Chapter 6 - THE IDEA OF RELIGIOUS CONTROL

 6.1            THE MISTAKE OF FUNDAMENTALISM

The term “fundamentalist” has been used in a variety of ways and is applied to many different doctrines and attitudes, but for my purpose here I am concerned with it only as a view about how to see the relation of religious belief to theories. On this score the fundamentalist attitude is essentially the same whether it occurs in Judaism, Christianity, or Islam. But contrary to the popular definition, what distinguishes a fundamentalist in each of these traditions is not taking a literal interpretation of scripture. The truly distinguishing characteristic is what I call the “encyclopedic assumption.” It is the view that sacred scripture (or theology derived from it) contains inspired and thus infallibly true statements about virtually every conceivable subject matter. It is this assumption and its consequences that truly typify fundamentalist thinking.

One consequence of this assumption is fundamentalism’s insistence that theorizing begin by seeing what scripture has to say on any subject to be investigated, and that theories then be built around whatever that scriptural teaching turns out to be. That is how fundamentalism sees the religious control of theories. What is crucial to this insistence is thus clearly not whether fundamentalists interpret scripture literally, but that they are committed to finding scripture to reveal truth on virtually every topic. (I will later argue that there is an important sense in which this program leads fundamentalists to interpretations that are not literal enough!)¹ So whereas almost all Jews, Christians, and Muslims expect some sort of guidance for theories from scripture, only the fundamentalist insists that guidance must be that of supplying specific truths on virtually every subject matter.

Another part of the encyclopedic assumption concerns what happens when even the most tortured exegesis of scripture texts can’t find any information about a subject matter. In that case, its guidance is often seen to take the form of supplying confirmation to a theory rather than initial information with which it can begin. So whereas a scholastic would say that a theory about biology, or geology, or physics, etc., is acceptable provided it does not contradict any revealed doctrine of the faith, a fundamentalist would say theories get more guidance than that. They must actually include whatever truths are revealed on their subject matter, or they should include an appeal to scripture among their confirming evidences, or both.

As an illustration of these consequences of the encyclopedic assumption in operation, consider the work of Richard Kirwan, the father of British mineralogy. Keenly interested in the newly rising science of geology, Kirwan issued a major publication in that field titled Geological Essays (1799). Throughout all his theories in these essays, Kirwan assumes that the flood of Noah, recorded in Genesis, must be the main geological event in the history of the planet earth. Since the Bible does not say that, or give as much information about the flood as the encyclopedic assumption leads him to expect, Kirwan goes so far as to speculate that the text we now possess must be an abridged version and that the original Genesis must have contained far more geological information! He further assumes that the six days of creation spoken of in Genesis are also basic guidelines for doing geology, “finds” evidence that the history of the earth falls into six stages, and argues:

 Passing by the faulty logic of this argument, I call your attention to the way it expresses the encyclopedic assumption. It is obvious that what is expressed here is not the scholastic goal of maintaining a harmony between truths of nature and truths of supernature. And even more obviously, there is no complete isolation of faith from theoretical reason as the irrationalist maintains. Instead, anything scripture so much as mentions is seen as capable of impinging on any subject matter, so that the impingement amounts — in this case — to supplying truths which are key facts for the understanding of almost everything — in this case geology.

At the same time geology and other sciences can also be expected to confirm the scriptures, according to Kirwan. This is not a view that has been held only by fundamentalists, so I’m not mentioning it as distinctive of their position. But it’s a mistake which is the more pernicious when conjoined to the encyclopedic assumption. It stems from misunderstanding the providence of God to be God’s intervention in the natural order, rather than God’s upholding the natural order. The term “providence” is the theological name for the teaching that God sustains in existence everything other than himself. In the biblical writings, this is viewed in the broadest way possible. It is by God’s providence that the sun rises and sets, the seasons change, the rain falls “on the just and the unjust,” and the laws of nature continue to regulate the universe (Gen. 8:22). Of course, Bible writers also speak of times when God himself acted in creation to reveal himself and/or to cause miraculous events. Such events are thus not merely part of God’s providence, but his own actions within the creation he providentially sustains. But God’s providence may not be confused with his special acts in connection with revealing his covenant. His special acts do, in a sense, intervene into the ordinary course of things so as to bring about something that would not have happened without his action (just as human acts do). But God often works his purposes in the world providentially, and his providence is never a matter of his intervening into a natural order that would just be there anyway. From the biblical point of view, there is nothing that would just “be there” if God had not created and continued to sustain it. So while God has at times acted in creation, scripture often describes him as accomplishing his purposes providentially, and that should not to be confused with his own actions or with miracles. Fundamentalists, however, tend to take every scriptural declaration of God’s accomplishing a purpose to be the declaration of events that are (at least partly) miraculous.

