A response to Frame's presuppositionalism

A friend drew my attention to Andrew Loke's article, ‘A response to John Frame’s Presuppositional approach to faith and reason.’ 

https://www.academia.edu/38036165/Loke_Andrew._2018._A_response_to_John_Frame_s_Presuppositional_approach_to_faith_and_reason._Journal_of_Reformed_Theology_14_356-376._Brill._Pre-peer_review_version_

I don't wish to get mired in exegeting Frame's voluminous position. So I'll just focus on the ideas. What I say may well be consistent with Frame's position, but my response to Loke isn't meant to be a direct comparison. 

In contrast with the Evidential Approach, which uses experiences (including experiences of others e.g. their testimonies)…

But there are different kinds of experience. Headaches are experiences. Dreams are experiences. Moreover, there's a distinction between revelatory dreams and imaginary dreams. Private experiences are different from public experiences. So Loke needs to be more discriminating. 

…and reason as starting points, 

But the status of human reason is worldview-dependent. If the backstory for human reason is naturalistic evolution or deistic evolution, where reason is the byproduct of an aimless, stochastic process, then it's hard to see how reason can have any normative standing. If, by contrast, human reason is God-given, then it can be a criterion, although unaided human reason remains limited and fallible. In the sense of God-given reason, human reason can be one starting-point, even though that needs to be informed by other starting-points. 

Presuppositionalists assume the truth of the Christian Scripture as their starting point in their assessment of the truth-claims of Christianity. 

I don't know what Loke means by "assuming" the truth of Christian Scripture. It's not just an arbitrary postulate. 

They acknowledge their use of circular argument; that is, a form of argument which presupposes the conclusion of what is to be proved. 

i) Throughout his article, Loke frames the issue in terms of "circularity". But that has limited usefulness because circularity is a metaphor, and metaphors are secondary. They can useful illustrations, but in order to truly understand an idea, we need to be able to translate the metaphor into something more abstract. 

ii) Loke fails to distinguish between logical circularity (in the sense of a syllogism) and epistemic circularity. Now, epistemic circularity is still philosophically controversial (like everything else in philosophy!), but it's a different kind of circularity. While epistemic circularity may or may not be satisfactory, it's not invalid or fallacious in the logical sense. 

For instance, is there a noncircular argument for an external world? If idealism is empirically equivalent, can our belief in the external world avoid epistemic circularity?  

One of the main motivations of Presuppositionalists is to uphold the authority of Scripture. They are concerned that to assess the truth-claims of Christianity in a non-presuppositional way would be to judge Scripture by another, more ultimate standard.6 Frame thinks that God speaks with absolute authority throughout the Scripture, and his words cannot be subjected to proof and disproof.7 Frame thus concludes that ‘in the final analysis we must believe Scripture on its own say-so.’8

But that doesn't rule out reasons for believing Scripture. 

The problem with Frame’s argument is that it is self-defeating, for as Gary Habermas observes, the evidential method of judging claims of divine revelation is actually taught in Scripture itself. To cite a few examples, in the Old Testament, potential prophets are to be tested according to their own predictions (Deut. 18:21-22). 

Which overlooks the parallel passage in Deut 13:1-5, where, even if the prediction comes true or he performs a miracle, he is still a false prophet in case he contradicts Mosaic revelation. So in that regard, Scripture is the ultimate criterion. 

Additionally, God is said to have challenged other gods to predict the future the way he could (Isa. 41:21-29; 44:7, 24-28; 46:10; 48:5, 14). These passages portray a God who allows himself to be tested in such a way that his words could be disproved (i.e. if the prophesized message does not come true), and who passes the tests, such that Israel is called to be his witness of these mighty historical acts of confirmation (Isa. 44:6-8; 52:6). 

No, not that Yahweh's words could be disproved, but that predictive failure exposes the fact that the words in question aren't from Yahweh but the imagination of a false prophet. Is Loke unable to draw that rudimentary distinction? 

