Dr Greg Bahnsen - Philosophy of Christianity: The Falsification Argument (Part 10)

Okay, let's get underway.

We have a lot to cover today. Try to make up for some lost ground. Let's begin with the word of prayer. Father, we do praise your name that you have called us to yourself, that you supplied us your spirit, even as you've given us your son. We pray that the spirit of your son might motivate our class, might motivate our thinking, and guide us into paths of righteousness, that we might think thoughts that are pleasing to you indeed, that we might think your thoughts after you. We ask, Lord, that you'd give us discernment to know the good and the evil, that we might see where the treasures of wisdom and knowledge are stored in your son, Jesus Christ. We pray you'd make us more able defenders of the faith which we love. We ask these things for the sake of Jesus Christ, our Savior and in his name. Amen. The last time we were together, we were talking about a number of stories or parables. It might seem a strange way to do philosophy, but it was popular for a while to kind of counter one story with another, one parable with another. And by this time, you've all caught up on your reading and you know all these stories. And so let's do a little bit of review here. We're talking about the problem of religious language. In particular the fact that religious language appears to resist falsification. Christians make claims, for instance, that God is love or that God loves his children. And nevertheless, when we find counter evidence to this, we resist falsification. We will not let our claims about God be falsified. And so that leads Anthony Flew to suggest that perhaps we're not asserting anything at all because nothing is ruled out by our claim that God loves his children or other sorts of Christian propositions. And can somebody review for me how Flew goes about demonstrating his point or how he thinks he demonstrates his point. We've all read the stories by now. Right. We had a good break over Friday. Let you catch up. Okay. He begins by giving an example of coming to a clearing in a jungle, two explorers. One says, there is a garden. I don't see that garden. And Alan says, well, it's here. The gardener hasn't come yet. And then he goes on to explain that, you know, they can't see the gardener and they put up an electric fence and there's no visible or tangible force. That's right. And so the original hypothesis, or claim that there is a gardener has died the death of a thousand qualifications. The the person has resisted falsification so much that it appears that the idea that there is a gardener and the idea that there's no gardener amount to the same thing. I mean, there's just no difference in cash value for these claims. Nothing's ruled out by the one that isn't ruled out by the other. Okay, and then there are a series of responses given to Flu. One by Basil Mitchell, one by RM Hare, and another by John Hick. And one by one. Can you quickly tell me how these three men reply to the challenge Flew has given? First of all, Basil Mitchell. Mitchell says that since a Christian will recognize that there is indeed a challenge to or something to the challenge that is presented to the Christian argument, that therefore that factor points out that there is some meaning to it. That's right. He recognizes that the counter evidence counts against his claim. But since he's a man of faith, the counter evidence is never allowed to be conclusive. And so we have a challenge, but never a conclusive challenge. And that shows that the claims are meaningful. RM hertakes another approach altogether. What is his? And summarize it in one word. Blick. Blick. What's a blick? Mindset. Mindset or organizing picture of something. A viewing of something. And what Hare says is that Christians have this over arching organizing view of things. And although nothing is definitely asserted by a blick, nevertheless they are meaningful because we can tell the difference between a sane and an insane blick. And the example of an insane blick he gives is what? That's right. The don who is paranoid, who thinks everybody's out to kill him. What happens when counter evidence through this hypothesis that everybody's out to kill him is given? How does he respond to the counter evidence? It's controverted to make it fit into his perception of it. That's right. It's important to say more than just that he rejects it. It's not that he rejects it. He finds in that evidence to the contrary, that as he sees in this, the attempt now to dupe him and to make him naive and to make him think that he could trust people, but it's just a way to get more efficiently to the goal of killing them. So that if he learns to trust people by this evidence, so it turns out every bit of counter evidence only works to help his own hypothesis. And that shows that it's a blick, it's meaningful even though it doesn't assert anything in particular.

All right.

And then John Hick. It'd be a lot easier of course, if John Hick had the blick hypothesis, because then you can remember Hick and Blick, but don't confuse them. Hick is a little more conventional, you might say, in his attempt to counter lose challenge. What does he counter it with? Okay, that's right. Eschatological verification. And what is that? Go ahead. The idea is we'll never know until whether one view is right or wrong. Okay, we won't know until then, but the point is we will know then, right? Okay, so there is a decisive difference. The atheist rejects verification in the eschaton and the Christian asserts it. And there's a great difference there. There's no dying the death of a thousand qualifications. Of course, there is another problem, and that's that there's no way to falsify the claim because if it should be false, there'll be nobody around to know that it's false. And so it does seem to be a heads I win and tails you lose for Hick. And that has not satisfied many pagan philosophers, I would imagine. Okay, Flew says our religious claims resist falsification. We have these three particular ways of countering the claim. And then I began at the end of our class hour together last week to talk about the background of this kind of challenge. And I located that in the school of thought called logical positivism. Now somebody, would you please rehearse for me just very quickly what Logical positivism is. Only the analytical is real? No, no, in terms of meaningful statements. Analytical statements or tautologies are one of them. Very cool. But even more importantly, are the empirical statements. That's right. Analytical and empirical. And for something to count for a logical positive, this has to be one or the other of these. And then an empirical statement is known because it meets the verification principle. It satisfies the verification principle. But I went on to show that a number of criticisms can be made and have been made of the verification principle. First, its vagueness. It went through a number of formulations. And the one that I want you in particular to remember so that I can ask you about it during our time of sharing at midterm. Remember that, okay. Is the falsification test. That's exactly where flu is coming from, the falsification test of meaningfulness. And this was formulated by a man named Karl Popper, very well respected philosopher of science today. He said a statement is cognitively meaningful if it is conclusively falsifiable. If there is some empirical means of showing conclusively that the statement is false, if it should indeed be false. What was the main problem with that test of meaningfulness? Empirical, meaningfulness rules are particular statements.

