This continues the series in which I discuss Maverick Philosopher Bill Vallicella‘s critique of my idea of philosophizing before and after Christ. (See Parts I, II, III, IV.)
In Philosophy after Christ, I wrote:
The relationship of evidence of one thing to another depends on there being minds fitted with reliable cognition that can surmise and test that connection. What must the world include for evidentiary relationships to be possible?
We may not be certain whether A is evidence of B, but that things are in evidentiary relationships to each other is something about which we not only have no doubt but wouldn’t know how to doubt. Is that merely a brute psychological fact without further ground? For doubting expresses intellectual exigency, critical “demandingness,” a healthy fear of being duped; exercising that virtue makes no sense except in a world that is completely intelligible (formally, efficiently, materially, and finally).[1]
And that brings us, as every philosophical question must, to worldview.
Bill gives me the impression that he’s identified a problem for the area of Christian apologetics called “evidences,” specifically the alleged evidence of lives transformed by their conversion. 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. . . . 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.’ . . .
. . . Someone who comes to embrace Christianity comes to view the world in a way very different from the way he viewed it prior to his becoming a Christian. . . [H]is worldview has been transformed. But that transformation is no part of the evidence of the truth of Christianity; if it were, then the transformation that occurs in someone who goes from being a Christian to an atheist or a Christian to a Communist or a Christian to a Buddhist, etc. is a transformation that is evidence of the truth of atheism, Communism, Buddhism respectively, etc.[2]
The whole matter of evidence, say, of event E being evidence in favor believing proposition P is related to the broader question of the natural world’s intelligibility. A few days later, he asked:
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?[3]
My epistemological touchstone is the biblical worldview; upon it, I test every proposition, even if it’s been traditionally categorized as a “specific doctrine of normative Christianity.” The short answer is that the God of Scripture has something no generic divine creative mind necessarily has: an answer to the problem of the One and the Many, unity and diversity. The answer lies in one “specific doctrine of normative Christianity,” namely, the Trinity, but only because the materials for inferring that doctrine are in Scripture, not because that doctrine came to be normative for Christianity.
As I tried to show in another post, Bill’s words justify my description of him as an “Athenian fence-sitter” [4]: he views every theological question through the allegedly neutral lens of philosophical analysis. It’s no different when it comes to the “eye of faith”:
I am not a theologian. I am a philosopher of religion who, as part of his task, thinks about theologoumena which, on a broad interpretation of the term, are simply things said about God, a term which therefore includes not only official, dogmatic pronunciamenti of, say, the RCC’s [Roman Catholic Church’s] magisterium, but also includes conjectures, speculations, and opinions about God that are not officially promulgated.
Bill may not be a theologian, but he does have a theology, a logos about Theos, which he evaluates according to certain analytical criteria. If Theos has spoken, however, then one would think (as I do) that His speech is the normative lens through which one evaluates the analysis. Doing so will, however, expose one’s analysis to the risk that God’s Word will render it foolishness (1 Corinthians 1:20-25). Any unwillingness to so subject one’s methodology does not eliminate the risk.
Bill affirms the existence of a supernatural being that created all things other than that being but has so far been unwilling to identify that god with Yahweh, יהוה, Who breathed (θεόπνευστος, theopneustos; 2 Timothy 3:16) the Hebrew and Greek Scriptures. He must rule that possibility out of court because it threatens his commitment to the intellectual autonomy that underlies and motivates his analysis.
He does, however, raise the issue of the ability to “see,” that is, to grasp and affirm, divine revelation and of the conditions of such sight. According to Paul, God has revealed his existence and power, they are manifest (φανερόν, phaneron) to us, but we unrighteously (ἐν ἀδικίᾳ, en adikia) suppress it (Romans 1:18-20) until God overcomes the suppression. (God does it: he raises to life not only the spiritually but also the epistemologically dead.) Therefore, any inability to “see” God’s work may be due to a sinful “holding down” or suppression (κατεχόντων, katechontōn) of truth.
Jesus asked his disciples, “Who do you say that I am?” Peter answered, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.” Jesus characterized Peter’s understanding this way: “. . . flesh and blood hath not revealed this to you, but my Father in heaven” (Matthew 16:15-17). Jerusalem’s elite, the Sanhedrin, deeply versed in the Scriptures, understood the claim but rejected it as blasphemy.
