Book Review: Scripturalism and the Senses (Part 4)

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

The Test of Skepticism

The opening of Mr. Lazar's third chapter pithily asks whether Clark's philosophy is any more capable of deducing Herr Krug's pen than Hegel's philosophy was. Because Clark found fault with Hegel for being unable to deduce said pen (given Hegel's philosophy), the implication is that unless Clark can do so (given his own philosophy), Clark's criticism of Hegel blows back upon himself. 

However, in reply to the above suggestion about Herr Krug's pen, Clark could simply reply that the criticism lands against Hegel, but not himself, because Hegel "denies that there is any limit to knowledge" and that "there is no unknowable" (emphasis mine). In fact, Clark mentions these, in the context of Herr Krug's pen, as reasons why Hegel must deduce the pen (given Hegel's philosophy). All Clark must do, then, is affirm that there is a limit to knowledge, that there is an unknowable, to avoid the burden of deducing the pen on his philosophy.

And Clark does this, at least to some extent. I have written on the problem of partial knowledge and why it is a powerful apologetic argument that a Scripturalist can use against a wide variety of worldviews (cf. link). One such quote by Clark is the following, and it illustrates the relevant difference between his view and Hegel's such that Clark's philosophy needn't be able to deduce things such as Herr Krug's pen to be successful:

Plato and Hegel constructed theories of knowledge which, if pressed to their logical extreme, imply that man must be either omniscient or completely ignorant. If every item of knowledge is so intimately connected with every other that its true nature cannot be seen except in its relation to all, then either we know all or we know nothing. Plato and Hegel both had a hard time escaping this dilemma.

Now Moses said, “The secret things belong unto the Lord our God; but those things which are revealed belong unto us and to our children forever” (Deut. 29:29). The Bible, therefore, both here and everywhere, assumes that we can know some truths without knowing all truths. Accordingly it is incumbent upon us to develop an epistemology in which the relationships are not such as to limit us to the disjunction of total ignorance or omniscience.

This epistemology may follow Augustine’s view that Christ is the light of every man: that is, mankind possesses as an a priori endowment at least the rudiments of knowledge, so that whenever anyone knows anything he is in contact with God. Or, the epistemology required may be more skeptical as to geometry and science and simply insist that God, being omnipotent, can be a verbal revelation make his truths understandable to me. (Baker's Dictionary of Theology, 1991, pgs. 245-246)

If there are limits to what we can know, we needn't be ashamed to admit them. Clark was not, for he knew he wasn't omniscient. On the contrary, precisely because he wasn't omniscient, he recognized the need to rely on the omniscient members of the Trinity for his knowledge. 

Therefore, as can be seen in the quote, Clark was comfortable in admitting that his epistemology could be regarded as relatively skeptical in regards to certain knowledge claims that other philosophical systems, such as Hegel's, make. To the scores of critics who cried out against him, Clark's reply was simple: "It is incorrect, therefore, to complain that the axiom of revelation deprives us of knowledge otherwise obtainable. There is no knowledge otherwise obtainable" (Clark and His Critics, 2009, pgs. 75-76). 

Now, Mr. Lazar is in good company among the many incredulous persons who wonder how Clark can admit he does not know his wife, pen, etc. Can one sanely suggest he does not know these things exist? Well, yes. Even as someone who now disagrees with Clark here - for I do believe such things are knowable in some sense - this criticism never impressed me. Clark's answer to it is quite satisfactory:

The objection was that even if revelation gives us some knowledge, it does not give us very much. In particular, it does not provide knowledge of zoology and Russian history. At that earlier point a systematically sufficient answer was given, namely, some knowledge at least is thus possible. (Clark and His Critics, 2009, pg. 77)

Although not usually recognized as such, a certain claim to infallibility meets us in our everyday affairs. When an accountant balances his books, does he not assume that his figures are correct? When a college professor hurries to class for fear that his students will disappear if he is late, does he not make judgments as to the time of day and the proclivities of students? When a chess club challenges another to a match, does any suspicion of fallibility impede its action? Cannot this club distinguish the dogma ecclesiastica that there actually is another club from the dogma haeretica that no other club exists? Must not all people act on the assumption that their beliefs are true? (Karl Barth's Theological Method, 1997, pg. 146)

In other words, we may assume or believe to be true that our wife is not a substitution, a pen is in our hand, etc. We act as if our beliefs are true. But for Clark, "knowledge" is not a kind of belief that may turn out to be false. It may be that any reasons I have for believing a pen is in my hand are insufficient insofar as I am hallucinating. It cannot, on the other hand, turn out that divine revelation is false. 

And whether one agrees with Clark's restrictive understanding of "knowledge" or not, one would be wrong, as Mr. Lazar is, to suggest Clark's philosophy collapses into skepticism (and thus fails said test) unless one is willing to attack either the possibility of knowing divine revelation in general or knowing divine revelation on Clark's version of Scripturalism in particular. Knowledge of biblical propositions would be enough to pass the test of skepticism. Mr. Lazar will challenge Clark's ability to know even biblical propositions, as I will return to in a moment, but pausing to note the sufficiency of having some knowledge rather than none is, as Clark, says, important.

Miscellaneous Comments: An Intermezzo

There are some things in the chapter that I think would be beneficial to address even though they do not directly bear on the question of the test of skepticism:

1) Clark was wrong to say "science is always false." He probably meant that scientific analyses are always unknowable. For example, two scientists can, by similar procedures, arrive at opposite conclusions. One meteorologist may say it will rain tomorrow. Another may say it will not rain tomorrow. One's conclusion will be true and based on certain, scientific analyses, but the fact that his conclusion is true does not mean he "knows" his conclusion (at least, not in the sort of internalist, infallibilist sense I believe in which Clark was interested). That is, most meteorologists would admit that their individual conclusions could, for all they know, prove false. But, in fact, one (or more) will be right. So Mr. Lazar is right to correct Clark, but really, this is a simple error Clark made that isn’t relevant to whether or not Scripturalism is true or fails a test of skepticism.

2) Clark may have said that an objection to his philosophy was that we can't know zoology or Russian history. But he never said the objection was true. He simply dismissed the objection as relevant to the point that he was, in contrast to his critics, at least able to account for some knowledge. In fact, Clark wrote a whole chapter on [biblical] history in A Christian View of Men and Things. He did believe we could know some history, contrary to what Mr. Lazar states. Similarly, the Bible also mentions many animals. Is it enough knowledge to satisfy critics? Not usually. But it at least sets the record straight.

3) To Mr. Lazar's allusion to the difficulty of self-knowledge on a Scripturalist epistemology, the quote he mentions doesn’t show Clark regarded self-knowledge is impossible, just harder than people imagine. Personally, I believe Clark held different beliefs at different times in his life. At one point in his life, Clark rejected the possibility of self-knowledge (Modern Philosophy, 2008, pgs. 273-274). At another point in his life, he affirmed it (see below). I argue that self-knowledge is compatible with and necessary for Scripturalism. At any rate, I can do no better at this point than to repeat remarks I have elsewhere made, including the links provided:

I think Clark, consistently acknowledging the difficulty of the subject, both denies and affirms self-knowledge in various places (link). Personally, I defend it (link) and believe it to be as necessary to Clark's epistemology as logic or language. All of the points Butler makes, I address in that post, including that I needn't know my name to have self-knowledge, that the meaning of "I" can be gathered from Scripture, that there are various books of Scripture addressed to the elect in general, and that one must know he is a believer if he is to know Scripture comprises the extent of God's special revelation. There is no incompatibility between self-knowledge with the idea a certain kind of knowledge (i.e. infallibilistic, internalistic) must be divinely revealed, explicitly or implicitly. There is incompatibility between the impossibility of self-knowledge and the concrete revelation of Scripture, which just is the axiom by which we can know anything in an infallibilistic, internalistic sense. Therefore, self-knowledge is legitimate.

4) Mr. Lazar, citing Ronald Nash, supposes Clark must be using "knowledge" in "a very idiosyncratic way." This is an excellent thought! It is unfortunate that it was not followed up by a meta-epistemic discussion of what Clark meant by "knowledge," whether he was right or wrong to think of "knowledge" in that way, and/or what an alternative proposal would be. I will, as in my last post, defer to here for an explanation as to the kind of knowledge Clark had in mind for now (as well as some evaluative, parenthetical comments on where Clark's thought might be improved).

