"The Knowledge of God" Series

Here are the links to "The Knowledge of God" series posts:

Scriptural Derivation

Introduction: The Necessity of Theology and Apologetics (1 Peter 3:8-17, “A Ready Defense”)
Part A (Intro.)
Part B (1 Peter 3:8-17)

The Doctrine of God
Part A (Unity, Eternality, and Aseity of God)
Part B (Incomprehensibility, Immutability, and Holiness)
Part C (Creator and Sustainer, Omnipresence, Omniscience, and Omnipotence)
Part D (The Lord of History, Incomparability, and the Personal Nature)

Creation and Man
Part A (Genesis 1:1-2:3)
Part B (The Enuma Elish, Genesis 2:4-25, and Genesis 3:1-24)
Part C (Genesis 4-10, and Genesis 11:1-9)
Part D (Christ: The Assault and Triumph Over the Continuity of Being)

The Irrationality of Sin (Romans 1:18-32, “The Exchange”)

The Wisdom of God (1 Corinthians 1:18-2:16, "The Wisdom of the Wise")
Part A (1 Corinthians 1:18-31)
Part B (1 Corinthians 2:1-16 and Excursus on Various Other Passages)

Pressing the Antithesis (Acts 17:22-34, “The Covenant Lawsuit”)

Philosophical Application

Overcoming the Anti-Metaphysical Bias

A Refutation of Scientific Realism

The Transcendental Argument for God, Part I (God’s Existence)
Part A (Materialism)
Part B (Dualistic Atheism, Vitalistic Atheism, Pan-psychism, Polytheism, Dualism, Monistic Pantheism, Dualistic Pantheism, and Panentheism)
Part C (Platonism, Aristotelianism, Post-Modernism, A Possible Objection, Conclusion, and Appendix: The Problem of Universals)

The Transcendental Argument for God, Part II (The Necessity of Special Revelation)
Part A (Rationalism, Empiricism, Kantianism, and Modern Idealism)
Part B (Logical Positivism, Probability Theory, Conclusion, and Appendix: Which Revelatory Theism?)

The Knowledge of God, The Necessity of Special Revelation, Part B

Logical Positivism

Logical Positivism was an extremely empirical philosophy and probably the most anti-religious knowledge theory that ever was. It was started by a group of philosophers that became known as the “Vienna Circle” and was propounded greatly by the Oxford philosopher, Alfred J. Ayer. Greg Bahnsen explains:

“Ayer maintained that any genuinely meaningful and factual statement must pass the “verifiability criterion” (which he could never successfully formulate) – to the effect that any meaningful statement is in theory verifiable by observation, either directly or indirectly (by observation of what can be deduced from it along with other “legitimate” statements). The philosopher does not have available to him any truths that are not accessible by the other sciences, and so the job of the philosopher becomes that of clarifying the language of science, developing logical sophistication, and purifying the field of the nonsense of metaphysics and ethics.”¹

Thus, something should be believed in only if it could be empirically “verified”, and so, all metaphysics went out the window. Nowadays, very few philosophers would hold to such a self-debunking theory, and the only ones who do are very naïve, philosophically ignorant, and logically untrained scientists and militant atheists. Here’s why:

1. Arbitrary: They simply defined metaphysics out of existence instead of actually attempting to prove it to be impossible. How could they have possibly have come to the knowledge that the *only* means of knowledge is empirical verifiability. Wouldn’t that first require infinite knowledge of the universe? Thus, they were arbitrary.

2. Secondary Hypothesis: Given human nature’s propensity to be dogmatic (whether people will admit it or not), scientists always invent secondary hypothesis to protect their theory from being disproven by newly discovered evidence. This would make theories unfalsifiable, and thus, unverifiable.

3. No Morals, No “Ought”s: Because Logical Positivism denied moral realism, it had to, of logical necessity, deny any “ought”s or “should”s. But on this basis, how could they say that one *ought* to believe something if it is verifiable? If there are no real ethics, then there is no necessary reason why someone should believe in something, verifiable or not!

4. No Connection Between Facts and Statements: “If “facts” are the actual states of affairs as they are directly experienced (say, the sensation of redness and roundness at this place and at this time), but “statements” are verbal utterances (consisting of written or voiced words like “red” or “round”), in what sense can we “compare” facts and statements? They are completely different kinds of things. (For instance, the word “round” does not look – is not physically sensed as – round.)”²

5. Communication Impossible: “At this point Ayer asserts that the Vienna Circle had not solved the basic epistemological problem. What is really meant when we say that a statement is verifiable? Does it mean merely that statements about facts are internally coherent with one another? Does it not also mean that statements must be verifiable in relation to facts? Then, if I make statements about my experience of facts, how can I convey the meaning of my experience to you? For my experience is private to me, and your experience is private to you; how then, if we each have to interpret every statement of fact as referring to our own experience, do we ever succeed in communicating with each other?”³

6. Self-Defeating: The verifiability criterion was itself unverifiable. That is, the belief – that for any statement to be true it had to be empirically verified – was itself not empirically verifiable. Thus, by its own standard, the verifiability criterion should not be regarded as true.

7. A Metaphysic Itself: Apropos (6), because the verifiability criterion was a presupposed axiom, it fell under the category of metaphysics, and so, by the Vienna Circle’s own standard, it was nonsense.

8. Other Arguments Against Anti-Metaphysics Apply: (See my lesson, “Overcoming the Anti-Metaphysical Bias”.)

9. Most Arguments Against Scientific Realism Apply: (See my lesson, “A Refutation of Scientific Realism”.)

Scientific Realism

I dealt with Scientific Realism in a previous lesson. (See my lesson, “A Refutation of Scientific Realism”.)

Probability Theory⁴

Having given up on finding a path to full assurance, some epistemologists have tried making a new path with statistical or “probable” knowledge. Instead, they say, a belief should be held in degrees of assurance in proportion to the probability that it is true. This probability is derived from something such as the frequency of occurrence or from the number of people (usually specialists) who hold to that belief.

For example, the degree to which a scientific theory is thought to be true is in proportion to the number of scientists who believe in it and the extent of time to which it has been believed. Thus, a scientific theory should be held with a great degree of assurance if it is believed in by the vast majority of scientists and has been for a great length of time.

Another example would be in determining whether something in history happened or not. The degree to which a historical event should be believed to have happened is proportional to the frequency to which other similar historical events have happened. Atheists usually apply this to miracles (following David Hume⁵). Therefore, they say, miracles are unlikely since they have not happened⁶ and do not happen now.

Of course, using probability theory as an epistemological base is pure folly for the following reasons:

1. Requires Complete Knowledge of the System: How can one even start thinking about what the probabilities are until one has complete knowledge of the entire system? Probabilities will change as new information about the system becomes known. Critics of probability theory have also pointed out the problem of “priors”:

“The mathematical theory of probability allows us to derive more probabilities once we have some probabilities. To give a simple example, given a probability of x for proposition P, the theory tells us that the probability of ~P equals 1 – x; but it does not provide the probability of P, or ~P, or any other proposition ex nihilo. These probabilities we have to start with, and that are not provided by probability theory itself, are usually called the prior probabilities or just priors. How do we come to our priors? This question is differently answered by subjectivists and those hoping for some kind of logical interpretation of probability. According to the former, our priors are just our subjective degrees of confidence. These, of course, may be vastly different for different individuals, but so be it. Those in favour of logical probability hold that there is some objective, or at least more objective, way of determining prior probabilities. It has been suggested, for instance, that the prior probability of a given proposition can be determined on the basis of the syntactical structure of the sentence expressing that proposition, a suggestion that, however, led already to insurmountable difficulties for very simple artificial languages. Other suggestions have proven equally problematic.”⁷

This general problem was shown most profoundly in my lesson, “A Refutation of Scientific Realism” (see Argument l.). Obviously no one but God has this knowledge.

