Apologetics – Anthony G. Flood

Christianity and intelligibility

Beneath a post on his blog, Bill Vallicella commented on a matter of common interest. I stress that Bill wrote a comment, not a paper for a peer-reviewed journal, and that’s all I’m doing here. I offer the following only as a further, not a last word.

Last Sunday, in responding to one Joe Odegaard, Bill wrote:

While I agree that Christianity makes sense of the world and in particular of the scientific enterprise, and while I myself have argued against materialism/physicalism/naturalism and in favor of Divine Mind as source of the world’s intelligibility, it must be borne in mind that Xianity [Christianity] is a very specific religion with very specific tenets such as Incarnation and Trinity. Why should anyone think that such apparently unintelligible doctrines are necessary for the intelligibility of the natural world? (Emphasis added.—A. G. F.)

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.

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. That’s the claim Bill has to defeat.

How is the Incarnation or the Trinity unintelligible, even apparently?

The equal ultimacy of the one and the many in the Triune Godhead saves predication from the consequences of monism and pluralism.

It’s also unclear what problem someone who affirms exnihilation finds in a divine person’s taking the form of a divine-image bearer. Some atheists have claimed, without justification, that exnihilation 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.

The Christian worldview, expressed on the pages of the Bible, is a revelatory “package deal,” if you will, not a buffet of optional metaphysical theses. The organic connectedness (within the divine decree) of creation, trinity, and incarnation—even the so-called “contingencies of history,” e.g., Joshua’s impaling the King of Ai on a pole after slaughtering all of his subjects (Joshua 8)—await clarification in God’s good time, if He sees fit to provide it, but are put before us for our assent today.

Do atheists have an excuse?

An edited version of this post, first published here five years ago today, forms the first half of Chapter 5 of Philosophy after Christ: Thinking God’s Thoughts after Him. The post linked in the first paragraph appeared on Bill Vallicella’s blog in 2018 (therefore, more than “a few months ago”).—A.G.F.

In a short post few months ago, Bill Vallicella argued that “If God exists, and one is an atheist, then one is ignorant of God, but it does not follow that one is culpably ignorant.” (Italics added.)

Bill takes his definition of “culpable ignorance” from a Catholic dictionary: ignorance is blameworthy if the ignorant one could have “cleared up” his ignorance, but chose not to. “One is said to be simply (but culpably) ignorant,” the dictionary says, “if one fails to make enough effort to learn what should be known.”

Bill applies this to the atheist this way:

I hold that there is vincible ignorance on various matters. But I deny that atheists are vincibly ignorant. Some might be, but not qua atheists. Whether or not God exists, one is not morally culpable for denying the existence of God. Nor do I think one is morally culpable if one doubts the existence of God.

Bill acknowledges that his exculpation of the professing atheist “puts me at odds with St. Paul, at least on one interpretation of what he is saying at Romans 1: 18-20.”

I’ll say! As Bill wrote in the post he linked to: “There are sincere and decent atheists, and they have plenty of excuse for their unbelief. The best of them, if wrong in the end, are excusably wrong.”

That position reveals a great deal about Bill’s idea of God. It’s not the idea one gets from the Bible, arguably the source of what Bill calls “the Judeo-Christian tradition.” I bring this up because Bill stipulates (in the post under discussion) that for “present purposes, it suffices to say that ‘God’ refers to the supreme being of the Judeo-Christian tradition.”

For Bill’s argument to work, that interpretation of Romans 1:18-20—God infallibly communicates His existence, power, and divinity to all people and they are all responsible for having received that communication—would have to fall outside that “tradition.”

God’s Word is the light that enlightens everyone who comes into the world (John 1:9). There are no exceptions for professing atheists.

Continue reading “Do atheists have an excuse?”