Likewise, 1 Kings 18:20-45 portrays Elijah challenging the people to view an awesome miracle as God’s vindication of his prophet and message. The New Testament portrays Jesus citing his miracles as evidences that he is the promised Messiah (Luke 7:18-23), and both Peter (Acts 2:22-24) and Paul (Acts 16:30-31) proclaim Jesus’ resurrection as the validation of his teachings. These passages affirm that both believers and unbelievers are told to examine history using their reason and their senses in order to ascertain God’s truth. But there is no hint in these passages that such evidential challenges displease God. On the contrary, God is said to have made the challenge himself.9

i) Loke fails to draw an elementary distinction between verification and falsification. God's claims are subject to evidential confirmation. It doesn't follow that God's claims are subject to evidential disconfirmation. If some claims are demonstrably false, that means they weren't God's claims in the first place. 

ii) They are not told to use their reason and senses even if their reason and senses are the byproduct of a blind natural process. From a biblical standpoint, their reason and senses are only (generally) reliable because God endowed them with reason and designed their senses. The same appeal doesn't work on naturalism. 

iii) In addition, even that assumes the right use of reason. Scripture gives many examples of unbelievers whose reasoning is irrational. 

In his other writings, Frame acknowledges that the Scripture itself directs us to consider evidences outside itself, such as the 500 eyewitness in the case of Jesus’ resurrection (1 Cor. 15:6), but he emphasizes that the witness’ testimony is to be evaluated by way of a Biblical view of evidence—not by theories like those of Hume and Bultmann which reject all supernatural claims from the onset.12

However, the problem with Frame’s view is that his circular approach is nowhere endorsed in the Christian Scripture itself. Scriptural passages which advocate the testing of claims of divine revelation (e.g. Deut 18:21-22) and which issue the challenge to other gods (Isa 41:21-29 etc.) do not affirm that Scripture should determine what views of reasoning, evidences and epistemology are to be adopted in order to prove Scripture. On the contrary, these Scriptural passages presuppose that logical inferences from experiences are ways by which people can know whether prophecies have been fulfilled and whether miracles have occurred. These passages also presuppose that logical inferences from fulfilled prophecies, miracles, etc. are ways by which pagans can come to know who the true God is, without having to first presuppose that any Scripture should control the way in which a person chooses, evaluates, and formulates these evidences.

i) Is Scripture submitting to the judgement of folks who operate with the plausibility structures of Hume and Bultmann? 

ii) Loke appeals to "evidence" as if that has an agreed upon meaning. But the concept of evidence didn't fall from the sky. Evidence is a philosophical concept, and there are competing concepts of evidence. At the bottom of my post I reproduce some different or divergent concepts of evidence.  

iii) This is parallel to the distinction between moral epistemology and moral ontology. Unbelievers say you can be moral without God. But while it's sometimes possible to be moral without believing in God, that doesn't mean it's possible to be moral without God existing. 

You can believe that milk comes from supermarkets rather than cows. Suppose you think cartons of milk are the natural state of milk. Normally that backstory won't impede your ability to function in the world. But the availability of milk requires a different backstory to be true. 

Paul did not argue for his view of evidence in a circular manner. 

Not in 1 Cor 15:6. But consider statements like:

Let God be true, and every human being a liar (Rom 3:4)

You will say to me then, “Why does He still find fault? For who has resisted His will?” But indeed, O man, who are you to reply against God? Will the thing formed say to him who formed it, “Why have you made me like this?” Does not the potter have power over the clay, from the same lump to make one vessel for honor and another for dishonor? (Rom 9:19-21).

Isn't that "circular"? 

In another passage, Luke portrays Paul as questioning the reasonableness of the sceptics’ presupposition by asking ‘Why should any of you consider it incredible that God raises the dead?’ (Acts 26:8, NIV). Following the Scriptural example of Paul (to which Frame would be committed) would imply that, when facing sceptics who reject all supernatural claims from the onset (such as Bultmann and Hume), the Christian should not argue for his/her view in a circular manner. Rather, he/she should show the unreasonableness of their rejection without circularity.

But Loke doesn't give us a noncircular argument to refute Hume and Bultmann. 

Other examples of non-circular arguments based on sensory experiences can be seen from the writings of Luke, who emphasizes that the resurrected Jesus was seen, heard, touch, and ate fish (e.g. Acts 1:3 cf. Luke 24:39-43). Similarly, the author of the Epistles of John emphasizes that the Incarnated Word was‘what we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes, what we have looked at and touched with our hands, concerning the Word of Life—and the life was manifested, and we have seen and testify and proclaim to you the eternal life, which was with the Father and was manifested to us (1 John 1:1-2). 