2. Historical One-Time Events: Many events in history are unrepeatable. Thus, this use of probability theory fails to take into account the ingenuity of man. Man is not an automaton. As for miracles, it presents a straw-man view of God by assuming that God is some giant clock who should regularly put out a miracle every hundred years or so just to let man know that He does indeed exist. On the contrary, God’s purpose in miracles is usually to make a very dramatic point, but He has ordained that most events in history take place through the means of ordinary providence. Lastly, but not of least importance, with the New Testament recording the Christological revelation of Jesus the Messiah and its exposition through the Apostles, there is no more need for miracles to confirm an oracle since propositional revelation has ceased and the Holy Spirit provides the assurance to the believer instead.

3. Subjective: The theory ignores the role psychology plays in one’s determining the boundaries of what event or persons (to use the two examples mentioned in the description) should count as an instance of something which will contribute to that set’s frequency. This is a classification problem and is highly subjective. For example, when analyzing the probabilities of miracles, should one classify the event in question first as a miracle and then look for other examples of miracles to determine the probability based on its historical or current frequency? Or should one classify the event as another kind of historical occurrence (based on another aspect of the event), look for other similar examples where people reacted in a similar fashion to a particular event (claimed to be miraculous or not), and consider the disputed event’s status as a miracle irrelevant to the question of whether it happened or not? Also, there is the problem that one will dismiss all other instances of miracles and then use that frequency of zero to determine the probability of miracles occurring (resulting in a zero probability). This is the circular problem which C.S. Lewis pointed out against Hume.⁸

4. It Destroys Science: Experience (especially in the form of science) is predicated on the belief that genuinely new facts can be discovered, but if we are only to believe in something based solely on the past, then on what basis could we believe in something new? This would utterly destroy science. Of course, this brings us back to the more general problem of Induction.

5. All Other Arguments Against Scientific Realism Apply: (See my lesson, “A Refutation of Scientific Realism”.)

Post-Modernism

I dealt with Post-Modernism in the previous lesson. (See my lesson, “The Transcendental Argument for God, Part I: God’s Existence”.)

Conclusion

Saint Paul once wrote to the saints at Colossae:

“For I want you to know how great a struggle I have on your behalf and for those who are at Laodicea, and for all those who have not personally seen my face, that their hearts may be encouraged, having been knit together in love, and attaining to all the wealth that comes from the full assurance of understanding, resulting in a true knowledge of God's mystery, that is, Christ Himself, in whom are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge. I say this so that no one will delude you with persuasive argument… See to it that no one takes you captive through philosophy and empty deception, according to the tradition of men, according to the elementary principles of the world, rather than according to Christ. For in Him all the fullness of Deity dwells in bodily form… [Philosophy and the tradition of men] are matters which have, to be sure, the appearance of wisdom in self-made religion and self-abasement and severe treatment of the body, but are of no value against fleshly indulgence.” (Colossians 2:1-4, 8-9, 23)

According to Paul, the reason why the heretics at Colossae failed to reach true knowledge and why their beliefs were arbitrary and ignorant was because they started with human-made categories instead of the special, propositional revelation of Christ who was, is, and ever shall be the all-knowing, sovereign Creator of the universe. It is this same error which plagues all autonomous forms of knowledge:

“If philosophy begins with man and his own authority, then the conclusion of philosophy cannot transcend this source – all of man’s thinking reflects his own subjective ordering and interpretation, but nothing of the objective world of reality. If you start with man’s thoughts as your point of reference, you cannot escape phenomenalism and thus skepticism – the egocentric predicament.”⁹

There is simply no way for finite man, by himself, to gain a coherent theory of the universe, God, and man unless he transcends the space-time continuum that constantly impinges upon him. This he cannot do. Thus, the only way for him to have knowledge of “the big questions” is for the answers to these questions to be revealed to him by a Being that does, in fact, transcend contingent reality and who possesses complete knowledge of the universe. The only worldview that can meet this requirement is Revelatory Theism.

Appendix: Which Revelatory Theism?

Now that the necessity of Revelatory Theism has been established, the question still remains: which Revelatory Theism? There is still the choice between Christianity, Rabbinic Judaism, and Islam. In short, one can show that the Old Testament truly does point to Christ and that Christianity is the true religion of the Hebrews.¹⁰ As to Islam, its own Qur’an attests to the authenticity of the Bible even though it contradicts the Bible all over the place!¹¹ Thus, Islam is self-defeating. So, Christianity is indeed the only actual¹² existing worldview that meets the two requirements of being both theistic and revelatory in the propositional sense.

[All Scripture quotes are from the NASB, emphasis mine.]

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1 Greg Bahnsen, Van Til’s Apologetic: Readings and Analysis (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R, 1998), p.367, ftnt.203.

2 Greg Bahnsen, Van Til’s Apologetic: Readings and Analysis (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R, 1998), p.371, ftnt.208.

3 Cornelius Van Til as quoted in Greg Bahnsen, Van Til’s Apologetic: Readings and Analysis (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R, 1998), p.370.

4 Here, I am speaking of the use of statistical “probabilities” as an epistemic base. I am not speaking of its use as a tool in more science-related matters.

5 It should be pointed out that Hume has been roundly refuted by many critics who have used some of the counter-arguments I listed below. See these books here, here, and here, for example.

6 I point out the circularity of this below under the “Subjective” argument.

7 http://www.arsdisputandi.org/publish/articles/000041/article.pdf

8 Some proponents of Hume’s argument have tried to improve on it by including a probability which would necessitate that no testimony which attests to a miracle should count. However, as the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy notes:

“[A] Bayesian analysis sheds no light whatsoever on the structure or substance of the argument, and can do nothing by way of either supporting or refuting the argument. Indeed, any Bayesian analysis of the question of justified belief in miracles must be otiose until the difficult and essential questions concerning “evidence” in relation to an allegedly miraculous occurrence are resolved — at which point any Bayesian analysis will add little except the technical complexity of a formal apparatus that may or may not “clarify” the structure of Hume's argument.

The balancing of probabilities is of no use until it is decided what goes into the balance — that is, what constitutes the evidence that is to be subject to the balancing of probabilities. The point is this; apart from independent philosophical arguments — arguments that would in effect undermine the relevance of a Bayesian analysis to the question of the credibility of reports of the miraculous — no such analysis can, in principle, prove that no testimony can (or cannot) establish the credibility of a miracle.”

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/miracles/

9 Greg Bahnsen, Van Til’s Apologetic: Readings and Analysis (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R, 1998), p.350, ftnt.176.

