Here is a dialogue with a catholic that Jimmy had over the issue of justification and Sola Scriptura:

Jimmy Stephens:

When we speak about justification we’ll have to get straight that we can have multiple justifications for one belief.

I might believe that I’m reading the Bible. There are multiple evidences of that, and not all of them are equal. Let’s say I’m reading biblehub.com. One evidence I’m reading the Bible is the “ethos” of the website. Another evidence is that I may already be familiar with the passage or parts of it from reading a physical copy. Similarly, I may get independent verification from a bot on discord repeating what biblehub has recorded. I may also have an emotive response to the passage that’s positive, and will probably get recognition from other believers with higher experience than I have.

So you can have a lot of different interwoven evidences for beliefs about the Bible.

Is that fair?

Apologia:

it’s fair, but i don’t think that’s sufficient justification. i get your point, but this is highly generic and doesn’t necessarily explain the specific canon we hold to and things like that


Jimmy Stephens:

sure, I’m not trying to establish that yet. I’m prefacing that we have beliefs about the Bible, and they can have multiple justifications.

Sometimes – too often, in these conversations, people get confused because they hold onto a background belief about some isomorphism between beliefs and justifications, as if one justification is the only relevant one.

I don’t agree with that, and while I think justifications are hierarchical, that’s not to say having justification x for belief y makes justification z irrelevant.

One can have multiple justifications and they’re all relevant in some way.

For example, Thomas suffers doubt about Jesus in John 20.

Now, he’s had many lines of evidence that the person appearing before him is Jesus.

Jesus prophesied this many many times in the Gospels

Jesus’s entrance is miraculous

Thomas has no competing explanation

Everyone around him recognizes Jesus

But what a Sola Scriptura person wants to say is that there’s a special justification among all of these. While all of these things evidence who Jesus is for Thomas, there’s one thing that does so above all others and that would suffice even without the others:

Jesus says He is Jesus

Why is that piece of evidence so special? Becuase it is God’s testimony.

Hebrews 6 tells us that when God comes down, giving us divine oracle with the intent to convict us of God’s salvific work, it is self-sufficient testimony. That is, in the same way that God is self-sufficient to create things when He speaks them into existence, so God is self-sufficient to cause you to recognize Him when He speaks to you.

Thomas’s doubt therefore was unwarranted. Jesus didn’t show Thomas his scars because Thomas was epistemically bereft of justification. Jesus did so because of Thomas’ weakness, psychological doubt, which was a result of either the natural effects of sin or an act of sin.

Apologia:

this is viciously circular

why is the God of the canonical books the correct God

Jimmy Stephens:

What do you have in mind when you say “viciously circular?”

I don’t mean to be pedantic, but I don’t think that’s a good term. In fact, I usually fault “presuppositionalists” for using it.

Apologia:

why not?

the vicious circle principle

Jimmy Stephens:

What’s that, though?
Because normally people have two things in mind with “circularity.”

Most people have two things in mind with “vicious circularity.”

First, “vicious” presupposes a “virtuous” dichotomy. The person wants to think there’s two kinds of circularity, one good and one bad.

Second, “circularity” usually refers to logical circularity, that is a pattern of inference where the conclusion is already one of the premises.
But there’s no such thing as a virtuous logical circularity. There may be “virtuous” circularity, but it would not be and cannot a logical kind. Therefore, it tends to be more accurate just to say:
There’s logical circularity, and there’s non-logical circularity.

Philosopher William Alston has a good term, epistemic circularity, for the kind of idea Vantilians have in mind.

So we have logical circularity and we have epistemic circularity.

Logical circularity is “bad.”

It’s when you reason from a premise back to that premise.

Epistemic circularity isn’t inferential in the first place. You don’t reason at all, much less reason in a circle.

Rather the “circularity” is coming from the fact that a source of belief is evidencing its trustworthiness in a way that invokes its trustworthiness.

For example, I see a computer. Seeing a computer successfully evidences the reliability of my eyes. But that evidence only works if my eyes are already reliable.

And we might distinguish these evidences like Frame, by differentiating between first-order and second-order evidences.

When I see my computer screen, I have second-order evidence that my sight is a reliable source of belief. It’s second-order because while this does legitimately support trust in my eyesight, it only does so on the condition that I have some special evidence for the reliability of my eyes.

First-order evidence would be some support for trust in my eyesight that isn’t subject to the err of my eyes. While I might have second-order evidence for my eyesight by referring to all its successful instances, the problem will remain that my eyes also fail sometimes, and so my eyes are not self-sufficient. The instances can evidence the reliability of my eyes only if there is some sufficient justification immune to the finitude and fallibility of my eyes.

If I did not have first-order evidence, then skepticism could arise for my second-order evidence, since if my eyes happened to be unreliable, I would just be mistaken about them ever succeeding at all.

We then can think of our concern here as a desire for some source of beliefs which is both sufficiently reliable to avoid skepticism and causes us to be aware of that fact. In other words, we need a source of belief that itself justifies our belief in its infallible reliability.

We need an item of knowledge for which the object does all the work: the object causes belief in it, the object justifies belief in it, and the object is the content.

By analogy, this is epistemological monergism. Supposing God is the object, He’s the one doing all the work. We’re receiving all the benefits without any merit on our own part.

So to bridge some gaps here – with Scripture, the philosophical ramification of Sola Scriptura is that the Scriptures, because they constitute God’s speech writ, possess all the power of God’s speech, which includes the power to cause, justify, and provide content for belief in God’s speech.

The Bible causes belief that it is God’s word, justifies belief that it is God’s word, and has all the rich content referred to as “God’s word” quite independently of any other evidences, though there are other evidences.