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)

The Gordon Clark Project

I have alluded in other posts to a project I have been working on for some time now: the compilation of what I consider to be a near comprehensive transcription of Gordon Clark’s positive epistemological views, covering all of his books and, to my knowledge, most of his shorter articles. I’m not sure that something like this will ever be “complete” - you’ll have to read Clark for yourself to decide that. But I’m as satisfied with it as I expect I ever will be, so, with the gratefully accepted permission of Tom Juodaitis at The Trinity Foundation, I am happy to share this resource:

Research on Gordon Clark

The works are arranged according to the order in which they were originally published. I expect that there are some grammatical errors here and there, and anyone who is willing to point them out so I can update this will have my thanks.

K. Scott Oliphint on Clark and Van Til

There’s been a podcast floating around for some time now about the “Clark and Van Til Controversy” involving K. Scott Oliphint, a fairly popular Van Tilian (link). I’m a little tired of writing posts on Van Til, but I’m also a little tired of seeing Van Tilians link to this audio. So, on that cynical note, here are a few observations:

Clark and Rationalism

A recurring criticism of Clark throughout the conversation is that he is too rationalistic. His view of logic and philosophy is too high. Unfortunately, “philosophy” is never defined, so there isn’t much I can say about that, but regarding rationalism and Clark’s view of logic, I found it ironic that the only actual citation of Clark – which was explicitly acknowledged as having been derived from a second-hand source (a book by Greg Bahnsen) – was the following:

The more consistent unbelief is, the less can agreement be obtained. So long as the unbeliever is inconsistent, we can force him to make a choice. If he inconsistently admires Jesus Christ or values the Bible, while at the same time he denies plenary and verbal inspiration, we can by logic insist that he accept both – or neither. But we cannot by logic prevent him from choosing neither and denying a common premise. It follows that in logical theory there is no proposition on which a consistent believer and a consistent unbeliever can agree. Therefore the doctrine of inspiration, like every other Christian doctrine, cannot be demonstrated to the satisfaction of a clear-thinking unbeliever. 

If, nonetheless, it can be shown that the Bible – in spite of having been written by more than thirty-five authors over a period of fifteen hundred years – is logically consistent, then the unbeliever would have to regard it as a most remarkable accident. It seems more likely that a single superintending mind could produce this result than that it just happened accidentally. Logical consistency, therefore, is evidence of inspiration; but it is not demonstration. Strange accidents do indeed occur, and no proof is forthcoming that the Bible is not such an accident. Unlikely perhaps, but still possible. 

How then may an unbeliever be brought to admit the inspiration of the Scripture? Or, for it is the same question, how did “I” come to accept inspiration? (God’s Hammer, 1995, pgs. 15-16)

Clark then talks about the role of the Spirit in conversion. Of course, only the second of these paragraphs was quoted so as to give listeners the impression Clark himself believed the consistency of Scripture could have been an accident. But even if such were the case, and it’s not, is it not interesting that Clark believed logic was insufficient to establish the truth of God[’s revelation]? Compare this apologetic to that of contemporary Van Tilians (link) and ask yourself who is closer to rationalism.

To be fair, Oliphint himself cannot be included in this group of Van Tilians. He says (45^th minute) that Muslims, atheists, et. al. can use the transcendental methodology or apologetic structure that Van Til does – i.e. an argument of the impossibility to the contrary – but the but claims that the content of any such non-Christian argument will always be false. Why? Not because we need to know all false positions in order to know the truth; Oliphint explicitly mentions that this is not necessary. Rather, we know the transcendental argument for Christianity is true “by virtue of God’s grace and what He has revealed” (47^th minute). This is excellent, but it’s easy to miss that he really is essentially affirming divine revelation as his epistemic axiom. This just is Scripturalism – give or take its authoritative sanctioning of alternative means of knowledge – and it is at odds with contemporary Van Tilian apologists who seek to prove God by logic apart from Scripture. In my experience, the number of those who interpret Van Til as teaching the latter outnumber those who would side with Oliphint’s interpretation.

But getting back to the idea that Clark was too rationalistic, if they had simply noted a few instances in which Clark’s exposure to secular philosophy could have provided an explanation for why he believed several dubious doctrines – like his acceptance of Leibniz’s theory of personhood – I don’t think I would have had much of a problem with it. I think it’s fair to say that it would be difficult for anyone who has read and taught as much and as long as Clark has to have maintained complete doctrinal purity throughout. I think the same goes for Van Til (link). This isn’t to excuse either man, it’s just common sense.

But they don’t leave their criticism of Clark at that. What they really mean by a tendency towards rationalism becomes apparent later in the video, when Oliphint says it would be better to side with Bavinck and say that “all theology, all dogmatics is ultimately a mystery” than it would be to say that the paradox of divine sovereignty and human responsibility has been solved; in fact, Oliphint shockingly says that the latter indicates a “secular” or “pagan understanding of what logic is meant to do” (40^th minute). This is what Van Tilians usually mean when they say Clark is too rationalistic: he tried too hard to solve so-called theological conundrums.

But then what is the role of logic according to Van Tilians? For on the one hand, we hear that “we must use logic” (41^st minute). This is repeated several times, and yet on the other hand, “…the church is going to have to set out paradoxes, two teachings, side by side, that we don’t have laws of thinking that allow us to bring together those things neatly” (43^rd minute). The church has to set out paradoxes? As in must or necessarily set[s] out paradoxes? From what “law of thinking” is this conclusion derived? Where has God revealed this? On the contrary, the New Testament celebrates the dissipation of mysteries and the unveiling of the whole counsel of God. Granted, there are things which have not been revealed as well as difficult sayings, but in light of the doctrine of perspicuity, this should provide no basis on which to defend the idea that paradox is a theological necessity. What we have here, then, is a clear real-life example of David Hoover’s argument that the analogical knowledge licenses paradox and inhibits a defense of the faith (link).