10 This shall be the subject of a later series.

11 http://www.lightshinesindarkness.com/bible_koran.htm

12 As opposed to hypothetical

The Knowledge of God, The Necessity of Special Revelation, Part A

The Knowledge of God

The Transcendental Argument for God, Part II

The Necessity of Special Revelation

“No one has seen God at any time; the only begotten God who is in the bosom of the Father, He has explained Him.” (John 1:18)

“I have come as Light into the world, so that everyone who believes in Me will not remain in darkness.” (John 12:46)

Introduction

As was shown in the last lesson, unless God exists, knowledge¹ is impossible. But, that still leaves open the possibility of Deism, the worldview that God created the universe and man but then walked away permanently. Thus, there was neither any interaction with human kind nor special revelation. It is functionally dualistic atheism without all of the problems associated with that view.²

Still, it remains that man would be ignorant about the nature of the universe, the nature of man and God³, the purpose of life, ethical limits, etc. In the past, deists (and others) have filled this gap with autonomous knowledge theories such as Rationalism, Empiricism, Idealism, etc. However, as it will be shown, all autonomous knowledge theories fail because they try to arrive at a coherent theory of the whole universe simply by starting with the finite mind of man instead of the revelation of the eternal God. As Cornelius Van Til said, “But to say how one fact differs from another fact in terms of the space-time continuum requires one to have some intelligible conception of this space-time continuum as a whole.”⁴ Man simply cannot integrate factual data from the universe that impinges upon him into a theory of reality without first knowing what reality as a whole actually is. The only worldview that can meet this criterion is one in which a Being – who transcends this reality and possesses complete knowledge of it – reveals a basic, intelligible conception of the universe, man, and God to man. In other words, man’s knowledge requires a “jump-start” from God.

Thus, the claim of this sub-argument is that unless one presupposes that man has received special, propositional revelation from God that gives man a basic, intelligible conception of the universe, a coherent theory of the space-time continuum, man, and God is impossible.⁵ What will follow will be a brief description of the major autonomous knowledge theories followed-up by equally brief refutations of those theories. I have already dealt with Platonism and Aristotelianism in the last lesson, and so, I will begin with the “Enlightenment” theories starting with Rationalism. [I will note again, before I begin, that I have had no formal philosophical training, and so my descriptions of these philosophies and the arguments against them may not use the proper philosophical language. I will also gladly accept correction if I have misrepresented any of the philosophies mentioned below.]

The Transcendental Argument for God’s Existence, Part II, Special Revelation

Rationalism⁶

The Rationalists, such as Rene Descartes, Baruch Spinoza, and Gottfried Leibniz, believed that there were “self-evident” truths that could be deduced with certainty (such as mathematics), and from these foundational truths, all other truths could be deduced. In general, they believed that the mind was connected to all other things such that by simply reflecting upon something in one’s mind, man could come up with truth. It became evident, however, that there were many problems with this philosophy:

1. Evidently Not Self-Evident: As time progressed, the Rationalists began to disagree with each other over what was rational and what wasn’t. One would say that something was “self-evident”, another would disagree and call the first “irrational”, and the first would return the favor. It became apparent that what was “rational”, “self-evident”, and “intuitive” to these men was, in fact, based upon their personal, subjective, and emotive opinions.

2. It Destroyed Experience: To quote Cornelius Van Til:

“According to these rationalists, therefore, there was not and there could not be anything new in science.

Yet the very idea of science presupposes that genuinely new facts are discovered and that in being discovered they are not lost in a net of abstract logical relations but really add to a fund of existing knowledge. If the rationalists were right, logic itself would be reduced to an eternal changeless principle of identity. All facts would be wholly known by abstract thought thinking itself. Thus not only would there be no facts not wholly known but the idea of the “wholly known” would become an abstract contentless principle. Logic itself would become meaningless. There would be no longer any process of reasoning; such a process would be absorbed in identity.”⁷

3. It Destroyed Individuality: By connecting all minds together along with everything else in the universe, they reduced everything to a blank identity, a form of monism. They had, therefore, destroyed the self, something that was the foundation for their Rationalism.⁸

4. Without Foundation: It has been shown by mathematicians and philosophers of mathematics that mathematics is not self-consistent unless one adds certain unprovable assumptions. For example, Kurt Gödel proved that full arithmetic which utilizes both addition and multiplication is not fully consistent without the assumption of a Platonic or actual infinity. Furthermore, Descartes’ famous saying, “I think, therefore I am,” is actually faulty reasoning. As David Hume showed, all the statement, “I think” or (more accurately) “thinking”, proves is that thinking is occurring, but it does not prove that there is a unified “self” doing the thinking.

5. Arbitrary: How could they have possibly come to possess the knowledge that all of reality was connected through minds? Didn’t they come to believe that based upon speculation?

Empiricism⁹

Empiricism was the opposite of Rationalism. Instead of believing that everything shared one mind, the empiricists, such as John Locke and George Berkeley, taught that every person was a wholly separate individual whose mind is a tabula rasa, or “blank tablet”. Thus, all knowledge comes through sense perception instead of internal reflection. With this reductionistic epistemology, one of its exponents, David Hume, quickly dissembled it, sending it into the abyss of utter skepticism:

1. Facts Without Any Relation to Each Other: If knowledge comes only through sense-perception, then all our minds consist of is a list of raw data without any connection between one data point and another. Thus, no complete theory of reality could be formed, and without a complete theory of reality, nothing could be said of reality at all because no one could know what reality really is!

2. No Universals, No Knowledge: Without logic and mathematics being presupposed¹⁰, man’s thinking and reasoning processes cannot function, and so, knowledge would be impossible.

3. Causation Questioned: Once sense-perceptions became discrete events recorded by a “blank slate” without connection between them, there was no reason to believe in the law of cause and effect.¹¹

4. Everything is Equally Possible: Without having a complete theory of the universe, no one could know what was probable and what wasn’t. To quote Van Til again:

“Grant an infinite number of possibilities, to begin with, as an absolutely pure empiricism must presuppose, then there is an infinite number of improbabilities to cancel every infinite number of probabilities. That is, there is no probability at all. Such is Hume’s argument. Hume is right when he says again and again that “an entire indifference is essential to chance.” The idea of a law of chances is, strictly speaking, a contradiction in terms. It is to this position of total indifference with respect to the future that anyone embracing a pure empiricism is driven.”¹²

Thus, they destroyed science, the very mode of knowledge which they wanted to use exclusively.

5. Goodbye Self!: If our minds are simply “blank slates” passively taking in information, then there is no reason to believe that we are unified cognitive egos. That is, as Hume pointed out, the “self” would just be a “bundle of perceptions”, a bunch of thoughts without connection or purpose.

6. Most Arguments Against Scientific Realism Apply: (See my lesson, “A Refutation of Scientific Realism”.)

Kantianism¹³

Immanuel Kant was a philosopher from Prussia who taught that both the Rationalists and the Empiricists were wrong and that both of their extremes would lead to the destruction of experience. He criticized the Rationalists for believing that everything could be known from innate ideas and the Empiricists for believing that the mind was a blank slate. Instead, he believed that no knowledge could be gained without sense-perception, but he also said that the mind imposes concepts such as space, time, quantity, quality, relation, and modality. Greg Bahnsen further explains:

“These mental impositions are “transcendentally” necessary – that is, they are presupposed for the intelligibility of any experience. Thus, “the understanding is itself the lawgiver of nature”; man’s active mind provides the order and regularity necessary for rational and scientific knowledge is only of things as they appear to us (phenomena), rather than of reality as it is “in itself” (noumena). In the very manner that Kant “saved science” (rendering all rational knowledge phenomenal only), he left plenty of room for a realm that transcends the mind’s activity, namely the noncognitive and nonrational experience of human freedom and moral obligation.”¹⁴

Thus, Kant banished metaphysics, including God, into the realm of the unknowable.

