People Converted Through Arguments

"My colleague J.P. Moreland, out at Talbot, has taken to responding to, when people say to him, 'You can't bring anybody to Christ through argument.', J.P. says, 'Oh, yeah, you can. I've done it.' And I can say the same. We constantly get emails and testimonies coming into Reasonable Faith that people who have come to Christ after seeing a debate or a video or have come back to Christ after walking away from Christian faith through Reasonable Faith materials." (William Lane Craig, 8:04 in the audio of his November 13, 2023 Reasonable Faith podcast here)

There are Biblical examples as well (e.g., Acts 17:2-4, 19:8).

Driving a wedge between reason and authority

A convert to Catholic attempted to rebut my post:

http://scottericalt.com/steve-hays-posits-false-dichotomy-between-authority-and-reason/

He calls his site Triablogue, for optimistic reasons known to him alone. 

I didn't name the blog. Ryan MacReyolds did. 

His latest screed is entitled “Catholic apologetics is self-destructive” — which must explain why it’s been around since Justin Martyr.

News flash: Justin Martyr wasn't Roman Catholic. 

At this point I am curious. Have Protestant apologists given up on sola scriptura? Maybe I’ve been otherwise engaged in recent years and missed the news. But I thought that the authority of Bible — and just the Bible, that’s it, sir — was one of the pillars of the Protestant Reformation. We judge everything by the authority of those seventy-three sixty-six books. Every doctrine must be found there or it’s just a vile tradition of men. Have Protestants given this up now? I only ask questions.

Mr. Hays goes on: “Notice how often a Catholic apologist reframes an issue in terms of authority … Human reason is so untrustworthy that we need the pope to play referee.”

Well, yes and no. I don’t really need to pull out Proverbs 14:12 here. If Mr. Hays and I are in an argument about sola scriptura, it’s fair for me to point out that the Bible must be interpreted and how does he know his interpretation is right? The meaning is not just there; the Bible does not interpret itself, Westminster notwithstanding. After all, Protestants differ even among themselves about many key verses. If that were not so, Arminians and Calvinists could not both be Protestant. That’s how unreliable “the Bible alone” is.

But that does not mean that Catholics have abandoned, or even given small importance to, “human reason.”...Does Mr. Hays have reason to believe that the Orthodox behave like Calvinist bloggers and make stuff up as they go?

Mr. Hays has a lot to explain when he cites Aquinas’s appeal to reason on the Real Presence. Aquinas was Catholic, sir.

All these objections suffer from the same confusion. I don't erect a dichotomy between reason and authority. Rather, that's what Catholic apologists typically do. Catholic apologists have resorted to skepticism since the Counter-Reformation:

http://triablogue.blogspot.com/2017/12/catholic-fideism.html

And it remains a fixture of Catholic apologetics right up to our own day. Take my recent exchange with Michael Liccione:

https://triablogue.blogspot.com/2019/08/running-in-place.html

Or take Ed Feser's essay, "The God of a Philosopher," in the recent Faith and Reason anthology, edited by Besong and Fuqua. Unlike Catholic apologists, I don't impugn the general competence of reason. Likewise, I'm not the one who says communication is so ambiguous that we require the pope to play referee. 

The strategy of Catholic apologists generates a dilemma. They can't tear down reason to attack the Protestant faith, then turn right around and appeal to the same untrustworthy faculty to defend Catholicism. 

And it’s a caricature to say that the pope plays referee all the time between warring Catholics. Not in my experience. First of all, Catholics don’t have that kind of hotline to the Vatican. Half the time, we can’t even get the local bishop to pay us any mind. Second, too many Catholics these days are full of pride and hiss like feral cats at anything the pope says. Pope Francis Derangement Syndrome is a real problem. But Catholics don’t send the pope an email every time Boodle and Coodle get in an argument about Luke 22:36 and the second amendment. The pope’s role as teacher of the whole Church is more about preserving the unity of the faith than answering every question that comes up.

I appreciate Alt's frank admission regarding the general uselessness of a living teaching office. I wish him success in persuading his fellow Catholics to share his dim view regarding the general uselessness of a living teaching office. 

And here, dear reader, is where the false dichotomy emerges. To give evidence at all means that the evidence has some authority, in your view.

Now he's resorting to his own homespun redefinitions. 

Apart from not knowing the meaning of “hiatus”—incongruity is closer to Mr. Hays’ meaning...

I'm using "hiatus" the same way dictionaries do: "a rift, break, gap, hole, discontinuity, where something is missing". An apt descriptor for how the dogma of transubstantiation drives a wedge between appearance and reality. 

 — no Catholic apologist I know defends, say, the Marian dogmas by telling us that the Church teaches the Marian dogmas and stopping there…In a similar way, when Pope St. John Paul II wrote in defense of the teaching that the priesthood is restricted to men (Ordinatio Sacerdotalis), he didn’t say “the Church has always taught this” and stop there. He explained why the Church has always taught it…And when Pope St. Paul VI reiterated the ban on artificial contraception (Humanae Vitae), he gave several arguments from reason, including an appeal to natural law.

i) He has yet to wrap his head around what the actual argument is. Catholic apologists constantly assert that human reason is so unreliable, interpretation is so unreliable, that we need the pope to play referee. They deploy Pyrrhonian skepticism to create an opening for the argument from authority (i.e. the magisterium) as the necessary backup. When, however, they do an about-face and appeal to the same discredited reason to prop up Catholic dogmas, the contradiction is blatant. 

ii) Yes, popes attempt to defend their dogmas by appeal to reason, but that's a throwaway maneuver because when it fails to persuade, they fall back on the fideism of naked ecclesiastical authority. 

