Philosophy – Page 6 – Anthony G. Flood

Explanation Unexplained

Does David Ramsay Steele’s Atheism Explained: From Folly to Philosophy confirm aspects of the Square of Religious Opposition discussed in a previous post? [1] In this one I’ll defend an affirmative answer.

This square is an aid to thinking about worldviews according to the epistemic authority they presuppose (if not acknowledge) and what it governs, that is, their principles of transcendence and imminence, unity and diversity.

The Square of Religious Opposition

Christian

Non-Christian

Transcendence:

1. Absoluteness

2. Control

3. Universals

4. Unity

5. Law

Quadrant II:

God’s Has Revealed Himself Concretely in His Word and Works

(Christian “rationalism”)

Quadrant I:

The Human Mind Can Know Everything—Reality Is Exhaustively Cognizable

(Antitheistic rationalism)

Immanence:

1. Relativity

2. Freedom

3. Particulars

4. Diversity

5. Randomness

Quadrant III:

God Is the Sovereign Creator

(Christian “irrationalism” — which makes human reasoning possible)

Quadrant IV:

The Human Mind Is Limited—Nobody Can Know for Sure

(Antitheistic irrationalism)

Each of Steele’s many arguments calls for an apologetic response from a specialist.[2] The table of contents lists many topics and rhetorical tacks.[3] None of them holds up, however, if nothing is holding Steele up. And nothing does.

To show this, I’ve chosen one section of Steele’s book, “God Must Be Subject to Natural Law.” In those few lines he gives the game away, the game being the sport he believes he’s making of Christian theism. But first a few matters by way of background.

According to Steele, either one believes in the God of the Bible (hereafter “God”) or one doesn’t. He happens not to, and so he declares himself an atheist. Thinking no reason for believing is sound, he ends his book by speculating about sociological and psychological causes for the persistence of the allegedly groundless belief. Thus, “atheism explained.” I will not survey his survey.

It is, in any case, incomplete. Steele claims to have started his explanatory enterprise by eliminating “extreme positions”[4] before considering less radical ones. He never, however, deals with arguably the most extreme of them all, namely, that human knowledge of God is innate and requires no justification. The very condition of justification is in need of none. If there is a debate, it is over identifying that condition.

Human beings can unethically suppress that innate knowledge, however, and profess atheism, which is what Steele does. The biblical worldview holds that every human being capable of forming beliefs (a) knows that God exists and (b) is responsible for that knowledge (John 1:19, Romans 1:18). [5] His or her profession of atheism is irrelevant to this issue as is the profession of theism.

Steele writes from within an undeclared worldview, one that rules out the Bible’s in advance. That’s unfortunate, for it’s the only one that makes possible the critique and theoretical justification he’s engaged in. It’s the only one revealed by perfect intelligence (Psalm 147:5, אֵ֣ין מִסְפָּֽר׃, ayin mispar). In the same world cognitive norms comport with absolute moral values, numbers, logical laws, natural regularity, and interpersonal communication and many other otherwise incommensurable realities. They cohere in the Biblical worldview at the center of which is a sovereign creator-God. I can show that they cannot cohere in Steele’s. Continue reading “Explanation Unexplained”

Aquinas’s proto-liberal concerns

The pleasant discovery of a series of posts by Professor Jonathan McIntosh on the site of the Libertarian Christian Institute (LCI) has occasioned my republishing today part of Chapter 10 of Christ, Capital & Liberty: A Polemic (CCL). As that chapter originated as a post written about ten years ago, I’ve edited it, airbrushing references to the polemic. (Those interested in the latter should consult the book. I’ve modified the chapter in other ways.)

With erudition and nuance, Dr. McIntosh locates Thomas Aquinas on the political spectrum as a proto-liberal (my term, not McIntosh’s).

These anti-libertarian sentiments [of Thomas’s, just enumerated by McIntosh] notwithstanding, there are yet many other respects in which Aquinas’s political thought is not only consistent with libertarianism, but arguably provide the latter with an ideal and even necessary, moral and metaphysical framework.

McIntosh’s aim is

to sketch at least the outlines of a distinctly Thomistic, natural law libertarianism, one that coherently combines Aquinas’s account of law’s place within the social and moral dimension of human nature, with libertarianism’s more considered and consistent ethic of law’s inherently coercive nature.

