When we ask a question—historical, cultural, scientific, ethical, political, whatever—we tactily imply that a prior question has been “settled”: on what ground is our asking “standing,” figuratively speaking? That is, what do we presuppose about reality, knowledge, and goodness? In Philosophy after Christ I essay a biblical answer; the need to elaborate upon it motivates this initial response to William F. (“Bill”) Vallicella, Ph.D., a long-time correspondent and friend, who occasionally critiques my efforts on Maverick Philosopher.[1] Some of what follows might prove too “in the weeds” for some visitors, but I’m writing for the record, which transcends our sublunary sojourns. Bill knows what I mean.
Also, since I neither write nor receive anything in the spirit of “So there!,” I’m under no illusion that this post or any of its sequels has a prayer of “concluding the matter.” And that’s all right: not only la lucha but also la dialéctica continúa. I may post a thousand words only to learn that in response to some of them, Bill has rather quickly generated several thousand of his own. Further installments will appear while I, who did not earn the leisure that Bill deservedly enjoys, am still working on my rebuttal. So, a thought occurs: “Whom am I kidding?” As I will catch up in time, there’s no reason to postpone publishing something today on the status questionis. But any rebuttal that Bill may publish may have to go without a surrebuttal for a while.
* * *
My earlier post, Christianity and intelligibility (implicitly “Part I”), elicited substantial responses from Bill (here and here). I encourage visitors to study them. (He refers to them as “installments.”) In the latter post, he asked four questions, my initial answers to which he approved for publication on his site:
Bill: Do you hold that the only possible explanation of intelligible predication must be in terms of a Christian worldview that includes not only Trinity and Incarnation but also Immaculate Conception?
Tony: No.
Which brought forth:
Bill: “No” has the virtue of being pithy, but hardly counts as a satisfactory answer. My growing sense is that further discussion of this and related topics won’t get us anywhere. We can agree on one thing: you are better off a presupper [presuppositionalist apologist for the Christian worldview] than a commie.
Well, thanks, I guess. There simply wasn’t enough space for a satisfactory answer. The Christian worldview as I defined it, that is, as “expressed on the pages of the Bible,” includes the Trinity and the Incarnation but excludes the Immaculate Conception. Bill conjoined the last doctrine to the other two. I reject the conjunction. His closed-ended question permitted the pithiest of responses.
The satisfactory response Bill deserves would not fit in that combox, and in any case people don’t go to his site to read me. My expansive and more satisfactory should reside on this site. I hope to disprove his surmise that further discussion “won’t get us anywhere,” but have no control over his disposition. Whatever it may be, I’m grateful he took the time to criticize what I wrote, for doing so occasioned my further thinking about the conditions of intelligible predication.
Here are his other questions and my longer-than-one-word answers (which set up what will follow).
Bill: Given the well-known logical conundra that arise when we try to render intelligible to ourselves such doctrines as Trinity and Incarnation, conundra that seem to threaten the intelligibility of these doctrines, and therefore seem to threaten the intelligibility of any explanation of intelligible predication in terms of a worldview committed to them, how do you respond?”
Tony: I won’t buy into what you call “well-known conundra” that “seem to threaten” this or that intelligibility. You’ve considerably added to my burden of rebuttal. When I believe I’ve met it, I’ll send you the link thereto.
Bill: Do you maintain that the supposed logical puzzles are easily solved and that Trinity and Incarnation in their orthodox formulations are logically and epistemically unobjectionable?
Tony: Again, I won’t sign off on “logical puzzles.”
Bill: If that is not the tack you take, what tack do you take?
Tony: Within the ambit of a combox [comments box or section] I cannot formulate my answer (which concerns the theological posture a Christian should take toward philosophical questions [emphasis added]) but I’m grateful to you for motivating me to try to explain presuppositionalism in a way that scratches where your mind’s itching (as mine did for many years). At least I know my answer won’t be unsolicited. (:^D)
Solicited or not, here it comes.
