Much has been written in recent years on the topic of faith and reason. In most of these works one will find a clear dichotomy between epistemology in general and religious epistemology. Much of the time one is reading a defense of the rationality of religious knowledge vis-à-vis a developed, broader system of epistemology. In this post-enlightenment age, rarely will one find an epistemology that presents the act of knowledge in a context of pre-established theism (or Christian theism) where theism serves as the ground for all knowledge whatever.

            Perhaps rightly so. For in discussions of religious epistemology, it is not knowledge of the world one is seeking to establish (that is usually a given and specific claims to knowledge of objects of the world tend to be used as a clear cases of knowledge) but rather it is claims to knowledge of the objects of religion that are under scrutiny. Most of us have little problem with reason. Rather it is faith we are seeking to bolster and show that it is indeed reasonable. What would be the epistemological advantage of showing reason to be faithful? However, could such an approach be developed where a system of knowledge was developed out of Christian philosophy of the world? Would such an approach solve any problems that plague theories of knowledge (and solve more problems than it creates)? This paper will take up those two questions and look at an attempt to answer them.[1]

            As stated above, in more recent discussions of Christian epistemology, reason is set up as the standard against which the claims of theism are judged. In a later chapter in Philosophy of Religion entitled “Faith and Reason”, William Rowe writes, “The central question that has occupied our attention since the first chapter is whether there are rational grounds supporting the basic claims of theistic religions.”[2] Similarly Geivett and Sweetman note, “The question of whether or not it is rational to believe in the existence of God is one of the most important of all human concerns. . . . However, it has proved difficult to decide the issue of the rationality of belief in God, and philosophers have debated it from the beginning of time without producing any clear-cut or decisive solution which has come to be generally accepted.”[3]  In chapter one of his Reasonable Faith, William Lane Craig states, “Before presenting a case for Christianity, we must come to grips with some very fundamental questions about the nature and relationship of faith and reason. Exactly how do we know Christianity is true?”[4]

            The view towards faith and reason represented by these statements is one of the reasons, I believe, why modern theistic philosophy has seen such a boon in apologetics—the discipline of “defending the faith.”[5] Defending it against what? Against the inroads of modern, post-enlightenment “reason”, upon the modern Weltanschauung. Certainly this is a noble and necessary endeavor.

What options have theistic philosophers taken in developing this defense? There seems to be two approaches that have been traversed in modern history. The first is to accept the enlightenment view of rationality (at least in a broad sense) and try to demonstrate that Christianity is rational on these grounds. This approach falls under the rubric of what many have called the Thomistic approach to apologetics.[6] It also has been characterized under the broader category of natural theology (or natural theologizing if one wishes to see it as applying the principles of a natural theology). The other, under the general aegis of Reformed thought, has sought to broaden the boundaries of what it means to be rational and in so doing demonstrate that analysis of belief in God may actually aid in defining what rationality is.[7]

The latter approach has been viewed by many academics as more auspicious and is gaining a wider and wider hearing among Christian thinkers. Even so, Reformed epistemologists are not trying to redefine the classical view of what is deemed as rational, but are trying to broaden what might be included within that idea. Certainly this is the view of Mark McLeod in his book Rationality and Theistic Belief. He evaluates the epistemologies of Plantinga and Alston characterizing their basic premises essentially as parity theses. By this he means to say that both Plantinga and Alston are attempting to explain the rationality of theistic belief by arguing “that certain beliefs about God are just as rational as beliefs about perceived physical objects.” [8] If McLeod is right, then these Reformed epistemologists see perception (or some phenomenological analogue) as paradigmatic of rational belief against which religious belief can be compared and, finally, to which it can be equated.

Though McLeod rejects these Reformed approaches he does not reject the idea of grounding the rationality of theism via parity with non-religious modes of belief formation. For after thoroughly examining and criticizing Plantinga and Alston, McLeod develops his own “New Parity Thesis” (which is an amalgam of Reidian epistemology and holistic coherentism) and argues that religious belief is justified in the same way as beliefs about persons as unique individuals. What is noteworthy about McLeod’s characterization of Plantinga and Alston, and McLeod’s own position is that the rationality of religious belief is being formulated in terms of some other generally accepted rational belief (or mode of belief formation) and not vice versa. It may not be natural theology pure and simple but it is certainly a not too distant relative.

            There is a third option, however, that is available to the theist. This third approach attempts to tear down the enlightenment view of reason altogether and erect in its place an approach to reason that places knowledge of God and His word at its center. This view has come largely out of the Dutch Reformed[9] churches developing from the thought of Abraham Kuyper (though its proponents argue that it had a much earlier origin[10]). This approach has had a much narrower hearing in the Christian academic community due to (I believe) its lack of systemization and its decidedly apologetic approach. It does however represent what I believe to be a largely clandestine view in many conservative evangelical churches and seminaries and represents the most developed view of an approach to a thoroughly Christianized epistemology qua Christian epistemology as I will define it.