In other words, Peter was “generated of God”: “He that believeth that Jesus is the Christ is generated (γεγέννηται, gegennētai) of God (1 John 5:1). Generated (“conceived,” if you will), not “born.” Jesus told Nicodemus he could not ideate or “see” (ἰδεῖν, idein; related to εἶδον, eidon, whence the English “idea”) the Kingdom of God unless he was generated from above (γεννηθῇ ἄνωθεν, gennēthē anōthen). (Not “born again.”)
Were Bill to say that mine is a “theological,” not a “philosophical” answer, I’d respond that without that insight into Jesus’ claims about himself—that He is not only the Son of God but also the creator of those who philosophize about Him—we forfeit the very ground of evidence-weighing. And this, I contend, is not true of atheism, Communism, Buddhism, and so forth; there is no worldview equivalence.
Unless God’s word is “under the floorboards” of one’s philosophical musings, they are the issue of one’s mental innards, spilling out into the void rather than expressing a truth God thought first. If the Father has not drawn you to the Son (John 6:44), then you will not have grounds for reasonably affirming anything, not even, for example, that two times two is four. As Van Til said, you can count but can’t account for your counting.[5]
In the same post, Bill wrote that certain “specific doctrines of normative Christianity, say, the
Trinity and Incarnation, may or may not be intelligible doctrines. Either way, the question remains why an account of the intrinsic intelligibility of nature in terms of Divine Mind requires them. . . .
I am genuinely asking why . . . anyone thinks that an account of the intelligibility of nature (including its uniformity, regularity, and predictability) in terms of Divine Mind must also include such specifically Christian doctrines as Trinity and Incarnation.
By the intelligibility of nature, I mean its intrinsic understandability by minds such as ours. The natural world is intrinsically such as to be understandable by us. As opposed to what? As opposed to deriving its intelligibility from us via our conceptual schemes. If the latter derivation were the case, then the intelligibility would not be intrinsic but relational: relative to us and our conceptual frameworks. . . .
After all, a Jew who rejects Trinity and Incarnation could hold that nature is intrinsically intelligible only if it is a divine creation. And a Muslim could as well. And our friend Dale Tuggy too! He is a unitarian Christian.
By the “intelligibility of nature,” Bill says he means “its intrinsic understandability by minds such as ours. The natural world is intrinsically such as to be understandable by us.” The Christian worldview holds that unless God meticulously foreordained nature to take the course it has, and therefore exhaustively “intellects” it, there is no uniformity, regularity, and predictability to be entertained.
Perhaps I’m missing something (it wouldn’t be the first time) but those are empty, hand-waving suppositions. Unitarian theists, be they Deists, Jews, or Muslims, must subordinate diversity to unity and thereby undermine a condition of intelligible predication, which is that they are equally ultimate. It’s not enough to affirm a monopersonal divine mind. Let them put up or shut up. Their merely possible “holding” of a position doesn’t make it cogent.
The question I raised in the initial post [Bill wrote] 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.
No, it’s not the same or even similar. Worldview questions are not factual questions, e.g., “Is there a box of crackers in the pantry?,” to cite Greg Bahnsen’s example from his debate with Gordon Stein.[6]
How should the difference of opinion between the theist and the atheist be rationally resolved? What Dr. Stein has written indicates that he, like many atheists, has not reflected adequately on this question. He writes, and I quote, “The question of the existence of God is a factual question, and should be answered in the same way as any other factual questions.”
The assumption that all existence claims are questions about matters of fact, the assumption that all of these are answered in the very same way is not only oversimplified and misleading, it is simply mistaken. The existence, factuality, or reality of different kinds of things is not established or disconfirmed in the same way in every case.
We might ask, “Is there a box of crackers in the pantry?” And we know how we would go about answering that question. But that is a far, far cry from the way we go about answering questions determining the reality of say, barometric pressure, quasars, gravitational attraction, elasticity, radioactivity, natural laws, names, grammar, numbers, the university itself that you’re now at, past events, categories, future contingencies, laws of thought, political obligations, individual identity over time, causation, memories, dreams, or even love or beauty. In such cases, one does not do anything like walk to the pantry and look inside for the crackers. There are thousands of existence or factual questions, and they are not at all answered in the same way in each case.