1. Anti-Metaphysics is Itself a Metaphysic: “If man is autonomous, then he acts as autonomous when he is engaged in intellectual interpretation. That is to say, in assuming man’s autonomy Kant virtually takes for granted the essentially legislative character of human thought.… On Kant’s view man’s autonomous intellectual activity can tell us what ultimate reality cannot be. And to say what ultimate reality cannot be is, in effect, the same as to say what it can and must be. Kant’s rejection of metaphysics simply leads him to the adoption of a new metaphysics.”¹⁵

2. All Knowledge Becomes Personal: If every mind imposes order from itself upon the world without any presupposed rational origin of those minds, then it follows that every mind would impose different orders upon reality. Thus, all ‘truth’ would be person-specific and relative. This applies especially to science, the very thing Kant was trying to save, since it was reduced to psychology.

3. The Relative Law of Non-Contradiction: “Kant argued that since it is the thinking subject that itself contributes the categories of universality and necessity, we must not think of these as covering any reality that exists or may exist wholly independent of the human mind. By using the law of non-contradiction we may and must indeed determine what is possible, but the possibility that we thus determine is subjective rather than objective. It is a possibility for us.… The validity of universals is to be taken as frankly due to a motion and a vote; it is conventional and nothing more.”¹⁶

4. The Phenomenal Self: “The “phenomenal” self is the self as it must appear in our experience of it. But this apparent self is the projection of the organizing activity of the mind – that is, the product of a “noumenal” self which is “in itself” free and undetermined. In the nature of the case, this noumenal self could not be rationally understood or interpreted (by the categories of understanding imposed by the active mind). It is a “transcendental unity of apperception,” a mere place-marker for one’s mental activity. In the “transcendental dialectic,” Kant discussed the “psychological paralogism” (or fallacy) that there is a substantial self, with continuing personal identity, that does the thinking.”¹⁷

Modern Idealism

Modern Idealism was the philosophy of choice for many, if not most, philosophers at the beginning of the twentieth century, but now, it is dead as a movement. Like Rationalism, the Idealists taught that all particulars are a form of a single mind transcending individual reality “coming in degrees to perfect self-consciousness.”¹⁸ Therefore, all of reality is unified and rational¹⁹, and so, the gap between the noumenal and phenomenal realm disappears. However, any statement about reality is only a partial truth seeing that it comes from a limited perspective, only a part of the perfect consciousness. Thus, any attempt to gain systematic knowledge is doomed a priori.

1. Changing Reality, Changing Truth: Because Idealism locates reason and truth immanently in changing reality (and not transcendently as in the Triune God of Christianity), reason and truth both change along with reality. Thus, ‘truth’ is in total flux, and knowledge becomes impossible.

2. Subjective Truth: If man’s knowledge is simply a part of the perfect consciousness and thus a limited perspective of the whole, then every man’s view of reality will be different but still equally valid. ‘Truth’ would be relative.

3. Reality an Illusion?: In order to avoid (1), some Idealists made time an illusion, and so, the universe was made non-temporal or unchanging. In that case, all of our sense-experiences would be illusory, and we would be reduced to bland abstract logic.

4. No Self: As a consequence of either Idealist route (i.e. 1. or 3.), all cognitive egos are absorbed into one great monistic reality, and so, the self is an illusion. It is either an illusion in constant flux or a changeless abstract illusion but an illusion nonetheless.

5. Arbitrary: How could they have possibly come to possess this knowledge that reality was Idealistic? Didn’t they come to believe that based on speculation? Why should we not believe in pragmatism, Idealism’s arch-enemy instead?

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1 Again, warranted true belief.

2 Of course, many modern deists 1) substitute the belief that God specially created man for some sort of non-teleological evolution and 2) possibly deny the existence of man’s soul. In these cases, (1) would functionally be dualistic atheism *with* all of the associated problems and (2) would functionally be materialism with all of its problems.

3 This would especially include the belief that He has left man alone after creating him.

4 Cornelius Van Til as quoted in Greg Bahnsen, Van Til’s Apologetic: Readings and Analysis (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R, 1998), p.382.

5 This is not to say that autonomous man can’t make one up. That happens all the time. However, such a conception of the universe would be arbitrary.

6 Here, I refer to Enlightenment Rationalism.

7 Cornelius Van Til as cited in Greg Bahnsen, Van Til’s Apologetic: Readings and Analysis (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R, 1998), p.335.

8 Descartes once said, “Cogito ergo sum,” I think, therefore I am. His own existence was “proven” from the rational deduction of him thinking (though, see the next point).

9 Here, I am referring to Enlightenment Empiricism.

10 And as I showed above (see “Rationalism”, Argument 4.), yes, they do have to be presupposed.

11 For a further discussion of this subject and its problems for non-theists, see James N. Anderson’s “Secular Responses to the Problem of Induction”.

12 Cornelius Van Til as cited in Greg Bahnsen, Van Til’s Apologetic: Readings and Analysis (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R, 1998), p.343.

13 The length of this description could never do justice to Kant’s philosophy, and so, for a lengthier description, see here or read Greg Bahnsen’s work, Van Til’s Apologetic, pp.343-358.

14 Greg Bahnsen, Van Til’s Apologetic: Readings and Analysis (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R, 1998), p.344, ftnt.170.

15 Cornelius Van Til as cited in Greg Bahnsen, Van Til’s Apologetic: Readings and Analysis (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R, 1998), p.345.

16 Cornelius Van Til as cited in Greg Bahnsen, Van Til’s Apologetic: Readings and Analysis (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R, 1998), p.346.

17 Greg Bahnsen, Van Til’s Apologetic: Readings and Analysis (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R, 1998), pp.350-351, ftnt.177.

18 Greg Bahnsen, Van Til’s Apologetic: Readings and Analysis (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R, 1998), p.359, ftnt.189.

19 In fact, according to Idealism, reality is reason itself!

The Knowledge of God, TAG, Part C

Platonism¹

Platonism was the philosophy of Plato, an Athenian who was the student of Socrates and the teacher of Aristotle. His philosophy is complicated in its detail, and like every worldview that I have described above, I will keep it short.

In Platonism, there are two separate and autonomous ‘realms’ of existence: the realm of matter and the realm of forms. Matter is considered to be a shapeless, changing, time-bound, and ‘unintelligible’ or chaotic surd. The ‘forms’ or ‘Ideas’ were impersonal, eternal, unchanging, timeless, abstract archetypes of all things and the source of all knowledge. The forms take matter and give it shape and substance, and matter “participates” in the forms. Thus, all dogs are ‘formed’ by the form or ‘Idea’ of ‘dog-ness’. All red apples are formed by the forms of both ‘apple-ness’ and ‘red-ness’.

As to man, Plato taught that man’s soul, being quasi-‘divine’, “participated” in that realm of forms but that it was imprisoned in the mortal body. Thus, the goal of man is to be rid of his evil material body so that he can return to his ‘heavenly’ home.

Platonism was and probably still is the closest attempt at building a successful, autonomous and non-theistic worldview. However, there are a great number of problems with Platonism, a number of which Plato’s student, Aristotle, pointed out:

1. Instantiation: The first and most obvious problem with Platonism is the problem of instantiation. If the forms are impersonal, inactive, abstract things, then how could they cause matter to participate in them? At this point, Plato had to resort to admitted myths, namely a ‘divine’ personal being called the demiurge.

2. Man’s Intellect is Changing: If man’s intellect learns, then it changes. But if it changes, then by Plato’s own standard, it is unintelligible and knowledge is impossible.

3. Man Reasons in Temporal Categories: Related to (2) is the fact that man’s intellect has to reason in sequential and temporal categories, not unchanging and immutable ones. Thus, by Plato’s own standard, man’s reasoning process is incapable of reaching true conclusions.