They also speculate that divine simplicity and the meaning of “logic” might complicate our ideas of what it means for God to think. Oliphint says that while humans need logic, “if logic is the science of necessary inference, God doesn’t have any because He doesn’t infer anything.” This seems a bit hasty to me. Of course, God does not derive His knowledge from anyone or anything else. But does that mean He has no grounds for His knowledge? I think not (link). It is at least debatable, depending on what Oliphint means by inference. And as to the question of whether a God without parts is eternally able to make “real distinctions,” the answer should be obvious:

To avoid and to confute Clark’s position, some of Van Til’s disciples contend that God does not think in propositions, and hence dependence on “mere human logic” is an untrustworthy crutch. To this Clark has made two replies. First, he remarked that his opponents cited no Biblical passage in which this is stated, nor did they deduce it by any “good and necessary consequence” from a group of such premises. Indeed, since the Bible is ninety percent propositional – commands and ascriptions of praise being the exceptions – it would be rather peculiar if the Bible would deny its own truths. Then, second, if God does not think in propositions how could he have given us all the information now contained in the sixty-six books? If he does not think that “David was the Kind of Israel,” how could he have framed that proposition for our instruction? Or, worse, if we say that God cannot think in propositions, we deny his omnipotence. And if we think in propositions and God does not, then Van Til’s statement will be true, that God’s knowledge and ours do not coincide at any single point. Since we “know” that “David was the King of Israel,” God cannot know it, and therefore it is false. So are all the Gospels, and Christianity is a delusion. (Clark and His Critics, 2009, pg. 414)

Analogical Knowledge

Speaking of analogical knowledge, it was disappointing to find that there was virtually no discussion of Clark’s concerns found, for example, in The Answer (link) in reference to The Text of a Complaint (link) which had been signed by Van Til.

Instead, they discuss in general terms what they believed Van Til’s concerns were which led him to positing analogical knowledge and emphasized that he was following the tradition of the Reformed Scholastics, concluding that if Clark had been aware of this, he would have been less likely to dispute it. But this is a strange assumption given that in the rest of the video, they mention several instances in which Clark departed from the mainstream Reformed tradition. What matters is whether an idea is sound, not whether it was taught by a group of people in the 16^th century and onward.

Oliphint does obliquely recognize that Clark wanted to ensure an “identity of content” between the mind of God and mind of man (10^th minute), but he does not explain why Clark could have thought this so important. Rather, he immediately goes on to say that following The Answer, which apparently was orthodox, Clark developed his views to the extreme. Far from this being the case, however, Clark’s reasons for his denial of analogical knowledge had been plainly spelled out in his reply to Van Til and company in the original answer:

On the complainants’ theory the proposition “the truth man has is analogical” is itself only an analogy. It is not the truth that God has. Nor could man know that it was God who was revealing such a proposition, for again the proposition “God is revealing that truth is analogical” is only an analogy of the truth. One can only be sure that such a proposition is not God’s truth. On the complainants’ theory there is no way of ever crossing over from an analogy of truth to the truth itself. All our thinking is shut up in analogies and resemblances and cannot coincide with God’s truth at even a single point. This position really cuts all connection between God’s knowledge and man's knowledge and plunges us into unmitigated skepticism. 

If the complainants cannot know what God means, how can they know God does not mean this or that? They affirm that there is a resemblance or analogy between the truth God knows and the qualitative different truth man knows. But by what right do they assert a resemblance when they cannot describe the qualitative difference? Or, how can they assert that two things resemble each other when they have never known and can never know one of them? One can say that two men resemble each other if one has seen both men. But one cannot legitimately affirm a resemblance between a man one has seen and a man one has not seen. Similarly, if a man knew God’s meaning, he could compare it with his own and remark the similarity or difference. If I know your opinion, I can say it is similar to or dissimilar from mine. But if I do not know your opinion, I have no way of knowing whether your opinion is the same or contradictory of mine. Similarly if man’s knowledge and God’s knowledge do not “coincide at any single point,” then for all we know, perhaps Christ did not die for our sins. (The Answer, pgs. 22-23)

And to all this can be added many more questions: is divine revelation, as God’s alleged “interpretation” of His archetypal thought (per Oliphint), itself thought by God? What does it mean to say ectypal knowledge is an interpretation of archetypal? If an interpretation gives a new meaning to that which is being interpreted, does that not imply God’s so-called “ectypal knowledge” (theology; divine revelation) is acquired? What does it mean and what sort of metaphysic is implied by the statement that “identity” is found in the “thing” rather than the “mind” (15^th minute)? Etc.

Now, I think the aforementioned link on Hoover’s critique of analogical knowledge covers the philosophical aspect. But as I got the impression that Oliphint was shying away from the stronger statements of Van Til, I think a few of these quotes from The Text of a Complaint will give the reader an indication of just what historical statements a proponent of Van Til must address in order to defend analogical knowledge (or whatever they now want to call it):

While we appreciate the effort to arrive at certainty with reference to man’s knowledge of God, in our judgment this is done at too great a cost. It is done at the sacrifice of the transcendence of God’s knowledge. His thoughts are not our thoughts. His ways are past finding out. The secret things belong unto the Lord our God. If we are not to bring the divine knowledge of his thoughts and ways down to human knowledge, or our human knowledge up to his divine knowledge, we dare not maintain that his knowledge and our knowledge coincide at any single point. Our knowledge of any proposition must always remain the knowledge of the creature. As true knowledge, that knowledge must be analogical to the knowledge which God possesses, but it can never be identified with the knowledge which the infinite and absolute Creator possesses of the same proposition. (The Text of a Complaint, pg. 5) 

It is clear again that the approach of Dr. Clark is quantitative through and through. It is the number of the propositions, rather than their content as such, not to speak of the inscrutable mystery of the mind of God which is viewed as excluding an exhaustive revelation of the divine mind. (The Text of a Complaint, pg. 6) 

It may be objected to the exposition of Dr. Clark’s views presented above that it leaves out of account the important consideration that Dr. Clark allows that beyond the knowledge of a proposition there is the knowledge of the implications of a proposition, and that the knowledge which man may enjoy of a proposition does not necessarily carry with it a knowledge of its implications. This qualification, however, does not affect Dr. Clark’s basic position in any substantial way. The implications of propositions are after all, on his view, also propositions. Consequently, the inclusion of such propositions among the number of propositions that are thought of as constituting the divine knowledge does not require any modification of the judgment that the distinction between the divine knowledge and the knowledge possible to man is merely quantitative. 