McIntosh is a kindred spirit whose work I’m happy to advertise. (Visit his blogs The Natural Law Libertarian and The Flame Imperishable.) His admiration for Thomas is great, but does not inhibit his criticism. Aquinas’s thought on the subject of liberty is, as I shall show in my own way, a mixed bag, but one whose contents every lover of liberty and reason is better off for having explored.

McIntosh’s series is entitled “The Libertarian Aquinas: Aquinas and Libertarianism,” and here are links to Part I, Part II, and Part III. (At least another installment is on the way.) I welcome any criticism of my effort he may see fit to give.

I’m taking this opportunity to thank again LCI’s Chief Executive Officer Doug Stuart for interviewing me about Christ, Capital & Liberty in late 2019 and making our discussion available on their site since last March.

Note: The “Austrians” referred to in today’s post are writers who subscribe to the Austrian School of Economics (ASE), whose “dean” was Murray N. Rothbard (1926-1995). “Anarcho-Catholics” are Roman Catholics who find a “profound philosophical commonality” between the ASE and Catholic teaching (but not “Catholic Social Teaching”). I would include among them James A. Sadowsky, S.J. (1923-2012), Joseph Sobran (1946-2010), Thomas E. Woods, and Gerard N. Casey, although none of them uses (or used) that term to describe his political philosophy. I have defended that compatibility; as a dispensationalist, however, I no longer use the descriptor for myself.

Continue reading “Aquinas’s proto-liberal concerns”

The Square of Religious Opposition: A Van Tillian insight, diagrammed by Frame, taught by Bahnsen, paraphrased by me

“Van Til observed that both the unbeliever and the believer maintain correlative views of continuity (rationalism) and discontinuity (irrationalism), and that these two sets of correlative views stand in contradiction to each other. . . . The Christian holds that God knows and controls all things (resulting in rationality and continuity), which contradicts the non-Christian’s view that reality is an expression of pure chance (resulting in irrationality and discontinuity). The Christian holds that God must reveal Himself and does so with authority over man’s reasoning (stressing discontinuity and ‘irrationality’ or man’s rational inadequacy), which contradicts the non-Christian’s view that reality is controlled and (in principle) completely knowable by the laws of his own mind (stressing rationality and continuity).

“John Frame has often capitalized on this significant insight in Van Til. . . . It is found in ‘the square of religious opposition’ in his The Doctrine of the Knowledge of God (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R Publishing Co., 1987), 14-15. . . .” Greg Bahnsen, Van Til’s Apologetic: Readings and Analysis, 399-400, n. 267.

A long excerpt from Frame’s The Doctrine of the Christian Life (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R Publishing Co., 2008) is freely available online; his exposition of the square of religious opposition is in chapter 4, 42ff. What follows is my rendering (part transcription, part paraphrase, done at least ten years ago) of Greg L. Bahnsen’s interpretation of Frame’s idea. My source is Bahnsen’s lecture “Disarming Worldviews” in his Loving God with Your Whole Mind series GB1413. (Clicking the link will take you to a file you may play or download.)

* * *

There’s an antithesis between the Christian worldview and the non-Christian worldview, but at least they have being worldviews in common. Every worldview incorporates considerations of transcendence and elements of immanence.

A worldview’s elements of transcendence are the absolutes, authority, and universals it depends on, all of which are prior to experience. They are the controls that provide unity, continuity, and order for experience.

1. What is absolute is not part of transient experience, but renders the latter intelligible and therefore must transcend that person-relative, changing, and qualified experience.
2. Every appeal to authority relativizes momentary thinking. If I claim to live according to a principle, then that principle, and not any thought that happens to cross my mind, functions as an authority for me. That standard, external to my mind and not a product of it, is that to which my thinking must conform.
3. No philosopher looks upon the world as a realm of utter diversity, so it must notice “commonalities” and employ universals to refer to those commonalities in order to conceive and talk about the diversity he or she does find. When we analyze the reality presented in our experience, we use universals that necessarily transcend the experience to be analyzed.