5) One final comment that I will keep brief, since I've mentioned the distinction between epistemology and apologetics in my last two reviews (link and link), is that when Mr. Lazar saying "Clark's negative and positive apologetics both result in skepticism," he really should be speaking about Clark's epistemology, not his apologetic. Mr. Lazar's comments come in the context of his support for Gordon Lewis' criticisms of Clark. I have already addressed Gordon Lewis here. I will only highlight the following points from that post to reiterate what the proper function of tests for truth are (i.e. apologetic, not epistemic): 

Note that the following isn't true: "Clark chooses to believe their truth because Christianity... is alone consistent." Rather, Clark chooses to argue their truth because Christianity is alone consistent. This is the difference between apologetics and epistemology. Apologetics consists in making arguments. This is not always so in epistemology - axioms are not known because they are the conclusion of some argument, they are known because they are self-authenticating. 

Clark has to argue for Christianity via logical consistency and practicality because, at the risk of stating the obvious, he can't know Christianity for those to whom he is engaging in apologetics. He could just say divine revelation is self-authenticating and leave it at that, but it is more persuasive (which is another function of apologetics) to additionally point out, when applicable, that an opponent's system 1) can't be self-authenticating if his system inconsistent or impractical, or 2) that his system is less coherent than Christianity is, in the case of something like Judaism. 

Lewis seems to think that Clark's tests for truth are the basis on which Clark claims to know Christianity. That is really the only explanation for why Lewis would think Clark would have to sift through infinitely many systems before knowing that just one, Christianity, is consistent. But that interpretation goes completely against what Lewis himself stated Clark believed regarding the nature and knowability of axioms earlier in his summary.

While "test[s] for truth" can serve as confirmatory evidences of Christianity, they shouldn't function as the ground of knowledge; divine revelation does. Elsewhere, I have called tests for truth necessary conditions for knowledge and the postulate[s] by which one claims to know anything the sufficient condition[s] for knowledge (link). The former are the means by which we make arguments for (i.e. apologetics) the latter (i.e. epistemology).

Again, apologetics should include an explanation of the epistemology of the system one is defending. Any good defense of a system of knowledge should explain what that system says about how we can know anything. But that explanation and defense should not be confused for that actual process of knowing. In fact, apologetics is only possible insofar as we know the system we are defending is true in the first place (see here).

As I've mentioned, it seems Mr. Lazar doesn’t understand that for Clark, we know the axiom of Scripturalism because it is self-authenticating. Clark was an internalist and foundationalist. We don’t know our axiom because other, non-Christian systems are false. That would be to make the axiom a conclusion, which Clark clearly rejects. It also means we would be searching for a true first principle, system, or worldview by sifting through false ones first, which would be circular, anti-foundationalistic, and/or question-begging given that such an enterprise would already presuppose knowledge of what a true first principle, system, or worldview would look like. Instead, given that apologists or defenders of the faith engage with other worldviews which have their own first principles, we argue about or against those first principles and their relationship to the resulting belief systems they produce. Such apologists already know (or should know!) their own system is true before they argue against others’. 

That is, the “tests” Mr. Lazar mentions are not neutral methods by which one can choose an epistemological first principle/axiom (which, again, would be impossible; cf. link). Rather, they are apologetic tools used to display or witness to the superiority of one epistemological system over against another. There is a very clear distinction between from what all our knowledge claims derive from (our epistemological axiom) and how we then go about trying to defend all of our knowledge claims (which is apologetics, not epistemology as such). We ought to defend our faith in a manner consistent with our epistemology, but it is a common mistake to conflate the two, as Mr. Lazar does in his appeal to Lewis’ critique of Clark.

The [Real] Test of Skepticism

The most noteworthy section in this chapter is entitled, "Is Scripturalism Skeptical of Revelation?" It must be an enticing thought to the critic, for if it were possible to show that Clark's philosophy results in skepticism of divine revelation itself, Clark would be in real trouble! This type of criticism would be much more problematic than one which suggests that Clark can't know certain propositions that other people normally take to be knowable. It would actually be an attempted reductio ad absurdem of [Clark's] Scripturalism. This section of Mr. Lazar's writing is worth quoting at length:

...here's the problem: according to Scripturalism, I can't gain knowledge by reading the Bible. In fact, I don't even know if my mother's New Testament exists. I have opinions about it, but I don't have knowledge of it. So where does that leave my Bible memorization? Do I really know those Biblical propositions or do I merely opine that I do? And how do I tell the difference which verses I know and which I merely opine?

Do you see the problem?

...So far as I can tell, Scripturalism has no way of distinguishing between knowledge of Biblical propositions and mere opinions.

Above, I quoted from 1 John 5:7. If you're familiar with textual criticism, you know the special problem associated with that verse, namely, most Greek manuscripts omit it. It may not be Scripture. In fact, the textual evidence is against it...

I have to wonder, how did Clark acquire his propositions about the evidence for or against the TR? And did he know them or merely opine them? Did the amount to revelation knowledge or something less?

And what about other textual issues? How about the longer ending in Mark?

Or the Pericope Adulterae?

Or Psalm 151?

Are the Scripture or not? How does the Scripturalist know?  

...How does the Scripturalist know if it really is Scripture? What does he check his beliefs against? Anything?

I'll tell you what I do. When I'm in doubt about something being Biblical - regarding the best translation, or the best reading, or whether something is canonical at all - I get out my Bible and check it. If necessary, I'll refer to my Greek New Testament, and to the best scholarship on the issue.

But the Scripturalist can't do that because he can't get such information by reading the Bible or other books. What, then, can he do? How does he distinguish between knowledge and opinion when it comes to Biblical propositions? So far as I can see, the Scripturalist has no way of discerning between the two. Yes, he can say that Scripture is his axiom, and he can formally define that to mean the 66 books of the Protestant canon, but he can't know if any of the propositions he believes are, in fact, part of the canon, can he? What would he do to check to see if there were? He can't check his Bible.

The result is that Scripturalism leads to skepticism about Biblical propositions, too. They function as a Ding an sich (the unknowable thing-in-itself), in the send that Biblical propositions are postulated by the system, but the actual content of the propositions are unknowable.

Hence, despite Clark's claims to the contrary, Scripturalism leads to skepticism about the Bible, too. 

One point of tension Mr. Lazar touches on is between Scripturalism and textual criticism. Clark himself never made much of a deliberate attempt to harmonize the two, although he does mention it in one or two instances I'll come back to later. It doesn't much matter, though, for in seeming contrast to Mr. Lazar, Clark believed that the Bible was propositional, not "ink marks" (God's Hammer, 1995, pgs. 180-182). Clark has his own method of answering how we acquire biblical propositions - occasionalism, as was mentioned in my last review. I would venture to guess that Clark would have resorted to this if someone had pressed him on the matter of textual criticism. 

Then, if someone complained that such meant he can’t know about textual variants – since they haven’t been divinely revealed – I can just imagine Clark being delighted to reply that it is so much the better for Clark not to have the trouble of needing to respond to any criticism dealing in it! Rather, the trouble would be for the person on whose epistemology textual variants are known to exist and inhibit him from knowing the content of divine revelation.

As I said in my last review, I disagree with occasionalism. I'll return to why this hypothetical approach by Clark would be suboptimal. But it is worth taking a moment to appreciate why the response would have some merits. Take Mr. Lazar's own implied position. I question whether Mr. Lazar can claim to be any kind of Scripturalist (neo- or whatnot) when he says that if he is in doubt about something being biblical, he resorts to "the best translation… reading… [or] scholarship." Wait... "best" by whose definition? In the scenario Mr. Lazar outlines, is Scripture his ultimate, epistemic foundation? Rather, does it not seem that his real epistemic foundation is whatever source he defers to in order to erase his doubts and come to assurance regarding what the content of Scripture is? 

Not only does this apply to textual variants (what some have called "micro-canonical" issues), the same question applies to the books of the Bible at large (a "macro-canonical" issue). How does Mr. Lazar claim to know that entire books of the Bible are divinely revealed? Is it the epistemic axiom, presupposition, or foundation with which he begins divine revelation? It seems not. Instead, he first "get[s] out [his] Bible and check[s] it." 

