Philosophy, the Great Cheat, and the Great Delusion

         Even though they rightly chastise their students for question begging, philosophers themselves always beg the question.  They always cheat.  If they did not cheat, if they did not beg the question, they could not do philosophy at all.  Philosophers begin with a colossal cheat and cannot proceed without it.  They beg the question, THE question, the question before all questions, right from the start. 

         Here is the question:  “Are mind and senses together a reliable way of understanding the world?

         In order to answer that question properly, in order to answer it without begging it, philosophers must not use the mind and senses in question.  But they do it any way.  They know that not to cheat here is not to begin.  In the choice between beginning with a cheat or not beginning at all, they elect to cheat.  They construct an entire system of reason on the foundation of a begged question, which is the philosopher’s version of the house built on sand.  Theirs is a system of reason based on unreason, even anti-reason.  Theirs is a rationality that is irrational at the root.  They start with a non-starter and march boldly forward nevertheless.  They build, in effect, a metaphysical Potemkin village, something far less profound and substantial than what meets the eye.

         Not to do so brings their entire project to a halt.  To acknowledge that initial cheat, and to refuse to go forward until it is resolved, is to bring the philosophic endeavor to an abrupt end at the very beginning, and that they will not permit.

         They do not permit it because to the great cheat they add the great delusion, which is the pose and pretense that human creatures are careful, precise, and objective seekers after the truth.  They are not.  They are wicked, sinful, self-glorifying sinners whose heart, Calvin rightly observed, is an idol factory.  It displaces and replaces God at every possible turn.  The philosophic impulse, like everything else about us, is fallen.  That’s because the will to power is stronger in us than the will to truth or to validity.

         If the philosophers have such knowledge about their crippled, indeed morally dead, selves, they deny it or suppress it.  If they do not have such knowledge, they are even more woefully ignorant and self-deceived than we yet have said.  They beg the question not only concerning a starting point, but also concerning themselves.  To the question “Even assuming that mind and senses are reliable, am I myself to be trusted in this philosophical pursuit?" they must begin by assuming that they are indeed capable or else not begin at all.  Somehow, that they have cheated at the outset of the philosophical enterprise by begging the question of mind and senses does not does not lead them to conclude that they are cheaters who cannot be trusted.  No; instead they cheat and then cheat again:  If they know they have cheated just to begin, they are deceivers and cannot be trusted.  If they do not know that they have cheated just to begin, they are incompetent and cannot be trusted.  Nevertheless, they trust themselves to begin.

         Do not follow them in their mistake, in their whirling self-delusion.

         Philosophers are like all other human creatures.  They are desperately fallen and deeply wicked.  They are not objective and truth-seeking analysts.  No one is.  Philosophers are subject to the same debilitating noetic effects of sin as are we all.  Ignorant of, or defiant of, the fundamental truth about us, philosophers march boldly and publically forward, spinning out false universes in their minds, hoping to lure you into the vortex of their delusions, mocking those who refuse to follow, but doing so only on the basis of the house of cards they have constructed for themselves and the lies they believe about themselves.  They not only misconstrue the world, they misconstrue themselves and God, which is utterly fatal to wisdom.  They do not know what Calvin knew:  Wisdom is comprised of two things:  knowledge of God and knowledge of ourselves.  Calvin knew that such knowledge is a package deal.  Those two foci of knowledge come tied closely together and are gotten only through Christ, Who is both truly God and authentically human.  He is known only through the historical events narrated and explained in Scripture, which for their work philosophers reject.  Were they to accept Scripture as the basis for their thinking, they would not be philosophers but theologians.

         In a display of unmitigated hubris, some philosophers even think they can reason their way up to God Himself.  They think that they can, simply by means of the mind and senses they cheated to use, construct a system of thought that encompasses and rightly understands the world, themselves, and even things beyond the world.  Regarding the last, they do not know that whatever they reach by such means is not God.  They do not know that God cannot be reached; He reaches.  We cannot get from here to there; He can and does get from there to here.  To know Him requires revelation and regeneration.  It requires raw, undiluted, redeeming and transforming grace, which is no part of philosophy.

         How to avoid begging these questions I have explained elsewhere.  Here is but one:

http://www.reformedandconservative.com/2011/06/revelation-as-event-knowing-god-without.html

         (An aside:  some philosophers think they can justify their use of mind and senses because mind and senses can be shown to work.  But that is simply to mistake pragmatic preference and utility for metaphysical warrant, which it is not and never can be.  It also simply continues to beg the question because both to determine and to measure utility requires mind and senses.) 