First, I acknowledge, red-facedly, my parenthetical misidentification of Bill’s genuine question as rhetorical, although I don’t know that it required such a prolonged corrective. This recap should get us back on track. Bill had asked:
Why should anyone think that such apparently unintelligible doctrines [as the Incarnation and the Trinity] are necessary for the intelligibility of the natural world?
The reply, which invited Bill’s digression, was:
The short answer is that appearances can be untrustworthy. Unless it can be shown that those tenets are really, not just apparently, unintelligible, the implicit objection (in the form of a rhetorical question) has no force. I fail to see what special problem the “natural world” allegedly poses.
I should not have inferred that Bill suggested they are unintelligible; it seems obvious that unless one can show that they are (which no one has done), the argument against the Christian worldview as the ground of intelligible predication doesn’t go through. The seeming, however, didn’t justify my leap.
As for the Incarnation (the assumption of human form by the Son of God), its purpose was to have the Lamb without blemish (Exodus 12:5, cf. John 1:29, 1 Peter 1:18-19, Revelation 5:6-14) sacrificed to satisfy God’s justice by by undergoing Roman torture and execution. The perennial animal sacrifices in the Temple could never effect that justice, but Jesus’ sacrifice on Calvary’s cross did (Hebrews 10:14). In the place of the sinners whom the Father gave Him, the Son became sin so that the Son’s righteousness could be imputed to them (2 Corinthians 5:21). That’s how they can have peace with God. The Incarnation meets the need for the teleological intelligibility of a world of created image-bearers; no other worldview can.
We can ask about the role of each proposition that the worldview encompasses, but it’s the latter as a whole that saves intelligibility; its components are the truths that God has revealed in Scripture and known to be true because so revealed.
What’s not found in Scripture, however, such as the Roman Catholic doctrines or dogmas about Jesus’ human mother’s alleged perpetual virginity (traditions dating to the second century, formally declared in 649), Immaculate Conception (de fide as of 1854), and bodily assumption into heaven (de fide as of 1950), then it’s not an implication of that worldview. A Roman Catholic apologist is, of course, free to argue that his worldview, with its epistemological authority (that is, its effective substitution of Sola Ecclesia for Sola Scriptura), is what saves intelligible predication, and therefore includes the aforementioned teachings. I’d be eager to evaluate such an argument.
Let’s consider Bill’s original query and its motive. A quotation from C. S. Lewis stimulated thoughts about sensory perceptions and the nonsensory intuition (worldview?) we bring to the former:
I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.[2]
I’ll omit the prefatory material and go directly to Bill’s comment:
This morning I observed a beautiful sunrise. And so I believe that the Sun rose this morning. I also believe that the Sun is the source of the natural light we enjoy on Earth. But it is false, and indeed silly, to say that one who believes in Christianity believes in the very same way. The difference is obvious. I cannot help but believe that the Sun rose this morning: I saw it with my own two eyes! Seeing is believing in a case like this.[3] That the Sun rose is given, if not indubitably, then for all practical purposes.[4] There is no need for a leap of faith beyond the given. The will does not come into it. In no way do I decide to believe that the Sun has risen. Examples like this one refute a universal doxastic voluntarism.
When it comes to the Sun’s rising, Bill asserts commonsense realism or empiricism: it’s obvious that it rose this morning, he says, because he saw it rise. And “for all practical purposes” that ends the matter.
As Bill’s life testifies, however, a philosopher’s interest transcends the realm of the practical. Plato asked about the shadows that his allegory’s cave dwellers see on its walls (Republic, Book VII, 514a–520a). For there’s the question of the trustworthiness (and import) of Bill’s senses, memory, and command of language as well as the question of the existence of people with whom he shares a natural language and to whom he reports what he saw. (I go into this in some detail in my book.)
No, to be justified in saying that one knows the Sun rose this morning (because one saw it rise) is not a matter of the will, yet that justification relies on a network of truths not given with that perception.