            Perhaps the question of an exhaustive epistemology based on religious constraints is actually penultimate.  The prior question may have to do with the extensibility of religion as a comprehensive philosophy of the world and life. If it is so extensible the idea of a thoroughly religious epistemology isn’t so far off. Opinions vary as to the intellectual viability of such a project. Some see the task being hindered by enlightenment thought and if we can shed our enlightenment fetters, the doors are open for a comprehensive philosophy based in religion (the way it used to be). For instance Evans and Westphal write, “Maybe religious knowledge looks dubious because we have the wrong idea about what it is to know something and how we know what we know. In the last thirty years there has been a marked resurgence of Christian Philosophy, and this suspicion has developed into a full-fledged assault on Enlightenment epistemologies and those philosophies of religion which rests on them.”[11] Even though they appear to be open to the idea of a “new Christian view of the world,” the bifurcation between religious and non-religious epistemology is clearly present throughout the papers in their book.

            In evaluating the Reformed answer to the epistemological question, Peterson, Hasker, Reichenbach, and Basinger draw some observations about the viability of what they call a “common philosophical rationality” based on religion. “It does seem that in deciding [whether religious experience grounds religious belief], an important role is played by one’s willingness (or unwillingness, as the case may be) to give up the goal of a ‘universal method’ for reaching philosophical agreement and to accept that the different starting points and belief-commitments of philosophers may give rise to disagreements that are not decidable by means of a common philosophical rationality.”[12]  They go on to conclude that the prospects for a religious epistemology whose application goes beyond the objects of religion alone are probably rather nil.

            It appears that religious epistemologies are developed in order to vouchsafe specific religious truth claims. However it seems to me that the development of broader epistemologies that begin with Christianity as a philosophical foundation is motivated by other concerns as well. As mentioned above, a Christianized epistemology may serve as an heuristic for general epistemological problems vouchsafing not only religious beliefs but any beliefs whatever. Further, there may be theological motivations . One may, for instance, wish to preserve the absolute sovereignty of God by completely removing man from the act of knowing. [13] This might best be done in an epistemological system that is driven either by God’s nature or His will.

            There is an important distinction between evaluating knowledge claims (which would be normative epistemology) and evaluating systems that evaluate knowledge claims (what we might call meta-epistemology). This paper is engaging in the latter type of evaluation and will seek to determine the viability of a system of epistemology. In order to evaluate whether or not a Christianized epistemology solves any of the problems that plague attempts to develop a comprehensive theory of knowledge, the problems themselves must be defined. What an adequate epistemology must do is a difficult question in and of itself.[14]

            What would a Christian epistemology look like? Obviously such an approach would have to be theistic. It would have to explain both events of belief formation and doxastic justification in terms of an ontology of knowledge that includes an explanation of the noetic relation between mind and world in terms of the creative act of God. Also it would have to include Christian revelation within the scheme. The latter is important for a Christian epistemology, as it is revelation that distinguishes a general theism from Christian theism.

            Specifically, I believe a fully christianized epistemology might have the following features. (1) It would explicate the justification (on the standard JTB account) conditions for all knowledge whatever. That is, its range of discussion will not be limited to religious knowledge alone.[15] (2) The justification conditions for knowledge would include an act of God that causes a given belief to come to be known. I will not specify at this point whether the causal relation needs to be efficient or final. However a fundamental tenet of Christianity is that God is not creator only but sustainer as well.[16] (3) Christian revelation somehow would serve as a standard by which the truth-value for all belief is measured.  (4) Full or complete justification of beliefs (knowledge) would be attainable only by those who stand in some personal relationship with God.[17] 

            These features are derived in part from the Christian belief that not only did God create man,[18] but He did so with the capacity to know Him. That is, man was created with a specific teleology: to enter into a personal relationship with God. Further, such a capacity, when not exercised leaves man incomplete.[19] A Christian epistemology then might include this noetic capacity insofar as it seeks to explain the conditions under which knowledge is possible.

            This precisely is the project of Cornelius Van Til. Instead of asking what one can know about religious matters based upon a non-religious view of knowledge, he asks what one can know of the world based on certain “religious” truths. The rest of this paper will examine Van Til’s approach to this question. One may ask, “Why Van Til?” I have chosen Van Til not because I believe his position to be the most clearly defined and presented, nor even because I hold him to be the most adequate representative of this particular position (in fact I lean the other way on both accounts). I have chosen to examine his view for the following three reasons.

            First Van Til’s epistemology represents what I believe to be the approach taken by many in (especially) conservative Christian churches at least in the west. The Christian scripture is the epistemological starting point of faith for many believers though most churchgoers do not usually understand the importance of that. Second, though Van Til’s writings are not popular outside of certain Reformed circles, he has had considerable influence on the evangelical church at large through his students, most notably Francis Schaeffer and Greg Bahnsen. Third, Van Til, has done specific work in the area of epistemology relating to theistic belief as an epistemologist and more importantly believed that the appeal to scripture was not only important for religious knowledge but for all knowledge. This relates directly to the project at hand.           

 

Essential Van Til

            My analysis of Van Til will be an attempt to draw out key characteristics of his view of knowledge as it might apply to a thoroughly Christian philosophy of the world. I cannot, in this short paper, hope to answer objections to his position (nor would I be qualified to do so). I can, however, attempt to build a framework that is representative of the key ideas of Van Til. My hope is that in constructing this framework I will be to provide enough insight into this view such that its viability (and potential for further development) can be fully appreciated.

