Reading: Notes Chapter 10

1.     The emphasis in what follows doesn’t fall on the universal impact of religious belief on all knowledge; it falls only on its impact on all theories. But the critique of reduction as a strategy for explanation in theories actually does have universal application. For not only every hypothesis, but every concept, at least implicitly, is either reductionist or not.

2.    While what will be developed is a non-reductionist theory of reality, it should be clear that my claim is that belief in God (and other biblical teachings) can be employed to develop a distinctive theory of knowledge as well. And these theories, in turn, can be brought to bear on theories in all the sciences. As I mentioned earlier, I have spelled out a few of the consequences of this program for epistemology in Knowing with the Heart.

3.    The idea that biblical revelation can and should provide such a distinctive perspective for the interpretation of the whole of life, though not popular, is not new. John Calvin held it in opposition to the prevailing scholasticism of the sixteenth century (see Institutes, II, ii, 16-18), and it was revived in the work of Abraham Kuyper (1837– 1920). It was Kuyper who directly applied this insight to theories:

 This means theories of philosophy as well as science:

This, Kuyper says, is because such knowledge arises in answer to questions which must include 

It is this position which is reflected in his most quoted remark:

This is the tradition given positive development in the philosophy of Herman Dooyeweerd (1894-1977), whose theories are sketched in the next three chapters. Arthur Holmes has summarized Dooyeweerd’s approach as follows:

4.    The reason why the critique of theory making about to be offered does not apply only to my particular list of aspects is this: once any candidate for the status of being a basic kind of properties-and-laws is taken to be sufficiently (logically) distinct from all others so as to be placed on a thinker’s aspect list, it is thereby also sufficiently distinct to invoke all the same obstacles to reducing any of them that are on the list I’m working with. So while there can be disagreements about what the right list is, once the aspects of any list have been distinguished as sufficiently different in kind from one another to be placed on the list there is no way they can then be either dismissed as illusory or claimed to be caused by any other. It is the qualitative difference of a putative aspect that renders it intractable to reduction. In broadest terms this is because: (1) in the case of eliminative reduction, if there is a sufficient qualitative difference to distinguish two aspects, then it cannot also be true that they are identical; (1)      for causal reduction, if there is sufficient qualitative difference to regard them as distinct aspects, then no concept of a causal relation between them is possible.

5.    A fuller description of these senses of “reduction” is as follows:

These strategies can be combined in various ways within the same theory. A thinker could argue, e.g., that some aspects are to be eliminated on the ground of meaning identity while others are to be eliminated by factual identity, and at the same time maintain that still others are either causally dependent or epiphenomenal.

The claims described here are not the only senses of the term ”reduction” as it is used in philosophy, but are the senses being rejected here as both philosophically and religiously objectionable. It should also be noted that some philosophers have used the term “supervenience” to designate an order in the appearance of certain kinds of properties without wishing to commit to a reduction between them in any of the senses defined above. That use is unobjectionable and is in fact close to the position proposed by Dooyeweerd as an alternative to reduction in his theory of reality. It should be noted, however, that supervenience is never taken to be a one-time occurrence but a constant pattern. As such, it leaves unanswered the question as to why the supervenient properties constantly supervene in just the ways they do. Any answer to that would either have to be reductionist or have recourse to a non-reductionist theory such as Dooyeweerd’s.

6.    Dooyeweerd, New Critique, vol. 1, 34-46. 

7. Ibid., vol. 2, 539.

8.     Here a reminder is in order of a point made in chapter 2. There I pointed out that when scriptures, myths, theologies, etc., trace everything back to some originating principle(s), they thereby confer on them the status of divinity whether they call it divine or not. The same goes for a theory. Whatever it postulates as that which makes all else possible and actual is thereby divine per se, whether or not the theorist wishes to recognize that fact.

9.    See Werner Jaeger’s comments on Aristotle’s Metaphysics XII, 3, 1070a, and on his Protrepticus in Aristotle (London: Oxford University Press, 1960), 49-52. It is the alleged independent existence of the mind, owing to our ability to conceive it apart from the body, that is the basis of his belief that it is immortal and divine. And since Aristotle recognized that whatever can exist independently is divine (Meta. 1064a34), it is significant that Jaeger quotes the Protrepticus as follows: “Man has nothing divine or blessed except the one thing worthy of trouble, whatever there is in us of Nous (mind) and reason. That alone of what we have seems immortal and divine.”