       

Getting Knowledge, or The Difference Between Certainty and Certitude.

         I must do now what scholars rarely do, but should do:  I must define my terms.  That way, even if you disagree with what I think, at least you'll know what I mean.

         "Knowledge" is justified belief.  That is, knowledge is consent to a true idea because the reasons for it are sound.  Consent to things true for the wrong reasons, or for no reasons whatever, is not knowledge but luck -- dumb luck.

         "Truth" is the agreement of our ideas with reality.  If our ideas comport with how things really are, they are true.  If they do not, they are false.

         "Objective" is when the object under review controls your thoughts about it. "Subjective" is when the subject doing the investigation controls his or her own thoughts about the object.  "Objective" receives from the object; "subjective" imposes upon the object.

         "Certitude" is how sure we feel about a thing.

         "Certainty" is how sure a thing is in itself, regardless of how we feel about it. 

         Regarding the last two notions, I need to say more.

         Having great amounts of certitude does not make a thing certain.  Having no certitude about a thing does not make it uncertain.  We often mistakenly think so because we confuse these two concepts, which I'd like to keep separate.  Because we conflate or confuse these concepts, we sometimes do things that increase our certitude about an idea and think that by doing so we have increased its certainty when we have not.  Certitude is something about us; certainty is something about it.  That's another way of saying that it's possible to feel quite sure about things that are utterly false and unsure about things that are objectively true.  Think here about all the centuries we thought the earth was both flat and the center of the universe.  To our detriment, we sometimes confuse and conflate things that are different, things like certitude and certainty.  Our task, in part, is to keep separate things separate.  Certainty and certitude are two such things.

         I think that when many persons complain about uncertainty they actually are complaining about imperfect certitude.  Therefore, when they set about trying to fix what troubles them, they do things that make them feel more certitude, but that don't really strengthen certainty.  Some appeals to authority and to infallibility strike me as just such aids-to-certitude masquerading as aids-to-certainty.  Those appeals are futile simply because we human beings cannot produce certainty.  Producing certainty is a Divine, not a human, prerogative.  Only God can make things certain, and He does so by establishing those things Himself.  What God has established is certain -- whether we know those things or not, whether we agree with those things or not, and whether we have certitude about them or not.

         Because I am a Christian and move in predominantly Christian circles, when I explain here the difference between certitude and certainty, and the way some folks strengthen the former while thinking they are strengthening the latter, two groups come to mind:  Protestants who misapply the doctrine of Biblical inerrancy, and Catholics who misapply the doctrine of infallibility.  I am not here arguing against either doctrine.  I am remarking about their misuse and about the motivations that seem sometimes to lurk behind that misuse as its operative and generative principle.  (To be fair, I lay exactly the same charge, and perhaps more, against most of the scientists with whom I have ever spoken.  Indeed, I know of no group of scholars more inclined to conflate certainty and certitude than modern scientists.)

        To move one step forward:  The only good reason for believing a thing is because it's true; the only good reason for rejecting something is because it's false.  That much is simple, but not easy.  It's sometimes hard to tell which one is which, and that can be enormously unsettling.  It undermines our certitude, which makes us deeply uncomfortable.  Because we humans have a strong distaste for ambiguity, especially on the issues that are most important to us, we don't want to stay in that uncomfortable and unsettling position.  To escape it, we sometimes produce specious reasons for believing things, reasons that comfort us, but that aren't sound reasons for belief, and that don't establish certainty. 

         Short of Heaven, full certitude is probably beyond us, even if we pay close attention to Scripture, to tradition, and to the Church.  But I, for one, will not complain to God about that.  If that is the world He left us, it is enough.

         Knowing is required of us by God Himself.  We are commanded by Christ to love God with all our heart, soul, mind and strength (Matt. 22: 37).  When Jesus said that, He was quoting an Old Testament passage (Deut. 6: 5) -- a passage to which He added a word -- and the word He added was "mind."  Minds are for knowing, and knowing is more than repeating what we've been told or taught.  As a matter of Christian stewardship, we are to make the best use we can of our minds.  By means of them we are to know -- each of us.  Our task is to know things as they really are, and not how we'd like them to be, because how we'd like them to be does not make them more certain but simply gives us a heart-warming sense of certitude.  As regards you and me, this shortcoming is not the shortcoming primarily of others.  We need to see it as our own and to guard against it diligently.   You will know yourself in greatest danger of opting for certitude (how you feel) rather than for certainty (how God has actually worked) in those moments when your system is under attack.