Philosophy before Christ: the case of an Athenian fence-sitter

In Colossians 2:8, Paul warns Christians not to be seduced by philosophy after (κατὰ, kata) “the elementary principles of the cosmos” (τὰ στοιχεῖα τοῦ κόσμου, ta stoicheia tou kosmou, i.e., demonic spirit-beings[1]) and not after Christ. This suggests the possibility of “philosophy after Christ,” a suggestion I pursued in a book with that title.[2]

“After” here doesn’t mean chronologically subsequent, but rather “in the manner or style of,” as one might paint after Rembrandt or after Picasso. When we philosophize, that is, pursue wisdom to help us lead rightly ordered lives, we ought to do so as Christ the Wisdom of God (σοφίᾳ τοῦ Θεοῦ, sophia tou Theou; 1 Corinthians 1:21) counsels. All philosophy that’s not “after Christ” (not only, say, Hermeticism) assumes a “neutral” posture toward God’s self-revelation in Scripture.[3]

Interestingly, twenty verses earlier, Paul taught not only that all things (τὰ πάντα, ta panta) cohere (συνίστημι, sunistēmi) in Christ, but also that He is “before all things (πρὸ τὰ πάντων, pro ta pantōn)” (Colossians 1:17). That is, He ranks above them because He created them: “. . . without Him nothing was made that was made” (John 1:3b). He decrees what is true about anything other than Himself: “All (כֹּ֤ל, kol) whatever (אֲשֶׁר, asher) pleases (חָפֵ֥ץ, hapes) the Lord (יְהוָ֗ה, Yahweh) does (עָ֫שָׂ֥ה asah)” (Psalm 135:6a). That includes the states of affairs we call “facts.”

Christ is not only “temporally” antecedent to (from “eternity past”[4]) His creation, but also pre-eminent over it. The set of “all things” includes His image-bearers: nothing has priority over Him—not even a philosopher’s mind. The thinker who gives epistemic authority to every Word that proceeds from the mouth of God (by which we are to live: Matthew 4:4) is different from the one who awards that status to something else. By “philosophy after Christ” I mean the pursuit of wisdom by practicing what Jesus preached, that is, answering Satan’s lies with Scripture; that is, putting Christ before that pursuit, not the other way around. Continue reading “Philosophy before Christ: the case of an Athenian fence-sitter”

Evidence I wasn’t always a “Van Tillian”

Listening this morning to an old (well, 2022) podcast[1] by the great Calvinist apologist James R. White, I was startled by his reference to Thom Notaro’s 1980 Van Til and the Use of Evidence. (White says he paid $3.75 for his copy back in the day, but a used copy on Amazon will set you back forty-five bucks.) Startled, I say, because over forty years ago, the Roman Catholic periodical New Oxford Review published, in its November 1981 issue, pages 29-30, my cluelessly negative review of Notaro’s book.

Consistent with my habit of airing my political and philosophical dirty laundry (which exercise works against one’s intellectual pride), I hereunder post that review’s text (and its prefatory note), which I took the liberty of posting in 2013 on my old site (whose anniversary I noted the other day).

* * *

On a “cringe-ometer” scale from 1 to 10, with 10 inducing a coma from embarrassment, this rates a 9. I pontificated about Van Til’s thought, about which I knew little first-hand, instead of actually reviewing a book about the role of evidence in an apologetic often mischaracterized as anti-evidence (even “fideistic”). In less than 600 words, I managed to beg every apologetical question, rendering myself a poster boy for the epistemological un-self-consciousness that, Van Til argued, renders every anti-Christian theistic worldview impotent.

In slight mitigation of my offense, I recall that as a New Yorker, who was not long before writing this a student in a doctoral program in philosophy, could not interact regularly with Van Til’s protégé, California-based Gregory L. Bahnsen, a Ph. D. in philosophy (USC, 1978). Had I been able to, my confusions would have been exposed and rectified much sooner. As it happened, I had to wait for the day I could carry around dozens of mp3s of his recorded lecture series and read many articles that are now freely available online. Even the very best of Bahnsen, his Van Til’s Apologetic: Readings & Analysis, was not available until after his passing.

I am posting this only to memorialize the flawed inception of my investigation into Van Til’s thought. I also observe that I did not give up.