10.     For example, “since on the one hand I have a clear and distinct idea of myself, in so far as I am only a thinking thing, and on the other hand a distinct idea of the body, in so far as it is only an extended thing, it is certain that I am truly distinct from my body, and can exist without it” (“Meditations on First Philosophy,” in Descartes’ Philosophical Writings, trans. N. K. Smith [New York: The Modern Library, 1958], 237).

11.      I say “much like” because they’re not in the exact same section of the boat. A square and a circle are two spatial shapes whose combination we intuitively know to be impossible. By contrast, “independently existing X,” where X is a kind of properties and laws, is not intuitively impossible but simply devoid of meaning content. So while one designates a null set, the other designates an empty set. They are still in the same boat, however, so far as the prospects for justifying claims of their reality are concerned.

12.      Knowing with the Heart focuses on critiquing the prevailing reductionist view of self-evidency and developing a non-reductionist interpretation to replace it.

13.     John Meyendorff, A Study of Gregory Palamas (London: Faith Press, 1964), 130. See also J. Pelikan, Christianity and Classical Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), 53.

Indeed, some theistic thinkers have gone so far in adapting their theories to the pagan tradition that they hold many realities other than God to exist non-dependently, provided God is the only independent being said to have created all the non-necessary entities. (E.g., Nicholas Wolterstorff in On Universals [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970]). But our definition of divinity shows why the central objection to this position is not simply that there would then exist things not in God’s control; it is monotheism that is at stake.

14.      Some recent writers have made this claim. See, e.g., J. Ross, ”Analogy as a Rule of Meaning for Religious Language,” International Philosophical Quarterly 1, no. 3 (Sept. 1971): 476; and J. McQuarrie, Principles of Christian Systematic Theology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951), vol. 1, pt. 2, 235 ff.

15.     Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics (Edinburgh: T. T. Clark, 1964), vol. 2, pt. 1, 230.

16.     Summa Theologica, q. 46, a. 1.

17.     I say that God’s actions can be either created1 or uncreated1, because scripture speaks of some of His decisions and purposes as being ”from before time everlasting” (2 Tim. 1:9, Titus 1:2) while others are spoken of as taking place at a particular time. In the case of the former, “action” would therefore be an anthropomorphic term (assuming God created time as a feature of the cosmos). It should be noticed, however, that on the view to be defended God could timelessly affirm a decision or purpose and then also reaffirm it temporally. In that case the reaffirmation would be created1, uncreated2, and created3.

18.      This language too needs clarification, however, since the view of God I will contrast and prefer to the Anselm/Aquinas view holds God’s unconditional being to be inconceivable by us. Thus the term “will” should not be taken to mean that the unknowable being of God is literally a will any more than that it is anything else we can conceive. On this view, the originating unknowable being of God has brought it about (created3) from all eternity that He has just the uncreated2 personal, loving, wise, etc., nature He reveals Himself to have. The term “will” is thus an anthropomorphic term intended to convey the (apophatic) denial that there is anything other than His own unconditional reality that is not within His control, and to affirm His unconditional freedom in relating to creatures in just the ways he reveals to be true of Himself. J. Pelikan points out that this was the way the Cappadocian Fathers used “will” when  he says that for them, “The [creative] ‘word’ of God, then, was equal to the ‘will’     of God, which was equal to the action of God — all these, of course, understood in    a transcendent and apophatic sense, fundamentally different from the sense that each of these terms conveyed when applied to human wills or actions” (Christianity and Classical Culture, 105). With these qualifications, then, this alternative to the AAA view can be expressed as the position that God chooses what He is and is what He chooses. Only God’s unconditional being is divine per se.

19.     God, Freedom and Evil (New York: Harper & Row, 1974), 98.

20.      Cf. the remarks of Vladimir Lossky: “. . . apologists like Clement and Origin, [were] too anxious to show pagans that all the treasures of Hellenic wisdom were contained and surpassed in the “true philosophy” of the Church. Involuntarily they brought about a kind of synthesis to Christian contemplation, an accent of Platonic intellectualism alien to the spirit of the gospel.” The Vision of God (Crestwood, N.J.: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1983), 65.