By contrast, immanence is about the here-and-now, the close-at-hand, what is continuous with our experience. It stresses the concrete details over the abstract plan. Every philosophy deals not only in authority and control measures, but also in the freedom we have to change, make our own decisions, to be different. Continue reading “The Square of Religious Opposition: A Van Tillian insight, diagrammed by Frame, taught by Bahnsen, paraphrased by me”

What are we doing when we’re reading? Bernard Lonergan and Gordon Clark on “black marks on white paper”

While reading The Presbyterian Philosopher, Doug Douma’s authorized biography of Gordon Haddon Clark, I was struck by this 1962 lecture snippet:

. . . ink marks on a paper, or sounds in the air, the noise I’m making, never teach anybody anything. This is good Augustinianism. And Protestantism is supposed to be Augustinian, at least it was in its initiation. And it was the most unfortunate event that Thomas Aquinas came in and replaced Augustinianism with Aristotelianism and empiricism which has been an affliction ever since. But the point is that ink marks on a paper, and the sound of a voice, never generates any idea at all. And Augustine’s solution of it is that the Magister is Christ. Christ is the light that lighteth every man that cometh into the world. This not a matter of regeneration. This is a matter of knowledge. And Christ enlightens the unregenerate in this sense just as well as the regenerate. If an unregenerate man learns anything at all, he learns it from Jesus Christ and not from ink marks on paper.[1]

Now, whom did these remarks put me in mind of? Why, Bernard Lonergan, S.J., the great transcendental Thomist, steeped in the Aristotelian tradition:

“Reading categories into” is a particular application of the great principle that you know by taking a look at what’s out there. Either it is out there or it is not; and the man who sees what is out there is right and the other fellow reads his own mind into what is out there. That is a fundamental error on what the exegete or interpreter does. What’s out there are black marks on white paper in a certain order. And if the exegete or interpreter gives you anything distinct, in any way different from those black marks on white paper in the same order, then it is due to his personal experience, his personal intelligence, and his personal judgment, or it is due to his belief in what someone else told him.[2]

Continue reading “What are we doing when we’re reading? Bernard Lonergan and Gordon Clark on “black marks on white paper””

1949: What were my influencers doing?

Last December 15th in Birdland, 1949-1965: Hard Bop Mecca, I marked the 70th anniversary of the opening of that legendary Jazz club on Manhattan’s Broadway off 52nd Street. Over the weekend I wondered what else was going on that year, but not the trivia one can learn from Wikipedia, such as:

- President Harry S. Truman’s inauguration in January
- Astronomer Fred Hoyle’s coining of “big bang” (a term of disparagement) in March
- Hamlet’s Best Picture Oscar win later that month
- The opening of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman in February at the Morosco (six blocks south of Birdland’s near-future site)
- The Soviet Union’s successful A-bomb test in August and Truman’s sharing that news a month later
- Twin Communist victories: the proclamation of the People’s Republic of China on the first of October and of the German Democratic Republic a week later.

World War Two was in the rearview mirror. but the Cold War with its threat of mutually assured nuclear destruction was straight ahead.

No, I was remembering what writers who influenced me over the past fifty years were doing in 1949. Most of the embedded links below will take you to posts that elaborate upon that influence. Continue reading “1949: What were my influencers doing?”

Gordon H. Clark’s scripturalism: Shawn Lazar’s revision

Shortly after posting Gordon H. Clark’s problematic rationalism a couple of weeks ago, I discovered the best sympathetically critical study of Clark I’ve ever read in the last thirty-five years. From first page to last, it’s well-written. It’s Shawn Lazar‘s Scripturalism and the Senses: Reviving Gordon Clark’s Apologetic, available in paperback or Kindle on Amazon. You can also freely download it as a pdf. (Many of his other writings are also available on that site. You may be asked why you want to access it.)

While reading Lazar, it occurred to me that defending the Christian worldview as the only one that can support rational defense itself—my approach to apologetics (see this and this)—one must first grasp and interrelate that worldview’s elements and their interconnections by reading Scripture, trusting that whatever affirms, teaches, and implies, God affirms, teaches, and implies.

That thought kept me reading Scripturalism and the Senses, even though the author would disagree with my inference. For that, in a word, is what Lazar’s revision of the “master axiom” of Clark’s Scripturalism amounts to:

The Bible is the only source of truth.

Lazar shows that this formulation overstated the matter and led many of Clark’s admirers to say “No thanks.” For even from the Bible we learn that we know things before and apart from reading Scripture. Even to do that, we have to know that’s what we’re doing when we interpret the Bible’s (or any other writing’s) alphabetic symbols as meaningful expressions.

Lazar reformulates Scripturalism’s master axiom this way:

The Bible is the word of God without error, true in all it teaches, affirms, and implies.