…and simply use logic, you are appealing to the authority of some logical formula…One can not possibly argue anything at all if there weren’t first an agreement about what counts as proof. That’s what authority is.

Once again, we're treated to Alt's idiosyncratic redefinition of standard terms and concepts. 

How Important Is Apologetics?

I recently wrote a post on Facebook about the usefulness of apologetics. I want to expand on some points I made there. I'll repeat part of what I said in that post, then expand on it.

Apologetics makes Christianity a viable option to people. As William Lane Craig often notes, apologetic efforts "help to shape and preserve an intellectual milieu in which faith in the Jesus of the New Testament is still a rational alternative for most persons in our culture." (in Paul Copan, ed., Will The Real Jesus Please Stand Up? [Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker Books, 1998], 178) What if a culture became convinced that the Bible teaches that the earth rests on the back of a turtle and that the world would end in 1500 A.D.? If people thought Christianity had been falsified to that extent, how much consideration would they give to becoming or remaining Christian? The ability of critics of apologetics (and people only mildly supportive of it) to lead people to Christianity through sermons, drama, music, family tradition, charity work, and other non-apologetic means is largely indebted to Christian scholars and lay apologists doing the groundwork needed for Christianity to be viewed as a viable option.

People are often more interested in reasoning and evidence than we think. If you were to ask Americans to justify their belief that George Washington was the first president of the United States, I suspect the large majority would be bad at articulating why they believe it. But they have good reasons for holding the belief, even if they haven't thought about the reasons much and aren't good at explaining them (the general trustworthiness of human testimony, the lack of dispute over the belief in question, the unlikelihood of a sufficient motive for fabrication, etc.). They aren't as concerned with reason and evidence as they ought to be, but it would be wrong to say that they have no concern at all.

Anti-theodicy

I'm going to quote and comment on this essay: N. N. Trakakis, "Anti-Theodicy", The Problem of Evil: Eight Views in Dialogue (Cambridge 2018), chap 4. Trakakis is a protégé of atheist philosopher Graham Oppy, and they often collaborate. In the essay Trakakis indicates that at one point the problem of evil pushed him into the atheist camp, but he now has an alternative position: anti-theodicy. 

I first encountered the anti-theodicy position in Cornelius Berkouwer. David Bentley Hart is another exponent of anti-theodicy:

https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2008/05/tsunami-and-theodicy

It may not be coincidental that Trakakis and Hart both have a Greek Orthodox frame of reference. 

The problem of evil often strikes people as irresolvable. No adequate or convincing solution to the problem seems forthcoming, and this despite numerous and often sophisticated attempts over the centuries and from highly trained and gifted philosophers and theologians. As John Cottingham recognizes, "The opponents of theism may devise ever more dramatic presentations of the problem of evil, and its defenders construct ever more ingenious rebuttals, but one has the sense that neither side in the argument has any real expectation of changing their opponent's mind, and that in the end they are succeeding in doing little more than upsetting each other". 

But, of course, that's hardly unique to debates over theodicy. That holds true for the whole range of philosophy. Typically, opposing positions in philosophy are constantly retooled rather than eliminated. 

It is also sometimes held that the theodicist's position of rejecting even the possibility of gratuitous evil–of holding, in other words, that every evil is always connected to a greater good and that we ought to believe (or can come to know) this to be so–has the objectionable consequence of reducing us to an attitude of passivity and fatalism in the face of evil. For why fight to eradicate evil if evil is a necessary or unavoidable part or byproduct of God's providential plan for the world. 

But that's dumb, for the second-order goods include the defeat of evil. Goods that derive from the struggle against evil. It's like saying that because challenges are built into sports and games, that reduces players to an attitude of passivity and fatalism in the face of challenges. But the obstacles exist to be overcome. They don't exist for their own sake. 

The teleological or instrumentalist conception of evil presupposed in theodicies, where evil is permitted by God for the sake of some higher end, is also open to the Kantian criticism that it negates the inherent world and dignity of persons by treating them as mere means to some end, rather than as ends in themselves. 

i) But Kantian strictures are not an unquestionable given. The onus lies on the Kantian deontologist to argue for his scruples. That's not something he can simply foist on others. 

ii) While, moreover, there's a floor to human rights, below which we shouldn't go, that doesn't mean everyone is entitled to the same treatment regardless of their behavior. People can forfeit their presumptive right not to be treated in certain ways. If a suicide bomber has designs on a kindergarten, he ought be stopped by any means necessary.  

I arrived at the conclusion that various recent theistic attempts to resolve the problem–including the skeptical theist response, and freewill and soul-making theodicies–fail to provide a satisfactory answer (at least with respect to certain types of evil). Absent any countervailing evidence in support of theistic belief, or without any good reason for continuing to uphold theism, "the only rational course of action left for the theist to take is to abandon theism and convert to atheism."

i) But there's enormous countervailing evidence.

ii) Evil is only a meaningful category within a Christian paradigm.

iii) Even if some theodicies fail to provide a satisfactory answer to certain types of evil, that hardly means they should be discounted for the types of evil they do explain. And what if a combination of theodicies suffices to cover all bases?

iv) Most philosophical positions face some recalcitrant objections. That's not unique to the problem of evil. If we jettison every philosophical position that has loose ends, there'd little left to believe. Although it's a bad sign when someone must introduce ad hoc loopholes to salvage his position, if you have good evidence that your position basically true, you should keep refining it. 