         To quote Tennyson:

"Our little systems have their day;

They have their day and cease to be:

They are but broken lights of thee,

And thou, O Lord, art more than they." 

   

Knowing God . . . for People Like Us

“ Hear the word of the Lord, ye children of Israel:  for the Lord hat a controversy with the inhabitants of the land, because there is no truth, no mercy, no knowledge of God.”

Hosea 4: 1, 2

“I am savagely attacked . . . because I do not adore Aristotle, but there is another one whom I adore, who promises not vain and frivolous conjectures about treacherous things which are good for nothing and have no solid foundation, but a knowledge of Himself.”

Lorenzo Valla, The Profession of the Religious

“Of all the writings of Cicero those from which I often received the most powerful inspiration are the three books . . . On the Nature of the Gods . . . When I read these passages I often have compassion on his fate and grieve in silent sorrow that this man did not know the true God . . . The ancients, and particularly Cicero, may pardon me if I say:  this great man devoted much energy to compiling what, it seems to me, ought not to have been written and, as I think, ought not to be read either. . . If I have said all this of my Cicero, whom I admire in many ways, what do you expect me to say of others?”

            Petrarch, On His Own Ignorance

“The Word became flesh,” and when He did, His own people dragged Him to the slaughter.  To our great humiliation, we ourselves are made from the same stuff as were His killers.

Epistemologically speaking, that changes everything.  It takes away the self-congratulatory delusion that we are objective, reliable, honorable seekers after Truth, that we are full of teachable good will and clear thinking.   We are not.  Even Nietzsche understood this about us:  The will to power is stronger than the will to reason or truth.  When Truth showed up, we killed Him.  God deigned to walk among us, to reveal Himself in human flesh, in human history, and in human terms.  In response, we deigned to annihilate Him.  That today He lives among us at all is no thanks to us.  We meant it to stop.  He meant it to reconcile his death-dealing enemies to Himself.  His plan worked.  Ours did not.  Graciously, He overwhelmed it and overturned it.

Without the revelation of our personal hatred for God and His ways that surfaced in our response to His incarnation, we might have gone on forever thinking that we are well-suited to knowing the world both properly and well, and through it, by means of our own ratiocenation, knowing the God Who made it.  Be deceived no longer.  The Truth Himself finds no welcome here other than what He makes.  Apart from that Divine making, He finds only enemies and death.

But whenever He wills, we cease to be our murderous and truth-suppressing selves.  By His grace, He makes us His friends, the recipients of redemptive and renewing mercy, which alone makes knowing Him possible.  Knowledge of God is mediated by saving grace because to know Him as God is to know Him as Redeemer.  If you do not know Him as Redeemer, you do not know Him. 

The redemptive Word of God had to come to us.  We could not, and would not, go to Him.  When He did come, He came as a human Person in history, as a Storyteller, as the chief and pivotal Character in the narrative drama of redemption -- not as a metaphysician, much less a metaphysical disquisition, something for which He seems to have precious little tolerance and of which to He seems to make precious little use.

Or, if Polanyi suits you better, if there is no subject who knows, there is no knowing.  The fundamental fact about the subjects who think they know God is their decisive rejection of Him and His revelation, which they suppress and exchange for lies and for gods of their own making.  The fallen, human subject who knows (or thinks he does) is very far from objective.  Indeed, there exist no such persons, especially when what they claim to know is nothing less than God.

It seems not to have occurred to those who adopt the philosophical path to knowing God that truth results in freedom.  Freedom does not result in truth.  You don't free yourself and then find truth.  The Truth must free you or in bondage you must remain.  Truth, you will recall, is a He, not an it (John 14: 6).  Truth Himself must liberate you from you.  Until He does, you are hopelessly lost and locked away in an error you cannot escape, no matter which philosopher’s path you walk.  The Biblical understanding of truth is not the allegedly timeless truths of nature or of metaphysics, but the narrative of God’s historical actions, the gospel.  Natural theology has its creed, but it is not the creed of Biblical Christianity, the creed of God’s grace.   

Neither Evidentialism nor Presuppositionalism

Willie Mays once made a dazzling over-the-shoulder catch of a fly ball off the bat of Vic Wertz.  That event is not the product of my mind.  I did not invent it.  Wertz would have flown out to Mays even if my mind never existed.  My mind cannot alter that event at all.  While I can know about that event, my mind is powerless to generate that event, to change that event, or to eradicate that event.  That event is independent of me.  It simply is what it is, regardless of what I might think about it.  Its reality as an event is settled.  It happened.  It happened whether I accept it or not, whether I know it or not, whether I like it or not, and whether I think about it or not.  It happened.