That's right.

Falsification is never conclusive for any particular statement. Let me illustrate that another way for you today. Let's say we have somebody who believes that all gods are immortal, not immoral. That may be true also in Greek mythology. But all gods are immortal. Apollo is a God. And all the elementary logicians can see immediately the conclusion is what? Apollo is. Right? Apollo is immortal. Okay. Now, is that statement empirically falsifiable? Well, it certainly appears that it is. Stop and think, gentlemen. What if you poison Apollo? What if you stab him? What if you put him in the electric chair? What if you hang him? What if you shoot him and he doesn't die? Well, I mean, it's one way to test it. But what if he does die? Now, let's say he dies, okay? You poison him and Apollo dies. Okay? Has the statement that Apollo is immortal been falsified? Well, actually, if this one has been falsified, which one of these is wrong? The one at the top. The one at the top. Okay. In other words, all gods are immortal. Apollo is a God. But Apollo turns out to be mortal. And therefore it's not the case that all gods are immortal. There's one God that's mortal. Apollo is a God who is mortal. Is that right? We have conclusively falsified this statement by falsifying the conclusion. Is that right? Or it could be that Apollo is in fact not a God. Or maybe his claim to deity isn't so hot. Yeah, right. Maybe all gods are immortal. An apologist isn't a God if he dies. You begin to see the point. When you get empirical disconfirmation of this conclusion, you don't know which of the premises to give up. And there's no way to conclusively decide which particular statement will be given up. And that's why the falsification test is never going to be conclusive. To use the clever language of Musgrave and Laskatas, they say the arrow of modus tollens always has an elusive target. Modus tollens is a moving logic that says if T, then Q, not Q, therefore not T. And that form of reasoning is always valid. It's one of the standard syllogisms and traditional logic. Modus tollens, you see, if P, then Q, but Q is not the case. Consequently P is not the case either. You can falsify the consequent, then you can falsify the antecedent. All right. But you'll notice that the arrow of falsification, you see, if you falsify. Q, you falsify. P is always elusive. The target of that arrow is elusive because you never know whether to give up the statement that all gods are immortal or to give up the statement that Apollo is a God or what have you. And that's what I was getting at when I said that we confront the world, our empirical experience, with a web of beliefs, and we never know where the web is going to be broken when falsifying evidence is found. And that's why Christians, whenever they find alleged falsifying evidence, can break the web elsewhere. They can say we didn't interpret the Bible correctly, we can't trust our senses. We're not sure these scholars are right in what they're saying. I mean, they can give up any number of things before they have to give up their Christianity. And that's what makes it so frustrating to pagan philosophers, to be sure. In expression, logical positivism, what is positive about logic? What does the term mean, though that doesn't have anything to do with being positive? Positivism is a school of philosophy, especially a school of sociology, I should. I should say. But it becomes a school of philosophy associated with the name Auguste Comte, C O M T E. And he had a positive program of reconstructing the sciences. I suppose that's where the. And what does positive mean in that sense? Okay, logical positivism is simply an attempt to take over the program of Comte, the positive reconstruction of the sciences, but in a logical way. So it's logical positivism, but there's nothing positive about it except in the sense that it's an attempt to put everything on a firm footing, a firm empirical footing. Does it mean the positing of logic? It doesn't mean positive logic and it doesn't mean depositing. No, it comes from a school of thought reconstruction of something. No, no. Well, it's. It's an attempt to be logical in the reconstruction of positivistic world and life view. But the positivism really has nothing to do with our idea of being positive about this. Would it help me if you told me what kind of sociology this Kant had? I mean, what was positive about that? What did it mean in that context? Well, his sociology was an attempt to be explicitly empirical at every point along the line, to get rid of anything that's smacked of metaphysical entities, to get rid of spirits, to get rid of gods, to get rid of souls, and simply to do natural science on a naturalistic basis. And what sense is that? Positivistic. How does that. That's just what the word comes to mean. I mean, I've never. Mainly, I think you're telling me it doesn't really have a handle. It's kind of a. I don't think. I don't think etymology is going to help in this case, as far as I know. Okay, other questions before I push on. Now, my main point at the end of the hour was to talk about logical positivism as that which undergirds flu's attempt, and to point out that positivism has failed. And if flu has no platform, then in that sense, flu has failed. And in a sense, I've already given you an answer to flu by pointing out the problems with the falsification test. But I want to go beyond this. And secondly, I want to point out that flu and Christians are in the same boat. We're all in the same boat. That's right. You write that down in your notes. We're all in the same boat, and I'll try to tell you why. As long as you can say that much, we're going to get somewhere on the midterm. Okay. Why are we all in the same boat? Well, first of all, there's a sense in which religious language is odd. In a sense in which religious language is ordinary language. It's odd language, and yet it's ordinary language. And the difficulty, I think, is that Flew has recognized only the oddness of religious language. He hasn't seen its ordinariness. And I'm going to elaborate on this for a few moments here. Religious language is odd, of course, in a great number of ways. In the first sense, it does not tend to. To lend itself to falsification. It resists falsification, even as Lewis pointed out, the oddness of that is that it also claims certainty for itself as opposed to mere possibility or probability. Christians don't say God probably loves us or God possibly loves us. They say it is certain that God loves us. So here's a claim that lays hold on certainty and yet resists falsification. Moreover, religious claims tend to be connected with moral predicates. Christians say that disbelief is not simply a mental error, it is a sin. You recall how Kierkegaard said that any religious language that tended toward being uncommitted or detached was suspicious from the outset. Could it really be religious language if you could have a cool attitude toward it? And that's true, isn't it? Religious language is odd. It claims moral predicates for itself. It claims certainty for itself.

