Scholastic Objection: God’s Relation to Universals

Of course, many embrace this position [idealism] including some presuppositionalists who would want to be careful with this line of thinking. If reality does not exist apart from an act of the intellect then there are a few absurdities that arise concerning God’s knowledge of Himself. Recall that presuppositionalists say that there are no facts apart from interpretations and I think this needs greater clarity. Is the presuppositionalist saying that there are no facts apart from interpretation for the human but not for God (and maybe some higher Spiritual Beings)?

If so, it appears that there’s a kind of Kantian distinction between the phenomenal and noumenal that’s going on. Seems that Van Til actually shuns the content distinction between the phenomenal and the noumenal by saying, “If there is to be true coherence in our knowledge, there must be the correspondence between our ideas of facts and God’s ideas of these facts, or rather we should say that our ideas must correspond to God’s ideas.” However, I don’t think that Van Til actually escapes the Kantian gap between phenomenal and noumenal but borrows significantly from it.

K. Scott Oliphint says that logic is created by God. With that in mind, we can’t actually know anything about God via logic because logic isn’t used by God to legislate reality – at least not necessarily, as Oliphint himself says, “the law of contradiction, therefore, as we know it is about the expression on a created level of the internal coherence of God’s nature. Christians should therefore never appeal to the law of contradiction as something that as such determines what can and cannot be true.” In this respect there is a massive Gulf both ontologically and epistemologically between God and man so we cannot truly use logic to make judgments about reality and expect them to always hold. Logical laws are created so God could theoretically change them at any moment. Of course, this leads us to wonder how we can trust God’s word if he could simply violate the law of non-contradiction and simultaneously tell the truth and to lie to us concerning the same thing. Now, the presuppositionalists may say well God has promised not to lie but that’s on the assumption that lying and not lying are contradictory and hence impossible, but if logic is simply created by God from his will then we cannot properly trust God in that respect at some point God could have lying and not lying be possible.

In the same respect – and there’s nothing we could do about it, but I think more fundamentally, we reach a problem with respect to this notion that we must be in conformity with God’s ideas of reality. It’s not that we are in conformity with what God has created and what God knows but what God’s ideas of creation are. This may initially sound Augustinian or Neoplatonic, but I think that’s an equivocation of the nature of ideas in the divine intellect in Augustinian and divine conceptualist thought.

Broadly, God’s ideas aren’t interpretations but universals. In Van Tillian thought, ideas appear to be interpretations of reality. This leads us to ask what God knows about himself and what the basis for that knowledge is. Descartes ran into a similar problem when he developed a doctrine of created truth. Descartes, at least according to some, held that at least some facts are created by God. It appears that in the Van Tillian framework all facts about God are willed to be by himself. If that is the case, when God knows himself to be omnipotent, does God know that he is omnipotent on the basis that he is actually omnipotent or on the basis that God wills that he is omnipotent? If the former, then not all facts are determined by God’s will. But if the latter, then we have to ask how God wills that power in the first place.

The only way that God would be able to will his own omnipotence is if he were already omnipotent, which is clearly absurd! God’s will would be prior to his own nature which again is nonsensical. Therefore this notion of God willing things to be true is Highly Questionable. That isn’t to say that logic is totally independent of God by no means but to say that logic is effectively a creature leads to the kind of absurdity.

Jimmy’s Response:

Forgive me the length of this response.

It is a common mistake to conclude that God can violate logic simply because He creates it. The idea is that, because God precedes the order of His creation, God is capable of exemption or outright violation of the very laws He set into creation. If God’s power is not limited to or at least delineated by logic, He must be able to transgress logical laws, so the thinking goes. If what is possible for God is not determined by laws of logic, that means it’s possible God could be or already has been illogical, right?