4. Argument from the Reliability of Cognitive Faculties: If the only ordering powers in the universe are impersonal forms², then man’s cognitive faculties would have had to come about through an impersonal manner, and thus, the chance that they would be reliable is, at best, inscrutable (see Argument 2. from “Materialism” above).

5. Both Realms Ultimate: If both realms are ultimate, then the forms cannot fully rationalize matter, and so, rationalism would be canceled out by irrationalism. Thus, because there is still some degree of unintelligibility in the sensory world, knowledge of that world is impossible.

6. A Form of Evil?: In Platonism, the forms are morally good, and matter is morally evil. However, the very concept of ‘evil’ requires its existence as a form in the realm of forms. As Greg Bahnsen noted:

“This is embarrassing for Plato because he conceived of the realm of Ideas (the Ideal realm) as that which is good or of positive value. For evil things to be intelligible, there must be an Idea for them, but that awkwardly suggests that such Ideas are in their nature both evil (as to substance) and good (as to form) simultaneously.”³

7. As Many Forms as Particulars: If there is a black cat, then that cat participates in the forms of ‘blackness’ and ‘cat-ness’. However, in order for the two forms to ‘form’ the cat together, those forms must both participate in the combined form of ‘black cat-ness’. But the cat isn’t simply black. It also has eyes, ears, teeth, enamel on those teeth, etc., and those things have a certain size, shape, color, etc. Thus, there must be an ultimate form for which all the more general forms participate in such that it describes the cat down to its very detail. So, for every particular in the universe, there must be a specific form just for it. Not only that, but since those particulars change, the particular-specific forms must change as well. However, if there are as many forms as particulars, and the forms must change with the particulars, then the forms are just as transient and thus unknowable as the matter which participates in them. Because of this, knowledge would be impossible.

8. Infinite Regression of Participation: Again, Greg Bahnsen explains:

“If relationships are intelligible on Plato’s terms, they must be an instance of a general Idea. The relationship between particular things and their Idea is that of “participation,” said Plato. Similarly, each participation must itself participate in an Idea of participation, and that participation must in turn participate in its own Idea of participation, and so on ad infinitum. Thus, as Van Til indicates, on Plato’s own terms a man cannot know any one particular thing without having infinite knowledge.”⁴

9. Unity or Diversity in the Realm of Forms?: Do all forms ultimately participate in each other making the realm of forms one giant form, or are all forms separate from each other with their own realms of existence? If they are separate from one another, then there is no way for them to interact with one another. This would mean that all particulars that participate in different forms⁵ would have their own separate realms of existence with their own ‘truths’. If they are, on the other hand, all ultimately one, then they would simply be, as Van Til put it, a completely colorless mass. It would be a bland Idea that said nothing, an ultimately irrational unity.

Ultimately, Plato had eternal, immutable, abstract thoughts without the necessary eternal, immutable Thinker from which those thoughts can be instantiated perfectly in the contingent universe without confusion. These problems can only be solved by placing the forms as ideas in the mind of the immutable God.⁶

Aristotelianism⁷

Aristotle was the student of Plato and an instructor in the Academy at Athens until Plato’s death. Afterwards, he tutored Alexander the Great and later started his own school in Athens, the Lyceum. Aristotle tried to improve upon Plato’s philosophy by locating the universals in the particulars themselves instead of in a mysterious realm of Ideas. Thus, every object is composed of both an intelligible form as well as individual, transient matter. Knowledge of this object comes through the senses which “draw out” its intelligible form through mental abstraction. While this solves many of the problems with instantiation and the transient nature of man’s intellect in Plato’s philosophy, it fails to solve all the other problems and even creates some.

1. Both Realms Ultimate: Aristotle kept Plato’s idea that universals and matter were both equally ultimate, and as with Platonism, the universals could not make matter fully intelligible. Because of this, all knowledge of contingent things would be impossible (see Argument 5. from “Platonism” above).

2. As Many Universals as Particulars: Aristotle still had the same problem as Platonism of requiring as many universals as particulars (see Argument 7. from “Platonism” above). As Greg Bahnsen notes:

“If one devised a “complex” universal (e.g., the form or Idea of man weighing two hundred pounds, having a snub nose, etc.) for every particular met in one’s experience, there would be as many universals as particulars and no point to distinguishing between universals and particulars. Moreover, the problem would then arise of how the universal of snub-nosedness relates to the complex universal of Socratesness (and to every other universal that incorporates snubnosedness).”⁸

3. Person-Specific Truth: “On Aristotle’s own assumptions, what an individual man knows (i.e., the abstraction, the intelligible species) is a result of the internal activity of his own mind and thus private to himself.”⁹

4. Argument from the Reliability of Cognitive Faculties: Aristotle still has the same problem as Platonism when it comes to the creation of man’s cognitive faculties (see Argument 4. from “Platonism” above). Although, in Aristotelianism, there is a ‘god’ called the Prime Mover, this ‘god’ simply puts everything in motion¹⁰ and is only aware of his own existence (making him functionally impersonal).

5. Evolution of Truth: Because man must come into existence through an impersonal process (as noted in 4.) and is still subject to that process, it follows that the way that he apprehends and forms beliefs about ‘truth’ will change as the process changes his mind (see Argument 3. from “Materialism” above).

6. Knowledge of Events Impossible: According to Aristotle, knowledge of things is only of their universals through abstraction, and thus, knowledge of individual particulars as they change through time is impossible. Again, Greg Bahnsen:

“Since eternal and unchangeable things are entirely unlike – indeed, contrary to the character of – brute and contingent facts, they would be destructive of the non-Christian’s conception of history as well. This is the dialectical tension inherent in Aristotle’s version of empirical knowledge. If the historical facts are knowable, they are eternal and unchangeable – and thus not historical at all. But if the facts are brute, contingent, and always changing, they are “historical” (in the sense given to that term in unbelieving worldviews), but unknowable.”¹¹

Post-Modernism

Post-Modernism is basically unbelieving man’s recognition that true knowledge through autonomous means is indeed impossible. It accepts naturalism, and as a result, it states that all truth is relative because man is the product of his environment. Thus, any view of reality, or “meta-narrative”, which claims to be objective is simply a belief that is culturally conditioned, and so, there is no reason to believe in it. Post-Modernism is commendable in that it recognizes that truth cannot be apprehended through autonomous means. However, instead of surrendering through repentance to the God of Special Revelation who is Himself the Truth, it denies everyone knowledge by jumping into the abyss of epistemic nihilism. Of course, this too, has its problems:

1. Post-Modernism is Itself a Meta-Narrative: By the post-modernists’ own standard, if all beliefs are socially conditioned, then the belief that all beliefs are socially conditioned is itself socially conditioned, and thus, there is no reason to believe in it! If the post-modernist makes a less sweeping claim that there is no way to know that a meta-narrative is true, then they are still refuting themselves since it amounts to the objective claim that objective knowledge is impossible. This would require them to possess complete, total knowledge of the universe in order to claim that they can’t have any knowledge of the universe! Reductio ad absurdum.

2. Naturalism as Absolute Truth!: Most Post-Modernists are naturalists, and in order to believe in naturalism, Post-Modernists must accept evolutionary theory (in neo-Darwinian or some other naturalistic form) as objective truth. In fact, they must go beyond evolutionary theory and assume metaphysical naturalism as absolute truth! (See the lesson, “Overcoming the Anti-Metaphysical Bias” which goes into more detail.)