What I'm left wondering is in what way this procedure cures his doubts. What is it about a physical book in his mother's library that gives him confidence? Is he really suggesting that he can reason his way towards knowing the content of divine revelation? As I wrote on the Scripturalist's ability to know the canon of Scripture long ago (link), such an answer would falsely suppose:

...that it is more legitimate to evaluate a creator by His creation than creation by a creator. Are any of these options really more plausible than a self-authenticating revelation? Do any of these alternatives have something more substantial than a superficially intuitive appeal? Well, I must leave that to the reader to decide. I would obviously answer in the negative...

Of course, there are perspectives which I would allege attempt to copy the method of knowing God's word, distorting it by substituting in place of Scripture something not of divine origin. And this troubles people, because if revelation is supposed to be self-authenticating, then how is it possible to sift through all these varying claims? Is playing a back-and-forth game of "my source is true and yours is not because my source says so" really the best that a Christian apologist has to offer? Still more troubling, how can our answer to such questions be made without presupposing revelation? After all, if some sort of revelation is necessary, then we wouldn't be able to answer any question without first specifying said revelation.

Well, actually all of this doesn't turn out to be so problematic. For the reply to this last question just is that we can't answer any question without first presupposing a specific, concrete revelation. So what? The reason why some accept and others reject one proposal over against another should depend on what one's revelation has to say about such. In the case of Scripture, while God's word may be self-evident, the only means by or reason for which any sinner would acknowledge it as such is grace.

Even so, we may further note that we are not left without means of distinguishing false claims to divine revelation. Keeping in mind that no necessary condition for knowledge can ground or function to demonstrate a sufficient condition for knowledge (link), there are nonetheless tests we can perform which serve as confirmatory evidences.

...the Bible itself prescribes criteria against which we can test its claims. Prophecy is one example. Internal consistency is another necessary condition for some communication to have been revealed by God. Etc. I have outlined and dealt with numerous such conditions elsewhere on this blog. Once again, no matter how many of these subsidiary conditions we show the Bible must and does satisfy, our trust in it must ultimately be based on its own, self-authenticating claim to be God's word. But by applying these subsidiary conditions to other worldviews, we can falsify them and thereby lend credibility to our own. While this is not demonstration - no first principle can be demonstrated anyway - it is a technique which is seemingly the most plausible means of persuasion available. The rest is left to God.

So, to summarize, Scripturalism - the axiom that the canon of divine revelation in general and the Bible in particular comprises the extant extent of that which men can know - is clearly not the conclusion of a set of theorems, no matter how necessary those theorems may be in order for a system to be true. Axioms must be self-authenticating or self-evident.

But the acceptance of an axiom is not arbitrary. If it were arbitrary, then it would be unnecessary. One of the necessary conditions, however, is that partial knowledge requires self-authenticating communication from one who is omniscient. We may not be able to demonstrate or prove the Bible in particular is said revelation, but this isn't relevant. For the Bible is taken to be the sufficient condition, not a mere necessary condition, and no axiom can be demonstrated, proved, or externally justified. The fact it just is self-authenticating is enough. People may not accept this, but then again, people may not accept that I know myself. I can't demonstrate that either, but is that any reason to think I can't know myself? No.

I do not see in what way Mr. Lazar could 1) think our epistemic foundation is not divine revelation but 2) also think that the alternative he will eventually prescribe can legitimately be called "neo-Scripturalism." Given the nature of his criticisms against Clark, Mr. Lazar's epistemology apparently relies upon an empirical method of inferring truth from sensations (i.e. referring to his Greek NT, a physical Bible, scholarship, etc.). I hope I am wrong, I just do not know how else to take Mr. Lazar's criticisms of Clark's epistemology than as a reflection upon his own.

Does this not mean that any confidence he has from these sources is on shaky grounds? As I mentioned in my last review, Mr. Lazar would have to confront Sellars' Dilemma and explain how he can start with a non-propositional Bible in his hand and somehow use that as a premise (seemingly without a truth value, since it is non-propositional) from which he is able to infer a propositional truth about what the true content of Scripture actually is... unless Mr. Lazar plans on addressing the whole host of criticisms regarding empirical knowledge that Clark argues in his many works. Even if it is not a pure empiricism to which Mr. Lazar holds, so long as he relies on empirical elements for his epistemology to function - as would be the case if he thinks he can avoid Sellars' Dilemma by actively, consciously derive propositional thoughts from sensations - Clark's criticisms are relevant and must be addressed.

Alternatively, the only way in which one could try to read Mr. Lazar's section here that would enable him to avoid the set of above problems and questions is if Mr. Lazar intends to criticize Clark's apologetic rather than his epistemology. But given that, in this section, Mr. Lazar discusses knowledge vs. opinion and believes he is reducing Clark's Scripturalism to skepticism, it is quite clear that he really is attacking Clark's epistemology after all. 

If Mr. Lazar restricted his critique to Clark's apologetic - if his criticism is merely that Clark cannot defend his beliefs as Mr. Lazar can - then Clark would not fail the test of skepticism. One's doubts could be relieved by recalling that one's apologetic abilities and lines of defense are subordinate to his epistemology. Neither Mr. Lazar nor Clark would (or could) defend their beliefs by appealing to some mysterious, spontaneous intuitions, yet neither would (or should) feel unconfident because of that apologetic limitation. As has been emphasized, apologetics presupposes an epistemology to defend. A more skeptical epistemology will entail a more skeptical apologetic, but "more skeptical" is not "totally skeptical," and is still better than epistemologies that make grand claims but collapse into skepticism upon closer examination.

Textual Criticism

Turning now to a more positive reply to the subject of textual criticism, I have addressed the subject in a few places (link, link, link) that are intended to be supplement a developed Scripturalism - that is, relevant differences between Clark's thought and my own are accounted for within these posts. But even Clark and I could agree with "rhetorical critical" arguments that do not depend on evaluating external, non-propositional realities (such as examining textual transmission and the like) but rather internal ones (such as examining literary structure or implicit, authorial themes present within the propositional revelation itself). 

That is, Clark could easily find common ground with me in giving apologetic reasons, for example, for why the so-called "longer ending" of Mark is divinely revealed. Two such reasons would be the Elijah theme and chiastic parallelism, both of which internally refer to the propositional (including interrogative and imperative) contents of Mark itself and, thus, are not extra-biblical. Of course, one can’t use apologetic arguments or defenses to, say, bootstrap axiomatic belief in Mark or its ending, but that’s true of any epistemic first principle. Clark's epistemology is in much safer territory than Mr. Lazar's.

Now I will return to discuss why I believe the above apologetic possibilities available to Clark are, while sufficient, incomplete. They are only part of a more robust defense available to a Scripturalist. First, let's take a look at a few instances in which Clark mention textual criticism in the context of apologetics:

Once when I quoted a verse from John’s Gospel to a modernist, she quickly replied, “But how do you know that he actually said that?” By the grace of God, I was able immediately to shoot back, “How do you know Jesus said anything?” The other faculty members at the lunch table gave vocal evidence of a point scored. The modernist woman professor and missionary to India wanted to use some verses, but not others. But she saw then that if she insisted on her verses, she could not object to mine. At any rate the attempt to destroy Christian faith by an appeal to the difficulties of textual criticism has been based on considerable exaggeration. (Against the World, 1999, pg. 147) 

Here, Clark made a fair point in the right context. Once one begins to cherry-pick which biblical statements can be regarded as trustworthy, one has begun to slide upon a slippery slope that will, if left unchecked, lead to skepticism. But what of a woman professor who would bit the bullet and admitted that nothing could be known of what Jesus said? Some time ago, I read Gordon Clark's thesis for his doctorate at UPenn. Clark must have been about 27 when he wrote the following:

In the case of Aristotle we are not dependent on fragments, for we have his complete works; we are perfectly familiar with the usages of his language; the only difficulty is textual and whoever bases a skepticism in textual criticism asserts that not only nearly all philosophy, but nearly all history as well, before the Renaissance, it forever unknowable. This is a reductio ad absurdem. We can with tolerable certainty ascertain the exact working of Aristotle, but to understand his thought we need also to know the arguments and discussion of previous arguments men which were the motives to his solution. Are these unknowable? My answer would be, try and see. (pg. 10)

Ironically, Clark would later reverse his thought and admit most of what is commonly supposed to be known is not. He no longer considered it to be a reductio ad absurdem to follow through the logical implications of a textual criticism which often presupposes an empirical methodology. Far from attempts to destroy Christianity through textual criticism being based on an "exaggeration," as Clark said, is this not what we are seeing in modern day anti-Christian polemics? 

