By Nathan D. Shannon
[Nathan D. Shannon is a Ph.D. candidate in theology at the Free University of Amsterdam and adjunct professor of philosophy at St. Joseph’s University, Philadelphia.]
If we seek to defend the Christian religion by an “appeal to the facts of experience” in accord with the current scientific method, we shall have to adulterate Christianity beyond recognition. (Cornelius Van Til, Christian-Theistic Evidences)
Cornelius Van Til’s rejection of brute factuality and his claim that the purported neutrality of evidentialist rationality is in its essence decidedly anti-Christian set the presuppositional apologetic method apart from all others.[1] In this article, I present a study of Van Til’s philosophies of fact and evidence in comparison with the evidentialism of John Locke, arguably the quintessential modern evidentialist. Section 1 is a brief survey of Locke’s epistemology, focusing on the nature of facts and their role in his theories of knowledge and belief. In section 2 we turn to Van Til. Van Til’s argument from predication leads us to the theological underpinnings of his views of fact and evidence. Then in section 3, having Locke’s and Van Til’s views before us, we turn to Van Til’s critique of evidentialism and, specifically, his claim that evidentialism is ultimately committed to creaturely rational autonomy. In this way Locke’s epistemology serves as a test case for the claims Van Til makes against brute factuality and evidentialist rationality.
As Gary Habermas wrote, presuppositional apologetics is as much a theological view of apologetics as it is an apologetic method.[2] His view is common, and should be welcomed by Van Tillian presuppositionalists. But what Habermas and others have failed to recognize, or what Van Tillians have largely failed to clarify, is Van Til’s claim that trinitarian theology itself endorses one and only one apologetic method as necessary, the transcendental, and that, given the Christian-theistic transcendental or presuppositional foundation, just about any apologetic approach is in play, including the use of evidence.[3]
Van Til’s views on facts and evidence are closely linked to his transcendental apologetic method; if Van Til is misunderstood on evidence, he will be misunderstood on the transcendental method as well.[4] And Van Til’s views on facts and evidence are often misunderstood by both sympathetic and more critical readers. I hope to dispel some of that confusion here. We begin with John Locke.
I. John Locke’s Ideas: On Facts And Evidence
John Locke claims to derive epistemological certainty precisely from the bare and uninterpreted nature of facts and from the passive receptivity of an unprejudiced mind. And, for Locke, rationality of belief flows from a measured employment of received ideas in assessing the probability of propositions not observed with certainty. The subject proportions belief to the strength of known evidence. So an abstract, systemless notion of fact is at the root of Locke’s approach to knowledge and belief.[5]
I will begin with a brief exposition of Locke’s theory of ideas and his theory of knowledge, and then discuss his theory of belief, dependent as it is in several ways upon his theory of knowledge. We will turn to Locke’s view of evidence next, specifically his view of the function of evidence in the assessment of the truth-likelihood of those propositions that cannot be known with certainty and so can at best be believed with a measured degree of confidence. At that point I will indicate the metaphysical implications of the nature and function of evidence, which are in many cases flatly contrary to what we might expect given claims Locke makes elsewhere in his An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. The goal is that this brief study will allow us to point out the ways in which Van Til’s apologetic draws attention to the decidedly anti-Christian presuppositions operative in Locke’s epistemology.
Nicholas Wolterstorff’s study, John Locke and the Ethics of Belief, provides a detailed analysis of Locke’s epistemology. Wolterstorff’s research is motivated by his interest in the peculiar normativity of modern evidentialism and evidentialist rationality, specifically in terms of the evidentialist challenge to religious belief.[6] Since Wolterstorff’s interest in Locke is similar to our own, and because he is not a Van Tillian presuppositionalist, I find it helpful to track closely with his arguments in what follows.
1. The Self-Presentation Of Ideas, And Their Agreement Or Disagreement
Following an opening salvo against the doctrine of innate ideas, Locke declares, “Let us then suppose the mind to be, as we say, white paper, void of all characters, without any ideas.”[7] The mind is a clean and uncorrupted void, a tabula rasa. It presupposes nothing, and has no natural apperceptive faculty. The mind is blank receptivity. “Whence has it all the materials of Reason and Knowledge?” you ask. “To this I answer, in one word, from experience: In that, all our knowledge is founded; and from that it ultimately derives itself.”[8] So all the content of the mind originates in perceptual experience.
Locke supposed that the receptive-informative experience exhaustive of the mind’s ideas comes in only two forms: “Our observation employed either about external, sensible objects; or about the internal operations of our minds, perceived and reflected on by our selves, is that which supplies our understandings with all the materials of thinking. These are the two foundations of knowledge . . . first, our senses,” or “sensation,” and “secondly . . . the perception of the operations of our own minds within us,” which Locke calls “reflection.”[9]
“Since the mind,” Locke continues, “in all its thoughts and reasonings, hath no other immediate object but its own ideas, which it alone does or can contemplate, it is evident that our knowledge is only conversant about them.” “Knowledge then,” he writes,
seems to me to be nothing but the perception of the connection and agreement, or disagreement and repugnancy of any of our ideas. In this alone it consists. Where perception is, there is knowledge, and where it is not, there, though we may fancy, guess, or believe, yet we always come short of knowledge. For when we know that white is not black, what do we else but perceive, that these two ideas do not agree?[10]
In sum, the substance of Locke’s theory of knowledge rests on this concept of ideas, ideas as the immediate perception of qualities of things. And following Wolterstorff, we observe that “the mind can be aware—directly aware . . . only of the mental,” of the modifications of the mind.[11] Ideas “are representations, mental representations, of entities distinct from themselves,” and “Our various ways of thinking about non-mental entities all presuppose our having ideas which are representations of non-mental entities.”[12]
Notice that not all ideas are themselves representations, since the mind is capable of building composite ideas or of deriving abstract ideas from immediate and simple ones. Complex ideas and ideas of substances, for example, according to Locke, are not representations, but are inferred from direct and simple ideas. Wolterstorff writes that “what Locke wishes to insist on is simply that some of our ideas are representations, and that our various ways of thinking about non-mental entities all presuppose our having ideas which are representations of non-mental entities.”[13] So all of the mind’s ideas depend upon perceptual representations.
How can we be sure that the impressions in the mind are anything like the objects in the world? Locke believed that objects in the world exercise their own natural powers to make impressions on the receptive mind and that those powers are consistent with the natures of the things themselves and thus truly represent the objects of experience. So the gap between material reality and ideas in the mind is bridged by the powers which objects in the world exercise in affecting the mind.[14]
Since mental ideas are not conceptualized or constructively apperceived compilations of sensations but are instead limited to the content of bare sense impressions, Locke restricts ideas to pure empirical data: the appearance of the greenness of the grass, the sensation of the aroma of perfume, and so on. So while he depends on the consistency of objects, powers, and impressions, Locke denies that substances themselves can be known. Nominal substances, he says, are knowable, but only as inference from the effects—modifications of the mind—to the cause. In other words, we can “know” the things in themselves only hypothetically, as the best available explanation for experiential data. Furthermore, ideas are simple for Locke, which means that the experience of an apple will include distinct impressions of color, weight, texture, taste, and so on. But the substances themselves are complex. Inference to a hypothetical substance in which inhere all the powers that are sensed depends on the premise that there must be some object in which those qualities bearing those powers are held together. Realism is the best available theory.[15]
Naturally, primary and certain knowledge is always and only of particulars. Universals are knowable only by abstraction. Locke will say, for example, that the number two cannot be thought of except as the aspect of twoness exemplified by a particular idea stripped of its individuating factors. If I hold two distinct objects in my hand, by focusing strictly on the numerical aspect of the perceptual impression, I can think about the abstract notion of twoness, but there can be no direct experience of it. In the chapter on maxims, Locke affirms the superior efficacy of particulars against necessary truths, a grudge he long held against his scholastic education.[16] As Wolterstorff explains, “Mental acts and mental images are self-presenting. . . . The remainder of reality can be thought about only by the mediation of mental objects which . . . represent items of non-mental reality not directly present.”[17] Such is the tenacity of ideas according to Locke.
Notice, finally, that “the key to Locke’s thought is his identification of the known with the certain.”[18] Knowledge is certain; and what is certain, is knowledge.[19]
And certainty is a direct deliverance of ideas. Locke achieves admirable simplicity: “. . . given that the immediate object of our awareness is our ideas, it seems obvious that one thing we can do is notice the relations among those ideas,” those that are just there before the mind’s eye.[20] “In such noticing, there is no room for mistake and error. We are certain.”[21]
Wolterstorff dubs this an “inspectionist” view of knowledge, since “to know is to notice that.” And, he explains, the difference between Locke’s epistemology and the classical twentieth-century view of knowledge is that “our contemporaries hold a non-inspectionist, pure assent (belief) view of knowledge, whereas Locke held an inspectionist (noticing) view of knowledge.”[22] Direct awareness, in the form of ideas, as the first fact of knowledge, is the prize, the hallmark of Lockean empirical certainty.
2. Belief And The Evidential Role Of Ideas
Wolterstorff observes that Locke’s theory of belief works in conjunction with his theory of knowledge: belief begins where the certainty of knowledge ends. Where perfect certainty escapes us, assent or judgment must reflect the probability of a proposition’s being true as that probability is understood based upon a satisfactory body of evidence, that evidence being things known with certainty.
Wolterstorff analyzes Locke’s theory of belief in terms of three principles: the principles of evidence, appraisal, and proportionality. The first is as follows.
Principle of evidence: Acquire evidence for and against the proposition such that each item of evidence is something that one knows and such that the totality of one’s evidence is satisfactory.[23]
One must acquire sufficient and sufficiently relevant evidence both for and against the proposition in question, and that evidence must be known, or, in other words, certain and self-evident. The evidence Locke envisions is certain, indubitable, impersonal, even (we may assume) objective. Locke understands evidence as self-presenting, such that its acquisition requires only a minimally intentional (or minimally volitional) act of inspection. It would be difficult to argue that Locke’s insistence on epistemological deference to “the facts themselves,” without bias, without interference of the passions, and without tradition or official opinion wielding undue authority, as he says, does not imply the objectivity of evidence—despite his reluctance to grant it. In other words, what prevents Locke’s metaphysic of knowledge slipping toward subjectivism is an implicit metaphysical confidence that, explicitly, he disavows. We will examine this inconsistency more closely below. In Locke’s mind, evidence is certain, and the uncertainty and probability of belief are grounded in self-presenting knowledge.
The second principle is built upon Locke’s insistence that evidence be collected both for and against a proposition, so that a net probability can be assigned to the proposition, and so that the truth-likelihood of a proposition might be objectively appraised. Wolterstorff’s second principle is thus the principle of appraisal.