[Rowe] In the light of our own experience and knowledge of the variety and scale of human and animal suffering in our world, the idea that none of this suffering could have been prevented by an omnipotent being without thereby losing a greater good or permitting an evil at least as bad seems an extraordinary, absurd idea, quite beyond belief. 

Rowe's plausibility structure isn't something he can impose on everyone else. If he find it absurd, beyond belief, that's his opinion, but not everyone shares his impression. 

It may not be coincidental that Rowe was an apostate. Ironically, Christian idealism leads some professing Christians to abandon their faith, yet they wouldn't have that idealism  were it not for the faith they abandoned. Their conclusion negates their premise. So many apostates are like time-travelers in the Grandfather paradox, who wouldn't exist in the first place because they erase the future in which they originate. 

Rowe's almost instinctive reaction of incredulity about the claims of theodicists are wont to make (we might dub it, after Harry Frankfurt, a "bullshit detector") has proven to be an invaluable resource in my journey through the thickets of evil. What Rowe is contesting, and I with him still, is the strategy of reconciling God with evil by making appeal to greater goods, whether known or known, said to be yoked some necessary but unfortunate way to the myriad evils of the world. Even if some evils can be accounted for, what almost always gets placed in the mystery category are the "hard cases"... 

I, for one, don't think the hard cases must be relegated to the mystery box. 

Antitheodicy

I'm going to comment on this essay:

Trakakis, N.N. (2013) Antitheodicy, in The Blackwell Companion to the Problem of Evil (eds J. P. McBrayer and D. Howard-Snyder), John Wiley & Sons, Ltd, Oxford, UK.ch25

Trakakis takes the same antitheodical position as David Bentley Hart:

https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2008/05/tsunami-and-theodicy

Perhaps that's a reflection of the apophatic orientation in Eastern Orthodox theology.

What's interesting about this is how antitheodicy is the polar opposite of Calvinism. In Calvinism, everything happens for a particular reason. Every event makes a contribution to the whole. There's a blueprint for history, where each event is coordinated in a part/whole, means/ends relation. 

Even though most freewill theists believe in theodicy, there's a tension in their position, because they wish to avoid making God complicit in evil. Carried to a logical extreme, this results in the antitheodicy. 

Although he doesn't mention him, Berkouwer is a good illustration of this outlook. Early Berkouwer was a Reformed theologian, but he drifted. Late Berkouwer was a modernist theologian and antitheodicist. As I recall, Philip E. Hughes reacted in the same way. There are informative parallels between objections to Calvinism and objections to theodicy. The position of Trakakis et al. is a reductio ad absurdum of freewill theism. 

The faith of an atheist

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3PHoMWIlklA

Augustine's Rebuke Of Fideism

"Faustus has an evasive objection, which he no doubt thinks a most ingenious way of eluding the force of the clearest evidence of prophecy, but of which one is unwilling to take any notice, because answering it may give it an appearance of importance which it does not really possess. What could be more irrational than to say that it is weak faith which will not believe in Christ without evidence? Do our adversaries, then, believe in testimony about Christ? Faustus wishes us to believe the voice from heaven [in Matthew 3:17] as distinguished from human testimony. But did they hear this voice? Has not the knowledge of it come to us through human testimony? The apostle describes the transmission of this knowledge, when he says: 'How shall they call on Him on whom they have not believed? and how shall they believe on Him of whom they have not heard? and how shall they hear without a preacher? and how shall they preach except they be sent? As it is written, 'How beautiful are the feet of them who publish peace, who bring good tidings!'' Clearly, in the preaching of the apostles there was a reference to prophetic testimony. The apostles quoted the predictions of the prophets, to prove the truth and importance of their doctrines. For although their preaching was accompanied with the power of working miracles, the miracles would have been ascribed to magic, as some even now venture to insinuate, unless the apostles had shown that the authority of the prophets was in their favor." (Reply To Faustus The Manichaean,12:45)

Retreating into pious nonsense

I'll comment on this post:

https://philosophyandtheism.wordpress.com/2014/07/08/god-in-time-yes-temporal-god-no/

God is in time because there is no time unless God is in it.

Unfortunately, Shannon gives the reader no reason to agree with that claim, on its own terms. It's just a tendentious slogan. 

At best, he shifts gears to a different argument:

That’s a little Vos-Van Til talk, but we could infer the same from omnipresence and eternity. Eternity does not mean that God as God cannot touch temporality (again, unless you are entangled in Thomistic simplicism; but then you have created your own problems). It means that he fills all time, just as omnipresence doesn’t mean that God cannot be in places (spatially located); it means that he fills all places. This is an unbiblical non sequitur: He fills all time, therefore he cannot be in time. So is this: He fills all space, therefore he cannot be in a place.

It doesn't even occur to Shannon that his comparison might backfire: just as omnipresence doesn't mean God literally fills space, eternity doesn't mean God literally fills time. Shannon doesn't anticipate that move, or give the reader reason to deny it. 

So if we affirm, say, omnipresence, what then is condescension (which the divines worked into the confession—WCF 7.1)? If God fills all space, what does it mean that he ‘comes down’? To where does he come down? Well, to the top of Mt. Sinai (Ex 19), for example—even though being omnipresent, he was already there. He ‘comes down’ to covenant with Israel. Mt. Sinai is a particular place; and Ex 19 records the Lord’s presence there at a particular time. And so: if God fills all time, we may say that he condescends in order to covenant with his people at Mt. Sinai, at that time. The Lord speaks to Moses, then and there. 

That's a theophany or angelophany. A manifestation of God's presence. A manifestation is the effect of something else, and not the thing itself. 