The Bart Ehrman's of the world undermine the confidence of Christians, with Muslims and new atheists in tow appealing to their publications (which Mr. Lazar must hope does not constitute the "best" scholarship!) to attack the Christian faith. If anyone should have anticipated this, it should have been Clark, who recognized in other areas that the doctrine of Scripture "on which all other doctrines depend is the one most viciously attacked of all. By a satanic instinct, the battle against Christianity is directed against its citadel" (God's Hammer, 1995, pg. 113). Whatever was the case when Clark wrote the following, it no longer matches the landscape of today's textual criticism:

The author suggests that there is no use discussing whether the alleged error was missing from the original until we have the original. This seems to betray a forgetfulness of textual criticism. The differences between the Greek New Testament which we have and the autographs are few in number and of slight consequence. Most of them are differences in spelling, or in word order, or in some small detail that does not affect the sense. To suppose that we are so ignorant of the original wording as this argument requires is to cast aside the whole science of textual criticism. (God's Hammer, 1995, pgs. 122-123)

The above, originally written in 1963, makes it sound as though Clark thought the science of textual criticism could indeed play an apologetic role to build up the confidence of believers... and he is right, although 20 years later, Clark seemed to have come around a little to look upon textual criticism with suspicion, remarking that modern textual criticism is "untrustworthy" (Behind the Versions, 1983, link). It is easy to understand why, for we can fast forward to present day in which modern textual scholars are positing that "the process of transmission of the New Testament texts resulted in a high degree of contamination" (link). We now have computers that attempt to reconstruct what the original or earliest texts may have been: 

The stated goal of the CBGM is to help pastors, scholars, and laypeople alike determine, “Which text should be read? Which should be applied? ... For the New Testament, this means trying to determine, at each place where our copies disagree, what the author most likely wrote, or failing this, at least what the earliest text might have been.” (link)

Likely wrote? Might have been? The problem with foundationally relying on the "best" scholars is that one has no idea to what conclusions their hidden assumptions will lead. There is no problem with scholarship per se unless one suggests, as Mr. Lazar implicitly has, that one's knowledge of God's word and divine revelation are end-products of such investigation. At that point, we have abandoned presuppositionalism in favor of rationalism, empiricism, some hybrid, or, for all intents and purposes, skepticism. Still worse, the doubt a Christian who subordinates his knowledge of Scripture to knowledge of creaturely authorities faces is left unresolved when the best that these "authorities" can offer are probabilistic "knowledge" of God's word (and we might even, as Clark did, contest how such an "authority" calculated the probabilities).

As I mentioned in my last review, I disagree with Clark's occasionalism. I think Clark's occasionalism would have, if push came to shove, forced Clark to fall back to internal, confirmatory evidences. In light of the above, it can be tempting for Scripturalists to abandon the enterprise of textual criticism - of understanding and evaluating the physical codifications of God's propositional revelation in history - when one begins with the propositions and not the physical codifications anyways. Why bother?

We are to take every thought captive to Christ (2 Corinthians 10:5). Educated Christians equipped with the word of God are equipped for every good work, including providing pushback to modern textual critical methodologies that, intentionally or not, undermine or control God's word. No such methodology is neutral. Assumptions are always built in to anyone's investigations. 

What then? The Scripturalist should, armed with God's word as his foundational assumption, be encouraged to apply it to textual criticism. Rather than merely retreat to defend our citadel, we must attack other citadels from it (which, in turn, is a form of apologetic defense). There is ample supply of apologetic material a Scripturalist can use that has already been provided in this [series of] post[s] by which he can defend himself against those who would use textual criticism to spread doubt. 

But we needn't only rely only on internal, confirmatory evidences and reductio ad absurdems, sufficient though they may be. A complete, optimal Scripturalist apologetic should feel free to incorporate textual critical evaluations that are appropriately guided by his epistemic foundation of Scripture itself into his defense of the faith. 

Example: patristic quotations can be used to argue that the books of the New Testament were written early and relatively shortly after Jesus' ascension. This is an example of how our confidence is confirmed and how doubt can be caused in those who oppose the faith. It is not that the argument is then used as a basis upon which to believe the New Testament, for from the divine revelation itself with which we epistemically begin, we can know the New Testament was written by contemporaries of Jesus. Rather, the point is that the truth of Scripture with which we begin has empowered us to find and then speak of extra-biblical confirmations of these truths, confirmations we already had reason to expect to find from divine revelation itself. All of creation is a superabundance of evidence for the Trinity we worship.

Of course, a through-and-through follower of the thought of Clark may ask, for example, how we know patristic quotations are authentic. Or perhaps they might ask how a Scripturalist can know that textual critical evaluations accurately depict the history of the transmission process. The question is legitimate. Because externalism is addressed in a future chapter in Mr. Lazar's book, I will leave most of my reply for a later review. But between this post, the last review, and this link (particularly the last four paragraphs), interested readers can anticipate what to expect. In short, because our epistemic foundation, God's word, indicates that extra-biblical knowledge is possible, we can construct arguments regarding "knowing" extra-biblical ideas. 

Can extra-biblical ideas conflict with our epistemic foundation? No - the latter always establishes the limits of the former. If, for example, it should appear that external, textual critical indicators are apologetically insufficient for defending the longer ending of Mark, Scripturalists should simply use what other apologetic defenses he has available to him to defend what he already knows is true.

Does extra-biblical knowledge eliminate the need for Scripturalism? No - "need" is context based, and I can think of a few reasons why the kind of knowledge Scripturalism defends is needed that the kind of extra-biblical knowledge on offer cannot supply (link, link). 

The upshot of this is that Mr. Lazar can know about the Bible in his mother's library, even though he should not found his epistemological axiom on it - again, see my last review for argument as to why we do not begin with the physical, non-propositional text that codifies the propositional revelation (the latter which we do epistemically begin with) - much less what creaturely scholars[hip] have to say about it. 

One final comment regarding Mr. Lazar's statement that biblical propositions, for Clark, "function as a Ding an sich (the unknowable thing-in-itself), in the sense that Biblical propositions are postulated by the system, but the actual content of the propositions are unknowable." This criticism by Mr. Lazar doesn't make sense. Propositions are the only kinds of things "knowable" (at least if we are speaking about "knowledge" literally). If Mr. Lazar is saying that Clark did not have had a criterion for epistemically deciding between two textual variants, that is because Clark's epistemic first principle already takes care of that question in the first place. Clark doesn't reason to divine revelation, he begins with it and defends from it. The absence of a criterion for discovering one's first principle is something inherent in every first principle, for every first principle must be self-authenticating:

But if there is a revelation, there can be no criterion for it. God cannot swear by a greater; therefore he has sworn by himself. One cannot ask one’s own experience to judge God and determine whether God tells the truth or not. Consider Abraham. How could Abraham be sure that God commanded him to sacrifice Isaac? Maybe this suggestion was of the devil; maybe it was a queer auto-suggestion. There is no higher answer to this question than God himself. The final criterion is merely God’s statement. It cannot be tested by any superior truth. (Today's Evangelism, Counterfeit or Genuine? 1990, pg. 113)

This disjunct faces two replies. First, it assumes that a first principle cannot be self-authenticating. Yet every first principle must be. The first principle of Logical Positivism is that a sentence has no meaning unless it can be verified (in principle at least) by sensory experience. Yet no sensory experience can ever verify this principle. Anyone who wishes to adopt it must regard it as self-authenticating. So it is with all first principles. (Christian Philosophy, 2004, pgs. 46-47) 

This is how to approach questions concerning the canon and textual criticism from a Scripturalist perspective. Thus, in the final analysis, while there is some truth in this chapter mixed in with some error, and while the truths are worth the emphasis, none of them result in a decisive failure of Scripturalism (not even Clark's occasionalistic version of Scripturalism) to pass the test of skepticism. 

In the next part of my review, I will turn to chapter 4, which Mr. Lazar calls the test of explanatory power.

Gordon Clark on the Problem of Partial Knowledge

As a preface to this post, I've decided to take a break from blogging. I'm not sure for how long. I'd like to try to integrate some of the thoughts from my posts into a one-stop read for a coherent Christian apologetic, so I'll still be working on that if nothing else. But to be honest, every so often I just run out of things to write about that I find particularly interesting on which I feel I can make some sort of relevant comment. It takes some time for the motivation and creative juices to start flowing again.