This tendency to confuse God’s providential sustenance of all things with his special acts in creation results in the fundamentalist looking for gaps within the natural order of things (or in our explanation of that natural order) which require that only God could be their cause in the same way God is the direct cause of miracles and of his own saving actions in history. These gaps then come to be viewed as the way science can confirm the truth of scripture. That is, since science can’t explain them, they are supposed to be items that are explained only by a special act of God. In this way, the fundamentalist position sees God’s providential involvement with the order of creation as always being more than sustaining the universe; the position actually sees God as the last step in many of the series of natural causes investigated by science. And it fails to notice that this would make God part of a natural causal series and thus part of creation!

Let me rephrase the last point to be sure it’s clear. Whereas you or I might look out the window and remark “it’s raining,” a biblical prophet would have said something like “the Lord is sending rain on the earth.” Both remarks would have reported the same fact, though the second contains an additional reminder that it is by God’s providence and purpose that all the natural forces coincided to cause the rain when and where it occurred. But the fundamentalist understands the prophet’s remark to suggest that there is some particular feature of the conditions that produce rainfall which, if scientifically investigated, could not explain rain without bringing God into the explanation. And that is just what is wrong. There is nothing in biblical teaching to suggest that God sustains the world such that if we investigate the causal connections in (created) natural processes we will find gaps in them which have no natural explanation. The biblical view is not that rain and other natural events are all partly miraculous, but that none of the things, events, or laws found in nature would exist at all unless God had created them and continued to sustain them.³

So while it is the case that God’s creativity and providence are the ultimate reason why there are such things as winds, clouds, and water, and the laws which guarantee their orderliness, it is the created order which explains created events in the sense that science looks for explanations. A scientific explanation of rain does not include why space, time, matter/energy, and all the laws that govern creation exist at all. That is a metaphysical and — ultimately — religious issue. Moreover, while God is the creator of the causal order which allows us to explain rainfall, he is not himself one of its causes alongside all the other causes — not even its first cause. Strictly speaking, God is not the cause of the universe, but the creator of all the kinds of causality in the universe.⁴

This last paragraph is not intended to deny that the scriptures also teach that the created universe somehow reveals its creator. But contrary to fundamentalists (and others), scripture does not suggest that creation witnesses to its maker by requiring that we import him regularly to explain how creation works. Scripture sees creation as revealing its maker by exhibiting itself to be dependent rather than self-existent either in part or in whole (see Rom. 1:20, 23). Viewed from the standpoint of the teaching of scripture itself, then, the fact that creation witnesses to God does not excuse the serious mistake of confusing God’s providence with those occasions on which he acted and reacted with humans in the course of revealing his covenant and fulfilling his promises in human history. And it is a wild over-rationalizing to construe the way the creation witnesses to God to be either that it provides specific information that can serve as premises from which God’s existence can be inferred, or that it provides content or confirmation for all sorts of theories.

What is worse, the view that science should be confirmed by biblical teaching is often taken to be reciprocal. As scripture confirms a theory, and the theory is the best explanation of whatever it’s about, then science has thereby also confirmed scripture! This combination, as I already remarked, is all the more pernicious when combined with the encyclopedic assumption. This is because of the strong element of rationalism implicit in that combination. For expecting religious teaching to be either proven by argument or confirmed by theories is to treat belief in God as though it were itself a theory (or at the least to be evaluated as theories are). This tendency can be seen in the way some fundamentalists oppose many current theories of science, against which they propose a competing “Scientific Creationist” theory supposedly derived from or confirmed by the Bible, which in turn confirms scriptural teaching — as we saw Kirwan do. But the revealed truths of Scripture are not theories at all. They are not hypotheses we invent in order to fill explanatory gaps and which we then need to defend as better than competing hypotheses. Rather, we believe them because, by the grace of God, we experience the teachings of scripture to be self-evidently the truth about God from God. For this reason, the fundamentalist idea that God fills explanatory gaps in theories is as unbiblical an idea of how to defend revealed truth as the encyclopedic assumption is of how to interpret it. The two mistakes are, of course, mutually supportive. Once scripture is viewed as giving truths for every science, and once the theories it supplies (or confirms) are seen as delivering more successful explanations than any alternative hypotheses, it is then an easy and irresistible step to regard such success as confirming the truth of scripture.⁵

To avoid such misunderstandings, it is necessary to keep in mind that, according to the Bible writers themselves, the purpose of the biblical writings is to record God’s activities in establishing his covenant with humans and to preserve the content of that covenantal message. When the Bible writers speak of natural events, historical events, political events, etc., they always do so in order to proclaim, interpret, or illustrate something about God’s covenant. Thus the biblical writings are first, foremost, and always about religion.⁶ It is simply a colossal error to suppose that if an event is religiously important, such as the importance of the flood to the covenant with Noah, it must therefore also be of key importance to geology or any other science. This religious focus of scripture must therefore be maintained as the basic guide to understanding it on its own terms; we must always seek to understand its language, its structure, its concerns, its setting and circumstances, in order to get as clear a grasp as possible of its message. And that way of treating it is the very reverse of assuming it to be an encyclopedic sourcebook for whatever our concerns and interests may be.

To illustrate what I mean by understanding scripture on its own terms, and as everywhere exhibiting a religious focus, let’s briefly consider the account of the ordering of creation and the origin of humans given in Genesis. A host of fundamentalists have taken this text to provide basic guidelines for astronomy, biology, and paleontology, as well as geology. They have supposed that the “days” of God’s creativity mentioned in Genesis must be twenty-four hour periods or else be distinct eras or stages in the history of the planet. Likewise they suppose that when God is said to have created forms of life to reproduce “after their own kind” that this is some sort of basic principle for doing biology rather than a commonsense remark based on what the writer(s) observed. But a close look at the text itself shows it was intended for quite a different purpose, one which disallows the fundamentalist interpretation. For the language and internal structure of the text (which I take to exhibit its “literal” meaning) stand squarely against the encyclopedic assumption.

In the Genesis account, God first calls into existence the “heavens and earth” out of nothing (ex nihilo). That said, the heavenly dimension of creation is immediately set aside, and all attention is concentrated on the earth (we would say “on the universe”). What follows is the famous account of the subsequent developmental formation the earth undergoes in conformity to the purposes of God. This is expressed as work done by God on successive days of a single week. These days of creation are as follows: Day 1, God separates light from darkness; Day 2, God separates sea from atmosphere; Day 3, God separates land from sea and creates plant life; Day 4, God creates sun, moon, and stars, Day 5, God creates sea life and birds; Day 6, God creates animals and humans. The stress in this account is clearly on the way everything depends on God. There are no other competing forces on an equal footing with God. Instead, it is he who brought into existence everything other than himself and now orders the creation in accordance with his purposes. So the emphasis of the text is on God’s creative sovereignty: “And God said, ‘Let there be. . . ’ ” There is virtually nothing said about what we would have seen take place had we been there to observe the early stages of the universe. All the text says about the consequences of God’s creative decrees is: “And it was so.”

Perhaps the most important factor in maintaining the religious focus of this text is the recognition that, far from being a stand-alone essay on scientific topics, this account is a prologue to, and part of, the covenant given to Moses at Sinai. For that reason, the most natural way to understand the “Days” of God’s formative activity is to see them in connection with the commandment that humans are to work six days and rest on the Sabbath. The text uses the literary figure of a workweek for God’s accomplishing his purposes in forming the earth in order to speak of it in a way that is parallel to, and an exemplar for, the command that humans should also work six days and rest on the Sabbath. Thus the account is intended as a literary framework — a figure of speech — rather than as a literal six days.⁷ This is confirmed by the internal structure of the account when we notice the way Days 4, 5, and 6 correspond to Days 1, 2, and 3. Day 1 separates light from darkness, while Day 4 introduces the sun, moon, and stars; Day 2 separates sea from atmosphere, while Day 5 speaks of the creation of sea life and birds; and Day 3 sees the appearance of dry land and plants while Day 6 records the creation of animals and humans. The following diagram may help convey this correspondence:

This correspondence is just too prominent a feature of the account to be mere coincidence. But if it is not coincidence, it shows something crucial to the correct understanding of the account, namely, that the “Days” were not intended to give a chronological account of how the ordering of creation came about. Instead, the “Days” comprise a way of expressing the “why” of God’s creating rather than its “how”; that is, they are intended to convey an order of purpose not of time. The basic difference between light and darkness, for example, is introduced as the background condition for the intended existence of the sun, moon, and stars. And the differentiation of dry land from sea and the creation of plants are the pre-planned conditions for the support of animal life and humans. Viewed in this way, it becomes ridiculous to argue — as fundamentalists have done — over whether the “Days” of creation are twenty-four hour periods or geological eras. As St. Augustine remarked long ago, the word “day” must be figurative in Genesis’s creation account, for how could there be twenty-four hour periods prior to the appearance of the sun, moon, and stars? (Notice that his observation applies just as well to geological eras.) To his comment I add: What can be the justification for taking the Days as either twenty-four hour periods or geological eras if they are not intended to give a chronological history of the universe at all but to convey the teleological order of God’s purposes? Both the twenty-four hour and geological era interpretations are based squarely on the encyclopedic assumption, and this assumption not only fails to grasp, but seriously masks, the thoroughly religious character of the account.

This is not to suggest that there is anything wrong in our asking questions about how the creation works or how old it is, or in our inventing theories to answer those questions. But we may not then suppose that because those questions are important to us they must therefore also be the concerns of the Genesis account. Fundamentalists err by imposing their own questions and concerns on the Genesis text, rather than reading the text in terms of its own (religious) questions and concerns.⁸ For this reason Genesis should neither be praised as good science nor condemned as bad science, because it’s just not science at all. The concerns of the text are covenantal. They are to teach truth about God, and the covenant of love and everlasting life God offers to humans.

The religious focus of the text is also the key to its account of human origins as well. It, too, must be read as the part of the Sinaitic covenant that begins by recounting the earlier covenants that followed the religious probation and fall of the first humans. So it begins by telling us that God formed the first human “from the dust of the ground.” Here too, as with the ordering of the universe in the days of a workweek, the purposes of God and the nature of what he forms (in this case, humans) are the real point of the account; and once again they are expressed by a story of working or “making.” This interpretation is confirmed by the way scripture everywhere uses “the dust of the ground” to refer to human mortality (Cf. Ps. 22:15, 29; 44:25; 103:14; 104:29; Eccl. 3:20; 12:7; Isa. 26:19; Dan. 12:2). It’s also confirmed in the context of the Genesis story itself. Notice that when the humans disobey God and lose God’s special protection, they’re told by God that they will now have to struggle for a living and that in the end they will lose that struggle and die: “Out of the dust you were taken; you are dust and to dust you shall return” (Gen. 3:19 RSV). The point of the story, then, is not to get us to believe that God formed a mud mannequin and made it alive by blowing on it, but that it was God’s purpose to make us mortal creatures who depend on Him. Moreover, that point is essential to the central thrust of the whole story because the covenants God offers humans include the promise of everlasting life (Gen. 3:22). So Genesis denies that everlasting life is natural to humans, contrary to what the ancient Egyptians and Greeks thought. According to Genesis we are not bits of divinity stuffed into physical bodies we’d be better off without; contrary to Plato, the body is not the “prison-house of the soul.” We’re made of the same stuff as everything else and we are as dependent on God as everything else. So, ultimately, our lives depend upon standing in proper relation to God. The point of the account, then, is to record the fact that when God first offered his love and everlasting life, they failed their probation and lost God’s promise. God then established covenants of redemption from sin whereby humans could be restored to the promise of life everlasting. And the covenant with Moses which follows this preamble is presented as the latest edition in the history of those redemptive covenants.

The same holds true for the account of God’s turning this dust-of-the-ground (mortal) being into a being with everlasting life. Here too, it’s the covenantal purpose of God and the nature of humans that are the focus and, once again, these are expressed as a “making” story. God breathes on Adam “the breath of life” and Adam becomes “a living soul.” But what exactly, in this account, is meant by “the breath of life”? Once again, if we keep in mind that this account is preamble to and part of the covenant with Moses, there can be only one answer: God’s breath is his speech, his covenant word of life. Here we do well to remember that the Hebrew translated here as “breath” is not the same as the word for “spirit.” It is instead the term used for God imparting His Spirit to a human – as when a prophet is said to be “inspired.” This part of Genesis is not, therefore a second creation story but an account of the beginning of redemption. So it is by God’s Word that the universe was called into existence, by His Spirit (breath, command) it was given orderly formation, and it is by receiving God’s breath (Spirit) of life that Adam becomes a redeemed “life”. Notice that in John 20:22 Jesus re-enacts this redemptive event with his disciples: “And he breathed on them and said, “Receive the Holy Spirit.” So just as God’s creative word created humans, just so His redemptive word offers eternal life to Adam and all who come after him.

The text recognizes, to be sure, that our lives depend upon food, water, air, etc. It regards these, however, as merely penultimate conditions for life since they also depend on God; the ultimate condition for life is to stand in covenant relation to God. So Deuteronomy 8:3 declares: “Man does not live by bread alone but by the word of God.” In other words, a fully human life does not consist merely in biological metabolism and survival, for biotic life has a supra-biological purpose: to know God and enjoy his fellowship forever. Thus it is by revealing himself to Adam that God fulfilled Adam’s nature, that is, as a religious being destined for everlasting life.⁹

Because the interpretation of this text has been subject to so much misunderstanding, caused so much grief, and is so controversial, I’m now going to restate my interpretation of the Genesis account of human nature starting from another angle altogether. This time I’m going to start by pointing out that any account of human nature has to assume some definition of what  counts as a human.  Merely unearthing, say, skeletal remains will not  show us whether the nature of the one who used the skeleton in life was the same as our own (and what we really want to know about any hominoid remains is how like us those critters were!). But to answer that question we must employ some definition of what counts as a human. Is a human a being that uses language, makes art, thinks abstractly, has a sense of morality, or what? For whatever is taken as the defining characteristic(s) of a human determines our understanding of when and where the first humans appeared. In other words, the first human was the first being in which the defining characteristic(s) of humans appeared, no matter what those defining characteristic(s) are taken to be.

Now since the interpretation I just offered of Genesis’ view of humans is further confirmed by all else it says about them, I'm taking it as Genesis' (implied) definition of human nature. On Genesis’s view, a human is a being made in the image of God for fellowship with God. In other words, a human is a religious being.  After that is established, a new story is begun. We know this because the formula in 2:4 - repeated ten times in Genesis - each time starts a new story. The formula is: “These are the generations of the heavens and the earth when they were created, in the day that the Lord God created the earth and the heavens. 

This is why I said that what follows the formula is not, therefore, a second creation story, but an account of the beginning of redemption. It also this explains why Adam and Eve are never said to be the first humans nor the ancestors of all humans, but are presented as the first humans to receive the promise of redemption from death. Citing a Jewish interpretation that is at least as old as Nachmanides (d.1270), Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik says that 2:7 depicts God as breathing His own Spirit into Adam. [The Lonely Man of Faith (NY: Doubleday, 2006), p. 22]. On this basis, I understand Genesis 2:7 this way:

“God, [who had] made humans mortal, now breathed into Adam His [God’s] Spirit, and he [Adam] became a redeemed-from-death-soul.”

This same interpretation applies as well to the Genesis account of the origin of the first woman. Here, too, the purpose of God and the nature of the woman are expressed in a “making” story. Her being made from Adam’s rib signifies that she shares with him the same human nature. The text itself emphasizes this point when it records with approval Adam’s comment, “She is bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh” (Gen. 2:23), since this is said in connection with the point that she is the only proper mate for Adam. The notion of being “taken from” Adam does, of course, introduce a new factor into her formation not present in the account of Adam’s formation in that it suggests her relation to God is in some way dependent on his. But this point, too, fits beautifully with the interpretation I’ve been presenting. For in the text only Adam is said to have received the revealed commands and promises directly from God, so presumably Eve must have received them from Adam. Thus Eve’s redemption was (partly) dependent on Adam.¹⁰

I conclude, therefore, that the fundamentalist interpretation of Genesis obscures the religious nature of the account as preamble to the Mosaic covenant, ignores the internal structure of the days of creation, and fails to connect  Genesis’s definition of “human” to its account of human origins.

Nevertheless, despite my rejection of the encyclopedic assumption, my protest against the confusion of providence with miracles, and my abhorrence of reading Genesis so as to make it answer scientific questions, I fully agree with the fundamentalist about the scope of the influence of religious belief.¹¹ On that issue, I agree that the irrationalist and scholastic positions do not adequately take into account the important claims scripture makes about all our knowledge being somehow impacted by the knowledge of God. But if we reject the fundamentalist’s understanding of how religious belief influences theories, what alternative interpretation is left for the strictly biblical position? My answer to this was already briefly sketched in chapter 4: our belief in God as the sole divinity, exercises its most profound and pervasive influence by regulating and guiding how we should think of the natures of creaturely things, including the entities proposed by any hypothesis. By acting as a presupposition to all theory making, rather than by being part of, or by confirming part of, the content of any particular theory, belief in God can guide every theory and do it in a more pervasive and important way. Moreover, this sort of guidance impacts not only all our hypotheses but all our concepts, so that this interpretation does justice to the biblical claim that no knowledge is religiously neutral.

How does belief in God supply this guidance? The same way any other divinity belief impacts theories, namely, by the two-step process described earlier. That is, entities proposed by a theory are understood and interpreted very differently depending on what general view of reality a thinker assumes. There are, for example, materialist, dualist, phenomenalist, etc. versions of atomic theory. And each view of reality differs from the others because it presupposes a different divinity. What I will argue, then, is that the same sort of difference results if God is taken to be the divine instead of matter, or sensations, or sensory forms plus logical categories, etc. Belief in God, I will argue, requires a distinctive view of reality which leads to interpreting the postulates of scientific theories in a distinctively theistic way. So the theist is not a “methodological naturalist” in science; to take that position would be to assume either that something in creation is divine rather than God, or that belief in God makes no difference to one’s interpretation of nature. At the same time, however, the distinctively Christian-theistic view of reality I’m going to argue for does not consist of looking for miracles to explain the workings of nature. Rather, it consists of interpreting numbers, or atoms, or evolution, or whatever, as having a non-reductionist nature — which is what I will argue belief in God requires.

6.2            PRESUPPOSITION

A number of times now I have expressed the main claim of this book by saying that every theory either explicitly contains some divinity belief or presupposes one. Rather than make that distinction repeatedly, I will now assume it in all that follows. That is, as I deal with what it means for a theory to presuppose a divinity belief, this should be understood to mean that a theory at least presupposes one; it does not rule out that it may in fact explicitly contain one. Perhaps the best way to explain what a presupposition is and how it can influence other beliefs is to give an example. Suppose that two people are having an informal debate. George states that although he does not enjoy paying taxes any more than anyone else, it still seems clear to him that the government is not doing enough about poverty. He adds that since our country is enormously rich compared to the way most of the world lives, there is no excuse for allowing any of its citizens to lack the basic necessities of life when that can  be prevented. Janet replies that the government gives away too much already. She adds that the very existence of a welfare handout only encourages people to depend on it. The government ought to be encouraging people to earn their own way.

George then retorts that most people find it humiliating to accept welfare help; they would much prefer to be independent. But, he adds, even if some people did prefer taking charity, that should not deter the government from doing what it ought to do, which is to supply the poor with the help they desperately need. Janet then says the government has no right to confiscate part of the pay of those who work each week in order to give it away to those who do not. She fears that the outcome of George’s view is that the government will end up regulating the economy totally in order to care for everyone totally. George protests that he is not advocating complete government control of the economy or of people’s lives. He adds that his ideas could be carried out for the cost of just one aircraft carrier, and Janet responds that the money would be better spent on the defense of everyone than on supporting a group of parasites. Let us assume that neither George nor Janet is any more harsh or uncaring than the other, and neither is more burdened by taxes than the other. Why, then, do they tend to see the whole issue in such utterly opposite ways? One major factor behind their disagreement could be that each has presupposed a different idea of the proper role and limits of government. This issue is never explicitly brought up by either George or Janet, but remains an assumption which guides and regulates all they say.

Both George and Janet assumed that government, properly understood, owes its citizens certain things — protection from foreign invasion, for instance. And both assumed that there are limits to the authority of government so that there are some things it should not do — such as confiscate everything in order to dole out all the needs of life to each citizen. But they had different presuppositions about the government’s obligations in the area of economics. George assumes that government has an obligation to supply basic subsistence to citizens who cannot (or will not) achieve it for themselves. Janet, on the other hand, assumes or presupposes that the proper role of government does not extend to support of the needy. Each thinks the debate is over government spending for welfare, and neither realizes that the disagreement turns on the more basic issue of the proper role of government in society.

This example illustrates the first feature that I want to stress about presuppositions: they are beliefs which can exercise an influence over other beliefs, even if they remain unconscious.¹² Another feature of the way presuppositions influence people is that even when they are held unconsciously, they regulate or guide the way people think. The thinking of George and Janet was driven in different directions by their opposing presuppositions about government. The longer they argued the further apart they got, because their assumptions led them to see each new point or each new proposal of the other as further off the mark. The more each applied the consequences of his or her own presupposition to the points brought up by the other, the more each followed distinct directions of thought which carried them further and further from one another’s viewpoint. For instance, they both agreed that a welfare program can lead people to become dependent on it, so that there is the risk of discouraging people’s initiative. George found that risk acceptable because he assumed that some form of public assistance is a duty of government. For him the risk would have to be much greater to excuse government from a duty. Janet thought that same risk unacceptable because of her assumption that such assistance is not one of the duties proper to government at all. To her the same risk appears ridiculous when the whole program is above and beyond the call of governmental duty in the first place. So even if they could both agree on exactly what the statistics of that risk are, it would make no difference to their positions on the issue: to Janet the risk would be a good reason against government assistance, while to George, it would not look like a good objection.

This sort of disagreement is a common occurrence. We  have all seen situations where intelligent people confronted with the same facts interpret them quite differently. Where one person sees a certain interpretation as quite plausible, another sees it as outrageous, while still another sees it as possible but not likely, and so on. And often the right sort of probing and discussing can expose the presuppositions which are the real core of the disagreements.

The worst difficulties in the way of discovering someone else’s presuppositions are of two types. One of these is in cases involving deception; the other type arises in cases where we try to recognize presuppositions held by people in a very different culture from our own. This is because the key element in recognizing someone’s presuppositions is the ability to imagine ourselves in the place of the other person. Where we can do that with reasonable accuracy, we can — and often do — discern another person’s unspoken assumption. But both deception and wide cultural disparity make putting ourselves in the other’s place very difficult indeed. This is why it is often easier to discover what is being presupposed by a particular abstract theory than it is to discover what is being presupposed by beliefs which are not part of theories. In the context of scientific or philosophical theory making, people are generally quite earnest about what they are doing, quite anxious to be as clear as possible, and have nothing to gain by proposing or defending a theory they do not believe. Thus, the possibility of deception rarely interferes in the world of theory making. Of course, the obstacle of cultural difference remains, and can perhaps only be overcome by experiencing and appreciating the other culture. But at least one of the two major difficulties with recognizing presuppositions is reduced to a minimum when we are dealing with highly abstract theories.

These features of presuppositions are important because the position being defended here is that it is by acting as presuppositions that divinity beliefs exercise their most important influence on scientific and philosophical theorizing. This point sharply distinguishes the position I’m defending from all the other positions concerning the relation of divinity beliefs to theory making. The radically biblical view seeks neither to find statements in scripture on every sort of subject matter that can be included in theories or used to confirm them, nor to restrict the influence of belief in God to the rare occasions on which revealed truth is contradicted by a hypothesis. What we want to say is that the most pervasive and powerful influence of a divinity belief is the way it acts as a presupposition that guides how we conceive the nature(s) of whatever a theory proposes.

Before proceeding to explain how this guidance works, however, it is necessary to be more precise about exactly what a presupposition is. Just how is this concept to be defined?¹³

One point cannot be overemphasized: a presupposition is a belief. This is why, strictly speaking, it is not beliefs or the sentences which express them that presuppose; it is people who presuppose. It is people who may presuppose the truth of one belief when they hold another belief. Thus a presupposition is a belief-in-relation to some other belief;¹⁴ it is a belief anyone would have to hold in order to accept another belief to which it is the presupposition. So saying that a statement has a presupposition is a shortened (but misleading) way of saying that any person who holds the belief the statement expresses would also have to accept its presupposition(s). For example, suppose someone knocks at my door and asks if John is home. I reply, “John will be back in half an hour.” My answer presupposed the belief “John is not here now.” Notice that my answer does not explicitly say that John is not home, nor can that fact be logically deduced from it. But it does presuppose it. If I spoke that sentence knowing all the while that John was home, I could justly be accused of deception.

This understanding of presupposition has been rejected by some critics who contend that, when applied to sentences, it does not adequately distinguish between what a sentence presupposes and what is logically deducible from it. For example, they say that while it seems clear that “John will return in half an hour” presupposes “John is not here now,” it is unclear whether it can be said to presuppose “John exists.” Of course it seems to presuppose “John exists,” but the problem is that “John exists” can also be logically deducible from “John will return in half an hour” (depending on exactly how we logically formulate it). And surely, they say, there is something peculiar about the same sentence both presupposing and logically entailing the same belief. What is peculiar about this is that in order to presuppose something we must already believe it, while we learn what it logically entails only after we draw an inference from it. So the problem is, how can “John exists” be at the same time believed in advance of, and also be a consequence of “John is not here now”?

In my opinion this is not a problem at all, and the mistake of the criticism lies in ignoring the point made earlier about people, not sentences, doing the act of presupposing. The same point applies equally to the act of drawing logical consequences. Sentences do not yield logical consequences all by themselves; people must draw those consequences. And therein lies the way around this supposed difficulty. For in normal speech — unless we are talking to ourselves — there are at least two people involved: a speaker and a hearer. And there is nothing strange about the fact that the speaker of “John will be back in half an hour” can presuppose “John exists” at the same time the hearer learns that fact by a logical inference. Since two different people are involved, there is no paradox at all. We are not forced to the absurd conclusion that the information already known by the speaker is also subsequently acquired by the speaker’s drawing an inference from what he himself said. Since the speaker already knew the information, he simply drew no inference. On the other hand, a hearer who did not know whether John existed could learn that fact by inferring it from “John will return in half an hour.”