As a starting point, I will lay out what I see as essential ideas in Van Til’s approach. Let F stand for any fact whatever. Let B stand for the self-attesting Christian revelation or Scripture. If we assert also that for any F,

 

(1) F sustains a relation R to B such that B interprets F

then S knows F just in case

(2)   S believes F

(3)   S presupposes God’s existence

(4)   S stands in some relation R*­ to R such that R completes F for S.

 

These four propositions capture the essence, I think, of Van Til’s epistemology. As mentioned earlier, his approach uses the language of metaphysics but he attempts to draw epistemological conclusions. Can the system based on these propositions form an adequate basis for understanding what knowledge is? To answer this we will have to carefully examine each of the above propositions then look at how they relate to one another to form Van Til’s approach to Christian epistemology.

Before examining the propositions, a word must be said about how this analysis relates to what is going on in epistemology as a discipline. Much of contemporary epistemology is concerned with addressing the ambiguity that exists regarding the third condition of the standard, tripartite view of knowledge. Namely, epistemologists are seeking to provide insight into that feature that turns true belief into knowledge. Historically, the study has concentrated on the justification condition though of late some epistemologists have replace justification with some other condition. In any case, examining that feature (whatever it is) will be important in our study of Van Til.  More specifically, we will have to surface from Van Til’s view that feature (or those features) that justifies or warrants Christian belief.[20]

            There are a couple of features that can be surfaced immediately about the set of propositions I have laid out. The first is that knowledge on this view is structured in terms of entities and relations that obtain between them. That is, when certain relations obtain between a person and some object, the person knows that object. Second this system relies heavily on Christian revelation. This is important to notice for our present purpose, as it is the Bible (insofar as it the logos of Christ) that defines Christianity qua Christianity. If Van Til’s system did not include the Bible in a fundamental way, it would be questionable whether or not it could be called a Christian epistemology. Third the set attempts to define all knowledge, not just “religious knowledge.” In fact, Van Til held that knowledge of anything in the world had to be understood in terms of Christian theism. For him, the claims of Christianity were “truer” than anything else one could know and so in some sense grounds all knowledge. Because of this, knowledge of the world could be defined only in terms of Christian theism. The following will examine the set of propositions in light of these considerations.

 

Presuppositions

            Van Til’s system has been called presuppositional. If that label is accurate (and I believe it is) one would expect presuppositions to be at the core of his system and (3) satisfies this expectation. Van Til’s use and meaning of the term “presupposition” is somewhat varied.[21] Essentially, the notion of presuppositions appear to include both a cognitive element—an entity of some sort which is the direct object[22] of some noetic function—and a relational element.[23] I think, then, presuppositions can best be understood in terms of objects and relations. Each of these must be taken in turn.

            Taking the former idea first, the objects of knowledge for Van Til are facts. Relating this to the concept of presuppositions, Van Til develops the idea that there is a fact (or are facts) upon which all other facts depend for their existence. For Van Til this has ontological as well as epistemological implications. Ontologically this means that certain facts cannot exist independently but are dependent upon other facts for their existence (ostensibly this would include their coming to be and their continuing to be). More to the point, Van Til believes that no fact can exist unless the fact stands in an ontological dependency relation to a single fact: the fact that God exists (F_G).[24] This latter fact however does not stand in a dependency relation to anything else. To use modal language, God’s existence is a necessary fact without which any other fact could exist. This ontological map is implied (if not explicitly stated) in Van Til’s use of presuppositions.[25]

 

Facts

To understand this better, we must digress and look briefly at how the notion of facts function within Van Til’s epistemological system. Since facts are the objects of knowledge then when a subject knows (or believes) a thing it is a fact that he knows. Although a systematic presentation of the nature of facts is hard to find in Van Til, they appear to have the following features: (a) they are extra-mental entities, (b) they are not propositional in nature,[26] (c) they can be apprehended by the mind, (d) they must be interpreted to be known, (e) facts, in some sense, just are objects and states of affairs (O/SA) and are not to be distinguished from them.[27] Essentially facts appear to be the objects and states of affairs that make up the world. All physical objects are facts as are states of affairs and metaphysical objects.

This description, however, does not really explain matters. The problem arises in the way Van Til employs the use of facts in his system. Facts appear to have properties that would differentiate them from objects and states of affairs (and vice versa). For example, (d) indicates that facts are apprehended by the mind meaning that facts are the objects of comprehension. But certainly when one comprehends the existence of a tree, one does not have a physical tree in one’s mind (imagine the headache that would cause!). Yet Van Til wants to avoid saying that a fact is a proposition or some other entity of that sort. Given this, the best I can say is that facts appear to be some property or properties of objects and states of affairs that relate to the mind in some way. Thus facts are not separated ontologically from these entities yet they do not necessarily encompass every property of these entities. This ultimately may be an inaccurate rendering of Van Til’s idea but will have to suffice as a working definition for our purposes.