Enough about that. Building on The Gordon Clark Project and a post I wrote a while ago (link), I believe the following illustrates how one can present the argument that an omniscient person is a precondition for knowledge by means of Clark's writings. There is a broader context in which I could have placed these quotes - namely, Clark's thoughts on necessary conditions in general - but I didn't want to over-complicate this clear line of thought:

Introduction

A system of philosophy purports to answer certain questions. To understand the answers, it is essential to know the questions. When the questions are clearly put, there is less likelihood that the answers will seem irrelevant to important issues. (A Christian View of Men and Things, 2005, pgs. 19-20)

A proposition can be judged ridiculous only if it contradicts some exceptionally well-established truth. If nothing has as yet been established, Descartes’ demon cannot be known to be ridiculous. (Christian Philosophy, 2004, pg. 32)

The more the various subjects are studied, the more their interrelationships will be seen. Indeed, the breadth of philosophic discipline as opposed to the narrow specialty of a single science depends on these manifold and intricate connections. (A Christian View of Men and Things, 2005, pg. 109)

This is a constant trouble with philosophic subjects. One hardly begins a topic before one discovers that another matter calls for prior attention. We are always being pushed back or forward, until it seems impossible to solve any one problem without solving all. Omniscience is the prerequisite, and omniscience is hard to come by. (Gordon Clark, Modern Philosophy, 2008, pg. 28)

What follows if it is true that psychological analysis presupposes a “complete knowledge of the psychological possibilities of life”? It would follow, would it not, that historical analysis also presupposes a complete knowledge of historical possibilities. In short, it would be impossible to know anything without knowing everything.

Such a Platonic or Hegelian requirement of omniscience is a serious philosophical problem. It is not to be dismissed thoughtlessly. The meticulous scholar, J. H. Hexter, in his Reappraisals of History, castigates historical relativism as a fad and insists on the “rudimentary distinction” between knowing something and knowing everything. But he omits all philosophic justification for this distinction.

Undoubtedly this distinction must be maintained, if a human being is able to know anything at all. Make omniscience the prerequisite of partial knowledge, and partial knowledge vanishes. But Bultmann, like Hexter, offers no help: less help, in fact, for Bultmann lets the requirements of omniscience stand. (Gordon Clark, Historiography: Secular and Religious, 1971, pg. 334).

Now, where the Ideas are important, everything is related to everything else. To use a crude example, the explanation of a desk lamp would require explanations of desks and lamps. The desks would then lead us into carpentry, labor troubles, kinds of wood, forestry, and governmental conservation. An explanation of lamps would include the laws of electricity, and so on forever. In fact, before one could understand a desk lamp, one would have to understand the universe.

This stress on the interrelations of everything with everything can be developed in two directions. One may argue: Since we know this one thing, we can deduce everything else; or one may argue: Since we do not know everything else, neither do we know this. The first direction has appealed to Hegel, to Bonaventure, Augustine, and Plato. (Ancient Philosophy, 1997, pg. 145)

Plato

But though there may be Ideas of some sort, when Plato leaves mathematics for politics the plausibility of reminiscence vanishes. The slave boy was easily able to remember the square on the diagonal, but neither the Athenians nor the Syracusans could remember justice, not even with the lengthy stimulus of the Republic.

Justice, of course, is a matter of ethics and politics; and more will be said about ethics later. But the definition of man as a two-legged animal without feathers is another case where reminiscence did not work too well. The difficulty is that, after one grants the existence of suprasensible Ideas, sensation stimulates different notions in different people. Whether the subject is justice or piety or the planetary spheres, Plato had to reply on procedures of ethics and science that cannot be completed.

The failure of Platonism to descend from Heaven to Earth, or, if you wish, to ascend from Earth to heaven, leaves the theory ineffective. Man before birth may have been omniscient, but here below the Platonic cave in which man is a prisoner actually has no opening. Platonism therefore cannot be accepted as the solution to our problem. (Clark and His Critics, 2009, pg. 30)

Hegel

That relations are internal, and especially that the truth is the whole, are themes hard to deny. Yet their implications are devastating. So long as you or I do not know the relationships which constitute the meaning of cat or self, we do not know the object in question. If we say that we know some of the relationships – e.g., a cat is not-a-dog and admit that we do not know other relationships – e.g., a cat is not-an-(animal we have never heard of before) – it follows that we cannot know how this unknown relationship may alter our view of the relationship we now say we know. The alteration could be considerable. Therefore we cannot know even one relationship without knowing all. Obviously we do not know all. Therefore we know nothing.

This criticism is exceedingly disconcerting to an Hegelian, for its principle applies not merely to cats, dogs, and selves, but to the Absolute itself. The truth is the whole and the whole is the Absolute. But obviously we do not know the whole; we do not know the Absolute. In fact, not knowing the Absolute, we cannot know even that there is an Absolute. But how can Absolute Idealism be based on absolute ignorance? And ours is absolute ignorance, for we cannot know one thing without knowing all. (Christian Philosophy, 2004, pg. 153)

A further insuperable hurdle for rationalistic logic is a proposition’s meaning. The meaning of a sentence depends on its context. Logicians recognize this fact, but they identify the context as the totality of knowledge. Hence, as is all too evident with Plato and Hegel, one must be omniscient to grasp the meaning of even a single sentence. This obviously rules out all human knowledge. (Thales to Dewey, 2000, pg. 398)

William James

Reenactment of a thought is possible, nonetheless, because it can be separate from this immediacy without alteration. Not only so, it can be separated from other thoughts without alteration. Thus history becomes possible.

This self-identity of the act of thought has been denied by two extreme views. The first view is that of idealism, the theory of internal relations, the notion that everything is what it is because of its context. This makes history impossible. To know any one thing it would be necessary to know its context; i.e. to know the whole universe. Knowledge would thus be restricted to the explicit consciousness of the omniscient Absolutes; and Collingwood, though he may be Beckett, does not claim to be the Absolute.

At the same time, a second view, the view that all acts of thought are atomically distinct from one another, is as erroneous as idealism. This view does of course permit the detachment of a thought from its context, for really there is no context; there is only juxtaposition with external relations. A science is merely a collection of things known and a mind a collection of acts of knowing. (Historiography: Secular and Religious, 1971, pgs. 225-226)

William James, in his A Pluralistic Universe stressed the disconnectedness of things. Wholes are to be explained by parts and not parts by wholes, he said; one group of events, though interrelated among themselves, may be unrelated to another group; there is no dominating unity – however much may be reported as present at any effective center of consciousness, something else is self-governed, absent, and unreduced to unity. In one place James denied the need of answering a question that many others have thought as important as it is difficult: “Not why evil should exist at all, but how we can lessen the actual amount of it, is the sole question we need there to consider.” Of course, if a question is literally meaningless (such as, why is music oblong?) it is really not a question at all and does not need to be answered. But if a question is not senseless, by what right can a philosophy rule it out of court? Even if it were quite trivial, it should find its place and its answer in some minor subdivision of the truth. Then, too, one might ask how James discovered that some groups of events are unrelated to other groups? Or, more exactly, since he allowed “external” relations and denied only “internal” relations, one might ask how James could discover that something is absent from and unreduced to unity by every effective center of consciousness? In other words, did James have a valid argument for the conclusion that there is no Omniscient Mind whose thought is systematic truth? He may then be caught on the horns of the dilemma he tried to escape. Irrational chaos and Hegelian monism were equally repellent to him. He wanted to find a middle ground. But perhaps there is no escape from irrational chaos except, not exactly Hegelian monism, but a logical completeness of some sort. It would be surprising, would it not, if social stability could be based on incoherence, or even large-scale disconnectedness?