Despite its popularity and persuasive force among Christian philosophers, this reasoning fails. It fails because it reduces possibility to God’s power in abstract. What I mean by “in abstract” is that the person reasoning in this way is only considering God’s power in isolation from His other divine attributes. In that way, the argument suffers a sort of inferential amnesia – it forgets that what is possible for God isn’t determined by God’s omnipotence alone. (As if God’s omnipotence can be “alone” at all!)

To illustrate the point, suppose someone reasons the following way. Since God is omnipotent, He can change Himself. God can turn Himself into a dog, for if He could’t, then He wouldn’t be omnipotent. Therefore, God is subject to change, not immutable. What are the flaws of this argument? Well, one of them – I submit, the biggest one, is that it tries to reason about God’s omnipotence in a vacuum, without considering the whole set of God’s attributes. It prioritizes one divine perfection at the cost of others.

Now this is exactly the mistake our Lutheran brothers have made. Just because God is capable of violating logic on the scenario where we only consider His omnipotence in a vacuum, that does not make it possible all things considered. After all, God’s omnipotence in a vacuum is not possible in the first place! God is not a mindless force. God is faithful, unchanging, and purposeful. So on the Vantilian position, we can say, per impossibile, that God has the mere power to break the laws, in the same way we can say, if squares have three sides, then squares are not quadrilaterals.

On the vantilian position, God created logic, sure, but He did so for important reasons. If God violated His own created laws, He would defeat His own goals and undermine His own motivations. Example: He would undermine His goal to reveal Himself in general, since all human knowledge is contingent on logical conformity. Another example: the laws themselves would no longer express something unique of God’s pre-logical Wisdom, since being illogical is just as Godlike as being logical. Another example: God’s act of inspiration would fail since exegeting Scripture presupposes a commitment to logical laws.

I could keep going, but you get the point. It’s not that God isn’t powerful enough to break logic. It’s that breaking logic is ungodly for other reasons. For those familiar with Cartesian voluntarism and the McEar objection to omnipotence, this should be a familiar strategy of apologetic. The lesson of this tale is don’t cut up God’s attributes, kids.

In summary, the error in the video’s reasoning is in the following conditional: “if logic is created by God’s omnipotence, isolated and arbitrary.” But nothing is created this way and the Vantilian isn’t saying otherwise. Yahweh – not some Platonic omnipotence abstracted from His nature – is the Creator of logic. Therefore, it does not follow that because God transcends logic, he can “break” the laws of logic. On the contrary, God’s logical ordering presupposes His faithful intent never to break the foundation He has set up for His human creatures. A theologian, Rob Dalrymple, once put it this way. God is alogical but He is not illogical. He transcends logic, but it is ironically this very alogicality that makes the Creator capable of making, sustaining, and perfectly fulfilling logical exigencies, which He indeed perfectly fulfills in the God-man, Jesus Christ.

Now, this is already long, but I would like to anticipate an erroneous rebuttal. As the video has already elsewhere, Scholastic Lutherans could reply that my response here invokes logic, therefore presupposing the application of logic to all my claims. Yes it does, and so what. All this shows is that logic is a condition of human knowledge (viz. of God), not that logic is a condition of God. (Vantilians are more than happy to grant this point and in fact, wield it as an apologetic weapon.) Yes, I have to use logic to talk about God, but that is a fact about human epistemology, not about God’s nature. After all, I can only express theology in English, too, but it doesn’t follow that God is metaphysically preoccupied with rules of English grammar.

Scholastic Objection: (Con)fusing Van Tillianism with Clarkainism

Jimmy’s Response:

At best, I suspect this is Clarkianism, not Vantilianism. Sometimes the definition or historic notion of “presuppositionalism” is made to include the philosophies of Cornelius Van Til, Gordon Clark, and Francis Schaeffer en masse. Sometimes others are added to the roster. (This is one reason why I reject the term “presuppositionalism.”) What this objection discusses is not compatible with Van Til or Schaeffer, but does sound remarkably on point for Clarkianism.