To round out this ontological picuture, Van Til holds that God created man with the capacity to know the world around him and he created the world with properties such that man’s noetic structure is able to cognitively “fit” with those properties.[28] He writes, “God has created the human mind. In this human mind God has laid the laws of thought according to which it is to operate. In the facts of science God has laid the laws of being according to which they function. In other words the impress of God’s plan is upon his whole creation.”[29] God’s design of both the human mind and the world allows for the possibility of knowledge. Further, God must aid in interpreting what man apprehends through this mind-world interaction. “If the Christian position with respect to creation, that is, with respect to the idea of both the subject and the object of human knowledge is true, there is and must be objective knowledge. In that case the world of objects was made in order that the subject of knowledge, namely man, should interpret it under God.”[30]

 

Facts and Interpretation

            This statement by Van Til brings to the surface another very important aspect about facts: facts must be interpreted to be known. This is the relational side of presuppositions. That is, facts are not “brute” but stand in relations to other facts and stand in ultimate relations to the plan of God. If one attempts to know facts apart from these relations, she is attempting to do the impossible.[31] There are no non-interpreted facts of science for example. Every thing that science discovers as a fact relates in some way both to the other facts of the world and to the plan of God. To know these facts truly, these relations must be a part of the epistemic process.

            To reiterate, the human mind has functions and properties that allow man to know in this way. For Van Til, this cognitive fit is part and parcel of the human design. With this, Van Til’s approach avoids (at least on the surface) much of the sticky epistemological problems that plague many systems (such as objectively validating the correspondence relation between thought and world). If this relation is built into the cognitive structure of humans and God created the world with properties that immediately “interface” with that structure, the need for sense datum or idealist theories is done away. With this background, (3) can be modified as follows,

 

(3¢) S presupposes God’s existence when S stands in some relation R* to F_G.

 

            A presupposition then includes a fact (I might add of a certain class) and the relation one sustains to that fact. As Frame points out, a helpful analog to this idea is the notion of a priori knowledge where the latter consists of knowledge that is not experientially based. Van Til’s notion of presuppositions takes this idea much further. For him, presuppositions are necessary for any sort of knowledge whatever. Beyond this, the relation between subject and this presupposition does in fact obtain for all persons.[32] Without this relation no one could know[33] anything. Again the presupposition to which all subjects must necessarily be related is the fact of God’s existence. We now must explore this relation a bit further.

 

The Presupposition Relation

            The first condition for knowledge, then, is that the subject presupposes the existence of God in terms of the relations described above. However, the epistemological significance of this relation has not been addressed. It seems at least prima facie false to say, for instance, that a person cannot know that Mount Rainier exists unless that person first believes the presupposition that God exists. Further, it is not at all clear what kind of a relation R* is. In order to address these problems, it will be necessary to introduce some key terms and distinctions that Van Til employs.

 

Denotation and Connotation

Van Til makes a critical distinction between the denotation and the connotation of a fact. Crudely, the denotation of a fact is its “thatness” and the connotation of a fact is its “whatness.”[34] These two terms specify the range of the relation that obtains between fact and subject. More specifically they designate the degree to which a subject is related to the object of knowledge. The denotation of a fact is, simply, the finite existence of that fact as it is grasped by the subject. What is denoted by a fact is nothing more than the prima facie properties and relations that can be predicated of the fact itself. It may be accurate to say that the denotation of a fact is those features that can be pre-reflectively apprehended of it. To say that the cat is on the mat is to say nothing more than that a cat exists, a mat exists and that the cat stands in an on top of relation to the mat. However there are much more to facts than mere denotation. Van Til brings out these further features in his idea of connotation.

            The connotation of a fact is all that is entailed by a comprehensive predication of that fact. This involves understanding all the facts that can be predicated of that initial fact. The cat, for instance, not only exists, but it is a living thing, it has x number of physical properties, it is of such and such a breed, it didn’t come into existence yesterday, etc. There may be innumerable other facts that can be predicated of any given fact. The point is that what is connoted by a fact includes every other fact that can be predicated of that fact.

            In employing the concept of connotation, Van Til seems to emphasize the idea of implication not fullness. What I mean by this is that Van Til was not trying to say that one had to have exhaustive knowledge of some fact before he could know that fact but that one had to understand that all facts imply an ultimate ground for their existence. I believe, then, there is an important distinction to be made between what Van Til meant by connotation and how he actually used the term in his system. The former is much richer yet the latter more easily employed from a practical point of view.

            With this distinction in mind can we provide an answer to the question of the type and nature of R*? The answer does not come readily. If the relation is epistemic, (that is, if the person must know this presupposition in the connotative sense in order to know any other thing) we are involved in a vicious circle.[35] For how does one come to know F­_G without first being in this epistemic relation? If the relation is not epistemic, how does it do any work in so far as it is functioning as a means by which F­­_G enters into the noetic structure of a person as an item of knowledge? A fuller answer to this will have to be deferred until later. At this point, it may be sufficient to say that this relation is epistemic but in a special sort of way.

It seems that for Van Til there is a special subclass of beliefs that are justified on the basis of the means by which they were formed.[36] The closest analog may be the notion of basic beliefs (however the pool of what might be considered basic for Van Til  is much smaller than that of most later Reformed thinkers). Provisionally I will use the term awareness[37] to refer this idea. Greater detail on how this awareness functions epistemically will be explicated below.