Just think of the differences in argumentation and the types of evidences used by biologists, grammarians, physicists, mathematicians, lawyers, magicians, mechanics, merchants, and artists. It should be obvious from this that the types of evidence one looks for in existence or factual claims will be determined by the field of discussion and especially by the metaphysical nature of the entity mentioned in the claim under question.
Dr. Stein’s remark that the question of the existence of God is answered in the same way as any other factual question, mistakenly reduces the theistic question to the same level as the box of crackers in the pantry, which we will hereafter call the crackers in the pantry fallacy.
A worldview or Weltanschauung is, of course, an Anschauung, a perception or intuition, but not a sensory perception.[7] Only one worldview, however, the one grounded in the Logos or Son of God, makes sense of sense perception, whether of the sun or anything else.
To be continued
Notes
[1] Anthony Flood, “Do Atheists Have an Excuse?,” Chapter 5 of Philosophy after Christ: Thinking God’s Thoughts after Him, Amazon, 2022, 34, 35. Bill
answers the question in the (qualified) affirmative. William F. Vallicella, “Are Atheists Vincibly Ignorant?,” Maverick Philosopher, November 8, 2018. “If God exists, and one is an atheist, then one is ignorant of God, but it does not follow that one is culpably ignorant. This puts me at odds with St. Paul, at least on one interpretation of what he is saying at Romans 1: 18-20.” In this series I intend to defend that antithesis and, as Bahnsen suggested, “push” it.
[2] William F. Vallicella, “The Sun Also Rises: On Solar and Christian Belief,” Maverick Philosopher, April 21, 2024.
[3] William F. Vallicella, “Christianity and Intelligibility: A Response to Flood,” Maverick Philosopher, April 25, 2024.
[4] Anthony Flood, “Philosophy before Christ: the case of an Athenian fence-sitter,” AnthonyGFlood.com, March 24, 2024.
[5] “Now the fact that two times two are [sic] four does not mean the same
thing to you as a believer and to someone else as an unbeliever. When you think of two times two as four you connect this fact with numerical law. And when you connect this fact with numerical law you must connect numerical law with all law. The question you face then is whether any law exists in its own right or is an expression of the will and nature of God. Thus, the fact that two times two are four enables you to implicate yourself more deeply into the nature and will of God. On the other hand, when an unbeliever says that two times two are four, he will also be led to connect this fact with the whole idea of law but will regard this law as independent of God. Thus, the fact that two times two are four enables him to get farther away from God.” Cornelius Van Til, Foundations of Christian Education, P&R Publishing, 1989. As cited here. See also Reformed philosopher Vern S. Poythress, Redeeming Mathematics, Crossway, 2015. Poythress earned a Harvard PhD in mathematics from Harvard in 1970; MDiv and ThM (apologetics) from Westminster Theological Seminary in 1974; MLitt (New Testament) from Cambridge in 1977; and ThM (New Testament) from the University of Stellenbosch in 1981.
[6] I encourage my visitors to listen to this storied debate: “The Great Debate: Does God Exist? Dr. Greg Bahnsen vs Dr. Gordon Stein,” February 11, 1985. YouTube (audio only). Here’s a link to its transcript.
[7] Weltanschauung, a calque of the Greek kosmotheoria, “is a network of first
truths that constitute our pretheoretical propensity to see (theoria) the world (kosmos), which includes God, mankind, and nature.” Flood, Philosophy after Christ, 39. Expounding Karl Mannheim, David K. Naugle wrote: “[T]he chief problem associated with the study of Weltanschauung [worldview, kosmotheoria] as a synthetic concept is that it stands outside, and is indeed prior to, the domain of theoretical reflection. That is to say that a worldview is not a theoretical but a pretheoretical phenomenon: it precedes and conditions abstract thought. Contrariwise, there is a strong tradition that equates worldview with a culture’s rational constructions, whether they be philosophical, scientific, or religious. The collective pronouncements of these disciplines constituted a culture’s essential philosophy, i.e., Weltanschauung.” Worldview: The History of a Concept, Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2002, 224. Emphasis added.