21.     Summa Theologica 1a, q. 3 and 1a, q. 21, a. 1, ad 4. See also his Summa Contra Gentiles 1, 38, 45, 73.

22.     Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1980, 53-54.

23.      Since I’ll be concentrating on the incompatibility of God’s aseity with taking His attributes as necessarily existing perfections, I will forego any lengthy treatment concerning the other AAA premise I find objectionable, namely, that only perfections are true of God. But I do find this premise also to be a disaster. For one thing, it entails that God can’t have real, contingent, relations to creation. Aquinas also recoiled from this consequence, but his “solution” for it was as bad as his theory of simplicity. He actually proposed that “while creatures are really related to God, in God there is no real relation to creatures, but only a logical one” (ST, 1a, q. 13, a. 7; q. 6, a. 2) That, however, isn’t even plausible. How can we be, e.g., truly loved by God while it’s not really true that God loves us?

24.     Does God Have a Nature?, 144. 

25. Ibid., 145-46.

26.      For still other reasons against the plausibility of construing God’s attributes as uncreated yet dependent on him, see Brian Leftow, “God and Abstract Entities,” Faith and Philosophy 7, no. 2 (April 1990): 193-217.

27.      As Aquinas puts it: “All perfections found in creatures pre-exist in God in a higher way.” (ST q. 14, a. 11) Clearly, however, all such attributes are learned from our experience of creation, and are then postulated to have a perfect degree in God. As Karl Barth points out, the result of this is that God is made up of a series of . . . attributes which are . . . primarily attributes of the human mind, in which the latter sees its own characteristics. . . transcended in the absolute . . . [But in this way] I never come upon an absolute being confronting and transcendent to me, but only again and again upon my own being. And proving the existence of a being whom I have conjured up by means of my own self-transcendence, I shall again and again succeed only in proving my own existence. (Church Dogmatics, vol. 3, pt. 1, 360)

28.     In 2 Timothy and Titus the Greek text literally says that God’s plan was “before time everlasting,” and 1 Cor. 2:7 uses similar wording. Jude speaks of God’s glory, majesty, dominion, and authority as “before all time, now, and forever.”

One recent translation has rendered the Revelation text cited as “let there be no more delay” rather than “there shall be no time.” But based on Liddell and Scott (A Greek English Lexicon, p. 2005), there is no precedent in the entire Greek language

for using the verb e’´stai with  cro´noV rather than  KairoV to mean “delay.” Besides,

the common theme of all these texts strongly suggests God’s sovereignty over time. I have defended this position in greater detail elsewhere. See “Is God Eternal?” in The Rationality of Theism, ed. A. García de la Sienra (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000), 273-300.       

My conclusion is that rejecting God’s non-temporality because it is incompatible with the AAA view of God begs the question with respect to the C/R view, on which there is no such incompatibility. Moreover, if the scripture statements about God being “before” time and His destroying time are taken at face value, they provide yet one more way that the AAA view fails to comport with scripture in a way the C/R view does.

29.      The Cappadocians also regarded this text as highly significant. They emphasized that whereas pagan Greek thought had taken the ultimate division of reality to be between the rational and the non-rational, this text makes that division to be between the Creator and the creature by regarding even the rational as creation. See Pelikan, Christianity and Classical Culture, 51-53.

30.     My translation here closely follows the Hebrew text rather than the Septuagint.

31.     This is also how 2 Peter 1:4 would be understood if it’s taken to say that believers share the “divine nature.” It would be the created3 nature freely assumed and possessed by the One who is divine. It does not mean that creatures will ever come to be divine in the pantheistic sense of sharing God’s uncreated123 being.

This is not the only possible interpretation of the text, however. It is plausible that it simply affirms believers to be partners of God. See A. Wolters, “Partners of the Deity” in Calvin Theological Journal 25 (1990): 28-44; and also the postscript in Calvin Theological Journal 26 (1991): 418-20.

32.     For example, scripture says that God cannot lie (Titus 1:2, Heb. 6:18). But this remark occurs in an explicitly covenantal context the sense of which is that he cannot lie to believers because he has promised not to. It should be borne in mind that at other loci scripture specifically says that God deceives those who are not believers (Ezek. 14:9, 1; Thess. 2:11).