Among the propositions that the Bible teaches, affirms, or implies is that we may rely on our sense organs, fallible though they are, in the acquisition of knowledge. There are other sources of truth, but since truth cannot contradict truth, no truth can contradict the Bible. When in doubt, refer to the master axiom.

Further, we don’t need an epistemology to justify belief in the reliability of our sensory apparatus. We believe in its cognitive reliability because Scripture reveals that about us. The Bible’s trustworthiness about the human condition, including its cognitive powers, is axiomatic. Continue reading “Gordon H. Clark’s scripturalism: Shawn Lazar’s revision”

Gordon H. Clark’s problematic rationalism

My Philosophy after Christ project continues with notes on the late Reformed philosopher Gordon Haddon Clark (1902-1985). Douglas Douma, the author of The Presbyterian Philosopher: The Authorized Biography of Gordon H. Clark, recently posted an essay about how one ought to go about defending the Christian faith (AKA, apologetics methodology). I commend Douma’s stimulating post to readers. It forms the background of this one, a (nonexhaustive) commentary upon most of it.

Cornelius Van Til, 1978, speaking on the steps of Federal Hall National Memorial, Wall Street.

We sometimes learn by drawing contrasts, and when it comes to defending the Christian faith, one of the most instructive is that between the apologetics method of Cornelius Van Til (1895-1987) and Clark’s.

For Van Til and his expositor Greg L. Bahnsen (1948-1995), the first question is: what worldview are unbelievers presupposing when they raise their objections?

For Clark and the first proponent of his philosophy and theology, John W. Robbins (1948-2008), it is: how do you know? For Clark, that means: what axiom does your objection to Christianity presuppose and what follows from it?

For Clark and Clarkians, the only rationally defensible axiom is: the Bible is the Word of God and therefore every proposition affirmed or taught in it may be taken as true and upon it one may build a philosophy of life.

For a time in the late ‘80s, I was a Clarkian (see my exchange with Bahnsen here and here. I was also a correspondent of Robbins’s. I have copies of our letters; Robbins’s estate should as well.) I had been a recent graduate student in philosophy, and Gordon Clark (who chaired Butler University’s philosophy department for 28 years) epitomized for me the ideal of Christian intellectual. That he also admired aspects of the thought of one of my philosophical heroes, Brand Blanshard, was also a plus for me.

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Worldviews, basic and theorized

For decades I asked, “What is the evidence or argument for this worldview?” (for example, Marxism, Existentialism, or Christianity). It was the wrong question. I had been assuming that “worldview” always means an explicitly held ideology, philosophy, or theology, a system of ideas one is obliged to justify (or counter) with evidence and argument.

One does not, however, argue for one’s worldview, at least not one’s basic worldview. Rather, one’s basic worldview—a network of nonnegotiable beliefs about one’s relationship to others, to the cosmos, and to God—is the foundation upon on which one argues or asks questions. One’s basic worldview is implicated in the effort to argue or justify. It gets expressed in socially and historically conditioned ideologies, philosophies, and theologies. They are many, but the worldview-forming capacity, like the language-forming capacity, is anthropologically one.

One may rationally vindicate one’s theorized worldview by showing its superiority to any other on offer, but the worldview will even supply the criteria of evaluation. As followers of this blog know, I’m developing a manuscript entitled Philosophy after Christ. Today I’m continuing the line of thought sketched in Worldviews, potent and impotent: Noam Chomsky’s “lucky accident.” I want to develop the idea of a pre-theoretical (yet theorizable) worldview which, without conscious effort, forms as we mature from infancy through childhood and adolescence to adulthood. It forms in tandem with our capacity for language (without which the theorization can’t be expressed).

I’ve come to distinguish between the worldview one spontaneously comes to have and any reflection upon it. I’m also aware of the temptation to conflate the two. That is, having reflected upon one’s basic beliefs, one identifies and labels the result of that reflection. Between the two, the human heart’s imperfect love of truth inserts a wedge. The possibility of faithless, rather than faithful, reflection emerges.

In other words, if worldview-reflection occurs, if we attend to our incorrigible beliefs and then say something about these “nonnegotiables,” we introduce the problem of truth, adherence thereto and suppression thereof.

Let’s consider the distinction between what I’ve called our “birthright” worldview (see, e.g., this and this) and our attempts to articulate and label it (our “ideologies” or “philosophies”). Our linguistic capability is also our birthright: there’s nothing we need to do attain it.