Obviously, the fans at the Polo Grounds that day did not invent Mays’s catch.  Rather, they responded to it.  They responded with wild, cheering approval.  It happened; they responded:  event, response.

With regard to that catch, I am in much the same position as the fans that day.  While I did not and cannot mentally produce Mays’s catch, I can respond to it.  I can applaud that event.  I can try to apply it productively.  For example, if I were a ball player, I might work to acquire Mays’ defensive skills, examining carefully how the feat was accomplished and might be repeated.  If I were a father or a coach, I might try to teach those skills to my child or to the Little League team I coach because Mays has shown us the remarkable heights to which defensive skills can be taken and the ways in which they might be memorably and wonderfully applied.

In other words, while I might alter the way that event is applied or not applied in my life, what I do with that event, if anything, has nothing at all to do with the reality of that event.  It is real; it happened.

Although I was not present at the ballpark that day, I know about that event.  I know about that event because a camera operator recorded it; because sports writers wrote about it; and because thousands of the fans who witnessed it talked about it.  The pitch, the swing, the ball’s flight, and Mays’s catch all were witnessed and recorded.   Of course, while someone else’s witnessing that event helps makes my knowing of it possible, the witnesses do not make the event.  They witnessed it; they recorded it; they passed it on.  But the reality of that historical event is independent of them, too.  They did not make it happen.  They witnessed what happened.  Witnesses do not make the event possible; the event makes witnessing possible.   

By contrast, assumptions, deductions, and presuppositions are all very different from the sorts of events I am describing, and they have a very different relationship with my mind than does an event like the Mays/Wertz event mentioned above, which is not a mind-generated event -- and that is the fundamentally important distinction:  One event is generated by my mind and the other is not.

Assumptions, deductions, and presuppositions all are something my mind generates.  They depend wholly upon my mind for their existence.  I can generate them, alter them, apply them, ignore them, or reject them.  Their existence, content, and use all are up to me.  While I might respond to the assumptions, deductions, and presuppositions I generate, they not are not independent of me in the way events outside my mind are.  We might say that while assumptions, deductions, and presuppositions come from me, events of the Mays/Wertz sort come to me.  I make the former; I am confronted by the latter.

By the same token, the ancient Israelites did not simply assume, invent, or project God’s self-disclosure on Mt. Sinai.  They were confronted by it.  They did not create it, devise it, or generate it.  They witnessed it; they responded to it (however foolishly); and they recorded it -- just as they did other events, like the plagues in Egypt and like crossing the Red Sea on dry land.  It happened; they responded:  event, response.

The apostles did not simply presuppose, concoct, or formulate the resurrection.  They were confronted by it -- by the empty tomb and by multiple encounters with the risen Christ, Who once was dead and now was alive.  It happened; they responded:  event, response. 

Here’s another event, an epistemological event:  God made Himself known.  Note carefully that the event in question is not my figuring things out about God.  The event is this:  God made Himself known.  I did not say that God made Himself knowable; I said that God made Himself known.  God has not merely made knowledge about Himself available to us; God has made Himself known by us, specifically by the elect.  That is how those who know God actually know God:  Our knowing God is the consequence of God’s doing.  We know because God did it.   For fallen human beings, knowing God is an externally, not internally, generated event.

When it comes to our knowing God, God is the Subject of our knowing, not merely its Object.  God can be the Object of knowledge by sinful human beings only because He first was its Subject.  When it comes to our knowing God, He did our knowledge.  He made it happen, not we.  That is the event.  God made Himself not simply knowable but known.  We do not generate the event.  It happened.  If we are among the redeemed, it happened to us.  Knowing God is a gift, not an achievement.

In that event, the Holy Spirit regenerates whomever He chooses and drives the Truth home to them with power and effect, just like Vic Wertz drove the ball to deep center field with power and effect.  Both events, the Mays/Wertz event and the God/elect event, are historical.  They happened.  They are not mind-generated.  The mind might respond to them, but the mind does not make them.

Had the Holy Spirit not regenerated the redeemed and made them able to receive this gracious gift of knowing God, and had He not actually put this knowledge of God into them -- had He not actually made God known -- neither they nor anyone else could ever have known God.  On our own, that is quite beyond us.  Such things are spiritually discerned, and we are radically unspiritual.

God made Himself known to some persons.  That is the event, and that is the particularity of the event:  God made Himself known to the elect.  They didn't do it; He did.