33.     The difficulties reviewed above are not the only ones that can be lodged against the Neoplatonism involved in viewing God as possessing all and only necessary perfections. James Ross has given a brilliant account of several more, including its violation of the set-theoretical ban on maximal sets and its incoherent account for how creatures can share in the Divine exemplars. See “God Creator of Kinds and Possibilities: Requiescant universalia ante res,” in Rationality, Religious Belief, and Moral Commitment, ed. R. Audi and W. Wainwright (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1986), 315-34.

34.     Pelikan, Christianity and Classical Culture, 42, 45, 50-54. Dooyeweerd has also made this point in his reply to Cornelius Van Til:

35.     Pelikan, Christianity and Classical Culture, 55. 36. Ibid., 209, 210.

37. Ibid., 214.

38. Ibid., 40.

39.      Ibid., 55. Cf. John Meyendorff’s comparison of this position to that of Origen: “Origen’s mistake consisted just in this, that he identified God with [a knowable] essence, and did not know that unchangeableness and movement, unknowability and revelation, supertemporality and action in time, could really co-exist, united in the. . . mystery of the personal Being of God.” A Study of St. Gregory Palamas (London: Faith Press, 1964), 223.

40.     Pelikan, ibid., 88.

41.     A Study of St. Gregory Palamas, 211, 204, 226.

42.     Pelikan, ibid., 212. See also pp. 231 ff. especially 235, where the “begetting” of the Son and Spirit is explained to mean they are uncreated12 but still generated by the Divine being and therefore created3.

43. Ibid., 102, 101.

44.      A Study of St. Gregory Palamas, 131. Calvin, too, makes the same point when he says that God’s transcendence means he is not subject to the laws which govern creation. For example: “We do not imagine God to be arbitrary [exlex]. He is a law to himself. The will of God is . . . the law of all laws” (Institutes, III, xxiii, 2). It is for this reason he says: “It is perverse to measure [the] Divine by the standard of human justice” (Institutes, I, xxiii, 2). Dooyeweerd has remarked that this position of Calvin “cut off at the root the interference of speculative metaphysics in the affairs of the Christian religion” by refusing to “elevate human reason to the throne of God” (New Critique, vol. 1, 93). Dooyeweerd then specifically applies Calvin’s general point to God’s transcendence of logical laws (New Critique, vol. 1, 144).

45.     The Vision of God, 85. The diagram should not be taken to suggest that God’s energies remain external to Him. They are not merely a mask He has assumed but what he everlastingly become. As St Gregory Palamas put it: “[God’s] energies do not comprise the being of God; it is he who gives them their existence… God by a superabundance of goodness towards us…consents to become particable [sic] to our intelligence” and “in his voluntary condescension imposes on himself a really diversified mod of existence.” Quoted in John Meyedorff, A Study of Gregory Palamas (London: Fait Press, 1964), 204, 211, 226.

46.      “Lectures on Genesis,” in Luther’s Works, ed. J. Pelikan (St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1958), vol. 1, 11.

47.      From The Bondage of the Will, as quoted by J. Dillenberger in Martin Luther

(Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Books, 1961), 191.

48.        P. Althaus, The Theology of Martin Luther (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1966), 20. That God “accommodates himself to us” is the flip sode of Genesis’ point that God created human nature in the image of “the character in which he pleased to manifest himself.”

49.     Church Dogmatics, vol. 3, part 1, sect. 41 (Edinburgh: T. T. Clark, 1964).

50.     So Luther says: “God is He for Whose will no cause or ground may be laid down as its rule or standard; for nothing is on a level with it or above it, but it is itself the rule for all things. If any rule or standard, or cause or ground, existed for it, it could no longer be the will of God. What God wills is not right because he ought, or was bound so to will . . . ” (Martin Luther, ibid., 196). And Calvin makes the same point: “Justly does Augustine complain that God is insulted whenever any higher reason than his will is demanded (Lib. de Gent)” (Institutes, I, xiv, 1).