And.

And it resists falsification. But having said that, on the other hand, there's something very ordinary about religious language too. It's not a technical language in any sense. It's not an academic language. You notice that our children can master Christian language. They don't have to go to college to do so, although they may have to go to college to learn the language of physics or sociology or philosophy to. So it's not an academic and technical language. It's the language of ordinary people. Moreover, it's not a language restricted to some limited or distinctive compartment of human life. Religious language enters into all that we say and do as Christians. It affects everything. And according to our faith, our language indeed makes a difference. In the real world. We believe that our language makes a difference because God can enter into all the affairs of our life and make his presence felt there. And in that sense, God does offer verification of himself. He makes a difference. He's verifiable, just as verifiable as the existence of any other person is verifiable. Or so it seems to the simple believer. It seems that it's as obvious to him that there's a God as there is that you're sitting there. And few religious people would claim that their faith is simply a blind leap in the dark. They think they have reasons for their faith. And these reasons in some cases are technical theistic arguments, such as we've looked at in the past in this class. Sometimes they're simply childlike appeals to experience. He lives within my heart, he's answered my prayers, or what have you. And so there's something very ordinary in religious language as well as something very odd. I don't think Flew reflects very much upon the ordinariness of religious language as it is descriptively the case. That is, he doesn't do a full description of the phenomenon that he's interested in. In fact, he implies that this ordinariness of religious language is something of a delusion. People think there's something ordinary about it, but in fact there's something very suspect all along because it resists falsification. But there's another interpretation of the data that I want to suggest, and that's simply that the ordinariness of religious language is not a delusion. And my interpretation can account for both the fact that religious language tends to resist falsification and claims verification for itself. Well, what is this other alternative, if it's not delusion, if it's not a delusion, to say that religious language is ordinary language? I want to suggest that religious language Is the language of basic conviction the language of basic conviction? Or if you wish to use vocabulary that we already utilized in this class, it's the language of presupposition, but the language of basic conviction. It's the language by which we state, invoke, honor, advocate, and in otherwise other ways bring to bear those things of which we are most certain, those things which are most important to us, those things which we will cling to even though we must lose everything else. Now, not all language, not all natural human language is religious in the usual sense. There's the language of basic conviction, and then there's the language of secondary convictions and tertiary convictions and all the rest. But religious language is the language of basic convictions. And I want to add that many people who consider themselves irreligious still have basic convictions. And in that sense I will say even they have religious language. Even though it's an irreligious religion, the language of atheism or materialism or hedonism or egotism or what have you, it nevertheless is the language of basic conviction. All of us have basic convictions, and even positivist have basic convictions. You know how we know positivists have basic convictions? Because they have things to which they are wed that they will not give up, though all else fails. The positivists were so tied to the language of natural science that when the logical positivist schemes failed, they decided to give up logical positivism and keep their trough to natural science. You know, you would think, well, since everything has failed, we might as well give up on the supposed merits of natural science. But they didn't. They were committed in advance to natural science as a paradigm of what is correct. And so positivists also have their basic convictions. And insofar as we try to be consistent as people, we try to bring all of our life and thought into accord with our basic convictions. Whether they be the basic convictions of materialism, logical positivism, or Christianity, nothing which is inconsistent with our basic convictions will be tolerated. Indeed, an inconsistency of that sort amounts to a divided loyalty, a confusion of life's direction for us. So most of us at least try to avoid this kind of confusion. And our basic conviction becomes our paradigm of reality, our paradigm of truth in our paradigm of what is right. And it is a paradigm to which all other examples of reality, truth and right must measure up if they are to count at all. And that means that our basic convictions become the cornerstone of our metaphysics, our epistemology, and our ethics. Now, I want to go on and add to this that we all have basic conviction language and that it turns out that the basic commitment language in general displays the same kinds of oddness and ordinariness that I've already noted in religious language. That is all basic commitment language shows the oddness and the ordinariness that we've already observed in our Christian language, our religious language. We state our basic commitments as certainties, not merely as possible possibilities or probabilities. Because our basic commitments are the things of which we are most sure. They are the paradigms of our certainty against which all other certainties are to be measured and weighed. Because basic commitments are paradigms also of righteousness, any challenge to those commitments will invariably seem unjust because such challenges, if successful, will deny our whole reason for living. So if I'm a logical positivist and I'm tied to natural science, anybody who challenges that is being unjust. That person is challenging my most basic commitment, challenging what seems to me the very reason for living. And obviously basic commitment language is the language of commitment. It's not detached, it's not objective. You don't have a cool attitude toward your basic convictions. And so there's this oddness that we see in all basic conviction language. It tends to resist falsification. And then in another sense, our basic conviction language is very ordinary. Before I talk about the ordinariness of this, let's let me just take a second to illustrate what I'm saying about basic conviction language outside of Christianity. Let's say that we're in a position of flu and we want to be open minded. We're going to challenge not just religious convictions, but let's say we're going to challenge the Mammon worshipper of the world. Okay, what would have to occur, or to have occurred to constitute for this Mammon worshipper a disproof of the primacy of money making. What would bring him to the conclusion that money making is not the highest value? Well, what would have to happen to cause him to abandon his faith? You can't simply say in advance, can you? You just