The last post on “The Frame of Knowledge” asserted that the revelatory viewpoint of Christian-theism provides the only acceptable “frame” in which reason and experience can be understood for what they are – i.e. gifts of the true God. I further tried to show that Christians, therefore, ought to begin and end their thinking from within this frame. I closed out with the observation that unless Christians rethink their approach to epistemology in more biblical, which is to say revelatory terms, they will aid and abet the non-Christian world in their never-ending attempts to “shove God in to the margins” of life.
The only way to fight back against this is for the Church to once again let the voice of the LORD be heard as it should. Christians must begin all predication by sanctifying “the Lord God in [their] hearts” (2 Pet. 3:15), and they must further insist that nothing that can be called knowledge can really be known outside of the supernaturalistic “frame of knowledge” provided in the Bible. They must forever abandon the two-storey truth model and instead interpret every fact biblically and theologically. Their epistemological foundations must comport with their theological conclusions. This must be done while mounting a resolute and sustained offensive on all non-Christian alternatives. Theology should always be on the front foot![i]
With that in mind it would be useful to take time to briefly review some of the most important thinkers of history. Five have been chosen mostly because they represent different examples of how unbiblical thinking can never clamber out of the holes it digs for itself, and how all attempts to build a satisfactory interpretation of life outside of a revelatory paradigm end in futility.
Plato (427-347 BC)
With Plato we come across a tremendously impressive attempt to formulate a conceptual scheme that takes into account the multifarious facts of human experience. Plato’s philosophy, which he developed after the execution of Socrates in 399 BC, is dualistic; that is, it posits two realms of ultimate reality.[ii] It may be sorted into three types: metaphysical, epistemological, and anthropological.[iii] In the metaphysical realm Plato conceived of two “worlds.” The present world is a world of changing entities; it is imperfect in that there is no single thing which can be said to be the exemplar or timeless representative of every other particular within its group.[iv] The other world is a higher world of changeless Ideas or Forms. It is a world of immaterial exemplars, of, for example, Chairs, Dogs, Justice, Truth, Beauty, Shape, and especially “the Good” etc.[v] An “ideal” realm of universals which the imperfect and transient particulars in this physical world crudely represent.
For Plato, to understand anything (from justice to cows) is to relate it to its class concept – to be able rationally to define the general nature of that which manifests itself in all the individual acts (of justice) or objects (particular cows). Mere opinion (derived from perception and imagination) is characterized by experience of a plurality of particulars or things that are only partly real because they are constantly changing and imperfect; our beliefs here are always subject to qualification and refutation. “Knowledge,” on the other hand, pertains to what unifies the many particulars of experience (the Idea of duck, rather than the plurality of ducks on the pond), what is ideal (perfect and unchanging), and what is fully real and (thus) can be stated without qualification.[vi]
In his epistemological dualism Plato held that only the reason could apprehend the Forms, thus, reason was to be distinguished from experience. Because experience relies upon physical contact with the lower world of particulars, it cannot come to knowledge (i.e. knowledge found truly only in the world of Forms or Ideas).[vii] Thus the life of the mind is placed above the earthly life of experience and manual labor. True knowledge, then, comes about only through rational reflection.[viii]
Plato’s anthropology follows from his view of the two levels of reality and the two levels of knowing. Since the material/empirical relates to the lower level of reality (that of imperfect changing particulars), there has to be a corresponding “lower” aspect of man which appropriates such “knowledge.” This is the human body.[ix] The soul, which is constituted in three parts (reason, spirit, passions),[x] is immaterial and thus has some access (when not governed by the lower constitution of man) to the higher Ideal world.
The major problem with this philosophy is that there is no way to bring the universals of the world of Forms into association with the particulars of the world of Matter. If the soul belongs to the higher realm how did it become a prisoner within a weak and mutable body? Also, as his student Aristotle asked, if all we actually see is in motion, how can we know about an unchanging realm of Ideas and what evidence is there that it even exists?
The practical implications of Plato’s dualism can be seen in his disparagement of the natural world and of honest toil; something that through Augustine was to infect the Church and society for over a thousand years.