At any rate, the suspicion that the introductory questions are all related and that an answer to any one of them affects the answer to every other would accord with the theistic belief in divine omniscience. The discouragement, the reflection, the suspicion of the previous pages do not prove or demonstrate the existence of an omniscient God; but if there is such a God, we may infer that all problems and all solutions fit one another like pieces of a marvelous mosaic. The macrocosmic world with its microcosmic but thoughtful inhabitant will not be a fortuitous aggregation of unrelated elements. Instead of a series of disconnected propositions, truth will be a rational system, a logically-ordered series, somewhat like geometry with its theorems and axioms, its implications and presuppositions. Each part will derive its significance from the whole. Christianity therefore has, or, one may even say, Christianity is a comprehensive view of all things: It takes the world, both material and spiritual, to be an ordered system. Consequently, if Christianity is to be defended against the objections of other philosophies, the only adequate method will be comprehensive. While it is of great importance to defend particular points of special interest, these specific defenses will be insufficient. In addition to these details, there is also needed a picture of the whole into which they fit. This comprehensive apologia is seen all the more clearly to be necessary as the contrasting theories are more carefully considered. The naturalistic philosophy that engulfs the modern mind is not a repudiation of one or two items of the Christian faith leaving the remainder untouched; it is not a philosophy that is satisfied to deny miracles while approving or at least not disapproving of Christian moral standards; on the contrary, both Christianity and naturalism demand all or nothing: Compromise is impossible. At least this will be true if the answer of any one question is integral with the answers of every other. Each system proposes to interpret all the fact; each system subscribes to the principle that this is one world. A universe, even James’ pluralistic universe, cannot exist half-theistic and half-atheistic. Politics, science, and epistemology must all be one or the other.

The hypothesis of divine omniscience, the emphasis on the systematic unity of all truths, and the supposition that a particular truth derives its meaning or significance from the system as a whole does not imply that a man must know everything in order to know anything. It might at first seem to; and Plato, who faced the same difficulty, tried to provide for two kinds of knowing so that in one sense a man might know everything and in another sense not know and learn a particular truth. At the moment, let an illustration suffice. To appreciate an intricate and beautiful mosaic, we must see it as a whole; and the parts are properly explained only in terms of the whole; but it does not follow that a perception of the pieces and some fragmentary information is impossible without full appreciation. Or to pass from illustration to reality: A child in first grade learns that two plus two is four. This arithmetical proposition is true, and the greatest mathematician cannot disprove it. But the mathematician sees this truth in relation to a science of numbers he understands how this sum contributes to phases of mathematics that the child does not dream of and may never learn; he recognizes that the significance of the proposition depends on its place in the system. But the child in school knows that two and two are four, and this that that child knows is true. Omniscience, even higher mathematics, is not a prerequisite for first grade. (A Christian View of Men and Things, 2005, pgs. 22-24)

The atheist who asserts that there is no God, asserts by the same words that he holds the whole universe in his mind; he asserts that no fact, past, present, future, near, or far, escapes his attention, that no power, however great, can baffle or deceive him. In rejecting God, he claims omniscience and omnipotence. In other words an atheist is one who claims that he himself is God; and the pantheist must be said to join him in the same claim. (A Christian Philosophy of Education, 1988, pg. 38)

Is any proposition true in isolation? Would an atom by itself be the same regardless of how the rest of the world might change? There are plausible examples that it would not. Here is a rock that weighs six pounds. But if an astronaut carries it into space it weighs approximately zero. When he drops it on the Moon, it weighs one pound. The truth of these propositions depends of the relation of the rock to the other parts of the universe. No one is true in isolation. Obesity is cured by a trip to the Moon.

Another example is a piece of canvas painted half red and half green – or any other two colors. Through these two halves of the canvas paint a stroke of gray, a mixture of black and white; but it will not be gray on the canvas. The single stoke of paint will be one color on the top half and a different color on the bottom half. Since everything seen has a background, its color is a function of its background. It is false to say it remains what it is no matter how the rest of the universe changes.

One further example. If there were no sense of sight, there would be no sense of hearing. If there were nothing hard, there would be nothing soft. If there were no animals, there could be no plants. The reason is that each of these terms expresses a distinction from its opposites. Sight is a form of non-hearing. Were they the same, we might have the term sensation, but we would not have two terms of different meaning. The terms “plant” and “animal” would not apply to different objects, if there were no different objects. There might be “living beings,” but no plants and animals. Similarly, there would be no living beings, if there were no non-living beings. This should be sufficient to dispose of logical atomism. (Modern Philosophy, 2008, pg. 175)

Augustine and Clark

Plato and Hegel constructed theories of knowledge which, if pressed to their logical extreme, imply that man must be either omniscient or completely ignorant. If every item of knowledge is so intimately connected with every other that its true nature cannot be seen except in its relation to all, then either we know all or we know nothing. Plato and Hegel both had a hard time escaping this dilemma.

Now Moses said, “The secret things belong unto the Lord our God; but those things which are revealed belong unto us and to our children forever” (Deut. 29:29). The Bible, therefore, both here and everywhere, assumes that we can know some truths without knowing all truths. Accordingly it is incumbent upon us to develop an epistemology in which the relationships are not such as to limit us to the disjunction of total ignorance or omniscience.

This epistemology may follow Augustine’s view that Christ is the light of every man: that is, mankind possesses as an a priori endowment at least the rudiments of knowledge, so that whenever anyone knows anything he is in contact with God. Or, the epistemology required may be more skeptical as to geometry and science and simply insist that God, being omnipotent, can be a verbal revelation make his truths understandable to me. (Baker’s Dictionary of Theology, 1991, pgs. 245-246)

Absolutism, and theism, too, hold that everything must be related to everything else in some way; there are no two things utterly independent, though in spite of Lotze, they may nonetheless be distinct. (Modern Philosophy, 2008, pg. 288)

One of the main points that the present volume wants to emphasize is the necessary logical connection of every proposition in an intellectual system with every other. (Historiography: Secular and Religious, 1971, pg. 179)

…this entire volume has been insisting that everything is connected with everything else. (Historiography: Secular and Religious, 1971, pg. 183)

A knowledge of geometry, a knowledge of anything, does indeed presuppose the possibility of detaching the given proposition from the several contexts in which it has appeared historically. Collingwood’s argument against idealism is irrefutable. If one must know everything in order to know anything, one can know nothing. (Historiography: Secular and Religious, 1971, pg. 227)

Plato in his theory of reminiscence may have used a myth to describe the disembodied soul of man contemplating the Ideas directly. This might be taken to mean that each soul is omniscient. In the Christian system this is not needed. Perhaps I have said that truth is the whole; at least I have insisted that all truth form a consistent system and have their meaning as parts of that system. But this does not entail human omniscience. At first it might seem to, for the New Testament makes our contact with the Realities more intimate than Plato does. In Acts 17:28 we read, “In him we live, and move, and have our being.” This could be made to sound like pantheism, and indeed the apostle connects his own statement with a similar sentiment in a pantheistic poet. When I have dared to connect some of my views with excerpts from pagan philosophers, I have at times been subjected to severe censure from certain quarters. But the New Testament is clear: We live and move and have our being in God’s mind. The Old Testament also in Psalm 36:9 says, “In thy light shall we see light.” Therefore I reject Nash’s conclusion, buttressed by a quotation from Etienne Gilson, that “The problem cannot be avoided simply by saying that man is in contact with divine Ideas in the mind of man.” These words really misstate the situation, for our existence in the mind of God puts us in contact with Ideas in the mind of God, and not simply “in the mind of man.”

The scripture presents the relationship between the mind of God and the mind of man as a much more intimate relationship than is commonly believed. In 1 Corinthians 2:16 the apostle says, ‘we have the mind of Christ’ (Noun Christou echomen). On this verse Meyer comments, ‘Since Christ is in them…their nous, too, can be no mental faculty different in kind from the nous Christou, but must, on the contrary, be as ideally one with it, as it is true that Christ himself lives in them.’ See also Philippians 2:5, ‘Let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus.’ Of course these verse do not equate the person of Christ with our person, either pantheistically or existentially. Their meaning is that our mind and Christ’s mind overlap or have a common area or coincidence in certain propositions. Thus objections taken from the Parmenides are inapplicable to the New Testament.

Note that Christ’s mind and our mind only overlap: they are not coextensive. Plato may require omniscience, but Christianity uses revelation; and man knows only so much as God has revealed to him. In my publications I have never claimed more than a partial knowledge for man. (Christian Philosophy, 2004, pgs. 144-145)

It cannot be charged with skepticism. If it is objected that it requires an impossibility, viz. that a man be omniscient, the reply is that its Hegelian form may involve such an impossibility; but this impossibility does not occur in the Christian system where an omniscient God makes a definite revelation to man. Hence, it is not necessary for a man to know everything before he knows anything. The subjective knowledge of any man depends not on his own complex of thoughts but on God’s system and on the fact of revelation. And contrary to what seems to be Dr. Buswell’s opinion, this is not at all inconsistent with God’s sovereign grace. (The Bible Today 42.6, March 1948, cf. pgs. 173-177.)