can't know what would make a person give up that conviction. Committed as he is, he devoutly hopes that nothing will bring about such a change in his attitudes. He not only hopes he knows, or so he thinks he knows, because he interprets all reality so as to accord with his commitment to money. Some event, indeed, we can't say what may cause him to change. If he yields to the temptation of regarding that event from a non mammon perspective. But if he does not give up his non mammon perspective, no challenge will ever be decisive to him. He changes his perspective because he is compromised. And if he doesn't compromise, he won't change his perspective. Very obvious. And that makes it something of a religious faith to him. Okay, so you see that there are other worldviews, other commitments in life that are just like religious commitments. In resisting falsification, there are some people who profess Christ, who give up that commitment too. And we say of them that they have compromised, that they are apostates, that they've given up the faith. Well, there are apostates from mammon worship too, and apostates from logical positivism. But as long as a person is consistent and keeps his faith up, then everything is going to all counter evidence is going to be resisted for him. Well now let's turn away from this oddness of basic commitment language to its ordinariness. The language of basic commitment is not strange, it's not esoteric. We use it all the time. It enters into every area of our life simply because it's so basic and so important to us. It's natural that we do so. It's important to us just because it makes a difference. It makes more difference in our life than anything else. And without it, nothing would make sense to us. Without money, nothing makes sense to the man and worshipper. Without natural science, nothing is meaningful to the logical positivist. Without it, nothing makes sense. All of experience then verifies the basic commitment, verifies the validity of our basic commitment. Everything, if it makes sense at all, verifies our basic commitment. The evidence is always there. My first claim is that religious language is but one instance of basic commitment language. Secondly, basic commitment language shows the same oddness and ordinariness that we see in all religious language. And now thirdly, we have to ask, how can a commitment be verifiable and non verifiable at the same time? We said it's ordinary, we can verify our claims, and yet it resists falsification. It's non verifiable. How can it present proof and at the same time resist falsification by contrary evidence? And the resolution of that paradox, the resolution of the tension between the oddness and the ordinariness of basic commitment language, gets us to the heart of the matter. Think for a minute of a philosopher who is committed to establishing all truth by the evidence of his senses. He must see it or hear it, or what have you. To have the truth established sense, experience, is his standard of truth. Now ask yourself what evidence would disprove his standard of truth? What evidence would be required to disprove the standard of sense experience for truth in one sense? No evidence at all. For if sense experience is truly his criterion, then all objections to the criterion will have to be verified. Through what? Sense experience. You see, he says sense experience is the standard of truth. Somebody says, I wish to challenge that. And he goes, do you want to challenge it with true statements or false statements? Well, true ones. Okay, then you verify your statements through sense experience, and then we'll see what you've got. But if the person submits to the test of sense experience, he submitted to the truth of the criterion from the outset. And so in one sense, there is nothing that can falsify his standard. All claims will have to be tested by the criterion which they are in fact opposing and thus disprove, as with other basic commitments, will come only in something like a crisis of faith. At the same time, all evidence, he will think, proves his criterion. The philosopher will argue very learnedly and cogently to establish his basic conviction that sense experiences the way to the truth. He'll try to refute contrary claims. He will produce carefully constructed arguments for his point of view. But now we must see that all such arguments will prove to be circular in character. Arguments for the sense criterion of truth must be verified by what? The very criterion they are proposing, the criterion of sense experience itself. And therefore sense experience verifies sense experience. A philosopher must argue for sense experience by appealing to sense experience. What choice does he have but to do that? If he appeals to something else as his final authority, he's not being consistent with his final authority. See how very simple this all becomes? It's elementary, my dear Watson. If he doesn't appeal to sense experience, then he's not really committed to sense experience. In the end, he's committed to something else. And that's going to be true for any basic conviction. Any final authority you have can only be established on the authority of that final authority itself. Or to put it another way, you can only authorize your final authority by means of your final authority. When we are arguing on behalf of an absolute authority, then our appeal must be to that authority and to no other. And that's why you'll see that a proof for the primacy of reason must appeal to reason. A proof for the necessity of logic always appeals to logic. A proof of the primacy of mammon must itself be part of an attempt to earn more money. And a proof for the existence of God must appeal in the final analysis to God. So next time somebody suggests to you that you're reasoning in a circle in a subtle sense because you're presupposing the very thing you want to prove, rather than backing off of that, you ought to say, and what are the alternatives? Shall I give up my basic conviction about God so that I might prove that my basic conviction is God? Would you give up your basic conviction to logic, commitment to logic, so that you might prove that logic is your basic conviction? It's impossible. Such arguments are circular. They must be circular. All arguments for basic convictions are circular arguments. However, the proof, or excuse me, the circularity of the argument is rarely blatant. It usually lurks in the background of the reasoning. One never says reason is true because reason says that it is true. One says instead, reason is true because one must presuppose it even to deny it. And we say the same thing as Christians. The existence of God is true because you must presuppose it even to deny it. That's a circular argument. But we don't come right out and say God exists because God says he exists. The circularity is not so blatant, it's not so flat, if you will, as that it usually lurks in the background as something subtle. It's something implicit rather than explicit. But just because it's circular doesn't mean that it doesn't have value. The argument is persuasive, though circular, because deep down in our hearts we know that we cannot live without reason or without logic, or more importantly, without God. A Christian theist, while conceding that the argument for God's existence is circular, nevertheless will claim that the argument is