Anthony Flood

January 16, 2013 (Slightly amended January 21, 2019) Continue reading “Evidence I wasn’t always a “Van Tillian””

Retrospects and Prospects

This year will be better than next year. Yes, that may reflect more my mood than reality, but it’s a mood that reality reinforces daily.

I’m an eschatological optimist—Christ’s saving work has given me peace (true union) with God, which is all that really matters—but a secular pessimist. The intermittent news of resistance to the totalitarianism that’s coming like Christmas may be accurate, but “So, cheer up, old boy!” doesn’t make me feel better (and making me feel better is no one’s obligation). Things will change for the better, or they won’t; I’ll know which soon enough, should I live so long.

Those charged with preventing with catastrophes (e.g., my country’s invasion) are in fact facilitating them, thereby undermining the good of order that makes the regular enjoyment of other goods possible. I cannot train my attention on the facilitators, however, if the criminal invaders in my vicinity are concentrating my mind wonderfully. Like them, the criminal overlords can be dealt with only by violence; I see no timely way to exercise legitimate violence against either class of criminal. So, I pray each day for safety but, failing that, at least for the opportunity to take a few of the bastards with me.

I will write until I can no longer, content with the probability that what I write might be picked up, if it ever will be, by people who won’t be born until after I’m dead. Perhaps 2024 will see the publication of Christian Individualism: The Maverick Biblical Workmanship of Otis Q. Sellers (the latest draft of which I’m sharing with beta readers) and of the second, expanded edition of Herbert Aptheker: Studies in Willful Blindness. Maybe I’ll get around to mining the 25 diaries (1970-1994) that record my interactions with the remarkable people I’ve met (and the mistakes they couldn’t prevent me from making).

Ultradispensationalist that I am, even the great Reformed Baptist apologist James R. White (b. 1962), whom I’ve been reading and listening to for about ten years has not been able to make a Calvinist out of me (not that he’s tried), but he certainly has ruined any Roman Catholic apologist’s chance of winning me back. Auditing many of his over 180 moderated debates over the past ten years, White always strikes me as having the better of the argument. To the task he always brings not only great learning and preparation, but also grit and not a little humor. A student of history, he teaches biblical Hebrew and Greek, yet wears his learning lightly, if I’m any judge of such things.

A couple of diamonds in the cultural dung heap, however, postpone utter esthetic despair.

One is the Bebop guitar virtuoso Pasquale Grasso (b. 1988) who, after the passing of my teacher and friend Pat Martino (1944-2021), showed me I could get excited about a player again. Here’s a great example.

The other gem is Harlem-born performer Wé Ani (b. 1999), the most versatile, and powerful, pop singer I’ve ever heard, whose voice salves my charred soul and never fails to plaster a smile on my face. My wife and I had first seen her in 2016 on The Voice (when she went by “Wé McDonald”). A physically different (almost unrecognizably so) Wé competed in last season’s (2023) American Idol, making it into the top five. Research revealed she was indeed the same person. What she did this year, however, hooked me. She can belt like nobody’s business, folk her way through any ballad (guitar and all), or rock it out, or out-Broadway any veteran of The Great White Wé, I mean, Way.

There seem to be at least a half dozen Wé Anis: after watching any two videos, I sincerely wonder, “Is that the same singer?” Without, I stress, impersonating any of them, she can put you in mind of Nina Simone, or Mary J. Blige, or Idina Menzel, or Whitney Houston, or Aretha Franklin, or Barbra Streisand. (This list is not exhaustive, but it risked becoming exhausting).

And she gave off a different vibe when belting out a Stevie Wonder classic for Tony Bennett (who clearly inspired her final tonal choice), bringing the Kennedy Center audience to their feet.

And then there’s the uncanny sonic chasm between her childlike speaking pitch and her robust, gritty singing voice: she says she wants to be taken seriously, but “it’s not easy sounding like a 12-year-old at 23.” The simile that comes to my mind is fiction’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (minus the creepy associations): she makes a fool of anyone who prejudges her talent on that basis. (For instance.)