Take a hologram. I could see and hear your holographic presence in my living room, but that doesn't mean you are physically present in my living room. It's a concrete representation. 

In principle, I might be dead by the time you receive the hologram. In that event, not only am I not actually in your living room, I'm not even offsite. 

And this presence of God with his people is no innovation; it is the telos of covenant history:

“Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man. He will dwell with them, and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them as their God.” Rev 21:3 

That presumably alludes to Christ dwelling with his people. That involves the communication of attributes. The usual Reformed construction is that what's said of each nature can be said of the person, but what's said of one nature can't be said of the other.

Christian realism

It’s important for Christians to have a realistic view of miracles. Of course, atheists regard a realistic miracle as oxymoronic. A contradiction in terms.

What do I mean by “realistic” in this context? Well, I’m not defining “realistic” the way W. V. Quine would define realistic. I mean “realistic” according to a Christian worldview.

Let’s begin with some comparisons. Is Narnia realistic? Is Middle-earth realistic? Is Poictesme realistic? They aren’t realistic compared to the actual world.

These are magical worlds. Magic is real in Narnia and Middle-earth. Magic is natural in Narnia and Middle-earth.

Narnia has its own rules. Magic is realistic given the narrative viewpoint which C. S. Lewis assumes in writing his stories.

That doesn’t mean anything goes in Narnia. Sometimes a creative writer resorts to a deus ex machina. Even in the fantasy genre, that’s an artistic flaw. It’s precisely because a creative writer is free to make the rules that he shouldn’t get one of his characters into a bind that only a deus ex machina can get him out of. A creative writer should have the foresight and consistency to make everything happen according to the rules of his imaginary world. Since he’s making up all the rules which govern his imagery world, he shouldn’t put himself in the position of having to make an exception to his own rules. Rather, his rules should cover every contingency.

Let’s take another comparison. The French film Donkeyskin (Peau d’Âne) is based on a 17C fairy tale. The film has a loosely medieval setting, viz. period attire, the Château de Chambord.

In the story, Catherine Deneuve has a fairy godmother. Her fairy godmother has magical powers. That’s realistic within the fairy tale framework.

However, at the end of the film, her father and fairy godmother arrive by helicopter. That’s a deliberate anachronism, for comic effect. In the world of Donkeyskin, fairy godmothers are realistic, but helicopters are unrealistic.

Likewise, when Peter Jackson filmed the battle of Helm’s Deep, he could have introduced predator drones, cruise missiles, and stealth bombers to help the good guys defeat the bad guys, but that would be out of place in the world of Middle-earth. In Middle-earth, wizards are realistic, but stealth bombers are unrealistic. That would mix up two different worlds. That violates the rules of Middle-earth.

Take another example: although I haven’t seen it, to judge by reviews, Cowboys and Aliens is a comedy of the absurd. It trades on the incongruity of science fiction and the Wild West, the 19C and advanced alien technology.

Let’s take a different example. It’s possible to write coherent time-travel stories that avoid the grandfather paradox and other antinomies. It’s possible to write a time-travel story in which everything happens just once.

Likewise, there are scientific models of time travel (or the equivalent), like stories set in an Everett universe (i.e. multiverse) or a Gödelian universe (i.e. rotating, non-Minkowski spacetime). However, SF novelists, directors, and screenwriters are usually too lazy to attempt coherent time-travel plots. That’s an artistic flaw. Time-travel may or may not be feasible in the actual world, but if you’re going to do a time-travel plot, try to make it realistic according to the physical laws you invent for the fictitious world you put it in.

Atheists like to attack miracles by concocting intentionally preposterous scenarios like Russell’s celestial teapot. But even a supernatural worldview has rules. It’s not a free for all.

Conversely, this is why it’s fallacious for atheists to define a miracle as a violation of natural laws. A world in which miracles occur is not a lawless universe. It’s still a rule-bound world, but it has its own set of rules.

That doesn’t mean God is bound by the rules. Rather, God made the rules in the first place. He doesn’t have to break his own rules, for the rules allow him to do whatever he wants. If he wanted to do something contrary to the rules, he’d put different rules in place from the get-go. God plays by the rules because the rules reflect his intentions. The rules don’t make him do anything or inhibit divine action. God isn’t a shortsighted creative writer who has to rewrite his own rules halfway through the story to extricate himself from an unforeseen dilemma.

There are theological systems that play into the atheistic stereotype. Take the hagiographic tradition of cephalophoric saints: decapitated Christians with talking heads. That’s supernaturally possible, but it’s not realistic.

Take Christians whose sacramentology requires the body of Christ to be physically present in a wafer. Indeed, simultaneously present in multiple wafers. Or take Christians who convert the risen Christ into a Marvel Comic Book superhero.

This is justified by a promiscuous appeal to divine omnipotence. But that’s unsound.

For instance, why was the tomb empty on Easter morning? How did Jesus escape?

Well, it’s possible that God changed his corpse into a butterfly that flew out the tomb through a crack in the stone. That would also account for the burial strips he left behind. Once he turned into a butterfly, the strips collapsed.

But although that’s possible, it’s not realistic–much less orthodox.

Imagine a Christian angrily denouncing my repudiation of the lepidopteran theory. “How dare you be so sceptical about God changing Jesus into a butterfly! There’s so much we don’t know about the Resurrection. And God is omnipotent. Who are you to dictate what God can do!”

No doubt God can do many things that surpass human imagination. But that doesn’t mean every supernatural explanation is equally plausible. What God can do and what God would do are two very different things.