Another possible objection to the foregoing might take the form that he does not draw a qualitative distinction between the knowledge of God and the knowledge possible for men since he freely recognizes a fundamental difference between the mode of God’s knowledge and that of man’s knowledge. God’s knowledge is intuitive while man’s is discursive (Cf. 18:5f., 18ff.). Man is dependent upon God for his knowledge. We gladly concede this point, and have reckoned with it in what has been said above. However, this admission does not affect the whole point at issue here since the doctrine of the mode of the divine knowledge is not a part of the doctrine of the incomprehensibility of his knowledge. The latter is concerned only with the contents of the divine knowledge. Dr. Clark distinguishes between the knowledge of God and of man so far as mode of knowledge is concerned, but it is a tragic fact that his dialectic has led him to obliterate the qualitative distinction between the contents of the divine mind and the knowledge which is possible to the creature, and thus to impinge in a most serious fashion upon the transcendence of the divine knowledge which is expressed by the doctrine of the incomprehensibility of God. (The Text of a Complaint, pg. 6)

This is Van Til’s position put “in context.” References to archetypal vs. ectypal knowledge, original vs. iconic or image knowledge, intuitive vs. discursive knowledge, eternal vs. learned knowledge, self-contained vs. derivative knowledge, and so forth are fine. But if you want to defend Van Til against Clark, you have to deal with what Clark thought were the problem statements in Van Til’s literature, and the problem statements in Van Til’s literature have to do with the qualitative identity of content (or lack thereof) between the mind of God and mind of man. One can’t gloss over or re-frame, as the Oliphint tried to do in minutes 13-18, what Van Til says in particular and expect myself or others who disagree with analogical knowledge to be satisfied.

Theology Proper

While their conclusions regarding the falsity of Clark’s Christological views – or, more precisely, the definition of personhood which determined Clark’s Christological views (incidentally, Oliphint’s statement at the 14^th minute that God’s archetypal knowledge is His being sounds remarkably like Clark) – are correct, here too they don’t show any indication of having read Clark on the subject. The idea that Clark was so “philosophical” that he failed to even interact with historically accepted creedal statements of Christianity is not true. Actually, most of his book The Incarnation is historical. 

Some of their statements about what problems they have with Clark’s definition of person aren’t on point, however. At the 36 minute mark, the host argues that taking Clark’s definition of person in conjunction with the need for real distinctions among the members of the Trinity leads to the following conclusion: “there ends up being some impersonal essence of which the persons don’t exhaust or overlap. So you don’t end up with a full, divine exhaustion. You don’t end up with a perichoresis…” If we qualify Clark’s theory of personhood as referring to thoughts – not just a set of propositions – then there isn’t necessarily a problem at this point, though there would be at others, for the persons of the Trinity could know each other exhaustively without thinking the same thoughts (link).

But the idea that the divine essence is personal brings up the issue of Van Til’s one-person, three-person “paradox.” Unfortunately, Oliphint never follows through on the host’s request for him to explain Van Til’s definition of a person as well as Clark’s, for Oliphint goes on to rely on Lane Tipton’s solution to Van Til’s Trinitarian paradox (35^th minute). I say it is unfortunate because Lane Tipton, who wrote a dissertation on Van Til’s Triunism, mentions in a different podcast by the same host (link) that he sees no problem with the essence being regarded as a person, so long as the meaning of “person” is different than it is when predicated of the Father, Son, and Spirit. But how can an essence be “personal” without being a person? Is “human” or “angel” personal? This seems awfully ad hoc, and at any rate, it still must deal with other Trinitarian issues like generic vs. numeric unity (link), the relationships among the persons (link), etc.

Miscellaneous

It could just be that I’m in an irritable mood today, but the tone of the podcast bothered me. To me, it felt as if a professor were condescending to lecture on some event in which his tradition played a polemic part and came out clearly victorious. Familiar elements include:

1. a historical exposition primarily consisting of what doctrinal details his fountainhead and subsequent tradition thought important without much corresponding discussion of the opposition;
2. distancing from some of the terminology in his tradition without actually conceding any conceptual ground (“analogical knowledge,” “presuppositionalism,” “transcendental”);
3. a few, well-placed, charitable comments towards the chief opponent designed to appear fair;
4. implicit suggestion throughout the discussion that everyone should already know who was correct, rendering detailed evaluation superfluous.

These appear to me to be intelligent men. Honestly, though, I doubt that any of them have read more than half a dozen books by Clark, if that many. Oliphint mentioned Clark in his Reasons for Faith just once. The other two seemed to know Clark only in virtue of what Van Tilians like Greg Bahnsen have said about him. I can only assume their intended audience are those who are already members of their choir. If so, I guess that’s fine. But then like I said, it’s a bit irritating if you’re on the outside looking in. Of course, there’s only so much that can be said in one video. Still, I was hoping for more.

How Could God Be Omniscient?

I was debating on whether or not to post something about this, because the reality is that any answer I give will be speculative. But I recently came across a few videos on youtube in which an atheist questioned how anyone could know himself to be omniscient. So, keeping in mind that speculation can be apologetically useful (link), I think I've found an appropriate context in which to give some thoughts on the title of this post.

I've spent quite a lot of time and written quite a few posts on how we can know God is omniscient. But this, of course, entails that God can and does know Himself to be omniscient. How? Well, the question itself might need some clarification. For instance, I don't believe God could have learned He is omniscient (link), but the distinction between discursive and intuitive knowledge is not what is at issue. What is at issue is the justification of knowledge [claims]. We can justify knowledge claims by divine revelation; according to what could God justify His knowledge claims in general and omniscience in particular? I think Gordon Clark provides the beginnings of a good answer:

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... 

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, pgs. 287, 290)

That is, God can test His self-knowledge-claim for coherence. To expand, God could know Himself to be omniscient if it is the case that such is an epistemic necessity, a precondition for anyone to know anything. Or, if "God is omniscient" coheres with all other truths and "God is not omniscient" does not, then the former must be true.

[I don't want to complicate this post with references to the philosophy of time, necessitarianism vs. "free" knowledge, the metaphysics implied by a correspondence theory of truth, etc. Needless to say that I don't think any of them pose an incontrovertible obstacle to a modified coherentistic account of divine knowledge.]