That's philosophically naive. It's a noncircular argument given sensory perception, but that only pushes the issue back a step. Does Loke have a noncircular argument for sensory perception? In a footnote, Loke quotes the following passage:

Philosopher David Chalmers argues that ‘even if I am in a matrix, my world is perfectly real’ and that we could still know that we really have ‘hands’, only that our understanding of the underlying metaphysics need to be adjusted. For example, instead of understanding the hand as being fundamentally constituted by unobservable quantum entities, we understand the ‘hand’ as fundamentally constituted by computer inputs. See D. Chalmers, ‘The Matrix as Metaphysics’, in C. Grau (ed.), Philosophers Explore the Matrix (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2005).

But Loke just leaves that hanging there. He doesn't seem to register how it complicates his straightforward appeal to "evidence" or "experience". Does he have a noncircular argument to debunk that skeptical thought-experiment? He can't debunk it by pointing to empirical evidence–since the point of Matrix-scenarios is that what we take to be empirical evidence might be delusive, and the illusion is indistinguishable from reality. What happens when you filter Lk 24:39-43, Jn 20-21, or 1 Jn 1:1-2 through a Matrix-scenario? 

I'm not saying that's a reason to doubt the Resurrection. Rather, I'm saying that Loke unwittingly introduced an undercutter or defeater for his own position, given the way he chose to cast the issue.  

Frame thinks that the unbeliever, when most self-conscious, opposes the very rational principles to which Evidentialist apologists appeal, and he reasons in ways designed to exclude the theistic conclusion. However, they recognize that this does not imply that the human cognitive equipment has been affected to the extent that it is no longer able to arrive at some truth of God by non-circular reasoning. On the contrary, as Feinberg points out, this ability can be seen as a matter of God’s grace as well—his common grace.

That's not a counter to Frame's statement. Some unbelievers are more consistently naturalistic than others. Common ground isn't uniform. 

It hardly needs to be said that many Muslims also devoutly believe that their position is true, and they believe that it can be clearly recognized as such). But the Quran and the Bible cannot both be divinely inspired and inerrant because they contradict each other at various important points. This demonstrates that circular argumentation is fallacious. 

The problem isn't simply that they contradict each other. These aren't symmetrical claimants. Muhammad himself, in his rise to power, appealed to the Bible, as he understood it, as precedent for his own message. He appealed to the witness of Christians and Jews. So the Koran requires biblical validation while the Bible doesn't require Koranic validation. 

Another problem with Frame’s method is that one can come up with a coherent system of doctrine which is similar to that of Christianity and which can also give an equally compelling account of morality, rationality…

Is Loke appealing to merely hypothetical alternatives? If so, what about hypothetical non-Christian accounts of reason, evidence, and experience? If that's a problem for presuppositionalism, that's a problem for evidentialism, too.  

This is most evident in the case of the Law of Non-Contradiction: no one (whether Easterner or Westerner) can deny this Law without also affirming it. Indeed, a violation of the laws of logic would be non-existent.

Philosopher Thomas Nagel observes that ‘The appeal to reason is implicitly authorized by the challenge itself, so this is really a way of showing that the challenge is unintelligible. The charge of begging the question implies that there is an alternative—namely, to examine the reasons for and against the claim being challenged while suspending judgment about it. For the case of reasoning itself, however, no such alternative is available, since any considerations against the objective validity of a type of reasoning are inevitably attempts to offer reasons against it, and these must be rationally assessed. The use of reason in the response is not a gratuitous importation by the defender: it is demanded by the character of the objections offered by the challenger.’

i) But doesn't Frame say the same thing about the Christian worldview? Ultimately there's no alternative. 

ii) Once again, the appeal to reason is worldview-dependent. The fact that reason is unavoidable doesn't mean it's reliable. Someone who's mentally ill still relies on his reasoning process, even though that's compromised. Someone who's color-blind relies on his defective vision, since that's the only vision he has. Someone who's high on acid relies on his perception of the world, even though he's hallucinating. 

There's a difference between the use of reason and the normatively of reason. The normatively of reason requires a certain kind of backstory. 