Because miracles really happen, we need to take seriously the kind of world in which that happens. That’s not Alice in Wonderland.

Van Tilian Old Calendarists

In this post I’m going to comment on some recent criticisms of James Anderson and Greg Welty by Nate Shannon and Vern Poythress.

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).

N. Shannon, “Christianity and Evidentialism: Van Til and Locke on Facts and Evidence,” WTJ 74 (2012).

i) So philosophical argumentation is, by definition, non-Christian? Whatever happened to “taking every thought captive”?

ii) Didn’t Van Til say things like: “there is an absolutely valid argument for the existence of God and for the truth of Christian theism,” “the argument may be poorly stated, and may never be adequately stated. But in itself the argument is absolutely sound”?

Doesn’t this suggest Van Til was convinced that there was, in principle, a rigorously formulatable version of TAG? Doesn’t he present this as a hypothetical ideal which Christian apologists should aim for, even if they fall short? 

iii) Does TAG merely “claim that Christianity is true, and everything contrary to it false”? A claim in contrast to a reasoned argument? So it just comes down to competing claims? What about the claim that atheism, Buddhism, Mormonism, Islam, Scientology, or Hare Krishna (fill in the blank) is true, and everything contrary to it is false? 

iv) Likewise, suppose Tipton and Shannon are correct in their interpretation of Van Til. So what? Is the purpose of apologetics to stay faithful to Van Til, or to defend the faith? The attitude of Tipton and Shannon reminds me of the Old Calendarists, who felt it was impious to deviate even slightly from Russian Orthodox tradition. Apologetics is not an end in itself, but a means to an end. The objective of apologetics is not to defend Van Til’s methodology, but to defend Christian theology.  Van Til is not the object of faith.

v) They haven’t learned the lesson of the Peter Enns affair. His claims can’t be allowed to go unchallenged. They need to be directly rebutted. How well did the Tipton/Shannon/Oliphint strategy work at out at WTS? How would invoking “covenantal apologetics” be effective?

vi) I skimmed Shannon’s blog (the entries from 10/11-2/13). From my admittedly cursory review, Shannon appears to be preoccupied with methodological purity. In that respect he falls into a trap all-to-common among Van Tilians: he devotes nearly all his time to talking about how to do apologetics rather than doing what he talks about. Leaves without fruit (Lk 13:6-9).

It’s like designing the perfect racecar, when you have no intention of ever racing the car. The car is always in the garage, as you keep refining your technology. Something to look at rather than drive. Something to admire. Buff and polish. But heaven forbid you should ever do anything with it.

v) Van Til talked about the metaphysics of knowledge. James and Greg are turning that programmatic claim into an actual, full-fledged argument. Redeeming the IOUs. That makes a significant advance in Van Tilian apologetics.

They are rewarded for their efforts by aghast expressions. How could they be so presumptuous as to stray beyond Van Tilian flash cards to unpack the claim and furnish supporting arguments!

Now I’m going to comment on Shannon’s recent “Necessity, Univocism, and the Triune God: A Response to Anderson and Welty.” (I simply copy/pasted excerpts from a PDF. This resulted in some transcriptional infelicities, but I won’t take the time to tidy that up.)

To put it another way, a proposition is essentially 'about' something, as AW note; propositions are essentially intentional (333-5). (This quality of intentionality or 'aboutness' serves AW as the link between propositions and personal minds.) So a proposition is essentially parasitic on whatever it is about. Apart from the thing it is about, a proposition has no referent and no meaning and thus cannot bear truth-value.6 The law of identity is an attribution, a de dicto sort of thing, of de re necessity to the state of affairs A=A, but the attribution itself—the law, the proposition—can have only de dicto necessity.

In an attempt to make them more like the sorts of objects that can have necessity, AW affirm that the laws of logic exist; but this is irrelevant. Real existence, particularly mental, intentional real existence, does not change the fact that the modality of propositions, just like their truth-value, is derivative and dependent upon a state of affairs distinct from any proposition 'about' that state of affairs. Quite the contrary. Affirming the mental existence of propositions in fact emphasizes the intentional and thus derivative nature of propositions and confirms that the modality of a proposition is merely de dicto.

Suppose God thinks to himself, “I am omnipotent,” or “I am the Son of the Father.”

Are divinely self-referential and/or intratrinitarian propositions derivative, parasitic, de dicto entities? Do they lack de re necessity?

If there is no possible world in which the law of noncontradiction is false, it does not follow necessarily that the LNC is true in all possible worlds. For to not be false, a proposition does not have to exist; a proposition might not exist at all and still be not false. But to not fail to be true, it must exist.

What does it even mean to say “a proposition might not exist at all”?

According to the doctrines of divine simplicity and aseity, God's mind and thoughts are identical to his being; the only necessarily existing thing, because God did not have to create…

Actually, isn’t the theory of divine simplicity in tension with divine freedom? Doesn’t divine simplicity make it difficult to finesse a principled distinction between necessary truths and contingent truths? Between intrinsic and extrinsic relations? Between what God is and what he wills?

…is God himself; thus God does not necessarily think anything other than himself. No thought content can be imputed to God essentially, in the possible world which is only God, short of implying that the thought content is identifiable with the being of God. Neither the proposition in question, nor any of the laws of logic, are part of the essential being of God: they are not God.

But that’s a false dichotomy, for possible worlds can be a subset of God’s self-knowledge. God knows what God can do. Possible worlds are variations on divine omnipotence.

Univocal mind. Univocal terms imply unitarian ontology.

How does that implication follow? Does the Father have a univocal concept of the Son? If so, does that imply unitarianism rather than Trinitarianism?