            With this background we can return to our initial proposition and expand upon the idea of the relation that obtains between S and F_G (the fundamental presupposition). S presupposes God’s existence just in case,

 

(5) ­God created S with an awareness of Himself.
and
(6) The awareness S has of God is validated by B.

 

            What Van Til is attempting to do is bring his entire theology and philosophy into the knowledge event by collapsing ontology and epistemology into a unified whole. A key idea in this attempt is that of the nature of man as a being created by God. For only if God created man could he stand in a direct epistemic relation to the fact of God’s existence.

            As mentioned above, Van Til emphasizes the unity of man within the “epistemically compatible” environment (i.e., the natural world) within which God created him. “God has created the human mind. In this human mind God has laid the laws of thought according to which it is to operate.”[38] The former idea is not fully expressed in (5) however. (5) would have to provide insight into what the awareness of God entails as well as how God’s creation of S relates to this awareness.

 

(5¢) God created S with a noetic faculty that is immediately aware of God’s existence such that S pre-reflectively believes the fact “God exists” is true.

 

With (5¢) not only is God designing the noetic faculty of man to be able to receive a belief about His existence, He somehow is causing man to have the very belief itself. Notice also that this belief is not limited to believers. This is not a belief that is somehow “inserted” at the time of salvation. By including the phrase “pre-reflective” I intend to bring in the idea that this assent to God’s existence is present in the noetic structure of all persons. Thus atheism would be learned and theism would be the normal, “default” position epistemically.

            (5¢) is too strong however. It is not the case that everyone who reflects on the question, “Does God exist?” answers it positively and Van Til did not want to argue for that.[39] However what is true, Van Til argued, is that no one can consistently deny that God exists and affirm any other fact. Any attempt to do so leaves one with epistemic gaps or holes that cannot be filled with any other fact except the fact that God exists.

 

Intension

Here is where Van Til’s usage of denotation and connotation come to full play. By using these terms as he does, he indicates that knowledge is, in some sense, degreed. One can know fully or partially (one recalls Paul’s statement in 1 Corinthians 13:12). How connotation functions in this context is not to explain how one might know any given fact but how one is aware that God exists. That is, knowledge of God’s existence is directly related to one’s ability to fully know any given fact. (I will use the term intension for this property and will explain intension more fully below.) (5¢) can be modified to account for this lack of fullness knowledge of a fact can have.

 

(5¢¢) God created S with a noetic faculty that is immediately aware of God’s existence such that S’s belief in F is underintended for S when not based upon F_G.

 

(5¢¢) locates S’s awareness of God’s existence in the underintension of any other fact within S’s noetic structure that is not based upon F_G. S’s awareness of the existence of God enters into S’s noetic structure through the realization that unless God exists, no fact can be fully intended. However (5¢¢) presents another problem. That F is underintended is a belief about F that is elicited by the omission of a fact (namely the fact that God exists) from one’s noetic structure. But if F_G is not a part of S’s noetic structure, how does S come to have the belief that F does not stand in relation to F_G? Further (5¢¢) brings in the notion of epistemic axiology: beliefs not held on the basis of F_G are somehow defective or incomplete. These issues, I believe, are what cause a lot of the problems for the critics of Van Til’s epistemology. What is it about F that itself that causes one to form this belief that it is underintended in the way described above?[40] (5¢¢) itself needs grounds of justification. If not, how does one avoid circularity?

 

Bringing it all together: The Transcendental Method

            These questions are tied closely together. Their answers are related to Van Til’s employment of his “transcendental method.” To develop this in full would take us too far afield and much of what is involved was mention above in the discussion of connotation and denotation. As the method applies to the above two questions, however, two things can be said. First, the method relies heavily on the idea that all facts have connotation and that the question of the connotation of any fact is elicited when a subject merely considers that fact. Van Til says, “A truly transcendental argument takes any fact of experience which it wishes to investigate, and tries to determine what the presuppositions of such a fact must be, in order to make it what it is.”[41] Van Til argues that all such reflection leads to God.[42]

            Second, epistemic defectiveness understood in these terms would mean that it has a lack of completeness or fullness. Any belief that does not include an account of its transcendental connotation is hanging in mid-air so to speak and is not epistemologically grounded. Again, it appears to be a mental capacity of humans as created by God that produces this awareness of defect. Apparently it is referencing the fact of the imago dei that forces the conclusion that only belief in God provides the ultimate connotative ground.

Further God would have to create the need in man to want to know what is ultimately connoted by a fact. Man would somehow have to be unsatisfied with “brute” facts and aspire to know the transcendental nature of all that is. I believe that Van Til would appeal to intuition here. It is just obvious given our penchant for scientific study and given the history of the philosophical enterprise that man is not satisfied with mere brute facts but want to know the whys and hows.[43]

            A belief is fully intended,[44] then, when what is ultimately connoted by the fact that is believed is a part of the doxastic structure of the one having the belief. For Van Til it is obvious that no other connotation is possible other than that God created the fact and that He ontologically grounds and interprets or provides the meaning of all facts. This can be expressed by the following propositions,

 

(7) Belief in F is fully intended for S when what S believes about F includes that which is ultimately connoted of F.

and

(8) Every F has as its ultimate connotation that God is the creative source of its existence and meaning.