Principle of appraisal: Examine the (satisfactory) evidence one has collected so as to determine its evidential force, until one has “perceived” what is the probability of the proposition on that evidence.[24]
While in the Essay Locke moves quickly from evidence to probability, Wolterstorff’s principle of appraisal brings into the still frame of analysis something important, which is not, as one might think, the action of the subject relative to a (satisfactory) body of (satisfactory) evidence. The action of the thinking person, remember, is only minimal; it is not more than inspection. Instead, the principle of appraisal serves to isolate the voice of the evidence. It brings into focus the influence which Locke’s theory of ideas has, via his epistemology and through his understanding of evidence as things known, on the believability of propositions. As a direct result of this arrangement, the most material, the most purely empirical, propositions are those which present themselves most readily to high likeliness to be true, so that the class of the most material propositions constitutes the class of the most believable propositions and each degree removed a proposition is from direct perceptual experience counts against its likelihood to be true. This is a core empiricist principle.
We now have this much clear: the probability of the proposition in question (from the second principle) on sufficient evidence (from the first). Let us now add the concept of degrees or levels of confidence or of assent. Wolterstorff calls this Locke’s principle of proportionality.
Principle of proportionality: adopt a level of confidence in the proposition which is proportioned to its probability on one’s satisfactory evidence.[25]
Locke himself places these three principles side by side: “But their being degrees herein, from the very neighbourhood of certainty and demonstration, quite down to improbability and unlikeliness, even to the confines of impossibility; and also degrees of assent from full assurance and confidence, quite down to conjecture, doubt, and distrust.” These, “the several degrees of and grounds of probability,” must determine in proportion the “several degrees” of “assent or faith.”[26]
The principle of proportionality completes Locke’s doxastic proposal for our purposes. Wolterstorff offers a helpful summary. Locke’s theory of belief says that
the first thing to do is to collect satisfactory evidence concerning the truth or falsehood of the proposition. That done, one must reflect carefully on the probability of the proposition on that evidence. And finally, one is to proportion one’s level of confidence in the proposition to its probability on one’s (satisfactory) evidence. To accomplish all this, it is important that one be concerned solely with determining whether P is true or false, entirely “indifferent” to any other value that believing or disbelieving P might have for one.[27]
With this survey of Lockean evidentialism securely in place, we should be in a good position to examine Van Til’s critique of evidentialism and his rejection of brute fact. Before doing so, we should ask what Van Til’s own view of evidence is. I propose an indirect approach, beginning with an ancient philosophical conundrum variously known as the problem of predication, the problem of universals, or the problem of the one and the many. We will trace Van Til’s analysis of the problem, and then examine his response to it. His response is, in a word, the triune creator God; happily for us, it is also there, at the very essence of God, that we should begin to unravel Van Til’s philosophies of fact and evidence.
II. Van Til On Facts And Evidence
What do we have in mind when we talk about facts? Do we mean statements of fact? Or do we mean, rather than statements, propositions? Propositions are subject-predicate pairs which may be true or false. “The cat is on the mat,” “apples are sweet,” and “Socrates is a man,” are all propositions.[28] Those certainly sound like facts. Are these the facts we have in mind, or the facts Van Til has in mind?
To say that a fact is a proposition risks neglecting an important distinction. A proposition is composed of both a subject, the thing we are talking about, and a predicate, what we are saying about that thing. “The cat” is the subject, and “[being] on the mat” is the predicate. We predicate being on the mat of the cat. The full picture then is of propositions and then of two distinguishable but essential components of propositions, subjects and predicates.
This distinction deserves attention because if we are to say that propositions are facts, we should be aware that propositions are composite things, and we should note the implication that subjects and predicates are incomplete as facts, or insufficient for factuality. If propositions are facts and facts are propositions, then subjects and predicates are necessary for facts but are not themselves facts. They, subjects and predicates, are the essential components of propositions and so of facts. Both would be necessary, but neither is individually sufficient. Is this true?
What is it about “the cat” that makes it not quite a fact? And why should “being on the mat” also not be a fact? Both are discernible, intelligible features of the world, and is that a fact, an intelligible feature of the world? On the other hand, there is indeed something about the proposition “the cat is on the mat,” as distinguished from “the cat” alone and “being on the mat” alone, that just says “fact.” And what it is, I think, is the satisfying achievement of pinpointing an instantiation of a generic predicate in an immediately recognizable, particular object. That familiar light of intelligibility and meaning is illuminated the moment the subject meets the predicate, the moment the act of predication joins the predicate to a particular thing. We have a fact the moment “being on the mat” is predicated of a particular thing, “the cat.” Prior to that, having in one hand “being on the mat” and in the other “the cat,” and not yet having brought the two together, we remain factless.
To see what I mean, notice that both the subject alone and the predicate alone become more fact-like the more we understand each one as a subject-predicate pair. “The cat” is not much of a fact as it is; but if we draw it into the open somewhat to reveal something more complete, such as, “the cat, this one, is the cat I’m talking about,” we find ourselves with something more substantial, something more factual in character, a subject and predicate match: (S) That particular cat is (P) the thing I am talking about, as distinguished from other things or other cats and all the things I am not talking about. The same could be done with the predicate “is on the mat.” By “is on the mat,” I mean not “not on the mat,” and not “under the mat” nor “identical with the mat.” The predicate “is on the mat” is a particular mode of being in distinction from all others. It is specific and exclusive temporally and spatially: there, now, right on top of that mat. It indicates a single time and space, an “isness” or existence. All that is to say that factuality is to a large extent the product of the matching of a subject and a predicate, of individuating a non-specific predicate in terms of a specific object.
As long as we are still to have a fact, therefore, the predicate is inseparable from the particular object, just like every chocolate chip cookie is a single cookie bringing singular delight to the person ready with a cool glass of milk, at the same time that a single cookie is an individuation of a broad class of snacks we designate “chocolate chip cookies.” No individual cookie is itself identifiable with the class “chocolate chip cookies,” nor, conversely, is the class, the idea, the concept, “chocolate chip cookies,” anything you could get your hands on and enjoy with a glass of milk or a cup of tea or however you like. So the two, the cookie and chocolate-chip-cookieness, are distinct, but both are necessary for predication, for saying that thing, that little disc of deliciousness, is a chocolate chip cookie.
We are claiming that subjects and predicates are necessary for factuality. What we really mean is something more intriguing, that subjects and predicates are necessary for intelligibility, and that subjects and predicates are, on their own, unintelligible. Neither the single particular nor the non-individuated universal is intelligible apart from the meaning-creative magic of predication.[29] One thing we cannot do is discuss in analytical detail something which is unintelligible; I cannot prove that something is invisible by pointing to it. The best thing we can do in this case is to try to demonstrate the inter-dependence of subjects and predicates in facts and predication.
For example, were there only the class, or the concept, “chocolate chip cookies,” and no actual, particular such baked goodies, the class would not name anything. It would be an empty class without a single member, a label stuck to nothing. “Chocolate chip cookies,” referring to no particular thing, would be no more informative than “bla bla bla.” Now suppose a single such baked snack, S, existed, just one. S could not be a single “chocolate chip cookie”; it could not be an individualized member of a class nor could it represent (individualize) a predicable concept, because there would be no class or concept at all, since there is only S. So if there were only S, no one would know what I meant if I set off pontificating about the features of chocolate-chip-cookieness, or about the superior qualities of chocolate chip cookies when compared to other kinds of cookies, other kinds of snacks, other foods, other worldly things. However, if we had at least two cookies, by distinguishing the similarities between them from the differences, we might begin to articulate in terms of the similarities a general concept that embodies all the essential characteristics of chocolate chip cookies. Thus “chocolate-chip-cookieness” would be intelligible only if and when it represents associations between at least two particular things. For intelligibility, meaning, knowledge, predication, and so on, we need particulars; we need association.
But of course we do indeed think in terms of the class “chocolate chip cookies,” and we depend upon it when we name and identify individual cookies. If I say that, right now, as I write, I have two chocolate chip cookies on my desk, you will have a pretty good idea what I mean, without seeing them, though you would be without any information on these particular cookies: their size, chocolate chip to dough ratio, and so forth. If we had individual cookies but were without the concept, there would be no way to indicate a general similarity between two or more particular snacks. Notice that without any predicates at all—made of flour, egg, butter, sugar, and chocolate chips; round in shape and a couple of inches in diameter; sweet and delicious; goes great with milk or tea—we would have no way to talk about them. We would have no way of making associations and hence no way of referring to them, in concept or symbol, in thought or speech.
What I have just attempted to illustrate is the problem of predication, variously known as the problem of the one and the many or the problem of universals.[30] It is a “problem” as the existence of the world is a problem: we depend constantly and in the most basic ways upon its being true and reliable, but it is difficult to explain. Our need for it and dependence upon it are far greater than our control over it and understanding of it. Thinking and speaking about things in the world seems at one moment to favor the universal and at other moments to favor the particular, and at one and the same time thought appears drawn toward the nobility of drawing general conclusions, while an overemphasis on generalizations tends to rob those generalizations of their content and applicability to particular things. In other words, predication is the intentional or representational association of concrete particulars (subjects) with abstract universals (predicates), and it simply cannot be avoided; it is the very structure of thinking and speaking to match universals and particulars, concrete things with abstract things. Predication is the very fabric of intelligibility. But it is terribly difficult to account for the fact that it can be done.[31]
Van Til was keyed into this problem with peculiar intensity. “The whole problem of knowledge,” he wrote, “has been that of bringing the one and the many together.”[32] And he saw the problem of predication as the flashpoint for apologetic methodology. In light of Christian truth, he wrote, “we would reduce all the historical theistic arguments to the one argument from human predication.”[33] Van Til argues, in sum, that “unless we presuppose the triune God of Scripture, our predication has no field of operation.”[34] It seems clear then, that the problem of predication lies at the core of our interest in evidence, evidentialism, and how these relate to the defense of the faith.
Van Til has written a great deal on this question in terms both of his critique of unbelieving thought and of a positive construction of a Christian philosophy of fact and predication. A challenge facing Van Til’s readers is synthesis, however, since his thoughts on the matter are scattered throughout his writings and are not always spelled out for the reader. In what follows, I will piece together, as succinctly as a fair representation of the material allows, Van Til’s analysis of non-Christian thought on the problem of predication. Then I will present Van Til’s own account of predication based on his triune-theistic philosophy of fact.
1. The One And The Many: Synchronic And Diachronic
We can approach the problem of predication from two points of view: synchronic and diachronic.[35] A synchronic approach puts things in terms of a snapshot of reality. It is interested in objects. We pause time in order to think critically about objects, their relations, and our knowledge of the world. A diachronic approach, by contrast, is interested in events and in change and difference over time. We try to step outside of time and observe the flow of things. Let us start with the former, the synchronic approach.
For Van Til, Plato and Aristotle represent two complementary approaches to the problem of the one and the many. Van Til believes both Plato and Aristotle failed to solve the problem because they both proposed theories of predication favoring either unity or plurality at the expense of the other. Van Til refers sometimes to one emphasis and sometimes to the other, but he understands these approaches to be of a kind. They both took the one-and-many to be a dichotomy or a dualism that they then set out to harmonize or rationalize.
