This continues a series in which I engage Bill Vallicella‘s critical exploration of aspects of biblical theism, especially when he interacts with my efforts to explain what I mean by philosophizing before or after Christ. (See Part I, Part II.)
To return to one of Bill’s recent questions, which I have been answering, but perhaps not (yet) to his satisfaction):
Why does an account of the intrinsic intelligibility of the natural world in terms of Divine Creative Mind require the specific doctrines of normative Christianity? That and that alone is the question I am raising . . . . The question I raised in the initial post was whether the knowledge involved when a person knows that the Sun has risen is exactly the same sort of knowledge involved when a person knows—if he does know—that Christianity is true.[1]
I gave part of my answer in Part II. The intelligibility of the natural world owes to its being what God in Scripture says it is (including what we are). God says many other things from which one may infer the “specific doctrines of normative Christianity.”
How does one know that the Sun has risen? Well, for practical purposes, one trusts that one’s senses, memory, command of language (to affirm the proposition, even tacitly, “The Sun has risen”), and so forth can support perceptual knowledge claims. But what justifies the trust, the memory, the linguistic command, the imperative to tell the truth (even if only to oneself), and so forth?
That’s where worldview comes in. Only one fills the bill, in my view.
Bill’s phrase “same sort of knowledge” needs clarification lest we risk equivocating on “to know” and its cognates. The warrant for affirming that “The Sun has risen” depends on one’s worldview, and a worldview is not an object like the Sun, but something integral to one’s subjectivity.
One can reflect on one’s worldview, but it’s not on the same “level” as the things or concepts one knows on that basis. It’s not an object of perception or logical deduction. If, however, one discovers that one’s worldview cannot account for intelligible predication, then one has no grounds for affirming “The Sun has risen.” In Part II, I mentioned this in passing:
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.
God is the original knower. Whatever we know, be it a sunrise (that affects our perceptual apparatus) or the Virgin Birth of Jesus (that comes to us by interpreting a historical record one trusts), God knew it first and perfectly. To repeat what I said in Parts I and II:
To know anything about something, 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. . . .
Greg L Bahnsen, expounding the thought of his teacher, put it this way:
[Cornelius] VanTil taught that the Creator God’s act of knowing was qualitatively different from man’s act of knowing, even though they know the same truth; not having the comprehensive and creative character of God’s knowing, finite man’s thinking will find certain combinations of biblical truth to appear paradoxical. . . . Logic could not be used as a self-sufficient epistemological criterion by which to judge the revelation of God since it was the only intelligible context for man’s use of logic as a tool of his intellect.[2]
God does not, as do we, come to know anything: He ordains X and causes X to be or occur. On pain of equivocating on “to know,” however, the content of our knowledge must have something in common with the content of God’s knowledge. Exposing Gordon Clark’s misunderstanding of Van Til, Bahnsen wrote:
It is not enough to affirm that . . . . God knows more than man. Nor is it enough to distinguish between ways of knowing, for this is only to say that God receives information differently from the way we receive information. God should be viewed as the “original of truth’: that is, He is the original truth, He originates all truth, and He is the standard of all truth. God’s mind alone is self-attesting and originally creative. . . . [W]e must think His thoughts after Him in a receptive and re-creative manner. He, on the other hand, need not compare His thoughts with anything, for His knowledge is receptive only in that it is creative knowledge. God does not come to knowledge—even by an eternal intuition—but creates knowledge . . . .
Hence a qualitative distinction must be maintained between the knowledge of the Creator and of the creature [that is, the Creator’s knowledge and the creature’s]; the former is originally creative, the latter is receptively re-creative. . . . This in no way implies that the standard or referent point of God’s knowledge and man’s knowledge are different; it is God’s mind for both God and man. Nor is this to say that our language does not literally apply to God; there is continuity between the meaning of terms as applied to God and applied to the creature. God, after all, truthfully speaks of Himself to us in our language. And, finally, what God knows (e.g., a state of affairs in the world) is not different from what man knows when he [man] is thinking correctly (i.e., thinking God’s thoughts after Him in obedience to His revelation).[3]
I claim (a) that all knowledge—empirical, theological, and philosophical—is worldview-dependent and (b) that only the worldview expressed in the Bible can bear that weight. Bill refers to “the specific doctrines of normative Christianity,” but for all I know to the contrary, he may have in mind one or more propositions not derivable from a sound reading of Scripture. I would not count them as propositions one can know to be true. But even in the case of a doctrine that is so derivable, their intelligibility is not different from the intelligibility of, say, creation’s order.
Textual interpretation is not like empirical observation, of course, but intelligibility is intelligibility; its metaphysical background—God’s eternal decree to create—is exactly the same in both instances.[4] The biblical worldview, a byproduct of God’s speaking, refers to that speech, whose content must be internally consistent. Now, we may or may not be able to grasp the coherence of truths, or deduce our grasp of one from our grasp of another, but their epistemological dependence upon the underlying worldview is the same.
In order to understand that His mind grounds the intelligibility of the natural world, do we really need in to believe that God took the form of man (to take one of Bill’s examples)? Yes, because that mind holds unity and plurality in equipoise. If it didn’t, then it couldn’t ground nature’s intelligibility, for nature is shot through with unity and plurality, which in involved in every intelligible predication. The Logos Who created all things and enlightens everyone and was incarnated as one of us is distinguishable from, even subordinate to, and yet “one with” the Father Who sent Him into the world to save it; He is identical to God and yet also with God (John 1:1, 1:14, 3:16, 10:30).
All of God’s truths are interrelated. Isolating one implication of the biblical worldview from other implications serves no theoretical purpose that I can see.
Where (upon what) are we standing when we “philosophically” interrogate God’s speaking in Scripture? If not upon Scripture, then . . . what?
To Be Continued
Notes
[1] William F. Vallicella, “Christianity and Intelligibility: A Response to Flood,” Maverick Philosopher, April 25, 2024.
[2] Greg L. Bahnsen, Van Til’s Apologetic: Reading and Analysis. Presbyterian & Reformed, 1998, 670. In outlining Bahnsen’s “square of religious opposition,” I wrote: “Christian philosophy has elements that seem ‘irrational,’ that is, not based ultimately on the authority of man and his thinking. The Christian’s profession of dependence on an authority beyond himself is a renunciation of rationalism, which [renunciation] will seem ‘irrational’ to the unbeliever.” Flood, “The Square of Religious Opposition: A Van Tillian insight, diagrammed by Frame, taught by Bahnsen, paraphrased by me,” January 26, 2021. This post is an ancestor of Chapter 11 of Philosophy after Christ: Thinking God’s Thoughts after Him, 2022. This is germane to our discussion of intelligibility.
[3] Greg L. Bahnsen, Presuppositional Apologetics: Stated and Defended, Joel McDurmon, ed. American Vision Press, 2010, Chapter 4, “Gordon Clark,” subsection “Key Criticisms of Clark’s Apologetics,” sub-subsection “Doctrinal Difficulties,” location 4211 in the Kindle version, which lacks traditional page numbering. For a defense of Bahnsen’s favoring of Van Til’s approach to apologetics over Clark’s, see P. Andrew Sandlin, “A Conflict of Apologetic Visions,” The Chalcedon Foundation, December 1, 2000.
[4] “. . . epistemologically self-conscious Christians know (at least implicitly) that creation is completely intelligible (and actually intellected by God: Psalm 147:5). They are not interested in pretending to infer God’s existence from creation’s intelligibility (pseudo-autonomously and dubiously from one’s mental innards).” Flood, “Bernard Lonergan had it backwards; August Hopkins Strong, about right,” December 4, 2018.