 

The Scriptures as the Ultimate Interpreter of Reality

             However Van Til does not defer this grounding to the imago dei alone. His system includes a further objective support or ground for the belief that the existence of God grounds all facts: the Christian scriptures. By introducing the Bible into his epistemology, Van Til unequivocally affirms that only the existence of the Christian God can provide the necessary connotative ground for all knowledge whatever. In fact, says Van Til, it would not be possible to know that God grounds all of reality without the Scriptures. “It is impossible to attain to the idea of such a God by speculation independently of Scripture. It has never been done and is inherently impossible.”[45]  Thus (6) brings in further justificatory grounds for F_G. It says that B serves to validate the awareness of the fact of God’s existence for S. This is what I believe Van Til means when he writes, “. . . the theist maintains that the term ‘existence’ cannot be applied intelligently to any ‘fact’ unless the ‘fact’ of God’s existence is a fact. . . . the theist maintains that we cannot begin otherwise than by reasoning analogically, i.e., on the presupposition of the truth of that which the Scripture says of God.”[46] (6) can be modified to include this.

 

(6¢) The awareness S has of God’s personality is phenomenologically similar to the nature of God as presented in B.

 

An initial problem with (6¢) is that S now is aware of more than the mere existence of God. S’s awareness of God involves awareness of specific properties of the personality of God. That this has to be included in (6¢) is warranted, I believe, by what is implied by the idea of presupposing God’s existence. It seems fairly clear that knowledge of the existence of God entails knowledge of many of His fundamental attributes, at least of the attributes ascribed to Him by the Bible. In fact, Van Til uses Christian Revelation and the existence of God interchangeably. This is because Van Til seems to view Scripture as more than just propositional revelation. He takes John 1:1 quite literally seeing Christ incarnate as the Word. He says, “It thus appears that we must take the Bible, its conception of sin, its conception of Christ, and its conception of God and all that is involved in these concepts together, or take none of them. So also it makes very little difference whether we begin with the notion of an absolute God or with the notion of an absolute Bible. One is derived from the other.”[47]

Another difficulty with (6¢) is that the word similar is plagued with ambiguity. What Van Til would need to present in order to disambiguate the idea presented in (6¢) is to explain how one’s awareness of God can “match”, in some sense, what one reads in the Bible about who God is (for simplicity’s sake, let’s call this matching relationship correspondence). I think he would do this by appealing to univocity and analogicality as terms identifying ways of reasoning. These terms would serve to describe the way one comes to have ideas and the relations that obtain between those ideas.

            In Van Til’s use of the term, reason is univocal if one’s ideas are “original.” By this he means that the source of the ideas before one’s mind is from the individual that has the ideas. It is generated by the individual herself not being known by anyone else. Reasoning is analogical if the source of the idea is generated by “participation” in the idea of another. For Van Til this other can only be the God of Christian theism. Given this, one reasons analogically when one thinks God’s thoughts after Him.[48]

            The immediate question that comes to mind is “What does it mean to think God’s thoughts after him?” First, by using the term analogical, Van Til clearly does not mean that man’s ideas are identical to God’s ideas. Rather man’s ideas are his own but the content of the idea is original with God and man by participating in God’s idea shares that content (though not as clearly and comprehensively as God does). Applying his ideas of connotation here, a person’s idea of a fact shares the content of God’s idea of a fact when what that person believes to be connoted by the fact is what God knows to be connoted by that fact.

            Second, the way man participates in God’s idea is via this metaphysical relation between facts (which we now see originate in the creative act of God) and the subject. Since there is a necessary presupposition of God’s existence, man participates in God’s thoughts as the relation between subject and object obtains. An important corollary to this is that atheists (or antitheists as he calls them) only think they do not think God’s thoughts after Him. In actuality they must or they would not know anything. In reality the antitheist suppresses this knowledge. Thus, the role of God as designer-creator cannot be overemphasized in Van Til’s system as it serves to be a Christian system of knowledge.

            For Van Til, the fact of God’s existence functions as the fundamental presupposition but it can so function only through the Christian revelation. That is, it is revelation that reveals to man that God exists and is the ground of all facts. What then is the object to which the subject is related? Is it the fact of God’s existence or revelation? Van Til says that the fact of God’s existence and His revelation of that fact are two sides of the same coin.[49] It is the presupposition of God’s existence that grounds all other facts but it his revelation of that fact that establishes this ground and allows men to know of this ground.