Wouldn’t it make more sense for Shannon to claim that univocal terms imply a pantheistic ontology? Of course, I don’t think that’s correct, but if he’s saying univocity blurs the Creator/creature distinction, wouldn’t pantheism be the corresponding category, rather than unitarianism?

 AW use  “mind,” “thought,” and “proposition” univocally. In their argument, all of these terms, familiar to us in the created realm, in the context of our knowledge and familiarity, are applied univocally to the mind and being of the uncreated God. When we say “a thought requires a mind,” what do we mean by mind? If no distinction appears, the use of the term suggests that there is one kind of mind; and of that kind, AW argue, there must be at least one which exists in all possible worlds, but that 'necessarily existing' mind is essentially of a kind with minds that exist in only some possible worlds.

He’s committing the word-concept fallacy. The fact that the same word is used doesn’t mean one can’t draw conceptual distinctions between the nature of God’s mind and the nature of man’s mind. At the same time, they share some things in common–which makes them both mental.

The problem with couching possible worlds in terms of logical necessity should be obvious: it is tautologous to say that the laws of logic are true in all possible worlds, and it is pure stipulation. It clearly indicates that we have reached the explanatory limits of this explanatory category.

i) To begin with, what’s wrong with reaching explanatory bedrock? Isn’t that inevitable at some point in the analysis? The only question is whether we stop prematurely.

ii) Moreover, it’s not tautologous, but linear. It’s not saying the same thing in different words, but explicating and grounding one thing by reference to something else.

In other words, possible worlds delineate, by pure stipulation, the boundaries for metaphysical speculation. We who use them for that purpose endorse this surrender to the laws of logic as the most basic and non-negotiable principles of intelligibility; we agree to play by those rules because we can neither find nor imagine any less controversial ones.

James and Greg aren’t treating the laws of logic as the most basic and non-negotiable principles of intelligibility. Rather, they are nesting the laws of logic in the mind of God. So there is an underlying explanation. Again, we need to distinguish between the metaphysical level at which the laws of logic subsist and the explanatory level.

The problem of a univocal notion of necessity comes to the fore in of apparent paradox. In 2 Kings 6 an axehead floats; it rises to the surface of the waters of the Jordan river.

i) First of all, that would be a contingent fact, not a necessary truth.

ii) Second, how is that paradoxical? The miracle involves changing the natural, normal conditions in some way or another. Could involve changing the properties of water into something that’s not water, or changing the composition of the axehead, or changing the relationship between water and a heavier object by interfering with gravity at that particular time and place. We could speculate on how it happens. But I don’t think it’s paradoxical.

iii) How can he even use that example if he rejects univocity? In that event, what do the terms refer to? What’s an axehead?

In John 2 Jesus changes water to wine.

i) A contingent fact, not a necessary truth.

ii) How is that paradoxical? It’s not saying water has the properties of wine. It’s not simultaneously ascribing contradictory properties of the same object. Rather, one kind of thing is changed into another kind of thing. Where’s the paradox? Unless we say change itself is paradoxical, a la Zeno, McTaggart, et al. but that wouldn’t be confined to miracles.

 On a larger scale, there are the problems of freedom and election and of providence and evil. All of these are thought to be at least apparently paradoxical. And the reason for this perception, and for the tremendous efforts it evokes toward resolution, is that it is assumed that notions of logical relations and of logical necessity operate univocally; it is assumed that they apply equally to man and to God.

The alleged problem of freedom and election or providence and evil isn’t logical, but moral or metaphysical. We’re not denying the God unconditionally elects some while reprobating others. We’re not denying that God providentially governs all events. The terms are not ambiguous.

It is assumed that the laws of logic, as we articulate them and have come to understand them, obtain identically or are equally true in all possible worlds, even in eternity past, before creation. If, however, we confess first the unique ontological self-sufficiency of the triune creator God, and, indeed, the (moral) authority and (epistemological and soteriological) necessity of divine self-disclosure in Scripture, then we always have ready in hand the derivative, dependent, and partial nature of the laws of logic. There is no possible world in which an iron axehead floats; This one did.

Why is there no possible world in which an iron axehead floats? Where’s the argument? What makes his assertion even prima facie plausible?

This is a true or even only an apparent contradiction only if it is assumed that our logical tools exist independently of God, and apply equally to creator and creature.10

i) Who said a floating axehead was an apparent (much less true) contradiction? At best, it would only be contradictory if ordinary conditions obtain. But the miracle presupposes a new and additional factor: God doing something that alters the usual conditions.

ii) He also fails to distinguish between a logical proposition and a concrete object.

It's likely that the incentive for positing these second order thoughts in the divine mind, distinct from content rich first order thoughts, is largely the preservation of the purely formal nature of the laws of logic, which is crucial to their existing (or being true) necessarily. God must think the laws of logic because the laws of logic exist necessarily. So this much is clear: AW are theologizing by the sheer force of logical necessity alone.

In an attempt to maintain pure formality and sustain the notion of necessity they've built their argument upon, AW claim that on some level distinct from his first order thoughts, God thinks exclusively about the form of his first order thoughts. That claim depends on the separability of form and content in God's first order thoughts, which is to lean on a broken reed. For second order thoughts to be purely formal, they must have as their content only the abstracted logical relations of God's first order thoughts. And if the content of first and second order thoughts is distinct, isn't the obvious implication that there are distinct first and second order divine minds?13 In that case the second order thoughts and the second order mind, rather than the first order, are more properly said to exist necessarily, as they only are purely formal.

