Innate knowledge

“Now, it seems to me that even the skimpy material in Genesis is sufficient to refute empiricism with its
blank mind…Even apart from the explicit statements in the New Testament, Genesis says that God commanded Adam and Eve to be fruitful and multiply. Since at that time they had no sensory experience of other people, must they not have had some innate intelligence to understand this command? Of course, an empiricist might insist that they had learned the meaning from observing animals. But this assumes that a fair length of time intervened between the creation of Adam and God’s imposition
of the obligation. One can better suppose that God gave instructions to Adam more immediately. This is rather obviously true of Genesis 2:16, 17. The command was given only moments after the creation. Of course, such a command was not a
priori knowledge, but the intellectual equipment to understand it was.”

http://www.trinityfoundation.org/PDF/034a-HowDoWeLearn.pdf

I myself don’t object to the idea that man possesses a certain amount of innate knowledge. That said, Clark’s exegetical inference suffers from two or three basic problems:

1.Clark is resorting to induction. He’s drawing a universal inference from a sampling of just two human beings!

2.Another problem with Clark’s argument from analogy is the fact that the situation of Adam and Eve is, in some degree, sui generis. They didn’t pass through the usual process of conception, gestation, childhood, and adolescence to reach maturity. Rather, they were created as adults. They were grown-ups without growing up. So, to be functional adults, they would have to be equipped with a fair amount of innate knowledge.

But Clark cannot validly extrapolate from their unique creation to the experience of their posterity–for there are some fundamental disanalogies between our situation and theirs.

3.In addition, Adam and Eve didn’t have the Bible. They didn’t even have the Book of Genesis.

So their experience is diametrically at odds with Scripturalism, according to which all knowledge is derivable from Scripture.