            In other words what gives the fact of God’s existence its “connotative application” to all other facts is the Christian revelation. He states, “For the Christian system, knowledge consists in understanding the relation of any fact to God as revealed in Scripture. I know a fact truly to the extent that I understand the exact relation such a fact sustains to the plan of God.”[50]  Elsewhere, he states, “There can be no fact that is ultimately out of accord with the system of truth set forth in Scripture. Every fact in the universe is what it is just because of the place that it has in this system.” [51] Revelation, then, provides the ultimate connotative context in which all facts are comprehended. Without revelation one could not derive the fact of God’s existence from any contingent fact.[52]

            Some have observed that, natural theology plays little or no role in Van Til’s apologetic system.[53] I don’t think that is entirely accurate. Because Van Til collapses epistemology and ontology into a single system of Christian reality, revelation just is God’s revealing Himself whether it is through the world or through special revelation. However, the former cannot be understood without the latter as the latter gives the former connotative fullness.[54]

Hendrik G. Stoker in the festschrift, Jerusalem and Athens, gives one of the best, if not the best restatement of Van Til’s theory of knowledge (what is particularly helpful about his words regarding the present context is that he appears to be sensitive to the possible role of a natural theology simpliciter). He writes, “God has created the universe according to his plan and every fact and every relation between facts therein is revelational of God.”[55]  God, in His position of designer-creator of all the world did not (could not) create anything that is not revelational. Elsewhere in the same chapter Stoker states that, “the whole of creation and every ‘thing’ within it, as well as every relation between ‘things,’ has not only analytical (intra-cosmical) meaning moments but revelational meaning moments as well; they are revelational of God and his plan, ultimately depending on God and on God’s knowledge of himself and of his counsel.”[56] Though the some of the terms he uses suffer with serious ambiguity the idea should be clear: all things created by God reveal God and relate to His plan as given in Scripture.

            This is reflected in (6¢). The subject experiences God by way of his noetic faculties that are designed by God to be defective if the beliefs gained by his experience of the world are not ultimately grounded upon the fact of God’s existence. Also, given the above, awareness of God includes the admission of  “positive content” about who God is (though this idea still may be fuzzy, I believe it follows from what has been said). Proposition (6¢) expresses an existential link between what one experiences via this awareness of God and what one finds written in God’s testimony of Himself.

 

Coherence

            How does the subject stand in this necessary relation with revelation? His claim is that when a person reads the Christian revelation it attests to itself as providing the only view of the world that is coherent. By coherent Van Til means that the Bible “matches” reality in the sense that the truths of revelation correspond to what we experience in the actual world and provides connotative insight. Any system that does not so correspond is incoherent.[57] By using the terms correspondence and coherence in this way we can see Van Til’s conflation of ontology and epistemology. Also we can see how accepting the Bible as revelatory of the truth of God might serve as an explanatory ground for all the facts that were created by God. The relation that obtains between the subject and the fact of God’s existence is the necessary acceptance of the Bible as “filling in” the connotation of all facts. It is necessary because without the Bible, that is, without full connotation, all facts are ultimately meaningless[58].

In light of the above, it seems fairly safe to say that propositions (4) and (6') provide us with the specifics of the knowledge event. When Van Til says that the Scriptures “interpret” facts, he means they provide the connotative analog to the idea God has about the fact in question. The Scriptures stand in this interpretive relation[59] to all facts and the subject stands in an epistemic relation to this interpretation. This latter relation involves the self-attestation of the validity of Scripture that is known in an immediate way to the subject. This is why I classify it as epistemic. The least problematic way to understand this self-attestation is to take it as a property of certain facts. However it is bit more than this. For (6') speaks not only of the relation S has to the self-attestation of scripture but also to the interpretation Scripture gives of the fact in question. “In other words” writes Van Til, “the question of the identity of Scripture could not be discussed without asking about the truth of the content of which it speaks.”[60]

There is a bit of a problem here however. For if R' is an epistemic relation it cannot function in S’s cognitive structure as a means of explaining knowledge.[61] In other words R' is a relation that obtains between S and R as the interpretive relation between facts and Scripture (and we might say the fact of the existence of God as well). R' is intended to explain how S knows any fact F. However R' is itself epistemic where S is in a knowledge relation to R. For S would first have to be able to know R via R'. This is one place, I believe, where vicious circularity enters into Van Til’s system.[62] It is not the intent of this paper to thoroughly critique Van Til’s epistemology. However if one were to critique it, I believe it would most likely have to start at this problem and work backwards, so to speak.

 

That Thing Called Justification

We now must return to the question that was raised earlier: what, according to Van Til, is that feature or those features that warrant or justify Christian belief turning it into knowledge? I believe the above analysis has provided key insights into this question and so a summary of what has already been said will have to suffice here. Even so, this question is difficult to answer for many reasons. The two primary reasons that I see are these. First, in order to give any kind of a satisfactory account of Van Til’s idea of warrant, I would have to discuss the notion of justification in general and then overlay Van Til’s epistemology on that discussion. Such a task is not possible in this context. Second, Van Til does not develop his epistemology in terms of warrant or justification. As such when one attempts to do so, the danger of misrepresentation looms heavily.

I think the best way to approach an answer to the above question is, using the seven propositions developed in this paper, attempt to pick out those features that might indicate how a belief in Christian theism might be warranted. Of course, this may be the wrong way to put it. As we have seen, Van Til does not see Christian belief (or belief in Christian ideas) as a subset of the totality of the contents of one’s noetic structure (where warrant for the former would be understood in terms of the conditions under which beliefs in general are warranted). Rather, he wants Christian belief to form, in a manner of speaking, the structure itself or at least provide the basis upon which all knowledge whatever rests. So in attempting to answer what warrants Christian belief, I will really be giving the conditions for warrant for any and all items of knowledge. Even so, the following will summarize what I take to be the conditions for a warranted belief in Christian theism.