And so why not say that God essentially thinks only the laws of logic, and these give form to his other thoughts, should he have any other thoughts? What is God at this point anyway—is he not merely logic thinking itself? Or, put it this way: what now of God's first order thoughts? What are those thoughts about? What is the stuff that God subtracts from his thoughts in order to think about them qua thoughts? And if only thoughts about thoughts qua thoughts are necessary, why suppose that God has first order thoughts at all? Aren't these thoughts contingent? The notion of thoughts about thoughts as thoughts in the divine mind is incoherent.

Doesn’t Trinitarianism imply second-order thoughts? What about this thought: “I am the Son of the Father”?

It is also pure fiction, forced upon AW by their commitment to a univocal notion of necessity, and standing in the place where AW should have been led to consult the riches of historical theology in which one finds orthodox protestantism consistently denying that God thinks discursively, infers one thing from another, or has propositional knowledge.14

i) Really? Orthodox Protestantism denies that God has propositional knowledge? How did he pull that out of the hat?

ii) There is no process of inference in the divine mind. No temporal succession. But God timelessly understands timeless implications.

iii) The standard Reformed position is that God doesn’t learn about the world from the world. God is not dependent on the world for anything he knows. Indeed, God has nothing to learn in the first place. God knows the world indirectly by knowing his plan for the world. In that sense, God lacks inferential knowledge of the world.

But I don’t think James and Greg deny that in their paper.

However, God's self-knowledge involves God's timeless knowledge of all logical relations.

This leads to a third theological concern. According to the doctrine of divine simplicity, God's thoughts are identical to his being. Indeed, AW think this much is true of any mind: “. . . thoughts belong essentially to the minds that produce them” (336 n.31). So if we think thoughts that are essential to God's being—exactly those thoughts that God thinks about his own thoughts as thoughts—are we not participating in the divine essence? The same thoughts—univocal thoughts—belong essentially to our minds and to God's mind. Given simplicity, in other words, unless we deny that our thoughts are ever identical to God's, we flirt with pantheism or apotheosis.

That confuses knowing the same truths with being what you know. Must I be a tree to know something about trees?

Or, hoping to maintain simplicity and the ontological distinction between God and creation, we may say that the laws of logic are abstract objects existing independently of both God and man.15 In that case, perhaps God knows the laws of logic in all possible worlds because he is omniscient in all possible worlds and the laws of logic exist in all possible worlds, not because he essentially thinks the laws of logic.

Of course, James and Greg expressly reject that model.

Even more troubling is this question: would we be able to affirm in this case that God's Word is essentially—necessarily, in all possible worlds—self-consistent and trustworthy?

If anything, it’s it harder to maintain the trustworthy, self-consistent character of God’s word when he rejects univocity. Doesn’t that mean the Bible is just partially logical, partially true? What we have in Scripture isn’t verity, but verisimilitude.

Traditionally there are three choices in terms of the meaning of theological language: equivocal, univocal, and analogical. AW implicitly reject the thesis that language and concepts are equivocal and say nothing intelligible about God. For readers of this journal, this is uncontroversial. Enjoying equally broad consensus in the history of Christian theology is a rejection of univocism: when we say “God is good” and “John is good,” it is clear that the predicates are not identical.16  Orthodox protestant thought takes theological language analogically and grounded in verbal divine self-revelation.

Analogy and univocity aren’t necessarily opposed. You can have a theory of analogical predication which allows for univocity if you compare two things at the relevant level of generality or abstraction.

On the basis of the voluntary self-revelation of God, we have true knowledge, and yet, since God is incomprehensible to the creature, our knowledge is never exhaustive. Add to this the metaphysics of the Creator-creature relationship: the creation is a contingent image of the Creator. All things are from him, to him, and through him (Rom 11:36, indicating aseity); and everything that was created was created by and through the Word (Col 1:6, John 1:3, indicating the triune economy of the act of creation). So we understand our theological knowledge and categories as applying to God truly but incompletely, imitatively and derivatively. So our concepts are analogical.  Not only the nature of the relation as analogical, but the order figures in as well: God is the original or the archetype, and we—and our knowledge—are the analogue, or the ectype. As in any analogy, there is an original and there is an analogue, and the order is irreversible—in the Creator-creature analogy more than in any other. God is the original; we and the created order are derivative. In sum, the irreducible ontological distinction between Creator and creature, and precisely this archtypal-ectypcal or original-analogue order, give us revelationally grounded, analogical theological predication. We have true knowledge, so we reject equivocism; but because of the 'ontological distance' between the Creator and the creature, our knowledge is ever partial; so we reject univocism.

There’s a sense in which I can agree with this. However, Shannon is simply using buzzwords like “ectypal” and “analogical.” He’s not giving the reader a model of analogical predication or ectypal knowledge. He’s not fleshing out the concepts. And he’s skating over the complexities and difficulties of articulating a satisfactory theory of analogy. He attacks James and Greg on philosophical grounds, but he doesn’t present a philosophically rigorous alternative. Instead, he just retreats into pious formulas. These don’t solve any problems. They are merely verbal placeholders. All the hard work remains to be done–assuming it can be done.

So in Christian thought, triunity is more basic than either threeness or oneness…

That’s modalistic. That makes Trinitarian oneness and threeness secondary to something more primary. A projection or epiphenomenon of something more basic.

Now I’m going to comment on some statements by Vern Pothress, in his forthcoming book on Logic: A God-Centered Approach to the Foundation of Western Thought.

