Book Review: Scripturalism and the Senses (Part 12)

Links to all parts may be found here. This part will contain a review and evaluation of Mr. Lazar's eleventh chapter in his book, Scripturalism and the Senses.

"Neo"-Scripturalism and Worldview Tests

As perhaps the shortest chapter in Mr. Lazar's book, I suppose previous chapters are meant to bear the brunt of the apologetic load on making good on the claims herein. As I have covered previous chapters in previous reviews, where appropriate, I will simply forward the reader back to the arguments made in those reviews to substantiate my responses here:

Test of reason: since the formulations of Scripturalism with which Mr. Lazar took issue were never one's written or state by Clark himself (link), for him to state that Clark’s Scripturalism is self-referentially incoherent is premature, at the very least.

Test of Skepticism: as I pointed out in my last review (link), among others, "Neo"-Scripturalists are in no position to be aware of the presence of external, epistemic justificatory factors which Mr. Lazar would say are needed to "warrant" any given belief in any given scenario about one's having a wife... or, for that matter, about one's self-existence. On this latter subject, I'm not sure what external justificatory factors Mr. Lazar could possibly have in mind which would be needed to "warrant" self-knowledge. 

On the contrary, one who accepts Clark’s understanding of Scripturalism could deduce that extra-biblical knowledge is possible, even if 1) Clark himself never made such a deduction and 2) one wouldn't be self-aware regarding when an externally justified belief (in particular) occurs. Extra-biblical knowledge is, however, a defensible possibility when grounded in a fundamentally internalist theory of knowledge, whereas it would not be so on a purely externalist theory of knowledge (since even one could not be aware that his deduction was accompanied by the requisite external justificatory factor). If, then, "Neo"-Scripturalism holds that the epistemic justification for all knowledge-claims will depend on an external factor, I would conclude that it does fail the test of skepticism insofar as no one can have "full assurance of... knowledge" (link). 

So, to reiterate another earlier review (link), Clark was not interested in the limitations of knowledge so much as he was interested in having a certain kind of knowledge. His "basic epistemology" bears out one's ability to have (and be aware that one has) the sort of robust "knowledge" needed to defend any other, supplemental definitions of "knowledge" one might wish to apply in certain contexts. 

Explanatory power: out of all the tests he mentions, Mr. Lazar is reticent to say he passed the test of explanatory power. That’s because, as I mentioned in an earlier review, this test is mostly relative in the first place (link). The key question - which Clark saw and answered - is that the some knowledge we can have on Scripturalism is absolutely better than the none we have without it.

One comment I didn't quite understand was the following: 

I don't think there's very much that can be directly deduced from the Bible when it comes to the rest of human inquiry. You'll not be able to deduce a study of Van Gogh's The Starry Night, the cure for cancer, the history of bluegrass music, the plans for a more efficient diesel engine, or the existence of a habitable planet in a faraway solar system. Neo-Scripturalism cannot explain those things, because the Bible does not. Those are subjects you'll have to discover apart from the Bible, according to the norms and standards of those different domains of inquiry.

In what sense do extra-biblical subject have "norms" and "standards"? Is one obligated to discover extra-biblical subjects through these norms and standards and, if so, why? Mr. Lazar did link to a few books, but just as he exposited Plantinga's thought in an earlier chapter, I would have been interested in how the books he cited might have answered some of these questions, or at least an example using one of the extra-biblical subjects he mentioned in the same paragraph.

Test of hardcore common sense: Mr. Lazar refers to the "presuppositions of argumentation" as "extra-Biblical." But any valid examples of performative contradictions - and the concept itself - are just instances of logical consistency being applied to one's claims, thoughts, and practice (link). Insofar as Scripture is logical or reasonable, calls us to be reasonable, and is itself the necessary and sufficient precondition for knowledge (of the "robust" kind, link), Scripturalism is not only compatible with the "test of hardcore common sense," it is, as with any other apologetic test, the epistemic ground for it.

Separately, Mr. Lazar is right to suggest that a denial of self-knowledge is a performative contradiction (link). At one point in his life, Clark would have agreed too (link). But I do think other alleged cases of performative self-contradictions - like regarding the "existence... of other people" - are avoided if 1) one is content to remain agnostic about knowing what is true and 2) one instead acts as if his opinions are true.

Conclusion: Mr. Lazar concludes by giving his epistemology a pass after "an initial evaluation." I've said enough about how I think Neo-Scripturalism is not a significant "reformulation" of Clark's Scripturalism (link).

The most striking statement in this chapter, though, is that Mr. Lazar asks the reader to "remember what Clark’s tests were meant to establish - they weren’t meant to demonstrate that a first principle is true...” –  I find this remarkable... because it is true! Clark's tests are apologetic, and epistemology grounds apologetics, not vice versa. 

But this is precisely a conflation Mr. Lazar made in earlier chapters (link). He even cited Gordon R. Lewis's criticisms of Clark, which wrongly assumed Clark's apologetic tests grounded his epistemology rather than the reverse (link; see, particularly, point 5 under the subheading, "Miscellaneous Comments: An Intermezzo). 

If Mr. Lazar had applied what he requests in this chapter to his evaluation of Clark in earlier chapters, then he might have realized that Clark did not fail the test of skepticism et al. after all.

In the next part of my review, I will turn to chapter 12, which Mr. Lazar calls Better Answers