What worldview makes sense of this network? A worldview is a view that “underlies” (we can test different metaphors[5]). I’m interested in clarifying the relationship to which the metaphor points. One’s Anschauung of the sunrise has conditions; one’s articulation or account of them will depend on one’s Weltanschauung.
I see no problem (as Bill seems to) with referring to one’s Weltanschauung or worldview as a “faith” (albeit not saving faith) insofar as it shares with the mindset associated with the term a pre-theoretical (not necessarily anti-theoretical) status. I generally agree with him when he writes:
. . . if you believe that God became man in Jesus of Nazareth, if you believe that the God-Man is fully divine and fully human, that he is one person in two natures, then you believe beyond the sensorily given.
I agree because one’s worldview is not sensorially given. But then Bill parenthetically adds:
(You also arguably believe beyond what is intelligible to the discursive intellect.)
The matter hinges on the meaning of “beyond” and “discursive intellect.” As I wrote in the previous post.
To know anything about something [e.g., the Sun, or the Son of God], we need not know that thing exhaustively (that is, the way God knows it). The Christian does not avail himself of his birthright (Christian theistic) worldview because it confers omniscience on him, but rather because (a) it saves intelligible predication and (b) no competing worldview does. . . .
Some atheists have claimed, without justification, that exnihilation [i.e., creatio ex nihilo, “creation out of nothing”] is “unintelligible” but they do so because they’ve absolutized the created order instead of relativizing it to its creator, who alone is absolute. Bill affirms exnihilation without exhaustively grasping it conceptually. He can do likewise for the Trinity and the Incarnation.
To acknowledge and affirm that our knowledge is not God’s knowledge is not to equivocate on “to know” but to allow the fundamental Creator-creation distinction to inform our framing of the problem of knowledge. Bill continues:
You cannot see God the way you see the Sun. To ‘see’ God in Jesus you need the ‘eye’ of faith which is quite obviously not a physical eye but a spiritual ‘eye.’
I have no problem with Bill’s metaphor of the “spiritual eye” because he understands that what is spiritual is what comes directly from God, even if it’s also physical (such as Adam’s body [Genesis 2:7]), or the manna He gave to the Israelites in Sinai [Exodus 16; John 6:31-35]). We’ll return to this when we discuss Bill’s discussion of the Holy Spirit’s spermatological complement to Mary’s ovum, without which complement the embryo that Jesus once was would not have been human.
To be continued
Notes
[1] Posts which touch upon aspects of his thought include: “Return to Philosophy and The Recovery of Belief,” November 23, 2018; “Bill Vallicella on Cornelius Van Til: An open mind and heart,” January 23, 2019; “Do atheists have an excuse?,” March 15, 2019; “Did the Apostle Paul argue for God’s existence?,” May 9, 2019; “Rights political and epistemic: Biblical theism alone can account for them,” August 18, 2020; “Man’s ‘true self’: my reply to critics,” June 25, 2023; “On arguing for one’s “sense of life”: Vallicella, Alain, Rand, and Bahnsen,” September 7, 2023; “Who needs government? A response to Bill Vallicella’s comment on David Mamet,” October 26, 2023; “The Transcendental Argument for the Existence of God Revisited: Toward a Response to Bill Vallicella,” October 31, 2023; “Criticism of Presuppositional (Worldview) Apologetics,” December 14, 2023; “Philosophy before Christ: the case of an Athenian fence-sitter,” March 1, 2024.
[2] C.S. Lewis, “They Asked for a Paper,” in Is Theology Poetry? London: Geoffrey Bless, 1962, 164-165. Cited here :https://www.cslewisinstitute.org/resources/reflections-december-2013/
[3] Bill’s footnote: “There may be other cases in which seeing does not suffice for belief. I am thinking of G. E. Moore’s putative counterexample: ‘I see it, but I don’t believe it!’”
[4] Bill’s footnote: “The hyperbolic skepticism of Descartes is not to the point here.”
[5] Anthony Flood, “God: ‘behind the scenes’ (or ‘under the floorboards’) of every argument,” December 12, 2018.