The Christian can appreciate Plato’s concern for relating universal concepts to the members of a class. In the end, neither Plato nor his followers (who included the brilliant Roman scholar Plotinus) could bring the two together satisfactorily. The Christian concept of a Triune God, however, resolves the problem. The mind of God is the source of the universal concepts as well as the particulars that we identify within a class. Moreover, the “one and many problem” is resolved theoretically in the one God who is yet three Persons.[xi]
Rene Descartes (1596-1650)
Descartes has been rightly called “the father of the Enlightenment.” He never had to work, being from a wealthy French family (although he did spend time in the army, though always out of harms way). He spent his teenage years as a student at a Jesuit college.[xii] He was an exceptional mathematician, being responsible for the invention of co-ordinate geometry[xiii], but his main claim to fame is his method of discovering veridical truth. Says Brown,
Giving free reign to his doubts, he granted the possibility that everything in his mind might be no more than dreams and illusions. How then could he be sure that the world existed? His answer had three main steps. First of all, he came to the realization that whatever he could doubt, there was one thing that it was impossible to doubt – the fact that he was doubting. This, in turn, led him to his celebrated axiom: Cogito ergo sum (‘I think, therefore I am’). The fact that he was having doubts and, therefore, thinking, meant that he must exist.[xiv]
It must not be supposed that Descartes was the first modern skeptic. His “method of doubt” was composed to enable him (and those after him) to have a foundation for thought upon which to build a comprehensive outline of knowledge. Descartes believed that his analytical method of discovery would make one able to find truth as well as to verify it. Not only that, but he believed his method would bring about a “unity of all knowledge, philosophical and scientific, that he expressed in the image of the Tree of Knowledge, whose roots were metaphysics, whose trunk was physics, and whose branches were the other sciences (including medicine and morality).”[xv]
From this starting point Descartes removed the source and fountain of truth from the mind of the Self-revealing God to the mind of the “I” – man. This is what, perhaps more than anything, triggered the Enlightenment, even among those who disagreed with Descartes’ rationalism. As Karl Barth truly reported, “the Enlightenment has been understood to mean man’s optimistic effort to master life by means of his own understanding.”[xvi] But this removal of the right to interpret truth from the Creator to the creature plunges man into a hopeless spiral of assertion and counter-assertion (as the debates between the Continental Rationalists and the British Empiricists[xvii] show).
[i] It is such a great shame that through the adoption of the tenets of Natural Theology and Classical Foundationalism theologians have cut themselves adrift from the only epistemological and metaphysical base which can fully justify their endeavors.
[ii] Norman L. Geisler and Paul D. Feinberg, Introduction to Philosophy: A Christian Perspective, (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1988), 430.
[iii] Nash, Life’s Ultimate Questions, 62.
[iv] Ibid, 63. See also Greg L. Bahnsen,’s taped lectures, Faith, Facts, and Worldviews, Covenant Media Foundation, Nagadoches, TX.
[v] Rather humorously, Plato could not conceive of exemplars of coarser things, like cow dung!
[vi] Greg L. Bahnsen, Van Til’s Apologetic: Readings and Analysis, (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R, 1998), 318 n.111.
[vii] Nash, 62-64.
[viii] This is the source of the gnosi” or secret knowledge of the various Gnostic sects of the Second Century AD.
[ix] Nash, 62, 88.
[x] Ibid, 89.
[xi] See Rousas J. Rushdoony, “The One and Many Problem – the Contribution of Van Til,” in ed. E. R. Geehan, Jerusalem and Athens.
[xii] Rogers and Baird, Introduction to Philosophy, 77.
[xiii] Colin Brown, Philosophy and the Christian Faith, 50
[xiv] Ibid, 50-51.
[xv] Bernard Williams, “Descartes, Rene” in Paul Edwards, ed., The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, (London: Collier-MacMillan, 1967), 2.345.
[xvi] Karl Barth, Protestant Thought in the Nineteenth Century, (Joplin, MO: Judson Press, 1973), 33.
[xvii] Indeed David Hume showed that since a person only really experiences individual sensations that are then interpreted on the basis of past individual sensations, it is not possible to identify the “I” in Descartes statement from one moment to the next. Thus, by positing an “I” that doubts Descartes was begging the question. See Bahnsen, Van Til’s Apologetic, 337 n. 162.
