Answering Dr. Howe’s Challenge…

If you’re not familiar with Dr. Richard Howe and his criticisms of presuppositionalism from an ostensibly Thomistic angle, see my introductory comments here. That said, let’s get right into his criticism. Starting at 45 min. in to this interview, Dr. Howe throws down the epistemic gauntlet:

Both sides agree that God is the ontological…[foundation for knowledge]. What distinguishes the two models [classical apologetics and presuppositional apologetics] is that the presuppositionalist says….”but no, God is the epistemological precondition”, alright?

So, what my challenge is … and I’ve asked every presuppositionalist with whom I’ve had the pleasure of interacting on this… that I can understand the arguments showing that God is the ontological… What is the argument showing that God is the epistemological precondition of knowledge? Every time I’ve ever heard anybody give an answer who’s a presuppositionalist, or have read, when they start to say: “…here’s the argument for God being the *epistemological* …” … every time, they give the argument for God being the *ontological* precondition. I’ve got pull-quote after pull-quote from Van Til, Bahnsen, Don Collett, Jason Lisle … all these guys … where, sometimes, within the same paragraph, they’ll go from saying the presupposition of God is the precondition of knowledge to God is the precondition of knowledge. Well, God is different than the presupposition-of-God. And I’ve never seen any argument … Well, why must the unbeliever presuppose God in order to know whether the sun is shining or not?

It’s a real shame Dr. Howe has had to wait so long for this.

I’ll begin without fanfare by saying Van Til was, I believe, a “critical realist” or, as Van Til thought of it: a “representational realist.” I don’t have the time to defend this here. I’ll only say that when you read certain passages of his Survey you hear him repeating the “representation” jargon in a way that signals his self-consciously identifying with a philosophical position. It took me years of reading those passages and glossing over them before I connected the British Idealist use of representational epistemology with Van Til’s comments. Learning Van Til’s intellectual background really disambiguates his thought. My interpretation on these points will have to be defended in another post. For now:

Consider, if you will, the Great Pyramid.

When seen from the side, it looks like a triangle. Fly over it and look straight down: it looks a square. Which is it?

What would Dr. Howe say? Well, he’s never given a public expose on his epistemology and has only made a few brief comments on it in some of his videos. Presumably he’d have some sophisticated Thomistic account but we’ve never heard it (someone link me to it if it exists publicly somewhere). In any case, he’s said he believes the typical human – as long as his faculties are working properly (ie: he’s not mentally handicapped, unconscious, etc.) – can just “look at a dog and know he’s looking at a dog.” This smacks of a sort of “direct” and/or “naive” realism.

(As an aside: He sounds like a sort of empirical foundationalist – presumably adding a typical Thomistic conceptualist account of the “forms” “impressing” themselves on the mind in some way. It’d be great to get clarity on his view of cognitive philosophy and at least a hint of a model for how he thinks this happens. In any case, he has, elsewhere, explicitly distanced himself from Plantinga’s project, so we’re left wondering what sort of empirical foundationalism he’s on about…)

But think again of our pyramid illustration. Here, we cannot directly see the object. It’s much bigger than we are, for one thing, and secondly, we can never see the entirety of it, from all angles, since we’re finite creatures. Thus, we must form a “representation” of it in our mind. For our purposes, we’re going to refer to this representation as a “concept”.

To try and keep this post short, one thing we can say about a concept is: it’s the sort of thing which can be true or false.

Therefore, we must have justification for any concept we employ in a belief.

…and the only way to justify a concept is by direct appeal to special revelation – or, that is: appeal to a direct, linguistic act, from God (the designer / artist / architect) to man, the finite “re-interpreters” of His great work of art.

Dr. Howe is right that in the majority of mundane cases, unbelievers have properly-functioning belief-forming faculties and will, usually, conceive of states of affairs with which they’re presented more-or-less correctly. Yet they can never have a justified, true, concept. How would they justify it?

How, Dr. Howe?!

I’ve used this illustration many times at Van Tillian Fire, but once again: every state of affairs with which a man is presented is inherently ambiguous, like the Duck / Rabbit image (is it a duck or is it a rabbit?). Suppose God were the artist. Suppose further God intended for it to be a picture of a duck. Suppose even further that we, having redeemed minds, automatically and intuitively correctly conceive of the image as a duck. Even here, we’d only have “warranted, true, belief” but it wouldn’t be justified for us. Not yet. You can’t zoom in on the pixels and discover that it’s meant to be a duck. You can’t back up and look at it from a distance, think really hard about it, come up with complex medieval deductive inferences about it, and conclude it’s meant to be a duck. The only way to be justified in your belief that it’s a duck is to have it on direct word from the artist, Himself…

(Again with an aside: Much more can and needs to be said about epistemology from a Van Tillian perspective of course. For one thing, special revelation simply doesn’t justify each and every one of our concepts. The basic ones – the famed preconditions of intelligibility, for example – are justified, which lays out our conceptual tools for properly justifying yet others, and so on. Wouldn’t it be nice if some professional Van Tillian philosopher or theologian wrote a book on Van Til’s epistemology, clearly working this out for us?????)

In addition to unbelievers’ lack of justification for their concepts (even their mundane concepts like: “the sun is shining”), they will, inevitably, because of their fallen hearts, begin to subtly “mis-conceive” of the world so as to never conceptualize the data with which they’re presented in the correct way – not even those experiences they have of their own, intimate, internal, mental states! Non-Christians, were they honest and correctly conceiving of their own mental states, would be as intimately familiar with God as a baby, on his mother’s breast, is aware of her presence. But they misconceive even these internal and deep God-sensings. How they do this is up to the individual and all end up doing it in a way that spirals them off into a world of crazy and irrational worldview-level speculation (like, publicly claiming to believe in ridiculous techno-fables about lizards crawling up out of mud puddles, or life spontaneously popping out of water after getting struck by lightening, etc. etc. and so on).

(Another aside: Dr. Howe often appeals to simple math phrases like 2 + 2 = 4 as examples of mundane conceptualizations of the world the non-Christian cannot possibly misconceive. Therefore, he thinks, we can use these concepts, form deductive arguments about them, and force the non-Christian to conclude God exists. Yet, look at the reality. Want to prove God from mathematics? William Lane Craig debated atheist Graham Oppy on this very thing. Look what Oppy did. Look at how Oppy re-conceives – that is: sifts and sorts and rearranges his concepts – to avoid any direct inference to His creator’s existence! As long as fallen man has this ability to sift and sort and rearrange the noetic hierarchy, so-called classical-apologetics is a nonstarter).

This entire epistemic model is motivated by Van Til’s strong sense of so-called classical theism (quite ironically). Think, if my readers will indulge a final illustration, of an artist. We commission him to paint a picture of a tree. The challenge, however? He must paint 50-years worth of the tree on the same canvass! Oh, and, no funny business! He doesn’t get to start at the upper left and paint a series of tree vignettes. He must paint all 50-years of the tree in one place…

…well, he might come up with some creative, abstract, work but at the end of the day, we finite humans can never imagine a tree like this. We are designed to think of God’s creation in discursive, yet logically-related, conceptually-robust, pictures. A series of true propositions. God, however, sees everything, everywhere, all at once (not just 50-years of it, but all creation, linked). He sees all of the Great Pyramid. He sees all the tree. He sees all, period. We cannot! We must, of necessity, have a piecemeal, conceptualized, view of His creation.

And we must have our concepts justified (else, no knowledge).

They can only be justified by appeal to the word of the One who created them.