simple, sound, and it is persuasive. He believes that God made men to think in terms of this circularity rather than in terms of some competing circularity. God made us to think his thoughts after him rather than to think the thoughts of logical positivists after them. And one will have to choose his basic commitment. Is he committed first of all to his Maker, to God, or is to be committed first of all to some other men, elite group of scholars, or to his own mind or to his own pocketbook? Whatever his basic commitment is, it's going to involve a circularity of commitment and reasoning. And we think that God made us to think in terms of his circle and not in terms of some competing circle. And so let me summarize basic commitment. Language is both odd and ordinary. It resists falsification. It refuses to be judged by some antithetical commitment. And yet on the other hand, it accepts the responsibility to verify itself and accepts the responsibility of displaying whatever rationality and consistency it may claim. And now let's drill into the nerve we've been setting up for this. The question is, what is Anthony Flew's basic commitment? Is it to reason? To academic integrity of some sort? To some secular ethic? To some religious agnosticism? I personally don't know what it is, but I'm sure that he has a basic commitment. And according to the Bible, if he's not a Christian, his basic commitment is categorized as hindering the truth of God in unrighteousness and exchanging the truth of God for a lie. Romans 1 Paul says all men suppress the truth in unrighteousness, hinder it, and they exchange the truth for a lie. And if Flew is not a Christian, and he certainly would not claim to be one, then we must say of him that his basic commitment amounts to exchanging the truth for a lie. According to Scripture, Flew is committed at a basic level to opposing, contradicting and resisting the truth of God, which in some sense he nevertheless knows. The Bible says he is self deceived. He knows the truth and yet he claims something contrary to the truth. Now this commitment of Flew's will be unfalsifiable and yet self verifying. For him, since it's a basic commitment, it will be self verifying, ordinary and yet resist falsification. Somewhat odd. This commitment will be unfalsifiable and yet self verifying because it's a basic commitment. For all of Flew's irreligiosity, he is logically just like a religious believer. That's why I said get in your notes. If nothing else makes any difference this afternoon. Logically, Flew is in the same boat with religious believers. Logically, he has a basic commitment which also resists falsification, and yet he believes to be self verifying. We have claims which we think are self verification verifying and they resist falsification. Now let me illustrate this in terms of a parody on Flew's own parable, written by my former instructor, John Frame. This parody on Flew's parable I think is very insightful and it uses the same idea of the garden. And Frame puts it this way. I hope you've all read Flews little story, because if you have, this is, I think, a brilliant counter to it. And if you haven't, it won't make near as much difference to you. But for what it's worth, please listen. Frame says once Upon a time, two explorers came upon a clearing in the jungle. A man was there pulling weeds, applying fertilizer and trimming branches. The man turned to the explorers and introduced himself as the royal gardener. One explorer shook his hand and exchanged pleasantries with him. The other ignored the gardener and turned away, saying, there can be no gardener in this part of the jungle. This must be some kind of a trick. Someone is trying to discredit our previous findings. And so they pitch camp. Every day the gardener arrives, he tends the plot, and soon the plot is bursting with perfectly arranged blooms. He's only doing it because we're here to fool us into thinking this is a royal garden. The gardener takes them to a royal palace, introduces the explorers to a score of officials who verify the gardener's status. Then the skeptic tries a last resort. Our senses are deceiving us. There is no gardener, no blooms, no palace, no officials. It's still a hoax. Finally, the believer despairs. But what remains of your original assertion? Just how does this mirage, as you call it, differ from a real gardener? You see now how the shoe's on the other foot? You see, we have all sorts of evidence we can give Flew about religious claims, but he wants to explain every bit of it away. And when he does, we want to know if his atheism is not dying. The death of a thousand qualifications. How is his non existent God different from the God for which all this evidence has been given? And then John Frame adds after this, a garden indeed. Isn't that where the biblical story began? In a garden? And what happened in that garden? Wasn't there abundant evidence for Adam and Eve of the existence of God and the demand of God on their lives? And yet, irrational though it may be, they denied God's claim upon them. And ever since that day, sinners have been guilty of the same kind of irrationality. For God is verifiable. God is knowable. God is, to use the language of Paul, clearly seen in his works, so that all men are without excuse for denying him. And so for the Christian, the denials of God lapse into sinful cognitive meaninglessness, an attempt to evade God by using atheistic language to describe what is a patently theistic world. And so flu and the Christian, I'm trying to point out, are in the same boat. Both have beliefs which are odd and ordinary, resistant to falsification, yet verifiable on their own terms. Logically, both systems face the difficulties of circularity. But one system is true and the other is false. And if men have been made to know such things? We certainly believe they have been. Then you can tell the difference between flu circularity and the Christian circularity, and you can know who is right and who is wrong. Okay, let me summarize. Our response to flu is very simply, that he's only told half the story. Religious language does resist falsification, but it also claims to be verifiable in terms of its own presuppositions. And this epistemological peculiarity, that we resist falsification, but we also claim verification for our claims attaches to all basic commitment language, not just to Christian or religious basic commitment language. It attaches to all unbelieving language as well. And so the very considerations that Flew is using against Christianity may not be used uniquely against Christianity, for his considerations are simply descriptive of the human epistemological condition in general. If what he says counts against Christianity, it counts against everything, in which case nothing has any meaning at all. And finally, Scripture pictures the unbeliever as the one who is truly ridiculous, who ignores the patent evidence, who makes mockery of reason, and on the whole has no basis for knowledge at all. To the Christian, the unbelieving circle is and ought to be absurd. And therefore I conclude that Flew has not succeeded in any sense in showing that religious language is cognitively meaningless. And in that sense, he's failed to show that human language cannot speak of God. Okay, what do Flew's peers call his school of thought? Do they use words like presuppositionists?