To summarize, we have found that a presupposition has the following characteristics:

First: it is a belief standing in a certain relation to another belief. The relation is that the presupposition is an informational requirement for holding the other belief. This means that no one could coherently hold a belief while denying its presuppositions, even though the belief isn’t logically inferred from its presuppositions. (If it were a logical inference, then if John didn’t return in half an hour it would have to be false that he’s not here now.)

Second: a presupposition need not be conscious to exercise its influence on other beliefs of the one who holds it. As a consequence, people may profess ignorance of — or even deny — a particular presupposition despite the fact that certain of their other beliefs show they either unconsciously assume it or are guilty of self-assumptive incoherency.

Third: in everyday affairs, beliefs and the sentences expressing them can have so many different presuppositions that it is often hard to tell what someone is presupposing. As we already noticed, this difficulty is especially compounded either when wide cultural disparity is involved or when it’s possible that someone may deliberately attempt to mislead others about what he or she is presupposing. Where deception is not a factor, however, people frequently can often succeed in discerning what others are presupposing by imagining themselves in similar circumstances. And the possibility of deception is considerably lessened in the context of theory making.

In addition to these summarized characteristics, I also want to point out that some beliefs which act as presuppositions do not, in turn, have either premises or presuppositions of their own because they are acquired by direct experience. Examples of such beliefs include (at least) those produced by normal sense perception, memory, introspection, and rational intuitions of self-evidency. I will call these beliefs “basic presuppositions.” And in keeping with the position that per se divinity beliefs are among our intuitions of self-evidency, I will be taking the position in all that follows that divinity beliefs are among our basic presuppositions.

This position is therefore in sharp contrast to the other views of the general relation of religious belief to theories. The first of those views ruled out any real relation between them. The others all focused on either the logical compatibility of specific religious beliefs and specific theories, or on the inclusion of biblical teachings in the content or confirmation of theories. But while not denying that revealed truth can, at times, act as “control beliefs” for theories in those ways, this position denies that those are the only or most important ways divinity beliefs impact theories.¹⁵ To be sure, the occasions on which specific revealed truths actually contradict or provide content for theories are easier to detect than the ways religious beliefs act as presuppositions to them. But that fact is, as I said earlier, no reason to suppose that such occasions provide the general model for how religious belief and theories relate. This is especially so when we realize that the sort of interaction they constitute is only piecemeal, relatively rare, and severely limited in scope. It thus falls far short of being an adequate account of the biblical claim that having the right God impacts all knowledge and truth.

The next three chapters are intended to illustrate in some detail just how the regulative control by religious presuppositions works for theories in mathematics, physics, and psychology. They will not yet present the argument as to why such control is unavoidable for theories, but are intended only to make clearer the sort of control that is being spoken of. (As I said earlier, the argument as to why such control is unavoidable will wait until chapter 10). One of the most important points to be noticed about these sample theories is how they show that divinity beliefs, when acting as presuppositions, do not entail exactly which specific hypotheses a thinker must hold. Divinity beliefs underdetermine theories in that respect; rather than requiring specific hypotheses, the belief that one or another aspect of the world is divine is a priority assignment that delimits a range of hypotheses that will look plausible to anyone with that divinity belief. At the same time it also excludes alternative ranges of possible hypotheses, ranges that may look plausible to theorists holding contrary divinity beliefs.

In these chapters I will employ the commonly accepted term “reductionist” for overviews of the nature of reality based on priority assignments. The sample theories will thus be spoken of as “reducing” the remaining aspects to the one(s) accorded priority and thereby also accorded the status of divinity. They will therefore speak of how any pagan divinity belief requires the nature of all reality be reduced to its favored aspect(s), and thus also requires the nature of a theory’s postulates to be likewise reduced to those favored aspect(s). So whether the hypothesis is a quark, an evolutionary process, or whatever, there are as many possible interpretations of the natures of what the theory postulates as there are of the nature of reality as a whole. In short, the sample theories that follow should be seen as illustrations of how the nature of whatever a theory proposes is conceived differently relative to whatever is presupposed as divine per se. This will then pave the way for the subsequent contrast of a uniquely biblical perspective for theories, a perspective in which the natures of what   a theory proposes are all conceived in a systematically non-reductionist way.

This is what is required, I will contend, for theories adopted or invented upon the presupposition that God alone is divine per se, and that divine status is not to be accorded to any aspect of creation.