And of course, because most Post-Modernists accept naturalism, usually in the form of materialism, the four arguments against materialism mentioned above follow. These, along with (1) would question how the post-modernist came to ‘know’ naturalism is true in the first place:

3. Argument from the Illusion of Thoughts and Self: (see Argument 1. from “Materialism” above.)

4. Argument from the Reliability of Cognitive Faculties: (see Argument 2. from “Materialism” above.)

5. Argument from ‘Evolving’ Truth: (see Argument 3. from “Materialism” above.)

6. Argument from ‘Person-Specific’ Truth: (see Argument 4. from “Materialism” above.)

A Possible Objection: Is TAG a Skeptical-Threat Argument?

The main objection to the Transcendental Argument for God’s existence has been to accuse it of being a “skeptical-threat” argument. A skeptical-threat argument is basically an argument that throws out the possibility of a hypothetical situation in which human knowledge of the actual world (and the self!) would be impossible. An example of this would Rene Descartes’ Cartesian Demon scenario made popular by the movie, “The Matrix”.

However, this objection, or counter-argument, represents a fundamental misunderstanding of TAG. TAG is a transcendental argument which is, in fact, an *anti*-skeptic argument. In other words, the transcendental argument seeks to root out those pre-conditions for which knowledge would be possible and skepticism would not be warranted.

Not only do they have TAG wrong, they have the accusation facing the wrong direction. It is the unbeliever’s worldview that is a skeptical scenario which leads to epistemic nihilism. As shown above, TAG simply points this out.

Basically, this objection seeks to bar anyone from pointing out to the materialist (or any adherent of any worldview with an impersonal beginning to the universe for that matter) that he is committing the self-excepting fallacy. It seeks to allow him to get away with making the naïve assumption that he is a third-person, objective viewer of the universe. So, not only is this not a real objection to TAG, it is an argument against believing in non-theistic worldviews.

Conclusion

Ultimately, to allow for the possibility of man possessing knowledge¹², the following conditions must be met:

1. There must exist one¹³ personal Being who exists in Himself and created the universe out of nothing.¹⁴

2. This Being must possess complete or analytical knowledge of both Himself as well as the universe.

3. This Being must have created the universe and continue to uphold it in such a way that it is intelligible.

4. This Being must have personally created man in such a way that man’s cognitive faculties are attuned to his surrounding environment and geared toward truth.

In short, this is Theism.¹⁵ In order to be justified in believing in anything, you must first believe in God. As one scholar put it:

“[I]n an order created by a perfect, omnipotent, and totally self-conscious Being, God, truth is both final, specific, and authoritative. God’s word can then be, and is inevitably, infallible, because there is nothing tentative about God himself. Moreover, truth is ultimately personal, because the source, God, is personal, and truth becomes incarnate in the person of Jesus Christ and is communicated to those who believe in Him. Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior, as the way, the truth, and the life, is also the Christian principle of continuity. The Christian doctrine, therefore, involved a radical break with the pagan doctrine of the continuity of being and with the doctrine of chaos. It also involved a break with the other aspect of the dialectic, the pagan, rationalistic concept of order. Order is not the work of autonomous and developing gods and men but rather the sovereign decree of the omnipotent God. This faith freed man from the sterile autonomy which made him the helpless prisoner of Fate, of the relentless workings of a blind order.”¹⁶

Appendix: The Problem of Universals

The basic problem which gives rise to the arguments from the ‘Evolution of Truth’ and ‘Person-Specific Truth’ against the worldviews mentioned above is the problem of universal truth. If truth is not universal, that is, constant throughout space and time, then it ‘evolves’ with time or is relative to each person. The problem boils down to the fact that if a worldview does not locate absolute, eternal, changeless truths in the mind of the eternal, personal God, then the apprehension of truth becomes impossible. Here are some quotes from well-known atheists and non-theists who acknowledge this¹⁷:

“Thus the question “Why science?” leads back to the moral problem: Why have morality at all when life, nature, and history are “not moral”? No doubt, those who are truthful in that audacious and ultimate sense that is presupposed by the faith in science thus affirm another world than the world of life, nature, and history; and insofar as they affirm this “other world”—look, must they not by that same token negate its counterpart, this world, our world?—But you will have gathered what I am driving at, namely, that it is still a metaphysical faith upon which our faith in science rests—that even we seekers after knowledge today, we godless anti-metaphysicians, still take our fire, too, from the flame lit by a faith that is thousands of years old, that Christian faith which was also the faith of Plato, that God is the truth, that truth is divine.”¹⁸

“Whereas the quarrel about universals and ontogeny had its meaning and significance within the context of medieval Christian culture, it is an intellectual scandal that some philosophers of mathematics can still discuss whether whole numbers exist or not…No, there are no preordained, predetermined mathematical ‘truths’ that just lie out or up there. Evolutionary thinking teaches us otherwise.”¹⁹

“Recent troubles in the philosophy of mathematics are ultimately a consequence of the banishment of religion from science…Platonism…was tenable with belief in a Divine Mind…The trouble with today’s Platonism is that it gives up God, but wants to keep mathematics a thought in the mind of God…Once mysticism is left behind…Platonism is hard to maintain.”²⁰

“The very idea that the world or the self has an intrinsic nature – one which the physicist or the poet may have glimpsed – is a remnant of the idea that the world is a divine creation, the work of someone who had something in mind, who Himself spoke some language in which He described His own project. Only if we have some such picture in mind, some picture of the universe as either itself a person or as created by a person can we make sense of the idea that the world has an “intrinsic nature.” ”²¹

For Further Reading/Listening:

http://radioapologia.com/archives/Metaphysics_and_Meaning_by_Russell_Manion.mp3

http://www.home.earthlink.net/~gbl111/knowledge.htm

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1 This worldview is critiqued here not only because it is a worldview in itself but also because some non-Christians, especially atheists, modify their worldviews by adopting Platonism. So, for example, the resulting worldview would be Platonic atheism.

2 Unless, of course, we want to include Plato’s admittedly mythical demiurge.

3 Greg Bahnsen, Van Til’s Apologetic: Readings and Analysis (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R, 1998), p.325, ftnt. 129.

4 Greg Bahnsen, Van Til’s Apologetic: Readings and Analysis (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R, 1998), pp.326-327, ftnt. 133.

5 Which would be, as per (7), all particulars.

6 And of course, in Christianity, matter is not evil.

7 Like Platonism, some non-Christians, especially atheists, modify their worldviews by adopting Aristotelianism. So, for example, the resulting worldview would be Aristotelian atheism.

8 Greg Bahnsen, Van Til’s Apologetic: Readings and Analysis (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R, 1998), p.330, ftnt. 143.

9 Greg Bahnsen, Van Til’s Apologetic: Readings and Analysis (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R, 1998), p.331, ftnt. 145.

10 Thus, he is not involved in the creation of man.

11 Greg Bahnsen, Van Til’s Apologetic: Readings and Analysis (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R, 1998), p.333, ftnt. 155.

12 i.e., warranted true belief

13 Contra Dualism (see “Dualism” above).

14 That is, the material or spiritual universe cannot be equally eternal and thus ultimate as this Being. There cannot be an equal ultimacy like there is in the worldviews of polytheism, Platonism, Aristotelianism, etc.

15 This, of course, would not eliminate Deism which will be the subject of the next and last lesson, “The Necessity of Special Revelation”.

16 Rushdoony, op. cit., p.143.

17 This is in addition to those cited above in the main lesson.

18 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science.