Evidence, whatever else it is, is the kind of thing which can make a difference to what one is justified in believing or (what is often, but not always, taken to be the same thing) what it is reasonable for one to believe...Inasmuch as evidence is the sort of thing which confers justification, the concept of evidence is closely related to other fundamental normative concepts such as the concept of a reason...To the extent that what one is justified in believing depends upon one's evidence, what is relevant is the bearing of one's total evidence.

Perhaps the root notion of evidence is that of something which serves as a reliable sign, symptom, or mark of that which it is evidence of. In Ian Hacking's phrase, this is ‘the evidence of one thing that points beyond itself’ (1975: 37). Thus, smoke is evidence of fire, Koplik spots evidence of measles...Of course, although the presence of Koplik spots is in fact a reliable guide to the presence of measles, one who is ignorant of this fact is not in a position to conclude that a given patient has measles, even if he or she is aware that the patient has Koplik spots. Someone who knows that Koplik spots are evidence of measles is in a position to diagnose patients in a way that someone who is ignorant of that fact is not. In general, the extent to which one is in a position to gain new information on the basis of particular pieces of evidence typically depends upon one's background knowledge. 

This suggests that the notion of evidence in play in statements such as ‘evidence tends to justify belief’ and ‘rational thinkers respect their evidence’ cannot simply be identified with evidence in the sense of reliable indicator. Let's call evidence in the former sense normative evidence, and evidence in the latter sense indicator evidence...Reflection on the role that considerations of background theory play in determining how it is reasonable for one to respond to new information...

It is natural to suppose that the concept of evidence is intimately related to the cognitive desideratum of objectivity. According to this line of thought, individuals and institutions are objective to the extent that they allow their views about what is the case or what ought to be done to be guided by the evidence, as opposed to (say) the typically distorting influences of ideological dogma, prejudice in favor of one's kin, or texts whose claim to authority is exhausted by their being venerated by tradition...According to this picture, a central function of evidence is to serve as a neutral arbiter among rival theories and their adherents...The slogan ‘the priority of evidence to theory’ has sometimes been employed in an attempt to capture this general theme. However, this slogan has itself been used in a number of importantly different ways that it is worth pausing to distinguish.

The idea of evidence as a kind of ultimate court of appeal, uniquely qualified to generate agreement among those who hold rival theories, is a highly plausible one. Nevertheless, complications with this simple picture—some more serious than others—abound. Above, we took note of the widely-held view according to which the bearing of a given piece of evidence on a given hypothesis depends on considerations of background theory. Thus, two individuals who hold different background theories might disagree about how strongly a particular piece of evidence confirms a given theory, or indeed, about whether the evidence confirms the theory at all. Of course, if the question of who has the superior background theory is itself susceptible to rational adjudication, then this possibility need pose no deep threat to objectivity.

However, a recurrent motif in twentieth century philosophy of science is that the bearing of evidence on theory is mediated by factors that might vary between individuals in ways that do not admit of such rational adjudication. Imagine two eminent scientists, both of whom are thoroughly acquainted with all of the available evidence which bears on some theory. One believes the theory, the other believes some different, incompatible theory instead.

Let's assume then that evidence sometimes does successfully discharge the function of neutral arbiter among theories and is that which secures intersubjective agreement among inquirers. What must evidence be like, in order for it to play this role? That is, given that evidence sometimes underwrites intersubjective agreement, what constraints does this place on answers to the question: what sorts of things are eligible to count as evidence?

Above, we noted that the traditional epistemological demand that one's evidence consist of that to which one has immediate and unproblematic access...For it is natural to think that the ability of evidence to play this latter role depends crucially on its having an essentially public character, i.e., that it is the sort of thing which can be grasped and appreciated by multiple individuals.

Reflection on examples drawn from more homely contexts also casts doubt on the idea that all genuine evidence is in principle accessible to multiple individuals. When one has a headache, one is typically justified in believing that one has a headache. While others might have evidence that one has a headache—evidence afforded, perhaps, by one's testimony, or by one's non-linguistic behavior—it is implausible that whatever evidence others possess is identical with that which justifies one's own belief that one has a headache. Indeed, it seems dubious that others could have one's evidence, given that others cannot literally share one's headache.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/evidence/

Update: "Begging the question".