Those attempts, being partly products of our decisions in response to our social and physical environments, may capture the birthright worldview accurately and flesh it out fruitfully. Or, those attempts may distort it and weaken its logical “pull.” Some writers have helped me think this through this problem. One of them is David K. Naugle, Chair of Dallas Baptist University’s Philosophy Department. He bears no responsibility for my imperfect grasp of his work.

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Worldviews, potent and impotent: Noam Chomsky’s “lucky accident”

My work on Philosophy after Christ proceeds; today’s post expresses part of what I mean by philosophy, not only chronologically after Christ’s earthly ministry, but also “according to Christ” (κατὰΧριστόν, kata Christon) (Colossians 2:8).

We all take many things for granted. If, however, we would honor our mental obligations, we ought not to take things for granted, but rather examine their grounds. That is, whoever aspires to pursue wisdom or “philosophize” (which pursuit the linguistic analysis called “philosophical” ought to subserve) should not take taking-for-granted for granted. We ought to ground that habit.

We can do that by examining our worldview to see whether it can bear the weight we put on it. The German for “worldview” is Weltanschauung, a calque of the Greek kosmotheoria. A worldview is a network of first truths that constitute our pretheoretical propensity to see (theoria) the world (kosmos), which includes God, mankind, and nature.[1]

Our worldview-forming capacity is innate. It is a heuristic for making sense of the world, including our sense-making. The Christian claims that the kosmotheoria on display in the Bible alone fills that schema concretely and successfully. It’s our birthright, which except by God’s grace we incline to trade for a pot of message. The history of philosophy is the story of the attempt to put something else in place of God’s Word, the chronicle of the many ways human beings can devalue their inheritance.

The renown linguist and cognitive scientist, Noam Chomsky (b. 1928) provides a glaring example of this devaluation. He matter-of-factly consigns science, his intellectual milieu for seven decades, to a meaningless void:

[A] partial congruence [Chomsky writes] between the truth about the world and what the human science-forming capacity produces at a given moment yields science. Notice that it is just blind luck if the human science-forming capacity, a particular component of the human biological endowment, happens to yield a result that conforms more or less to the truth about the world.[2]

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Reflections on Ernst Cassirer

Ernst Cassirer

Over the years I have collected several short essays on the great morphologist of the human spirit, Ernst Cassirer (July 28, 1874—April 13, 1945) by very different thinkers whom I also admire and posted them on my other site. Here I provide links to them and excerpts from them, in the hope that they will stimulate interest in Cassirer and the problems he wrestled with.[1]

In his review of Cassirer’s An Essay on Man, Brand Blanshard sounds a note of disappointment:

It is hard not to think, as one reads a book so wealthy as this in historic and scientific erudition, but at the same time so oddly inconclusive, that Cassirer was rather a distinguished reflective scholar than a great speculative philosopher. The learning is not mobilized in the interest of any theory; the book is not so much an “essay on man” as a series of essays, all suggestive and enlightening, which converge on—what? It is hard to say. Perhaps there is no end, or harmony of ends, toward which all these activities are moving. But then, on Cassirer’s own showing, no philosophy of man would seem to be practicable; there would only be a theory of art, a theory of religion, and so on. This is in fact what he gives us. And an admirable gift it is, for which I, at least, am thankful. Only it is not what he sets out to give, nor all that the reader hoped to gain.

William Schultz, in his Cassirer and Langer on Myth, commented directly on Blanshard’s assessment:

Here is the assumption of a continental philosopher that a system must ‘converge’ on something or lead to an overall unity of experience, an ideal unity. To some extent, the criticism is correct, for the main arguments are not in An Essay on Man, yet Cassirer’s claims about the need for unity should have alerted Blanshard that they were in his previous books, as Cassirer himself said in the Preface to that work written almost twenty years after the three-volume masterpiece [The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms]. Ironically, both Blanshard and Cassirer share some of the same assumptions about what philosophy should do, but Blanshard did not study Cassirer’s work enough to recognize the revolutionary way in which Cassirer satisfies traditional expectations about what a philosophy is and does.

The other subject of Schultz’s study, Susanne Langer (1895-1985), the German-American philosopher whose thought was shaped to a large degree by her early absorption of Cassirer’s writings in the original as they were published, contributed an essay his theory of language and myth to the Library of Living Philosophers volume dedicated to him.

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