging of the question as there was no non-circular explanation as to why induction has helped us to survive. Most notably, we will see that the philosophers of science have remained engaged with the problem of induction, even the briefest introduction to a philosophy of science will describe it as an issue “which keeps us awake at night.” [79] Both Schlick and Carnap had extensive treatments of it in their original editions of their theories of knowledge; neither of which survived into later editions as a compelling solution. A substantively different approach to the problem was seen in Popper’s attempt to interpret science as a discipline of falsification, i.e., to recast science in essence as logically deductive. It was an attempt to get around both the positivist problems of verificationism and to ‘solve’ the problem of induction. For Popper, we are to view science as something other than empirical and inductive, reducing the importance of induction, and thus to be more comfortable with the insoluble problem of induction.[80]

However, Popperism had many logical problems of its own and once this particular Genie was let out of the bottle it was a short jump to the position of his one-time student, Richard Feyerabend, to deny there was anything that qualified as a “scientific” method. For Feyerabend, falsification compounded the difficulties for complex webs of propositions[81] and Feyerabend actively endorsed what he called “epistemological anarchy” such that he was designated by some as the “greatest enemy of science.” [82] This was not as iconoclastic as it sounds as Feyerabend later clarified to those who thought they saw a rejection of science in his work (and they were many.) His appeal was rather to a kind of strengthened pragmatism—let us not be overly concerned with how we arrived at knowledge, just be glad we got there. Thus, the conception of science as somehow implicitly inductive has remained and this reliance on induction we will see undermines its claims to be the required standard of rationality.

1.8.4 Political Ethics and Science

However, and in my view far more importantly, Feyerabend made a supremely important observation about science:

“Science must be protected from ideologies; and societies, especially democratic societies, must be protected from science…science should be taught as one view among many and not as the one and only road to truth and reality.” [83] (Emphasis added).

Here he is denying any privileged position for science just because it is “science” or to the scientists because they are “scientists,” arguing that democracies for their own strength and longevity, should be protected from the excesses of ideologized science. The latter might seem unintuitive until we consider that “scientific materialism” provided the backbone for what became Stalinist tyranny, and the Nazi experimentation in the prison camps was considered by the historic cultural leaders of Europe as genuine science; indeed, it was picked up and given respectability throughout the 1960s within the international eugenics movement.[84] It is also worth remembering that the logical positivist and humanist manifestos of the 1930s had science at the heart of a new paradigm for the progression of human civilization freed from any metaphysical moorings. Similarly, we will see that the behaviorist utopia of Harvard Professor B F Skinner, which emerged first with his novels in the late 1940s and which he unflinchingly maintained up to his death in 1990, designated concepts such as “freedom,” “dignity” and “morality” as relics of a post-Christian era that needed to be purged that a truly scientific “planning” of society might be accomplished.

Now, it is this ethical dimension to science that makes it necessary for us to reflect on; it will occupy us at various points in this work and plays a significant role for us. Russell wanted to believe that “philosophy could inspire a way of life” [85] but owing to his engagement with the logical positivism of the Vienna Circle and its project to “clean up” philosophy from its muddled metaphysical speculations, struggled to make up his mind as to what there was left in life to be the targets of our inspirations. Russell’s changes in philosophical views were frequent, many and most basic to the degree he changed his mind frequently as to just what objects constituted reality.[86] Yet he was to be commended in that he was bold enough to argue that there was such a thing as the “real.” In a lecture attended by Carnap in which they argued whether the concept of reality was a “pseudo-problem” [87] of philosophy, Russell asked Carnap as to whether his wife really did exist or whether she was to be considered a pseudo-construction of Carnap’s consciousness.[88]

Thus, we argue that we must be prepared to stand on the ground initially carved out by Moore and Russell that we are free to believe in a world in which the grass was really there, it was green, and the sky was really above us, and it was blue. We are free to escape from the idealist’s prison of the real as the perceived, where we are forever separated in the Kantian hinterland from the Ding an Sich (the thing in itself), but also from the arbitrariness and skepticism of the positivist and pragmatist alternatives. So, we will see that whilst the logical positivist and pragmatic view was to elevate a ‘scientific view of the world’ to ideological status, it was a narrow phenomenological perspective that Quine later exposed as resting on a supremely dogmatic metaphysic. The ‘scientific view’ was indeed a particular view of the world, but it was a barren one, and a tentative and uncertain one at that.

To emphasize this, the logical positivist Neurath had fully appreciated the epistemological frailty of the position and his famous analogy of rebuilding a ship whilst at sea, reflected the tentativeness and the weak view of certainty at its heart. This analytic turn, though welcome for its rigor, tended to make smaller and smaller units for philosophical reflection and abandoned the traditional synthetic task of philosophy. Similarly, Russell’s description of oppositional worldview philosophy as “pretentious,” [89] accepts this rarefied role for philosophy as the only possible one. However, our argument is that it can hardly be thought impressive that the modern philosopher is seldom interested beyond the narrow circumspection of their specialism, and we proceed to that basis.

1.8.5 Science is more than Propositional Statements

Most importantly, by “science” we argue that we are not speaking of just the “natural sciences” such as Physics or Chemistry where it might be argued that the aggregate of a series of propositions are said to constitute the body of the discipline. In such a view, ‘scientific’ questions could be answered simply using the predicates ‘true’ or ‘false’ with the implication that the wider ‘truth’ (or Truth, with the capital ‘T’) was the aggregate of all the ‘true’ propositions. This was then said to constitute the “science” of the subject.

This was the influential and novel definition of ‘science’ as offered by Schlick,^[90] the putative father of 20^th century positivism and is essentially phenomenalistic.[91] This reflected the enormous influence of the “new Physics” of Einstein (see §2.6.9) and the working out of its philosophical implications in the Germanophone world, which with the scattering of its predominantly Jewish intellectuals from Europe during the Nazi era, came to dominate the wider Anglo-American empiricist and analytically orientated philosophies. Schlick himself was one of the first expositors of Einstein’s General Relativity in 1917 just two years after Einstein published, being commended by Einstein himself for the clarity of his explanation.[92] Schlick was very much the heir of the “philosophical physicists” personified in the work of Helmholtz and Planck, being a PhD student whilst working with Planck. Consequently, it is perhaps the working definition still assumed, consciously or unconsciously by most of modern naturalism and hence our need to give it attention here. The philosophical elegance and clarity obtained in his definition of science, was his response [93] to the ambiguity, irrationalism and subjectivity of the post-Kantian philosophy that had dominated German philosophy.[94] It was in the service of contrasting ‘science’ with philosophy; he still considered the latter legitimate but not scientific by nature because of the questions it asked. The questions of philosophy, which Schlick described as a sequence of physical or psychic ‘acts,’ were concerned with clarifying what was meant, they were not knowledge bearing, they were not instruments to recommend one answer over another.[95]

However, such a definition excises huge swathes of the conjectural and imaginative cognitive processes, rarefying what might be considered science, which was precisely what later philosophers of science such as Karl Popper, despite his having attended meetings of the Vienna Circle and possessing a common antipathy with them to metaphysics, would consider fundamental to science.[96] Popper’s counterview was substantially obsolescent before it was even published in English by Quine’s critique of both the verificationism of positivism and the Popperian alternative falsification. [97] For Quine, philosophy was contiguous with science and authentic philosophy was a part of science and what constituted science was itself a ‘scientific’ problem.[98] Quine was relaxed by the implicit circularity that this assumed, which will be important for us when we consider worldview apologetics, where we understand there is a difference between logical circularity and the logical fallacy of vicious circularity. Quine for very different reasons than the Van Tillians, views circularity in reasoning as inevitable, the issue is rather how tight that circle is before it becomes fallacious.

As radical as Quine was, a more substantive and influential challenge was to come via the work of the philosopher of science, Thomas Kuhn. He challenged fundamentally the view of science as somehow a rational, linear process in perhaps the most influential work on the philosophy of science in the 20^th century, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Although first published in 1962, it is still a standard work today [99] and has an almost normative status, particularly amongst those disciplines that are vulnerable to charges of being unscientific and by association, irrational. Indeed, although not welcomed by Kuhn himself, Kuhn’s legacy was to relativize just what might be considered science as a function of historical expediency for a culture and brought the ‘social’ or ‘soft’ sciences such as sociology and psychology much more into the mainstream as legitimate ‘science.’

It also served to demythologize science as the rational method of human thought. As noted, for this reason, Kuhn’s legacy was maintained much more within the Arts generally and their fight with “science” rather than the philosophy of science.[100] Those like Rorty who progressively distanced themselves from professional philosophy and wanted to categorize science in a quasi-Wittgensteinian fashion as akin to poetry, strongly endorsed Kuhn.[101] ‘Science’ is simply a manner of speaking about reality with no special privileges accorded to it as specifically or especially rational.

That said, undoubtedly one of the most important insights emerging from Kuhn and developed in the postmodernism of Rorty was that any description of reality was always made “under a description,” it is always a matter of interpretation rather than just the “brute facts.” In other words, Schlick’s formulation “all synthetic judgments are a posteriori,” [102] i.e., judgments are based in and confirmed by a neutral ‘experience,’ is seen to be too naïve; we are already begging the question because the “truth” predicate is defined within a system (that defines for us the bounds of ‘experience’) rather than in an abstract and objective fashion.

Whilst we will concur to a degree with this position, we will also qualify it importantly, but we can conclude with many philosophers of science that Schlick’s conception was too narrow and excludes much of what is now accepted as legitimately scientific. Notwithstanding and of equal importance, the outstanding success of “science” in the last two centuries means we must also be careful before denuding it of too much authority in human discourse as the postmodern critique has encouraged some to do. We will thus proceed to carefully contextualize science for our discussion.

1.8.6 Science as Correlated with Epistemology and Philosophy

Now, regardless of the particulars of this debate over science which we shall revisit as necessary, we will in lieu of our discussion above assert with prima facie justification, that ‘science’ in a more inclusive sense is an aggregate term for the theoretical and empirical data of the “hard” (physical) and “soft” (social) sciences. However, we can push further, we might also correlate “science” much more closely with the term ‘philosophy’; that is, as a synonym for all the spheres of human knowledge. This is not just because of the historical equivalence of the usage of “natural philosophy” which was still the common sense of the term even during the early work of Einstein[103] but also because of the philosophical engagement of Germanophone physicists Helmholz, Mach and Planck who were all engaged philosophically in a non-trivial manner. It seems little more than prejudice, linguistic convenience, or sociological convention to chop up their work into the ‘scientific’ and the ‘philosophical.’

We can strengthen our assertion by considering that modern compendiums of the philosophy of science demonstrate that science evades a clear definition in terms of either a particular metaphysical approach, a coherent theory of knowledge, even a specific methodology[104] or a rational process. Psillos, after explaining in excess of 45000 words that the scientific concept of explanation is unexplainable, offers us this despairing conclusion:

“In light of the preceding discussion…it should be obvious that there is no consensus of what explanation is…[A] single and unified account of what explanation is, is futile and ill-conceived.” [105]

Whilst this conclusion has a peculiar incongruity in that we are receiving an explanation written by a philosopher of science into why we can never receive a coherent scientific explanation, his subsequent words should provide us with hope, even if it failed to do so for Psillos himself:

“Perhaps the only way to understand explanation is to embed it in a framework of kindred concepts and try to unravel their interconnections. Indeed, the concepts of causation, laws of nature and explanation (emphasis original) form a very tight web…hardly any progress can be made in any of those, without relying on, and offering accounts of, some of the others (emphasis added).” [106]

The implications of what Psillos is stating here as the finishing paragraph to what only can be described as his epic paper in his part of constructing “the most definitive…ever provided” edifice to (dare I say, ‘explanation of’) “the philosophy of science ever provided,” [107] are worthy of another epic paper and certainly reinforce the philosophical presuppositions of this work:

We need to understand our beliefs and commitments form an interconnected web.
Our explanations will be circular in terms of our most basic controlling assumptions.

Taken together, (a) and (b) are the major constituent parts of our worldview, though more commonly, the term conceptual scheme might be used.[108]

So, we want to assert that science and epistemology, when considered generally, much like theology and philosophy, have the same referent (a general account of the universe) as their target material but choose a specific vocabulary and mode of argument when discussing with a particular target audience. Thus, it is sometimes argued that the distinction is, on a technical level, one more of the level of abstraction, when we ask a “philosophical” question we are not looking to the empirical work of a particular science, indeed we cannot, but we are establishing principles applicable to all sciences.[109] This is certainly a useful, working definition but on analysis it begs the question as it already assumes a difference; but we have already seen Quine sees no substantive difference between science and philosophy, whereas the positivists denied philosophy any knowledge bearing status (so there would be no metaphysical principles to be had) and yet many physical scientists were historically happy to be known as practicing “natural philosophy.”

It is sometimes also said that philosophical knowledge “transitions” to scientific knowledge as the understanding and application of the principles increases within each discipline.[110] This also has a prima facie plausibility but lurking behind it is an odor of a pragmatic or an instrumentalist view of knowledge generally. Some “sciences” working through pages of mathematical or statistical analysis will never progress beyond those methods into more “concrete” expressions, but it would seem sectarian and unreasonable to label them ‘un-scientific.’ Thus, in summary, it is perhaps far more convincing that certain groups like to call themselves “scientists” for sociological reasons to distinguish themselves from those they consider “un-scientific.”

The designation of being the latter, like that of being a “fundamentalist,” is an emotive pejorative with little content because the term is so imprecise. That is, the designation is often merely one of preference or prejudice and is arbitrary in nature. As both Psillos and Mahner discovered, attempting to analyze science in pursuit of clarity in the definition pushes you in a worldview direction. This is precisely the position we will be arguing for, science is defined only within the wider context of the entire map of our knowledge, much as Quine described it as a “web” of belief.[111] Some beliefs, near the center of the web are held tenaciously and require overwhelming evidence to be displaced, others at the edge of the web might be lost without affecting those close to the center.

In Wittgensteinian terms, we have several “forms of life,” each with their own language games at work here and we are in danger of being “seduced” by one or the other to the detriment of our cultures. Wittgenstein himself had reflected that in his early years he had attached improper importance to the language game of science but came to understand it was possible to be knowledge bearing in language with no reference to the physical world.[112] As Plantinga too argued, we cannot accuse every community outside of our 19^th and 20^th century Western view of science as being “irrational,” their science is conceived and construed in a different way.[113] Any other conception of science has historically gravitated towards tyranny, both intellectual and political.

1.8.7 Avoiding The “Tyranny of Science”

As we have already noted, one of the modern philosophers of science to deny most forcibly that naturalistic conceptions of “science” should be intellectually privileged before other knowledge gaining activities of humanity was Paul Feyerabend. Indeed, Feyerabend asserted that this privileging of naturalistic science was “tyrannical” [114] which was perhaps well illustrated during the COVID-19 pandemic when “following the science” was equated with unjustified lockdowns and the removal of basic freedoms, Dodsworth illustrating this vividly:

“[It’s about] how the government weaponised our fear against us—supposedly in our best interests—until we were one of the most frightened countries in the world…the behavioural scientists advising the UK government recommended that we needed to be frightened. The Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group on Behaviour (SPI-B) said in their report Options for increasing adherence to social distancing measures,1 dated 22 March 2020, that ‘a substantial number of people still do not feel sufficiently personally threatened; it could be that they are reassured by the low death rate in their demographic group, although levels of concern may be rising’. As a result they recommended that ‘the perceived level of personal threat needs to be increased among those who are complacent, using hard-hitting emotional messaging’. In essence, the government was advised to frighten the British public to encourage adherence to the emergency lockdown regulations.” [115]

Feyerabend was likewise concerned with the social boundaries of science and the dangers of the cultural deference to it.[116] This is well reflected in that the head of the pharmaceutical Pfizer ‘joked’ that “the whole of Israel was a petri-dish” [117] after the Israeli government decided to ‘vaccinate’ its way out of the COVID pandemic; it was a strategy that failed [118] but remarkably, was unnecessarily repeated in many nations around the world despite of that failure, with similar results of failure. Epidemiologists in nations that argued for a different approach because they believed lockdowns and vaccinations would never deliver what was being promised for them, were subject to international vilification with even ceremonial monarchs joining in the criticism and condemnation of any approach that did not endorse the WHO’s ‘official’ guidance.[119]

Other dissenting scientists were ostracized, imprisoned, referred to professional bodies and forced from their employment. Media and social media were mandated to “follow the science” and platforms which marketed themselves as refuges of “free speech” became “scientifically controlled” centers of speech. It was rather like a dystopian, Orwellian novel, “following the science” was clearly subject to a political agenda and it was a tiny subset of science which was followed to the detriment of life and liberty. I explored this abuse of science during the ‘pandemic’ in an extended study[120] and it certainly seems that Feyerabend’s vision that a science out of control would inevitably become tyrannical, was almost prophetic, with a privileged subsection of “senior scientists” providing ‘science’ on-demand to allow politicians to pursue immoral actions against their citizens.

This, we argue, reflects the enormous, ongoing cultural confidence in the power of science and the secular state to solve the problems of humanity through this thing called “science” which emerged into the mainstream popular consciousness in the latter half of the 19^th century [121] and it was a centerpiece of the liberalism of the West in the early 20th. In early Liberalism, particularly in the British version which was permeated by the messianic pretensions of the Empire before God bringing civilization to the heathen, organized religion provided the moral authority for the State and its justification to the wider polity. However, the heavy reliance of the totalitarian regimes of Nazism and Communism on “science” meant that there grew a reaction to its totalizing naturalism to favor more recognition of the individual and the subjective, sometimes a violent retreat into subjectivity as in the existentialist movement of Continental philosophy.[122]

This also came into sharp focus during the Vietnam War in the US where the ‘indiscriminate’ use of technology as weapons during the 1960s until the end of the war in 1975 fanned cultural suspicion of science as illegitimate in contrast to recognizing the humanity and dignity of all people. It seemed that cultures were technologically advantaged but no less barbaric. The 1970s were characterized by what seemed like a moral and social decay in the fabric of the West, ethnic conflict within society, and a loss of confidence in “science” and indeed, religion or any other “metanarrative” of an “establishment” to solve these problems of society.

As we also noted previously, it is worth remembering that the ideologies of Marxism and Nazism both privileged naturalistic, value-free “science” in this way as central to their praxis which led to the systematic death of over 120 million in the 20^th century. Having begun his career as part of the Third Reich, Feyerabend can thus be permitted this indulgence for his unique perspective and as one of the most colorful and iconoclastic but original philosophers of science who could simultaneously earn the title the “worst enemy of science.” His defense against this accusation is pointed and simple, science must be “subject to public control” (we might say ‘democratic’ control) as it was in previous eras and scientists should not be privileged as a new medieval Catholic clergy, beyond the law and beyond censure.[123] Thus, the importance of the political ethics that emerge from our project, particularly when faced by this type of political challenge.

1.9 Philosophy as Transformative

An interesting contrast can be made between the biblical Hebrew culture and the contemporary Greek culture of the same time with regards to the nature of knowledge. As our work is concerning knowledge it is useful to pause and reflect on why we should, or should not, pause and reflect. For the Hebrew, a father was to train his son in a trade and that trade would allow the son to be considered an adult member of society. In that sense, the education of a child was measured by the mastery of a set of skills that allowed the child to be a self-enabling and contributing member of society. Knowledge was expressed in the context of living in the world, it was not an abstract or contemplative model of knowledge.

However, a Greek conception might be that a ruler was trained by his “tutor” by exposure to a body of “knowledge” and could learn by rote a set of tenets. On successful recitation they would be considered “educated,” but there was no requirement for that knowledge to be grounded or applicable to living in the world. We, to a large degree, have inherited the Greek presumption, we can all remember staying up all night to “revise” for an exam, do the exam and then forget all what had been “learnt” a couple of days later. One argument that we will consider is that it is questionable whether we ever ascended to the status of knowledge, and we shall investigate the requirements for “knowledge” within this work. In a similar manner, in the dying days of the British Empire, it was traditional that British Army Officers had no requirement to be trained as regular soldiers with the result that they were spectacularly inept until the radical reforms of Montgomery during WWII that saved the nation from utter humiliation in Africa against Hitler’s Rommel. The philosophical contrast was the training of the mind apart from the living of life, some things are only learnt through “doing.”

This was also the philosophical backdrop to a great dispute in the 20^th century amongst the educational reformers who argued for comprehensive education against the backdrop of the selective schools; even now, the most radical Left of British politicians will still be seduced into sending their children to ‘public’ schools that are anything but public in the common sense of the word,[124] so that they might receive their training to rule us all as is their birthright. As a child in the 1970s, this was a live issue for me, and I failed my 11+ for Colchester grammar despite my father’s endless drilling me with practice exercises. As Professor Simon put it, I was to be doomed to the “sink comprehensive” [125] only encountering the grammarians as they beat us at rugby as well as any other sport,[126] we knew our place. Such also was the debate between the polytechnics and the universities, with the polytechnics converting themselves to universities during the 1980s for the purpose of instantly gaining kudos in the marketplace even if nothing else but their name had changed. The most supreme irony being that the polytechnics often became “better” universities because of their practical orientation and links with industry. One of my brothers who took the vocational route picking “vocational” qualifications over the Liberal Arts degree, is now enjoying the good life down-under. Despite many (and probably myself) telling him otherwise, he has not shed any tears missing out on a “broad,” Liberal Arts education. Of course, we might want to defend ourselves that it might just mean he has been desensitized to the important issues of intellectual life as he enjoys the Gold Coast.

Educational theorists often blame Plato at this point—there is gold in some of us, silver in others, the rest are common base metal and some of us are just plain wood. With the 19^th century social-Darwinist twist, each of us should know our place, such is the natural evolutionary order of things. This is the issue of the mode of philosophizing which has shaped our culture. In testament to our societal failures, my confirmation bias would be to favor the practical over the contemplative conception of philosophy. I intentionally chose an old “polytechnic” over the competing university when I trained as a teacher. As a practicing teacher I would often find that the toughest schools in the most “deprived” areas frequently had far better praxis in terms of innovation, curriculum diversity, and care for the individual pupil in contrast to the “posh” schools where the teacher could throw a textbook into the midst of the elite, and everyone would pass with an ‘A’ whilst the teacher read their newspaper with merely a “peep hole” that they might maintain order (my mentor during training related such a story to me of his training days). A colleague of mine recounted how her philosophy class spent many hours considering the conundrum, “if a tree falls in the forest but no one hears it, does it make a sound?” Now being an engineer and a physicist by training, my instinct was to say, “be analytical, objective, and clear about your definitions and the problem resolves,” I felt the Vienna Circle anointing to clean-up philosophy come upon me:

P1: “Sound” is a compression wave itself caused by the disturbance of the uniformity of a medium.

P2: The tree falling disturbs the uniformity of the medium.

Conclusion: a tree falling in a forest makes a sound.

Now please spend all that “saved time” discussing this question to consider rather philosophy that might arrest the catastrophic decline of the West. In similar fashion, when I was training in 1994, I took a psychology of education class where the question, “what is normal?” was posed. I was expecting an intense duel of competing socially defined epithets being offered by us postgraduates militating against the tyranny of the majority, it was all cut short by the lecturer giving the statistical definition “the highest frequency in a population.” This was perhaps in enormous contrast to my psychology of religion teacher many years later who framed “madness” as merely “socially defined,” the implication then being we could all be “mad” and not be concerned about it. Perhaps this should be borne in mind with our contemporary discussions of gender and sexuality which increasingly eat up letters of the alphabet.

That is, for myself in my philosophical naivety, such a “ridiculous” contrast regarding the normal would have settled those matters in favor of the practical. With my head still full of formulae from a life as an engineer, there is still something about the clarity and simplicity of a philosophy rooted and grounded in life and living which to me guards against those excesses of academic life.[127] The wider philosophical point then becomes the brutal reductionism of my legacy position, we realize how unfulfilling and perhaps uninspiring such a model of philosophy would be, as Russell mused “in praise of idleness,” [128] reflection has its place for a person to consider the “why” as well as the “how” of existence. Social psychologists too can get far more elaborate than that clean definition of “normalcy” above with Bell curves and distributions reducing the “intelligence” of a human population to a single quotient; the “mis-measure of man” that rather paradoxically the evolutionist Gould found so objectionable.[129] There is clearly the need for contemplative philosophical reflection here that the philosophy itself might be transformational. Thus, that does not mean I advocate a complete rejection of the contemplative in favor of the pragmatic; as we shall see, pragmatism begs the most important philosophical questions and I reject it as a model of philosophy.

Rather, there is a mediation within the epistemologically self-conscious perspective of what is asserted in the name of philosophy as to its relevance for solving the problems of society and culture more generally. In this sense, we would be wise to argue for a transformative model of philosophy, both as a matter of education of the mind and how to live in the world. By turning our pure mathematics into applied mathematics, we appreciate the beauty and value of the pure, so also with philosophy. Blackburn makes this critical judgment that expresses a similar imperative:

“we are not going to agree with the great postmodernist slogan made famous by Jacques Derrida: ‘Il n’y a pas de hors-texte’ (‘There is nothing outside the text’) [It appeals only to those] sufficiently divorced from the activities of life (at least at the times when they are writing about life) to really begin to imagine themselves in a virtual reality, the sealed world of their own beliefs and sayings…The cure, as Wittgenstein saw very clearly, is to remember, and perhaps to practise, the practical techniques and skills of doing things in the real world…” ^[130]

However, what we are considering so far above is philosophically agnostic. From a Christian perspective, Christian philosophy is transformative not just in a definitional fashion but in a phenomenological one also. If, as Descartes also wrote in his notebook, “the fear of the LORD is the beginning of knowledge” [131] this refers not just to intellectual or cognitive knowledge but the practical skills of life. The Hebrew language has a set of words which reflect these different senses of knowledge:

“The noun {…} (da’at, “knowledge”) refers to experiential knowledge, not just cognitive knowledge, including the intellectual assimilation and practical application…It is used in parallelism to {…} (musar, “instruction, discipline”) and {…} (khokhmah, “wisdom, moral skill”).” [132]

In his rationalism, it might be questionable that Descartes took these different senses of knowledge to heart, but he certainly argued that the atheist was unable to argue for a systematic theory of knowledge,[133] though equally others felt able to invert Descartes arguments and present an atheistic version. The most profound claim of biblical knowledge is the knowledge of salvation, the spiritual and intellectual response to the simple argument of Paul:

“But what does it say? “The word is near you, in your mouth and in your heart” (that is, the word of faith that we preach), because if you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.” [134]

Here the Greek verb sw,|zw (so[set macron over o]zo[set macron over o]) translated “saved” has wide philosophical application with a field of meanings such as rescue, liberate, keep from harm, heal and preserve. In this conceptual sense, it is almost an exact equivalent to the Hebrew word Shalom (בְּשָׁל֑וֹם) emphasizing the phenomenology of the concept for the believer. The regeneration and the renewal of the individual is then the transformative force within a culture, the restoration of the dominion mandate given to humanity in the Genesis narrative.[135]

However, even with the regeneration of the individual that remains outside of a political organization, you will never transform or even reform a society, a far broader theonomical understanding is needed and we will examine this in more detail in later sections. As Cope (2015) argues, political naivety is endemic in the wider evangelical consciousness. Societal “Transformation” has a magical ring about it, all the problems of culture and society will be solved with everyone getting “saved.” In contrast, the Reformers, in opposition to modern revivalism, had a multigenerational perspective. It is of note that most twentieth century revivals throughout the world, especially in the West, impacted wider culture very little in marked contrast to previous centuries. Indeed, within a few years of the “revival” there was virtually no trace of its impact to be found in metrics even as basic as church attendance.[136] So our designation of philosophy as “transformative” is not at the expense of contemplation or rational reflection, but rather the litmus test of what our philosophy brings to living in the world. We prefer something that is at least relevant to the solving of human problems.

1.10 Summary and Conclusion

In this chapter we have introduced some of the definitions, themes, and the methodological assumptions we are going to be following in this book. First, we indicated our rejection of metaphysical skepticism, we take the position that the world as God’s world is knowable to us, God provides us with senses that allow us to live in the world by coming to a knowledge of the world. We also introduced the important concept that all our reasonings about the world are “theory laden” and that those theories will be derivative from the values, those values in turn are implicitly assuming a particular metaphysic. For our work, this assumption is of a personal God that cares about the universe, our world, and each individual person.

We then offered this work as an apologetic work and examined the definition of apologetics and considered that apologetics can be conceived of as consisting of both objective and subjective aspects. We asserted our position as arguing for what has become known as the “presuppositional” apologetic method, which has the central methodological principle that the faith must be defended in a positive manner consistent with the faith, rather than relying on a negative, defensive method dependent on a foreign epistemology drawn from evidentialism or classical apologetics. We then examined the role of scripture and religious experience within the apologetic framework and argued that an apologetic model consistent with scripture should assume scripture as the foundation for all reasoning. We concluded that a post-Reformational model was necessary to properly incorporate the role of religious experience, particularly with regards to spiritual gifts, but argued that scripture mandated an apologetic that rationally defended the faith. We distinguished between the biblical usage of “logos” and “rhema,” concluding that although there was implicit plasticity in a narrative, the biblical narrative clearly intended itself to be understood in an objective sense as well as us responding subjectively to it and for us to build our foundations upon what we understand. Thus, our basic orientation within this work was to argue that the Christian worldview was objectively defensible, whilst also noting that the aim of an apologetic discourse was not necessarily the conversion of the opponents, but that the account offered was intellectually sufficient to refute the charge of irrationality.

In order to posit how we might seek to offer an objective proof of the Christian worldview as the only coherent worldview, we introduced Kant and the transcendental mode of reasoning. We immediately asserted that whilst agreeing with the basic programme of Kant to discover what general conditions must be fulfilled for any particular instance of knowledge to be possible, we do not agree that he was successful. We examined how Kant and Hume are asymptotic for the limitations of understanding in modern philosophy and particularly the significance of the problem of induction. We argued that induction was the foundation of natural science but would only be justified by a Christian metaphysic. We then examined in detail the paradigm of naturalistic science, the dominant paradigm of our time asserting that its naturalism offered no basis for a true science which has historically encompassed all the domains of human knowledge. This again we connected with the necessity for a worldview founded on a Christian metaphysic because there are implicit ethical assumptions within our science that cannot be avoided. Naturalistic science was exposed as tyrannical both in its excesses of the totalitarianisms of the 20^th century and our contemporary context of the pandemic.

We thus assert that one of the principal benefits of epistemological self-consciousness is that it recognizes the autonomy of every sphere of human knowledge but does not permit the autonomy of any sphere to operate in a moral vacuum. We understand this as one of the seminal insights of Kuyper and in lieu of our collapsing of the rigid boundaries between science, epistemology, theology and philosophy, we can justifiably concur with him that the designation ‘science’ must be taken to include the hard and soft-sciences, theology, ‘philosophy’, literature, and political economy in order that we do justice to what we know as well as how we know—in other words, a holistic and a non-naturalistic account of science.^[137] Hao Wang, most definitely a philosopher that remained within the wider analytic tradition but viewed the analytic school as inadequate to the task of philosophy in his later period,[138] expressed the imperative for this distinction and the correlative need for a wide cognitive field for our scientific vision concisely:

“Quine’s emphasis on empirical psychology is related to his idea of a ‘liberated epistemology’, which proposes to make the study of language learning a successor subject to epistemology. But I take his proposal to be in the tradition of asking ‘how I know’, rather than ‘what we know’.” [139] (Emphasis added).

We noted that if there is admitted a functional difference in preference to a theoretical one for these categories, then it would seem to be that many philosophers believe that the level of abstraction in which they operate is a higher than that of the scientist who is dealing with phenomena. However, we understood that this immediately begged the question as to why dealing with “phenomena” might be considered a definitive attribute of the scientist; there are many “theoretical” scientists who seldom deal with phenomena. Thus, on the basis of a similar assessment, we concur with Quine who considered the distinction between philosophy and science much as he considered the distinction between the analytic and the synthetic, merely one of convenience. Thus, we assert that the dispute of a difference between science, the humanities and philosophy is in the final analysis a linguistic one, not a theoretical one; we can take ‘science’ in its broadest sense as encompassing human knowledge in its entirety.

This is not to deny the legitimacy or value of the individual subjects or their autonomy as spheres of knowledge over which they are sovereign but recognizes that there is a unifying ethical principle that coheres the spheres and provides an interpretative framework of reality.[140] ‘Science’ is thus a close synonym of “philosophy” which we now take to define and articulate more closely that we can see what to demand from Epistemological Self-Consciousness. We can freely claim to be advocating a scientific thesis and a thesis concerned with the concrete, real world of experience, as well as with the world of ideas and concepts. We can thus express formal agreement with Kant in his conclusion regarding practical [141] reason:

“In a word, science (critically sought and methodically directed) is the narrow gate that leads to the doctrine of wisdom, if by this is understood not merely what one ought to do but what ought to serve teachers as a guide to prepare well and clearly the path to wisdom which everyone should travel, and to secure others against taking the wrong way; philosophy must always remain the guardian of this science, and though the public need take no interest in its subtle investigations it has to take an interest in the doctrines which, after being worked up in this way, can first be quite clear to it.” [142]

In summary, and of great methodological importance for us, we see that Kant attempted to tie his metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics together. Whilst we noted that both Van Til and Plantinga defer to agree that he achieved this coherently, consistently, or convincingly, we can certainly agree with Van Til that Kant’s transcendental programme seeking the preconditions of understanding on this tripartite basis should remain appealing to us, even if we disagree with his autonomous method [143] and final conclusions. We can also discern from this passage that Kant believed there was a moral responsibility of philosophers to have worked through the problematics that confront humanity and to have offered ethical solutions. For this reason, also, we undertook a consideration of the transformative role of philosophy and its contemplative role, emphasizing the importance of keeping the practical dimension in mind. It is the challenge of working through this process that will be undertaken in this work.

1.11 Chapter Outlines

[BL 1-7]

In chapter two we examine some of the historical issues within philosophy and identify some important features of reason and rationality.
In chapter three we begin working out the taxonomy of a Christian philosophy within the tripartite framework. We consider in detail the work of Plantinga in providing a framework for warranted Christian belief, its limitations and why it is necessary to supplement his work with the positive apologetic of Van Til.
In chapter four we examine transcendental reasoning in general and the significance of worldview for the reasoning pattern. Particular attention is paid to the circularity problem and the role of ultimate authorities in our noetic structure.
In chapter five we deal with the more theological variables of our philosophic equation and how these inform our transcendental approach. These are the “big issues” of post-Reformational Christianity and our philosophy should be compatible with them.
In chapter six we deal specifically with the Transcendental Argument for God (TAG) as Van Til’s form of transcendentalism and consider the varieties of objections to it. The TAG aims to demonstrate the necessity rather than just the sufficiency of the Christian worldview as the prerequisite for intelligibility.
In chapter seven we consider the political implications of our philosophical perspective in a critique of traditional evangelical thinking for the Christian philosopher.
Chapter eight summarizes what we have learnt and identifies an outstanding research question emerging from our study. [/BL 1-7]

[1] Mahon, The Ironist and the Romantic, 12.

[2] John Dewey in 1927 wrote a famous essay called “The Problems of the Public.” Although he wrote for a decade seeking answers in a Christian context, he was famous for his post-Christian thinking known as instrumentalism, a form of pragmatism. He influenced 20^th century Anglo-American culture to a remarkable degree in education, psychology, politics, and philosophy. He strongly influenced Richard Rorty who became one of the most influential figures during the last two decades of the 20^th century.

[3] I have made a point of juxta positioning ‘universe’ and ‘nature’ because the ordinary language use of the term “nature” refers to the environment of our planet, whereas most philosophers when using the term “naturalism” are talking about the entire physical universe.

[4] The classic Greek word from which we get the English term apologetic is ἀπολογία (“apologia”). This is not, as in English, a negative after the fact saying sorry for something or some state of affairs. It was rather a reasoned defense of your position before a trial of your peers, a positive defense of your position. Thus, Socrates made his apologia before the rulers of Athens and in the three occurrences in the Christian scriptures (Phi 1:16; 1Pe 3:15; 2Co 7:11), all carry this sense of the word. Further, 1 Pe 3:15 is sometimes considered as the foundational, modus operandi of the discipline. Thus, “Apologetics” should be understood using this original sense of the word.

[5] Van Til, Christian Apologetics, 1.

[6] For example, Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism, xlii. Here Rorty considers the “messy dispute” between religion and secularism “settled” (in secularism’s favor).

[7] Rorty’s relationship to religious thought is far from straightforward, I consider it in more detail at https://planetmacneil.org/blog/richard-rortys-iconoclastic-deconstruction-of-philosophy/ .

[8] Princeton was founded in 1746 and was one of the nine pre-Revolution colleges. All the “Ivy League” colleges were founded by Protestants. The curriculum, though heavily weighted with theology, was also concerned with educating the whole person and giving people skills for exercising the “dominion mandate” (Gen 1:26; see also Macneil, Dominion Theology, 57 ff.) to create a godly culture. Princeton still boasts one of the world’s largest philosophy faculties and a functioning seminary (though now very different to the Princeton of the founders). It is of note that Plantinga described it as a “failed [Christian university]” (Plantinga, On Christian Scholarship, 1) and advocated for a very different model.

[9] See, for example, Sproul, Lindsley & Gerstner, Classical Apologetics; Cowan, Five Views on Apologetics.

[10] Bahnsen, Socrates or Christ.

[11] See the discussion of this issue in Plantinga, Warranted Christian Belief, 217 ff. This is an important doctrine within Calvinism and the wider Reformed scholarship. Arminian theology is far weaker and unclear on this issue, and thus many Arminian apologists favor a Warfieldian style appeal to a common rationality.

[12] This is what might be known as the “Socratic dialogue.”

[13] In fact, the intense and detailed argument of the first seven chapters of Romans reaches its climax in Romans 8, it is the argument of the need of salvation through grace alone and the futility of human attempts to justify themselves.

[14] Kuyper, Encyclopedia, 156.

[15] Sennett, The Analytic Theist, xi–xviii.

[16] Anderson, Cornelius Van Til and Alvin Plantinga is probably the best example of a working professor actively interested in this linkage. Salazar, A Comparitive Analysis of the Philosphical Views of Alvin Plantinga and Cornelius Van Til is another example concentrating on the impact of their doctrines of God on their philosophies. I give a biographical summary of the two at https://planetmacneil.org/blog/van-til-and-plantinga-comparison-and-contrast/ .

[17] Sproul, Lindsley & Gerstner, Classical Apologetics.

[18] Bahnsen, Van Til’s Apologetic, 634–62.

[19] Bahnsen, Presuppositional Apologetics, 137–261. Here Bahnsen provides perhaps the most comprehensive analysis in print of this issue and argues that Van Til is the most consistent of the presuppositionalists.

[20] “Transcendentalism” is most immediately associated with the “Critiques” of Immanuel Kant which seek to examine the preconditions of the understanding of any predication, or what makes possible any knowledge of the objects of nature. However, Van Til’s appropriation of the term was with a strong qualification, see § 1.6.

[21] It might be a surprise to those of us working in a British context that there is a British Council of Prophets, https://www.prophets.org.uk/ .

[22] Faith is fide in Latin; hence fideism as “faith-ism,” living life by faith. For an academic treatment, see Penelhum, Fideism. I tried to catch some of the attractiveness of the position in https://planetmacneil.org/blog/the-fideistic-leap/.

[23] Van Til, A Christian Theory of Knowledge., 54–73.

[24] Plantinga, Warranted Christian Belief, 499.

[25] Tertullian, Prescription Against Heretics, (VII).

[26] Kierkegaard, The Kierkegaard Collection, 131.

[27] This was the subject of the debate between Nielsen and Phillips rehearsed in Wittgensteinian Fideism?

[28] I am indebted to Professor Ó Murchadha for this observation.

[29] The work of Madame Guyon and St Teresa of Avila were particularly impactful on me.

[30] “…those miraculous powers and manifest operations, which were distributed by the laying on of hands, have ceased. They were only for a time. For it was right that the new preaching of the gospel, the new kingdom of Christ, should be signalized and magnified by unwonted and unheard-of miracles. When the Lord ceased from these, he did not forthwith abandon his Church but intimated that the magnificence of his kingdom, and the dignity of his word, had been sufficiently manifested. In what respect then can these stage-players say that they imitate the apostles?” (Institutes, Bk.4, Sec VI).

In defense of Calvin, he was reacting against the frequent appeal to “miracles” and “signs” in preference to sound doctrine. He also, correctly, understood the “Apostles of the Lamb,” the original 12 (including Matthias, Acts 1:26), had a unique and special role, never to be repeated. However, he seems not to recognize some offices as continuing believing they were for the foundation of the church and the purpose of establishing the church “everywhere.” He believed because the church was “everywhere,” there was no need for say the Apostolic office (see his Commentary on passages such as Eph 4:11; 1 Co 12:28.) Of course, we can formally agree with him that those offices might cease if the church was indeed “everywhere,” but we know now that it is absolutely not the case.

[31] For example, see Finney, Seeing Beyond The Word, 19–48 for a comprehensive account of the issues surrounding the misrepresentation of Calvinism and the Arts.

[32] I discuss Kuyper’s cultural philosophy in Abraham Kuyper, Culture and Art.

[33] Kuyper served as the Primeminister of the Netherlands between 1901 to 1905, started a political party, founded the Free University of Amsterdam, founded two newspapers, and broke from the State church in founding the Reformed Churches of the Netherlands.

[34] He gave a series of lectures in 1898 at Princeton University that outlined his position on how Calvinism related to culture generally. This is perhaps the first definitive statement of Neo-Calvinism (systematized later in his Encyclopedia) and was highly influential on other Reformed Dutch theologians including Van Til.

[35] Bratt, Abraham Kuyper, 19.

[36] A story I tell with youthful exuberance (this began life in 1990 with lots of potential offence to the critical reader) as an appendix to my (as yet, only self-published) book at https://planetmacneil.org/blog/macneils-guide-for-the-spiritually-perplexed/ .

[37] McGrath, A Passion for Truth, 22–23.

[38] 1 Cor 12:5 (NET).

[39] I acknowledge this criticism as Professor Ó Murchadha’s here though in the case of the Trinity I do believe the biblical evidence both linguistically from the Hebrew in Genesis 1:1, 26 and in the “Father, Son, Holy Spirit” narrative throughout John’s gospel (e.g., John 14) provide very strong evidence for that conception as a legitimate inference. More technically, in Gen 1:1, “God” (Elohim) is a plural form coupled with the verb “bara” (‘create,’ Strong’s No. 1254) as a singular. Whilst the Hebrew plural was sometimes used to intensify an attribute of the singular substantive, the context offered in v.26 is emphasizing the plural using a verbal form. To explain the plural otherwise relies on creative imports of a heavenly council who God has invited to create with him (the NET Bible notes for Gen 1:26 are informative at this point.) That notion itself is extremely problematic and contested. Rather, philosophically, I believe we at once see the resolution of the “one and the many” problem in the person of God, right at the beginning of scripture as our metaphysical foundation. Whilst this is not conclusive (some have argued it is imposing trinitarian concepts rather than finding them), I find it philosophically and theologically compelling, in contrast to the weakness of the alternative explanations.

[40] The Book of James seems to follow very closely Paul’s argument in Romans on key points, using the same scriptures that formed the key parts of Paul’s argument. Paul describes the tension in Gal. 2 between himself and James who had maintained a strict, Jewish form of life post-conversion. Though Paul himself had occasionally accommodated to Jewish scruples (normally with disastrous consequences), by the time Galatians was written, he was clearly unwilling to compromise. If nothing else, this demonstrates the need for a hermeneutic structure when approaching scripture.

[41] Wesley expressed this in opposition to some of the strict Calvinism of his time in asserting that there should be some evidence of conversion or of Christian convictions in daily life, it was not sufficient to merely assent to a set of theological propositions or to recite a creed in church. This was also an issue of contention for Jonathon Edwards regarding the immoral behavior of some members of the covenant families of New England, we consider that later in our thesis.

[42] For example, “Do not answer a fool according to his folly, lest you yourself also be like him. Answer a fool according to his folly, lest he be wise in his own estimation.,” Prov 26:4–5 (NET).

[43] The gospel of John is famous for its use of irony and some of its patterns of argumentation were suggestive of Midrashic exposition, with the long, extended discourses.

[44] 1 Co 14:10–11 (NET) with my amplification. The first occurrence of ‘meaning’ translates the word aphonos (Strong’s Number 880) which is focusing on the relation of speaking the language as a tool of articulation. The second occurrence of ‘meaning’ uses a different word. Here the Greek word is dunamis (Strong’s Number 1411) which refers to power as the inner quality of an object. In other words, language has the power of conveying meaning to the speakers; it comes into the English language as the word “dynamite.”

[45] Though Lloyd-Jones self-identified as an “evangelical,” his understanding of the term was far stricter and more in line with the Puritan understanding, see What Is An Evangelical? He was an expert on the Puritans, see The Puritans, and was considered the foremost example of the expository, exegetical preacher of the 20^th century; an enormous archive of his work is found at https://www.mljtrust.org/ .

[46] We qualify this statement later as the concept of an independent realm of nature that could be scientifically studied, first articulated with Scotus, then Ockham, and Aquinas. However, there is a good consensus that the Reformation was a pivotal turning point that made a far friendlier environment for natural science by removing the Aristotelian metaphysics and psychologism that had largely constrained it.

[47] Jn 16:13 (NAS); Jn 8:31–32 (NAS).

[48] Mat 7:24–27 (NAS).

[49] This is not to denigrate that movement; I self-identify denominationally as “Word of Faith.”

[50] Mat 4:4 (NAS).

[51] For the most robust justification for this view, see Bahnsen, Always Ready, §§ 1–26.

[52] It is worth noting here that the term epistemological unconsciousness is not being used in the same sense as some Eastern religions might use it, where it refers to mystical modes of knowing. Thanks to Dr Wali for this comment.

[53] Frequently this relies on a tautological appeal to evolutionary theory: Those that count survive. How do we know that? We survived and we count.

[54] There is an issue of nomenclature here as to why we want to insist on equating ‘Reformed Christianity’ with Augustinianism; it immediately has the feel of sectarianism and might be argued to be historically problematic. Indeed, we shall shortly argue that Augustine (b.354) was a member of the Church headquartered at Rome, he was a Roman ‘catholic,’ Saint Augustine is a ‘hero’ celebrated in the present RC church.

However, this tension is easily resolved, first on a structural level: the papacy had not developed (though the Roman bishops were attempting to assert their primacy during the time of Augustine which was the time of terminal decay for the Roman Empire) and there was but one church; but secondly, theologically: it is the theology and philosophy of St Thomas Aquinas (b.1225) who it is argued, stood directly against some of Augustine’s presuppositions regarding the roles of faith and reason, and it is Aquinas who dominates the basic orientation of RC theology and philosophy today.

Thus, there is no real contradiction, the Reformers in many senses were trying to return to the period before the papacy in which Augustine’s work, particularly his mature work, was considered as one of the philosophical high-water marks of the Roman patristic period. Equally significantly for Catholic scholarship, it might also be argued that Henri de Lubac (see the bibliography) as a Catholic reformer of last century was attempting to recover a more orthodox Augustinian view whilst not defaming Aquinas, instead claiming Aquinas had been misinterpreted in the neo-Thomism of his successors.

[55] Francis Bacon (1561-1626), in his rigorous attack on the classical epistemology of his time, also concluded there were “idols” that hindered a true science.

[56] Which has intellectual foreshadowing in Aristotle who argued transcendentally for the law of excluded middle and was revived in the near contemporary arguments against skepticism of P F Strawson in the 1960s. Strawson’s work more than any other, was the catalyst for the revival of the interest in the transcendental mode of argumentation and what can be achieved by means of it. We spend extensive time on this in future sections.

[57] This is a recurring theme in the work of Van Til as K Scott Oliphint notes in his editorial notes to Van Til, The Defense of the Faith,146n3. For a more charitable and appreciative reading of Descartes, see Macneil, Descartes showed there was no need for God.

[58] Plantinga, “On Christian Scholarship,” 274.

[59] We will examine more closely in future sections the “coherence” and “correspondence” theories of truth. The point here is that they need not be considered rival theories at all, they deal with different aspects of truth, the epistemological and the metaphysical respectively.

[60] It is of note that the “early” Augustine, influenced heavily by Greek philosophy as most of the early church Fathers were, might be considered to have held the view that faith should be in concord with “right reason.” Sixteen centuries later, this was the Warfieldian or the ‘Old Princeton’ view which is a testimony to the longevity and persuasiveness of the position. He steadily moved to the opposite view however, and in his later life he published a series of “retractions” and “corrections” explaining why he had changed his mind. His controversy with Pelagius on the nature of human will and its role in the salvific process was one of the drivers to his change of mind. Similarly, St Anselm (1033–1109), one of the great intellects of the so-called “Middle Ages” (who had established a vibrant intellectual center during his tenure at Bec in Normandy) captured this thought in the Latin inscription that prefaced many of his works, “Fides quaerens intellectum,” translated literally as “faith seeking understanding.” This, in a few words, also captures the purpose and the intellectual lineage of this work.

[61] For example, Van Til, The Defense of the Faith, 381; Plantinga, “On Christian Scholarship.”

[62] Whilst other of Van Til’s students such as John Frame (who is still working) have been influential, written on Van Til and developed aspects of his position, only Bahnsen was described by Van Til himself as the “authority on his position.” Bahnsen was known as a capable debater engaging in public debates with atheists within the secular academy. A number of Bahnsen’s students are still academically, culturally and theologically active, e.g., Michael R Butler, Gary DeMar, and Keith Gentry who might all be credited with developing Van Tillian thought. Following Bosserman (see bibliography), James N. Anderson, K. Scott Oliphint, Vern S. Poythress, Ralph Allan Smith, Lane G. Tipton and Bosserman himself should all be considered contemporary Van Tillians.

[63] We could have just as easily used the terms “Calvinistic” or “Reformed” here. As Pawson, IHOPKC stated, Calvin might be ‘merely’ considered to have put Augustine’s theology down in a systematic manner. However, by avoiding naming Calvin, it can avoid the controversy associated with him. In some philosophical circles, the term “Augustinian” is preferred as Augustine was recognized as a philosopher as well as a theologian whereas Calvin is conceived of as an anti-Papist theologian first to the eclipsing of all else, no matter how prejudiced and ill-informed such an assessment would be.

[64] Often just abbreviated to ‘naturalism.’ The term is immediately derivative from the movement that is said to have begun with Thales in Ancient Greece (c600 BCE) who attempted to explain the whole of nature (including “the gods”) in terms of the natural processes themselves; or, alternatively, that every process of reality (including “the gods”) is necessarily a natural process, i.e., subject to nature. However it is nuanced, it is at base a form of monism. See Frame, Apologetics, 52–54; Plantinga, “On Christian Scholarship,” 270–72.

[65] Both Greg Bahnsen and Michael Butler (who will receive numerous citations in this thesis), make the point that it is just intellectual prejudice to assert that “unless it is naturalistic, it is not scientific.” Plantinga, Where The Conflict Really Lies, represents probably the most sophisticated deconstruction and rebuttal of this view to which we will also give attention as necessary.

[66] For more about this remarkable and neglected figure, see Macneil, Abraham Kuyper.

[67] Kuyper, “Common Grace in Science.” In the early stages of this work in a conversation with Dr Toby Betenson, I suggested (and he agreed) that the terms “science” and “epistemology” were equivalent, the Latin scientia from where we derive “science,” and the Greek episteme are both rendered “knowledge.” It seems more a matter of the academic discipline, rhetoric or prejudice to prefer one over the other.

[68] Kuyper, Abraham Kuyper—A Centennial Reader, 403–40.

[69] Faraday, “Experimental Researches in Electricity.”

[70] Plantinga, Where The Conflict Really Lies is an extended deconstruction of naturalism and its presentation as unscientific. Some of the most forceful and articulate critiques of naturalism have been made by Plantinga.

[71] As the adverse side-effects of the COVID vaccines slowly force themselves into the medical and the public consciousness, this provides a case study as to the perils of pragmatism and political expediency in medical ethics.

[72] However, interestingly in engineering there is a distinction between “empirical formulae” and formulae resulting from theoretical (rational) analysis. Empirical formulae result from large scale measurements that are seen to be approximated by a mathematical formula but have no basis in theory, they just “work.” In a previous life I worked with modelling fluid flow which is highly complex and for large scale systems has proven difficult to analyze theoretically with any acceptable degree of predictability and accuracy. However, in the name of safety, ISO and API standards exist that mandate safe practice on the basis of the empirical theories. It is perhaps provocative that this ‘scientific’ process is exposed as at best, semi-rational. However, we should also note that theoretical analysis is preferred wherever possible in virtually every ISO or API standard as a basis for action.

[73] Hume & Steinberg, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, loc. 2399.

[74] In commenting on this passage, Bahnsen asserts that he modelled this approach to life for most of American society (but we could equally add Europe too)—when thinking about life gets you down, hit the bar!

[75] Ayer, Language, Truth, and Logic. The first edition was published in 1936 in lieu of Ayer’s involvement with and learning from the Vienna Circle. It was one of the most influential works published in 20^th century philosophy and set the agenda until Quine’s deconstruction of the view in 1953 (though Ayer continued to argue for it through the 1960s). See also n. 187.

[76] Ayer, Language, 49 ff.

[77] Carnap’s early principal work the Aufbau (1928) has the English title “The Logical Structure of the World and Pseudoproblems in Philosophy.” Similarly, Ayer’s discussion of the problem of induction describes it as a pseudo-problem because it is insoluble.

[78] Quine, “Two Dogmas of Empiricism,” 20–46.

[79] Okasha, Philosophy of Science—A Very Short Introduction, backmatter.

[80] However, this argument is very weak as the scientist in practice is not really concerned with falsifying the theories of others (though they might do it as a consequence of their work) but is primarily interested in advancing or ‘proving’ the truth of their own theories. Popper’s conception of science created quite a stir in the period immediately after publication in English (1959—even though the first edition was published in German in 1935 it lost out to the logical positivism that he was critiquing) but was quickly eclipsed by Kuhn’s theories and the naturalism of Quine, both of which were well established by the end of the 1960s.

[81] The problem for falsification in these cases is what precisely is being falsified? If we have 10 propositions but only 1 is faulty, we cannot say that we have falsified the other 9. See also nn. 96-7.

[82] On the face of this remark, you would have expected him to have a kinship with a Rorty or the wider pragmatist movement, but his close associates and friends were philosophers of science (he had a close friendship and professional disputation with one of the most influential philosophers of science, Imre Lakatos, captured in Lakatos & Feyerabend, For and Against Method; his dislike for “intellectuals” (including here Rorty, Nagel and Searle, leaders in the postmodern pragmatist movement) was plain, see Feyerabend, Killing Time, 146–47.

[83] Feyerabend, Against Method, viii.

[84] The basic principles of eugenics underpinned the ‘Family Planning’ ideologies and the various frequent excesses of colonial rule around the world. Academic journals that freely used the name persisted through the 1960s but various scandals such as forced familial separation, de facto ethnic cleansing, forced sterilization or abortion of humans judged intellectually ‘inferior,’ meant the term lost respectability and is seldom used in a positive sense openly today. However, some key components of the philosophy survive in some of the questionable practices of powerful NGOs (particularly billionaire funded foundations) or quasi-UN bodies (bodies that are nominally part of the UN but now function de facto independently from it, both financially and governmentally, e.g., the WHO). For example, especially under the guise of ‘reproductive health’ and vaccination protocols, fertility reducing hormones were added for “strategic reasons” to the compounds to deliberately limit population growth in “undesirable” locations. See Macneil, The Great COVID Caper, § ‘Ruthless and Immoral NGOs.’

[85] Russell, History of Western Philosophy, 789.

[86] Russell, My Philosophical Development. This was not a typical autobiography, the introduction by Baldwin contextualizes it well as does Wood’s postscript. Russell does not see his frequent changes of mind as problematic but rather as signs of dynamic thinking.

[87] As we will study, for Carnap and the other logical positivists who were most sympathetic to him, a “pseudo-problem” of philosophy might be considered a question that could never have a final answer. Any question that could not be disassociated into logical components that would admit of truth claims was to be rejected as “non-sense.” It was because its language was ambiguous that it seemed to be expressing an insoluble proposition; yet, when it is expressed in the ideal language of set theory and logical notation, it is shown to be a linguistic confusion and hence a “pseudo-problem” or no problem at all. Carnap represented the first major push of linguistic philosophy to derive a “perfect” language that would clearly express propositions and thus “solve” the problems of philosophy that had resulted from this obfuscation in normal language. This was his reading of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus where Wittgenstein asserted that the solution to the problems of philosophy was in their disappearance, when his argument for logical form of reality was properly understood.

[88] Carnap, Philosophy of Science, loc.77.

[89] Russell, Western Philosophy, 789.

[90] Schlick, Problems of Ethics, xiii ff.

[91] Though known as the putative father of positivism because of his role in starting the Vienna Circle, Schlick was unusually broad in his perspective, an accomplished physicist and known for contributions to psychology, mathematics, biology, and sociology. His “demolition” of a key component of Kantian thought in his 1922 General Theory of Knowledge (with a 2^nd edition in 1926) was one of the pivotal events that shaped the “scientific” approach to philosophy that exerted an enormous influence on major figures such as Russell, Popper, and Hempel.

Interestingly, his commitment to realism is often contrasted with other members of the Vienna Circle such as Neurath and Carnap, their later views on language meaning that Schlick’s assertions of a ‘real’ world were eventually classified as “philosophical pseudo-statements” by Neurath. Carnap, however, influenced Schlick to soften his commitment to realism but it was still clear that Carnap paid homage in his work to Schlick, see Carnap, Philosophy of Science. Schlick, in short, shows a breadth to his work sometimes not associated with the positivist movement, see Oberdan, Moritz Schlick.

[92] See §§ 1 and 2 of Oberdan, Moritz Schlick.

[93] For example, see his closing remarks to his introductory preface to his Problems of Ethics (xiii). This was written in 1930, almost 10 years before an English translation was available. This was the beginning of the period in which logical positivism was to almost dominate analytic philosophy (as well as exerting an enormous influence into a broad spectrum of the Humanities) until the mid-1950s with its denial of the meaningfulness of metaphysical statements. We consider this in greater detail later. As I will mention frequently, modern scientific naturalism owes much of its basic hostile orientation to metaphysics from logical positivism. Schlick himself did not see this success of the movement he founded; he was assassinated by a mentally ill former student on June 22, 1936.

[94] Indeed, what might be called the wider “Continental” school to contrast it with the Anglo-American analytic school which it was soon to displace, in major part to the work of the logical positivists, the former as the dominant philosophical school in the Anglophone world. Perhaps the most concise and readable account of the difference is found in Glock, Analytical Philosophy, 65 ff. A comprehensive assessment of what might be thought of as ‘Continental’ philosophy is found in West, Continental Philosophy.

[95] A method famously employed by him in his Problems of Ethics (1939). Ayer articulating the same conclusion, concluded “the propositions of philosophy are linguistic in character, not factual…philosophy is a branch of logic,” Language, Truth & Logic, 57.

[96] See the Preface to the First English Edition of Popper (2002) where Popper (writing in 1959) clearly and explicitly describes his differences with the “language analysts” which is a synonym for the logical positivists. He had initially maintained a degree of affinity with them, having attended meetings of the Circle during the 1930s, and is some respects might be considered as having maintained a similar approach in generality, especially in regarding metaphysical language as ‘meaningless’ whilst departing in detail. By the time of the publication of the first edition of his Logik der Forschung (1935) there were clear differences. Most importantly, Popper believed that philosophical propositions were possible, that is, philosophy was capable of bearing and constituting knowledge. Importantly, by 1969 Popper had admitted metaphysics had a role to play in science specifically and human knowledge generally, see Popper, Knowledge and the Body-Mind Problem, 76. In the same work, he also rejected materialism as dogmatic, preferring a view that admitted both mental and physical states.

[97] In brief, a scientific statement (or proposition) was one that in principle was falsifiable. The great advantage over verificationism was that only a single counterexample was sufficient to establish the truth or falsity of a scientific proposition. Popper when formulating this had in mind his experience of working with a psychologist where the same data could be appropriated by rival psychological theories, both claiming to be scientific, as establishing them both. This he felt was too broad and illogical (it denies the law of excluded middle) and was considered by him as characteristic of pseudo-scientific theories.

More generally, the problems of delimiting pseudo-science vs para-science vs science vs non-science is admirably attempted in Mahner, Demarcating Science from Non-Science, but in reading his introduction and then the conclusion, I would argue he struggles to move beyond anything but a very detailed description of the problem and the many different attempted resolutions; rather than quenching the flames of the epistemological “anything goes” bonfire of Feyerabend, he seems to have provided fresh fuel for that fire.

[98] We shall return to Quine repeatedly. He pushed naturalism as far as it could go which inevitably terminates at a behaviorist view of human nature. Quine himself states he was attracted to a behaviorist explanation of human psychology even in his High School years.

[99] The 50^th anniversary edition was reissued in 2012 with the most recent reprint in 2021.

[100] Where though initially significant and influential, he was frequently, and rightly, criticized for a lack of precision and ambiguity in his writing.

[101] For example, Kuhn featured prominently in Rorty’s Mirror of Nature which served to catapult Rorty into fame and infamy in equal measures. He is also heavily featured through Rorty’s series “Philosophical Papers,” a 4-volume set in which he collated his work into distinctive categories, only completed shortly before his death in 2007. The essay in Volume 4, Philosophy (89–104) is typical of Rorty’s ability to apply his own deconstructive metanarrative to philosophy and philosophers whilst simultaneously denying there was a metanarrative to be had. The use he makes of Kuhn in that essay is typical of his application.

[102] Schlick, General Theory of Knowledge, 384.

[103] Einstein himself was far more philosophically astute than modern naturalistic science recognizes, recommending a young Moritz Schlick for a professorship but recognizing the difficulty in his appointment as him “not being a member of the established Kantian church.” See Oberdan, Moritz Schlick, who describes the Kantian themes that influenced the physicists and were surprisingly influential on Schlick’s thinking. It is also of note that Schlick’s appointment to the university of Vienna was to the chair of Natural Philosophy. It might also be noted that Niels Bohr wrote extensively on philosophical implications of his account of quantum theory, known as the “Copenhagen interpretation” (though his work was poorly received in contrast to his physics.)

[104] A descriptive account of the multiple variations and incommensurate nature of the variations is found in Ladyman, “Ontological, Epistemological and Methodological Positions.”

[105] Psillos, “Perspectives on Explanation,” 170.

[106] Psillos, “Perspectives on Explanation,” 171.

[107] Gabbay, Thagard, & Woods, General Preface, v–vi.

[108] We will draw a future distinction between these two, with “worldview” being a far stronger term with ontological implications.

[109] For example, Bahnsen, ASC3 Practical Apologetics (GB1356a–GB1360b). In his magisterial History of Philosophy series and his Introduction to Philosophy series he employs a similar distinction.

[110] Mahner, Demarcating Science employs this distinction as one of the lines demarcating science from non-science.

[111] In Quine & Ullian, The Web of Belief, we find a view of “science,” or more correctly rationality and knowledge, presented in an accessible way as a composite of different activities such as evidence, intuition, and judging. The text was originally created as a primer for pre-University students on critical thinking in a literary theory context but proved popular as a primer in philosophy courses. The later edition was rewritten to acknowledge the change in the audience.

[112] I discuss this is Macneil, Wittgenstein.

[113] Plantinga, Where The Conflict Really Lies, Preface.

[114] Feyerabend’s Against Method (2010, 1975) is now perceived as on a par with Popper and Kuhn regarding the status and limits of scientific reasoning. His last full book published before his death was titled The Tyranny of Science, a transcription of a series of public lectures given in 1992 derived from his lecture course he gave at Berkeley between 1958 and 1990. Though in many senses he was an intellectual chameleon, the justification for his iconoclastic views constantly moving and changing, his constant preoccupation was to demonstrate the myths and misrepresentations surrounding the modern apologies for science. Rushdoony’s The Mythology of Science is a searching critique in a similar vein dealing specifically with the theory of evolution and the dedication to it by the evolutionists, treating it as on a par with a religious commitment.

[115] Dodsworth, A State of Fear: How the UK government weaponised fear during the Covid-19 pandemic, loc.107–109.

[116] In the follow-up to AM, Science in a Free Society (1978) he broadened his cultural criticism in irreverent fashion and argued that science should be subjected to democratic processes of control rather than science controlling the democratic. It was a challenging argument to make considering the “success” of science, but he attempted it vigorously. It is of note that his widow Paolino, stated that he was the most “dissatisfied” with this book at the time of his passing and had wanted to revise it.

[117] Sample, ‘We are a petri dish’: world watches UK’s race between vaccine and virus.

[118] At the time of writing, it was on its eighth wave.

[119] Macneil, The Great COVID Caper, 62.

[120] Macneil, The Great COVID Caper, 62.

[121] Though Francis Bacon, as early as 1620, had presented the utopian vision of science as savior in his novel The New Atlantis.

[122] Abraham Kuyper had written repeatedly in opposition to the scientism that was part of the Zeitgeist of the latter 19^th and early 20^th century. His epistemology put the person, their relations, and their faith as a central relation. Bratt commented “this sounded postmodern” a century before Lyotard. Existentialism was associated first with Kierkegaard who emphasized the subjectivity and authenticity of faith rather than objective dogmas; it was then secularized in Sartre as a form of Marxism (treating our very material existence as “absurd”) and given a dense and alternative conception by Heidegger (who also exerted some influence on theology.)

[123] Found in full in his autobiography, completed on his deathbed, Killing Time, 145 ff.

[124] For the non-British reader (and perhaps even for the British reader) the nomenclature is thoroughly confusing. The British “public” school is the equivalent of an Ivy League school in the US, they are independent schools who are paid for by private fees or endowments, not by the government. The US “public” school is the equivalent of the British “comprehensive” school, government funded. Only the highly privileged elite can afford to send their children to the British public school and many of the elites around the world also send their children to be educated there, particularly diplomats.

[125] Simon, What Future for Education?

[126] Interestingly though, the “Grammar” only played rugby and cricket, “football” (soccer) was too “common”!

[127] Perhaps demonstrated well by the “Sokal hoaxes” where fake papers advancing bizarre ‘postmodern’ theses were accepted for publication in leading postmodern journals. “Sokal Squared” was a similar recently repeated exercise concentrating on the nascent gender and CRT disciplines which I considered more fully in https://planetmacneil.org/blog/fake-but-peer-reviewed-academic-papers-published-by-fake-but-famous-journals/ ; despite the ridiculousness and lack of critical peer assessment exposed by the fakery, the academics were unrepentant, labelling it “an attack of the Right.”

[128] Russell, In Praise of Idleness.

[129] Gould, The Mismeasure of Man.

[130] Blackburn, S. (2006). Truth—A Guide for the Perplexed (Kindle ed.). London: Penguin., 169–70.

[131] Pr 1:7 (NAS).

[132] NET Bible translators note for Proverbs 1:7.

[133] Descartes, Meditations and Other Metaphysical Writings, 99–104.

[134] Rom 10:8–9 (NET).

[135] This was the subject of my master’s dissertation, Macneil, Dominion Theology.

[136] For all its fame, the “last” Welsh revival of 1904–5 which has an enormous apocryphal status as the catalyst for other revivals around the world, such as the LA Azusa Street revival (1906–1908), had little long-term effect on Welsh culture. Similarly, Azusa Street gave birth to Pentecostal denominations, but American society as a whole continued its degeneration. The Great Tent evangelists after WWII and the Toronto Blessing of 1994 for all their fame and notoriety in Christian circles, all failed to impact wider society as vehicles of reformation. Indeed, Canada, apparently a continuing center of the “blessing” is transforming itself into a totalitarian ‘liberal’ state and is criminalizing Christian orthodoxy, prohibiting the preaching of certain passages.

[137] Kuyper, “Common Grace in Science,” 441–60.

[138] This was self-identification on the part of Wang, e.g., Wang, Beyond Analytic Philosophy. He was a confidant of and expert on Kurt Gödel (1906–1978) who’s ‘incompleteness theorems’ were perhaps the most important pieces of mathematical philosophy of the 20^th century, and perhaps of all time in which he demonstrated that classical mathematics lacked a rational basis, i.e., certain statements accepted as true could not be proved as true. It also demonstrated that mathematics could not be derived from logic, refuting the logicism of Frege and Russell. Gödel felt he had disproved nominalism in mathematics (favored by many positivists and post-positivist naturalists such as Quine) which considered mathematics to consist ‘solely in syntactical conventions and their consequences.’ That is, he had a conception that mathematics was objective (a descriptive science) and about the real world. See Kennedy, Kurt Gödel.

[139] Wang, Beyond Analytic Philosophy, 208.

[140] This was considered one of the most significant aspects of Kuyper’s thought to guard against the ecclesiastical hegemony of either the Catholic or Protestant churches whilst maintaining the central importance of a biblical worldview throughout culture. See Kuyper, “Sphere Sovereignty,” 461–90.

[141] “Practical reason” is reason applied to (or the reason of) how we should act, i.e., a synonym of ethics; “theoretical” reason is reason applied to (or the reason of) how we should think, i.e., our ideas and concepts.

[142] Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, 130.

[143] It is somewhat of a dogma in Van Tillian circles to describe Kant’s method as “autonomous” (neatly explained in Theodore M. Greene’s introductory essay to Kant’s Religion (1960/1793)), meaning without reference to God, or in a more nuanced sense, “not finding its final reference point in God but the mind of autonomous man” (Bahnsen, Practical Apologetics, audio recording.)

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The Nature, Character, and Purpose of Philosophy

Planet M Blog

The blog of Dr Michael Pòl Macneil PhD

Introduction