Before I comment, I’d like to say that to his credit, Poythress isn’t one of those Van Tilians who spends all his time talking about apologetic method. Poythress does practice apologetics in books like Redeeming Science, Redeeming Sociology, Inerrancy and Worldview, Inerrancy and the Gospels.

Something similar to this argument can be found in James N. Anderson and Greg Welty, “The Lord of Non-Contradiction: An Argument for God from Logic,” Philosophia Christi 13:2 (2011): 321–338. But it appears to me that this article does not take into account the presence of analogy and the Creator-creature distinction in logical reasoning about God (see chapter 24 below).

If he’s saying the Trinitarian relations are merely analogous to logical relations, that’s a problem, for that would generate three layers of reality: Trinitarian relations, logical relations (which are somehow distinct from Trinitarian relations), and concreta. If logical relations are analogous to Trinitarian relations, then they have a realty that’s distinct from God, without being creatures. Entities which are analogous to Trinitarian relations, but not identical. So what's their metaphysical status?

The problem, in relation to the ontology of logic, is that theological analogy usually involves a contrast between transcendent reality and mundane reality. And, presumably, logical relations would be on the transcendent (=divine) side of the distinction–although they’d have concrete analogates. If, however, logical relations are merely analogous to the Trinity, then what are they? What’s their ontological status? Are they transcendent, but different from God? Are they a tertium quid? Not quite divine and not quite mundane?

If any concrete piece of reasoning is, by theological definition, an imperfect creaturely representation of uncreated logic.

Isn’t the claim that “any concrete piece of reasoning is, by theological definition, an imperfect creaturely representation of uncreated logic” itself an imperfect creaturely representation of uncreated logic? So is that claim an imperfect representation of a truth?

We need to distinguish between logical arguments, and arguments for the ontology of logic. Needless to say, Greg and James are using ectypal logical arguments, in the sense that their arguments reflect their human understanding of logic; but that's distinct from what they are arguing for or arguing about. They are arguing for or about the archetypal logical truths or logical relations constituted by God’s mind.

Can we have one term, father, that applies both to God and to human creatures who are biological fathers? Clearly we can. But God’s fatherhood and human fatherhood are not on the same level. So the relation between the two is one of analogy rather than strict identity.

One problem with this comparison is that formal logic is fact free (“topic neutral”). A formal system of entailment relations that doesn’t make constantive claims. Rather, it provides an abstract framework into which you can plug factual premises or truth-claims. Formal logic isn’t comparing one thing with another, is it? We need to distinguish logic from what we do with logic. James and Greg aren’t talking about the content which we plug into logical syllogisms, but the necessary metaphysical system of entailments.

He seems to be confusing whether logic is worldview neutral with whether logic is content neutral? There’s an obvious sense in which the ontology of logic is worldview sensitive, viz. conceptualism, constructivism, fictionalism, platonic realism. These go with different views of reality. And you have the whole effort at a naturalized logic, to match a naturalistic or materialistic worldview.

In that sense, logic is not neutral. But of course, James and Greg weren’t arguing for neutrality at that level. Just the opposite. They were presenting a theistic foundation for logic.

Conversely, that kind of “neutrality” is very different from topic neutrality.

Is It Sinful To Produce Or Want Evidence Like The Shroud Of Turin?

Here's something I wrote in another thread, in response to somebody who cited John 20:29 against my view of the Shroud of Turin:

Is Craig a fideist?

William Lane Craig’s recent answer to a question is getting some buzz in the blogosphere:

http://www.reasonablefaith.org/site/PageServer?pagename=q_and_a

His answer raises the issue of whether he’s a fideist. On the face of it, it seems absurd to suggest that Craig is a fideist. Few men have done as much or more to argue for their faith.

Still, a hostile critic might say that’s deceptive. In his heart of hearts, Craig is a fideist who merely exploits reason and evidence to rationalize his fideism, to make his fideism more outwardly respectable, to snare unsuspecting converts. So it’s just a charade or calculated ploy.

Of course, that’s the least charitable interpretation of his motives. In this post I’m less concerned with dissecting Craig’s position than addressing the issue at a more general level.

One way of testing a position is to assume it’s true for the sake of argument, then consider what the evidence would look like in that event. If true, what does the position entail? If true, what’s consistent or inconsistent with that position?

A fair-minded atheist should conduct that exercise. If he refuses, then he’s not a fair-minded atheist.

Suppose you’re an atheist. You don’t believe in the Holy Spirit. Still, in order to evaluate Craig’s claim, you should grant his premise for the sake of argument and then consider the consequences of that postulate.

The Holy Spirit is a person of the Godhead. Omniscient, omnipotent, and so on.

If the Holy Spirit exists, is he able to instill in Christians an unfalsifiable faith in Christianity? Can the Holy Spirit create that mental state in Christians? Off-hand, I can’t think of any antecedent objection to that possibility.

Assuming that he could do that, would he do that? Beyond the abstract possibility, is that a plausible suggestion–given the premise?

Well, most Christians in church history don’t have access to reams of corroborative evidence. Likewise, most Christians in church history don’t have the aptitude to formulate rigorous arguments for the faith. So it’s not improbable that if the Holy Spirit exists, he’d give Christians a degree of conviction that’s not dependent on their brilliance or erudition.

In order to reject that appeal, an atheist would have to disprove the existence of the Holy Spirit, or demonstrate that his existence is unlikely. So an atheist can’t justifiably dismiss Craig’s appeal to the self-authenticating witness of the Spirit out-of-hand. He’d have to go back a step and successfully challenge the operating premise. For unless he knows or has good reason to believe there is no Holy Spirit, then he can’t presume that Craig’s appeal special pleading.