She’s also a modest and charming interviewee (sans tatoos, nose ring, acrylic claws and other accoutrements of female celebrityhood): consider one from 2018 and another from September. The Standard, her latest, will drop on January 12, 2024.

Such are my few oases of refreshment these days. I feel better having shared these sentiments. However quixotic it may sound, I wish all my subscribers and visitors a happy and safe 2024.

Criticism of Presuppositional (Worldview) Apologetics

I welcome it, and recently got some from William Vallicella, Ph.D., a rejoinder to my response to him. Unfortunately for me, however, it’s part of a long series that bears on what I tried to do in Philosophy after Christ, and I haven’t yet been able to give the series’ members the study they deserve.

What I’m focusing on is Bill’s helpful distinction between a rationally acceptable argument and a rationally compelling one. I think my Van Til-inspired transcendental argument can be formulated so that it’s not merely acceptable, but also one that “coerces” rational assent (at least by those who value rational standards). Bill charges me with conflating, if not confusing, epistemic and ontic possibility, a serious matter, one I will confess if I must. How one coordinates one’s metaphysics (which determines ontic possibility) with one’s epistemology has its own presuppositions.[1]

I can “live with” a “merely” rationally acceptable argument that can defeat any candidate, alternative to the Christian worldview, for the status of transcendental condition of intelligible predication, that my interlocutor might suggest. Of course, such serial refutation, however successful for however long, falls short of proof. To be able, however, to pre-emptively rule out the possibility of there being any successful candidate remains for me a desideratum. I’ll let others speculate about what psychological type that confession betrays.

Note

[1] See, e.g., Greg Bahnsen, “The Necessity of Coordinating Epistemology with Metaphysics,” Section 1 of Chapter 3, “Neutrality & Autonomy Relinquished,” Presuppositional Apologetics: Stated and Defended. Joel McDurmon, ed. American Vision Press, 2010. See also Bahnsen’s magisterial exposition of Cornelius Van Til:

Van Til did not address specific disputes between philosophers or contemporary debates regarding possibility, but he realized that Christians are committed to hold certain beliefs about possibility that unbelievers will reject. “It is today more evident than ever before that it is exactly on those most fundamental matters, such as possibility and probability, that there is the greatest difference of opinion between theists and antitheists.” To put it simply and memorably: “Non-believers have false assumptions about their musts.”

Greg L. Bahnsen, Van Til’s Apologetic: Reading and Analysis. Presbyterian & Reformed Publishing Company, 1998, 281. The internal quotations are from Cornelius Van Til, An Introduction to Systematic Theology. Presbyterian & Reformed Publishing Company, 1974, 36, 264. To the latter footnote Bahnsen appended:

That is, they [antitheists] utilize a false philosophical outlook regarding “necessity,” “possibility,” etc.

Philosophy after Christ: First US Amazon review

From a friend, John Lancaster

A Fascinating Read.

Let me first preface this review by mentioning the following:

I was initially introduced to the author via his blog AnthonyGFlood.com. Coming from an Austrian economics background, I gravitated towards the posts covering political economy, history, civics, and individualism. While I also enjoyed Flood’s work in philosophy and theology, I’m not as well versed in those fields. Even though the quality of his work is uniform across his different ventures, my connection to the formerly mentioned topics was far stronger than my connection to the latter.

That being said, as a Christian and eclectic thinker, I jumped at the chance to read Philosophy After Christ. Having already reviewed [Herbert] Aptheker: Studies in Willful Blindness, I was looking forward to another insightful, concise, and engaging read.

Insightfulness, conciseness, and engagement are in spades with this book. Don’t let the sub-200 page count fool you, this is not a light read.

Flood argues the Christian worldview as “the only worldview that makes possible what philosophers do . . . [and] that everyone, even those who claim to be anti-Christian, operates implicitly in terms of the Christian worldview.”

He supports this stance through rigorous logical deductions while constantly referencing Scripture. Flood’s ability to sequentially link his chains of logic is truly a masterful display.