Models of Epistemic Justification: Coherentism (God) and Foundationalism (Man)

Now since it is the conclusion of a demonstration that we are trying to prove, and since it is proved by giving the premises, it follows that the premises of demonstrated knowledge are better known than the conclusion. If we did not know the premises, obviously we could not know the conclusion. The conclusion cannot be more certain than the premises on which it is based. The premises are the cause of the conclusion, and therefore they must be prior to it. And also, in demonstration, although not in every formally valid syllogism, the premises must be true. For demonstration is knowledge, and there can be no known of the non-existent. The premises, therefore, must be statements of what exists or what is so, i.e., they must be true.

Of course, there may be a chain of syllogisms in a demonstration, as there is in geometry. But the chain must have a starting point, and such a starting point must be, not only prior, causal, and true, but in particular primary and indemonstrable. It must be an immediate, basic truth. Nothing can be more certain than these basic truths, for if the least doubt attached to them, doubt would likewise attach to all the conclusions; and this would mean that science would be tottery. But the conviction of pure science must be unshakable.

In the nineteenth century it was commonly believed that science was as unshakable as Aristotle could have wished; but the prevailing mood of the twentieth century is that science is tentative, and that laws stand in need of constant revision. Therefore, the current objection to Aristotle is that the science which he describes is non-existent. The formal validity of syllogisms may possibly be foolproof, but their applications to concrete material, and more especially the premises on which they are based, are not completely beyond all doubt. To Aristotle this would mean that there is no scientific knowledge, as he defined knowledge. There was a similar difference of opinion in his day. Some said there is no knowledge; others said all truths are demonstrable. But Aristotle agreed with neither the one nor the other.

Those who denied the existence of scientific knowledge argued that demonstration is the only method by which something can be known. But demonstrations depend on premises. And if the premises are to be known, they too must be demonstrated. This leads on back in an infinite regress, with the result that the demonstration is never finished, or more accurately, never begins. Accordingly, there is no scientific knowledge. The other group also held that demonstration is the only method by which anything can be known; yet they held that everything can be demonstrated because proof goes around in a circle: Every premise is a conclusion, and there is a finite series in which the end and the beginning are identical. Aristotle replies that a proposition cannot be both prior and posterior as this view requires. Since the exact number of terms is irrelevant, they may be reduced to three and the absurdity becomes apparent. Circular demonstrations would be equivalent to saying that A is B; Why? – because B is C; Why? – because C is A; Why? – because A is B. With circular and infinite demonstration both ruled out, it follows that not everything can be demonstrated and that there must be first, indemonstrable truths.

A philosopher of a different school, Hegel for instance, would no doubt admit that the three-term circle is an absurdity; but he might argue that the exact number of terms is no so irrelevant as Aristotle thought. A bad circle is a little circle; but if a circle can be drawn so as to include everything, it is a beautiful circle. In a rational universe everything is implicated in everything else; and precisely for this reason a three-term circle is absurd: It fails to show the other relationships of A, B, and C. Hegel might even attribute some very small and very bad circles to Aristotle himself: He might ask, Is Aristotle’s reply anything more than a two-term circle, in which demonstration is possible because there are primary truths, and there are primary truths because there must be demonstration?

At any rate, against the two views, Aristotle asserts that not all knowledge is demonstrative. There must be primary basic truths because the regress in demonstration must end in these basic truths, and these are indemonstrable. Therefore, besides the scientific knowledge, which is demonstration, there is its originative source which enables us to recognize the basic indemonstrable propositions. (Thales to Dewey, 2000, pgs. 101-102)

The substantive point needing discussion is whether the law of contradiction is the one and only test of truth.

Ideally or for God this seems to be the case. Since there is nothing independent of God, he does not conform truth to an alleged reality beyond truth and beyond him. Since there is no possibility of “vertical” (to use Carnell’s terminology) coherence, the “horizontal” test, or, better the horizontal characteristic of logical consistency seems the only possible one.

Weaver correctly notes that I do not claim for human beings the ability to apply this test universally. In this sense it is a “negative” or, better, an incomplete test. For this reason it must be supplemented some way or other. (Clark and His Critics, 2009, pg. 287)

Undoubtedly I hold that truth is a consistent system of propositions. Most people would be willing to admit that two truths cannot be contradictories; and I would like to add that the complex of all truths cannot be a mere aggregate of unrelated assertions. Since God is rational, I do not see how any item of his knowledge can be unrelated to the rest. Weaver makes no comment on this fundamental characteristic of divine truth.

Rather, he questions whether this characteristic is of practical value, and whether it must be supplemented in some way. It is most strange that Weaver here says, “I must agree with Carnell,” as if he had convicted me of disagreeing with Carnell by providing no supplementation whatever. Now, I may disagree with the last named gentleman on many points, but since it is abundantly clear that I “supplement” consistency by an appeal to the Scripture for the determination of particular truths, it is most strange that Weaver ignores my supplementation. (Clark and His Critics, 2009, pg. 290)

One who believes in the unity of truth may still believe that the false system entails contradictions; but to prove this is the work of omniscience. (Historiography: Secular and Religious, 1971, pg. 370)

Implications: Self-Authenticity

How then could God show to a man that it was God speaking? Suppose God should say, “I will make of you a great nation...and I will bless them that bless you and curse him that curses you.” Would God call the devil and ask Abraham to believe the devil’s corroborative statements? Is the devil’s word good evidence of God’s veracity? It would not seem so. Nor is the solution to be found in God’s appealing to another man in order to convince the doubter. Aside from the fact that this other man is no more of an authority than the devil, the main question reappears unanswered in this case also. What reasons can this man have to conclude that God is making a revelation to him? It is inherent in the very nature of the case that the best witness to God’s existence and revelation is God himself. There can be no higher source of truth. God may, to be sure, furnish “evidence” to man. He may send an earthquake, a fire, or still small voice; he may work spectacular miracles, or, as in the cases of Isaiah and Peter, he may produce inwardly an awful consciousness of sin, so that the recipient of the revelation is compelled to cry out, “Woe is me! For I am undone, because I am a man of unclean lips.” But whether it be an external spectacle or an inward “horror or great darkness,” all of this is God’s witnessing to himself. (A Christian View of Men and Things, 2005, pgs. 182-183)

But if there is a revelation, there can be no criterion for it. God cannot swear by a greater; therefore he has sworn by himself. One cannot ask one’s own experience to judge God and determine whether God tells the truth or not. Consider Abraham. How could Abraham be sure that God commanded him to sacrifice Isaac? Maybe this suggestion was of the devil; maybe it was a queer auto-suggestion. There is no higher answer to this question than God himself. The final criterion is merely God’s statement. It cannot be tested by any superior truth. (Today’s Evangelism: Counterfeit or Genuine?, 1990, pg. 113)

Since it is easier to distinguish the difference between Christianity and Playboy’s obscenities than it is to distinguish Riemannian from Euclidean geometry, wisdom counsels us to rephrase the objection, to state what Dr. Montgomery intended to state, and then to answer what he meant but did not say. What he obviously meant was that a priori principles, since they are not based on evidence, are arbitrary; and if arbitrary, the a priori of Playboy is just as legitimate as the fundamental principles of Christianity. Now, there is a certain sense in which this is true enough. If neither set of principles can be based on evidence, and if both sets are regarded by their advocates as the starting point for all demonstration and argument, then obviously no one can support either set on anything more fundamental. This is simply to say that every system of thought must start somewhere.

Where then does Dr. Montgomery start? So far as I can understand him, he professes to base the truth of the Bible on archaeological and historical evidence. This evidence in turn is based on sensation or perception. Or, more philosophically, one may classify Dr. Montgomery as an Empiricist. As such he must hold that sensory experience is more reliable that a divinely-given revelation. He must hold that sensation is self-authenticating, and that the Bible cannot be self-authenticating. (Christian Philosophy, 2004, pg. 96)

The second half of the disjunction was: “or else the evidence is dependent on the proposed authority itself, and the revelation fails, in consequence, to win its credentials as a reasonable source of trustworthy propositions.”