Clearly this discussion hinges on accurately defining warrant or justification. Up to now, I have been using the two terms somewhat interchangeably, but this will not do. There is an important distinction between warrant and justification that is too involved to address adequately here.[63] I will follow Plantinga regarding the term justification and classify it as being primarily a deonotologistic notion; as one that is concerned with epistemic duties and rights. This seems closer to how Van Til would view the question of the conditions for knowledge. As I mentioned above in passing, it seems that Van Til would see knowledge as a condition having to do with what one has a right to believe.[64] Assuming this is accurate, I will attempt to summarize from the material above how Van Til would answer the following question: under what condition or conditions is one within his epistemic rights to believe in God?

Put simply, one is within her epistemic rights to believe in God when one finds it impossible to know anything apart from that belief. As was presented above, Van Til holds that all claims to knowledge are underintended or lack full connotation when that claim is not grounded on the presupposition of God’s existence. I think this conclusion is derived from the conjunction of premises (5¢¢) and (8):

 

(5¢¢) God created S with a noetic faculty that is immediately aware of God’s existence such that knowledge of F is underintended for S when not based upon F_G.

and

(8) Every F has as it’s ultimate connotation that God is the creative source of it’s existence and meaning.

 

            If any fact is underintended for S, if it is not connotatively grounded on the fact of God’s existence and purpose as outlined in Scripture, then S has an epistemic duty to seek the full connotative implication of her belief in the fact. This quest can only be adequately concluded in the fact of the God of the Bible. As such, S is within her epistemic rights (and would have an epistemic duty) to believe in that God as the ground of all facts. Of course it should not go without saying that this approach includes the necessary conditions for knowledge that God created the world, and humans. Further He created humans and the world with properties and functions that allow for a cognitive “fit” making knowledge possible.

            It might go like this. Bob is a computer programmer who is writing code for a large computer company. In the course of his writing he begins to reflect on a portion of the logic he has just written: if A then X else Y. In his reflections he considers conditionals and concludes that such conditionals exist in many aspects of life outside of the computer program he is authoring (“if a fetus is human, then abortion is wrong else abortion is neutral with regards to ethical considerations” might be one example). His inquiring mind cannot stop there however. If he did, his belief would be underintended and he could not claim to know that conditionals are a part of the structure of the world nor that they have any meaning regarding that structure.

            He considers further how the conditionals could have been built into the structure of the world (and reflects much more on the nature of conditionals themselves) and how they could come to have meaning regarding life and action. He considers evolution as a possible answer but it comes up far short as being an adequate answer. He remembers that many of his friends have said that religion claims to have the answers to life so he begins to reflect and research the claims of the major world religions. After some thoughtful reflection (and some help from the sensus divinitatus and the Holy Spirit) he begins to form the conclusion that the Christian Bible provides the most coherent picture of the orderliness of the world and one into which his belief about conditionals would fit most propitiously. In addition, the Bible presents an anthropology that explains how a person like Bob can come to know facts about the world. Given all this, Bob comes to accept the Bible as true, and forms the belief that God created the world and it structure (that includes conditionals as a constituent).

            Our programmer now has a full (should we say transcendental) picture of how his belief in conditionals can make sense given everything else he knows about the world. In this way, the inadequacy of his original belief was the impetus by which he came to believe in God and thus provides the epistemic justification for his timely belief in God and the Christian scriptures.

            The way I have laid things out here, the approach is in an important way inductive[65]. However Van Til continuously stresses the necessary role of the Holy Spirit and the importance of the sensus divinitatus in his apologetic and so to classify it as entirely rationalist would be incorrect. The induction seems to be the occasion for the belief in God but not the cause of it. This is a brief sketch of how things might go in Van Til’s system as far as justification is concerned.

 

Conclusion

            There are many aspects the Christian epistemologist can find of value in Van Til’s approach to epistemology. One is the emphasis on teleology and design. It seems impossible to construct an epistemology sensitive to Christian concerns and ideas without including this aspect. Another is the implication design has on the act of knowing. If God did create the world and humanity, it seems extremely probable that He would design the latter to be able to interact epistemically with the former. Certainly there are a lot of fundamental problems in understanding how knowing works that a Christian approach can go a long way in solving. The teleology inherent in Christian ideas is a fundamental reason for this.

            Whether or not Van Til’s approach is ultimately successful is not one I’m prepared to answer. It seems to me that a lot of good work is being done in Christian epistemology particularly among Reformed thinkers. If Van Til’s system does have insoluble flaws, those flaws may not warrant a complete rejection of the system. Perhaps the successful parts can be mapped to what is being done in more philosophically rigorous attempts at constructing a epistemology based on a Christian approach to the world.  In any event, there is much work to be done in epistemology particularly Christian epistemology. Perhaps men like Van Til have laid a foundation upon which more auspicious theories might be build.