Now, the atheist might ask what reason we have to think this is the case. But notice that that's a subtle change in the subject. If the atheist wants an account of how we can know that God can be omniscient, we are capable of providing a defense of our own knowledge-claims. But this is a question of what justification we have for believing God is omniscient, not what justification God could have for the same belief. There's a difference.

Our epistemic limitations and dependencies would obviously not pose a problem to an omniscient God. That we may not see the logical necessity would not imply there isn't one. That there necessarily is an omniscient God - whether we recognize or are even capable of recognizing such to be the case - does not appear contradictory, anyway, so as far as the burden of proof is concerned, the apologetic task that was set before us is complete.

At the same time, there is also no need to sell ourselves short. Of course, none of the above references to epistemic limitations is meant to imply we in fact can't see a logical necessity for an omniscient God. Actually, given the problem of partial knowledge and logical need for revelation from one who is omniscient, it is ironic that any argument against the possibility an omniscient mind presupposes revelation from such a mind. For as I mentioned above, this in turn presupposes that said mind can know himself to be omniscient, and that's what this was all about.

Scripturalism and Plausibility

Plausibility is fickle. What sounds right to one person can sound ridiculous to another. I would say the most plausible explanation for this is that while people want to be [or at least appear to be] consistent, they vary in respect to certain beliefs. How well some proposition coheres with beliefs about which one is relatively inflexible will influence how disposed one will be to accept it.

Now, psychology doesn't really interest me. If I make a good argument, I shouldn't feel responsible for how a person responds to that argument. And, in general, I don't. Then again, there's not much point to making an argument in the first place if I have no hope that it will succeed in convincing the listener. I may better convince myself, but in any case, it is natural to want something more. 

What I am getting at is that while arguing for Scripturalism is fine, to convince more people, it seems that some time should be spent in making it more plausible. Who, after all, would admit to believing what he thinks is implausible? 

But how would one go about making something more plausible? Is there an exact science to it? I don't think so. In fact, my advice here is based on intuition and experience, but that should be fine since the goal is not to explain how to erect a sound argument but rather how to take a sound argument, the conclusion of which you think a person opposes, and make the conclusion more plausible. There's room for generalizations, allowances for context, etc., here. So most of what follows will be rather informal.

In general, for example, I wouldn't recommend stating the conclusion first. People don't like to backtrack, so instead of immediately provoking them into disagreement with a conclusion and, by extension, one of the as-yet unstated but underlying premises of a valid argument, it would seem better to state those premises which you believe are both agreeable and integral to the conclusion, and then show why they entail the conclusion. Take the following, well-written statement by Fred Dretske:

If your reasons for believing P are such that you might have them when P is false, then they aren't good enough to know that P is true. You need something more. That is why you can't know you are going to lose a lottery just because your chances of losing are 99.99 percent. Even with those odds, you still might win (someone with those odds against him will win). That is why you can't learn - can't come to know - that P is true if all you have to go on is the word of a person who might lie about whether or not P is so. This is just another way of saying that knowledge requires reasons or evidence (in this case, testimony) you wouldn't have if what you end up believing were false. You can learn things from people, yes, but only from people who wouldn't say it unless it were true. (Contemporary Debates in Epistemology, pgs. 43-44)

This is what I would call a plausible argument. You can't know a proposition if it is false, so you can't know a proposition if there is, for all you know, a chance that it is false. A simple, common-sense argument for infallibilism buttressed by an example of how his argument applies to something like the lottery. Examples are good tools when trying to make an argument plausible.

For the purposes of Scripturalism, Dretske cites an even more useful illustration: the possibility of learning from people, where learning implies knowledge-acquisition. Dretske acknowledges it is possible to learn from people, but only from people who wouldn't lie. An excellent deduction from his previous remarks. But would Dretske agree that only one who cannot lie - say, God - satisfies? How else could Dretske be in a position to know who would and wouldn't lie? He may have a suspicion or opinion one way or another, but the real question is would he infallibilistically know? Since we've come this far in agreement, could Dretske really just go back and forget his own arguments? [I don't know how Dretske would respond to any of these questions, of course.]

Or take the following by Richard Fumerton:

We will agree here, therefore, that we cannot avoid knowledge skepticism with respect to the physical world if we understand knowledge as requiring justification so strong that it eliminates the possibility of error.  

Of course, the moral most contemporary epistemologists draw is that we should reject Cartesian standards from knowledge. Our only hope of avoiding skepticism with respect to knowledge of the external world (the past, the future, other minds, and so on) is to accept more relaxed standards for knowledge. (Contemporary Debates in Epistemology, pg. 86)

That one contemporary epistemologist admits there can be no empirical "knowledge" in the strong sense in which Dretske, another contemporary epistemologist, intends above is quite a concession. While this doesn't show that empirical knowledge is impossible - again, a sound argument can do that even without a so-called plausible presentation - what it does do is show a willingness to respectfully engage and even heartily agree with acknowledged top minds of a given field.

We can even allow for discussion as to more relaxed standards for a colloquial understanding of "knowledge" so long as we in turn can push the point that everyone implicitly holds some beliefs must adhere to the stricter standards (infallibilism, cf. here). I am not aware of any Scripturalist who would necessarily deny we can "know" about an "external world" in a loose sense, but that's because, as I pointed out in my last post (link), Scripturalists are more interested in defeating skepticism. That is, they are more interested in "knowledge" in the "strong" sense outlined by Dretske and alluded to by Fumerton. Focusing a discussion on a few, key points and agreeing with peripheral issues when appropriate will be more conducive when attempting to explain why Scripturalism is true, because at the same time you alleviate concerns that it doesn't cohere with pre-established beliefs.

David P. Hoover on Gordon Clark

As I would expect Van Tilians to be able to reply to his impressive criticisms of Van Til’s apologetic (link), I think his paper on Clark (link) is equally deserving of a reply from a Clarkian. Insofar as I do not agree with everything Clark wrote, perhaps I am ill-suited to the role, but I agree with Clark in many respects – especially epistemologically – so until someone smarter than Hoover and I comes along and sets us both straight, I will try to fill in a few gaps.