19 Yehuda Rav, ‘Philosophical Problems in the Light of Evolutionary Epistemology’ in Math Worlds, ed. Sal Restivo (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1993), pp. 81, 100.

20 Reuben Hersch, What is Mathematics, Really? (Oxford, U.K.: The University Press, 1997), pp.42, 122, 135.

21 Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, p. 21.

The Knowledge of God, TAG, Part B

Dualistic Atheism

Dualistic atheism still says that there are no deities in the universe, but it does allow for the existence of the soul in order to deal with some of the problems with materialism such as the “Illusion of Thoughts and Self” problem. However, because this view still has an impersonal origin of man, all of the problems with Materialism remain:

1. Argument from the Illusion of Thoughts and Self: Because the soul still has its origin in the impersonal cosmos, the most we can expect out of this soul is impersonality, and thus, there is a still a denial of the self-conscious, cognitive ego (see Argument 1. from “Materialism” above).

2. Argument from the Reliability of Cognitive Faculties: (see Argument 2. from “Materialism” above.)

3. Argument from ‘Evolving’ Truth: (see Argument 3. from “Materialism” above.)

4. Argument from ‘Person-Specific’ Truth: ‘Truth’ would still be relative to each individual soul since there would be no common, personal origin of these souls but an impersonal one instead (see Argument 4. from “Materialism” above).

Vitalistic Atheism

Vitalism, or rather neo-Vitalism, is the belief that the material cosmos has an unseen, inherent property, or “life force”, which causes matter to give rise to life. A small minority of scientists within the scientific community of the early twentieth century played around with this belief to deal with the “origin of life” problem. However, it still cannot avoid the problems associated with an impersonal universe as the origin of life and cognitive faculties:

1. Argument from the Illusion of Thoughts and Self: Because the ‘mind’ (which is still nothing more than matter) came from an impersonal cosmos, and thus, could only be as personal as the cosmos that gave rise to it, then it too would still be impersonal (see Argument 1. from “Materialism” above).

2. Argument from the Reliability of Cognitive Faculties: Because the universe which gave rise to the cognitive faculties of man was impersonal, and an impersonal force is not concerned with truth (since truth is an abstract idea of a mind), then it follows that the reliability of man’s cognitive faculties is unreliable or inscrutable at best (see Argument 2. from “Materialism” above).

3. Argument from ‘Evolving’ Truth: (See Argument 3. from “Materialism” above. Of course, this would apply only if there was some element of non-teleological evolution involved as well.)

4. Argument from ‘Person-Specific’ Truth: ‘Truth’ would still be relative to each individual brain since there would be no common, personal origin of these brains but an impersonal one instead (see Argument 4. from “Materialism” above).

A Vitalistic Atheism that is also dualistic (i.e., including the soul) would still have all of these problems since, as I showed above, adding a soul but keeping its origin (as well as that of the body and its cognitive faculties) in the impersonal cosmos does nothing to solve these problems. (See the arguments against both “Dualistic Atheism” as well as “Vitalistic Atheism” above.)

Pan-psychism

Pan-psychism is a form of naturalism that attributes both a mental as well as a material aspect to all things. Even atoms have a degree of consciousness.¹ Like Dualistic Atheism, this is an attempt to avoid the “Illusion of Thoughts and Self” argument that plagues materialism. However, because Pan-psychism’s cosmogony has an impersonal origin of the universe, man, and his soul, then it still suffers from the problems with man’s non-teleologically formed material body and mind interacting with the material universe.

1. Argument from the Reliability of Cognitive Faculties: (see Argument 2. from “Materialism” above.)

2. Argument from ‘Evolving’ Truth: (see Argument 3. from “Materialism” above.)

3. Argument from ‘Person-Specific’ Truth: ‘Truth’ would still be relative to each individual mind since there would be no common², personal origin of those minds (see Argument 4. from “Materialism” above).

Polytheism

Polytheism is the belief that there exist many separate finite deities that came into existence in the distant past from the chaotic void or substance.³ To quote one scholar:

“All non-biblical cosmogonies, according to Keil and Delitzsch, ‘are either hylozoistical, deducing the origin of life and living beings from some primeval matter; or pantheistical, regarding the whole world as emanating from a common divine substance; or mythological, tracing both gods and men to a chaos or world-egg. They do not even rise to the notion of a creation, much less to the knowledge of an Almighty God, as the Creator of all things.’ The consequences of this non-biblical perspective are far-reaching. In this concept, being is evolving and in process. Because being is in process, and being is seen as one and undivided, truth itself is tentative, evolving, and without finality. Since being has not yet assumed a final form, since the universe is in process and is continually changing. A new movement or “leap in being” can give man a new truth and render yesterday’s truth a lie.”⁴

Also inherent in this worldview is the dialectic between the two eternal, impersonal principles of chaos and order causing the events of the cosmos. Thus, history proceeds in an impersonal fashion without end due to these principles of chaos and order ‘balancing’ each other out. Because of this, polytheism suffers from all of the same problems as materialism, only instead of the ground of existence being the material cosmos, it is the impersonal (and irrational!) chaotic void.

1. Argument from the Illusion of Thoughts and Self: If everything, including the soul arose from the chaotic void, its thoughts and even the self-conscious ego would be an illusion. It would be nothing more than the result of the outworking of the two impersonal cosmic principles of order and chaos (see Argument 1. from “Materialism” above).

2. Argument from the Reliability of Cognitive Faculties: Although most polytheistic systems say that the gods or some personal agent created man, this only takes the problem one step backward since those very gods were themselves formed from an impersonal, non-teleological process (see Argument 2. from “Materialism” above).

3. Argument from ‘Evolving’ Truth: “Because being is in process, and being is seen as one and undivided, truth itself is tentative, evolving, and without finality.”⁵ (see Argument 3. from “Materialism” above.)

4. Argument from ‘Person-Specific’ Truth: Because each soul derives its identity and its relation to the ‘outer’ (i.e. material) world individually from the impersonal, chaotic cosmos, ‘truth’ would be relative to each individual soul (see Argument 4. from “Materialism” above).

Dualism

By dualism, I mean a form of polytheism in which there are two equal and opposing deities that fight over the universe. The form of Zoroastrianism under the Sassanid dynasty would be a kind of dualism. Because the two deities share space and interact in the universe, the universe must be more ultimate than they. Thus, either the impersonal universe gives birth to these deities, or there is some aspect of the universe which they cannot control (not to mention the two deities battling for control over it). Under the first scheme, there are all the problems associated with polytheism. As for the second, it would suffer from all the problems associated with metaphysical dualisms such as Platonism (see “Platonism” below).

Monistic Pantheism

Monistic Pantheism, or simply Monism, is the belief that everything is ultimately one and without division, and thus, all divisions are ultimately illusory. This view usually involves reincarnation. Buddhism and Hinduism are examples of this worldview (though they have serious differences).

1. Argument from the Illusion of Thoughts and Self: Because everything is an illusion, then you and your thoughts are also an illusion. Of course, this means that the belief that your thoughts are illusory is also an illusion, and this results in an infinite regress of illusory beliefs. Second, any supposed reason to believe in monistic pantheism is also non-existent since it too would be illusory. Finally, the belief in monistic pantheism would be an illusion as well, and thus, the belief completely defeats itself. Reductio ad absurdum.

2. Argument from Truth: Since there are no differences, there is no contrast between ‘truth’ and ‘falsehood’:

“Panikkar maintains that Indians cannot really accept the principle that might be called the backbone of western philosophical thinking: the principle of contradiction. For Indians, Panikkar insists, things can indeed ‘be’ and ‘not be’ at the same time. …This seems to be close to the Taoist idea of yang and yin, where all things participate in the reality of their opposites: light and darkness, male and female, good and evil, flesh and spirit, and so forth.”⁶

“There are those who argue that these Eastern patterns of thought are inviolable and Christianity must adapt to them completely. Jung Young Lee has argued that in Asia we must get out of the habit of thinking in terms of either/or; we must be able to think of both/and. Change, he believes, may be the key to the universe, and ambiguity and differences merely the reflection of aspects of reality. In traditional Chinese thought, yin and yang are believed to be complimentary modes of being….He seeks to apply this to his view of God.”⁷

“Zen is one thing and logic another. When we fail to make this distinction and expect Zen to give us something logically consistent and intellectually illuminating, we altogether misinterpret the signification of Zen.”⁸

If there is no difference between ‘truth’ and ‘falsehood’, then everything and its opposite would be both ‘true’ and ‘false’ in the same sense at the same time. To make it even more absurd, this belief destroys itself: if everything is both ‘true’ and ‘false’ in the same sense at the same time, then that very belief would be false at the same time as being true! Thus, there is no reason to believe in this view (as opposed to not believing in it) since every reason to believe in it also presents us with a reason not to believe in it in the same sense and at the same time. Thus, knowledge (including the belief that monistic pantheism is true) would be impossible. Reductio ad absurdum.

3. Argument Against Reincarnation: If everything is ultimately one and thus, an illusion, then man is also an illusion. That means that all of his experiences and actions of good and evil are illusions as well making the possibility (not to mention the very idea!) of reincarnation impossible. Furthermore, if all is one, then everything and its opposite are the same as well. This means that good and evil are simply two sides of one coin. Ravi Zacharias explains a story from the Bhagavad-Gita:

“There is a classic passage in the Bhagavad-Gita in which Krishna counsels young Arjuna, who is on the battlefield, facing the possibility of killing his own half-brothers. He struggles and cannot bring himself to do this. Krishna, who comes as his chariot-driver, talks to him about his duty. This was his duty, to fulfill his caste’s responsibility as a warrior. This is the way life moves on. But he told Arjuna not to fear to do his duty, for all good and evil are fused in the one ultimate reality, Brahman. In Brahman, says Krishna, the distinction breaks down. That which appears evil is only the lesser reality. In the end, all life, all good, all evil, flow from God and back to Him or it.”⁹

Thus, reincarnation is made impossible since there can be no ascending the scale of being for doing right or descending for doing wrong since all actions, whether good or evil, are both good and evil at the same time and in the same way. Reductio ad absurdum.

Dualistic Pantheism

This ontology posits the existence of both matter, spirit, and an impersonal power that controls the history of the material and spiritual universe. This would be your “Star Wars” type world (though I don’t know how many real religions like this are out there). In this worldview, like the chaos/order dialectic of paganism, the impersonal power would cause the events of history to fatalistically go back and forth between chaos and order, good and evil.¹⁰ Thus, this worldview would have all the same problems as materialism except that the hard determinism would come about through the impersonal force rather than through matter and physical laws.

1. Argument from the Illusion of Thoughts and Self: Because of this fatalism, man and his thoughts, being a part of the universe controlled by this impersonal force, would simply be a puppet to the swinging pendulum of history controlled by the impersonal power. Man would simply think and believe whatever the impersonal power needed him to believe in order to bring the cosmos back into “balance”. Man, as a personal ego, would technically not exist since he is simply the outworking of the impersonal force (see Argument 1. from “Materialism” above).

2. Argument from the Reliability of Cognitive Faculties: Like materialism, man and his cognitive faculties would come into existence as the result of an impersonal process moved along by this impersonal power (see Argument 2. from “Materialism” above).

3. Argument from ‘Evolving’ Truth: Because man would come about via some form of evolution, ‘truth’ would ‘evolve’ (see Argument 3. from “Materialism” above).

4. Argument from ‘Person-Specific’ Truth: Corollary to (1) is the logical conclusion that ‘truth’ would be relative to each individual (see Argument 4. from “Materialism” above).

Panentheism

This is the worldview in which the material universe is God’s ‘body’. This could take a number of forms. The first is one in which ‘God’ is not a personal being and would be the same as the “Dualistic Pantheism” mentioned above. But the most popular form of panentheism would be the view that ‘God’ is a personal but changing being that evolves along with the rest of the material cosmos (since it is his ‘body’). Thus, his cognitive faculties would be unreliable, and what he believes to be ‘truth’ would evolve with him. Likewise, it is usually held by those of this view that this ‘God’ had nothing to do with the emergence of man, and so, man came about as the result of a non-teleological process of evolution.¹¹ This view would have the same problems as “Dualistic Atheism’s” enumerated above.

Another (unpopular) form taken would be to give priority to this ‘God’s’ spiritual nature over his material one. This would allow this ‘God’ to be an unchanging being that could make man with properly functioning cognitive faculties. However, that view would simply be a form of theism and somewhat similar in terms of the affect on epistemology (but still vastly different in many other important ways) to Christian theism’s doctrine of God’s omnipresence.

In summary, if this God is impersonal or personal but evolves or learns of himself¹², or if he had nothing to do with the emergence of man, then man is doomed to epistemic nihilism for the above mentioned reasons. The opposite of that view would simply be a form of theism.

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1 There are typically two views of pan-psychism. The first says that each entity down to the very particle has its own consciousness. The second says that the entire material universe possesses a collective consciousness like an organism. I will be dealing with the first view under this heading. The second view can range from Dualistic Pantheism to Panentheism, and thus, it would be susceptible to any of the arguments I list under those headings below.

2 Since each thing down to the very atom has its own consciousness which is limited in scope, knowledge of the universe would be specific to the individual composed of those individual atoms. If, however, one argues that the material world has a collective consciousness, then this view would reduce to something akin to panentheism (see below).

3 I am not dealing, here, with another polytheistic view like that of Tolkien’s Middle Earth which says that the gods were created by an eternal, self-existing Deity. This would actually be a form of Theism. In fact, there is a slight similarity in Scripture to this since God did create other ‘mighty beings’, namely the angels.

4 Rousas John Rushdoony, The One and the Many (Thoburn Press: Fairfax, VA., 1978), p.143.

5 ibid.

6 Stephen B. Bevans, Models of Contextual Theology (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1992), p.5.

7 William A. Dyrness, Learning about Theology form the Third World (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1990), pp.140-141.

8 D.T. Suzuki

9 Ravi Zacharias, Jesus Among Other Gods: The Absolute Claims of the Christian Message (Nashville: W Publishing, 2000), p.119.

10 This would not be the same as Divine Providence since, in the Christian doctrine, God causes all things to come to pass through both secondary as well as primary means. Thus, while both of these views are deterministic, the Christian Providential view would be a form of compatibilism which allows for free, human actions but the pantheistic view cannot avoid being a form of hard determinism.

11 One could hold to a view in which this ‘God’ created man, but it would still suffer from arguments 2 and 3 since, like polytheism, it would place the problem one step backward to the ‘God’ who is himself evolving.

12 That is, if this ‘God’ either does not have complete knowledge of himself or the material universe (which, in this case, would also be part of him), then it follows that there could be some remnant of unknown potentiality, whether in his own spiritual being or the material universe, which would affect his ability to know and create humans with properly functioning cognitive faculties attuned to man’s environment.