Michael Volpe had intended to append the following as a comment to the last post, but it merits standing alone as a post. I appreciate the effort he put into it; in due time, I’ll address his criticisms in a comment of my own.—A.G.F.
In his book Philosophy after Christ: Thinking God’s Thoughts after Him, Anthony Flood opts for a transcendental argument for the existence of God. It can be summarized as the impossibility of the contrary because Christianity as a worldview alone gives the conditions that makes predication possible. Since Anthony clearly states his indebtedness to Cornelius Van Til, one must ask what difference, if any, there is between their understanding of the same argument.
The Calvinistic Van Til built his form of the transcendental argument to justify the contradiction that God desires the salvation of those whom He does not choose. And though He elects, this free offer of Christ for all supposedly relieves God of the charge of being evil for not choosing everyone when He could have done so. Especially since it is man and not God who is the ultimate cause of sin deserving of hell. Thus, Van Til needs to combat not only the belief in free will and free thought, but rationalism. The former two lead to chance as being ultimate and the latter requires omniscience. Either way, if any of these are true, they would destroy the belief that his hyper-infralapsarian Calvinism (grounds the free offer in Christ’s limited atonement) is the transcendental truth or worldview alone which establishes predication but without its constituent truths logically entailing each other for a sound and consistent deductive system.
This scheme enables Van Til to reject the sufficiency and necessity of the proposition, the laws of identity and inference to state and justify truth except when it suits his own system. Is Anthony willing to go as far as Van Til not only in his neo-Calvinistic theology but even his philosophical maxim that there can be no point of coincidence, contact or identity between our knowledge and God’s? If so, how does he explain his own absolute judgments without destroying the Creator/creature distinction? And if not, why? How?
Transcendentalism as we have come to know is not specific enough and sufficient to determine which Christian worldview depicts reality. One can be a Hegelian, a Calvinist, an Arminian or a Romanist and still use the transcendental argument for the existence of God. So, the questions become which God and why? As Van Til rightly said, “theology determines apologetics.”
Appealing to the equal ultimacy of unity and diversity within the Godhead still cannot establish the argument. Why? Because not only does the aforementioned group together also concur with that to some degree or another, but non-Christians seem to have a better grasp on the problem of the one and many. Following the lead of Van Til, most transcendentalists assert that God is both one and three in the same sense. For they cannot maintain God is one and three in different senses without giving up their belief that God’s word concerning Himself in Scripture is necessarily comprised of antinomies that cannot ever be reconciled for man because of being finite.
But even if antinomies are taken for granted, how can Christians argue that their set of antinomies are better than other Christians or non-Christians sets of beliefs to explain reality without some kind of identity or point of coincidence between what is being offered as a true interpretation of God? Thus, by default we are led back to maintaining the sufficiency of propositions and the laws of identity and inference to state and convey truth. But this comes too close to rationalistic axioms and deductions many transcendentalists try to avoid in proving Christianity.
Epistemologically Anthony wants experience and/or sense perception to be constitutive of knowledge and rejects occasionalism (finite things cannot be their own efficient cause). Yet, he accepts a form of occasionalism concerning the intuition of the knowledge of God in relation to sense objects, which becomes the basis for his worldview that supposedly alone establishes predication.
For the knowledge of God is neither an inductive inference nor a deduction. Sense objects only occasion the knowledge of God which comes via an immediate grasp that is neither determined by divine illumination and efficiency. Somehow the human mind and will has been so created by God that it is its own efficient cause as it intuits God, Who in turn sustains it in its freedom.
This immediate knowledge of reality corresponds with the greater revelation contained in the Scriptures. Thus, man inescapably knows God. Anthony does not, however, address how this type of creaturely freedom to intuit can exist without sensations, sense perception, and the array of epistemological challenges inherent in empiricism and its notion of a blank slate.
Since Anthony accepts secondary causes as actually having power of themselves to intuit, think, will and sense in conjunction with God’s preserving power, he agrees with free-willers like Bernard Lonergan, and many Calvinists even though they might disagree on the use of sense objects, sensation, and sense perception in the acquisition of knowledge.
And even Malebranche, with his occasionalism, believed in free will. Unlike Gordon H. Clark’s thought, the implication of such thinking is man’s will can move God and be determinative, whereby God chooses a world He does not get all He desires but still could have done it another way without doing injustice to Himself or the creature. What then is the standard to arbitrate between God and man as to the world He must create to be considered just?
It would seem that Anthony, more than Van Til, presupposes man has free thought and free will to know and to determine for himself his own destiny by choosing good or evil (at least in Adam), if not for predestinating grace. What kind of Christ are we left with? How do we explain evil, suffering, God’s wrath or especially hell? And how can we intuit anything without a combination of divine illumination and efficiency even in establishing unbelief and evil?: “For of Him, and through Him, and to Him are all things” (Romans 11:36).
There are no exceptions. Without such a divine determinism how can we be certain about anything, let alone Christianity? Of course, this can be construed as acosmism. But the fullness of divine determinism has yet to be plumbed enough in the history of thought to easily dispel it in favor for an unbridgeable dualism between the so-called incorporeal substance of God with all other kinds of substances. The latter view is a tired and exhausted meta-epistemology.
So, then, whose worldview enables predication? Considering the above observations and questions, the answer is not as clear as Anthony Flood maintains. Regardless, his apologetic is true in the sense that he desires and attempts to make Christ and His word, and not a methodology preeminent in thought. Christ is the transcendent truth Who, as the Logos, alone establishes predication.
To the degree Anthony attempts in making Christ first, to that degree he is somewhat successful. Though his system to me is too incomplete and maybe theologically fallacious at some points, there is still quite enough substance in his thinking that will challenge any competing thought. To fully appreciate this, you will have to read his book for yourself. I eagerly wait for his sequel.
— Michael M. Volpe