Background and Terminology

Briefly, I will point out that some terminology Hoover uses could be perceived as biased since provided without much explanation. In his introduction, for instance, he writes that “Clark is an uncompromising Idealist and Rationalist.” Now, the idea that Clark was an Idealist is debatable; Clark didn’t necessarily have a problem with it (Clark and His Critics, 2009, pg. 209), and for that matter, nor do I if Idealism is defined as there being a significant sense in which there is no reality independent of God’s mind. Univocal [real] images, for example, are as possible as univocal [real] propositional knowledge; this will be important to remember when discussing how the coherence theory of truth could be supplemented, though it must also be acknowledged that empiricists bear a burden of proof when it comes to so-called knowledge about some allegedly corresponding image.

But given that Hoover was familiar with Clark’s book Three Types of Religious Philosophy, in which Clark differentiates his “Dogmatism” from Rationalism by denying that “all religious knowledge, can be deduced from logic alone, i.e., logic apart from both revelation and sensory experience” (Christian Philosophy, 2004, pg. 21), why Clark is classified as a Rationalist is a bit of a mystery. Whereas “Rationalism believes that it can deduce by its own method what God can and cannot say” (Ibid., pg. 42), Clark held that divine revelation is necessarily self-authenticating. Hoover is fair in his exposition of Clark in most other respects, so it is strange that he does not explain why he considers Clark a Rationalist. He highlights their similarities - such as the acceptance of the coherence theory of truth - at the expense of individuating characteristics.

I do not mean to suggest that Hoover intentionally fails to provide all the pertinent facts. I suspect the real trouble here and elsewhere is that the scope of the article is inherently restrictive. In my opinion, Hoover was given a 10,000 word limit or so to explain and then critique the epistemology of a man who wrote several dozen books on it and dedicated his life to teaching it. Quite possibly, Hoover could have anticipated the sorts of questions I am and will be asking but felt that addressing them would be too tangential or less relevant than what he would have had to cut out. Naturally, Hoover is also not only or perhaps even chiefly writing for readers who are already familiar with Clark, so the space available to present a comprehensive rebuttal - let alone a defense of his own thoughts - is mitigated by the purpose of the article: the focus is meant to be on Clark, not Hoover (so far as this is possible), and the historical “progression” of his thought as well as an evaluation of it. Of course, none of this will prevent me from remarking on what is left unsaid that I think is important, whether or not such was deliberate.

On Induction

Hoover’s abstract reads as follows:

Gordon Clark is an uncommon presuppositionalist. Dating roughly from the publication of his “Wheaton Lectures” in 1968, he has increasingly stressed the complete impossibility of empirically acquired knowledge. According to Clark, the Bible, and only the Bible, can be known. All observation based truth-claims and all inductive arguments are logically worthless for apologetic purposes. This essay attempts to follow the progression in Clark’s thought which leads to such a thoroughgoing skepticism (with regard to a knowledge of the contemporary world). The essay looks, in turn, at Clark’s reasons for rejecting the reliability of perception, Clark’s adoption of the Bible as axiomatic, and Clark’s propositionalism. Although these subjects are treated critically, the aim of the author is to achieve clarity on what Clark holds and why.

Hoover similarly states a little later, “Valid reasoning, for Clark, is the only profitable reasoning one can engage in, and it is definitionally deductively valid reasoning. Inductive arguments whose premises merely support their conclusions are necessarily bad arguments - in fact, worthless.” These ideas warrant further explanation than I think was provided in the article. Clark did agree with Plato that “Knowledge is timeless and changeless and requires, not observation, experiment, and induction, but deduction alone” (Ancient Philosophy, 1997, pg. 141). He also said that “there is no logical place for induction in presuppositionalism. One assumes or presupposes certain axioms and from there on everything is deduction” (The Trinity, 1990, pg. 93). So, if Hoover is meaning only to refer to the fact that “unnecessary inference arrives at no truth at all” (Lord God of Truth, 1994 pg. 39) - as I suppose he could be, given his qualification that Clark argued induction is “logically” worthless - Hoover is as entirely correct in his assessment of Clark as Clark is of induction.

But all of this only pertains to Clark’s own positive, [meta]epistemological views. A recurring theme throughout this post will be that Scripturalism is a philosophy which attempts to promote and supply the need for infallibilistic knowledge. Insofar as an apologetic or belief is unnecessary, it isn’t epistemically relevant - which is, I stress, not to say it is completely irrelevant. But what we need, what we must have - in short, that which is necessary - should come first, and fundamentally, this is “philosophical knowledge.” Induction, therefore, cannot be epistemically profitable, but at the same time, Clark’s philosophy is compatible with the opinion that induction can serve a pragmatic function. And even in the context of apologetics, Hoover notes elsewhere that Clark believed:

The apologete can take up archaeology only in its potential for logically embarrassing the opponent to Christianity. That is, “scientific discourse” can be taken up only ad hominem against the individual who puts credence in science.

Thus, it is somewhat misleading to suggest that the ability to refute or disconcert an opponent with his own methodology is “worthless,” even if the methodology itself can (and should) be demonstrated to be so; in fact, assuming his faulty basis in order to show it leads to [other, more overtly recognizable] undesirable beliefs seems to me to be a rather common-sense apologetic attempt to persuade an individual that it is his basis that is in need of correction. Apologetics needn’t be restricted to the providing of a defense of one’s own position, although and notwithstanding Hoover’s seeming disagreement (cf. footnote 24), that is certainly a precondition for an analysis of another’s (link).

Cognitivity and Sentience

Early on in the article, Hoover does a relatively good job of restraining himself from incredulous dismissal of the consequences of Clark’s arguments, evident, for example, in the following:

The very legitimacy of questioning the reliability of sentience (the capacity to discriminate the environment by the senses) seems to imply that there are perhaps other (non-sentient) modes of cognitive access, other methods for finding out, that might be used instead. And if sentiently gleaning content goes part and parcel with inductive method, then the question becomes whether there is a better method than observation and testing to find a cure for AIDS. But what might an alternative be like? Divination? Inspecting tea leaves? Saying the first (second, third) thing that pops into one’s head? (Observing tea leaves is, of course, ruled out.) Or perhaps there is no such disease as AIDS since its occurrence is alleged on the basis of observation! And by parity of reasoning there are no diseases afflicting anyone! But if we find that we cannot help but admit that we do have the capacity for making observations in God’s world and that sentience is inextricably tied up in the making of observations, we will find Clark’s position even startling. But it is important to state that Clark’s position cannot be put away by a string of rhetorical questions.