They do not.

Do they? Well, Flew is one of linguistic analysts today. Linguistic analysts and his peers call them that as well. Oh, yes, It's a very broad school of flu. Do they use other subtitles like presuppositionalist? No, that's Christian talk, isn't it? Well, there is discussion in metaphysics of presuppositions, but it's not a school of thought as such. Yeah, he would be considered in the school of thought of linguistic analysis over against, say, process philosophy or existentialism or phenomenology. He's a British philosopher in the classical mold. He's an empiricist and interested in logic and clarity of thought, which is pretty much our American tradition in philosophy too, although we're a bit more eclectic than the British are. Other questions about religious language and its meaningfulness. Is anybody yet disturbed by the challenge of flu? It makes me feel good if you're not, but I'm bothering you. Before, when I discussed logical positivism, I defined it as the real is the analytical. If I had said the real is the empirical, which can be analyzed, would you have accepted that answer? The real is the empirical, the real or the meaningful? The difficulty is that logical positivists don't wish to have any doctrine of metaphysics at all. And anytime you say the real is the following, then you're giving metaphysical dogma. And they don't believe in metaphysics, so they don't talk about what's real. They only talk about what's meaningful. I concede. I concede. If I had said if the meaningful is that which is tautological or empirically verifiable, then you would have given us logical positivism. Yes. All right, you've said it about seven or eight times. Just once more because I'm having difficulty sorting it out yet. The difference between ordinary and extraordinary language. Use another term. Basic conviction language. Yeah. Okay. Basic conviction language is the kind of language that shows this oddness and ordinariness about it.

Okay.

Now, not all language is the language of basic commitment. If you say it's sunny outside, although you may be part of some religious cult that is committed to the idea that it's sunny today and you give your very lives for it and all that, it's pretty unusual for that to be a basic commitment. That's the sort of thing, when you look at the window, you say, hey, it's sunny outside. It's one of those passing almost trivial, unless you haven't seen the sun for a few weeks. Almost trivial? Yeah, unless you live in Ohio. You might just get a little crazier about it. You look at the room, you say, hey, it's sunny today. Or, you know, there's so many hymnals over on the. Over on the cart there, or something like that. That's not a basic conviction thing that doesn't resist falsification. You say, hey, there's 30 hymnals. And somebody walks in and goes, well, actually, there's 34. You say, oh, well, I guess it's 34. Unless you are just really proud or something, and you're committed to the idea that you're infallible, in which case that becomes something you can't give up. Most of us would give up the idea that we didn't count the hymnals. It's not a basic conviction. And there's a whole. Although I didn't say this in the lecture, I think it's probably helpful to see now that while we have our basic convictions, the fundament on which everything else builds, there are levels of conviction, and these levels will be different for different people. And I think probably it's true the levels of basic conviction are different for different Christian theologians too. You know, let's say I have a view of the origin of the soul, a sandwich traditionist. Let's say I'm also a Calvinist and I believe in predestination. And there's somebody else who is a traditionist and a predestinarian. It may very well be that he's a lot more committed to his traditionism than he is to his predestination, okay, in his web of beliefs as a Christian theologian, whereas I might give up traditionism very easily, but I hold on to predestination, you know, no matter what. There are no is a basic conviction that we have to recognize within the web of everybody's beliefs. And then of course, that's true of the unbeliever too. You know, he has a number of beliefs, some of which resist falsification to this degree and others resist falsification to a greater degree than there are those that resist falsification altogether. His most basic conviction, which if he gives up, he's really had a conversion experience. He might have been converted from, say, a man in worship to hedonism. He may say, well, I don't really care about money anymore. Sex is what counts. You know, that's a conversion experience in a sense, because he's given up. What is most basic to it, and of course, what we're interested in as Christians is that this conversion experience takes place away from all other competing claims, all other idolatries to life in the Son of God. So what I'm pointing out here is, I think, true throughout life. It's not some kind of unique claim that only Christians can see. I think unbelievers can see this. In fact, I can assure you, unbelievers see it. You can read Willard Van Ormond Klein's book the Web of Belief. He's an adamant anti Christian, probably the best known philosopher in our country today, teaching at Harvard, and he's the one who's written this introduction to epistemology entitled the Web of Belief, which is the analogy that I've been using. So it's not a uniquely Christian insight to point out that we all have our presuppositions and we have degrees of presuppositional commitment. That's what I'm getting at. There are you see these convictions and then as you get up here, small and small, finally, way up here, kind of a minuscule point, is how many hymnals there may be over on the cartoon you can get that one up very easily. But down here you're not going to give up and here you're going to give up with varying degrees of strength and resistance. And I'm saying flu down here is a God hater, to use the language of the Bible. And so he looks at those who love God and says, hey, you know, you got these commitments that resist falsification. They must not be meaningful. That's like saying his hatred of God is not meaningful just because it's his basic conviction. Are we to believe that the only thing that has meaning is something for which you can have no ultimate conviction? That is what some non believing or unbelieving philosophers have suggested. In answer to Flew, by the way, I said he almost gives the impression that the only thing that has meaning is something you can give up. Which is to say that anybody committed to a scientific theory for all he's worth, that theory doesn't have any meaning for it. Well, that's silly, isn't it? And I think my analysis does justice to the full range of the facts or I hope a lot better justice than does Flew's. And if you follow my analysis, his critique doesn't do us any harm at all. In fact, I think it turns out harming his own theory or anything other than a Bible sent, Bible oriented web breaks at some point or completely, completely so. Well in theory for the person, it need not ever break, although we're convicted on the teaching of the New Testament that someday it will break but every knee will bow and all tongues will confess. But in another sense, even then I wonder whether the web will completely break because my own feeling is on the day of judgment you'll still have the unbeliever rationalizing his sin and saying, God, you didn't give us enough evidence. And so in that sense, throughout all eternity, unbelievers will think that their plight is God's fault and not their own. And yet they'll have clear evidence, you know, they are sinful and they should have known that sort of thing. So in one sense it will break, in another sense it doesn't, I guess because I don't think people are going to learn to love God on the day of judgment. I think he'll either go to that day loving him or not loving him and that will be confirmed for all eternity. The basic convictions will stay the same is what I'm getting at. Yes, for clarification on that point, what would be the basic conviction of an existential. A little bit louder, what would Be the basic conviction of an existence. Essentials, freedom, freedom from anything. If it's John's wall, Sartre from anything, freedom even from the opposition to that wall over there. Sartre says, if I can't go through that wall, it's because I've chosen not to go through that wall. Pay your money and take your choice. Did he choose not to die? Yes, sir. Sartre had an answer for that. Not he chose to die. He does drink in a real sense, that people are the masters of their fate. And you can choose to die too. If he was reconciled with the idea of his own death, he should say that death was no obstacle to him and therefore he had overcome it. He was still a free man. The existentialist Existentialism, of course, the school of thought comes from the statement that existence precedes essence, which is the heart of all existentialist philosophy. There are a lot of variations among existentialists and even variations from decade to decade within one existentialist thought. You follow Sartre's career, it's rather amazing to see his flip flops. But when all is said and done, the existentialist believes that he exists. He shows up on the scene and then he determines for himself what he shall be. First, that he exists is true, and then what he exists as becomes true by his own free choice. So he chooses to be a person of a slave mentality, or he chooses to be a person who has an authentic existence, free of self deception by making his own decisions. But the idea is that he is totally free to be what he chooses to be. He determines his own essence, and that's what makes him an existentialist. He first exists and then he determines his essence. Okay, that's his basic. I think that's a fair philosophical analysis of the case. There may be something even more basic to individual existentialist. Sartre may have been all said and done. He may have said, you know, I'll throw away being in nothingness, I don't care about that, but don't take away sex, for all I know. I'm not trying to slander him. I'm saying that in his own personal life there may have been something a lot more important than his own philosophy. But philosophically, that's the basic commitment. Existence would not have been a basic commitment. Well, like I said, that existence precedes essence is the basic conviction, not simple existence. Because he might have existed as predetermined to be a man or a woman or a coal miner or a philosopher or what have you. But his point is that he first existed and then he determined what he would be. Any other freedom to determine. That's right. And all of man's problems arise from the bad faith that he doesn't have the freedom to be what he wants to be. You know, Sartre is one of the most adamant opponents of Freudian analysis. Just because. What did Freud teach? That we are subject to forces beyond our comprehension, beyond our cognizance, beyond our control. Sarkur said that's heresy. Pretty close to Nietzschean philosophy and perspective. Nietzsche in philosophy? Well, certainly, yeah. Historians of philosophy would draw a connection between Nietzsche and existentialism. Other schools of thought, too. Nietzsche's hard to categorize. Kind of a wild person. I meant that philosophically, it's true. He was wild in his life too, I guess. Other questions about religious language and its resistance to falsification. Okay, this is the modern form of the religious language debate, but now there is a medieval form of the religious language debate we have to look at also. Actually, Brody, our editor, puts the medieval debate first. For historical purposes, I trust. I thought it would be best to take up the one that's challenging the Church today. I don't want to take a lot of time and the medieval debate. But the modern debate is over the meaningfulness of religious claims. I will want you to know the difference here. The modern debate is over the meaningfulness of religious claims, whereas the medieval debate is over the meaningfulness of attributions. How can the attributing of a quality to God be meaningful? And the first figure we look at in our textbook anyway on this problem is Maimonides, the Jewish philosopher who was very influential on Thomas Aquinas development. Maimonides says that attributing positive properties to God, attributing positive properties underline positive. Attributing positive properties to God would imply that God is a composite being. If we can attribute anything positive to God, that is to imply that you could add up qualities in the Godhead and therefore he would be a composite being. What's wrong with that? Especially if you're a Jewish theologian. I mean, it would be difficult if you're a Christian too. But God is one.