51.      The point here concerns a real definition of red such that one could know its color quality from the definition alone. Hence, it will not do to offer a circumscription such as “the hue we see when our eyesight is normal and we are exposed to light of such and such wavelength.” We would already have to know what red looks like to be able to set its wavelength parameters. The same holds for other attempts such as “the color of blood or of a ruby,” etc.

52.     For example, when we use the term “cause” to express that God is the creator of the world, it is as an idea rather than a concept. No concept we have of causality corresponds to God’s creatorship: it is neither formal, nor final, nor material, nor efficient; neither is it any of the causal relations that are qualified physically, biotically, sensorily, historically, or economically, etc., since God is the creator of all the kinds of causality found in the cosmos. But stripped of these and every other conceptual specification (time, and all laws), all that is left is the limiting idea of one thing bringing about another in an unspecifiable sense. Only in that way, by designating a limiting idea, can the term “cause” be used for the dependency of everything other than God on God. Another example is the term “could” when applied to God. When we ask whether God could have created the world other than the way He did, or whether He could have made the laws governing possibility different from what they are for our experience, we are using “could” as a limiting idea, not a concept. Our concepts of “could” are all senses of possibility delimited by laws that hold in the cosmos — laws that God created. (Hence God didn’t create by choosing from among antecedently existing possibilities, but created every sense of possibility we can conceptualize.) Stripped of all aspectual (and other) specifications, however, we can use the limiting idea that God “could” have created other laws of possibility which we can’t now even form an idea of, since our knowing is governed by the laws He in fact did create. This is why asking whether God could have made different laws does not amount to asking whether it’s logically possible that the laws of logic be other than they are. An affirmative answer to that question yields a contradiction. But that is not the right way to understand the question. Rather, the question uses “could” to refer to the limiting idea of the ontological basis of every kind of possibility found in the cosmos. That basis is, of course, the unknowable, originating being of God. The same goes for the idea that God “assumes” relations and properties to himself. That, too, is a limiting idea meaning that He brings it about that they are true of Him in a way unspecifiable by us.

53.     Does God Have A Nature?, 139-40.

54.     An analogous point is also missed in the standard logic textbooks’ treatment of the “paradox” that an inconsistent argument entails every conclusion (see, e.g., Introduction to Logic, I. Copi and C. Cohen [Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 2002], 375-78]). The paradox is supposed to be that an argument with inconsistent premises validly entails every conclusion whatever. The paradox is actually the result of forgetting that assessing whether an argument entails its conclusion is the project of seeing whether its conclusion would have to be true if its premises were true. The claim that an inconsistent argument entails every conclusion ignores the point in italics, and fails to notice that it is the consequence of abandoning the project of seeing what else would have to be true if the premises were. For if inconsistent premises were true, the law of non-contradiction would be false and no conclusion would follow because there would be no such thing as entailment. It is this shift that produces the illusion of universal entailment; it shifts the usual project of assessment to the meta-project of imposing the law of non-contradiction upon an argument whose premises deny it. Please don’t misunderstand this to be a recommendation that the law of non-contradiction be rejected or doubted. It’s surely correct to maintain the law and reject one or more of an inconsistent argument’s premises. But it is not proper procedure to abandon the usual project of logical assessment without acknowledging that shift.

The importance of this point is that the same unacknowledged shift in project is often transposed onto the C/R view of God by those who criticize it for saying that God created the law of non-contradiction. The critics allege that such a view leads to requiring that contradictory beliefs about God both be true. But in fact it does no such thing. There are no examples of contradictions that follow from trying to conceive what would be the case if the law of non-contradiction didn’t exist because there would be no such thing as logical following and because because no concept we can form in conformity to that law would yield an example of anything not governed by that law. Thus nothing contradictory about God follows from the view that His uncreated being transcends the logical laws, and any putative example of what would (allegedly) be true if the law did not apply to God is — like the paradox that inconsistent premises entail every conclusion — a case of imposing the law of non-contradiction on His transcendent essence in order to criticize the claim that the law doesn’t apply to Him. Such criticism therefore fails to show any flaw in the C/R position, and is no more than a dogmatic dismissal of it.

55.     This position is nicely explained by C. S. Lewis in his book Miracles (New York: Macmillan, 1948), 69-70.

56.      William Alston has commented insightfully on the range of possibilities for religious language: