Last week I posted a grad school paper I wrote in 1978 about the problem (scandal?) of diversity in philosophy. Bill Vallicella commented on it in his site’s combox. I mostly agree with his criticisms of how I formulated things then, but in the end he mentioned a persistent issue between us, namely, my worldview approach to philosophy in general (“presuppositionalism”) and Christian apologetics in particular.
As Bill’s passing (hand-waving?) comment was not a paper for academic peer review, I won’t hold it to those standards. I caught in it, however, a dismissive attitude, shared by many, that casts aspersions on what I’m up to. It occasioned and merits a response. I give one with no insinuation of “So there!” but rather in Bill’s irenic spirit.
He wrote:
. . . I think you and I have much common ground. The difference is that you have opted for a presuppositionalism that to me makes no sense and is a privileging of an arbitrarily adopted position. I have shown to my satisfaction that TAG [the Transcendental Argument for the existence of God] is a non-starter. You of course disagree. This is yet another philosophical disagreement. You may think you are beyond philosophy and that philosophy is, as you term it ‘misosophy,’ but you are still stuck at the philosophical level.[1]
Greg L. Bahnsen would often charge his debate opponent with being arbitrary. Don’t be!, he’d advise, before showing how his opponent offended in that respect.
The Christian worldview’s grounding of intelligible predication extends to one norm informing the giving of reasons, that is, of not being arbitrary. If you’re not thinking in harmony with that worldview—if the Word of God is not behind your admonishments—why not be arbitrary?
Avoiding arbitrariness is a good instrumental to producing other goods (instrumental or intrinsic) about which we can pose the same challenge. I may feel strongly, wordlessly, that I shouldn’t be arbitrary, say, because I implicitly grasp that arbitrariness undermines the conversations we need to have about important matters.
We can go down the rabbit hole of justifying having that conversation, and so forth. What terminates the regress is recognizing that giving reasons for what we believe, that is, by not being arbitrary, is one way of doing what God expects of us.
We can hear God inviting His people to reason, rebuke, refute, convict, and convince collectively with Him: “Come, let us reason together” (Isaiah 1:18).[2]
Then there’s Peter’s instruction to his readers to defend rationally—give an apologetic for (ἀπολογίαν, apologian)—their hope in Christ (1 Peter 3:15). Who hears Peter (or any other man He commissioned with authority) hears Him (Luke 10:16).
Throughout the Gospels we see Jesus reasoning by necessary implication from what His Father has revealed in the Scriptures and from the propositions to which even His enemies professed to commit themselves.[3]
But this is probably not philosophy by Bill’s standards.
Which, if any, of the following propositions do my critics hold to be true? Or am I missing a third possibility?
-
- Intelligible predication has no conditions that the exigent reasoner must meet before going on his merry cognitive way in the sciences, arts, civic affairs, and so forth without worrying his head about them.
- Intelligible predication may have conditions that an exigent reasoner must meet, if challenged, in order to show the ultimate basis for his reasoning, but the Christian worldview, as expressed on the pages of the Bible:
- does not meet them, or
- another worldview does, or
- we know of no worldview that meets them, so our reasonings may be, for all we know, ultimately groundless, but we may go on our merry cognitive way in the sciences, arts, civic affairs, and so forth without worrying our heads about them.
I fail to see how the “may” in 2.3 is anything but arbitrary. (Hand-waving?)
How is it arbitrary for the one who says the Christian worldview alone makes possible intelligible predication whose disparate, incommensurable conditions include logical laws, moral absolutes, and nature’s regularity? Endeavoring to be clear about that dependence is among the least arbitrary of rational motivations.
When the Christian asks you what’s behind it all, you can ignore him, say you don’t know or don’t care, and add that not knowing or caring doesn’t prevent you from pursuing your projects. I think that what’s arbitrary is pursuing one’s cognitive business after becoming aware of the issue and confessing that nothing fills the bill. (Or, as Kamala might say, “Not a thing comes to mind.”)
As for “privileging an arbitrarily adopted position,” what philosopher is not guilty of that, no matter how rigorously and comprehensively his system. Plato? Aristotle? Hegel? Kant? Schopenhauer? Cassirer? Lonergan?
How did any of them relate logical law to nature’s regularity and either or both to moral absolutes? From what starting point did their mental innards-spinning commence? Number (Pythagoras)? An element (e.g., Thales)? Descartes’ cogito? Hegel’s Geist? Engels’s matter in motion? Or . . . what?
Here’s a (merely) suasive consideration: if you believe, as I believe Bill does, that the God of the Bible exists, isn’t it at least plausible that He is the condition of the intelligible predication of His created image-bearers, that He is not accidentally related to that condition? Why should someone who appreciates the contemplative, God-oriented life not be inclined toward the TAG? How is that a “nonstarter”? How does that fail to “make sense” when sense-making is the TAG’s very motive?
Our common reality is intelligible in its equally ultimate unities and diversities—including the coherence of logical (mathematical) laws, moral absolutes, and nature’s observable regularities—just because it was created by and therefore must reflect the Triune God and is not a chance-riven chaos.
In the biblical worldview, the mutual coherence of those incommensurably disparate abstract objects makes sense. That worldview is ours if we affirm the epistemological primacy of the propositional content that God breathed (θεόπνευστος, theopneustos; 2 Timothy 3:16) into the writing of the Bible.
What accounts for our power of symbolic reference in our harnessing of memory, which we continuously take for granted? Here’s a proposal: in the beginning was the Word (Symbol) Who both is God and is “in relation to” or “toward” (πρὸς, pros) God, who enlightens us as we come into the world and in whose image we are created (John 1:14; Genesis 1:26-27).
Is this a “nonstarter” that “makes no sense”? Don’t they give us a fighting chance of making sense of the world, of other persons, and of our ability to communicate symbolically? Denying them makes it impossible. What worldview would (does) Bill offer in its place?
Or is philosophy a game that one can trade in for another, like Hume’s billiards, if a player questions its Prime Directive: never question your presumption of intellectual autonomy. We’re all “stuck at the philosophical level.” I wrote a book wherein I characterize those who do not philosophize “after Christ” as “stuck.” [4] (I understand he was not reviewing that book in the combox.)
Bill raised one more issue:
But here is a challenge for you (I am not speaking in my own voice). It might be urged that while it is true that no philosophical dispute has ever been resolved to the satisfaction of all competent practitioners, it is a BAD INDUCTION to conclude that no phil. dispute will ever be resolved to the satisfaction, etc. After all, we’ve been at this game for less than three millennia . . . and who knows what the future will bring once Trump MsAGA, Elon Musk colonizes Mars, and we make contact with advanced extraterrestrial civilizations, etc.
What would you say to the BAD INDUCTION objection?
According to Gordon Clark, there’s no such thing as a good induction: every one is a formal fallacy. Now, no more than you will suspend your worldview will I suspend mine to answer that question. Time is irrelevant. Popularizers of Darwin used to argue (I paraphrase) that, given enough time, hundreds of chimpanzees could bang out Shakespeare’s literary corpus on typewriters. There is no possible future in which something other than the God is the ultimate condition of our intelligible predication.
But there is another point I should make. You seem to think that philosophy proceeds reasonably only if it achieves agreed-upon results. I deny that as I have argued many times. Why do you accept it?
But I don’t; the seeming’s a mirage. Philosophy can proceed dialectically—through disagreement—indefinitely. Dialectic does not threaten the philosophical enterprise. What threatens its intelligibility is a self-inflicted scotosis toward its origin and aim.[5] The remedy is openness to insights, but sometimes insight threatens bias and so is suppressed.
Openness may be partly a personal achievement, but on topics that bear on the spiritual dimension of the presumption of autonomy, openness must be a gift from God, who alone can give sight to the spiritually blind (and raise the spiritually dead). To the extent that our thinking is not based on and ordered toward God’s truth, to that extent it proceeds arbitrarily. It cannot integrally proceed on any other basis.
Notes
[1] William F. Vallicella, “Disagreement in Philosophy: Notes on Jiří Fuchs,” Maverick Philosopher, November 24, 2024. Emphasis added.
[2] Isaiah’s main verb is iוְנִוָּֽכְחָ֖ה (wəniwwāḵəḥāh), whose root is יָכַח (yakach). The Septuagint (Greek translation of the Hebrew Old Testament, third to second centuries BC) rendered יָכַח as ἐλέγχω (elegchō), which appears many times in the Greek New Testament.
[3] See, for example, Dallas Willard, “Jesus the Logician,” Christian Scholar’s Review, 1999, XXVIII:4, 605-614. Text is taken from Willard’s site. Willard (1935-2013) was, among many other things, a translator of Husserl’s Philosophy of Logic and Mathematics and Philosophy of Arithmetic.
[4] Anthony Flood, Philosophy after Christ: Thinking God’s Thoughts after Him, Amazon, 2022.
[5] On scotosis as a suppressor of insights that conflict with our interest,
see Bernard Lonergan, Insight: A Study of Human Understanding, Chapter 6, “Common Sense and Its Subject”: “Besides the dramatic bias that results from an aberration of the censor, besides the individual and group bias of common sense, there are scotomata that block the emergence of relevant insights. The name derives from the Greek word for darkness (skotos), and it has been employed to designate the blind spots that can be detected in the field of vision. Such a scotoma results from an interference with the process of insight; for the act of seeing is not just outer seeing but also inner seeing, and it is to this inner seeing that scotosis applies.”