Still, a few points on Clark’s behalf seem to be required. In the next section of his article, Hoover correctly writes that “Clark’s ultimate concern for presupposing, it seems to me, is more nearly the philosophical one of overcoming skepticism (by exhibiting at least one logically irrefutable truth).” But in that case, what do “the reliability of sentience,” “the reliability of perception” and “cognitive access” to one’s environment entail? In particular, do any or all imply one should be able to have infallibilistic knowledge of his environment? If so, why does Hoover even think one needs to know his “environment” in the first place, assuming there even is such an environment? If not, then I do not see how any of this is relevant to the business of Clark’s epistemology given what Hoover himself acknowledges to be its primary concern: the refutation of skepticism by the establishment of infallibilistic knowledge.  Other theories of “knowledge” may ask that less stringent conditions be met, but for that very reason Clark would not be as interested in them; they would have no value in making headway toward Clark’s goal. In one of his footnotes, Hoover says: 

...the fact that informal cognition (knowledge by sentient acquaintance) is subject to well-known limitations and pitfalls does not argue that there can’t be sentient acquaintance with the world. To have a cognitive capacity does not entail the having of it to a superlative degree or the having of it without limitation with regard to the sort of capacity it is. 

But would Clark necessarily disagree? After all, Clark does at times informally refer to sensation as that which stimulates actions designed to preserve the body from [perceived] harm or an occasion on which knowledge occurs (cf. Lord God of Truth, pgs. 16, 23); at least, I am not aware that he has provided a strict definition of it, although he certainly chastised those who attempted to found their philosophy on it without defining it. So it’s not so simple as Hoover’s conclusion that “Clark simply refuses to acknowledge informal noetic capacities in man.” It’s not a question of whether we must have “faith that we inhabit a real and discriminable world of real and discriminable sinners” in order to evangelize or whatnot. Clark agreed that we should act as if all our beliefs (opinions included) are true:

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)

But it is clear that all of this is has nothing to do with whether our inferences not based on divine revelation can be infallible, let alone why they need to be (link). I am pretty sure, then, that Clark would ask Hoover if or how he infallibilistically knows he has this capacity. How does Hoover account for how Timothy could infallibilistically know he has found Paul’s cloak? Or doesn’t he? If Hoover were to demure but protest that Clark is being reductionistic - as he does in the rest of the aforementioned footnote - I think Clark would say this is all besides the point, for the refutation of skepticism requires a narrower focus as to what sort of knowledge could count as a defeater. Hoover may not care as much about skepticism as does Clark, but then it would be an “empiricist” rather than a “rationalist prejudice” that is at issue here. 

Additionally, regarding so-called “ostensive clarity,” Hoover never really explains how or if one can discriminate between conflicting claimants. This may have less to do with Hoover and more to do with whatever particular brand of empiricism he espouses, but it’s hard to tell because nearly all allusions to it are either mentioned in passing or phrased in such a way that the reader is not sure whether Hoover is committed to the idea in question. 

On the one hand, Hoover says “What is important to see is that one cannot discredit [ostensive (or inductive) demonstrability] by showing that it cannot be analyzed in terms of [discursive demonstrability].” Does that not also imply one can’t be credited over another? Epistemologically, that would be a point Clark would consider in his favor.

On the other hand, Hoover clearly wants to avoid arbitrarity. In one footnote, he suggests that empiricists “can maintain that there is an intimate and necessary relation between sensory stimuli and the perception facilitated thereby, but deny that stimuli and perception relate by logic. A stimulus, after all, is a stimulus a causal sort of thing.” In another, he says the possibility of “phenomenal indistinguishability... can be contested,” but instead of explaining how, he goes on to argue that our epistemological limitations don’t affect ontic statuses. Now, anyone “can maintain” any position. The real question is why he would. So wouldn’t it more be more helpful to explain what grounds an empiricist could have for these positions? Maybe he is presupposing them, though he continually seems to want to contrast presuppositionalism with his evidentialism. 

Why, then, does Hoover think sensations cause perceptions? And then how can perceptions be used to form abstract concepts or universals? I mean, there must be some point at which propositional beliefs are connected to sensation, perception, images, etc., right? I had thought that was the whole point of “empirical” knowledge. But since the predication of truth-values is propositional enterprise, then in contrast to what he states above, mustn’t there be discursive reasoning or logical relations somewhere in this empirical process? Well, where and how?

In yet another footnote - which one can probably by now sense is where most of Hoover’s positive [counter-]assertions have unfortunately been relegated - he writes: “From an aggregate of black dots which ostensibly occupy an area on a newspaper page, one cannot deduce the likeness of President Reagan. The President’s likeness is gestaltic in character, not discursive.” What does that mean? Does one have legitimate reason to infer a resemblance to President Reagan or not? Could one have legitimate reason for denying a resemblance? What suffices as a “likeness”? The reader is left guessing. If this is all purely intuitional - Hoover asserts that “there is an inherent informality in the very meaning of truth and in the human being’s mode of cognizing truth” - then I would consider empirical knowledge to be rather arbitrary and subjective.

Ironically, Hoover is so busy chiding Clark for “begging the question” against empiricists when he agrees with Blanshard in one instance or picks apart empirical particularities which Hoover doesn’t hold to in another - as if Clark were always obliged to refute all of empiricism and all empiricists universally and at once or else refrain from making any attempt at refuting individual arguments empiricists have used - that in the remaining space it seems he can do little more than make offhanded comments about or references to what he does hold to and why. But this in turn begs questions too. If Hoover’s empiricism really is so different than that of those whom Clark critiqued, I would have expected a bit more effort to distinguish his views, especially given his insistence that Clark’s opponents did not actually “fail to identify clear alternatives.” 