That's right.

God is one. God is not composite in any sense. He's an absolute unity. And so Maimonides reasoned, if God is an absolute unity, you can't attribute anything positive to him, because that would be to say you have something to which something more can be added and added and added. And therefore God becomes a composite being. He's not an absolute Unity. All right. How did Maimonides solve his problem, which to my own way of thinking is his own development? I think it's a problem in his own mind. But how did he attempt to rid himself of the difficulty? All attributions of properties had to be stated in such a way that they denied others. Very good. That's exactly right. Exactly right. All attributions have to be of negative properties. All right, so that if we say God is living, that sounds like it's a positive attribution, but in fact it must be translated into more philosophically precise language as God is not dead. God is not dead. It's a Maimonides figure. If he used negative attributions, that is attributed the denial of positive qualities to God, that therefore he would avoid making God a composite being because he's not adding anything to God. He's taking things away from the concept of God. God is not dead. Okay? God is not impotent. God is not this, God is not that. That's not adding all these things and then creating a composite or a mosaic for God. If you look in your textbook on page 278, I'll give you the key expression in Maimonides for our reading. Page 278, right in the middle of the page. After this preface, I shall say that it has already been demonstrated that God, may he be honored and magnified, is existent of necessity. And that there is no composition in him, as we shall demonstrate, and that we are only able to apprehend the fact that he is and cannot apprehend his quiddity. It's one of those words you hear on the six o' clock news almost every night. Right? Quiddity. What's quiddity? His what kind? His kind or his whatness, if you will. His whatness. It is consequently impossible that he should have affirmative attributes, for he has no that outside of his what. And hence an attribute cannot be indicative of one of the two, all the more his what is not compound, so that an attribute cannot be indicative of its two parts. And all the more he cannot have accidents, so that an attribute cannot be indicative of them. Accordingly, he cannot have an affirmative attribute in any respect. And that's the heart of the reading right there. What did Thomas Aquinas say in answer to Maimonides? In many ways, Aquinas was influenced positively. In this case, he differed with his mentor. What did Aquinas say? Well, he disagreed with Maimonides. For we really want to say that God is more unlike some things than other. Things.

