3 A Christian Conception of Philosophy

3.1 Overview

What we will endeavor to accomplish in this chapter is to build on the understanding of philosophy in the previous chapter and to work our way towards what a distinctively Christian conception of philosophy requires.  From the assessment of the previous chapter, we can safely assume a “traditional” division of philosophy as offering the most holistic account but here we want to precise it with the concepts that will help to make it a robust philosophical account.

First, we clearly distil the categories we have been assuming in our previous critical discussion, modifying and clarifying where necessary.  Such is the importance of our refutation of the skepticism regarding metaphysics, which suffered repeated philosophical assaults during the 20^th century, that we must put a spotlight on the relation between the wider fields of human knowledge, science, and metaphysics.  It is a principial and important relation if for no other reason that the language game of science, and particularly naturalistic science, is the dominant paradigm of our time. [1]  If we cannot show that what we believe is scientifically respectable or at least defensible, or if we are unable to persuasively deconstruct or recontextualize the credibility of a naturalized metaphysics or a naturalized epistemology, we will struggle in the philosophical and wider cultural marketplace.

Our ultimate strategy will be to establish the necessity of a transcendental criteria for rationality generally, we can then demonstrate that the confidence in a “scientific worldview,” whatever that might mean in its details, is only defensible as a generality with a Christian metaphysic as its foundation.  We then firmly place the Epistemological Self-Consciousness project in the appropriate context, that of worldview philosophy.

3.2 Metaphysics

3.2.1 Speculative, Descriptive and Revisionary Metaphysics

Ladyman in a contribution to what was conceived of as the “most comprehensive attempt to provide a philosophy of science,” [2] offers a definition of metaphysics as “the theory of what exists [ontology]…the most fundamental questions about being and the nature of reality…whether there are objective natural kinds [categories]… [or whether] there are laws of nature.” [3]  Thus, temporarily leaving Ladyman’s own exposition aside of a scientifically orientated metaphysics, it is easy to see why ‘metaphysics’ can easily become a speculative, amorphous, imprecise, and loaded term easily associated with mystical or occult accounts of the universe and the supra-rational interrelation of its objects; sometimes being pushed to posit an irrational denial of all distinction, a monism posited against the direct evidence of our perceptions.[4]

That is, metaphysics and science often end up being contrasted, even by the more moderate and informed practitioners.  Consider this account of Mumford, who as a metaphysician, wants to define metaphysics for us:

“Science is based on observation, which is often its starting point and the ultimate arbiter of the truth of a theory. Metaphysics, while it’s concerned with the world, is not so much concerned with that part of it that can be observed. What we can see with our eyes is of little help in metaphysics, or philosophy in general. The evidence of the senses is not what decides whether a philosophical theory is to be accepted or rejected. We considered, for example, whether a table was just a bundle of properties or was a substance underlying and holding together all those properties. We should note that we cannot decide between these two theories on the basis of observation.

It is not as if we could actually remove the properties of a real object and find a propertyless substratum. What would one look like, given that it was propertyless? Our questions are not, therefore, scientific ones…what we do in metaphysics is indeed above and beyond physics. It is above in its level of generality; and it is beyond the observational investigation of the world, thinking about the features that rationally the world should or could have.” [5] (Emphasis added)

Thus, Mumford wants to drive a thick wedge between science and metaphysics, or more specifically, between physics (broadly conceived as the theory of the physical) and metaphysics.  However, he also wants to distinguish between philosophy and science on the basis that science is an empirical process, which we have already demonstrated in our discussion is a highly contentious position.  The sociological dimension of his self-identification as a “metaphysician” might be the best explanation for such a naïve view.  It seems scientists are not the only ones that want to demarcate their subject from its competitors.[6]  We can rightly be critical of him here:

1. It would be a particular type of arcane philosopher or religious mystic who would not be concerned with what their eyes do see, or to deny that what they see with their eyes has no bearing on philosophy.
2. For a realist, one of the principal tests of a philosophical theory is its relation to reality and excepting the absolute idealists, most idealists would also be concerned with how their concepts are tied to the intersubjective world, however conceived.
3. As we demonstrated previously, to separate philosophy from science is not an objective procedure, it is a matter of arbitrary criteria, prejudice, or linguistic convenience (and probably a combination of all three). That is, it is logically impossible to distinguish between whether or when a physical law which has an organizing feature should be considered ‘metaphysical’ or ‘scientific’ without begging the question.

In summary, Mumford in his account of metaphysics is demonstrating for us what should be properly called “speculative” metaphysics, the rather more secularized and respectable form of “religious” metaphysics.  When reading Mumford, one senses his desire for the procedure which he wants to defend to be considered “scientifically respectable,” but you are then easily frustrated by the passages above where he seems to be suggesting no such reconciliation is possible.  This makes it easier to understand why metaphysics was the target of extreme dismissal by Hume in the 18th century and by the logical positivists in the 20^th century.

However, as we also noted, that dismissal was later demonstrated by the devastating critique of Quine as nothing but itself a metaphysical position which dogmatically asserted the single principle that denied all metaphysics.  In response, Quine himself proposed a revolutionary [7] ‘naturalized,’ descriptive metaphysics (quickly followed by a “naturalized epistemology” [8]) which had a degree of scientific and logical respectability and was established by himself and others of similar naturalist convictions.  This was to provide a functional ontological foundation [9] for science, informing the practice of it by what is most properly called methodological naturalism.[10]  Quine’s metaphysics were austere and limited in scope indeed, but for that reason were eminently respectable and acceptable to the naturalist project.  Ladyman’s account with which we began this section belongs broadly to this naturalistic tradition, but he also clearly demonstrates in his discussion the multitude of sometimes contradictory assumptions and mutually exclusive perspectives possible beneath that umbrella of naturalism.  Exactly what entities were admitted and how they exist or relate to one another, if indeed at all, makes it somewhat fluid, arbitrary, and subject to change with the paradigm shifts of science.[11]

Thus, the Quinean model seemed overly austere in contrast to the ambitious metaphysics of those who were seeking some kind of a recovery of the generality of description^[12] and even explanation or ‘revisionary’ improvement of the understanding of the world[13] in the post-positivist period.  There was, and always will be, a deep dissatisfaction for the worldview philosopher with the incongruity of lodging at the Humean philosophical dead-end of there being no reasonable basis for reason, enduring the Kantian psychologization of reason, which then degenerates further into a Quinean, behaviorist account encompassing the whole of nature and learning.  Unable to solve the intransigent problems of knowledge, they are dissolved by subsuming them under another science.

That is, Quine liberated the world from the dogmatism of logical positivism, only to return to their altar of the “pseudo-problem” for worship as he paid homage with behavioral psychology as the successor subject to epistemology.  His naturalist followers appealed to evolutionary science as their hope, but Plantinga then proceeded to strongly argue that naturalism and evolutionary theory were incommensurable at the logical level that should have been of fundamental importance to Quine.[14]  There was a scholarly (and sometimes unscholarly) argument with Plantinga over the details,[15] but that led to his refinement of the argument over the best part of two decades.  There is now a substantive agreement about the force of these anti-naturalistic arguments when conceived in the detailed Bayesian fashion [16] or as a broader conceptual argument, as found for example also in Lewis [17] and as revised in his interpreter Reppert.[18]  It would appear to be a metaphysical prejudice, a religious commitment to an atheistic scientism, that keeps us in the Humean cul-de-sac.

Further, the austere answers of Hume and the naturalism he influenced are far more inadequate in other ways important to us as philosophers who do not merely think of philosophy as the handmaiden of science [19] but, to borrow Russell’s phrase, as an “inspiration to a better way of life.” [20]  We find unlikely support for our contention in ironically one of the most visionary and prophetic of the 20^th century public intellectuals, Aldous Huxley, who in his philosophical writings had once argued for a complete negation of metaphysics in a negative, atheistic existentialism.  In sympathy with Russell, he advocated for an “erotic revolt” that the moral restrictions “imposed by Moses” might be undone as mere conventions. In rejecting such a “Christian” view of the social and economic order, society could be liberated and more just when reconstituted on a socialist basis.  However, later in his life, Huxley in an unusually cogent piece of writing argued as early as 1937 that Hume’s view decimated vast swathes of human experience as “meaningless” when these experiences were what brings meaning when faced with the “angst” of meaninglessness.  “Meaninglessness” was no longer the pathway to emancipation but a negation of being and becoming, the social emancipation an illusion as “The Party” was elevated as an infallible organ of tyranny. [21]  In doing so, he paralleled Wittgenstein’s latter rebuttal of the positivist interpretation of his view of language in the Tractatus [22] and their political application of it in their manifesto.[23]

So, in summary, it behooves us to refuse to surrender to an intellectual powerlessness and skepticism about the world; we are seeking to understand nature, master and reshape it.  That is why this work has no reticence in arguing for a strong metaphysics and we now proceed as to how metaphysics can legitimately provide a foundation for science and our epistemology.

3.2.2 Metaphysics as the Foundation of Science

In the previous section, we rejected substantially Mumford’s definition of metaphysics, but we can affirm with him that metaphysics will supply interpretative tools, ordering functions and concepts.  This process is inevitable, and most philosophers of science after Quine would accept that we always interpret the data that might come to us from the phenomenal experience through a conceptual scheme or what we will eventually label a “worldview.”  We will see why equating a “worldview” with a “conceptual scheme” alone is not wholly adequate, but our point here is that metaphysics aims to help rescue our conceptions of a meaningful universe, an understandable cosmos and thus informs how we should behave in it.

We have already seen how Huxley as representative of a caste of young intellectuals desired to cast the universe as “meaningless” so that we can swap places with God as the locus around which reality revolves.  However attractive that this atheistic moral nihilism of Nietzsche and the scientific socialism of the Marxists was to both the young Huxley and the young Orwell, as it was to generations of Romantics, radicals and libertines on different Continents, it was replaced with the dark pessimism of his Brave New World and of Orwell’s 1984; both of which saw no limit on the moral self-justification and appropriation of executive power by the State empowered by the inevitable flow of history towards its utopian consummation; this was all too easy to be co-opted by those otherwise with the more classical Liberal view, for the State, is, after all, “a minister of God to you for good.” [24]  To avoid this tyranny and the merging of Church, here broadly conceived as even the secular “civic religion,” and State,[25]  is the political challenge that is before us, a metaphysic must provide a context for action and a guide to our morals.[26]

To this end, Viktor Frankl a survivor of Auschwitz and other concentration camps, vividly reminded the post-Holocaust world of the immanent freedom and dignity of the human person which would only come from a metaphysical awareness of one’s value and place in the universe.[27]  Rather than choosing the absurdism of Sartre or the moral nihilism in the embracing of sexual licentiousness of a Huxley or a Russell [28] in response to their existential condition, the existentialism of Frankl, which grew into an entire school of psychology and psychiatric practice, focused on the individual discovering, encountering, and embracing the meaning of their existence.  This was found and expressed most of all in maintaining the dignity and nobility of their humanity in the face of the greatest and gravest of indignity, evil and ignobility that confronts one.[29]  He asserted that the concentration camp had merely one aim and that was to dehumanize, such that a person seeks merely to survive at the cost of all moral sense which would then justify their treatment as sub-human animals by their captors,[30] rather than answer the questions that their very existence asks of them.[31]  Both the Nazis and the Communists believed their programmes to be “scientific,” with religious moral sentimentality washed away by Nietzsche and the salvific manifestos of the logical positivists for science,[32] it was not just legitimate, but incumbent in this new era to make the scientifically informed judgments regarding the inferior races, particularly when it is for the noble aim of regenerating humanity.[33]

Similarly, philosophically, and theologically, naturalistic science struggles to arrest such an internally coherent account of brutality if it is limited to the methods of empirical science.  The empiricist model of science posits itself as descriptive rather than analytical but if we have no analysis there can be no synthesis, no organizing of our observations into a framework where it can be understood and interpreted, we then have no moral conscience in that thing we call science.  This is what Plantinga and Lewis more generally call naturalism refuting itself by its own presuppositions.[34]  So, in what sense does it make sense to refer to metaphysics as the foundation for science?  We can discern this indirectly by returning to Mumford and correcting what he describes as the organizing ‘worldview’ feature of metaphysics:

“[W]e have been trying to understand the fundamental nature of reality…Science also seeks to understand the nature of reality, but it does so in a different way. Science looks for some general truths, but they are also concrete, whereas the truths of metaphysics are very general and abstract…the philosopher’s answer will be at the highest levels of generality. They may say there are particulars that fall into natural kinds, there are properties, changes, causes, laws of nature, and so on. The job of science, however, is to say what specific things exist under each of those categories. Metaphysics seeks to organize and systematize all these specific truths that science discovers and to describe their general features.” [35]

Whilst we have already taken issue with Mumford’s strict dichotomy between science and philosophy viewing it as untenable, we can permit the methodological variation and the functional differences between the two without incoherence.  We would also want to challenge this naturalistic notion of “abstract,” like Murdoch argued [36] our values are never distinct from, but rather spring from, our metaphysical assumptions.  We would also want to challenge that it would be possible to come up with “specific truths that science discovers” without first having the organizing metaphysic in place to help us interpret those facts; we never encounter “naked facts,” [37] we always view reality through whatever metaphysical lens we assume.  However, Mumford is correct to identify metaphysics as providing an organizing function.  Most importantly, that metaphysical lens will also organize our conceptions of value.

3.2.3 Metaphysics as the Organizing Transcendentals

So, in summary and to this end, metaphysical concepts such as causality, probability and possibility, time, personality, identity through time, eventuation, mind, and matter legitimately provide organizing transcendentals of experience—that is, they make all experience coherent and understandable because they are presupposed for the purposes of intelligibility.  The organizing principles of metaphysics attempt to unify the human field of knowledge by systematizing the human sciences but also attempting to explain why science itself is successful as a methodology, or being rather more Wittgensteinian and critical, seek to identify what are the ‘family resemblances’ between the many different sciences which might explain their success.  They must also provide a justification for the values with which science is conducted.  Thus, we will understand as we develop our understanding of our Christian version of transcendentalism, that it is only with the addition of the ontological Trinity that there is a transcendental justification for these transcendentals and a value base for our actions, if we are to rescue ourselves from the skeptical challenge of arbitrariness, moral nihilism, ethical relativism, and dogmatism.

3.3 Epistemology

3.3.1 Introduction

Epistemology for our purposes is conceived of as the theory of knowledge, “concerned with…the analysis of knowledge and its relationship to belief and truth, the theory of justification, and how to respond to the challenge of…skepticism” [38] but also, and importantly for the development of this work, warrant.  This term is particularly important for us as a study in Christian philosophy as the definition and exposition of the term by Plantinga was considered “one of the major accomplishments of twentieth century epistemology.” [39]  Our aim in this section is to distil these highly complex issues in a non-trivial way and with enough detail that we can provide a robust grounding for our theory of knowledge and thus provide the underpinning for epistemological self-consciousness.

3.3.2 A Philosophy of Facts

‘Belief,’ ‘fact’ and ‘truth’ are complex concepts in need of analysis and clarification.  There are elaborate extended theories of belief which we shall not examine as they are not relevant for us here, for we can immediately recognize with Bahnsen that “knowledge is a subcategory of belief: to know something is, at least, to believe it” [40] (emphasis added).  It is the subcategory we are concerned with, not the padding.  Most generally, a belief might be characterized as:

“a positive cognitive attitude toward a proposition, an action-guiding mental state on which a person relies (whether intermittently or continuously) in his theoretical or practical actions and plans.”[41] (Emphasis added)

In our emphasis, we are noting that volition is involved in belief.  That is, we view belief such that a person will act upon their beliefs but that does not mean they are necessarily conscious of those beliefs; they might have subconscious beliefs or beliefs which are too difficult to verbalize or are sublimated beneath layers of pain.  A person might insist they “believe” x, y, or z but then their actions demonstrate otherwise.  Somewhat paradoxically, someone may hold what they consider to be a belief in their conscious mind, but their actions show a different and stronger (or more positive) commitment to another set of subconscious beliefs.  We should also recognize that some beliefs are held based on deduction or inference from other beliefs, whilst some beliefs are considered incorrigible or infallible to us; that is, they are not held on the basis of substantiating evidence or they are considered to be self-evidencing, they are basic beliefs.  For example, Calvin held that belief in God was properly basic, and to avoid impiousness, the only appropriate way to believe in God.[42]

Now let us consider factuality.  Most importantly, we need to recognize immediately that what constitutes a particular “fact” about the world will be a function of our epistemological position (thus, our beliefs) and our metaphysical commitments.  That is, our philosophy of facts governs our treatment of evidence and whatever basicity, deduction, induction, or inference we might defensibly make from those facts.  This also has the implication that what is even accepted as deductive or inductive is also governed by our presuppositions.

This was established beyond reasonable doubt by the work of Quine and most notably Thomas Kuhn in the post-positivist period, he argued that there are no such things as “brute facts” as had previously been argued by many of the logical positivists and to some extent, empiricism generally, but that our very observations of the world were “theory laden” or “worldview dependent.”  [43]  Kuhn argued convincingly that contrary to a naïve empiricism, a “fact” is not an abstract, objective entity that is independent of our perception and conceptualization of it or even its cultural context.  In the contemporary language of the philosophy of science we explicate this when we assert that ‘facts’ are never naked sensory data (for we can just as well argue philosophically just what the term ‘data’ might mean),[44] they are interpreted within a conceptual framework (or, in Kuhn’s terms, a normative paradigm) [45] that renders them meaningful.   This might be better explained as the basic distinction between “seeing” and “seeing as”: an aborigine in a first-contact encounter, will have the same phenomenological experience as us if we were to show them a television but would not have the same perceptual process and might have a very different idea of our television.  It might reasonably be rendered a portal to the spirit world.

Thus, “theory laden” or “worldview dependent” are givens in our discussion, and the latter phrase will become increasingly important for us as we focus the discussion, there is no other way by which we can conceive of the problem in a rigorous, transparent, and coherent manner.  There is also an indissoluble relationship between truth and factuality.  Nagel puts the intimate and important connection this way:

“Some philosophical claims about knowledge have turned out to be confused or self-undermining, but other findings about knowledge, like its special connection with truth, have stood the test of time.” [46] (Emphasis added).

It would seem reasonable to assert that all facts should be truths about the world and some theories of truth would indeed declare we have merely expressed a tautology in that assertion.  However, all truths are not necessarily (logically) facts, unless we permit abstract truths with no material analogue into our theory of truth.  That is, “facts” are perceived as having, if not a necessary, a special or strong connection with reality; “truth” can be conceived broadly (in terms of theoretical coherence) or narrowly (in terms of correspondence or disquotation).[47]

We should remind ourselves from a previous discussion that these are then not two oppositional theories of truth as frequently conceived but are addressing different questions, one dealing with the metaphysics of truth (what is truth?), the other with how we know something is true (within the context of a theory), the epistemology of truth.  It is our theory of the world, or worldview that gives us both a test for and the conditions of truth; it is not merely a “conceptual scheme” but makes ontological commitments.  Thus, Quine would speak of our “theory of nature” as giving meaning to any proposition or factuality about the world.[48]  The question then before us becomes how we test worldviews for coherence and truthfulness if all are epistemologically self-contained and we are not to surrender to relativism and arbitrariness.  For example, Rorty would appropriate Kuhn to attempt to deconstruct any normative conception of reality and ethics on the basis “everything is under a description” and concluded the only position we should hold is a certain tentative, ironic view of our predicament in the world (we think in lieu of Sartre’s starting point that our existence is just “absurd”), we should not take life and certainly not philosophy, too seriously.[49]  However, in Blackburn’s critique [50] of Rorty, he asserts this is just moral cowardice and Rorty himself spilt much ink in later years arguing the importance of “ethics” and for a particular political vision [51] with the utmost sobriety and through both academic and popular media.[52]

Hence, we should be able to immediately appreciate the importance of factuality.  Some consider ‘God’ to be the most substantive and important ‘fact’ of the universe upon which all others ‘facts’ depend and have their origin:

“We may say, then, that we seek to defend the fact of miracle, the fact of providence, the fact of creation, and therefore, the fact of God, in relation to modern non-Christian science…that we are seeking to defend Christian theism as a fact.  And this is really the same thing as to say that we believe the facts of the universe are unaccounted for except on a Christian-theistic basis.” [53]  (Emphasis added).

This will be the view that we will be defending and advancing.  However, others forcefully reject God is any kind of ‘fact’ other than that of a delusion or shared mistake:

“the difficulty for the religious community is to show that its agreement is not simply agreement about a shared mistake…it is clear that particular religious beliefs are mistaken, since religious groups do not…agree and they cannot all be right…” [54] (Emphasis added).

We will consider the resolution of the dispute as we progress, but the principle of “worldview dependent” perception and conception is biblical, Christian and sound; Calvin had grasped this many centuries earlier when he spoke of the “spectacles of Scripture” enabling us to “[gather] up the otherwise confused knowledge of God in our minds, having dispersed our dullness, clearly shows us the true God.” [55]  In this case our description is scripture, and “everything” is the created realm.

3.3.3 A Philosophy of Evidences

Our previous discussion concluded that worldview considerations govern the very perception of our experience and govern our interpretation of data.  A traditional naïve view of evidence as being weighed in the balances of a neutral scientific practitioner engaged in disinterested research and marching us ever onward towards truth and objectivity is most certainly found wanting.  This was the basis of the concern that this confidence in empirical methods remained so strong in Christian apologetics that it reduced any apologetic claims to discussions of probabilities of truth rather than certainty.  Thus, let us consider the reformational move that Van Til made to reshape the landscape of Christian apologetics.

Van Til emphasized that he was not rejecting traditional evidential arguments such as the cosmological or ontological proofs, and historical arguments for the resurrection but that he was not going to use them in a linear, sequential manner to demonstrate the proof or truth of God’s existence.  This is because as we noted previously, as standalone, apologetic arguments they are logically very weak and limited in what they can establish. To illustrate further, there is nothing necessary derived from the fact of Christ’s resurrection other than a man who was dead had come back to live for reason or reason(s) unknown unless we have already believed the scriptural narrative that interprets it for us.[56]

Indeed, the proof or truth of God’s existence had rather to be assumed for those arguments to have logical force and so, consequently, will have very little apologetic value for the conscious sceptic.  Thus, for Van Til, the appropriate apologetic method is to seek to uncover the presuppositions that make experience itself possible and to discover the only worldview that supports those presuppositions.[57]  That is, as we had previously posited, he concurred with Kant about the transcendental question but proceeded to answer the question with a transcendent transcendental framework rather than using the tools of transcendental psychology.

This becomes an epistemological principle of principal importance that allows us to escape from the circularity problem caused by the interdependence of metaphysics and epistemology.  There was the constant challenge in the history of philosophy of whether metaphysics must proceed epistemology or vice versa.  How can we know objects unless we have a theory of objects?  Yet how can we define a theory of objects unless we know what an object is?  This circular argument “tormented and obsessed” epistemologists such as Chisholm.[58]  Only in the conception of a God who is trinitarian, both immanent and transcendent can this problem of being above and within creation, as both a unity and a diversity, be solved.   He is both the one and the many, the whole and the particular; or to use the Van Tillian term, the “concrete universal.”

This is a term which Van Til derived from idealism.   Van Til had claims to be an expert on Bernard Bosanquet (1848-1923) whom Van Til “deemed the most advanced and sophisticated idealist of his generation” [59] and interacted with F H Bradley, one of the last and most influential of the British idealists.  Thus, it was a controversial term for him to use but it was only the willful refusal of critics to engage with the additional (or completed) sense he was giving the term that made it so.  Van Til directly responded to the contradiction implicit in this term by agreeing that idealism could never resolve this contradiction if it proceeded on naturalistic or atheistic assumptions.  This is because it worked from the assumption that “Man and the Absolute” were correlative, whereas for Van Til, Christian theism considers it necessary that God is self-contained, requiring only Himself.[60]  This was Van Til’s nuancing of his understanding and his solution to the “one and the many” problem which had been one of the most intractable problems of unbelieving philosophy, e.g., are universals merely linguistic conveniences or have they metaphysical status (do natural kinds exist?) and if only particulars exist, how are we able to communicate in a contingent universe governed by chance?  For Van Til “kind” was what it was because God thinking of an object makes it what it is, his thinking is then constitutive of the particular objects of reality.  This would be in contrast to human thought which was always derivative in its concepts from God’s conceptualization and subsequent actualization of the world.  There is thus a tight correlation and interdependence between his metaphysics and epistemology in which both spring from his Christian theism, “…God, who gives life to the dead and calls into being that which does not exist…” [61]

So, in summary, despite epistemology often being taught as if it was a self-contained discipline, we can conclude even at this stage that this is misguided and incorrect.  It would be inconceivable for a materialist to maintain a supernaturalistic metaphysics; they would intuitively opt for an empirical hypothesis.  Thus, we have established that metaphysics and epistemology are linked, and further that this circularity is only resolved by the mind of God as the origin of both correspondence and coherence.  Our presuppositions govern how we handle the evidence of our senses and push us in the direction of transcendental philosophy.

3.3.4 Overcoming Skepticism

When we considered skepticism previously it was within the context of how the response to skepticism had generated several different philosophical schools, each of which with their particular approaches to reality were attempting to mitigate it in some way; we might say we examined the epistemology of the various skepticisms.  Yet we did not consider skepticism itself (we might say the metaphysics of skepticism) or its ethical dimensions.  It is by adding these dimensions that we shall demonstrate how that makes it possible to answer far more comprehensively the skeptical challenge.

Here we examine in detail the two main forms of skepticism, and in the process of navigating through the turbulent waters we encounter the Christian philosophy of Gordon Clarke who used a skeptical premise to build his theory of knowledge and his apologetic approach.  However, we find his positions untenable and a dangerous, immoral application of a skeptical premise.  We then proceed to examine how considering the psychology of skepticism proves an effective tool to dismantle most of its force.  We then arrive at a terminus that suggests a transcendental critique is the only route forward to dismiss any residual logical force of the skeptical argument.

Recollect that Ladyman, writing as a philosopher of science, helpfully focusses the epistemological project as directly concerned with, as one of its primary goals, the task of countering skepticism, “Epistemology is the theory of knowledge and as such is concerned with…how [we] respond to the challenge of local…or global skepticism.” [62]  Implicit in Ladyman’s account is the assumption that unless the skeptical challenge can be mitigated, there can be no robust science and in lieu of our previous conclusions from §2, we can forcefully concur with that judgment; though unfortunately, there is little to find in his account other than a repetition of the various attempts we have already seen to mitigate it.  However, we can still usefully apply his definition as a starting point for our own discussion.

Primarily, his definition tells us that skepticism comes in two specific forms:  local and global.  That is, it is conceivable someone has difficulties in accepting the absolute certainty of individual ‘facts’ but claims to be non-skeptical and instrumentalist in their general approach to reality.  This we would call local skepticism that is mitigated in some way in practice.  In direct contrast to this, we can all imagine a stubborn or lazy apologist for idleness who wants to camp out at the Humean caravan park, claiming we have no reasonable basis for reason; that is, there is no purpose or meaning to life other than what we give it, so let us eat, drink, and join Hume himself in playing backgammon until we die! [63]  This would be a global claim.

Whether this global claim of epistemological impotence can be maintained without collapsing into incoherence we will probe shortly for it would seem prima facie to be an abandonment of our epistemic duties and as a Sartre or a Camus would put it, make the starting point for our existence in the world an absurd one.[64]  Such a position is one we cannot afford to entertain, we already have the records of the dissipation and destruction suffered by such Romantic thinkers as Rousseau, Shelley and Byron who downgraded reason in favor of feeling.[65]  Even if we cannot precisely formulate just what is wrong with global skepticism of that sort, it is the moral disappropriation that follows in its wake that should immediately make us incredulous and become our strongest lever against skepticism.

So, in lieu of our introductory remarks above, there is arguably a difference between a local skepticism as a method (as say employed by Descartes) and by someone considering skepticism as a metaphysical feature telling us something about the way reality is constituted or of our conceptual relations to reality (as in Hume).  Thus Strawson, who spent large sections of his career challenging the legitimacy of skepticism in the latter sense nevertheless accepted the legitimacy of the former:

“The sceptic is, strictly, not one who denies the validity of certain types of belief, but one who questions, if only initially and for methodological reasons, the adequacy of our grounds for holding them. He puts forward his doubts by way of a challenge—sometimes a challenge to himself—to show that the doubts are unjustified, that the beliefs put in question are justified. He may conclude, like Descartes, that the challenge can successfully be met; or, like Hume, that it cannot…Traditional targets of philosophic doubt include the existence of the external world, i.e., of physical objects or bodies; our knowledge of other minds; the justification of induction; the reality of the past.” [66]

That is, by a local skepticism we are challenging, perhaps by some kind of hypothesis, counterfactual or thought experiment, to what degree (if any) a particular ‘fact’ of the world, recollection or memory can be held to be ‘true,’ incorrigible, or infallible.  In contrast, the global sceptic, because he tolerates no metaphysic has no logical boundaries to his skepticism, will live his life in an intellectually schizophrenic manner; because he nevertheless must act as if there were certain elements and laws of nature that constrain him.[67]

So, whereas local skepticism can be a practical gateway into knowledge, global skepticism, the metaphysical form of skepticism, is the assertion that claims to knowledge are beyond the reach of the human mind.  All that remains are contingent features of the world and the coherence of the world as a whole is beyond the powers of human cognition.  However, there are also variations of severity and tenor of the global sceptics.  With Hume’s criticism as asymptotic to their theories of knowledge, such a claim was normative for the logical positivist movement of the 20^th century we met earlier in this work, with both Schlick and Neurath offering versions of it.  However, Schlick and Neurath had no motivation to be morally cynical or intellectually lazy, there’s was a mitigated global skepticism with Ayer labelling it a “thoroughgoing phenomenalism”; [68] the positivist movement was wanting to be the scientific view of the world.  This was a long way from the deliberate nihilism of a Huxley or a Sartre. Their unmitigated global skepticism was a much stronger claim, it would suggest an undermining of the entire scientific and philosophical project.

How can such a claim even be formulated in an intellectually respectable manner?  Well, some have argued based on the unreliability of our senses in particular instances that we can thus never trust our senses.  However, this seems to be committing the basic logical fallacy of hasty generalization, so it is of some interest that Christian logician Gordon H Clarke argued precisely this [69] when presenting a major revision of his Neo-Platonist epistemology for which he had gained a considerable reputation.[70]  Clarke’s revised theory asserted that Man’s only knowledge was knowledge contained in the Bible or knowledge deduced from what is contained in the Bible, arguing in the final major works of his career for fideism as the only option for the Christian philosopher.  Fideism,[71] or “dogmatism” [72] as he preferred to label it, was where we accept that the central or basic claims we make as part of our epistemology are unprovable and accepted as axioms, unprovable presuppositions:

“The only personal solution to this logical impasse is a change of heart on the part of one of the contestants.  Agreement can be obtained only by one party’s repudiating his premises and accepting the other’s presuppositions…the change is something logic [argumentation] cannot do.  God alone is able.” [73]

His reasoning was that secular philosophy could not give an account or justify any single item of human knowledge therefore there was no knowledge available to Man via his senses or deduction except what is revealed in the Bible or deduced from what is in the Bible:

“The term dogmatism therefore designates that method of procedure which tries to systematize beliefs concerning God, science, immorality, etc. on the basis of information divinely revealed in the sacred writings… If now one appreciates the present status of the argument, the dogmatic answer to the question can easily be given. The present status of the argument is the choice between dogmatism and nihilism.” [74]

As just noted, Clarke had adopted this position from his previous logicism which had gained a substantial following amongst a distinct group of conservative presbyterian apologists [75] after he became grounded as a Neo-Platonist would with some of the imponderables and paradoxes that Plato was all too aware of.  Nash’s essay included in the 1968 Festschrift for Clarke was primarily concerned with Clarke’s original epistemology which had gained him so much scholarly respect and in explicating Clarke’s difficulties in wrestling with these Platonic conundrums, but he added an appendix dealing with Clarke’s revised view, declaring it in short shrift incoherent.[76]

This response was echoed in an identical manner by Bahnsen [77] because it assumes empirical methods offered no possibility of knowledge and yet we would need to read the Bible (an empirical process) to obtain the biblical knowledge.  Although Clarke did not deal with this objection immediately, deflecting his opponents with a challenge to contradict his deconstruction of empiricism (which was forceful), his later attempts appealed to forms of intuitionism and to the immanent presence of the knowledge contained in the scriptures in the human heart.  However, as Butler then noted, it “then makes the scriptures themselves redundant” [78] for their revelation is prescient in the human subject.

More seriously, from the point of view of Christian worldview philosophy, the most dangerous consequence of this position was that there are no normative ethical boundaries for our conduct.  Whereas Clark or his followers [79] would never countenance such a move as Reformed Christians, they could not offer an argument against it because his final move was undeniably a fideist one.  Specifically, all proof is conceived of as being within a system of proof and it is the sovereignty of God, not an apologetic argument that Clark offers as his ultimate rationale.  As Bahnsen noted, apologetics as a philosophical defense, is destroyed by this expression of global skepticism.[80]

It is not difficult to see the perversity of such a view and the nefarious applications for the unbeliever that is available through such a view.  The desire for the facsimile of justification for irrationality in our worldview has been a recurring feature in Romantic and post-Kantian philosophy.  Huxley expressed this vividly and simply in his retrospect and frames it specifically as originating from the desire to reject a Christian view of the world:

“For myself, as, no doubt, for most of my contemporaries, the philosophy of meaningless was essentially an instrument of liberation…We objected to morality because it interfered with our sexual freedom; we objected to the political and economic system because it was unjust.  The supporters of these systems claimed in some way they embodied the meaning (a Christian meaning they insisted) of the world.  There was one admirably simple method of confuting these people and at the same time justifying ourselves in our political and erotic revolt:  we could deny that the world had any meaning whatsoever…” [81] (Emphasis added).

However, rather paradoxically for Huxley, he found the rejection of the Judeo-Christian principles was catastrophic.  He found that one of the strongest practical objections to his global skepticism was that it opened the door to the very political tyranny which he had wanted to avoid:

“By the end of the twenties a reaction had begun to set in – away from the easy-going philosophy of general meaninglessness towards the hard, ferocious theologies of nationalistic and revolutionary idolatry…The universe as a whole remained still meaningless, but certain of its parts, such as the nation, the state, the class, the party, were endowed with significance and the highest value…[and]…can have only evil and disastrous results…” [82] (Emphasis added)

The political dimension we will begin to consider in more detail in the subsequent section when we deal directly with ethics, but we should at least get a sense of the interconnectedness of one’s ethical theory with one’s metaphysic and theory of knowledge.

We can also make a further observation that narrows the legitimacy of skepticism still further.  A skepticism regarding our senses is incoherent for another basic, methodological reason.  It is in the additional observations of our senses, perhaps informed by additional understanding from theoretical analysis, that often corrects our previous observations or leads us to additional theoretical reflections.  That is, a radically new theory formulated through ‘edge-case’ analysis previously dismissed as “experimental error” is not at all uncommon in the history of science, physics especially.^[83]

Further and perhaps conclusively, if we assume the global sceptic wants to convince us all to become global sceptics, they will need to believe they “know” global skepticism to be the case.  In other words, they are requiring that they can be certain that there is no certainty.  No matter how this is presented in the philosophical or scientific literature, “sometimes under the guise of newly introduced technical vocabulary,” [84] there is a basic incongruity in this position that is at its most obvious with primitive skepticism, and furthermore, if we push it harder to demand an account of the skepticism, we should now see is implicit in any form of skepticism.  Too often the sceptic is assuming directly or indirectly, consciously, or subconsciously, that which they are seeking to refute, Plantinga attacks Hume on that basis:

“And this leads to the scandal of skepticism:  if I argue to skepticism, then of course I rely on the very cognitive faculties whose unreliability is the conclusion of my skeptical argument.” [85]

Looking forward to our future discussion, we will see that in Van Tillian terms, this is recognized as a failure of skepticism under transcendental critique.  Transcendentalism is important to argument in a much more basic sense of making argumentation itself possible and coherent, so a transcendental argument is categorically different to a deductive or an inductive style argument.  Thus, we will need to consider transcendentalism in much greater detail but for our purposes now, the transcendental is that part of our knowledge structure that makes rationality reasonable and completely disarms the skeptical challenge.[86]

So, in summary, we should, on an ethical basis, immediately label the primitive global skeptical view as both incoherent and destructive.  We can also note at this point a very important feature of the skeptical challenge, that as soon as we talk methodology, and try to apply the global skeptical premise, we find we cannot without instantiating specific cases and we find that we are now talking about ‘local’ skepticism.  In Wittgensteinian terms, the solution to the problem is the disappearing of the problem once we have clarified exactly what we mean.  That is, as soon as we attempt to state a more moderate form of global skepticism that asserts that there is no certainty available to us, or that all our scientific conclusions are subject to ‘revision,’ we have moved to a consideration of local skepticism.  Global skepticism then appears as a principle with absurd consequences and thoroughly impractical because we can never articulate any of its consequences or implications without self-contradiction.

We can reinforce this conclusion reminding ourselves of our previous section dealing with skepticism, where we can now recognize local skepticism as characteristic of the genus fallibilist.  In that section we have already seen that the various fallibilist schools failed to be internally coherent when they were looking for a plausible account of the possibility, or an account of, the knowledge that we are aware or know we possess regarding the world.  Thus, even a local skepticism on anything but a methodological level as a hypothetical tool cannot be acceptable to us.  That is, local skepticism is not warranted in a moral sense as a gateway into a general skepticism even if in some abstract, absolute logical sense its referent cannot be refuted because of the possibility of error.  In a reciprocal fashion, we may not be able to claim absolute certainty for certain kinds of measurements, inductions, or observations regarding the physical world but that does not morally warrant us to give up experimentation and having a psychological confidence and an ethical commitment to improvement.

So, our knowledge, even if it is changed, adapted, or replaced with new formulations, is still certainly available to us through a combination of a transcendental principle, empirical and deductive processes.  They are sometimes supplemented by abductive or probabilistic analyses, and we do not have to choose between them.  They often answer different questions, they are often complementary and are parts of our epistemic toolbox.  Thus, we should have seen in our analyses here and in our previous section regarding the various secular responses to the challenge of skepticism, that epistemological error results when one principle is chosen to the exclusion of all others.

To reiterate, we find that global skepticism seems to be a concept that lacks content and application, it is an abstraction masquerading as a category.  As soon as we try to apply it, it concretizes into local skeptical arguments which if conceived in anything but as a hypothetical tool (rather than as a statement for which there is no way the question could be answered), it would render the achievements and procedures of human science and research illegitimate.  In contrast, for us, the pursuit of truth and warranted verisimilitude remain legitimate goals of research.  Thus, as a further step in our argument, this is surely a discussion of what is valuable to us and not just a matter for logic.

That is, we can see that a rebuff of skepticism is pushing us in the direction of ethical considerations and in the direction of a coherent, integrated, worldview philosophy.  If we attempt to deal with skepticism in a naturalistic or purely propositional fashion, we arrive at a philosophical impasse unable to dislodge the sceptic.  Yet the moral imperative is to dislodge the sceptic just as it is the moral imperative to have the courage to condemn the prison camp guard at Auschwitz.[87]  That is, if we remain personally and collectively committed to progress, that is we believe it is something we should do, our incomplete or tentative moves towards ‘absolute’ certainty do not prevent us from acting as if we were “certain” at important milestones along the way and acting in a way that demonstrates our moral commitments.[88]  It only warrants a skeptical despair and an amoral impasse to the morally cowardly or the apathetic in the face of the great potential of our progress as a race.  We can at once be confident of the truth we know now whilst we understand that we might know the same truth in a more complete or robust fashion in the future, but we can remain confident that we have still encountered and know the truth at the present time.  Blackburn expresses this thought well:

“Perhaps we never found logos or a ‘first philosophy’, an underlying foundational story telling us, from somewhere outside our own world view, just why that world view is the right one. But perhaps we have learned to do without that, just as we learn to retain our hard-won confidences, without closing our minds to any further illuminations that the future may bring. Above all, I hope we have become confident in using our well-tried and tested vocabulary of explanation and assessment. We can take the postmodernist inverted commas off things that ought to matter to us: truth, reason, objectivity and confidence. They are no less, if no more, than the virtues that we should all cherish as we try to understand the bewildering world about us.” [89] (Emphasis added)

Notice how Blackburn uses metaphysical and epistemological terminology and correlates that with ethics.  This is a good example of “worldview” thinking.  For Blackburn, his assertions are ethical and fall within that worldview to justify them, even in the face of epistemological skepticism.   Skepticism becomes far more of a psychological choice and an example of epistemic irresponsibility, than it is a philosophical necessity.  For example, Hume, on his own admission, answered his own thoroughgoing skepticism by playing backgammon with his friends and living day to day ignoring his skepticism.  Hume’s failure in the final analysis was an ethical one, not a logical one and was caused by his metaphysical prejudice. We do not permit ourselves that indulgence within epistemological self-consciousness.

Yet we do acknowledge there is a further step in discrediting skepticism on a logical level.  This we defer to when we discuss the transcendental mode of argumentation for answering the skeptical challenge, for this enables us to establish the rational basis for reason and then to argue that we are able to have objective certainty about the existence of the Christian God and that it is provable, rather than merely an evidential or probabilistic claim about the existence of “a God” (though we might now understand we would be within our epistemic rights to claim we are not irrational in believing).  For the time being, we can now assert that psychologically, skepticism holds no compelling appeal for us to be epistemologically cautious.  However, skepticism has historically been borne out of naturalism pushed to its logical limits, so we now move to consider why naturalism is more generally incoherent to further invalidate the skepticism built on it.

3.3.5 Two Dogmas of Evolutionary Thought

In titling this section as I have, I am playing on the title of Quine’s famous refutation of logical positivism, Two Dogmas of Empiricism.  Quine, as we have already noted, was one of the most innovative and influential post-positivist philosophers of the second half of the 20^th century, famous for both his radical behaviorism and proposing a naturalized metaphysics and a naturalized epistemology as a replacement and mitigation of the dogmatic criticisms he had levelled in that famous paper. Thus, let us examine the reasons why we should also immediately reject any form of his “naturalized epistemology” even when first argued by such eminent naturalists as himself.

Firstly, it must be said that the naturalist model uses evolutionism (and particularly natural selection) as a quasi-religious device, rather like an atheological hermeneutic that allows the flow of science through time to be given structure and reasonable meaning – no statement regarding counter-intuitive complexity or conceptual confusion is not capable of clarification by appealing to natural selection.  Further, I would argue that historically, evolutionary thought was and remains today, primarily a metaphysical dogma in its entirety.  Most significantly, it predates Darwin, even in its modern scientific incarnation, with Darwin himself in extant correspondence admitting he was riding a wave of popular sentiment regarding the inevitability of human progress and improvement which had become a strong theme in the paleopositivist philosophy of Comte, and similar socialist and humanistic thinkers inspired by the French Revolution.[90]

Conceptually, it has roots in the very origins of the pre-Socratic tradition (though it must be recognized to what degree is a disputed claim [91]) but both evolutionists and creationists have agreed on that assertion for very different reasons.  What changed with Darwin was that it got a scientific makeover and a proposed mechanism (‘natural selection’) was offered; but, on detailed inspection of Darwin’s text, on the most tentative basis and with minimal evidential support.[92]  Even during Darwin’s lifetime, it was considered scientifically implausible and with the work of his contemporary Mendel on genetics undermining a central claim of his theory,[93] it was only with the deliberate scholarly suppression of Mendel’s work and the aggressive scientistic zeal of Thomas Henry Huxley,[94] “Darwin’s bulldog,” that Darwinism was maintained as a credible thesis.

The scientific plausibility problem did not go away.  Historically, as paleontological evidence mounted during the 20^th century and the embarrassment of the major gaps in the fossil record became the major issue for the most serious evolutionists, there was an urgent internal search (though not a trace of it was or seen in mainstream school textbooks and graduate introductions) for an alternative model of evolutionary thought.  Following almost 70 years of theory and counter theory, it arrived in 1972 with Stephen J Gould proposing a major revision known as punctuated evolution.  The sophistication of presentation and subtle sophistry of the revised theory was quite magnificent, Gould himself describing it as the paradox of the “insulation from disproof ” without realizing that was because he was still reasoning in a tautological manner on a key philosophical and explanatory point, explaining the gaps in the fossil record as a result of periods of rapid change followed by ‘quiet’ periods in evolutionary history, that therefore we would expect to see no evidence of intermediate forms.[95]

However, there is no “therefore” in this account; he is simply affirming the consequent.  Clearly, this was not a hypothesis which was then tested against the evidence confirming the predictions of a theory but rather a pseudo-hypothesis that was fit to the evidence to give the desired end-result.  However, it was a major repudiation of Darwinism based on the lack of paleontological evidence, this was a direct contradiction of gradualism and the mechanism of natural selection as well as a deconstruction of many of the competitor views to his own.  Philosophically, it was in essence a more sophisticated borrowing of the concept of rapid revolutionary change from Marxism [96] by a scientifically capable and credible researcher [97] (it had previously been attempted dogmatically by Marxists aware of the evidence problem), but it utterly cemented the tautological structure of evolutionary thought.  Even more astonishingly, we would not know of the scientific poverty of the theory [98] reading our standard textbooks, but as Gould openly states, “it is a metaphysical commitment on our part.” [99]  Thus, tellingly, when Neo-Darwinists speak of ‘Natural Selection’ today they mean something very different from natural selection as the principial mechanism of evolution.  Apparently, we have a choice of two dogmas, gradualist evolution or punctuated evolution, both claiming to be Darwinian but mutually exclusive.[100]  Similarly, Plantinga demonstrates this dogmatism in his critique of Dawkins’ arguments:

“For the nontheist, undirected evolution is the only game in town, and natural selection seems to be the most plausible mechanism to drive the process.  Here is this stunningly intricate world with its enormous diversity and apparent design; from the perspective of naturalism or non-theism, the only way it could have happened is by way of unguided Darwinian evolution; hence, it must have happened that way; hence there must be a Darwinian series for each current life form.”  [101]  (Emphasis original)

That is, Plantinga argues here that the presuppositions of naturalism simply provide a dogma with which to deal with the question of origins and the diversity of nature and concludes it will not allow us to “follow the argument where it leads.” [102]  In contrast, the theist might want to countenance some form of guided evolution as the means to creating a Darwinian series which is then interpreted as a creative act of God; for other reasons they might be unwise to do so (it would require a creative hermeneutic to reconstruct historical biblical claims, which have all proved philosophically embarrassing [103]), but they could.

Secondly, the unnerving fallacy that Plantinga exposes in naturalist thinking is that even if we grant the naturalist that natural selection was somehow epistemically justifiable and biologically possible in some non-astronomical scale,[104] that does not mean it was necessarily the case as argued in for example, New Atheism.  It just does not follow that we can argue as Dawkins did in the Delusion that because God as a supremely complex being is thought of being “improbable” that evolution by natural selection is more probable (presumably because it demands less complication) and thus must be the case.[105]  Rather, a metaphysical presupposition will be implicit in answering that question; as Dawkins indicated himself, he was inverting the probability argument frequently made by believers for his own purposes, but we can observe that neither inflection of the argument has superior logical force, and the logical force of the argument in either form is particularly poor on critical examination.  On a trivial level, Dawkins’ conundrum is rather like having eight options before us, all with a low probability but being required to choose one.  At the very least, our epistemic rights permit us to withhold commitment until we are convinced by substantiating evidence or a compelling logical argument.

That is, there is a basic problem, even if we accept that there are Darwinian sequences or even if we admit natural selection, that in itself does not establish a design-free universe and require us to accept the naturalist presupposition.  However, the most glaring philosophical fallacy is to treat the hypothesis of God as if it was the same as any other scientific hypothesis.  Dawkins explicitly stated this fallacy as his opening assumption and has oft repeated it.[106]  Yet, in discussing ultimate authorities, there is no way we can stand outside of that authority otherwise we would be asserting that the human mind has the superior authority, and it would be the ultimate authority, usurping God.  Dawkins has fundamentally begged the question in even framing the argument as he does, and it is an error oft repeated in unbelieving polemics across the arts and the sciences.  The fundamental assumption of unbelieving thought is the ancient Greek prejudice we began our study with, the unaided intellect can judge the ultimate issues of reality; as Lewis stated, it is “God [that] is in the dock…God may be acquitted but the important principle is that [men are doing the judging].” [107]

So, in summary, a sneering Dawkins or a mocking Dennett claims much more for the evolutionary argument than it can deliver, even if we grant them a hearing for the sake of the wider case being argued, for as Plantinga rightly states, “Argumentum ad Derisionem is hardly an approved argument form.” [108]  What we are beginning to suspect is that naturalism is taking on the characteristics of a dogma, or as we noted previously, Gould’s “metaphysical commitment” that is pre-theoretical.  I believe in the following three subsections we can establish that beyond reasonable doubt.

3.3.6 Physicalism

The most extreme form of naturalistic epistemology is known as physicalism.   Physicalism is the position that all processes, even mental ones, eventually reduce to physical processes—that is, all is physics!  Though popular with a particular clique of physicists (implausible though that might seem!) and a sect of naturalist philosophers, it understandably draws substantial criticism from non-physicists unhappy that their branch of science is viewed as a downgraded science, and the more holistic philosophers unhappy at the rarefaction of the human experience.[109]

Similarly, epistemologically, it then follows that all knowledge forming processes can be reduced to neuroscience or evolutionary psychology and problems of epistemology become problems for another branch of science; this was the strategy of the “naturalization” project of Quine.  However, when the neuroscientist or the psychologist is asked to give an account of the knowledge forming process, all that can be offered is “evolutionary advantage” which, as we noted above, is a “miserable tautology.” [110]

3.3.7 Those That Survive Think Inductively

The more respectable and sophisticated naturalism found in a Quine or in a Goodman suffers from a similar weakness to the crude form found in Dawkins.  Quine especially, for all his exposure of the dogmatism of positivism seems to be arguing for a softer, but equally pervasive set of naturalist presuppositions justified or explained by some tautological recourse to evolutionary theory. Quine’s conception of induction is a perfect example, let us paraphrase:  we think inductively, and we have survived; thus, those that have survived, have survived because evolutionary advantage resulted when they thought inductively.  This is a repeatable formula for any natural characteristic or phenomenological event—it persisted or was beneficial because it offered evolutionary advantage and evolutionary advantage resulted from its presence, so what is present is present, a miserable tautology indeed.  Quine readily admitted such reasoning was begging the question:

“[T]he answer [to the riddle of induction] is best sought in terms of natural selection.  An innate sensitivity to certain traits, and insensitivity to others, will have survival value insofar as the traits [of prediction that the future will be like the past] that are favored are favorable to prediction [but] [n]either the projectible traits nor the traits favored by natural selection are easily characterized, and the relationship between them is more tenuous still.  Further, when we appeal to biology and theories of neural organization we appeal to science that is itself grounded, in large measure, inductively.”  [111] (Emphasis added)

Thus, there is surely nothing subtle about the circularity, it viciously begs the question in the most tautological fashion.  That is, if we can never explain why or what the specific evolutionary advantage was, such reasoning is always viciously circular.  It was simply a presupposition or limiting notion necessary to support the naturalist programme.

3.3.8 If All We Have Is Nature…

Interestingly, one of the most searching critiques of naturalism was provided by C S Lewis in his Miracles, the second edition of which benefitted from the robust critique of Elizabeth Anscombe of the first.  Lewis has not received the recognition he deserves for his philosophical thought with a major factor being the mistruths spread because of the debate with Anscombe.^[112]  In brief, he asserted that if nature is all we have, there is absolutely no reason to accept what nature says on an epistemological level unless we have a supernaturalistic metaphysics.  This position was defended in the most robust manner by Plantinga in which he acknowledges the debt to Lewis’ formulation of the argument against naturalism.[113]

In making his case, Plantinga notes Darwin himself was uneasy about the emerging naturalism of his viewpoint and the consequences it held for the status of reason, asking: if all was nature, why would we trust the reason that arises from that same nature?  That is, just how far do we need to be up the evolutionary tree for our reason to be reliable?  On this basis, Plantinga noted that Quine, Ayer, and Dawkins all “found hope” in Darwin as providing a hermeneutic in evolutionary thought but notes the hope is far less robust than they want to admit for the very reason that Darwin and Lewis perceived—there can be no natural justification of nature because justification is always conceptual in character and thus beyond nature by definition.  It reflects on nature; it is apart from nature, and it is an abstraction of thought.[114]  So, in this short but I hope fair and salient account of as Lewis would say “the cardinal problems of naturalism,” [115] we find naturalism as self-vitiating and evolutionary thought as a dogma.  We can now proceed to seek firmer epistemological foundations elsewhere.

3.3.9 Justified True Belief (JTB), Gettier and Epistemic Warrant

Robert Audi in his authoritative introduction to epistemology, offered us this definition of epistemology which will help us frame one of the most influential and persistent working definitions of knowledge, the JTB thesis:

 “Epistemology, or the theory of knowledge, is concerned with how we know what we do, what justifies us in believing what we do, and what standards of evidence we should use in seeking truths about the world and human experience.” [116] (Emphasis added).

This connection of truth, evidence and justification can be traced all the way back to Plato and is thus known as the “classical” definition of knowledge.   Despite not being without serious problematics or controversy, some of which were articulated by Plato himself and the most important of which we will consider immediately below, it has, nevertheless, for many philosophers remained a substantive basis on which to found much epistemological discussion. [117]

For example, in Descartes and then Locke, this definition was associated with a reliance on some form of justification through evidentialism, where for a belief to be responsibly held, i.e., to fulfil one’s epistemic obligations or duty, you should have good reasons for the beliefs you hold.  Likewise, this was the view forcefully argued by 19^th century polymath William Kingdon Clifford [118] who asserted it was a moral duty incumbent upon all to have good reasons for what is believed. It is of note that he then dismissed “faith” on the grounds it lacked such justification which chimed well with the Darwinist thesis that had been advanced a few years before he wrote.

However, the most significant challenge to the JTB thesis (though it had its historical precursors) were the “Gettier problems.”  Gettier’s tiny three-page article,[119] spawned an encyclopedic response which remains a live issue for epistemologists who in one way or another still consider epistemology as a legitimate category. [120]  He had demonstrated in an elegant fashion using some simple parables that belief, truth, and ‘simple’ or first-person evidential justification (‘I saw that, heard this’ etc.), otherwise known as “internalist accounts” which emphasize the first-person involvement in the “knowing” process, were not sufficient (and, on the contra-externalist accounts, not even necessary) grounds for knowledge.[121]  For example, someone may have personal justification for a belief that was contingently correct, e.g., they observed a stopped clock (formed a justified belief regarding the time) that just happened to be correct at the instant of observation (i.e., true).  Yet with our God’s eye view and the additional information available to us, the fulfilment of JTB conditions would not mean that they had come to knowledge of the time.[122]  Those elements of belief, justification and truth were necessary, but not sufficient and two thousand years of Western thought regarding knowledge crashes unceremoniously to the ground.  As Plantinga noted, “the havoc he…wrought in contemporary epistemology has been entirely salutary.”  [123]

There was clearly a need for a “fourth element” and many accounts have attempted to append an additional criterion.  For our purposes, we need but note that even in the face of a “blizzard of rival theories” that emerged to try and improve on its shortcomings, those theories proved too complex or problematic to replace what they were trying to improve upon.[124]  Yet, Plantinga has probably, more than any other epistemologist, given as full an analysis as possible as to the problem of knowledge and an ‘answer,’ or more accurately an alternative conception of knowing as an answer to the Gettier problems and it is to this we now turn as an important building block towards epistemological self-consciousness.[125]

3.3.10 Plantinga and Warranted Belief

Plantinga develops a broadly Reidian [126] framework in his own theory.  Plantinga considered Reid “substantially correct” in his account and his basic approach to reality, which was a commitment to realism and reliabilism.  The former refers to the belief in an objective external world and the latter to the belief that properly functioning cognitive faculties give you access to that world.  However, Reid’s philosophy used a particular conception of “common sense realism,” and we should all realize that “common sense” is a problematic concept, as it is usually indexed to a form of life within a culture, or even a subculture.[127]  Thus, Plantinga strengthened the account of Reid in two volumes ^[128] before developing his account of warranted Christian belief in a third.[129]

Plantinga’s arguments reject internalist accounts of knowledge as inadequate, but it is important to understand that he substantively modified and enhanced the rival externalist school such that belief in God could be considered both basic and epistemically responsible.  Externalism holds that knowledge is essentially a “relationship between a person and a fact,”  [130] noting that a person can be quite unaware of the origin of their knowledge (thus failing the primary internalist criteria), e.g., they know that Everest is the highest mountain but have no recollection of why they know that.  That is, they may have had evidence at some point to come to that belief or they may have accepted it based on testimony or some other authority.  Despite their failure to meet internalist criteria, most of us would be happy to concede that they really did know something about Everest.

However, externalism suffers from what is known as ‘The Generality Problem.’  The externalist must grant that there is some discriminating faculty within the individual that makes it possible to establish that relationship and to discriminate between the true and just what appears to be true because of contingency.  The theory is only robust if there is a specific faculty that can assess the reliability of the mechanism in those cases, but most assessments will be made on the criteria of vision, hearing, or some other relatively general faculty.  Thus, as Nagel notes, because first party justification is deemed to play no role:

“If we carve up belief-forming processes so narrowly, then any true belief will count as knowledge.  How do we hit the target of describing the mechanism and its context at just the right level of detail?”  [131]

Hence, a pure externalist account will be problematic and so Plantinga does not deny that internalist conceptions such as justification will play no role, but he strengthens, or better subsumes, the internalist conception of justification to warrant (which has additional externalist and reliabilist underpinnings).  “Warrant” becomes what must be added to truth and belief to ascend to a claim of knowledge.  He conducts the details of this argument at great length in his Warrant trilogy  [132] and presented a helpful, abbreviated form in a simplified, retrospective summary volume.[133]  We will trace the salient features of this model below.

Firstly, Plantinga makes the important distinction between warrant and justification, with warrant being the stronger term.  Justification, for Plantinga, is the locus for what Gettier problems revolve around and concretely for Plantinga, someone is justified when they have “not flouted one’s epistemic duties” by properly considering the available evidence in the formation of their beliefs and the subsequent progress of their “downstream experience” which permits them continued justification.[134]  However, as the Gettier scenarios demonstrate, the possibility remains of a dissonant component that misdirects commitment to a generally false but contingently true, justified belief.  Warrant for Plantinga is the defeating of this dissonant component from the cognitive environment with a stronger definition:

“[T]he claim is that such belief…originate[s] in cognitive faculties that are functioning properly in a suitable environment according to a design plan successfully aimed at producing true beliefs.” [135]

This, as we have noted, owes much to Reidian reliabilism, but Plantinga strengthens Reid by reducing the reliance on the fluid concept of common sense and adding the concepts of a design plan ideally suited for the epistemic environment successfully aimed at truth.  What he means by this is that correctly functioning cognitive faculties could be following a design plan, but that design plan could be aimed at say, survival, rather than the truth.  In this case, the claim to knowledge would fail, which would seem to be intuitively reasonable—we know that when survival becomes a priority, an organism might quickly behave instinctively or selfishly rather than in a dispassionately rational manner.

Plantinga also overhauled the ‘proper function’ requirement, expounding the ‘proper’ to assert that a naturalist account of warrant can only be supported by a supernaturalistic metaphysics, thus importing a theistic premise as functionally necessary for a rational system:

“The fundamental idea is that God provides us human beings with faculties or belief producing processes that yield these beliefs and are successfully aimed at the truth; when they work the way they were designed to in the sort of environment for which they were designed, the result is knowledge or warranted belief.” [136]

Thus, turning specifically to Christian beliefs, he asserts that as a form of theism, we can be warranted, that is, rational in our faith.  That was a substantial achievement and was enough for his work to be noted as “one of the major accomplishments of twentieth century epistemology” by one of his epistemological peers.[137]

Now some such as Butler have critiqued Plantinga that his initial account of warrant (Plantinga 1993a, b) was “naturalistic,” [138] this is accurate in the sense Plantinga conceived of warrant in term of cognitive functions (part of our natural makeup), common to all of us and readily admitted he was offering a naturalistic epistemology but cojoined with a supernaturalistic metaphysics.[139]  I would assert that his emphasis here though was in the conjoining, the epistemology does not stand alone but should be considered with the metaphysics, which is precisely the direction we want to travel in epistemological self-consciousness.  Additionally, God is conceived of as providing us with these faculties and central to Plantinga’s argument is Calvin’s sensus divinitus, conceived of as a cognitive function that works to present a belief in God that is properly basic, i.e., not arrived at via inference from evidence; much like perception, memory and a priori knowledge.[140]  Plantinga then relies heavily on Calvin’s theological account of it, as seen from the exegesis of the key biblical passages.[141]  More generally, he describes one of the focusses of his project as developing “Calvinist Epistemology” [142] and I believe we can see in his most mature work, Plantinga is offering an apologetic that is not neutral and not wholly negative.  It is also not clear that Butler’s criticism would be sustained if we import Bas van Frassen’s critical definition of naturalism,[143] which reduces to “there is no such person as God” [144] which would appear a long way from Plantinga.  Strawson is also careful to indicate the “elastic” usage of the term and its interpretation.[145]  So, the accusation of being a “naturalistic” account is not on its own conclusive with regard to the claim that Plantinga was offering an insufficiently Reformed epistemology.

Butler’s further and stronger claim is that this is not a “biblical” epistemology, or more specifically, an epistemology drawn from scripture.  He wants to contrast Plantinga with the apologetic method of Bahnsen.  Bahnsen explicates and exegetes at great length the scriptural basis for his method [146] with his distinctive analytic style.  However, rather paradoxically, Butler’s criticism of Plantinga on a Van Tillian basis might have been levelled at Van Til.  Bahnsen had wanted to correct the ‘deficiency’ admitted by Van Til that he regretted never demonstrating in detail the scriptural basis for his apologetic.[147]  I would argue something similar is going on with Plantinga; Plantinga is assuming a Christian basis (and I would say “strongly assuming” if we believe his own intellectual and personal autobiography [148] ) but we do not find a Bahnsenite threading of scriptures together in his work.  We rather, like Van Til, find profound works of philosophical theology.  There are papers where he pulls in quotes from Paul, the exegesis of Calvin or something from Anselm, Aquinas, or Augustine, or makes the case against a natural theology from Rom. 1:18.  So, it seems Plantinga can claim rather better theological credentials than those that Butler is willing to grant him at this point.

However, Butler makes another, and I believe the strongest, most serious criticism of Plantinga.  It is that his apologetic is merely theistic rather than Christian, strong in its negative function but weak in putting forward a positive apologetic.  That is, we might view his project as merely establishing the rationality of Christianity as a basic belief but conceding that the non-believer could be just as rational.[149]  We should be happy to concede that this seems to be the position that Plantinga would be seen as arguing for through his early work into the middle period of the RE movement.[150]  The reason we would want to challenge this as his final position is because Plantinga himself seems to have had recognized this criticism and moves in his warrant trilogy from establishing some general notion of warrant, to its application for theistic belief and then specifically for its application to Christian belief.  Most significantly, he also deals directly with the challenge of religious pluralism with the clear presupposition that Christianity should be considered true and warranted:

“From a Christian perspective, this situation of religious pluralism is itself a manifestation of our miserable human condition…A fresh or heightened awareness of the facts of religious pluralism…could serve as an occasion for a renewed and more powerful working of the belief-producing processes by which we come to apprehend [the truth of Christianity and our obligation to God].  In this way knowledge of the facts of pluralism could initially serve as a defeater; in the long run, however, it can have precisely the opposite effect.” [151]

Thus, he explicitly deals with what he calls “defeaters” to Christian belief, conceived of as an argument that undermines the basicity of a belief by demonstrating its falsity:

“If the believer concedes that she doesn’t have any special source of knowledge or true belief with respect to Christian belief—no sensus divinitus, no internal instigation of the Holy Spirit, no teaching by a church inspired and protected from error by the Holy Spirit, nothing not available to those who disagree with her—then, perhaps…she will have a defeater for her Christian belief.  But why would she concede these things?  She…should ordinarily think…that there are indeed sources of warranted belief that issue in these beliefs….She believes, for example, that in Christ, God was reconciling the world to himself;  she may believe this on the basis of what the Bible or the church teaches…it is the work of the Holy Spirit to convince our hearts that what our ears receive has come from him.” [152] (Emphasis original)

So, it seems problematic to characterize Plantinga’s theological terminus as purely theistic, he certainly has Christian theism in mind.  Notwithstanding, Butler makes the further criticism that Plantinga’s conception of warrant moves from the general to the specific with the final move for Plantinga to Christian belief.  That is, it is a naturalistic account from the bottom-up.  Plantinga can certainly be interpreted that way and concedes as much with an important qualification, he always requires a metaphysical foundation of theism but finishes with a clear explication of Christian belief:

“When I speak here of Christian belief, I mean what is common to the great creeds of the main branches of the Christian church…the theistic component of Christian belief [but] also the uniquely Christian component.” [153]

Butler asserts that a Van Tillian or truly Reformed apologetic would go to the scriptures, establish warrant from the scriptures and then build their epistemology from the top down in a presuppositional manner.  Butler explicates this in his presentation immediately after discussing Plantinga, noting his approach as a “truly Reformed epistemology…we derive our epistemology from the Bible for it to be a biblical epistemology.” [154]  Butler also makes the important point, examined and argued at length in Jeffreys,[155] that Plantinga has modified and extended Calvin’s conception of the sensus divinitus and allows it to play a far larger role in his thought than Calvin permitted in his.  The implication is thus that Plantinga cannot be considered sufficiently “Reformed” in this regard.  Yet, even if we grant this contention, this does not in itself delegitimize Plantinga’s extension of the concept any more than it does Van Til’s extension and refinement of Calvin’s thought.[156]  Where Butler is more difficult to answer is in arguing that Plantinga is using a different concept of the sensus divinitus altogether, suggesting it is knowledge gaining, in opposition to Calvin asserting all men already have knowledge of God.  I believe the answer at this point is that both Butler and Plantinga have defensible positions at this point—we have an issue with begging the question at this point as to what precisely Calvin meant by knowledge.  His discussion seems to involve both an a priori and an a posteriori conception of knowledge, combined also with ‘instinct’ and conscience:

“That there exists in the human minds and indeed by natural instinct, some sense of Deity, we hold to be beyond dispute, since God himself, to prevent any man from pretending ignorance, has endued all men with some idea of his Godhead, the memory of which he constantly renews and occasionally enlarges, that all to a man being aware that there is a God, and that he is their Maker, may be condemned by their own conscience when they neither worship him nor consecrate their lives to his service.” [157] (Emphasis added)

Calvin proceeds to expound this sensus divinitatus in a polyvalent fashion. Plantinga freely admits he is extending this conception and precising it within a specific framework of modern epistemology.  He, I would argue, is emphasizing the knowledge gaining noetic process, which is rather different than Butler’s Van Tillian metaphysical criticism, though Butler is a fine analyst also.  Calvin is certainly proceeding in his argument in a systematic fashion, but his categories are not those of modern analysis.  We thus must caution that Butler’s criticism is not proved as a defeater for Plantinga.

In summary, I would argue that largely what we see here is a linguistic distinction between the analytic philosophical method of Plantinga and the presuppositional apologetic of a Van Tillian more aligned with the methods and vocabulary of Idealism.[158]  Anderson concurs broadly with me there [159] and has probably made use of both positions sympathetically though well known as a Van Tillian.  Plantinga’s controlling methodology is to “answer the fool according to his folly that he not be wise in his own estimation” whereas the Van Tillian method is “Do not answer a fool according to his folly, lest you yourself also be like him.” [160]  Just as these two scriptures are not contradictory but occur as a couplet for our benefit, we should see the legitimacy of both approaches, just as we appreciate the polyvalency of Calvin’s account.  The Van Tillian defends the faith in a manner consistent with the presuppositions of scripture, Plantinga deconstructs and exposes the presuppositions and the consequences of the arguments of the unbelieving opponent, frequently demonstrating their limitations and the faults of their arguments.

It seems we are in danger of making a philosophical mistake by the forced juxtaposition of the two apologetic approaches as if they were mutually exclusive options; their motivations and goals are different but largely complimentary (as Butler also indicates in recommending aspects of Plantinga’s work)—Plantinga provides the detailed analysis, Van Til provides the high-level transcendental proof.  It is one of the weaknesses of the Van Tillians, as noted by Bahnsen himself, that there can be a laziness when it comes to the detailed argumentation in refuting an informed (even if very wrongly informed but nevertheless articulate) opponent.  It is not sufficient to jump directly to the final transcendental refutation missing out serious evidential or scientific objections that have been answered by equally serious research.[161]  We might not need evidence on our own terms within our own community, but we must certainly argue the point with our opponents rather than just accuse them of incorrect presuppositions and autonomous reasoning, no matter how perfectly correct that assessment would prove (as we will demonstrate in future chapters).  It is just not a complete account or rigorous intellectual refutation of their culpability.

Notwithstanding, there remains an important substantive difference between Plantinga and Van Til as captured in Butler’s final criticism of Plantinga as an epistemology that does not prove the necessity of Christianity, merely its sufficiency.  This is salient and pertinent as we note that Plantinga considers it “beyond the competency of philosophy” to demonstrate the truth of Christianity despite his own strong, personal conviction of its truth.[162]  Plantinga mitigates what he believes rational argument can establish, he believes that Christian belief is in the final analysis formed in a way that supersedes what rational argument can accomplish, he does not believe he establishes the truth of that belief though he believes it is true:

“I won’t argue that [Christian] belief is true, although of course I believe that it is.  The fact is that there are some very good arguments for [Christian] belief, arguments about as good as philosophical arguments get; nevertheless, these arguments are not strong enough to support the conviction with which serious believers in God do in fact accept [Christian] belief…these arguments are not strong enough to confer knowledge on someone who accepts them…” [163]

Now, I do believe that Plantinga is being particularly nuanced here and I still believe his position remains a Calvinist one.[164]  The Calvinist will always maintain that it is the sovereignty of God and the grace of God that brings one to salvation and not a rational argument, it seems Plantinga has drawn the line between the philosophical and the theological here—thus, the limiting of the competence of philosophy:

“But is it true?  This is the really important question. And here we pass beyond the competence of philosophy.  In my opinion, no argument with premises accepted by everyone or nearly everyone is strong enough to support full blown Christian belief.” [165]

There is also the equivalent coda in the full statement of his arguments:

“…here we pass beyond the competence of philosophy, whose main competence…is to clear away certain objections, impedances, and obstacles to Christian belief.  Speaking for myself and of course not in the name of philosophy…it does, indeed, seem to me to be true, and to be the maximally important truth.” [166]

So, in summary, we can acknowledge Butler has the formal right to criticize Plantinga as wanting in the final analysis for proving the objective truth of Christian belief, but he equally should (and I would say further that he does) acknowledge the strength and force of what Plantinga has given us in defending the faith.[167]  However, in agreement with Butler, it necessitates we must follow Van Til if we wish to proceed to an objective proof of the existence of and the necessity of the Christian God as the guarantor of knowledge, as required by epistemological self-consciousness.  We will examine the transcendentalist approach of Van Til in subsequent chapters which allows Van Til to assert that the only possibility for coherence in human predication is the necessary existence of the Christian conception of God.[168]  However, we need another thread to our philosophical garment if it is to serve us in the most demanding winters and it is the ethical or our theory of values.  Ethics, or our theory of values and of what is valuable,[169] grounds our philosophy by testing it against the world we dwell in, so it is to that we now turn.

3.4 Ethics

3.4.1 Introduction

Ethics is almost always prefixed with a qualifier: classical, situational, secular and rule-egoism being four examples reflecting distinct conceptions of ethics that have at one time exercised an influence over Christian ethicists.[170]  All these schools still fall within the remit of ethical discussions, for sometimes ethics is treated more as a descriptive science than a prescriptive process.  We should also note that these terms are already something of an aggregation, there are distinct schools within Christian ethics and secular ethics which have reflected on one another, cross-pollinated one another, and importantly, aggressively rejected one another.  Thus, there is no way we can do justice to the detail of the variation of ethical perspectives and why they diverge as they do, but rather we will do justice to the guiding ethical principles of our thesis and why it is authoritative for us, and why such a detailed enumeration of rival ethical theories is then rendered superfluous.

Ethics is most basically “the surrounding climate of ideas about how to live.  It determines what we find acceptable or unacceptable, admirable, or contemptible…what is due to us, and what is due from us, as we relate to others.” [171] That is, it is the constitutive material of our moral knowledge.  Whereas a “moral” act is considered the “right way” to act, an ethical theory is the theory that defines why it should be the right way to act.  Thus, Van Til spoke of “the Christian view of human action or behavior.”  [172]  This will include our Christian conceptions of “good” and “bad” actions, virtue and vice, justice and injustice, and the Christian criteria which are proposed to judge such actions.  Ethics is also inherently political, how we organize and govern ourselves or permit ourselves to be governed flow inexorably from our ethical conclusions.

Of course, any comprehensive treatment of ethics would demand far more space than is permitted here but we can give just enough of an argument to demonstrate that we can reject the positivistic and naturalistic psychologizing of ethics.  Like Willard, we refute the abolition of moral knowledge and boldly assert its reality, we thus do not merely describe what ethics might be, but we reason and argue to the point that we might prescribe what our ethics should be.[173]  Our ethics are not just a manner of behavioral conditioning, exotic socio-biological psychology [174] or relativised to our cultural situation or personal feelings (though all are factors to consider) but an outer expression of our inner convictions regarding our place in the Universe and our relation to the God of scripture and one another.  For the epistemological self-conscious, our objective referent must be the revelation through the narrative of scripture.  Yet, this is not merely memorizing the Ten Commandments but appreciating the elaborate and detailed exposition of those principles in the Law and the narratives of scripture.  The ethical life for the Christian is the life lived in harmony with the mind of God but let us first walk the path to this as the only logical terminus for the ethical life.  That is the aim of this section.

3.4.2 Ethics, Moral Knowledge, and Worldview

Perhaps more than any other area of study in philosophy, ethics is the interface between philosophical belief and action.  A basis for and a theory of ethics is required for us to live in the world and with one another.  The challenge is presented to us is that which Aristotle clearly lays before us:

“But not every action nor every passion admits of a mean; for some have names that already imply badness, e.g. spite, shamelessness, envy, and in the case of actions adultery (moicheia), theft (klopê), murder (androphonia)…It is not possible, then, ever to be right with regard to them; one must always be wrong.” (EN II.6 1107a8–15) [175]

This we might interpret as, “if our ethics end up condoning adultery/theft/murder there is something wrong with our ethics.”  However, in our modern context, the debate surrounding birth and death, [176] particularly regarding abortion and euthanasia, witness to the fact that not everyone agrees with everyone else where ethics is concerned.  In Aristotle there is something a priori in his conception of ethics and something of an active, psychological commitment demanded of the actor, known as hexis in his writing, a term found also in Plato reportedly from Socrates’ conception of knowledge.[177]  It refers to a personal ownership of and responsibility for your conduct, a resonance rather than a dissonance between your theory of your world and your practice of life.

Ethics is, in any reputable conception, about the how we live and the why we live the way we do.  Now “reputable” is a loaded term but like Willard argued with a high degree of plausibility, much of 20^th century ethics was in disrepute.  Beginning with the analytic method of Moore and the positivistic conceptions of Schlick, ethics was reduced to a descriptive science, i.e., a set of propositions considered ‘true.’ [178]  These were the psychologized conceptions of ethics that pursued knowledge only (i.e., description) that had a putative debt to Watson’s behaviorist accounts of psychology,[179] which were then pushed to greatest extreme in the psychological theories of Skinner who believed we could engineer a perfect society, because human behavior was, after all, entirely a matter of conditioned response.  The disrepute results because in such an understanding there is no moral culpability because one’s behavior was an inevitable consequence of one’s environment.  Thus, if there is a “fault” it is that of “society”; more specifically, the fault is that social engineers and cultural visionaries who have been too timid and have allowed concepts such as freedom, dignity, and democracy to obstruct the scientific path to an ordered and peaceful world.

Now, this immediately begs the question as to why such a world as envisaged by Skinner and his fellow travelers would be desirable.  Why would we consider an ‘ordered and peaceful’ world preferable to a ‘free, dignified and democratic’ one—this is an ethical question, and we should demand the answer rather than accept these as poles of a dilemma.  Why choose between these two?  In my view, this is a false dilemma, a ‘free, dignified and democratic’ society in no way implies a disordered and a non-peaceful society, unless the order and peace we seek is that modelled by North Korea.[180]

Particularly for Christian worldview philosophy, these views should not escape the need for ethical evaluation and rebuke, and for the epistemologically self-conscious, their coercive and autonomous character stands utterly opposed to the freedom and liberty within the scriptures that form our foundation.[181]  Thus, to fully grasp the nettle of the real nature and purpose of ethical reflection, we should understand the inseparable nature of our metaphysics (being of  the world), our epistemology (our theory and thoughts in the world) and our ethics (what we decide to do being of and in the world).  All these are presuppositions that control our thinking about and action in the world.  The aggregate of these we might also call our worldview which will increasingly feature in our discussion as epistemological self-consciousness develops.

3.4.3 Theonomy and Ethics

In the view of this work, the core of Reformed normative ethics can but be “theonomical.”  It integrates our ethics with our epistemology and with our metaphysics, they become a coherent package rather than viewed as disparate categories.   Bahnsen helps us understand why this is a preferable approach:

“If the law of God is the moral ideal to be followed…and if the practice…is contrary to it, what measures [will correct] the situation?  This question, as every other question, must be addressed by the law of God itself.  The moral code not only sets forth standards to be followed…it lays down principles of conduct to be followed by those who wish to bring about [reformation].” [182]

The theonomical ethical position asserts the primacy of the scripture in ethical matters rather than the primacy of the autonomous human intellect.  The intellect is not to be ignored as if this was merely a dogmatic commitment, the intellect is rather to be used as a tool and applied with the presupposition of working through the material provided in the scriptures and systematizing it whilst properly regarding the Creator-creature distinction.  It is this conception of theonomy and the role it plays in defining our ethical theory and informing our practice that diffuses what Van Til called “the labyrinth of ethical literature.” [183]

Theonomy in the most general sense is associated with Reformational confessions, especially those of the Puritans and more specifically the Westminster Standards of 1647.  Theonomy is formed from Theos and Nomos, classical Greek words for “God” and “Law”; so theonomy is simply a preference for “God’s law” in contrast to autonomy, formed from Autos and Nomos, meaning “Self” and “Law.”  God’s Law in this sense [184] is conceived of as being scripture alone and all of scripture:

“[I]t is necessary for the Christian to maintain without any apology and without any concession that it is Scripture, and Scripture alone, in the light of which all moral questions must be answered.  Scripture as an external revelation became necessary because of the sin of man.  No man living can even put the moral question as he ought to put it, or ask the moral questions as he ought to ask them, unless he does so in the light of Scripture…There is no alternative but that of theonomy and autonomy.” [185] (Emphasis added).

Now, we do need to qualify the sense of “autonomy” that Van Til uses here and that we are employing.  Most vividly, “autonomy” became well known as Kant asserted it as the basic intellectual attitude of the Renaissance with Kant arguing that a condition of moral culpability must be the autonomy of the human subject.  We should feel comfortable agreeing with Kant, as Paul also acknowledges, there is a conscience in a person that at once accuses them or declares them innocent.  Every person has a personal responsibility before God and is judged on the basis of their decisions.  There are indeed further serious and complex theological issues of the noetic effects of sin and the necessity of grace to draw the fallen subject to receive salvation, and yet the maintaining of their moral culpability.  We examine those issues more closely in §5, yet the principle is sound.

Autonomy can also be taken in a more positive sense as shown in the Amplified Version rendering of 2 Co 9:8:

“And God is able to make all grace [every favor and earthly blessing] come in abundance to you, so that you may always [under all circumstances, regardless of the need] have complete sufficiency in everything [being completely self-sufficient in Him], and have an abundance for every good work and act of charity.”

Here the Greek word αὐτάρκειαν (autarkian) is used for ‘complete sufficiency’ from which the English word autarky (self-governing, self-sufficient) is directly associated.  The Greek of the verse and those following are particularly emphatic regarding the overflowing abundance of a believer to be a blessing to those around them.  Of course, and this is recognized in the Amplified Text, the self-sufficiency or autonomy of the believer is not a self-sufficiency originating with their humanity but in their contact with the divine nature.

The conception of “autonomy” that we are criticizing is the sense of where it is conceived that Humanity was “coming of age” and rejecting external sources of coercive authority, particularly as manifested in the Catholic hegemony and then the Protestant hegemonies that replaced, or at times, worked adjacent to them.[186]  It might also be expressed in the naturalistic and scientistic philosophies we have considered that explicitly and completely, as a matter of methodology, rejected the noumenal, elevating the power of an independently functioning reason as the final criteria of action and the judge of knowledge, even if this resulted in a skeptical conclusion and its own diminution.  Similarly, a religious expression of the autonomous attitude was seen post the legitimate rejection of the coercive power of the Catholic church by the “stepchildren” of the Reformers or the “radical Reformation,” some Anabaptist sects were particularly antinomian and moved to extreme positions rejecting all civic authority.[187]  Many “anabaptists”, including the Pietists, deemphasized objective scripture that was seen to legitimize the coercive authorities, preferring the “inner light” and subjective criteria.  Kant, being from a Pietist background, would have been exposed to this non-dogmatic conception of Christianity and we can understand his complex attitude to religion more easily with that knowledge.[188]  So, our sense of “autonomy” and indeed the general Van Tillian sense of the term, is when reason is employed independently of any scriptural reference or accountability to God, rather than challenging the moral culpability of a person.  Our introductory remarks at the start of this work, emphasized this was the sense understood with respect to the Greek thinkers who had discovered “humanism.”

Thus, the theonomical perspective that emphasizes the interpretation of scripture as a whole in search of ethical principles, is not analogous to the primitive fundamentalism of the 1920s and 1930s which was often characterized by “proof texting” and anti-intellectualism.[189]  For the Puritans, and modern theonomists would concur, theonomy meant taking God’s laws and statutes as normative though that did not mean without interpretation; sometimes a law specific to the cultural situation of ancient Israel illustrated a more general principle, and that principle was what was sought after.[190]  As is well known to students of American history, the “Puritan Canopy” was a reflection of the New England Puritan’s desire to construct a society based on what they had found in the scriptures by their covenantal compacts between and within families at the foundation of their settlements:

“Puritan theologians assumed there was a given (rather than a constructed) character to human nature, the world, and God’s way of reaching out to the world.  They took for granted that the central religious task was to orient the self to the prerogatives of God as those prerogatives had been revealed in Scripture.” [191] (Emphasis added).

However, the canopy had begun to fragment by the 1750s ironically under the stress of the Great Awakening centered around Jonathan Edward’s “subtle and most able restatement of [the] inherited Calvinist convictions.” [192]  Edwards was a revivalist in the literal sense of the word, he was seeking to revive that which, like Eli the High Priest during the time of King Saul had become old, fat and blind in its old age.  However, his ecclesiological innovations of prohibiting the openly unregenerate from partaking of the Lord’s Supper [193] and his growing doubts over the theological validity of a localized covenant as envisaged by the New England Puritan orthodoxy and social organization, had in them the seeds which grew in freshly ploughed Arminian soil on the new frontiers.  Additionally, however unintentionally or indirectly, Edwards’ work opened the door to political republicanism, Noll sees in this the transition: “[a] move from theology to politics, and intellectual leadership…from the clergy to men of state.” [194]

Nevertheless, the influence of the biblical narratives and more specifically the Law of God remained strong and basic in the American Christian consciousness [195] and provided inspiration for the wave of “Arminian” revivalists during the 19^th century.  Finney was to write:

“In studying elementary law, I found the old authors frequently quoting the Scriptures and referring especially to the Mosaic Law as authority for many of the great principles of common law. This excited my curiosity so much that I purchased a Bible, the first I had ever owned. Whenever I found a reference to the Bible made by the law authors, I turned to the passage and consulted it in its connection.” [196]

Finney’s theology was rich and deep  and it is a gross simplification to simply designate him as the archetypal modern Arminian evangelical.[197]  Finney was committed to the Law of God, was both a political and a religious reformer and was far more similar in his broad social and political programme to his near contemporary and Presbyterian founder of Westminster Theology Seminary, J Gresham Machen, than to the fundamentalist evangelicals that from the 1870s onwards were emerging as a response to theological liberalism.[198]  Like Finney, Machen was heavily socially and politically involved, emphasizing the imperative of biblical law as the foundation for ethics:

“Men are wondering today what is wrong with the world.  They are conscious they are standing over some terrible abyss.  Awful ebullitions rise from that abyss.  We have lost the sense of the security of our western civilization.  Men are wondering what is wrong.  It is perfectly clear what is wrong.  The law of God has been torn up…and the result is appearing with ever greater clearness.  When will the law be rediscovered?” [199]

In summary, the point I make here is that to the time of Machen there was a clear and enduring commitment to the Law of God as the basis for Christian ethics.  An abandonment of the Law of God as the basis for Christian ethics has been an anomalous interlude in the history of the church corrected by its restatement in Van Tillian thought and applied practically by his early interpreters such as Rushdoony and Bahnsen, which then fed into the wider Reconstructionist movement.  However, with this application, there was an important dimension added to the term which we will examine in the next section.

3.4.4 Modern Theonomy

As noted above, modern theonomy was primarily the work of two men [200] in applying Van Tillian thought to first the socio-political sphere and then more broadly.[201]  Bahnsen was to reflect on this seminal work:

“Theonomy in Christian Ethics argued that God’s word is authoritative over all areas of life (the premise of a Christian world-and-life view). It argued that within the Scriptures we should presume continuity between Old and New Testament moral principles and regulations until God’s revelation tells us otherwise (the premise of covenant theology). It argued therefore that the Old Testament law continues to offer us an inspired and reliable model for civil justice or socio-political morality (a guide for public reform in our own day, even in the area of crime and punishment).” [202]

There should have been nothing of especial novelty here, it being as Bahnsen put it, “vanilla Reformed social theory” [203] and it might be characterized more formally within moral philosophy as a version of the ancient Divine Command Theory which considers morality as somehow dependent on God.[204]  However, Rushdoony and Bahnsen formalized the general commitment of the Reformers into a modern socio-political programme that became one of the major distinctives of that Reconstructionist movement that grew out of their work.[205]  Their theology was rigorous and more consciously consistent with Reformed principles,[206] with the remnant of the neo-Thomistic positions founded on natural law theory purged, and where ethics is not merely theistic but is dependent directly on the Christian God as a reflection of His character, particularly His justice and His love.

That is, when we say that “God is good” we mean that in a specific epistemologically self-conscious manner.  We are not embroiling ourselves in the Euthyphro dilemma by considering “goodness” as a standard that somehow God lives up to (and is therefore outside of God) and undermines Him as the foundation of moral action, but we immediately take the position God is the origin of goodness as He was also the origin of physical creation.[207]  The “is” here is both the existential “is” and the predicative “is”; God is linguistically and logically unique in this respect and that is what modern theonomy recognizes.

Similarly, God acts virtuously because He is the origin of virtue and demonstrates virtue just because that is who He is and He acts completely in accord with His Own Law, it being a codification of His character.  The Euthyphro dilemma is a dilemma because one considers God to be charged with obeying His own commands as analogical to our act of obedience.  That is, it fails to recognize the creature-Creator distinction for in contrast, there is no action of obedience required on God’s part because to be obedient would suggest God has some sort of option to deny the perfect unity and balance of His own character.  Alston makes this clear in a more formal fashion:

“…a necessary condition of the truth that ‘S ought to do A’ is at least the metaphysical possibility that S does not do A. On this view, moral obligations attach to all human beings, even those so saintly as to totally lack any tendency, in the ordinary sense of that term, to do other than what it is morally good to do. And no moral obligations attach to God, assuming, as we are here, that God is essentially perfectly good. Thus divine commands can be constitutive of moral obligations for those beings who have them without it being the case that God’s goodness consists in His obeying His own commands, or, indeed, consists in any relation whatsoever of God to His commands.” [208]  (Emphasis added)

Fundamentally, in Van Tillian terms we dissolve the dilemma because we consider the ontological Trinity as our Foundation of Reality.[209]  Bosserman captures this thought by demonstrating how abstracting our situation from the metaphysical context leads us away from truth and into epistemological error and thus culpable ethical failure:

“Satan responds with a direct contradiction of God’s claim, and the reasoning at work behind it is a rudimentary example of abstract thinking. If fruit is really good for food, then every particular piece of fruit may be enjoyed as food, and that is that. Any additional claim that it is also good, or perhaps better for the time being as an educational device, to be peered at, but not eaten, represents an obvious contradiction of the earlier, and of course, complete interpretation of the goodness of fruit. In fact, it can easily be discarded as a lie. Satan appealed to something good—the law of God—as a ground for disobeying the law of God (cf. Matt 4:1–11). But, in order to support his argument, Satan had to reinterpret God in light of it, casting Him as forbidding the tree out of a selfish desire to prevent Eve from attaining the sort of wisdom and maturity necessary for governing the creation.” [210]

So, in summary, we see the importance of the normative scripturally based presuppositions that constitute our “worldview” rather than trying to abstractly theorize, analyze or synthesize on an autonomous basis; our metaphysical commitment must be to the goodness of God and the knowledge provided for us by the scriptures.  Our ethical orientation must be to theonomy, a commitment to the wisdom (understood as the ability to apply socio-politically our knowledge), revealed to us in the scriptures.  Thus, we are now in a better position to understand the import of Paul’s proposition, “Christ, in whom are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge.” [211]  In summary, it is only a Christian worldview philosophy that will be able to provide the ethical position fully consistent with the implications of the Christian metaphysics and with Christian epistemology.  It is to that task we now turn in more detail.

3.5 Christian “Worldview Philosophy”

3.5.1 Introduction

In summary of our argument so far, we have seen Plantinga argued as an analytic philosopher and presented an argument for the rationality of Christian belief.  That is, Plantinga was not so much concerned with proving the truth of Christian belief (though he believes it is true and the only viable option) but rather to shut the mouths of those who would accuse Christians of irrationality. Plantinga frequently argues on his opponent’s own terms and demonstrates the inadequacy of their arguments and how they claim more for their arguments than can be sustained.

We have then posited that Van Til’s thought provides the bridge to prove the truth of Christianity.  It is with bringing Van Til’s thought to the fore that we are primarily concerned with in this section, but we unexpectedly find Plantinga an ally in that regard.  The perceived difference between Van Til and Plantinga can be mitigated to a large degree and not seen as weakening either one, with both positions standing in support of distinctively Christian philosophy and in opposition to “classical” and “evidential” apologetics.  That is, for any system of knowledge, we have already seen that Plantinga has taught us that the justification or warrant of the beliefs in question are a central concern.  Plantinga became known for his analytic scrutiny [212] of issues in contemporary analytic philosophy on their own terms with no apologetic intent but is perhaps less well known for his positive and negative apologetic challenges to Christian philosophers; that is, to both present their own programme and to demonstrate the inadequacies of the alternatives.[213]

That is, at this high level, both Van Til and Plantinga were methodologically equivalent—they wanted to expose the shortcomings of secular thought and present the only plausible alternative—Christian theism. However, when we stopped our programme with Plantinga we found that there was nothing in his conception which implies there should be, logically or ethically, a Christian basis for philosophy, only that it is rationally defensible and if true, is a justified and warranted purveyor of knowledge.[214]  We concluded that we needed to move in a progressively Van Tillian direction in order to anchor our beliefs not just as rational defendable and warranted but also necessarily true, in a substantive and metaphysical sense.

His claim is thus stronger than Plantinga’s, or as we have argued, it picks up where Plantinga leaves off to not just to give sufficient conditions for Christian epistemology but to establish the necessity of Christian epistemology.  This strong claim is correspondingly more controversial, disputed and is what the epistemological self-consciousness project seeks to advance.    It is evident that the very nature of Van Til’s challenge to unbelievers and Christian philosophers makes his work far less palatable and less likely to be discussed in mainstream religious studies or philosophy of religion overviews, even within the Reformed community.[215]  For Van Til, philosophical discussion was not merely abstract, therapeutic, pragmatic or elucidatory, it was also about solving problems and revealing to a sinful subject their sinfulness—this is an example of epistemological self-consciousness in the most basic and explicit sense.  The apologetic task was a tool for bringing the hearer to epistemological self-consciousness as a tool of evangelism, which was also an expression of his passion and compassion.[216]

3.5.2 What is “Christian Worldview” Philosophy?

As Butler noted,[217] the term “Christian worldview philosophy” was once almost patented by the Reformed Van Tillians but is now much more in the common parlance.  This raises a semantic problem, as “Christian Worldview Philosophy,” much like the designation “fundamentalist,” has been used merely as an imprecise, pejorative term.  For example, Robbins in his rather ill-tempered exchange with Plantinga [218] directed the designation at any philosopher that might have the audacity to disagree with his appropriation of Rortian postmodern pragmatism into Christian ethics and his subsequent denial that a strong Christian philosophy was even possible.  However, Plantinga in reply, although he did not use the term “worldview” himself, clarified and encapsulated the proper definition and use of the concept perfectly:

“First, Christian philosophers and Christian intellectuals generally must display more autonomy—more independence of the rest of the philosophical world.   Second, Christian philosophers must display more integrity…in the sense of integral wholeness, or oneness, or unity, being all of one piece…And necessary to these two is a third: Christian courage, or boldness, or strength, or perhaps Christian self-confidence.” [219]

Similarly, in addressing the need for a distinctively Christian philosophy, he is more explicit still:

“According to the view of Christian philosophy I and others advocate, Christian philosophers should consider the whole range of problems from a Christian or theistic point of view; in trying to give philosophical account of some area or topic-freedom, for example, evil, or the nature of knowledge, or of counterfactuals, or of probability, she may perfectly properly appeal to what she knows or believes as a Christian.  She is under no obligation to appeal only to beliefs shared by nearly what common sense and contemporary science dictate, for example.  Nor is she obliged first to try to prove to the satisfaction of other philosophers Christianity is true before setting out on this enterprise of Christian philosophy.  Instead, she is entirely within her rights in starting from her Christian understanding addressing the philosophical problems in question.” [220] (Emphasis original).

In other words, Christian philosophy proceeds on its own terms and using its own presuppositions.  Van Til would concur here but would also make the stronger point that this demonstrates there is no “neutral” ground between these positions.[221]  Secular philosophy assumes the autonomy of the human intellect and its ability to make ultimate rational judgments.  Christian philosophy denies that right, our intellect, and rationality is derivative and dependent for its operation on the Christian God.

3.5.3 The Requirement for a Worldview Transcendental

That is, in Van Tillian terms, our “worldview” governs the overall semantic content of our discourse, our theological views derived from scripture alone will govern the boundaries in which our philosophy is constructed, which must also find its referent in scripture.  Thus, Van Til argues you cannot have a Christian worldview without simultaneously outlining both a theology and a philosophy; he often emphasized you cannot talk about the individual facts of the world until you nailed down a philosophy of facts and have decided what “a fact” is.[222]  To repeat, there is no neutral ground shared with the unbeliever where we may meet and use some authority that we both accept to resolve our differences, without subverting the authority of scripture.  He was a philosophical theologian even if he was reticent in admitting it, preferring to be considered a purveyor of scriptural truths with a call to conversion throughout his work:

“…from reading your first pages you make me out to be a philosopher.  Well, I guess I am one of sorts, but you put everything in a better perspective by pointing out that even [in] my philosophizing…I am trying to bring out that only the biblical answer to this problem is the true answer.” [223]

Without the Van Tillian transcendental Christian presupposition that belief in God is rationally defensible and provable from the impossibility of the contrary, there can be no philosophy that is logically sound.  On a purely descriptive basis, this incongruity is witnessed to no better than in the history of 20^th century philosophy where the meaning and formulation of autonomous and Godless philosophy has been recapitulated again and again. The logical positivist Otto Neurath posited the modern predicament this way:

“There is no way to establish fully secured, neat protocol statements as starting points of the sciences. There is no tabula rasa. We are like sailors who have to rebuild their ship on the open sea, without ever being able to dismantle it in dry-dock and reconstruct it from its best components. Only metaphysics can disappear without a trace. Imprecise ‘verbal clusters’ [Ballungen] are somehow always part of the ship… A new ship grows out of the old one, step by step—and while they are still building, the sailors may already be thinking of a new structure, and they will not always agree with one another. The whole business will go on in a way that we cannot even anticipate today. That is our fate.” [224] (Some emphasis added).

Cat in explicating Neurath summarized his skeptical cul-de-sac thus:

“He denied any value to philosophy over and above the pursuit of work on science, within science and for science. And science was not logically fixed, securely founded on experience nor was it the purveyor of any System of knowledge. Uncertainty, decision and cooperation were intrinsic to it. From this naturalistic, holistic and pragmatist viewpoint, philosophy investigates the conditions of the possibility of science as apparent in science itself…” [225] (Emphasis added).

We discern that philosophy had been understood as washed up on the shores of what Schaeffer insightfully calls ‘anti-philosophy’:

“Thus, we are left with two antiphilosophies in the world today.  One is existentialism, which is an antiphilosophy because it deals with the big questions but with no rationality.  If we follow [the alternative] it defines words using reason, [but] finally language leads to neither values nor facts.  Language leads to language, and that is all.  It is not only the certainty of values that is gone, but the certainty of knowing…” [226] (Emphasis added).

Schaeffer was not the most thorough or systematic of apologists, drawing criticism from friend and foe alike, but though he could be wrong or inaccurate in the details, both Bahnsen [227] and Packer [228] recognized the profound insight of his “broad strokes” into the modern malaise, even if their own programme was substantially different from his.  In short, unless we want to join the anti-philosophers who can know nothing and cannot state the basis on which a Nazi concentration camp guard should be condemned,[229] there is, of necessity, a requirement to articulate a transcendental basis for all philosophy.  We argue that the transcendent authority claims of scripture are legitimate as a basis for providing the foundation of the Christian claims of knowledge.  More generally, as we proceed in our analysis, we are able to demonstrate that any alternative worldview either fails the coherency test, contradicting its own basic propositions or is shown to be borrowing intellectual capital from the Christian worldview in order to facilitate the criticism of the Christian worldview.  This was succinctly expressed in three words by Cornelius Van Til, “atheism presupposes theism” ^[230] and our next section aims to bring out the distinctiveness of this presuppositional approach.

3.5.4 Evidentialism and Rationalism

Van Til was credited with the “reformation of Christian apologetics” [231] by articulating a means of defending the faith that remained consistent with the faith itself, whilst avoiding fideism on the one hand and rejecting the appeal to a common intellectual ground between the believer and the unbeliever on the other.  He is generally accepted to have originated a distinctive apologetic method during his career.[232]  Significantly, Van Til broke categorically with the evidentialism and rationalism of Enlightenment apologetics that had come to be identified with Protestant orthodoxy, even within the conservative schools.

Traditionally, this model of apologetics had come to treat theology as a “science” [233] and was concerned with the “facts” of apologetics, e.g., the unaided reason of a man or woman should be able to evaluate “evidences” for God’s operation in the world and by the shared human rational process be convinced by argumentation to a place of belief, vis-a-vis the “theistic proofs.”  Such an approach was implicitly based on a natural theology, suggesting a common ground was available to believers and unbelievers.

In other words, on this view, also known as the classical or Princetonian view, as facts could be considered “objective reality,” the existence of God was objectively provable, with “facts” shared qualitatively and quantitatively between men and men, and between men and God; their meaning is in themselves, they are “brute facts.” [234]  Thus, apologetic philosophy provided the intellectual foundation or “the facts of” systematic theology,[235] a person must be convinced by rational arguments before he has sufficient warrant or obligation to believe.  The last great Princeton theologian, B.B. Warfield (1851-1921) argued against his peer, the great Dutch theologian Abraham Kuyper (1837-1920) (who had posited an antithesis between believer and non-believer resulting in two distinct sciences), that a person could start from an unbelieving, autonomous science and be convinced with rational argument to surrender to the “truth” of those arguments and then relinquish their intellectual autonomy.[236]

On Van Til’s view, which at this level accepts the basic presupposition of Kuyper in direct contradiction to the Warfieldian school, systematic theology lays the intellectual foundation for apologetics.  As we posited in the previous section, philosophy is built not just upon the scriptures but with the scriptures; it uses a different language than theology and might engage a different audience, but it is not discontinuous with theology.  Thus, Van Til asserted:

“Philosophy, as usually defined, deals with a theory of reality, with a theory of knowledge, and with a theory of ethics.  That is to say, philosophies usually undertake to present a life-and-world view.  They deal not only with that which man can directly experience by means of his senses but also…with the presuppositions of experience…Christian theology deals not only with God; it deals also with the world.  It would be quite impossible then to state and vindicate a truly Christian theology without also stating and defending—be it in a broad outline only—a Christian philosophy.” [237] (Emphasis added).

To emphasize, Warfield had asserted the exact opposite—you establish the authority of the scriptures on a common rational basis with the unbeliever (‘right reason’) and that persuades the unbeliever to surrender their rational autonomy.

However, the implication of this position is that any type of proven discrepancy (or new research) might invalidate the entire corpus, “a proved error in Scripture contradicts not only our doctrine, but the Scripture claims and, therefore, its inspiration in making these claims”  [238]; an inductive generalization which has at its heart a logical fallacy if for no other reason that it is an inductive generalization for which there can be no logical necessity.[239]  However, that is a technical discussion, and there is a more basic, theological reason as to why the Warfieldian view is un-Christian which we shall examine next.

3.5.5 The Impossibility of “Right Reason” and “Common Ground”

Van Til’s transcendental critique of Warfield and Kuyper and his resulting synthesis, had the follow key characteristics:

1. He accepted Warfield’s basic position that Christianity was objectively provable, and that people were not being rational when they rejected it.
2. He accepted Kuyper’s basic position that the believers and unbelievers created two types of science because of their antithetical principles which produces two opposing theories of knowledge, the unbeliever was vain in their reasoning and were not able to understand the things of God’s Spirit or His Word. The scripture had to be accepted with its self-attesting authority and a worldview was built upon it.  There was no neutral, “common ground” on which both could meet and sort out their differences.
3. However, Kuyper’s conclusion from his principle, that apologetic discussion between believers and unbelievers was therefore impossible because there were two, different, rationalities was rejected by Van Til.[240]
4. He accepted with Warfield that Christianity was the only rational position (for to deny the Christian worldview would collapse into skepticism and irrationality) but he denied that Warfield was warranted to state that the means of attaining rational certainty was through the “right reason” of the unbelieving person. This was because this principle would have had the implication that “right reason” had to be satisfied at any point of objection in the future, the actions of Christ in scripture were only to be validated once “right reason” has been satisfied.
5. In contrast to Warfield, he insisted that it was the impossibility of right reason because of the sinfulness of the human condition that provided our strongest transcendental argument for the necessity of the self-attesting nature of the scriptures and the call to repentance within them. This reversed the inference of Kuyper, apologetic argument was not excluded but became necessary, the sinful person was incapable of right reason (of being rational) as long as they continued in their rebellion, they destroyed
6. He concluded then, by accepting both Warfield’s and Kuyper’s basic propositions but rejecting their conclusions as fallacious.

Van Til’s position was that the noetic effects of sin made Warfield’s position untenable and inconsistent with Warfield’s own Calvinistic theological work on the noetic consequences of sin.  It also highlighted Kuyper’s conclusion did not follow because only the Christian position could be considered fully rational, and any use of rational argument meant the unbeliever was importing assumptions possible only on the Christian worldview.  In summary, Van Til is asserting that it was possible to be objectively certain of Christian claims (with Warfield, contra Kuyper) though this was only possible on a transcendental basis because believers and unbelievers create distinct sciences (contra Warfield with Kuyper).

Van Til thus offered the convincing proof that it was systematic theology that had to lay the foundations for philosophy and apologetic philosophy, “by asserting a separation between philosophy and theology, you are destroying the foundations of philosophy.” [241]  The natural person was not capable of applying their reason and climbing up to God; thus, Plantinga also “it is hard to avoid the conclusion that natural theology does not provide a satisfactory answer to the question…Is it rational to believe in God?” ^[242]  The implications of Van Til and Plantinga here are that an evidential apologetic is methodologically deficient to resolve issues as to the status of theistic belief and the nature of God, the transcendental approach is the only one that remains. Thus, we can recognize that Roman Catholic and Arminian evidentialist apologetics which assert there is a neutral, common ground where believer and unbeliever can meet, i.e., a zone free of theological or philosophical presuppositions, is untenable.   We instead recognize that the impossibility of right reason and, as argued in previous sections, the theory-laden imperatives of a worldview would never permit an argument to be constructed that would satisfy both the atheological and the theological requirements for a common starting point.[243]

So, in summary, if we were to be asked “Why do you feel no obligation to only appeal to beliefs shared by nearly what common sense and contemporary science dictate? Do you not understand that philosophy and theology deal with differentiated domains of reality?” We should no longer feel embarrassment if we have followed the arguments of this work into epistemological self-consciousness.  The differentiation is a naturalist mist that evaporates as the sun rises.  The very structure of the world and reality on the Christian worldview is assumed in the atheological questioning and renders the question incoherent by assuming a logical structure derived from a worldview it wants to refute.  The “differentiated domains” are not metaphysically differentiated, they are different spheres of reality rightly considered as having their own modalities, but primarily merely functionally differentiated and linguistically separated for meaningful discourse.

3.5.6 Plantinga and Van Til on Apologetics—Contrast and Confluence

As we have noted in the introduction to this section, the strong claim of Van Til is made even more controversial because some Christian philosophers sympathetic to Plantinga have been extremely dismissive of Van Til.  It should also be noted that Plantinga himself only mentions Van Til once in what is considered his most important apologetic work, and this is only to indicate the common parody of Van Til’s epistemology that states “those that do not know God…don’t really have any knowledge at all.”  [244]  Yet this is not Van Til’s point at all, and we can only assume Plantinga has not read Van Til in any depth (if at all).  Van Til’s point was that if the unbelievers lived consistently with their stated presuppositions, they could have no knowledge, but they do not, for they assume logic, causality, and coherence (however inconsistently) and borrow intellectual capital from the believer’s Christian worldview to make sense of the world.  Rather paradoxically, the context in which Plantinga quotes Van Til is in the course of making an argument that is substantially similar to Van Til’s argument and the conclusion is also similar, we do not know as we ought, either things or ourselves without the foundation of a Christian worldview:

“But if we don’t know there is such a person as God, we don’t know the first thing (the most important thing) about ourselves, each other, and our world…because…the most important truths about us and them is that we have been created by the Lord and utterly depend upon him for our continued existence.” [245]

We can mitigate the conflict further by recognizing that there could hardly be a greater contrast in their respective methods and their vocabulary which lends itself to the obfuscation of Van Til’s views when approached with an analytical philosopher’s perspective.  On this basis, some have even refused to recognize Van Til as a philosopher [246] with very little willingness to work through Van Til’s language that is reminiscent of idealism.  Van Til also writes on occasions where it is clear English was not his first language, was rather unsystematic in presentation [247] and can assume a lot of philosophical knowledge in his readers which can make his presentations seem obscure or overly compact.  As we have already noted, he also had a penchant for using terms which had a long history in philosophy but with a distinct sense that frequently caused misinterpretation of his views.[248]  However, this hostility I believe obscures an otherwise great and neglected concord between the positions, and it is in the understanding and explication of their concord which helps us progress in epistemological self-consciousness.

Firstly, we have already seen a similar conception of the role and practice of philosophy that it should be Christian not just as some kind of end but in method and premise.  Secondly, we have already seen how Plantinga had disarmed his philosophical opponents by considering their arguments and invalidating them on their own terms.  Thirdly, Anderson makes the important assessment of the concord between their work whilst recognizing the distinctiveness, but he notes that it is in the transcendental direction of some of Plantinga’s arguments where his apologetic force was greatest and where he approximates to the method of Van Til.[249]  Consequently, we will concentrate increasingly from this point onwards on the distinctiveness of Van Til’s transcendental and presuppositional apologetic approach as integral to epistemological self-consciousness, only mentioning Plantinga in revision and where we notice a confluence or contrast between their views.

3.6 Summary and Conclusion

We began this chapter by considering the specifics of the philosophical categories we had established as the basis of our research in the previous chapters: metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics.  First, we considered first metaphysics, the theory of reality, and noted how it had frequently become speculative, obscure, and distant from sensible accounts of the universe; we contrasted such accounts with the scientifically orientated metaphysics.  We acknowledged that metaphysics was important to ground and give philosophy a context; we noted how significant intellectual movements had denigrated metaphysics to seek a scientific view of reality but had collapsed into a scientistic view, rarefying vast swathes of human experience as meaningless or in having emotive meaning only.  We noted that the social consequence of the denial of meaning or purpose in the universe, was that of social dissipation, eroticism, and nihilism; we noted it was ‘science’ freed from metaphysical moorings that had provided the rationale for the totalitarian variations of Nazism and Communism, noting that naturalistic science could provide no critique of such brutality.  We contrasted this with the experience of a survivor of Auschwitz who argued that a metaphysical awareness of one’s purpose and value was the essence of being and becoming even when confronted with the worst of humanity and the worst of existence.  We then concluded that metaphysics was essential in providing both an ethical and interpretative framework for science and by providing organizing categories and transcendentals for human experience generally.

We then examined epistemology as the theory of knowledge.  We clarified our terminology around what we understand by “belief,” “fact,” “evidence,” and “truth” as these are central to most theories of knowledge.  We noted that both Quine and Kuhn as the most influential of the 20^th century philosophers of science had argued for the theory-laden nature of these concepts that reflected an interconnected web, constituting a worldview concept.  Such a concept becomes useful to us as the basis for a key element of our own epistemology, but we examined in some detail as to why their naturalism was untenable.  It was demonstrated as self-vitiating as a theory of knowledge by considering its various dependencies on tautological evolutionary thought, physicalism, and induction.  We noted their conclusions were relativistic, scientifically in the case of Quine and sociologically in the case of Kuhn because they lacked a metaphysical basis, and a sceptic could reject them as arbitrary.  We then revisited this issue of skepticism and by identifying that skepticism was predominantly psychological in character, that permitted us to largely mute its central claims.  We recognised we need to wait to a future chapter on transcendentalism to expunge it more fully at a logical level, but we introduced the transcendental vocabulary at the pertinent point which allowed us to map out the contours of our theory of knowledge as a practical imperative.

We examined why the Platonic Justified True Belief (JTB) thesis was inadequate as a theory of knowledge and how it must be supplemented and reconstituted using a concept named warrant.  Whereas justification in the JTB thesis was internalistic, Plantinga argued that warrant was externalistic, derived from proper functioning faculties in a conducive epistemic environment, following a design plan, aimed at truth.  By refining and improving upon the Reidian basis of this thought, he demonstrated convincingly that Christian knowledge claims will have warrant if they are true; but we noted that Plantinga considered it beyond the capability of philosophy to demonstrate that truth to the satisfaction of all parties.  We noted that Plantinga, although providing a naturalistic account of warrant, admitted that only assuming the Christian metaphysic would validate the truth claim.  In response, we then considered Butler’s criticism of Plantinga’s terminus as inadequate as a Christian theory of knowledge, concluding at best that it was theistic, and how he posits that we need to move beyond Plantinga’s theory of knowledge into the theory outlined by Van Til to demonstrate that Christian knowledge claims are necessarily true.  Yet, despite this final dissonance between the theories, we noted that to a large degree there was substantial agreement between the two, the apparent difference being mitigated to a large degree by the distinct aims and methodologies of the philosophers; Plantinga was an analyst dealing with detailed arguments and demonstrating the inadequacies of their logical underpinnings, Van Til was a transcendentalist dealing with worldviews and general principles of coherence.

We noted that Van Til proposed the way forward was to consider the issues of factuality, evidence, warrant, and justification in a transcendental manner using a transcendent transcendental framework.  Thus, we find that both Van Til and Plantinga posit the essential and central role that the Christian conception of God must play in our epistemological self-consciousness, providing a context for those definitions that the sceptic could only refute by implicit self-contradiction.  Both men could thus be seen as emphasizing the same metaphysical context and concluding that the failure of human thought was an ethical failure.  We then considered more broadly the topic of ethics as a theory of value, focusing on the interconnections and interdependencies with our metaphysical and epistemological position.  We noted the centrality of the scriptures and emphasized the commentary within the scriptures on the principles stated in the Commandments which provided an overall theonomical context for our worldview.  The important conclusion was that theonomy remained of central importance as a basis for ethics in a Christian worldview.

We noted in our discussion of worldview that the Christian philosopher operated in a Christian context and was perfectly warranted in approaching philosophical issues from a Christian perspective rather than limited to using presuppositions that were universally shared by all or by nearly all involved in the debate.  Both Van Til and Plantinga recognized the incommensurable nature of worldviews and that there is not necessarily neutral epistemological ground upon which we can meet opponents and engage in a Socratic dialogue.  We found Van Til was far stronger than Plantinga here, asserting that transcendental logic requires the Christian worldview if human predication is to be intelligible at all; systematic theology had to lay the foundation for apologetic philosophy and not vice versa.  This was understood as a restatement of the Augustinian assumption of the priority of faith in the faith-reason debate.  We noted how Van Til’s position was a synthesis between the Warfieldian and Kuyperian accounts, with him accepting their basic insights but rejecting their final conclusions as fallacious.  It was possible to be objectively certain of Christian claims (with Warfield, contra Kuyper) though this was only possible on a transcendental basis because believers and unbelievers create distinct sciences (contra Warfield with Kuyper).

Thus, in the positive sense, we have argued in this chapter that Christian worldview philosophy is epistemologically self-conscious by definition.  You cannot have a comprehensive knowledge of the world unless you can give a general account of the world both in terms of its objects, the relationships between them and the moral imperatives to which they are subject.  There is an implicit coordination and interdependence between our metaphysics, our epistemology, and our ethics.  This has been recognized within the secular academy by naturalists such as Quine and Kuhn who argued in the context of a holistic theory of nature.  As Ó Murchadha also argues, anything short of a complete account on its own terms is no account at all because it defers in the final analysis to an external source of authority to validate it.[250]  Christian worldview philosophy must be articulated and defended in a manner consistent with the presuppositions of Christianity conceived of as its normative, scriptural tenets.

Both Plantinga and Van Til agree that unless philosophy is done on a Christian basis, it ceases to be authentic or coherent because it can give no rational justification for its own foundation; that is, its worldview is transcendentally the foundation for its coherence.  Thus, in the next chapter three chapters we examine in more detail the transcendentalist basis of a truly Christian philosophy by considering transcendentalism in general, identifying how Christian presuppositions shape a distinctively Christian transcendentalism and then to give precise expression to the Van Tillian transcendental argument for God.

[1] As Bahnsen notes, some atheological apologists believe that a statement is not to be considered scientific unless it assumes naturalism.

[2] Kuipers, Handbook of the Philosophy of Science, backmatter.

[3] Ladyman, “Ontological, Epistemological and Methodological Positions,” 303.

[4] As, for example, in many forms of Hinduism and Buddhism where the aim is to intuit the oneness of all being.

[5] Mumford, Metaphysics, 100.

[6] Mahner, “Demarcating Science from Non-Science,” 515–75.

[7] There is some question as to how “revolutionary” we should consider Quine’s approach.  For all the disdain that was heaped on Aristotle, his behaviorist theory of knowledge was, like Aristotle’s, a psychological solution to the problem of knowledge construction.

[8] Quine, “Ontological Relativity & Other Essays,” 69–90.  Although this never appeared until 1969, Quine in the introduction makes it clear that he had already formulated and presented this view by 1965.

[9] Quine, “On What There Is,” 1–19.

[10] Plantinga, Where the Conflict Really Lies, 168ff.

[11] The informed reader might smell a Kuhnian emanation at this point, his concept of a “paradigm” as a hermeneutic tool to interpret science and especially the progress of science.  Kuhn will play a significant role in our future discussion.

[12] Taylor, Metaphysics, xv ff.  Like P.F. Strawson, Taylor asserted he was being descriptive rather than attempting a theory of metaphysics.  However, both men undoubtedly advanced metaphysics as a theoretical discipline, Taylor in his arguments regarding fatalism (52–62) and Strawson’s use of transcendental arguments in Individuals set off the debate about the merits of transcendental arguments which is an argument form leveraged later in this book.

[13] Lawson-Tancred, “Introduction,” loc. 158.

[14] Plantinga, Where the Conflict Really Lies, 307 ff.

[15] Fitelson & Sober, “Plantinga’s Probability Arguments,” 115–29.

[16] Plantinga, Warrant and Proper Function, ch.12.

[17] Lewis, Miracles—A Preliminary Study.

[18] Reppert, C.S. Lewis’s Dangerous Idea. Reppert clarifies and refines Lewis’ argument.

[19] In medieval conceptions of philosophy, it was orthodox to consider philosophy as the “handmaiden of theology.”  The only legitimate practice of philosophy was to support Church dogma.  Similarly, for the post-positivists and many who favor an empiricist flavor to their metaphysics and especially for their epistemology, they see no purpose for philosophy other than in the explication of science.  We might call this part of the worldview of scientism, and we can see some characteristics of a religious commitment on the part of the believers.

[20] Russell, History, 789.  Russell’s exact words were “philosophy does not cease to suggest and inspire a way of life.”

[21] Huxley, Ends and Means, 267, 273 ff.

[22] See Macneil, Wittgenstein and Religious Language.

[23] Wissenschaftliche Weltauffassung—tr. ‘the scientific view of the world.’  This was title of the 1929 manifesto of the Vienna Circle which also fed into the first Humanist Manifesto (1933).

[24] Rom 13:4, NAS.

[25] See Sookhdeo, The New Civic Religion.

[26] Explored in a distinctive fashion in Murdoch, Metaphysics. Although Blackburn describes her ‘religious’ thesis as “implausible,” this reflects Blackburn’s anti-religious prejudice, Murdoch’s work was serious and provocative on this subject.

[27] Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning.

[28] Russell in his youth described his sexuality as “un-Victorian,” rejecting Christian ethics of virtue with many likeminded young intellectuals of the period such as Huxley. They embraced sexual ‘freedom’ which translated for Russell as many affairs, and four marriages.  This was a significant factor in his immediate dismissal from City College in New York in 1940, where after protests he was judicially judged ‘morally unfit’ and was unable to take-up his appointment.  However, he (like Huxley) markedly tempered the excesses of his lifestyle in later life.  As Irvine, Russell noted, he believed sex, though a basic need (and thus not confined to the boundaries of monogamy), should not be removed from “serious emotion and from feelings of affection.”  In a particularly moving piece of writing at the end of his life, he described his life as one of seeking for love (and eventually finding it) with one of his daughters also noting that most basic need in her father.

[29] Frankl, “Logotherapy in a Nutshell,” 101–36.

[30] The Nazis would make documentary style films within the ghettoes demonstrating the inhumanity of Jew to Jew.  This was especially so in the activity of Jewish collaborators.  This helped provide the ‘logic’ for their later extermination in the camps.

[31] This question of moral sense is explored deeply by Iris Murdoch in Metaphysics.  She was known for both her literary accomplishments, her keen sense of aesthetics and her moral philosophy.  She wrote much about metaphysics and demonstrated how metaphysics enriched the philosophical landscape.  She interacted with existentialism and wrote various critiques eventually seeking a firmer foundation for moral philosophy, see Existentialists and Mystics, a collection of those essays and shorter articles.

[32] It was somewhat ironic that the Wissenschaftliche Weltauffassung of the Vienna Circle had such an effect on Nazi ideology as most of the members of the Circle were Jewish and left for the US during the 1930s.

[33] Heidegger was to write (1935) that his initial involvement with the Nazis was because he saw in the “inner greatness of the movement” a chance for the “regeneration of the people.”  This was not just for the German Volk but a technological overhaul of Being of all humanity.  This was properly religious in intent (Heidegger went onto to influence theology.)  He was not alone, many Germanophone intellectuals, including Jung, were fellow travelers for a time before admitting they “goofed.”  Wheeler, Martin Heidegger, provides an excellent summary of the complexities of this argument.

[34] Plantinga makes this argument in Where the Conflict Really Lies, Lewis in Miracles.

[35] Mumford, Metaphysics, 99

[36] Murdoch, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals.

[37] Historically, “naked facts” as a concept was associated with the empiricism of Locke.  The mind is viewed as the “tabula rasa” upon which experience creates simple ideas, grouping into complex ones, eventually coalescing into the understanding.  This is now generally described as “naïve” empiricism and has few contemporary defenders.

[38] Ladyman, “Ontological, Epistemological and Methodological Positions,” 303.

[39] Foley, In A. Plantinga, Warrant and Proper Function, backmatter.

[40] Bahnsen, Van Til’s Apologetic, 159.  Bahnsen notes that Wittgenstein rejected this view, asserting that knowledge and belief were distinct categories.  Few have followed Wittgenstein in this view, it is difficult to dismiss that connection between belief and knowledge established by Plato, problematic as it has been.

[41] Bahnsen, Van Til’s Apologetic, 160.

[42] Institutes of the Christian Religion, Bk.1, Ch.4, Sec. 1.  Here Calvin uses the term “manifest” in the terms of the natural revelation in creation rather than implying a natural theology which posits positive evidential inference from nature to God.

[43] Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 111–34.  This became known as simply Structure in conversation.  It is difficult to underestimate Kuhn’s influence and impact at the time of publication.  Though a philosopher of science, his legacy was primarily in other disciples (especially non-scientific ones) who felt his work de-privileged science as a unique, objective enterprise.  That is, Kuhn struggled to escape the relativist implications of his work and ran into problems with his more general thesis of the incommensurability of scientific paradigms.  Thus, although an extremely important milestone in the philosophy of science, he was by no means the last word.

[44] For example, it is common in Information Theory to distinguish between ‘information’ and ‘data.’  “Information” is conceived of as “data” that has been organized in some way.  If sensory data or ‘stimulus’ is where we start (as in Quine, From Stimulus to Science), we have already imposed a preunderstanding on our ‘facts.’

[45] “Paradigm” first appears in Kuhn’s Structure on 11 and is what he called “normal science,” a stable iteration of a particular science.  Kuhn was originally a physicist, and paradigms were easy to discern in physics—Baconian, Newtonian, Einsteinian quantum physics and the Quantum Field Theory (QFT) of Hawkings/Penrose.  Ian Hacking in his introductory essay to the 50^th anniversary edition thus questions how applicable his model is generally to the other sciences but does not question the basic concept of a governing paradigm which became influential far beyond the sciences.

[46] Nagel, Knowledge, 116.

[47] See Macneil, Feeling Good About Truth, for an in-depth examination of truth, particularly its ethical dimension.  See Audi, Epistemology, 245 ff.  for an account of the coherence and correspondence theories of truth.

[48] Quine, Theories and Things, 22–23.  For Quine a “fact” was not even an epistemological issue, it was an issue of fundamental ontology, i.e., you do not argue over the definition of a fact, the collection of facts is just what constitutes science.

[49] This was the background Rorty sketches in introducing his second major book Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity.

[50] Found in an extended fashion in Blackburn, Truth.  Rorty acknowledged the force of his criticism (at one point) in a footnote.

[51] Rorty, Philosophy and Social Hope.  This was a collection of essays during the 1990s during a period just after the zenith of his success.  He could never live consistently with the almost nihilistic implications of his views (Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, xv) and in the decade after spent a lot of time arguing about “ethics” in attempting to tame the postmodern monster he had unleashed.

[52] “Richard Rorty:  The Man Who Killed Truth”—was broadcast on BBC4 on Nov 07, 2003.

[53] Bahnsen, Van Til’s Apologetic, 37–8.

[54] Scriven, ‘The Presumption of Atheism,’ 345 ff.

[55] Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, Bk.1, Ch.6,

[56] For example, Barbara Thiering (1992) in an academically “respectable” higher-critical thesis, asserted that Jesus did not actually die, but was buried in a cave, revived by the magician Simon Magus, married, had three children with Mary Magdalene, divorced, and finally died in Rome.  Plantinga, Knowledge and Christian Belief, 102–3 gives us some other choice examples.

[57] We examine this “worldview” thinking more closely in § 3.5.

[58] A classic statement of this problem is found in Chisholm, The Problem of the Criterion, 3.

[59] Quoted in Bahnsen, Van Til’s Apologetic, 9 n15.

[60] Van Til, The Defense of the Faith, 1–24.

[61] Rom 4:17 (NAS), emphasis added.  There are interesting exegetical issues with this verse as discussed in the NET notes for it, though they are slightly unclear as to the difference in the renderings.  The literal Greek is καλοῦντος τά μή ὄντα ὡς ὄντα (“calling the things not existing [or not being] as existing [being]”), which has the interesting philosophical issue regarding the ontological status of non-existing objects, i.e., what is implied in using the sign “thing”; something which was discussed much in linguistic philosophy by Russell, Quine, the positivists and was revisited by Plantinga also.

[62] Ladyman, “Ontological, Epistemological and Methodological Positions,” 303.

[63] The biblical reasoning of Paul is identical in 1 Co 15:32, “If the dead are not raised, let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die.”  Paul on many occasions expresses a similar thought, “If we have hoped in Christ in this life only, we are of all men most to be pitied.”  Paul was certain of his metaphysics and his claims to knowledge, “For this reason I also suffer these things, but I am not ashamed; for I know whom I have believed, and I am convinced that He is able to guard what I have entrusted to Him until that day” (2Tim 1:12).  The perfect tense of “believe” in the Greek emphasizes this was a life-changing decision and encounter for Paul.

[64] Both Sartre and Camus subscribed to what might be called versions of absurdism, see Aronson, Albert Camus.

[65] A profound, controversial, and provocative account is provided by historian Paul Johnson in Intellectuals, which is a salient, rabid deconstruction of the intellectual caste.

[66] Strawson, Skepticism, 2–3.

[67] Plantinga does note that there is a minority view of Hume that he was not a sceptic at all and that his conclusion was best described as a pragmatic one—we must live ignoring our skepticism.  However, there is little doubt that he was (and is) the putative progenitor of the skeptical clan.

[68] Ayer, Language, Truth, and Logic, First Edition Preface.

[69] Clark, ‘The Wheaton Lectures,’ 25–124.

[70] Nash, “Gordon Clark’s Theory of Knowledge,” 125–75.

[71] A general account is provided in Penelhum, Fideism.

[72] Clark and his followers had argued to distinguish “dogmatism” from fideism, but Clark in his final book Three Types, 104, did finally describe his position as fideist, accepting dogmatism was a form of fideism.  Clark was a competent logician and held to a neo-platonic view in the early part of his career.  His confidence in logic was absolute, “In the beginning was the Logic, and the Logic was with God and the Logic was God” (his translation of John 1:1 in his Logic.)  He commits the etymological fallacy here; Logos was not used in the sense which “Logic” was used until a number of centuries after John wrote those words.

[73] Clark, Historiography, 337.

[74] Clark, Three Types of Religious Philosophy, 8, 139.

[75] These were centered around Trinity Divinity School which is still the main source of Clark’s material under the auspices of the Trinity Foundation.

[76] Nash, op cit.

[77] Bahnsen, CVT and Gordon Clarke.

[78] Butler, Plantinga.

[79] Clark taught at Trinity Divinity school for many years, and it became the focus for opposition to Van Til’s apologetic when Van Til criticized Clark for failing to recognize the Creator–creature distinction which led to a bad-tempered argument during the 1940s which culminated in Clarke leaving the OPC.  Trinity Divinity School still has zealous Clarkians to this day who still take exception to Van Til’s criticism of Clark’s position and evidence that Van Til was “neo-Orthodox.”  As Bahnsen, CVT and Clarke, indicates in clarifying the political, theological, and philosophical issues around that controversy, it would have been most peculiar for Van Til to be caricatured as neo-orthodox by the Clarkians when he was the most forceful exposer of that movement as heterodox and no friend of evangelical Christianity, even being complemented on that fact by some of his most forceful apologetic opponents.

[80] Bahnsen, CVT and Clarke.  The final 10 minutes of this presentation are a forceful rebuff of what Bahnsen see as the ultimate problem with Clarke’s position.  This audio presentation follows the contours of Bahnsen, Van Til’s Apologetic, 669–72.

[81] Huxley, Ends and Means, 273.

[82] Huxley, Ends and Means, 274.

[83] Einstein’s early quantum theory predicted that the photons of light which he said made up a light wave (it was normative in the contemporary physics of his time to consider an entity to be either a wave or a particle; it would be a logical contradiction to be both), having a nominal mass, would be bent by a gravitational field.  He predicted a detectable delay in comparison to the Newtonian equation in viewing an eclipse of Jupiter because of the slight bend of the light would become significant because of the vast distances involved between the Earth and Jupiter.  It was confirmed with a remarkable degree of accuracy to 10 decimal places.  Previous microscopic “quantum” effects such as this, which were so small they had been dismissed when measuring on the macro-scale, were found to be present when researchers revisited previous datasets where they had dismissed the aberrations as limitations of the measuring apparatus.

[84] Nagel, Knowledge, 55.

[85] Plantinga, Warranted Christian Belief, 219 n. 29.

[86] In fairness, it should be noted that not all philosophers will accept the legitimacy of the transcendental mode of argument, which is why we will consider it in a chapter on its own.

[87] Rorty, in an interview with a sympathetic interviewer as reported in the posthumously published An Ethics for Today, had pointedly refused to condemn such a guard, ‘moral condemnation is too easy here.’

[88] This argument is elegantly made by Blackburn in his critique of Rorty and postmodernism at numerous places in Blackburn, Truth, e.g., §§ 6.8, 8.6.  In criticizing Rorty’s position he pushed very hard on this point, recalling Aristotle’s maxim that if ‘our ethics permit murder, there is something wrong with our ethics’; an observation Wittgenstein had also reflected on when he asserted that philosophy must be lived and thus judged through the processes of life itself, it is our “form of life.”  Blackburn took very seriously Rorty’s quip “truth is what your contemporaries let you get away with,” and as he noted “it is shocking enough to be something Rorty’s contemporaries wouldn’t let him get away with,” (op cit., 31).  Blackburn’s critique of Rorty and postmodernism in general was perhaps the most sustained and thorough one in the literature, see also https://planetmacneil.org/blog/richard-rortys-iconoclastic-deconstruction-of-philosophy/ .

[89] Blackburn, Truth, 220.

[90] There is a major Darwin correspondence project due to complete collation of his correspondence (numbering in excess of 8500 letters), see https://www.hps.cam.ac.uk/research/projects/darwin-correspondence .  Darwin had been impressed by the work of Comte as his naturalism strengthened later in his life.

[91] Zuiddam, “Was evolution invented by Greek Philosophers?” 68–75.  I feel Zuiddam never quite expunges the thesis of the origins of naturalism (and hence evolutionism) with the Presocratics which was blatant by the time of the post-Socratic Epicurus.  His ‘retrospect’ at the end of the paper and its footnotes perhaps admits as much but the paper is a provocative and cautionary read.

[92] Bahnsen, Evolution (Scientific and Theistic).  In this recording, Bahnsen gives a rigorous and thorough critique referring to the paucity of the empirical evidence.  Darwin only offered two instances in his Origins.

[93] It was only with Huxley, Evolution:  The Modern Synthesis, that an attempt was made to reconcile Mendel with Neo-Darwinism.  By this point “classical” Darwinism had been quietly shelved.

[94] Aldous Huxley was his grandson, as was famous biologist and synthetic evolutionist Sir Julian Huxley.

[95] Gould, The Structure of Evolutionary Theory, 755–64.

[96] Gould discusses this very interpretation in Evolutionary Theory, Appendix A.

[97] Gould wrote one of the best critiques of socio-biology in his Mismeasure of Man which was a direct assault on a genetic basis for reducing intelligence and the potential for human improvement to a single measure (the IQ).  The later edition containing a critical response to Murray and Herrnstein’s The Bell Curve which equated social inequality with intelligence measured using similar assumptions.  He also intersected with religious themes in a serious, non-trivial way.  Gould’s thinking was far more nuanced and capable than his theory of punctuated equilibrium would suggest with his work describing extremely thoroughly the inadequacies of Darwinism and the imperative for its revision, it was just his own theory was equally as inadequate and philosophically bankrupt.  He, like Dawkins, had a level of commitment to evolution as fact, in his own words “a metaphysical assumption,” which could only be described as religious, defining ‘religious’ as the dominant presupposition in one’s life.

[98] Such is the religious and dogmatic zeal of the evolutionists that the mere attempt of a major exhibition at a National History Museum in 2019 to highlight some problems with the theory caused a national level debate, accusations of religious fundamentalism and right-wing conspiracy theories undermining serious science.

[99] Gould, Evolutionary Theory attempts a metaphysical analysis at various points during his explication of his revised theory.  His tome runs to almost 1500 pages, and it is to his credit that he recognizes the underpinnings of evolutionism in its major forms are always metaphysical and pretheoretically so.  What is so vivid in his exposition of his revised theory is how thoroughly he discards competing theories of evolution such as Dawkins’ Selfish Gene thesis (calling it a ‘fallacy’), Lamarckian ‘myths’, and a detailed refutation of individual innovations through the 20^th century by just about every significant evolutionist up to the late 1960s.  He first proposed his theory in 1972 and was totally committed to its inevitability and correctness as a matter of historical determinism.

[100] The exchange between Dawkins and his allies with Gould and his allies was (and remains, even after Gould’s death) particularly caustic.  The important substance of the debate, however, is found accessibly in Sterelny, Dawkins vs. Gould.  Gould was ‘happy’ to return in kind Dennett’s ill-tempered rubbishing of his work.  It is of note that Sterelny is a philosopher and in the final summary at the end of the book we sense that clearly; this debate is about the presuppositions of a worldview, not about the ‘evidence.’

[101] Plantinga, Where the Conflict Really Lies, 24.

[102] Plantinga, Where the Conflict Really Lies, 24.

[103] Dawkins once interviewed a senior Bishop who had no interest in contesting Dawkins basic claims about evolution as a fact, in paraphrase “none of us believe that creation story now [that silly Babylonian creation myth].”  Dawkins’ contempt for such intellectual capitulation I cannot help but find myself in agreement with, even though I have refused to pay my television license after the BBC aired that same 2012 series, owing to the lack of balance in it overall.

[104] This is questionable.  See https://planetmacneil.org/blog/evolutionary-theory-and-probability-theory/ .

[105] Quoted in Plantinga, Where The Conflict Really Lies, 28 ff.

[106] For example, Dawkins, The God Delusion, Ch. 2.

[107] Lewis, God in the Dock, 244.

[108] Plantinga, Where the Conflict Really Lies, 38.

[109] Rarefaction was considered a merit by the logical positivists and in its putative successor, the naturalist programme.  Indeed, rarefaction meant making it congenial to a naturalist, scientistic account.  Interestingly, Huxley in Ends and Means, esp. Ch. XIV and XV, writing at the zenith of logical positivism, completely rejected this rarefaction though he had once been enamored by the scientific and humanistic worldview.  Huxley never signed the first Humanist Manifesto that was published just as he released his Brave New World in 1932.

[110] A phrase for which we thank Kant who used it when discussing the traditional arguments for God’s existence.

[111] Quine & Ullian, The Web of Belief, 88–89.  Quine in this passage is referring explicitly to the influential work by Nelson Goodman Fact, where he challenged an evolutionary explanation of why certain inductions would have survival value.  Quine is honest enough to admit there is no satisfactory solution to what Goodman has argued that is not begging the question.  As Gould spoke of his own pretheoretical commitment, Quine demonstrates the same metaphysical commitment to some version of evolutionary theory.

[112] Lewis helped found the Socratic Society at Oxford which hosted some of the liveliest debates of the era.  The Anscombe–Lewis debate is the subject of much misrepresentation, see https://planetmacneil.org/blog/the-lewis-and-anscombe-debate.  Anscombe complimented Lewis on his revised argument.

[113] Plantinga, Warrant and Proper Function, 237, n.28.

[114] Plantinga, Warrant and Proper Function, 216–38.

[115] Lewis, Miracles—A Preliminary Study, ch.2.

[116] Audi, Epistemology, i.

[117] See for example Chisholm (1973, 1989) who spent most of his career trying to resolve the problematics surrounding it.  In his own words, he was “obsessed with the problem.”

[118] Clifford & James, The Ethics of Belief / The Will to Believe.

[119] Gettier, “Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?”, 121–23.

[120] A significant epoch in this literature was its documentation by Shope, The Analysis of Knowing.

[121] Nagel, Knowledge, 61.

[122] This was a famous example by Bertrand Russell in 1948.  Other examples are provided by Nagel, Knowledge, 46–49; 58.

[123] Plantinga, Warrant and Proper Function, 32.

[124] Nagel, Knowledge, 55 ff., 114–16., ch.4.

[125] It should also be noted that Plantinga showed that others had already posited specific scenarios which would be recognized as examples of ‘Gettier’ problems long before Gettier was even born, e.g., Russell’s clock (1912) and Meinong’s (d.1920) conditioned auditory hallucinations (Gesamtausgabe, 398–9.)  There were also examples in ancient Indian and Chinese philosophy.  However, Gettier managed to summarize concisely the problem.

[126] After Thomas Reid, who in Plantinga’s view, was a “much neglected” contemporary of Hume.  In his preface to Warrant and Proper Function, Plantinga acknowledges his debt to Reid.  Nichols & Gideon provide an excellent overview of Reid’s work and influence.  There is substantial extant communication between Reid and Hume who were Scots contemporaries.

[127] For example, in modern “pluralistic” or “multicultural” societies, each ethnic community will probably have its own conception of “common sense” or what is normative and acceptable behavior.

[128] Plantinga (1993a, b).

[129] In Warranted Christian Belief, 218–27.  Plantinga effectively exegetes Reid’s critique of Hume and exposes what Plantinga calls the “scandal of skepticism”:  we rely, assuming the reliability of the faculty of reason, to reach our skeptical conclusion about reason.

[130] Nagel, Knowledge, 61.

[131] Nagel, Knowledge, 66.

[132] Plantinga (1993a, 1993b, 2000.)

[133] Plantinga, Knowledge and Christian Belief.

[134] Plantinga, Warrant: The Current Debate, 10 ff.

[135] Plantinga, Knowledge and Christian Belief, 30.

[136] Plantinga, Knowledge and Christian Belief, 89.

[137] Foley in Plantinga, Warrant and Proper Function, backmatter.  Foley.

[138] Butler, Plantinga.

[139] Plantinga, Warrant and Proper Function, 237.

[140] Plantinga, Knowledge and Christian Belief, 35; the full account is found in Plantinga, Warrant and Proper Function, chaps. 3–7.

[141] Plantinga, Knowledge and Christian Belief, 30–35.  This is the highly abridged version of the full argument found in Plantinga, Warranted Christian Belief, 167–356.

[142] Plantinga, “Self-Profile,” 55–64.

[143] Van Frassen, known primarily as a philosopher of science, is very provocative on this point, asserting that a robust definition of naturalism is extremely problematic to formulate.

[144] Quoted by Plantinga, Warranted Christian Belief, 227.  Bas van Frassen is known for his seminal work in the philosophy of science and his theory of constructive empiricism, which was an anti-realist conception of science, positing that a scientific theory aims to be empirically adequate only.  Van Frassen is also of note for being an advocate of transcendental arguments which will be considered later in this book.

[145] Strawson, Skepticism and Naturalism,1.

[146] Bahnsen, Presuppositional Apologetics and Always Ready.  The former is the more academic development of the latter, which was only rediscovered posthumously by Bahnsen’s family clearing out his office after his premature departure from heart failure.

[147] Berkhower had criticized him on this basis and CVT responded directly acknowledging the fault in his Festschrift Jerusalem and Athens, 203–4.

[148] Plantinga, “Self-Profile,” 33 ff.

[149] Butler, Plantinga.

[150] A further discussion of the development of Plantinga’s ‘middle period’ is found in Reformed Epistemology.  As noted already, our discussion here moves past this period, to his most mature work which bears the slightly awkward Extended A/C (Aquinas/Calvin) designation.

[151] Plantinga, Knowledge, 113–14.

[152] Plantinga, Knowledge, 113–14.

[153] Plantinga, Warranted Christian Belief, vii.

[154] Butler, “Religious Epistemology Seminar,” MB208–MB210.

[155] Jeffreys, “How Reformed Is Reformed Epistemology?”, 419–31.

[156] The ‘theological’ question is much more whether Plantinga has a biblical defense of his position.  As Bahnsen provided the detailed exegesis for Van Til, it may be required that Plantinga’s thought would need the attention of a theologian to defend it (if possible).

[157] Calvin, Institutes, loc. 795.

[158] Van Til was characterized (accurately, I believe) by Bahnsen as “using the vocabulary [and] logic of idealism but in a way that the idealist logicians could not because of their own non-theistic presuppositions.”  Van Til expounds this in Systematic Theology, Ch.2.

[159] Anderson, Cornelius Van Til and Alvin Plantinga and If Knowledge Then God.

[160] Prov. 26:4–5 (NET); cf. Plantinga, Self-Profile, 33.

[161] Van Til said as much in response to a question as to why he did not apply detailed historical criticism of his opponents, he answered it was because his colleagues in other departments had the expertise to do it much better on an historical basis than himself.  His skill and gift were in philosophy, and he would proceed on that basis.

[162] Plantinga, Warranted Christian Belief, 499; Knowledge and Christian Belief, 126.

[163] Knowledge and Christian Belief, x.

[164] I detect a hint of Kierkegaardian existentialism in Plantinga here, a “leap of faith” seems to be required.  Both of his 1958 published papers (his first) dealt with existentialist themes though he was always a rigorous analytical philosopher in method.  See https://planetmacneil.org/blog/the-fideistic-leap/ for a broader discussion of Kierkegaard.

[165] Plantinga, Knowledge and Christian Belief, 126.

[166] Plantinga, Warranted Christian Belief, 499.

[167] Butler acknowledges in early assessments (1997) the substantial contribution of Plantinga and his criticisms of unbelieving philosophy.  In later work, he seems far more ambivalent towards Plantinga though still acknowledging his status, accomplishment, and contribution, see Butler, Biblical Presuppositional Apologetics.  In his latter presentations he was frustrated that Plantinga had not progressed in his understanding of Van Til over a period of 20 years.

[168] Bahnsen, Van Til’s Apologetic, 715.

[169] Butler prefers to consider ethics as a subheading of a wider theory of values, with aesthetics as a sister category.  As Wittgenstein noted “Ethics and aesthetics are one” (Tractatus, 6.421) and I will mean both.

[170] Ramsey, Christian Ethics.  This is an older but an excellent quality primer by some of the most influential ethicists of the early post-positivist period where philosophical thought regarding ethics was again expanding beyond the confines of verificationism and psychologized ethical discourse.

[171] Blackburn, Being Good, 1.

[172] Van Til, The Defense of the Faith, 74.

[173] Willard, The Disappearance of Moral Knowledge, viii.

[174] Zak advances the thesis that the hormone “oxytocin” explains our moral behavior, “Am I actually saying that a single molecule…accounts for why some people give freely of themselves and others are cold-hearted bastards…?  In a word, ‘yes.’” (Zak, The Moral Molecule, 11).  He remains an entrepreneur and a professor in good standing, still pioneering this new ‘science’ (neuroeconomics, immersion neuroscience), see https://pauljzak.com/; he claims the full authority of twenty years of “peer reviewed” research.  As a philosophical exercise, this field provides great examples to test against Mahner’s Demarcating Science from Non-Science criteria for distinguishing science from pseudo or non-science.

In view of the “peer reviewed” status of this research, I would be amiss to omit the general point that “peer review” is not always an objective process but reflective of far wider interests, sometimes informal censorship of dissident scholarship, sometimes reflective of the kudos gained by publishing your ‘revolutionary’ paper, sometimes purely of your corporate buying-power, sometimes as a means of political control.

[175] Here the references are to Aristotle’s division in the Complete Works; Aristotle’s principal ethical writings are also found in The Nicomachean Ethics which has a helpful contextualizing introduction.

[176] Blackburn, Being Good, sect. 8–9.

[177] Sachs, “Aristotle: Ethics.”

[178] Schlick, Problems of Ethics, 1.

[179] Watson first presented his theory in 1913 in an article in Psychological Review and established a distinct school of psychology that viewed human behavior as governed by scientific laws and thus being entirely deterministic.  Quine was to recount how impressed he was in reading Watson and his influence on Quine’s rejection of mentalistic accounts of language and his general psychologized perspective on naturalizing epistemology and ontology cannot be underestimated.

[180] Skinner presented his utopian vision in his novel Walden Two (1948) and the philosophical statement (or ‘post-scientific’ justification) of his programme in Beyond Freedom and Dignity (1971).  See https://planetmacneil.org/blog/skinners-utopia/ .

[181] Much more could and should be said on the imperative for freedom and liberty as central to the Hebrew and Christian scriptures, see my Politics.

[182] Bahnsen, “The Theonomic Position,” 52.

[183] Van Til, The Defense of the Faith, 74.

[184] Sometimes in biblical studies “the Law” is taken to just refer to the Pentateuch (the Five Books of Moses); similarly, “the Law and the Prophets” describes just the collection of the Pentateuch and the prophetic books.  However, in the theonomical sense, “The Law” is just a shorthand for all of scripture as is often the case in the Christian scriptures, especially in the writings of Paul (who was also an expert in “The Law” in the narrower sense).

[185] Van Til, The Defense of the Faith, 77.

[186] Notwithstanding, it is easy to be overly judgmental regarding the attitude of Luther, Calvin, and some of the Reformed fathers to the “radical” reformation.  They felt that the progress of the Reformation was disrupted by the popular agitation associated with some of the radical groups which gave the Papist kings excuse to attack the Reformed communities.  With the eventual attempted insurrection at Munster violently crushed, it seemed their caution was warranted.

[187] See Verduin, Reformers and Their Stepchildren.

[188] Kant, Religion, was his most mature piece of moral philosophy.  It is of interest that he submitted the work via the theology faculty in case it needed to be “censored” for impiety.

[189] See https://planetmacneil.org/blog/scripture-and-the-post-darwinian-controversy/ .

[190] It is thus not merely a form of crude Divine Command Theory that some 20^th century Christian ethicists such as Wolfhart Pannenberg found “so unpersuasive today.”

[191] Noll, America’s God, 21.

[192] Noll, America’s God, 25.

[193] This was in reaction to the admission to the Lord’s supper those from covenant families just on that basis even though they had a lifestyle that showed no interest in piety or the things of God.  See https://planetmacneil.org/blog/jonathon-edwards-and-the-destruction-of-the-puritan-canopy-in-early-us-history/ .

[194] Noll, America’s God, 50.

[195] Noll has an appendix in which he addresses the issue of the historiography of the “Christian Republicanism” with regards to the founding of the United States.  The issue of the role and the measure of influence of Christian thinking is a highly contested arena, often dominated by the political interests of the parties.  His point is that Christian apologists tend to overplay or give exclusive place to the role of biblical thought, and secular authorities try to downplay or eliminate its influence.  In many ways the debate is more acrimonious and more intense than it was when Noll wrote, particularly in the wake of the Trump era when President Trump held the door open to Christians in a manner not known since the era of Lincoln or Washington.  A notable recent contribution to the debate based on validating contested historical accounts against the primary sources is Barton & Barton, American Story.

[196] Finney, The Autobiography of Charles G. Finney, 8.

[197] Finney, The Life and Works of Charles Finney, vol. 1. This collection includes work on systematic theology, revivalism, autobiography, sermons, and Christian ethics.

[198] For example, owing to Machen’s stringent defense of the Bible he is sometimes misidentified by critics (e.g., Barr Fundamentalism, 165) as a “fundamentalist” or a “conservative evangelical” but early fundamentalists were often obscurantist and advocated withdrawal from mainstream culture and academia.  See https://planetmacneil.org/blog/the-fundamentals-and-fundamentalism/ .

[199] Machen, Education, Christianity, and the State, 41–42.

[200] A concise summary is found in Bahnsen, Theonomic Position.  See https://planetmacneil.org/blog/theonomy-in-christian-ethics/ for further links.

[201] See North (ed.), Foundations.

[202] Bahnsen, No Other Standard, 3–4.

[203] The Puritan Westminster Confession is generally accepted as theonomical and as advocating civil society based on God’s Law as revealed in both covenants.

[204] Austin, Divine Command Theory.  But see also n. 547.

[205] A highly compressed summary of the emergence of the movement and the major personalities in it is found in North & DeMar, Christian Reconstruction, ix–xxi.  Christian Reconstructionism was also the subject of my master’s dissertation, Dominion Theology.  There I argued (correctly, I maintain) for its orthodoxy.

[206] In a personal exchange where I congratulated an academic theologian on his account of presuppositional apologetics, I was most surprised when he said, ‘I am no longer a presuppositionalist as classical (Calvinist) apologetics was so Thomist [so I have reverted to it].’  Ironically, that Thomism was precisely the heart of Van Til’s objection to Warfieldian (Old Princeton) apologetics.

[207] The Hebrew word ְּרֵאשִׁ֖ית (re’shiyth) refers both to being first in position and in temporality (time), similarly reflected in languages such as Gaelic where the word ‘toiseach’ has both the positional and the temporal sense (hence, the title of the Irish PM).

[208] Alston, “Some Suggestions for Divine Command Theorists,” 303–26.

[209] Bosserman in The Trinity provides us with a book length exposition of this complex, but foundational aspect of Van Tillian thought.  The pertinent level of the argument here is that only a Triune God guarantees the unity of thought and purpose, i.e., God is good all the time.  Anything more than three persons could mean possible pairing to the exclusion of the others and a disunity in the composite personality of God.  It is also interesting to consider that the psychologist Jung advocated a quaternity for this very purpose that the fourth element of “evil” would “complete” God whereas it would do exactly the opposite, it would fragment the unity of the divine personality.

[210] Bosserman, The Trinity, 235–36.

[211] Col 2:3, NAS.

[212] A contemporary of Plantinga’s recommended to the APA the term “alvinise” to describe a rigorous deconstruction of what appeared to be a simple problem into its complex parts!  For example, the common philosophical proposition that “some things do not exist” was proved in a standard way by logicians by saying “Pegasus was a mystical beast from a fantasy, that proves there are some things that do not exist.”  Plantinga later rejected that view with great rigor by drilling down into what “thing” necessarily entails.  Similarly, Kenny, History, 796, pays homage to Plantinga for “unsolving” the “solved” philosophical problem (after Russell) of the ontological argument.

[213] Plantinga, “Advice to Christian Philosophers,” 296–315; “Afterword,” In Sennett, The Analytic Theist, 353–58.

[214] Edgar & Oliphint, Christian Apologetics, 589.  As Edgar & Oliphint note, this has been a controversial aspect of Plantinga’s approach in Reformed circles.

[215] Bartholomew & Goheen, Christian Philosophy.

[216] Greg Bahnsen, a one-time student but later close friend of Van Til recounts his visits to Van Til’s home after his retirement and his habit of walking every day, “evangelizing” the nuns at the convent close to where he lived.  He also sent open letters of “gospel hope” to various national leaders.

[217] Butler, “Religious Epistemology Seminar,” MB209 ff.

[218] Plantinga, & Robbins, “On Christian Philosophy,” 617–23.

[219] Plantinga, “Advice to Christian Philosophers,” 297.

[220] Plantinga & Robbins, “On Christian Philosophy,” 618.

[221] Bahnsen, Van Til’s Apologetic, 640–1.

[222] This issue is examined at great length with reference to Van Til’s work contrasted with other apologetic methods by Bahnsen, Van Til’s Apologetic, ch.8.

[223] Van Til, “Response to R.J. Rushdoony,” 348.

[224] Neurath, “Protocol Statements,” 91–99; Neurath, “Foundations of the Social Sciences,” 47.

[225] Cat, “Otto Neurath.”

[226] Schaeffer, “He Is There and He Is Not Silent,” 276–358.

[227] Bahnsen, Presuppositional Apologetics—Stated and Defended., 241–260.  Bahnsen here performs a critique of Schaeffer in which he demonstrates Schaeffer was inconsistent and incoherent in the details of his apologetic whilst respecting his general accomplishments, “[F]or the most part he has done a better job of relating biblical Christianity to the whole of life…Though what he has to say has not been thorough in any one area, all of his works suggest valuable insights with which no substantial difference need be taken.” (Presuppositional Apologetics, 241.)

[228] Packer, Francis A Schaeffer Trilogy, xi–xiv.

[229] The post-modern pragmatist, Richard Rorty, pointedly refused to do this in interviews with sympathetic interviewers, “moral condemnation is too easy here” (Rorty, Take Care of Freedom, 96–103.)  Blackburn, one of the fiercest critics of Rorty on ethical grounds, asserted (politely) this demonstrated moral bankruptcy, in Blackburn Ruling Passions and Truth.

[230] Bahnsen, Van Til’s Apologetic, 128–29.  According to Bahnsen who was taught by Van Til, he would challenge his students to unpack this aphoristic triplet to demonstrate that they had mastered the basic features of his apologetic philosophy.

[231] Bahnsen, “Socrates or Christ: The Reformation of Christian Apologetics,” 191–240.

[232] William Edgar, “Introduction,” 3 ff.

[233] For example, see Chapter 1 ‘On Method’ in Charles Hodge, Systematic Theology, first published 1845.  The treatment of “theology as a science” suggests presuppositions based upon Enlightenment humanist thought rather than Reformation thought.  Alister McGrath, Passion For Truth, engages in a lengthy analysis of the domination of Enlightenment thought within the old Princeton and Barr pours caustic, ill-tempered scorn on Warfield for the “architectonic confidence in reason” (Barr, Fundamentalism, 272).

[234] Rushdoony, Van Til and the Limits of Reason, loc. 234.

[235] Bahnsen, “Socrates or Christ,” 191–240.

[236] Bahnsen, Van Til, B B Warfield, and Abraham Kuyper.  The interrelation between these men and how Van Til reconciled their apparently opposing positions with a novel synthesis, is explored in detail in an accessible fashion.  Most of the material in this presentation is also found in written form in Bahnsen’s “Socrates or Christ.”  It is unclear whether the essay was updated in the later edition before Bahnsen’s death in 1995; there are some indications the text as whole was updated for the reprinted edition.

[237] Van Til, Christian Apologetics, 55–56.

[238] Hodge & Warfield, “Inspiration,” Presbyterian Review.

[239] How Warfield attempted to avoid this critical weakness was by asserting it was not possible to prove any error was present in the autograph (because we did not have the autographs), it had been introduced in the copying process—a novel inversion of the text-critical principle.  See Macneil, Scripture and the Post-Darwinian Controversy for a discussion.

[240] It should also be noted that though Kuyper formally rejected apologetics, he nevertheless, in practice, engaged in a rigorous defence, regeneration, and application of Christian thought to the wider culture as evidenced in his Lectures (1898).

[241] See Van Til, Christian Apologetics (2nd ed.), 56 n.1.

[242] Plantinga, God and Other Minds.

[243] Plantinga, Knowledge and Christian Belief, x.

[244] Plantinga, Warranted Christian Belief, 217.

[245] Plantinga, Warranted Christian Belief, 217.

[246] William Lane Craig was a case in point.  Anderson, CVT and Plantinga outlines this controversy.  John Frame, a former student of Van Til, now full Professor, took issue with Craig over that assertion and it is a strange one; Van Til was recognized as an exceptional student by the noted metaphysician A.A. Bowman (then Professor of Logic) who offered him a graduate scholarship at Princeton.  He studied Christian philosophy under Jellema (as Plantinga did) and was awarded a PhD in philosophy.

[247] That is, many of his works were broad in scope and intent giving the impression for the uninitiated that they lacked focus.  There were some notable exceptions to this criticism, both of his works dealing with neo-orthodoxy (1946/1974) are recognized by friends and foes alike as systematic and rigorous critiques.

[248] It was precisely these considerations that inspired Bahnsen to write his commentary and guide to Van Til, see Van Til, xvii ff.  Butler, Bahnsen, gives firsthand testimony of conversations on this issue.  The most explosive misinterpretation of Van Til was what he meant by “analogical reasoning”—for his detractors this was a retreat into irrationality; for Van Til it was a recognition of the qualitative difference in the quality of thinking between creator and creature.  This was quite a different sense than how it had been previously used.

[249] Anderson, If Knowledge Then God, 25–27.

[250] Ó Murchadha, Phenomenology of Christian Life, Preface.