I recently had opportunity to enjoy breakfast with Bill
Vallicella and few other gentlemen who love the philosophical pursuit of truth,
beauty, and goodness. Bill is an
accomplished philosopher and has an award-winning blog called Maverick Philosopher. There a number of
topics on Bill’s blog that are too sophisticated for me to intelligently
comment upon (e.g., his interaction with Peter Van Inwagen's theory of properties) . However, I spent
some time looking around and found some thoughts that Bill posted on Romans
1.18-20 (Is There Any Excuse for Unbelief?) and I thought I might interact with this post and offer a few thoughts.
1.
Bill is a theist who is “sympathetic to
Christianity.” His view of the
apostle Paul does not appear to be so sympathetic. He argues that Paul begs the question in this passage. He also alleges that Paul appears to be
resorting “to ad hominem attacks and
psychologizing.” As a conservative
evangelical Christian my view of the apostle’s argument in Romans 1 is that it
is divine revelation and as such carries divine authority. Mark Thompson argues:
It
is Paul’s apostolic commission which sets his epistles apart from other letters
in the first century. As letters of an apostle, indeed the apostle to the
nations, they are placed alongside the other apostolic documents and continue
to exercise a unique and normative role in the church of Jesus Christ.
The Pauline epistles should not be viewed as simply as some of the earliest ‘unchallengeable
instances’ of gospel-speaking. In and through their undoubted
particularity the risen Christ continues to address his people.[1]
I have posted some additional pieces
of Mark Thompson’s important essay “The Missionary Apostle and Modern Systematic
Affirmation” (HERE) which argue this point more fully. It appears, then, that Bill and I have
different methodological starting points as we approach Romans 1.
2.
Bill recognizes a potential objection to his
reasoning on Romans 1 and so offers a brief rebuttal to the charge that he has
not taken into consideration the noetic consequences of original sin. He offers two considerations. The first revolves around the issue of
moral responsibility for a sin that “one has not oneself committed but
has somehow inherited.” This is a
standard objection to the doctrine of original sin and I’m going to let it go
for now. The literature on this
issue is immense and the back-and-forth charges and counter-charges regarding
original sin won’t be summed up here. (I would, however, recommend Paul Copan's essay Original Sin and Christian Philosophy as a good introduction to the topic.) The second objection offered is more easily defused. This objection reads:
Second, if our faculties
have been so corrupted by original sin that we can no longer reliably
distinguish between the evident and the non-evident, then this corruption will
extend to all our cognitive operations including Paul's theological reasoning,
which we therefore should not trust either.
Bill has made a hasty move
here. The answer to this objection
should be evident once the rest of Paul’s theology is taken into account. Yes, our noetic faculties have been
corrupted by sin and this corruption does extend to all our cognitive
operations but this corruption can (and
is) overcome by God’s grace. This
is the claim that Paul makes for himself and has been affirmed by the history
of the church. Paul has been the
recipient of God’s grace and has been commissioned by the risen Christ to bring
God’s word to the nations (Romans 15.15-16; 1 Corinthians 3.10; Galatians 1.15-16;
2.9; Ephesians 3.2, 7-8). Once
this larger perspective of Paul’s theology is recognized the potential for
self-referential incoherence is overcome.
3. Bill
states:
But is the world a
divine creation? This is the question, and the answer is not obvious. That the
natural world is a divine artifact is not evident to the senses, or to the
heart, or to reason. Of course, one can argue for the existence of God from the
existence and order of the natural world.
There is an alternative way
of understanding Paul’s comments in Romans 1. I understand the text of Romans 1.18ff as teaching that
unbelievers do indeed know God (in some sense). There is a debate as to whether this passage is teaching
that God is knowable or whether he is known. In other words, is Paul teaching that people can reason to
God through empirical means or is it the case that God’s existence is
apprehended immediately through the natural order? One author put it this way:
Two features of 1:19 are
relevant to this discussion. The
first of these concerns the meaning of the phrase τὀ γνωστὀν τοῦ θεοῦ. Does this phrase
refer to actual or merely potential knowledge? In other words, is there a real sense in which unsaved men
know God, or is Paul simply saying that God is ‘knowable’? This second view has the support of
many well-known scholars. However,
H. G. Liddon’s statement is hard to disprove: ‘The phrase…must, according to
the invariable New Testament and LXX use, mean that which is known not that
which may be known about God.’...
While γνωστὀς may have a potential meaning in Classical Greek, it seems best
in light of both NT usage and the context to understand it as a reference to a
real yet suppressed knowledge.
There is no warrant here to speak of a potential knowledge of God to be
gained by probability argumentation.
Paul is certainly not attempting a ‘cosmological argument.’ Rather, he is speaking of an actual
knowledge of God obtained from nature.[2]
Now may it may be possible
to argue for the existence of God by using a discursive process that has its
foundation in the natural order but this is not what Paul is doing in Romans 1. Paul seems to be claiming that all
people “know” the true God in some sense.
Specifying exactly how this knowledge is to be construed is difficult. Reformed theologian Greg Bahnsen has
attempted to articulate a philosophically nuanced perspective on the knowledge
of God held by the unbeliever in light of the teaching in Romans 1.
When we say that men “know”
that the living and true God exists, we are (in part) asserting that they “have
evidence” that justifies the belief that He exists. A word should be added here about the general nature of the
warrant for believing, to which we implicitly allude in claiming that all men
know God.