Along with unraveling the philosophical components of his claim, Flood sharply addresses opposing arguments from distinguished intellectuals such as Bertrand Russell, Cornelius Van Til, and Gordon Clark.

For anyone looking to bolster their understanding of Christian philosophy, look into different theistic interpretations, or enjoy quality cerebral jousting, this is the perfect read for them.

Thanks, John. I hope it will have successors. That’s up to other readers.

On arguing for one’s “sense of life”: Vallicella, Alain, Rand, and Bahnsen

In “Alain on Monasticism,” a stimulating Substack offering, my friend and philosopher extraordinaire Bill Vallicella (“Maverick Philosopher”) asked about the fruitfulness of arguing for or against a sense of life. The occasion was his recent re-reading of On Happiness by Émile-Auguste Chartier (1868-1951), whose nom de plume was Alain. My interest is not in Alain’s antipathy toward monkish existence but rather in Bill’s (apparent) ambivalence toward mere attitudes that imply (or entail) philosophical claims. Since I’ve probably misunderstood the problem Bill was cornering, I’m hoping that what I’ve written below will move him to set me straight. He writes:

Alain . . . frankly expresses his sense of life or sense of reality. I don’t share it, but can I argue against it? Does it even make sense to try to argue against it? Probably not. In a matter such as this, argument comes too late. Alain feels it in his guts and with his “whole being” that the religion of the mournful monks, the religion Alain himself was raised in, is world-flight and a life-denying sickness.

For a worldling such as Alain, the transient things of this world are as real as it gets, and all else is unreal. The impermanence of things and the brevity of life do not impress or shock him as they do someone with a religious sensibility.

In a Schlitz ad from yesteryear Bill finds this mood summed up:

. . . in the words of a 1970 beer commercial:

You only go around once in life
So you have to grab for all the gusto you can.

He continues:

The worldling’s attitude is a matter of sensibility and it is difficult and probably impossible to argue with anyone’s sensibility. I cannot argue you out of your sense of reality. Arguments come too late for that. In fact, arguments are often little more than articulations on the logical plane of a sensibility deep in the soul that was already in place before one attained explicit logical skills. Continue reading “On arguing for one’s “sense of life”: Vallicella, Alain, Rand, and Bahnsen”

“Presuppositionalism”: a reply to an implicit criticism

In “Christ on the Possibility of Social Order without Christ (Matt. 12:24-6)”, an anonymous blogger led into his polemic against “political presuppositionalism” with a swipe at unnamed advocates of generic “presuppositionalism.”

Presuppositionalism, at least in some of its articulations, is the Christian epistemological and apologetical philosophy according to which knowledge is only possible on the condition of a self-conscious presupposition of the existence of God and the truth of his revealed word. One of the problems with presuppositionalism, at least insofar as it represents a distinct theory, is that it confuses the metaphysical conditions for the possibility of knowledge with the epistemological conditions for the possibility of knowledge. God’s existence and role as first cause may be metaphysically necessary for there to be knowledge, but it doesn’t follow from this that God has therefore made it the case that the presupposition of these truths is necessary to have knowledge. (The Natural Law Libertarian, June 19, 2023)

No, presupposing the worldview is necessary, not to have truth, but in order to give an account of how one has it. Accounting for knowledge is an epistemological task.

Continue reading ““Presuppositionalism”: a reply to an implicit criticism”

“Philosophy after Christ”: James N. Anderson’s review

This morning James N. Anderson, Carl W. McMurray Professor of Theology and Philosophy at Reformed Theological Seminary in Charlotte and author of What’s Your Worldview?: An Interactive Approach to Life’s Big Questions—see a list of his other publications—alerted me to his review, published today, of my Philosophy after Christ: Thinking God’s Th0ughts after Him. It appears on his blog Analogical Thoughts (a.k.a., προγινώσκω, proginōskō, “to foreknow”; see Romans 8:29). For his praise of the book I am grateful, but for his criticisms, I am indebted to him. Please take this link.