This disjunct faces two replies. First, it assumes that a first principle cannot be self-authenticating. Yet every first principle must be. The first principle of Logical Positivism is that a sentence has no meaning unless it can be verified (in principle at least) by sensory experience. Yet no sensory experience can ever verify this principle. Anyone who wishes to adopt it must regard it as self-authenticating. So it is with all first principles.  (Christian Philosophy, 2004, pgs. 46-47)

Implications: First Principles

The demonstration of a proposition, such as any theorem in geometry, is completed only when it is referred to the axioms. If the axioms in turn required demonstration, the demonstration of the proposition with which we began would remain incomplete, at least until the axioms could be demonstrated. But if the axioms rest on prior principles, and if these too must be demonstrated - on the assumption that every proposition requires demonstration - the proof of our original theorem would never be finished. This means that it would be impossible to demonstrate anything, for all demonstration depends on indemonstrable first principles. Every type of philosophy must make some original assumptions. And if the law of contradiction is not satisfactory, at least these Heracliteans fails to state what principle they regard as more so. Nonetheless, though the law of contradiction is immediately evident and is not subject to demonstration, there is a negative or elenctic argument that will reduce the opponent to silence. (Thales to Dewey, 2000, pg. 88)

Logically the infallibility of the Bible is not a theorem to be deduced from some prior axiom. The infallibility of the Bible is the axiom from which several doctrines are themselves deduced as theorems. Every religion and every philosophy must be based on some first principle. And since a first principle is first, it cannot be “proved” or “demonstrated” on the basis of anything prior. As the catechism question, quoted above, says, “The Word of God is the only rule to direct us how we may glorify Him.” (What Do Presbyterians Believe?, 1985, pg. 18)

But what about these assumptions or axioms? Can they be proved? It would seem that they cannot, for they are the starting points of an argument, and if the argument starts with them, there is no preceding argumentation. Accordingly, after the humanist or theist has worked out a consistent system by arranging all his propositions as theorems in a series of valid demonstrations, how is either of them to persuade the other to accept his unproved axioms? And the question is all the more perplexing when it is suspected that the axioms were chosen for the express purpose of deducing precisely these conclusions. (A Christian View of Men and Things, 2005, pg. 26).

Basic worldviews are never demonstrated; they are chosen. William James and Bertrand Russell may believe in a pluralistic universe, but they can offer no demonstration of this, the most fundamental of their intellectual beliefs. The mechanist believes that all natural phenomena can be reduced to mathematical, quantitative equations, but he never gives a mathematical demonstration of his belief. So it is with every world-view; the first principle cannot be proved – precisely because it is first. It is the first principle that provides the basis for demonstrating subordinate propositions. Now if such be the case, the thoughtful person is forced to make a voluntary choice. As a matter of fact, the thoughtless person as well is forced to choose, though the necessity to make a choice and the particular choice made may not be so obvious. It is obvious, however, that a thoughtful person, one who wishes to understand, one who wants to think and live consistently, must choose one or another first principle.

Still it remains true that no demonstration of God is possible; our belief is a voluntary choice; but if one must choose without a strict proof, none the less it is possible to have sane reasons of some sort to justify the choice. Certainly there are sane reasons for rejecting some choices. One most important fact is the principle of consistency. In the case of skepticism inconsistency lies immediately on the surface. Explicit atheism requires only a little analysis before self-contradiction is discovered. Some statements of naturalism more successfully disguise their flaws. But all these choices are alike in that it is not sane, it is not logical, to choose an illogical principle.

Consistency extends further than a first principle narrowly considered, so that it can be shown to be self-contradictory in itself; it extends into the system deduced from the first principle or principles. The basic axiom or axioms must make possible a harmony or system in all our thoughts, words, and actions. Should someone say (misquoting by the omission of an adjective) that consistency is the mark of small minds, that he does not like systems, that he will act on one principle at one time and another at another, that he does not choose to be consistent, there would be no use arguing with him, for he repudiates the rules, the necessary rules of argumentation. Such a person cannot argue against theism, for he cannot argue at all. (A Christian Philosophy of Education, 1988, pgs. 41-42)

No philosopher is perfect and no system can give man omniscience. But if one system can provide plausible solutions to many problems while another leaves too many questions unanswered, if one system tends less to skepticism and gives more meaning to life, if one worldview is consistent whole others are self-contradictory, who can deny us, since we must choose, the right to choose the more promising first principle? (A Christian View of Men and Things, 2005, pg. 29)

The difference between naturalism and theism-between the latest scientific opinions on evolution and creation; between the Freudian animal and the image of God; between belief in God and atheism-is based on their two different epistemologies. Naturalism professes to learn by observation and analysis of experience; the theistic view depends on Biblical revelation. No amount of observation and analysis can prove the theistic position. Of course, no amount of observation and analysis can prove evolution or any other theory. The secular philosophies all result in total skepticism. In contrast, theism bases its knowledge on divinely revealed propositions. They may not give us all truth; they may even give us very little truth; but there is no truth at all otherwise. So much for the secular alternative. (A Christian Philosophy of Education, 1988, pgs. 138-139)

Implications: Causes of Axiomatic Disagreement

You or I might be induced to accept the Bible by the testimony of the Church; but a Moslem would not. You or I might consider the matter heavenly, but the humanists would call it pie in the sky. The literary style of some parts of the Bible is majestic, but Paul’s epistles are not models of style. The consent or logical consistency of the whole is important; for if the Bible contradicted itself, we would know that some of it would be false. Personal testimony as to the saving efficacy of the doctrine impresses some people; but others point out that queer people believe queer things and find great satisfaction in their oddities.

How then may we know that the Bible is true? The Confession answers, “Our full persuasion and assurance of the infallible truth and divine authority [of the Scripture] is from the inward work of the Holy Spirit.”

Faith is a gift or work of God. It is God who causes us to believe: “Blessed is the man whom thou choosest and causest to approach unto thee” (Psa. 65:4).

Empiricism has been demolished. Unless, therefore, one chooses a Dogmatic first principle, one must choose skepticism and irrationality. Neither of these has anything to oppose to Dogmatism. Sanity therefore must be dogmatic. So much then for the status of the argument.

What now is the question to be answered? It is not, Shall we choose? Or, is it permissible to choose? We must choose; since we are alive we have chosen – either a dogmatic principle or empirical insanity. The question therefore, urged by atheist, evangelical Christian, and evangelistic Moslem, is, Why does anyone choose the Bible rather than the Koran? The answer to this question will also explain how a Christian can present the Gospel to a non-Christian without depending on any logically common proposition in their two systems.

Since all possible knowledge must be contained within the system and deduced from its principles, the dogmatic answer must be found in the Bible itself. The answer is that faith is the gift of God. As Psalm 65:4 says, God chooses a man and causes him to accept Christian Dogmatism. Conversely, the Apostle John informs us that the Pharisees could not believe because God had blinded their eyes and hardened their hearts.

The initiation of spiritual life, called regeneration, is the immediate work of the Holy Spirit. It is not produced by Abrahamic blood, nor by natural desire, nor by any act of human will. In particular, it is not produced by arguments based on secular and empirical presuppositions. Even if there were a common truth in secularism and Christianity, arguments based on it would not produce faith. What empirical evangelicals think is most necessary, is most useless.

Even the preaching of the Gospel does not produce faith. However, the preaching of the Gospel does one thing that a fallacious argument from a non-existent common ground cannot do: it provides the propositions that must be believed. But the belief comes from God: God causes a man to believe; faith is a divine gift. In evangelistic work there can be no appeal to secular, non-Christian material. There is an appeal – it is the appeal of prayer to the Holy Spirit to cause the sinner to accept the truths of the Gospel. Any other appeal is useless.

If now a person wants the basic answer to the question, Why does one man have faith and another not, or, Why does one man accept the Koran and another the Bible, this is it. God causes the one to believe. But if a person asks some other question or raises an objection, he will have to read the argument over again. (Christian Philosophy, 2004, pgs. 100-101)

Conclusion

A sound epistemology cannot demand omniscience or complete freedom from error: Its aim is not to show that all men or any man knows everything, but that some men can know something. (A Christian View of Men and Things, 2005, pg. 210)

In view of this pragmatic dealing with history, its positivistic denial of universal law, of metaphysics, of supernatural interpretation, it may be permitted by way of anticipation to suggest the conclusion that, instead of beginning with facts and later discovering God, unless a thinker begins with God, he can never end with God, or get the facts either. (A Christian Philosophy of Education, 1988, pg. 31)