Both the classical apologist and the presuppositional apologists say that God is the ontological precondition of all reality and in a sense the epistemological precondition of all reality, but the classical apologist affirms the latter in virtue of the definition of truth, the conformity of a proposition to some real being. And since God is the source of all being, God is necessarily the source of all truth. To say that something is true implies that God exists because being is defined upon God.

However, the presuppositionalist says that the idea of God in the mind is the precondition of intelligibility. The classicalist says that only in virtue of God’s existence can we say that something exists because without being, nothing exists. But the presuppositionalist adds that the idea of God is the necessary precondition of intelligibility, and it seems to me that the presuppositionalist does not properly make the distinction between the idea of God and God in himself.

I don’t think anybody reasonable says that they have a perfect concept of God in their minds whether reflectively or not, so I think there’s a sleight of hands that many are not aware of. I truly believe that this is the most devastating objection because it contains both the argument against the transcendental argument for God’s existence and a severe undermining of what is occurring in the presuppositional mind. They aren’t showing that they actually presuppose God in himself, and even if they are, they don’t establish His actual existence. This is at its core a confusion of ontology and epistemology.

Jimmy’s Response:

Scholastic Objection: Conceptual Relativism:

The general notion of conceptual schemes that should be obvious by now – Van Tillian presuppositionalism relies heavily on the idea of a conceptual scheme to say that today, unbelievers are fundamentally unable to interpret metaphysical facts properly and that Christianity as a whole is presupposed for intelligibility. Donald Davidson is pretty critical of conceptual schemes and I think he’s right. He argues that the dominant metaphor of conceptual relativism, that of differing points of view, falls into a paradox because points of view only make sense in so far as there’s a common coordinate system on which to plot them. As he says in his paper, the existence of a common system betrays the whole notion of conceptual relativism. Applying this to presuppositionalism, it doesn’t seem possible to compare worldviews unless there is some underlying scheme beneath both of them – not something merely contained in both of them accidentally, but an overall basis on which all worldviews are built that allows comparison.

Jimmy’s Response:

Let’s try to understand this objection. We’ll call this objection conceptual relativism. Remember that Vantilians accuse all unbelieving worldviews of subjectivism – that is, unbelieving epistemologies fail to resolve justificatory regress. Perhaps the video has this in mind when bringing up conceptual schemes and Donaldson. If so, perhaps the objection is supposed to be that, if Vantilians are similar to postmodernists who think we all only have access to our personal conceptual schemes without genuine universality or objectivity or exception to change, then no matter what critique is unleashed on unbelieving conceptual schemes, at bottom, the Vantilian is foredoomed by his own imprisonment in a conceptual scheme along with everyone else. So isn’t Vantilianism self-defeating?

That would indeed be a severe problem, but our response is simple. Vantilians do not believe in this notion of conceptual schemes. We do not believe humans lack any universal, objective, invariant elements of knowledge. To borrow Donaldson’s lingo, we simply maintain that the coordinate system available to all men by which they can and do navigate conceptual schemes is revealed Christian knowledge. Indeed, the God who is immutable, omnipresent, and sovereign possesses the needed attributes to provide something changeless, everywhere and every time, independent of human opinion.

Notice how this not only avoids relativism, but in fact, it’s a direct and positive rejection of it. Revelational epistemology does not construe worldviews as postmodern conceptual schemes. A “worldview,” for Vantilians, is more – much more than an adoptable framework for ivory tower intellection. Worldviews are a way of life that answers its basic questions, which inherently commits one to some kind of gospel narrative, which shares unargued desires and goals at its roots, and which is fundamentally religious “yea” or “nay” to Christ.

It’s reasonable to ask why we should think those things are all related, but answering that question isn’t needed to resolve the objection. Yes, what a worldview is, how it comes back to Christianity, needs to be developed and defended – no doubt. But all that’s necessary to answer the conceptual relativism objection is to note that it attacks a secular idea of conceptual scheme, not the Vantilian notions of revelation and worldview, wherewith relativism is outright denied.

Objection: Biblical Issues