Aquinas points out the obvious truth, that it's not enough to say that God is not dead as a way of saying he's living, because God is not like living things either. He's not like plants and animals, is he? And so in some sense, he's not living either. He's not living in the ordinary sense of the things we see around us. And so Aquinas says, what you really want to say is that God is really more not dead than he is not living. You see, there's this continuum between being not living and not dead. And he's more toward the not dead side of the continuum than he is to the not living side. So he accepts the terms of the debate by monadies. You have to use negative predication. But don't you recognize you've got to always put this in some comparative framework? God is more not dead than he is not living. But if he is more not dead than he is not living, what is that to say? That's to say something positive about him, that he's living rather than dead. And so by introducing comparison into the negative attribution, Aquinas suddenly gets positive attribution back into the picture. And of course, I think any logician would have recognized that from the beginning, whether something stated positively or negative has nothing to do with the essential attribute itself, but simply in the manner of linguistic expression.

And in the medieval world, that didn't.

Come out quite as clear as a modern logician would put it. But Aquinas did make the same point in a roundabout way. He said, you have to have comparative negative attributes to be accurate. And that is simply then to get around to a positive attribute, after all. Well, then, what is the problem with attribution to God for Aquinas, if it's not? We're moving off of Maimonides here. Let me make sure you understand the math of the lecture here. Maimonides was just confused. Aquinas says. But Aquinas says there is a big problem in making attributing things to God. What is the problem for Him? Well, it's fourfold. I think we can get through this before our time is up. He says the problem is that in attribution of something to God, we must avoid, first of all, implying the conditions of corporality in God. We must not imply that God is corporeal in making attribution to Him. The difficulty here is that when we look at an attribute in our own experience, it's always an attribute of a corporeal thing, something that has Composition and temporality, something that exists through time as a composite. So we see it, let's say we see justice in a man who exists in time as a composite being, and we say God is just. But is that to say God has a human body, or we see beauty in a flower and we say God is beautiful? Is that to say that God is like a flower, that he has a corporeal body? So Aquinas, first of all wanted to avoid implying that the conditions of corporality could be found in God. Secondly, he wanted to avoid implying that God is not incomprehensible. After all, I stated that in a double negative on purpose. The traditional dogma was that God was an incomprehensible being. It would seem to follow from that that if God is incomprehensible, we can't attribute anything to him or about Him. Therefore, if we are making attributions, how do we guard the doctrine of God's incomprehensibility? So the second problem was that of not implying that God is not incomprehensible, since we're making attributions and in some sense comprehending him after all. Thirdly, Aquinas wanted to avoid the problem of univocal predication. Can somebody tell me what univocal predication is? I'm making it the same instead of predicated diverse. That's right. Univocal predication is saying that God holds a predicate in the same way that man holds the predicate. So that when I say that God is good and I say that man is good, that we're using good in exactly the same way. Now, Aquinas said we had to avoid univocal predication. Why? Why shouldn't the meaning of the word good be the same when we're speaking of God and when we're speaking of man? What is it, Ross, that discusses that in detail? Well, Ross does the within the Thomistic answer to this problem, but he doesn't deal with this specifically, as I recall. Well, univocal predication would obscure the transcendent perfection of God. If God is good in the same way that man is good, then his goodness is an eminent goodness. It's not a transcendent goodness. And therefore the transcendent perfection of God has been compromised. Okay, well, if we're not going to use univocal predication, one would think that necessarily we're going to use equivocal predication. Equivocal predication? What is it to equivocate on a predicate? Oh, you're all Getting tired. Put them on the same basis. No, no, no. That's univocal. Univocal. Una vocal, same word. Relative, not relative, diverse. Equivocal means that there's at least two meanings being used here that would. I'll give you a clinical predication. Here's my argument. I have time to write it down. Some dogs have spots. My dog has spots, therefore my dog is some dog. Good argument, eh? One more time for the slow and fast. Some dogs have spots. My dog has spots, therefore my dog is some dog. What's the problem there? The word some is being used equivocally in that argument. The word some is being used in two different ways in the major premise. It's being used quantitatively. Some dogs have spots.

That is, among all the dogs.

You'll find those that have spots in the conclusion. My dog is some dog is being used qualitatively, meaning this is some dog and it's a pretty good dog. Right? Got spots argument is not a good argument because there's equivocal predication being used. Being using one word in two different ways. Now, Aquinas said, when we make attribution to God, we must avoid equivocal predication. Because if we use equivocal predication, that will preclude knowing something about God's nature from his ordinary creatures. I mean, if the meaning of the word good when it applies to a dog or a man is completely different than the meaning of the word good when applied to God, we'll never learn anything about God from creation because the meaning of the terms will always be different. Okay, let's review before we go home. Now, the problem for Aquinas is that if we're going to make attribution to God, we have to avoid implying that he's corporeal, avoid implying that he is not incomprehensible. We have to avoid univocal predication, and we have to avoid equivocal predication because univocal predication obscures his transcendence. Equivocal predication obscures our knowledge of him from the world. And with that, and with your avid interest in this issue, I'll leave you hanging until Wednesday and we'll find the the answer to our problem, or at least we'll find Thomas answer to the problem.