Believing that predication depended upon the intelligibility of the predicates themselves, Plato posited the “forms,” eternal, heavenly exemplars of predicates like good, just, and beautiful.[36] When we predicate “is beautiful” of one thing, and then of another, and perhaps of a third, we imply that the predicate is consistent, that it does not change from one moment to the next.[37] But it is a question of meaning, not only of continuity. If no account can be given for the determinacy of the referent, if we do not know what a term or a predicate refers to, then we do not know what it means at all, let alone whether its meaning is a constant. If there is no such thing as beauty, the predicate “is beautiful” does not really say anything. So Plato thought of the forms as the eternal constants anchoring predication and meaning in the high, incorruptible heavens. He posited the forms as a way to account for predication. The forms are the universals predicable of particulars.[38]
Plato’s forms are sort of like gods and sort of not like gods. They certainly encroach on the claims of theism: they are eternal and self-defined, and they are the necessary reference points for intelligibility in the world. And yet, the forms are impersonal and in that sense unlike god(s).[39]
Impersonality is a problem in the following way. Plato said that the highest form was “the Good.” His optimism is commendable. Actually Plato used the Greek word τὸ ἀγαθόν, or ἡ τοῦ ἀγαθοῦ ἰδέα.[40] The problem is that Plato would not be able to tell us two things: why ἡ τοῦ ἀγαθοῦ ἰδέα is good, or preferable (even normative), and how, as he hoped, τὸ ἀγαθόν manages to come out on top, such that we should “reject” its complement, evil, and such that we could, with confidence and sincerity, defend the value of pursuing τὸ ἀγαθόν instead of its complement.[41] Unless moral properties are indexed to a person, to a divine person, in fact, they are only intelligible as complements or counterparts. As such, neither is better, preferable, normative, or good versus evil; one is one and one is the other. Impersonal complementarity provides as much moral clarity as a chess board.
But the more intractable difficulty for Plato’s doctrine of the forms is that it is false. Or, more charitably, if it were true, Plato would have no way of knowing. Suppose a most sincerely inquisitive student were to have asked Plato, “Master, is ἡ τοῦ ἀγαθοῦ ἰδέα good because you say so, or do you say it is good because it is good?”[42] Plato would have had two equally unappealing options. The former, in which Plato could confess to have invented moral goodness and designed it according to his own will and preference, has an epistemological advantage going for it: if Plato himself unilaterally decrees moral goodness according to the pleasure of his own will, we know the provenance of moral value, Plato himself, and Plato could never err morally; he could never be immoral, so long as he remained self-consistent. The latter option avoids self-deification and subjectivism but kicks the epistemological can down the road: if it is good, if Plato just found it that way and recognized its goodness, how did he recognize goodness? What did he recognize, exactly?
Here Plato has no answer. To borrow a phrase from Locke, however Plato “sometimes lights on truth,” he is “in the right but by chance; and I know not whether the luckiness of the accident will excuse the irregularity of his proceeding.”[43] While he may be able to distinguish moral good from moral evil most of the time, and for the most part to most people’s liking, he cannot account for that distinction (unless it is all his own), nor can he substantiate his very hopeful declaration that the Good is ultimate. “Good,” “just,” and “beautiful” simply refer to the greatest conceivable predicates for Plato himself, or for Plato and his friends, or for Plato and whoever agrees with him. As Rorty said, truth is what our friends let us get away with saying. And it all works splendidly until someone challenges Plato. He would have to either convince us to follow him as our moral authority or provide an account for goodness and tell us how he knows what it looks like, given that the forms of the Good, the Beautiful, and the Just are so heavenly pristine as to have no particular features to them at all. Plato has, in effect, written the contents of his own mind on the ceiling and declared, pointing upward, “There in the heavens lie our abiding universals!”[44]
Aristotle, likely Plato’s most prolific student, began with particular essences and the distinguishability of individual things.[45] He rejected his teacher’s heavenly forms, or so it might seem, and thought instead that there was a single universal, being—just being. On Aristotle’s model, predication reduces to naming subdivisions of being, of distinguishing finer and finer individuations of being according to essences. So meaning resides in essences, in individual, particular things. But in order to say or know anything about a particular thing, one must take a step or two back, broaden the scope, loose the finer details, and make associations with other particular things.[46]
Aristotle specialized in recognizing, with inimitable conceptual dexterity, how things are related and how they are distinguished. But he was not unaware of the need to account for predication, of the need to justify somehow the applicability of increasingly extensive and proportionally vague predicates. He knew that to say “this object is X” and “that object is X,” he must have a referent for X that comprehends both objects but is limited to, or exclusive to, neither one. And beyond that, another, broader association wants for yet another more comprehensive predicate. A single prediction sets the whole thing in motion, and sooner or later a magnificent tapestry of predication requires universal grounding. We need a predicate which applies to everything, a universal predicate. Not much could be said about this universal without compromising its universality, without weighing it down with some measure of particularity. To get at it, Aristotle had to balance two concerns: the ultimate thing could not be material (since materiality implies limitation), and the ultimate thing could not depend essentially on anything else (which is a kind of limitation). The result was thought thinking itself.
Whatever irked Aristotle about Plato’s forms, it was the abstractness and mysteriousness that he most directly rejected by turning instead to the immediacy of the facts of experience and the essences of material things. But Aristotle’s notion of individuating essences, as helpful as it is, faces a few problems. One is that, for all that effort, essences are not individual things, but abstractions. What I mean is this. Aristotle said that man is essentially a rational animal. He is an animal like so many others but distinguished by the natural endowment of rationality. His essence is rational animal. But show me rational animal. Where is rational animal? What does it look like? How tall is it? Does it have a name, or any special abilities? What does it eat and what does it like to do? These questions can be answered of individual men, but not of the essence of man, because that essence is not a man but an abstraction. Rational animal is, clearly, not a particular thing, but an abstract predicate, different, at the end of the day, only by a slight measure of detail, from a Platonic form.[47]
Another problem is that Aristotle’s essentialism is, like Plato’s doctrine of forms, imaginary. Aristotle has, in effect, proposed a concept that he hopes will provide for the predicatory intercourse between universal and particular, between abstract predicates and the hard factuality of experience. So Aristotle speaks of essences, and such talk has proved tremendously influential, but it is neither more reliable as a theory of predication nor more verifiable than Plato’s theory of forms. Aristotle’s principle departure from his teacher’s work was that he decided to bet on the immediacy of experience where Plato had been less confident in it and had favored the constructs of abstract reason. Aristotle dragged Plato’s forms down from heaven, and imagined them tethered to the factuality of experience. In fact, Aristotle’s essences are no less abstract than Plato’s.[48]
Van Til’s claim that Plato and Aristotle taken together demonstrate the one and many dualism at the presuppositional level in non-Christian thought explains his references to a Platonic-Aristotelian methodology, phraseology no doubt unnerving to readers of philosophy who understand the differences between these two pillars of Western thought to be so basic as to make any association too superficial to be of much use.[49] That frustration takes Van Til’s point to be the problem, but it is not; the dualism itself is the problem, which is actually Van Til’s point. Both thinkers, in their respective attempts to account for predication, chose to prioritize either the universal (the one, or oneness, Plato) or the particular (the many, Aristotle), and both accomplished a great deal—they composed formidable and influential philosophical systems—but neither solved the basic problem of predication. And who could think of two people more qualified to grapple with an ageless philosophical conundrum? Seeing these two giants lying vanquished at the feet of the problem of the one and the many makes the problem itself appear that much more daunting.
In Van Til’s writings we also find frequent mentions of the one and many problem from a diachronic point of view. The difficulty of relating distinct particulars by means of stable and universal predicates may be construed diachronically by thinking instead of the difficulty of the stability of meaning through time and change. Van Til refers to a polarity similar to the Platonic-Aristotelian one embodied in the thought of Heraclitus and Parmenides.[50] Imagine Plato and Aristotle looking together at a forest. Plato argues that the constitutive reality is the forest, in the sense that the forest best approximates unparticularized and pristine treeness, in reference to which each tree is recognizable as a tree. Aristotle argues that the forest is the thing to focus on only as far as it represents the relatively few features shared by all individual trees contained within it. The forest is not anything but the association of innumerable trees. Notice that the picture they are debating is static.
Re-orienting their discussion in terms of temporal and eternal or in terms of being (isness, a static notion) and becoming (change from one thing to another over time), is what Van Til’s reference to Heraclitus and Parmenides captures.[51] These two Greeks argue over how it is that the seed, the bud, the young tree fresh with bright green leaves, and the tall, foreboding oak, are all a single thing. Parmenides refuses to recognize a difference: there appears to be change, but in the end, change dissolves into a singularity of unified being, a great, still isness. Heraclitus will not be outdone. He says that there really is no tree, since nothing ever is at all, certainly not in the way Parmenides means it; there is only constant becoming.
Heraclitus did believe that we could speak of a unifying principle of all things, the logos. But this unifying logos, he argued, was itself constant change. Panta Rei, he declared: everything flows, changes, and becomes, without end. “One can never step into the same river twice,” he reportedly said. In other words, the particulars are the only real things; since there is no unity behind or above the particulars of experience, we cannot hope to unify them through broader and broader associations, or by reference to static universals. Heraclitus’s position forces us to take experience with utter seriousness but the intelligibility of experience with a large grain of salt: whatever we think we know we cannot really know, since neither we, the knowers, nor the things we know, are ultimately anything at all but crests and troughs in the flux of unending change. Before you can say, “that is a chocolate chip coo . . .” it has become something else, and so have you.
When Heraclitus predicates an irreducible flux to all things, he demonstrates Van Til’s illustration of the man made of water trying to climb out of water on a ladder made of water.[52] There is a patent absurdity to a categorical declaration such as Heraclitus’s panta rei which entails the impossibility of categorical predication. In other words, Heraclitus made a claim, that all is change, that undermines the intelligibility of predication itself. To say that x is y is only to point to a glimmer of light, a fleeting reflection, on the troubled and turbid waters of becoming. Before you have finished uttering the words, x is no longer what it was, y has disappeared, and the association you had hoped to make is unintelligible noise.[53] But if this is truly the picture Heraclitus had in mind, what of his declaration all things that exist (x) are things that change (y)? It too must be meaningless.[54]
Parmenides is said to have declared that “all is one,” and to have argued that we may say of all things only that they are. By predicating this stable unity of all things, Parmenides hoped to anchor the intelligibility of predication and thought in the bedrock universality of being, beyond our own cognitive-experiential naiveté and the confusing array of particularity.
Parmenides taught that the defender of the reality of change faced a dilemma. Suppose something comes to be, he said: something changes from A to B, or B appears when and where it previously was not. B must have come (1) from being (from A or something else) or (2) from non-being. Since from nothing nothing comes, it cannot be the latter. But if it is the former (from A or something else), if it came to be from being, it already was, and so did not genuinely come to be. In other words, it is impossible for anything to come to be, simpliciter, so everything that has been or ever will be simply is.[55] Parmenides’ dilemma has the feel of Cartesian reductionism. It is, in effect, a line of questioning roughly like this: what is the one thing that always is, that cannot be doubted, and which must, in all other things, be assumed? The answer is being, just being.
His effort too ends in confusion: despite the unity of being providing that anchor for thought and predication, no predicate more specific or more particular than being is really true.[56] For Parmenides, reality is stable enough to know something about it, but the only thing knowable is that it is stable. As Oliphint says, “Though we seem to have lost Heraclitus’s flowing river in Parmenides’ static ocean, we seem also to have lost Heraclitus, and Parmenides, and the differences that forced the theories in the first place.”[57]
The failure of non-Christian thought to account for the universality and particularity essential to predication and knowledge is an important part of Van Til’s apologetic outlook. “To all this we must humbly but confidently reply,” he says, “by saying that we have the best of philosophical justification for our position. . . . We as Christians alone have a position that is philosophically defensible.”[58]
Another important part of Van Til’s apologetic outlook, the constructive counterpart to this dismal take on the inability of philosophy to make sense of the world, is Van Til’s explanation of Christian, triune-theistic, philosophies of fact and predication. His view goes something like this: Predication, and even knowledge, is basically one and many because the object of knowledge is basically one and many. Facts are essentially one and many because creation itself is intrinsically, essentially, diachronically and synchronically one and many. And this is so because God the creator is essentially and from all eternity personal, a se, and triune—one and many. Let us see how he gets there.
2. Van Til’s Philosophy Of Fact
Van Til’s philosophy of fact depends basically on two theological doctrines: the doctrine of God, specifically trinitarian theology, and the doctrine of creation. In order to understand Van Til’s philosophy of fact and his theory of predication, and his basic apologetic outlook, we must begin with theology. That fact is worth noting in its own right. Many of Van Til’s appreciative readers no less than many of his critics miss the fact that for Van Til it is both true that one’s theology or philosophy of the ultimate nature of things implies necessarily certain things about one’s view of factuality and of human thought and predication, and likewise that one’s views of factuality and of human thought and predication imply certain things about ultimate reality. It was not for nothing that Van Til was a presuppositionalist: he believed that truth claims stood or fell in terms of the consistency between ultimate commitments and immediate claims.[59] There can be no more ultimate commitment than one’s theology proper; so we begin with the doctrine of God.
3. The Doctrine Of God
Van Til wrote continuously, it seems, of divine aseity, personality, and triunity, and a distinctive feature of Van Til’s writing on theology proper is that he understood these three central doctrines as interdependent. He believed that aseity should be understood as triune-personal, divine personality as triune and a se, and triunity as personal and absolute, completely self-defined, and self-existent.
The aseity of God may be defined, and it may be illustrated. Affirming divine aseity is to say that God is a se, of or toward himself; his existence is self-reflexive. In terms of how God exists, we may say that God is self-defined: there are no predicates outside of God that he must refer to in order to be who he is or to know himself. God is intelligible to himself without association to anything but himself. He is of, to, for, and from himself. So also in terms of what God is, God’s being is necessary.[60] To affirm the necessity of God’s being is simply to affirm his absolute independence, and thus to affirm that the nonexistence of God is impossible. God depends on nothing outside of himself for his existence. Along these lines, Reformed theology has traditionally affirmed that God eternally wills himself and eternally knows himself, such that God himself is the only eternal, necessary object of his will and the only eternal, necessary object of his knowledge.[61]
We may illustrate divine aseity by remembering that before God created the world, there was only God. We need to step lightly here in terms of what we predicate of eternity prior to and apart from creation. The best thing to say is that there was only God. To say that there was “nothing” in the place of creation is not as precise as it should be, since, as Van Til affirmed, there were neither things nor non-things against which God existed, defined himself, or knew himself: “The eternal one and many form a self-complete unity. God is absolute personality and therefore absolute individuality. He exists necessarily. He has no nonbeing over against himself in comparison with which he defines himself; he is internally self-defined.”[62]
So, for example, when we say that God is eternal, we do not mean that God is outside of time nor that he is within time but immune to it (that he does not change). That would be to define God relative to time and in terms of something external to himself, even if by contrast. Precisely the contrary is meant by affirming eternity: God is not defined by nor relative to time. We would say the same thing about moral goodness. God’s goodness is essential to his own being; his being is his goodness and his goodness his being. God’s goodness is not defined or understood or confirmed with reference to either an abstract or a created moral property or any notion of justice outside of himself. And so on for all the essential attributes of God. For Van Til, this is simply a consistent affirmation of aseity. Apart from and prior to creation all that is is the positive self-existence of God. Before the creation, there was only God.[63]
Closely connected with divine aseity is the doctrine of simplicity, which denies any composition in God: God is not composed of parts.[64] God is his knowledge, and God is his will, and so on. So while God’s will and his knowledge are distinguishable, they are not essentially distinct nor in any sense separate from the nature of God. Simplicity precludes our thinking that God comes to know himself over the course of time or learns discursively about his own thoughts or will. God knows in the same mode that he wills and that he exists: in eternal self-completeness.[65]
Since the Council of Nicaea in a.d. 325, the church has affirmed that God is one substance and three persons. Divine personality has largely been articulated in terms of the incommunicable attributes of the three persons (the unbegotteness of the Father, the eternal begottenness of the Son, and the procession of the Spirit from the Father and the Son), emphasizing the threeness of divine personality. Needless to say, Van Til affirms orthodox trinitarianism, but in addition to affirming tri-personality, he affirms that God is one person: “We do assert that God, that is, the whole Godhead, is one person.”[66] This is simply to say that God is absolute personality,[67] and that there is no sense in which God is impersonal. The triune personality is a se and simple: “If God is being considered apart from his relation to the world, being and consciousness are coterminous.”[68]
Van Til put triunity in the following way: “God’s being presents an absolute numerical identity.”[69] Which is to say, God is equally one and three. The equal ultimacy of one and three in God affords a rich triune and personal doctrine of divine simplicity, an uncompromised simplicity in which there are difference, subject-object relations, intelligibility, and the free will of God.[70] And, in fact, it is the equal ultimacy of the three and the one that grounds self-definition (aseity): “We have in the case of God absolute numerical identity and, therefore, internal qualitative sufficiency.”[71]
4. The Doctrine Of Creation
When Van Til says, “The idea of creation is implied in the idea of the self-sufficient God,”[72] he demonstrates two things noted above: he understands ultimate commitments and immediate claims as organically and necessarily related, and he labors to draw out the close mutual relations between basic theological doctrines. There are at least four significant implications of this connection that Van Til affirms between the nature of God and the doctrine of creation.
First, if God is a se and simple, the creation must in every sense have come from nothing. “For God nonbeing is nothing in itself. . . . Since nonbeing is nothing in itself for God, God had to create, if he wished to create at all, ‘out of nothing.’”[73] Van Til would deny that God created the actual world from pre-existent possibility.
Second, God stands in a unique epistemic position relative to creation. Van Til says, “When God existed alone, there was no time universe, and there were no new facts arising. The only knowledge activity that existed was completed in the circuit of the mutually exhaustive personalities of the triune God.”[74] More succinctly, “Christianity says that there once was no a posteriori aspect to knowledge at all,” and “There never were any facts existing independent of God that he had to investigate.”[75] If God knows himself exhaustively, and God is a se, there is nothing that God does not know exhaustively. All facts that are not facts about God are therefore created facts—essentially contingent facts, but sovereignly willed and designed.
Third, the utter “knownness” of all things by God is what Van Til refers to when he says that there are no brute facts. But Van Til’s rejection of brute facts entails something more subtle than God’s knowledge of all things; it implies that the true and original meaning of all facts cannot be different from God’s understanding of each and every fact. This is also is a basically trinitarian insight: as fact (being) and meaning (interpretation, knowledge) are coterminous in God, so are fact and meaning coterminous in creation; since the creator God is self-defined, there cannot be a single fact which is not God-defined.[76]
Fourth, we must remember that divine self-sufficiency is triune self-sufficiency. It then follows that the divine act of creation is also triune, that God’s knowing, determining, and bringing into existence all things but himself is a triune activity, equally ultimate in its unity and plurality. “In God’s being,” Van Til says, “there are no particulars not related to the universal, and there is nothing universal that is not fully expressed in the particulars.”[77] It is necessary, therefore, that we affirm the equal ultimacy of unity and plurality in the created order, as long as we affirm the doctrine of creation and the self-sufficiency of the triune God. “It goes without saying that if we hold to the eternal one and many in the manner explained above, we must hold to the temporal one and many to be created by God.”[78]
Notice the dramatic shift from the Thomistic notion that the unity of God is discoverable by natural reason but the triunity of God is knowable only by revelation. For Van Til, God-created things are necessarily equally one and many, and therefore we may understand the unity and plurality of the created order as revelatory of the triunity of God. Van Til writes, “All aspects being equally created, no one aspect of reality may be regarded as more ultimate than another. Thus the created one and many may in this respect be said to be equal to one another; they are equally derived and equally dependent upon God who sustains them both.”[79] And elsewhere he writes,
If God is being considered apart from his relation to the world, being and consciousness are coterminous. And because this is so, the facts of the world are created facts, facts brought into existence as the result of a fully self-conscious act on the part of God. So then, though we cannot tell why the Godhead should exist tri-personally, we can understand something of the fact, after we are told that God exists as a triune being, that the unity and the plurality of this world has back of it a God in whom unity and the plurality are ultimate.[80]
In Gen 8:22, God promises, “While the earth remains, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night, shall not cease.” This declaration is a singular, unified, sovereign, and objective ordination of contingent and subjectively unforeseeable change, and it is, therefore, a promise only the triune, personal God could make.[81] The synchronic unity and plurality essential to predicating the color green of a leaf on a tree is triune-theistic, and so is the diachronic unity and plurality essential to predicating green, then yellow, then a crispy, fall brown of the very same leaf. So just as the moral law expresses the glory and the righteousness of God, the wonders of creation express, pour forth, we could say, clear and distinct speech about the nature of the creator.[82]
5. Factuality And Evidence
Factuality is a metaphysical notion. Factuality is the fact of factness, if I may put it that way, the state of affairs such that there are predicable things, that predication happens. And factuality is a fact. Predication happens.
In contrast to the philosophers, Van Til has not attempted to answer the problem of the one and the many or, we should say, to rationalize the dichotomy between unity and plurality.[83] But he has attempted to account for both the mystery and the reality of one-and-many factuality and of knowledge and predication. He has attempted to account, he says, for this apparent contradiction.[84] He does so by articulating the inter-connectedness of the doctrines of divine aseity, personality, and triunity, and by concluding that, based on these doctrines, the created order should be understood as a “replica” of the creator God in whom unity and plurality are equally ultimate.[85] A se, personal triunity makes God both intelligible to us as God and ultimately mysterious from the creature’s point of view; and the equal ultimacy of unity and plurality in God’s creation is both the necessary condition for intelligibility and predication and the enigmas of factuality and history.
On the basis of the demonstrable failure of philosophical attempts to account for predication, and in light of this Christian theistic account, Van Til affirms that the a se, triune, personal God is the necessary condition for the intelligibility of the world, for thought and for predication. Thus presuppositionalism.[86] He writes, “Any fact and every fact proves the existence of God. . . . If this is not the case, no fact ever will. Every fact proves the existence of God because without the presupposition of God and his counsel no fact has any distinguishable character at all.”[87]
And what does Van Til say about evidence? When we say “evidence” we do not always mean a fingerprint or a phone record. A person can give evidence by testifying to what she has witnessed. She would then speak, explain, even conjecture, thus providing evidence. Propositional evidence is just that, evidence in the form of statements or propositions, true or false claims, about states of affairs. So a fact or a proposition may function as evidence in a particular context, namely, within the context of an argument.
An argument is a claim plus supporting reasons. The central claim of an argument is its conclusion, and the supporting reasons are sometimes called premises. Essentially, premises are propositional evidence given for the conclusion. And for an argument to be successful, or sound, the premises must be true, and the inference (logical relation) between the premises and the conclusion must be valid. Distinct from the question of truth, then, the logical relation that obtains between the premises and the conclusion can tell us strictly in formal terms whether the premises support the conclusion. And that is the distinction between facts and evidence: a fact is a proposition, but evidence is a proposition which is thought to stand in some logical relation to another proposition. Specifically, when a fact serves as evidence for another fact or claim, it is implied that the one fact helps to establish the other as true, or provide grounds for believing the other, or from the one, plus whatever else is needed, we may infer the other.
Given Van Til’s triune-theistic philosophy of fact, we may say that there is a sense in which all facts imply each other. In the same way that Van Til emphasizes absolute numerical identity, he also affirms that created factuality replicates the equal ultimacy of the unity and plurality of facts. He therefore emphasizes the singularity and unified nature of created factuality as dependent upon, derived from, and reflective of the nature of the triune creator. The simple relationship of logical entailment pretends to squeeze the triune richness of factuality into a narrow, linear relationship that rejects, at least implicitly, the idea of a systematic unity to all facts.[88]
The triune completeness of created factuality sets the parameters for apologetic and even Christian-scientific methodology, in Van Til’s view. Speaking specifically of the presuppositional approach to apologetics as related to the nature of factuality, Van Til says, “There is one system of reality of which all that exists forms a part. And any individual fact of this system is what it is in this system. It is therefore a contradiction in terms to speak of presenting certain facts to men unless one presents them as parts of this system.”[89] Ultimately, the systematic inter-relatedness of facts and the createdness (ex nihilo) of factuality lead to Van Til’s rejection of brute factuality and his insistence on presuppositional self-consciousness.
Furthermore, man as knower finds himself in an epistemic environment not only revelatory of God but originally known by God its creator. There are no facts which are encountered and then known by God. Rather, God wills all facts into knowability according to their original knownness in his own mind. Van Til will say that God “interprets” his own thoughts in the act of creation, the point being that God does not have the first or most extensive or most exhaustive knowledge of created facts; God has original knowledge of all things.
Therefore man’s basic epistemic duty is reinterpretive of God’s own thoughts and submissive to revelation. Van Til says,
For the Christian system, knowledge consists in understanding the relation of any fact to God as revealed in Scripture. I know a fact truly to the extent that I understand the exact relation such a fact sustains to the plan of God. It is the plan of God that gives any fact meaning in terms of the plan of God. The whole meaning of any fact is exhausted by its position in and relation to the plan of God. This implies that every fact is related to every other fact. God’s plan is a unit. And it is this unity of the plan of God, founded as it is in the very being of God, that gives the unity that we look for between all the finite facts.[90]
We now have before us an overview of Van Til’s philosophies of fact and evidence. What of Van Til’s rejection of brute fact? As the Greeks recognized, facts are not just brute, abstract things. Facts exist as part of a system. Van Til’s basic claim is that the system that accounts for factuality and therefore gives all facts meaning is the Christian system, grounded ultimately in the triune being of the personal creator God and revealed in Scripture. For Van Til, the ultimate explanatory system is God’s system: the particulars of history have meaning within the unity of God’s providence and decree. And the ultimate explanatory “thing,” in that case, is God himself. There are no brute facts, and “only Christian facts are possible.”[91]
III. Van Til On Lockean Evidentialism And Two Contrary Commitments
Adjacent analyses of Locke’s and Van Til’s philosophies of fact and evidence bring into sharp relief the many differences between them. Van Til believed that these differences can be traced to two ultimate, irreconcilable commitments: one to subjective, creaturely, rational autonomy, in the case of Lockean evidentialism, and the other to the nature of the a se, triune, personal, creator God, in the case of a consistently Christian approach to fact and evidence.
Based on what we have seen, Locke would likely endorse Van Til’s summation of the empiricist approach to factuality: “The scientist, if his description of even a small area, or of an aspect or a dimension, of Reality is to stand, must assume that Reality as a whole is non-structural in nature until it is structured by the scientist.”[92] When Van Til says that he “must,” he means he “must” in order to remain consistent with his commitment to rational autonomy. And this is precisely Locke’s procedure: he claims metaphysical agnosticism and affords realism only the very tenuous rank of best available explanation. In other words, he disallows pronouncement on the structure of reality, hoping to suspend positive metaphysics in the realm of the hypothetical and unwarranted. Locke is concerned that groundless metaphysical assumptions corrupt a right use of reason. He views metaphysical claims as presumptuous and beyond the jurisdiction of a prudent, measured, and minimally accountable inspectionist epistemology. What is most certain, in his view, is whatever steps onto the even playing field of passive perceptual receptivity. So on Locke’s model, Van Til claimed, “A ‘fact’ does not become a fact . . . till it has been made a fact by the ultimate defining, world-constituting power of the mind of man.”[93] Van Til appears to have Locke just right: “Reality as a whole is non-structural in nature until it is structured by the scientist.” This is “the idea of brute, that is utterly uninterpreted, ‘fact,’” and it is, certainly for Locke, “the presupposition to the finding of any fact of scientific standing.”[94]
Clearly, a method like Locke’s “wants to be anti-metaphysical. It claims to make no pronouncements about the nature of reality as a whole.”[95] As I noted in section 1, however, Locke’s metaphysical agnosticism proves difficult to maintain. Indeed, Van Til finds it insincere: Although a Lockean metaphysical prudence “seems to be very modest,” Van Til says, “in fact, however, [it] does make a pronouncement about the nature of Reality as a whole.”[96]
That pronouncement is twofold. It says, first, that reality itself is without structure, meaning, or interpretation—unknown and unknowable—until it is given intelligible shape by the mind of man, and second, that only that which takes shape in the mind of man may have any shape at all, and the rest remains void and formless. Van Til puts the dual proclamation this way, drawing an analogy between a Lockean philosophy of fact and the occupation of Simon, called Peter, and his brother Andrew:
Some of those “objective” fishes must permit of being graduated into fishes that have scientific standing. Some of them at least must be catchable. So the “facts,” that is the “objective” facts, if they are to become facts that have scientific standing, must be patternable. But to be patternable for the modern scientist these “facts” must be absolutely formless. That is to say they must be utterly pliable. They must be like the water that is to be transformed into ice-cubes by the modern refrigerator.[97]
“The scientist,” Van Til says, “even when he claims to be merely describing facts, assumes that at least some aspects of Reality are non-structural in nature. His assumption is broader than that. He really assumes that all Reality is non-structural in nature.”[98] The subjective, creaturely mind, acting alone, constitutes facts as knowable things, creating, in effect, truth itself. And only that which is thus constituted by the activity of the creaturely mind may be said to have any intelligible constitution at all. Van Til says, “The only fish that exist for him are those he has caught in his net. He makes bold to say ‘What my net can’t catch isn’t fish.’ That is to say, description is patternization. It is an act of definition. It is a statement of the what as well as of the that. . . . Description itself is explanation.”[99]
The purportedly passive receptivity of the mind in Locke’s system proves to be the molder of reality and truth, the keeper and creator of meaning. In sum, the modern evidentialist, “pretending to be merely a describer of facts, is in reality a maker of facts. He makes facts as he describes. His description is itself the manufacturing of facts. He requires ‘material’ to make facts, but the material he requires must be raw material. . . . The datum is not primarily given, but is primarily taken.”[100] And to this Van Til responds, “What the modern scientist ascribes to the mind of man Christianity ascribes to the mind of God.”[101]
Finally, what about the transcendental method? The transcendental method seeks to affirm what, bound by the doctrines of God and creation, the Christian must confess about the world: that “only Christian facts are possible.”[102] Arguing for the transcendental claim that only on the basis of the triune theism taught in Scripture are facts, predication, and reason possible, Van Til calls arguing the “impossibility of the contrary.”[103] We might say that Van Til’s entire apologetic outlook is transcendental; he holds that the necessary pre-condition for knowledge is the triune God: “We say that if there is to be any true knowledge at all, there must be in God an absolute system of knowledge.”[104] But since one cannot reason to the pre-condition for the possibility of reason, such a transcendental claim must be defended indirectly, by arguing that each and every other attempt to account for the possibilities of fact and prediction fails.[105] So Van Til claims, “If the Christian theory of creation by God is not true, then we hold that there cannot be objective knowledge of anything.”[106] And how must we approach making an argument to the impossibility of the contrary? “One must place one’s self upon the foundation of those who speak of uninterpreted facts, for argument’s sake, in order to show the impossibility of the existence of any uninterpreted (brute) fact.”[107] This, in brief, is Van Til’s apologetic method.
IV. Conclusion
I do not believe that Van Til intended to endorse a particular structure of argumentation in the abstract, the transcendental argument, per se, in a formal sense. Instead, the Christian philosophies of fact and evidence that he has attempted to clarify are already, in effect, a transcendental argument. In other words, Christianity itself just is a transcendental argument in the sense that a consistent Christian confession implies the impossibility of epistemological or rational neutrality. Van Til believed that making that point by expounding biblical-theological doctrines of God and creation as the preconditions for predication and reason forces the non-Christian’s hand; he is forced to account for the condition of the possibility of his objection to Christian theism, and, unless he accepts the self-revelation of God in Scripture, Van Til contends, he will not be able to do so. In this sense the cross itself stands between the sinner and true knowledge of any single fact, and the goal of the transcendental argument is to force this point of reckoning.
Given the basically trinitarian constitution of created factuality, Van Til denies any but an apparent evidential common ground with non-Christian thought, and he rejects brute fact without qualification. Van Til’s apologetic foundation, his philosophies of fact and evidence, holds steadfast to the basic contention that unbelief and the rejection of God take place and by all necessity must take place within the world that the triune, personal God created and governs; it seeks to remain faithful to its confession and to treat unbelief consistently as unbelief, as suppression of the truth. I believe we may say simply that in his philosophies of fact and evidence, Van Til has attempted only to express the claim that Christianity is true—and if it is, all facts proclaim the triune, personal creator. Van Til claims, in sum,
Every fact and every law in the created universe is brought into existence by God’s creation. Every fact and every law in the created universe continues to exist by virtue of the providence of God. Every fact and every law in the created universe accomplishes what it does accomplish by virtue of the plan or purpose of God. God foreordains whatsoever comes to pass, though his Son Jesus Christ.[108]
Notes
- For Van Til on the role of facts and evidence in Christian apologetics, see his Christian-Theistic Evidences (vol. 6 of In Defense of the Faith; Phillipsburg, N.J.: Presbyterian & Reformed, 1978). There are also relevant passages in Van Til’s core texts: A Survey of Christian Epistemology (vol. 2 of In Defense of the Faith; n.p.: den Dulk Christian Foundation, 1969); Common Grace and the Gospel (Nutley, N.J.: Presbyterian & Reformed, 1977); Christian Apologetics (ed. William Edgar; 2d ed.; Phillipsburg, N.J.: Presbyterian & Reformed, 2003), 127-28, 148-59, 163-66, 190-91; An Introduction to Systematic Theology: Prolegomena and the Doctrines of Revelation, Scripture, and God (ed. William Edgar; 2d ed.; Phillipsburg, N.J.: Presbyterian & Reformed, 2007), 86-89, 242; The Defense of the Faith (ed. K. Scott Oliphint; 4th ed.; Phillipsburg, N.J.: Presbyterian & Reformed, 2008), 18-19 (esp. 18 n. 78), 140-41 (esp. 140 n. 38), 304-5, 323-26. A helpful study of Van Til’s method is K. Scott Oliphint, “The Consistency of Van Til’s Methodology” (Scarsdale, N.Y.: Westminster Discount Book Service, 1990), also published in WTJ 52 (1990): 27-49. See also Clark H. Pinnock, “The Philosophy of Christian Evidences,” and Van Til’s response, in Jerusalem and Athens: Critical Discussions on the Philosophy and Apologetics of Cornelius Van Til (ed. E. R. Geehan; Phillipsburg, N.J.: Presbyterian & Reformed, 1971); and Thom Notaro, Van Til and the Use of Evidence (Phillipsburg, N.J.: Presbyterian & Reformed, 1980). Notaro’s text is a helpful introduction. He provides a survey of the theoretical history of Van Til’s view of evidences, relying as it does in many ways on Abraham Kuyper, and presents Van Til’s thought in debate with his critics. Gary Habermas’s interaction with John Frame (“An Evidentialist’s Response,” in Five Views on Apologetics [ed. Steven B. Cowan and Stanley N. Gundry; Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2000], 236-48) rehearses many of the standard objections to the presuppositional position on evidence.
- Actually Habermas believes presuppositionalism is largely a theological position and not much of an apologetic at all: “Presuppositionalism is only an incomplete apologetic system. . . . So this position is better described, not as a distinct apologetic method, but as a theological outlook on apologetics” (“An Evidentialist’s Response,” 241). Van Til indeed affirmed a basic connection between theology and apologetics: “But if apologetics is to do its work properly, it is important that systematics work out fully its own methodology” (Introduction to Systematic Theology, 26).
- The use of evidence, yes; evidentialism, no. Regarding the traditional theistic proofs, for example, Van Til wrote, “Calvin argues throughout his first book that men ought to believe in God, because there is, and has been from the beginning of time, an abundance of evidence of His existence and of His character. There is objective evidence in abundance and it is sufficiently clear. Men ought, if only they reasoned rightly, to come to the conclusion that God exists. That is to say, if the theistic proof is constructed as it ought to be constructed, it is objectively valid, whatever the attitude of those to whom it comes may be. To be constructed rightly, theistic proof ought to presuppose the ontological trinity and contend that, unless we may make this presupposition, all human predication is meaningless. The words ‘cause,’ ‘purpose,’ and ‘being,’ used as universals in the phenomenal world, could not be so used with meaning unless we may presuppose the self-contained God” (Common Grace, 49). See also Van Til, Defense of the Faith, 197-98, and Oliphint’s explanatory note, 197 n. 47. Later in the same work Van Til says, “Accordingly I do not reject ‘the theistic proofs’ but merely insist on formulating them in such a way as not to compromise the doctrines of Scripture” (255). See also Greg L. Bahnsen, Van Til’s Apologetic: Readings and Analysis (Phillipsburg, N.J.: Presbyterian & Reformed, 1998), 613-22. Bahnsen writes, “Since presuppositional apologetics opposes the traditional method, does it repudiate theistic proofs and appeal to empirical evidence? An affirmative answer is often given by the opponents of presuppositionalism, yet that is a serious misrepresentation. Would it not be extremely odd for a defender of the faith to be antagonistic to proof and evidence? One should suppose from the outset that an apologist’s misgivings would not be about proofs or evidence per se, but rather about the kind of proof and evidence employed and the manner in which it is used” (613).
- In recent years, James Anderson, David Reiter, and other scholars have shown interest specifically in TAG, the transcendental argument for the existence of God. This philosophically rigorous discussion overlooks the fact that in the context of Van Til’s apologetic, the transcendental argument amounts to the claim that Christianity is true, and everything contrary to it false. There is no indication in Van Til’s writing that he had any interest in formal transcendental argumentation apart from positive Reformed, Christian presuppositions. I think Lane Tipton is correct when he says, “Van Til never viewed his transcendental method as operating outside of a trinitarian theology and a corresponding ‘revelational epistemology.’ To construe Van Til’s approach as attempting to establish his theology on the basis of philosophical argumentation is simply to misunderstand his approach at a very basic level. This would be to grant a priority to philosophy that Van Til’s system in principle prohibits” (Lane G. Tipton, “The Triune Personal God: Trinitarian Theology in the Thought of Cornelius Van Til” [Ph.D. diss., Westminster Theological Seminary, 2004], 170). Don Collett strikes a nice balance in “Van Til and the Transcendental Argument,” in Revelation and Reason: New Essays in Reformed Apologetics (ed. K. Scott Oliphint and Lane G. Tipton; Phillipsburg, N.J.: Presbyterian & Reformed, 2007), 258-78.
- And so Locke’s epistemology serves as a perfect test case for Van Til’s critique of evidentialism. Another motivation for working with Locke is the fact that Lockean evidentialism has been very influential for modern epistemology and rationality, particularly in terms of what has been called the evidentialist challenge to theistic belief. Wolterstorff describes “Lockean evidentialism” as “the form of evidentialism concerning theistic beliefs that has been most commonly espoused and discussed in the modern Western world. . . . It was John Locke who first propounded the thesis with clarity and force” (Nicholas Wolterstorff, “Once Again, Evidentialism—This Time Social,” in Practices of Belief [ed. Terence Cuneo; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010], 267). Wolterstorff also writes, “Locke was the first to develop with profundity and defend the thesis that we are all responsible for our believings, and that to do one’s duty with respect to one’s believings one must, at appropriate junctures and in appropriate ways, listen to the voice of Reason. Reason must be one’s guide. . . . Locke was the great genius behind our modern ways of thinking of rationality and responsibility in beliefs. And Locke’s vision became classic: for many, compelling; by some, contested; by no one, ignored. Locke, on this issue, is the father of modernity” (Nicholas Wolterstorff, John Locke and the Ethics of Belief [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996], xiv).
- Wolterstorff describes this interest succinctly in the introduction to John Locke and the Ethics of Belief. See also his essay, “Can Belief in God Be Rational if It Has No Foundations?,” in Faith and Rationality: Reason and Belief in God (ed. Alvin Plantinga and Nicholas Wolterstorff; Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1983), reprinted in Practices of Belief, 217-64.
- John Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 2.1.2. When quoting from the Essay I have modernized spelling and capitalization and omitted Locke’s italicization where it is not germane to the present purposes. I use the Oxford University edition, edited by Peter H. Nidditch. At this point it is important to mention that the perception of the agreement or disagreement of ideas, Locke’s rubric for knowledge, is perception of a de re relationship; it is not propositional knowledge, although Locke does at times neglect the distinction. Wolterstorff notes that, in Locke’s system, “we must, says Locke, distinguish between two sorts of propositions, mental and verbal,” or between de re and de dicto relations between ideas (John Locke, 18).
- Locke, Essay, 2.1.2.
- Ibid., 2.1.2, 3, 4.
- Ibid., 4.1.1-2.
- Wolterstorff, John Locke, 14. “One has insight,” Wolterstorff writes, “only into the existence of one’s mind, into one’s having of ideas and one’s performing of mental acts, and into the interrelationships of these” (Nicholas Wolterstorff, “Locke’s Philosophy of Religion,” in The Cambridge Companion to Locke [ed. Vere Chapell; Cambridge Companions to Philosophy; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994], 176). Notice that there is a distinction here between sensations and the ideas of which those sensations are productive (though one cannot help “seeing,” one may choose more deliberately to survey), and between mental actions and the ideas produced by deliberate reflection on those mental actions. Locke makes the distinction clearer when he says that ideas of reflection are the products of the mature reflection of capable adults than he does when he says concerning sensation that “having ideas, and perception . . . [are] . . . the same thing” (Essay, 2.1.7-8, 9). Michael Ayers writes, “Locke’s ideas, when not occurring in actual sensation (or ‘reflection’), are sensory images or quasi-sensations. They are mental images in that to have an (occurrent) idea is evidently for Locke to be in a state of consciousness: an idea must be ‘taken notice of’ in order to exist” (Michael Ayers, Locke: Epistemology and Ontology [Arguments of the Philosophers; New York: Routledge, 1991], 51).
- Wolterstorff, John Locke, 15. It bears noting that when Wolterstorff uses the language of representationalism, he means to refer to ideas or images of both sensation and reflection. He follows Locke’s close association of the products of these two experiential sources of ideas. Despite the questions which such a formulation invites, Locke describes reflection as “perception of the operations of our own minds within us,” noting that “though it be not sense, as having nothing to do with external objects; yet it is very like it, and might properly enough be called internal sense” (Essay, 2.1.4).
- Wolterstorff, John Locke, 15.
- Ayers writes, “To ignore for the present the special case of ‘reflection,’ they [i.e., ideas] are caused in us by external things acting on our sensory mechanisms. For that very reason simple ideas must be taken to correspond to their objects in regular and orderly ways, even if we are ignorant of the nature of those objects and of how they act on us. A simple idea is therefore . . . a natural sign of its cause. As such it is a ‘sign’ in another sense too, since it is naturally fitted to represent or ‘signify’ in thought that feature of real things, whatever it may be, which is in general responsible for our receiving ideas or sensations of that type” (Locke, 38).
- Again, Ayers: “The simple appearance is taken by the mind as the sign of its unknown cause, but the mind has no choice in the matter since that is what a natural sign signifies. Speculations as to the intrinsic nature of its cause, whether true or false, are irrelevant to the signification of the idea or to its truth” (ibid., 40). John Yolton finds even this cautious hypothesis untenable: “Locke’s idea of substance as an addition to the sensible qualities, as the locus of the real essence, is not derivable from simple ideas of sense but is an hypothesis of reason” (John Yolton, John Locke and the Way of Ideas [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1956], 134).
- “Though these particular instances, when well reflected on, are no less self-evident to the understanding than the general maxims brought to confirm them; and it was in those particular instances, that the first discoverer found the truth, without the help of the general maxims: and so may any one else do, who with attention considers them” (Locke, Essay, 4.7.11).
- Wolterstorff, John Locke, 16.
- Nicholas Wolterstorff, “The Migration of Theistic Arguments: From Natural Theology to Evidentialist Apologetics,” in Practices of Belief, 180.
- Locke made this most clear in his second letter to Edward Stillingfleet: “With me to know, and to be certain, is the same thing; what I know, that I am certain of; and what I am certain of, that I know. What reaches to knowledge, I think may be called ‘certainty’; and what comes short of certainty, I think cannot be called knowledge” (The Works of John Locke [10 vols.; London: Printed for Thomas Tegg and others, 1823], 4:145, quoted by Wolterstorff, “The Migration of Theistic Arguments,” 180).
- Wolterstorff, “The Migration of Theistic Arguments,” 180
- Ibid., 181.
- Ibid.
- Wolterstorff, John Locke, 67.
- Ibid., 73.
- Ibid., 79.
- Locke, Essay, 4.15.2.
- Wolterstorff, John Locke, 84.
- Actually these are all sentences which, to put it loosely, give voice to propositions. A single proposition may be expressed using various sentences, say, roughly equivalent sentences in different languages (“it is raining,” “es regnet,” “plouă,” all express the same proposition). Generally speaking, philosophers have not come to any agreement about what propositions actually are.
- Notice that there may be linguistic propositions or purely cognitive (pre-linguistic) propositions. I can say “the cat is on the mat,” but I can also simply think about the cat’s being on the mat. By including the latter, the claim that predication requires subjects and predicates becomes the claim that intelligibility and knowledge require subjects and predicates.
- Van Til explains the problem this way: “The many must be brought into contact with one another. But how do we know that they can be brought into contact with one another? How do we know that the many do not simply exist as unrelated particulars? The answer given is that in such a case we should know nothing of them; they would be abstracted from the body of knowledge that we have; they would be abstract particulars. On the other hand, how is it possible that we should obtain a unity that does not destroy the particulars? We seem to get our unity by generalizing, by abstracting from the particulars in order to include them into larger unities. If we keep up this process of generalization till we exclude all particulars, granted they can all be excluded, have we then not stripped these particulars of their particularity? Have we then obtained anything but an abstract universal?” (Defense of the Faith, 48-49).
- “The philosophers have sought for a unified outlook on human experience. Philosophers have sought for as comprehensive a picture of the nature of reality as a whole as man is able to attain. But the universe is composed of many things. Man’s problem is to find unity in the midst of the plurality of things. He sometimes calls this the one-and-many problem” (Van Til, Defense of the Faith, 47; see also Oliphint’s explanatory note, ibid., n. 7).
- Van Til, Introduction to Systematic Theology, 30.
- Van Til, Psychology of Religion (n.p.: den Dulk Christian Foundation, 1971), 58.
- Ibid., 59.
- More often a distinction is made between metaphysical and epistemological approaches to the problem of the one and the many or the problem of universals. See Oliphint’s explanatory note in Van Til, Defense of the Faith, 47 n. 7. That distinction is, however, more pragmatic than actual. The metaphysical approach can never escape the fact that what it discusses is how things are referred to, which is an epistemological question; the epistemological approach cannot be much concerned for our cognitive access to things without some metaphysical confidence in the things about which we know and have beliefs. I opt for a synchronic and diachronic distinction because I believe it better represents the ways in which Van Til most often discusses the problem.
- Naturally what I say here is vastly simplified. On Plato’s doctrine of forms see Frederick J. Copleston, Greece and Rome: From the Pre-Socratics to Plotinus (vol. 1 of A History of Philosophy; 9 vols.; New York: Image Books, 1993-1994), 163-206.
- “As you know, we customarily hypothesize a single form in connection with each of the many things to which we apply the same name” (Plato, Resp. 596a, in Plato: Complete Works [ed. John M. Cooper; Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997], 1200).
- As Socrates explains to Cebes, “I think that, if there is anything beautiful besides the Beautiful itself, it is beautiful for no other reason than that it shares in the Beautiful, and I say so with everything. . . . If someone tells me that a thing is beautiful because it has a bright color or shape or any such thing, I ignore these other reasons—for all these confuse me—but I simply, naively and perhaps foolishly cling to this, that nothing else makes it beautiful other than the presence of, or the sharing in, or however you may describe its relationship to that Beautiful we mentioned, for I will not insist on the precise nature of the relationship, but that all beautiful things are beautiful by the Beautiful” (Phaedo, 100c-d, in Works, 86). See also Oliphint, Reasons for Faith (Phillipsburg, N.J.: Presbyterian & Reformed, 2006), 39-41.
- Van Til writes, “He [Plato] looks upon this ideal world as one consisting of impersonal principles” (Introduction to Systematic Theology, 172).
- See, for example, Resp. 508c-509a (Works, 1129).
- “Plato saw that somehow the Good had to be supreme if there was to be intelligible predication.” He recognized, Van Til writes, that otherwise “absolute negation and absolute affirmation would cancel one another . . . but he could not get rid of the ‘mud and hair and filth’ in the ideal world” (Cornelius Van Til, Christian Theistic Ethics [vol. 3 of In Defense of the Faith; n.p.: den Dulk Christian Foundation, 1971], 21).
- “When Socrates asked Euthyphro whether ‘the pious or holy is beloved by the gods because it is holy, or holy because it is beloved by the gods,’ he sought to make plain that all law must, in the nature of the case, be above all personality” (Van Til, Common Grace, 6). On the same page Van Til says, “The Good, the True and the Beautiful as abstract principles, hovering above all gods and men—these are the universals of non-Christian thought.”
- Locke, Essay, 4.17.24.
- “There is no true transcendence in Platonism” (Van Til, Introduction to Systematic Theology, 202).
- Aristotle discusses predication most directly in the logical works, especially in the Categories, the Topics, and the Posterior Analytics. See Copleston, Greece and Rome, 277-86. My brief synopsis alludes also to Aristotle’s metaphysics. Copleston is helpful there as well (ibid., 287-319).
- For example, here is Merriam Webster’s definition of “apple”: “the fleshy, usually rounded red, yellow, or green edible pome fruit of a usually cultivated tree (genus Malus) of the rose family” (http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/apple [accessed March 30, 2012]). “Fleshly,” “rounded,” “red, yellow, or green” are broad descriptors which apply to any number of things aside from apples, and which depend for their meaning on those broader applications, but they are not unidentifiable, heavenly forms.
- “While Aristotle may be said to be more empiricist than was Plato, it remains true that he held to essentially the same ideal of knowledge that Plato had. He says specifically and repeatedly that knowledge is of universals and of universals only. That is to say, only such knowledge can be said to be scientific knowledge as enables man to reduce facts to logical relations. Therefore knowledge, properly speaking, is only of species” (Van Til, Introduction to Systematic Theology, 264). See also the explanatory note by Edgar on the same page (n. 11).
- “In a non-Christian scheme of thought abstract universals and particulars stand over against one another in an unreconcilable fashion. Such was the case in Plato’s philosophy. Aristotle sought to remedy the situation by teaching that the universals are present in the particulars. But he failed to get genuine contact between them, inasmuch as for him the lowest universal (infima species) was, after all, a supposed abstraction from particulars. Hence the particulars that were presupposed were bare particulars, having no manner of contact with universality. And if they should, per impossibile, have contact with universality, they would lose their individuality” (Van Til, Common Grace, 81).
- He says, for example, that “Thomas’ notion of man’s participation of man’s knowledge in God’s knowledge has not cut itself free from its monistic origin in Platonic Aristotelian thought” (Van Til, Introduction to Systematic Theology, 97).
- “The interpretations of the natural reason, made by the aid of abstract principles and brute facts can, in the nature of the case, lead with rationalism (Parmenides) into a universal validity that is empty of content, or with empiricism (Heraclitis) to a particularism that has no universality, or to a phenomenalism that is a compromise between these two positions and shares the weaknesses of both” (Van Til, Common Grace, 64). See also Oliphint, Reasons for Faith, 42-45.
- An explanatory note by Oliphint reads, “These notions are aspects of Van Til’s overall critique of unbelieving thought as inherently dialectical. The dialectic, generally, is one of rationalism/irrationalism. For Van Til, the non-Christian principle of continuity is best exemplified in Parmenides’ monism. For Parmenides, all that is, is being. Anything else would be nonbeing and thus would not ‘be.’ The non-Christian principle of discontinuity is best exemplified by Heraclitus. Heraclitus taught that everything is in flux, and thus one never steps into the same river twice. So, the principle of continuity is focused on unity, and the principle of discontinuity is focused on diversity” (Defense of the Faith, 133 n. 25).
- “Suppose we think of a man made of water in an infinitely extended ocean of water. Desiring to get out of water, he makes a ladder of water. He sets this ladder upon the water and against the water and then climbs out of the water only to fall into the water. So hopeless and senseless a picture must be drawn of the natural man’s methodology based as it is upon the assumption that time or chance is ultimate” (Van Til, Christian Apologetics, 131-32). See also Van Til, Defense of the Faith (4th ed.), 124-25.
- “All things change into their opposites as Parmenides said with regard to Heraclitus’ position. There is no subject to which a predicate can be attached and there is no predicate to attach to a subject” (Van Til, Psychology of Religion, 59).
- This is a simplification of Heraclitus’s views, from what we can tell. It would appear that Heraclitus made much more of an attempt to balance the one and the many than Van Til gives him credit for. See Copleston, Greece and Rome, 38-46. However, in the Cratylus (402a), Plato has Socrates say, “Heraclitus says somewhere that ‘everything gives way and nothing stands fast,’ and, likening the things that are to the flowing of a river, he says that ‘you cannot step into the same river twice’” (Works, 120). So Van Til’s representation of Heraclitus stands as well as Plato’s does.
- Here is how Copleston puts it: “His doctrine in brief is to the effect that Being, the One, is, and that Becoming, change, is illusion. For if anything comes to be, then it comes either out of being or out of not-being. If the former, then it already is—in which case it does not come to be; if the latter, then it is nothing, since out of nothing comes nothing. Becoming is, then, illusion. Being simply is and Being is One, since plurality is also illusion” (Greece and Rome, 48).
- This remark of Van Til’s, regarding any “Platonic” methodology, is applicable to Parmenides: “The burden of the whole matter lies in the fact that on any Platonic, or semi-Platonic, basis, the conditional can have no meaning” (Common Grace, 82).
- Oliphint, Reasons for Faith, 42. Van Til says, “Parmenides concluded that to understand anything historical, it would have to be reduced to an element in a timeless system of categories.” Note that this is a diachronic application of Plato’s doctrine of the forms. “He therefore denied the reality and significance of all historical plurality” (Van Til, Introduction to Systematic Theology, 32).
- Van Til, Common Grace, 8.
- “The investigation of any fact whatsoever will involve a discussion of the meaning of Christianity as well as of theism, and a sound position taken on the one involves a sound position on the other” (Van Til, A Survey of Christian Epistemology, 207). He also says, “To argue by presupposition is to indicate what are the epistemological and metaphysical principles that underlie and control one’s method,” and, “To admit one’s own presuppositions and to point out the presuppositions of others is therefore to maintain that all reasoning is, in the nature of the case, circular reasoning. The starting point, the method, and the conclusion are always involved in one another” (Defense of the Faith, 121-22, 123).
- “He identified himself without the need of other facts from which he needed to be distinguished. There was no universal being of which he was a particular instance” (Van Til, Introduction to Systematic Theology, 367).
- See Richard Muller, Post-Reformation Reformed Dogmatics: The Rise and Development of Reformed Orthodoxy, ca. 1520 to ca. 1725, vol. 3: The Divine Essence and Attributes (2d ed.; Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2003), 406-10; and K. Scott Oliphint, God With Us: Divine Condescension and the Attributes of God (Wheaton: Crossway, 2011), 93-99, esp. n. 12.
- Van Til, Defense of the Faith, 47 (emphasis added).
- “Before the world was, God existed from all eternity as a self-contained and self-sufficient being. From the Christian point of view, it is impossible to think of the nonexistence of God. It is very well possible to think of the nonexistence of the world. In fact, we believe that the world once upon a time did not exist; it was created by God out of nothing” (Van Til, Introduction to Systematic Theology, 29).
- Van Til understood simplicity and aseity as interdependent: “The self-existence of God can be maintained only if we start concretely with the notion of God as the fulness of self-contained being” (ibid., 333).
- Van Til understood simplicity as trinitarian. More precisely, Van Til understood triune personality to be necessary for the doctrine of simplicity: “Absolute numerical identity [tri-unity] should be opposed to specific or generic unity. God is complete self-consciousness [triune personality]. If he were not, [he would not be self-defined, and] he would not be one Lord, and the words of Deuteronomy ‘Hear, O Israel; the Lord our God is one Lord’ would not be strictly true (Deut 6:4). There would then be some vague undefined subject or substance [theological predicates, such as Deut 6:4] not exhaustively predicated [because not self-defined in God’s own being]. It is therefore because of the [a se] fulness of the concrete self-existence of God that he is simple” (Introduction to Systematic Theology, 341 [emphasis added]). By “complete self-consciousness” Van Til means complete self-knowledge. The reference to Deut 6:4 is meant to indicate that if God were generically one, his being would not be self-defined but it would have to be defined with reference to something other than himself. In that case God would not be a se, and his being and attributes, including sovereign lordship, would be derivative. Rather, the triune, personal God is completely self-conscious and self-defined (a se, in other words), and it is because of the triune and personal fullness of the being of God that God can be truly simple and still be God. By contrast, Aristotle’s thought thinking itself has the attribute of (divine) simplicity; but as generically one and impersonal, it has nothing else. “By saying that God’s essence is simple and that the three persons are equal to one another as to their divinity,” by affirming simplicity and triune personality inseparably of the same God, “the Church has set itself in opposition to all forms of non-Christian thought” (ibid., 352).
- Ibid., 363.
- “When we say that we believe in a personal God, we do not merely mean that we believe in a God to whom the adjective ‘personal’ may be attached. God is not an essence that has personality; he is absolute personality” (ibid., 364).
- Ibid. Van Til also says, “Unity and plurality are equally ultimate in the Godhead. The persons of the Godhead are mutually exhaustive of one another and therefore of the essence of the Godhead. God is a one-conscious being, and yet he is also a tri-conscious being” (ibid., 348). Notice also that the self-defined nature of God’s self knowledge entails the fact that God is ultimately mysterious to man: “At the same time, this mysterious God is mysterious because he is, within himself, wholly rational” (ibid., 364).
- Ibid. He also says, “Using the language of the one-and-many question we contend that in God the one and the many are equally ultimate. Unity in God is no more fundamental than diversity, and diversity in God is no more fundamental than unity. The persons of the Trinity are mutually exhaustive of one another” (Defense of the Faith, 48).
- Oliphint puts it this way, “It is not the case that God’s simplicity obviates any difference or distinction; the Father is simple, the Son is simple, and the Holy Spirit is simple. Each of the three persons is distinct in his own right, all the while being identical and equal to the one God. There is distinction, there is difference, and there is identity” (God With Us, 253). Oliphint also says, “An understanding of simplicity necessarily has God’s triunity in its immediate purview. To affirm simplicity by reason alone, only later to bring in a notion of the Trinity by way of revelation, is to rend asunder what God has joined together” (ibid., 253 n. 61).
- Van Til, Introduction to Systematic Theology, 341. And triunity is a se: “The diversity and the identity are equally underived” (Van Til, Defense of the Faith, 34).
- Van Til, Introduction to Systematic Theology, 36.
- Van Til, Defense of the Faith, 49.
- Van Til, Introduction to Systematic Theology, 31.
- Ibid., 30. Also, “God is completely self-conscious and therefore knows himself and all things analytically” (Van Til, Survey of Christian Epistemology, 200).
- “Scripture teaches that every fact in the universe exists and operates by virtue of the plan of God. There are no brute facts for God. As to his own being, fact and interpretation are co-extensive. There are no hidden unexplored possibilities in God. And as to the universe, God’s interpretation logically precedes the denotation and the connotation of all facts of which it consists” (Van Til, Christian-Theistic Evidences, 51). Also, “There never were any facts existing independent of God that he had to investigate. God is the one and only ultimate Fact. In him, i.e., with respect to his being, apart from the world, fact and interpretation of fact are coterminous” (Van Til, Introduction to Systematic Theology, 30).
- Van Til, Defense of the Faith, 49.
- Ibid.
- Ibid., 50.
- Van Til, Introduction to Systematic Theology, 364-65.
- “Facts and logic not based upon the creation doctrine and not placed in the context of the doctrine of God’s all-embracing providence, are without relation to one another and therefore wholly meaningless” (Van Til, Defense of the Faith, 316). Also, “Accordingly, we need the indescribable fulness of the being of God as the presupposition of our notions of time and space” (Van Til, Introduction to Systematic Theology, 335).
- Ps 19. Van Til writes, “The psalmist does not say that the heavens probably declare the glory of God; they infallibly and clearly do” (Cornelius Van Til, The Reformed Pastor and Modern Thought [Phillipsburg, N.J.: Presbyterian & Reformed, 1980], 32).
- “By virtue of the idea of creation we have seen that the universals and particulars that we meet with in the universe cannot exist in independence of one another. Hence there can be no warfare between the priority of the subject or the object of knowledge” (Van Til, Psychology of Religion, 60).
- “It appears that there must seem to be contradiction in human knowledge. . . . The contradiction that seems to be there can in the nature of the case be no more than a seeming contradiction. If we said that there is real contradiction in our knowledge, we would once more be denying the basic concept of Christian-theism, i.e., the concept of the self-complete universal in God” (Van Til, Defense of the Faith, 68).
- “Thinking of the infinity of God in relation to time in this manner, we therefore think of that fulness of internal activity of which the movement in the temporally conditioned universe is a created replica” (Van Til, Introduction to Systematic Theology, 336).
- “We argue that unless we may hold to the presupposition of the self-contained ontological trinity, human rationality itself is a mirage” (Van Til, Common Grace, 9).
- Van Til, Introduction to Systematic Theology, 40. “Man’s knowledge of God is logically more fundamental than man’s knowledge of the universe” (Van Til, Defense of the Faith, 66).
- For a trinitarian approach to logic, see Vern S. Poythress, “Reforming Ontology and Logic in the Light of the Trinity: An Application of Van Til’s Idea of Analogy,” WTJ 57 (1995): 187-219; and Poythress’s forthcoming Logic: A God-Centered Approach to the Foundation of Western Thought (Wheaton: Crossway, 2013).
- Van Til, Defense of the Faith, 167.
- Van Til, Survey of Christian Epistemology, 6.
- Ibid., 8.
- Van Til, Common Grace, 4.
- Ibid.
- Ibid.
- Ibid.
- Ibid.
- Ibid. Van Til puts “objective” and “facts” in quotes to represent the evidentialist’s hypothetical realism.
- Ibid.
- Ibid., 3.
- Ibid., 4. The unilateral, truth-constitutive role of subjective, creaturely reason is so unchallenged, Van Til says, that description of a fact is taken as the definition of that fact.
- Ibid., 5.
- Van Til, Survey of Christian Epistemology, 8. “It is the firm conviction of every epistemologically self-conscious Christian that no human being can utter a single syllable, whether in negation or in affirmation, unless it were for God’s existence. Thus the transcendental argument seeks to discover [or divulge] what sort of foundations the house of human knowledge must have, in order to be what it is. It does not seek to find whether the house has a foundation, but it presupposes that it has one. We hold that the anti-Christian method, whether deductive or inductive, may be compared to a man who would first insist that the statue of William Penn on the city hall of Philadelphia can be intelligently conceived without the foundation on which it stands, in order afterwards to investigate whether or not this statue really has a foundation” (ibid., 11).
- Van Til, Survey of Christian Epistemology, 205. Tipton says, “The representational principle,” and so ultimately the ontological Trinity, “supplies the deeply trinitarian rationale for the transcendental argument from the impossibility of the contrary” (“The Triune Personal God,” 163-64).
- Van Til, Introduction to Systematic Theology, 68.
- “Our argument as over against this would be that the existence of the God of Christian theism and the conception of his counsel as controlling all things in the universe is the only presupposition which can account for the uniformity of nature which the scientist needs. But the best and only possible proof for the existence of such a God is that his existence is required for the uniformity of nature and for the coherence of things in the world. We cannot prove the beams underneath a floor if by proof we mean that they must be ascertainable in the way that we can see the chairs and tables of the room. But the very idea of a floor as the support of tables and chairs requires the idea of beams that are underneath. But there would be no floor if no beams were underneath. Thus there is absolutely certain proof for the existence of God and the truth of Christian theism” (Van Til, Defense of the Faith, 125-26).
- Van Til, Introduction to Systematic Theology, 67.
- Oliphint, “The Consistency of Van Til’s Methodology,” 20. “We must meet our enemy on their own ground. It is this that we ought to mean when we say that we reason from the impossibility of the contrary” (Van Til, Survey of Christian Epistemology, 205).
- Van Til, Christian-Theistic Evidences, 50-51.
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