We do so because of a common
but simplistic (and thus misleading) tendency to make inferential or discursive
knowledge the model for all cases of knowing. If Sam knows that milk gives him indigestion, he came to
this conclusion through certain “steps of reasoning.” He recalled a number of past experiences in which ingestion followed
his drinking of milk, but could not remember any cases of ingestion where milk
had not been in his diet, so he made a general association and interpreted it
in a casual fashion, etc. Sam did
not simply look at milk and immediately apprehend it ingestion-producing
quality (although some children claim to have this kind of intuitive ability
when they encounter new vegetables); rather, he inferred the truth from his
experience. Likewise, if Sam knows
that 487 multiplied by 139 equals 67,693, it would be highly unusual if he did
not gain this knowledge by making a mathematical computation. In a large number of cases, our
knowledge of a proposition is warranted by a discursive process of inference. For example, all of the union truckers
are on strike; Sam is a union trucker; therefore, Sam must be on strike. Such inferential or discursive
knowledge is common, but that does not mean that knowledge arises only from
such reasoning. There are obvious
cases of noninferential knowledge; it is implausible and artificial to insist
that they must somehow be the product of an “unconscious” inference.
Surely there are times when
one believes certain propositions with good reason, without inferring them from
other propositions—as when one believes that one is typing with both hands, or
believes that the music is painfully loud, or believes that one is not the same
person as one’s neighbor, or believes the times tables in math. When Sam knows that a black cat is in
path, he does not infer it from propositions about his sensations, about forms
of appearance, about animal categories, etc. His knowledge is not discursive, following certain steps of
reasoning to a likely conclusion; he immediately
(without mediating lines of inference) apprehends the truth that a black cat is
in his path. (We need not concern
ourselves here with debates over how to account for such noninferential
cognition, whether by linguistic conventionalism, behaviorism, an intuitive
faculty, etc.). Such a
non-propositional experience (an acquaintance with an object) is not something
mystical and ineffable; rather, people have the ability to express and define
the experience propositionally (thus describing it and relating it to other
beliefs so that it is available for reference, memory, assertion, inference,
application, etc.). The
“immediate” apprehension may very well be caused (“mediated”) by natural
factors, but the recognition takes place in the absence of discursive inference
(drawing a conclusion through the mediation of reasoning from premises).
When we encounter a person
at the store and “know” that he is our friend Sam, our belief can indeed be
warranted without being derived or reached by a series of mental arguments,
computations, or inferences. The
same is true when we directly identify his signature on a letter. There is evidence that justifies what
we believe, but it is noninferential and direct. This claim should not be too controversial, but it does
require some attenuation. In those
cases where “knowing” is immediate or noninferential, we are speaking of the
evidence as it is apprehended by a particular individual at the initial time of
assenting to the proposition warranted by it. No doubt somebody else who is unfamiliar with Sam might not
immediately apprehend that this letter is from Sam. And if someone should raise some doubt whether the letter
is, after all, from Sam, the kind of “evidence” that would be brought forth to
defend or vindicate the challenged belief would be the discursive or
inferential kind, rather than the initial evidence of direct apprehension.[3]
Bahnsen, following his
theological mentor Cornelius Van Til, goes on to apply these basic
epistemological principles to Romans 1 and the knowledge of God.
Van Til maintained,
following the teaching of Paul in Romans 1-2, that all men have a knowledge of
God that is justified by direct apprehension of His handiwork in the world and
within themselves. Even without a
discursive argument or a chain of inferences from elementary observations about
experience, all men see and recognize the signature of their Creator in the
world that He created and controls, as well as in themselves as His created
image… This knowledge of God is mediated in the sense of being caused by the
stimulus of the external world and man’s internal constitution, but it is
apprehended immediately without argumentation, computation, or self-conscious
reasoning.[4]
It is important to affirm that
this reality of the unbeliever’s knowledge of God is a revealed truth. It is not a truth that is drawn from
empirically questioning the unbeliever.
Bahnsen recognizes that unbelievers will claim they have no such
knowledge. According to Bahnsen’s
understanding the unbeliever is in a complex epistemic state in which he both
knows God and also engages in a process of self-deception.
With these elements of the
complex situation at hand, we can adequately resolve the paradox of saying that
the unbeliever believes or (by extension) that the man who does not know God
knows God. We will take Sam as our
hypothetical unbeliever. When we
say that Sam does not believe in (or know) God, we are describing him according
to certain features of his behavior and thinking: for example, his immoral
conduct and attitudes, his refusal to glorify God, and especially his
profession not to believe in God.
After all, Sam acts and talks like a person who sincerely disbelieves;
indeed, he argues vehemently against believing in God’s existence. However, the fact of the matter is that
Sam actually does believe in God.
When we say that he believes in God, we are (in accordance with the
diagnosis of God’s word) describing him according to certain features of his
behavior and thinking that manifest belief: for example, his living in terms of
some kind of moral standards, his acceptance of the need for logical
consistency, his expectation of uniformity in nature, his fear of death, and
his assuming of freedom of thought.
As in the case of believers, we say that Sam knows God in the sense that
he has justified, true beliefs about Him.
So then, it turns out that Sam’s belief is mistaken.[5]
4. Even
if one is not convinced by Bahnsen’s analysis there is still something to be
appreciated. By taking Paul’s
thought in Romans chapter 1 as a revelational set point and attempting to
reason from this point allows one to explore epistemological options that may
not have been immediately evident.
Bahnsen’s conceptualization of the epistemological situation does
precisely this without the quick dismissal of Paul’s thought as being engaged
in “ad hominem psychologizing.”
[2]
David L. Turner, “Cornelius Van Til and Romans 1:18-21: A Study in the
Epistemology of Presuppositional Apologetics” Grace Theological Journal 2 (1981), 53. Online: http://faculty.gordon.edu/hu/bi/ted_hildebrandt/NTeSources/NTArticles/GTJ-NT/Turner-Rom1-GTJ-81.pdf.