When the Holy Spirit regenerates you, He gives you knowledge of God.  He makes it so that you begin finally to relate properly and well to God, which is what knowing God really is.  Knowing God is a relationship based upon things said and done in history, whether by Yahweh for Israel or by Christ for the redeemed, things explained to us by the Holy Spirit in Scripture, and then applied to us by the Spirit through Divine activities such as regeneration and illumination.

In other words, we do not begin with humanly generated notions, or with evidences, or with unaided human reason, or with anything else.  We do not begin at all.  When it comes to knowing God, for us to begin is not to begin.  God begins.

Knowing God was never a matter of “How do I know?”  Knowing God always had to begin with Him or not to begin at all.  To start with us is simply a non-starter.  You can’t get there from here.  But He can get here from there, and He did.  God made Himself known to some persons.

We are talking about an event.  We are not talking about a presupposition, an invention, a fantasy, a wish, a deduction, or even a question.  We are not starting with any human activity whatever.  This event -- knowing God -- does not depend upon the knowers.  It depends upon the Known.  This event is a historical action.  Like other historical actions, it depends upon historical actors.  In this case, the Actor is God.  This event does not depend upon us presupposing it any more than does Mays’s catch.  It happened.  Like Mays’s catch, God’s making Himself known has lots of witnesses; and like Mays’s catch, it does not depend upon those witnesses for its reality.  Quite the opposite:  Their role as witnesses depends upon it happening.   The witnesses do not make the event possible.  The event makes the witnessing possible.  It happened.  It will continue to happen as long as, and as widely as, God wills.

By making Himself actually known, God takes the epistemological initiative.  He assumes upon Himself the epistemological responsibility for our knowledge of Him.  What we do with it, if anything, is a different issue altogether.  In making Himself known by us, God reveals Himself to the mind and senses He created and thereby grants to them the metaphysical validation and warrant we never could have granted them on our own.  We cannot produce metaphysical warrant of this sort from below or by ourselves.  Without His actions, we are reduced simply to metaphysical and epistemological cheating, to begging the question, to using our mind and senses to assert that mind and senses are the proper means to knowledge, even knowledge of God, or else reduced simply to invoking our own mind-generated presuppositions and following them wherever we deduce they lead.

Our knowledge of God is a God-produced event.  God made Himself known.  It happened.  Do with it whatever you will, but you cannot change that fact any more than you can make Mays drop the ball or make Wertz hit it over the fence.  God’s self-disclosure happened.  God made Himself known by the elect.  He did it.  He did it in space and time.  He did it (1) externally through events like the exodus, the incarnation, and the resurrection, and by inspired, explanatory words, like Deuteronomy, the Gospel of Matthew, and the epistle to the Colossians, events and words that were addressed to the mind and senses He gave us, thus granting them the transcendent validation they otherwise always would lack.  He did it (2) internally through events like regenerating us and illuminating us -- all of which leaves Aristotle and his ilk beyond the pale when the issue is not only knowing God, but knowing, period.  Their use of mind and senses is mere question-begging, pure and simple.  They assume that mind and senses are reliable means of knowing and simply proceed to use them, use them even when it comes to knowing What cannot be known by us on our own at all, namely God.

The knowledge of God given to the elect is not something the elect presuppose, deduce or establish.  It is an event, an event of God’s own doing.

There can be no knowledge of God that God Himself does not impart.  That is, you might know the answer to a difficult mathematical question either because you figured it out for yourself, or else because someone who knows the answer told you.  Either way, you can get the right answer.  But to the question of how one knows Elohim, the articulate, divine, unity-in-plurality, there are not two ways, but one:  God must tell you.  God must tell you because, “What is offered to man’s apprehension is not truth concerning God but the living God Himself” (Temple, Nature, Man and God, p. 322).  Read that sentence over again until its full force sinks in:   “What is offered to man’s apprehension is not truth concerning God but the living God Himself.” 

Unless God begins, no beginning is possible.  Those who deny this point fail to recognize that God has begun.  He made Himself known by us, and in so doing He (1) validated the mind and senses He made for us, and, more importantly, He (2) regenerated us so that we are able to receive the knowledge of Himself that He so graciously gives.  Without that regeneration, we would unleash our fallenness upon special revelation the way we do upon general revelation, and with the same deleterious and devilish effect.  God Himself, and only God Himself,  is the origin, content, Subject, and Object of our Knowing Him.  He is its root, ground and cause; we are its recipients.  He does it; He does it to whomever He wills, whenever He Wills.  He brings Himself to us; we do not bring ourselves to Him, not even if our name is Aristotle.