Anyway, when the reader recalls that this article was written in 1984, only one year before Clark’s death, it should not surprise him that the mainstream views of contemporary empiricists (like Hoover?) should have changed so quickly from what the mainstream views of the empiricists of yesteryear believed. Clark himself noted this as a recurring trend throughout the history of philosophy. When it comes to secularly approved epistemologies, the only constant is change. Then again, even if none of what he said in his books is applicable to modern empiricists - which I doubt - Clark can hardly be held responsible for not responding to empirical ideas which had not yet been invented when he originally published them. But this is an impression one can sometimes receive from Hoover’s article.

The Coherence Theory of Truth

Hoover defines the coherence theory of truth as follows:

Briefly, the coherence theory of truth holds that there is only one ultimately coherent system of truth. Truth, that is, is a system of geometrically organized propositions. If a certain proposition is true, it is logically entailed by the system—or less stringently perhaps, a true proposition is one which is simply not inconsistent with any of the other propositions in the system. On the other hand, a proposition is false if and only if it fails to be entailed by the system—or, if and only if it is inconsistent with the system. The system contains all truth and only a truth can properly be said to be a knowable.

In the case of an omniscient God, I don’t think an analogy to geometry is appropriate, but this is a bit technical. So far as a human like Clark, Hoover, or myself would be concerned, this is a fine explanation. And Clark does hold to the coherence theory of truth to the exclusion of all others (cf. Today’s Evangelism: Counterfeit or Genuine?, 1990, pg. 111; “The Bible Today” 42.6, March 1948). But while I think Hoover is correct to criticize Clark for holding to it exclusively, I don’t think he goes about it the right way. Hoover argues:

The telling criticism, however, is that, contrary to Clark’s belief, the coherence theory of truth does not provide a theory of the meaning of truth, but only a criterion for its recognition within a formal system. Thus, if presented with a proposition P, and I know that P is a member of a set of propositions which is consistent, then if that set is sanctioned by a true axiom, P must be true as well. The mere coherence of P is a sufficient criterion of its truth. But note that P’s content, by the coherence criterion, is irrelevant. My point is that a sure—fire criterion for the identification of a true proposition as a true proposition is not necessarily an insight into the meaning of truth. 

But for the moment, let us suppose that the coherence criterion is also the meaning of ‘true’ as predicated of propositions. Suppose that Clark is right. Take the proposition, “Jesus Christ has come in the flesh.” (I John 4:2). The recipients of John’s letter, let us assume, rejoiced in this truth as over against the docetic teaching about the incarnate Christ. But in what, exactly, could they have rejoiced given that the coherence theory of truth is true? If we are indeed given the meaning of truth by the coherence theory, then John’s proposition’s truth consists in its formal consistency with the larger set of propositions of which it is a member. They rejoiced, then, that “Jesus Christ has come in the flesh” is logically consistent with all the other propositions they held for true. Conceivably, there may have been in that early church some rather eccentric academics and logicians who had the necessary expertise to delight in the logical fittingness of John’s statement, but did not the early church rejoice rather in this statement’s content? In what this statement is about? The Apostle John’s faithful witness is that we do not serve a docetic Christ, but a Christ who became flesh. The proposition in question, if we are to make sense of being encouraged and gladdened by it, is about a non-proposition—viz., the Incarnation of Christ. Its coherence may be a criterion or sign of its truth but its truth is more plausibly construed as its faithful recounting of what had taken place in the case of Jesus of Nazareth. So unless a mere mark of truth is the meaning of truth, coherence cannot be definitional of truth.

Maybe I’m missing something, but in the second paragraph, it just seems like Hoover reverts to the string of rhetorical questions he had earlier acknowledged would be insufficient for the purposes of his article. Clark would say a proposition is “about” whatever is the subject of the proposition. Then what?

As for the first paragraph, I don’t understand why Hoover thinks that “P’s content, by the coherence criterion, is irrelevant.” How could one gauge coherence between two propositions unless he can compare their content? 

Furthermore, as hard as it is to believe - which is why I say I could be missing something - it looks as though Hoover conflates the coherence theory of truth with coherentism. The former has to do with what truth is as such; the latter has to do with the “recognition” of it. These don’t refer to the same thing, though they may seem to. The latter is essentially a theory of how we can justify some knowledge-claim, and as a Scripturalist, Clark certainly didn’t think we know a proposition is true if and only if it coheres with other propositions. He acknowledged this could be possible in the case of God (cf. Clark and His Critics, 2009, pg. 287ff.), but he equally makes clear that he doesn’t consider coherence a “sufficient criterion” for men. “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). So our [justified] knowledge of what truth is as much depends on divine revelation and that which can be derived from it as anything else.

Instead, I think it is better to attack the metaphysic which undergirds an exclusive adherence to the coherence theory of truth. If there are realities other than propositions and the concepts of which they are composed, then one who [correctly] believes that everything is related will have to relate his theory of truth to that. Earlier, I noted Hoover calls Clark an Idealist and that this is not necessarily false or a bad thing. But I would argue and have argued (see here, here, here, here, and here), however, that if Idealism implies the “propositional monism” to which Hoover attributes to Clark - viz. that “the set of all real objects and the set of all knowables is the same set” - this metaphysic is inconsistent with Clark’s stated philosophy, which in the main is sound. 

Persons

While what has been said above may address the concern that “Clark’s epistemology requires a serious distortion of human nature, to that extent it is ill-suited to serve as a basis for defending the Christian faith,” Hoover also questions Clark’s metaphysical thesis of persons as a congeries of propositions [or, perhaps a little more precisely, thoughts]. Now, as Hoover says upfront that he wishes to “sketch a reductio ad absurdum argument against Clark’s insistence that persons are propositions,” the challenge will be to refute Clark while operating within Clark’s epistemological framework. Indeed, as the Bible just is a series of sentences, and the Bible alone is, on Scripturalism, the source of all [infallibilistic] knowledge, the only way to show to Clark that there are realities other than sentences is if it is shown that sentences are in some respect deficient in explaining things the Bible refers to. So it might be true that on Clark’s metaphysic of persons, propositions must be regarded as bearing capacities or properties like moral character, rights, and so forth, but Hoover’s conclusion that this is “curious” seems to dangerously imply that Hoover is begging the question. But then he says that this is not “formally decisive,” and so we are really just left with the following paragraph:

According to Clark, persons are propositions (i.e., “complex definitions”). Drawing from Leibniz, Clark affirms that a given person is precisely the set of propositions that make up his life history. And a person is all his propositions. From this it follows that personal identity, self-knowledge, is utterly problematic if not impossible. This follows for two equally sufficient reasons—the first posing a strictly epistemological problem and the second, a logical problem of individuation: (i) Epistemologically, at any point in one’s “autobiography” one has only a finite sample of a possibly infinite set of propositions that will go to constitute his identity. Recall that propositions based on sentient awareness do not count. Now if one has but a finite sample of propositions relevant for his/her identity, the probability that one has enough propositions for a correct identity judgment is either exceedingly small or zero (a finite number over infinity is zero). (ii) Logically, Clark’s theory identifies the person as a “complex definition”—or, to say the same thing in a way that will help us make the point about individuation more clearly, a person is a set of propositions. Persons, then, are individuated by propositional sets, by propositional totalities. This has the exceedingly odd consequence that persons can be told apart, so to speak, only by virtue of their entire life histories. Because no person in this life has the requisite omniscience to know total life histories, it follows that persons in this life are not the sort of thing that can be told apart. But perhaps more seriously—and this brings us around to the test question concerning the exercise of moral agency—if persons are thus individuated (by logically complete propositional sets), how is it imaginable that persons could be moral agents within their life histories? For in Clark’s sense of person, the person seems to be his life history and not a participant within it. And it does no good to invoke the omniscience of God. The fact that God can individuate the propositional sets in question still does not allow persons to be agents within history. Propositional sets are simply not the sort of entities that could commit adultery, care for the sick, or resist temptation. Thus it would appear that a propositional monism is insufficiently rich in basic categories to allow even the Biblical David to sin and repent. 

Now, I have defended the possibility of self-knowledge with a Scripturalistic framework here, among other places. I also think I’ve also pointed out a fallacy in the idea that a function in which x is some finite number and y approaches infinity equals zero when the former is divided by the latter (link). 

In response to the other arguments, that we cannot now knowingly individuate ourselves would not be to say that it cannot be done, nor that we cannot have an opinion as to how we are distinct subjects. This may remove some of the sting of the criticism, at least until it is explained why infallibilistic knowledge [of ourselves or, for that matter, extra-biblical realities in general] is necessary in order to obey God.

I do think Clark was a bit unclear as to whether a person is “what he thinks” (The Trinity, 1990, pg. 129) or, in agreement with Leibniz, whether a person is the sum of what may be predicated of him (cf. Clark and His Critics, 2009, pgs. 148-149). Maybe he thought these two ideas can be resolved.  But I didn’t really understand the criticism that a “person seems to be his life history and not a participant within it.” On Clark’s view, how could there be the former without the latter? Perhaps Hoover’s philosophy of time or history is different from Clark’s, but if so, he never says it.

In short, Hoover seems to be attacking all the right doctrines in all the wrong ways. While I agree with his conclusion that persons cannot just be propositions, I provide other reasons for it (e.g. here).

Language

While I don’t seem to agree with many of his answers, Hoover does ask some really good questions. On the subject of language, he writes:

What it means to presuppose the truth of all this content is itself far from clear. And the question is important beyond a mere philosophical quibble. For one thing, there is the character of truth itself according to the different presuppositionalists. Does truth attach to locutions within the various literary genre in a univocal way - e.g., in poetry, didactic passages, historical narrative? How does truth qualify, and provide implication for, imperatives, interrogatives, counter-factual subjunctives? When one avows that one “presupposes Biblical truth” one does not, ipso facto, answer this sort of question.

These are all excellent, each deserving of more development than I have the present capacity to give. I have written about counter-factuals here. Regarding imperatives and interrogatives, they must mean something just as declarative sentences must mean something, and we must be able to understand them. So perhaps it is possible to reformulate these types of sentences in declarative form without a loss of meaning. For example, per Augustine, a question could normally refer to an expression of desire that a person teach him about some subject. A command could be thought of as an [assumed] authoritative declaration that one [is obligated to] perform some action. In any case, both types of sentences connote that the utterer has certain hopes or expectations of his interlocutors. As for there being various literary genres, even such being the case, one point they all must have in common is to communicate some understandable meaning, in which case historical-grammatical exegesis should be able to be indiscriminately applied.

But Hoover makes other, more provocative relations between language and Scripturalism, such as:

Suppose, for example, that I want to determine whether “Hoover is using the Axiom” (1) makes sense, and (2) whether it is true. Since on Clark’s assumptions knowledge is the system headed by the Axiom (as identified), the individual terms if they can be assigned content, must be defined in the Axiom, and the proposition as a whole is certifiably true only if it is either mentioned in the Axiom or deducible from the Axiom. Taking the truth of “Hoover is using the Axiom” first, we see at once that it is neither mentioned in the Bible nor is it deducible from the Bible. It follows that I, Hoover, can never know whether I am using the Axiom—whether reading, applying, or reflecting on it. More drastically, perhaps, the very proposition “Hoover is using the Axiom” contains one prominent term for which no Clarkian meaning can be assigned. On the criteria already given, no acceptable definition of “Hoover” can be acquired. Hence, it seems to me, the formula “Hoover is using the Axiom” fails to constitute an intelligible proposition. 

As for the idea that something must be explicitly defined in order for one to be able to understand what it means, I see no reason why, if every concept is “a name given to a very lengthy complex of propositions” (Modern Philosophy, 2008, pg. 273), our ability to understand what any one of them means cannot be due to meaning that is inherent or implicit in their usage. After all, if concepts are like empty receptacles into which meaning is poured, defining a concept by making it a subject of a proposition is no good, for the predicate turns out to be just another empty receptacle. See here and here for more on the ideas of necessary and intrinsic meaning.

Now, when it comes to the ontology of man, the “innate knowledge” of language and logic which is evoked upon “the heat of experience,” and so forth, there is much more that can and must be said. But given these available speculatory answers, Scripturalism doesn’t stand or fall here (link), so I will leave further thoughts for another time.