Exploring Approaches to Apologetics CA513 o Apologetics t ...

Exploring Approaches to Apologetics

Transcript - CA513 Exploring Approaches to Apologetics © 2019 Our Daily Bread University. All rights reserved.

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LESSON 12 of 24CA513

The Rational Empirical Approach II

Exploring Approaches to Apologetics

In 1 Corinthians 3, toward the end of that section, the Apostle Paul writes, “But do not deceive yourselves. If anyone of you thinks he is wise by the standards of this age, he should become a fool so that he may become wise, for the wisdom of this world is foolishness in God’s sight. As it is written, ‘He catches the wise in their craftiness, and again the Lord knows that the thoughts of the wise are futile.’”

We have seen some of the futility of a naturalistic worldview and some of the foolishness of the pantheistic worldviews in which people imagine that they are God. But oddly enough in the Christian Church, some people put the wisdom of men above the truth that comes from God. The passage continues, “So then no more boasting about men.” In Corinth there had been divisions—those who followed Paul and others who followed Apollos and some Peter. He writes, “All things are yours, whether Paul or Apollos, or Cephas or the world or life or death or the present or the future, all are yours and you are of Christ and Christ is of God.”

I hope that as we study different apologists, we do not become divisive as the people at Corinth did. We seek in evaluating these writers to appropriate what is true and good in them and avoid their weaknesses. All are yours. Learn from the pure empiricists, the rational empiricists, and the rationalists, the mystics, and so on. All are yours so long as you honor Jesus Christ and His Father in heaven.

Our God, we thank you for the privilege of utilizing all that is good and true in your creation. Forgive us when we have so narrowly defined the limits of your truth. Help us to receive it wherever it may be found and to grow by it and to become better servants of others through it. For Jesus’ sake. Amen.

Gordon Lewis, Ph.D. Experience: Senior Professor of

Christian and Historical Theology, Denver Seminary, Colorado.



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In the last lecture, we gave a brief evaluation of the approach of Pure Empiricism. Then we presented an overview of Stuart Hackett’s Rational Empiricism. And toward the end, we sketched the position in terms of our five points of comparison. We begin today with an evaluation of Hackett’s position on those five points.

First, what about Hackett’s logical starting points? His starting points, in my judgment, are helpful methodologically. Seekers or defenders of the faith may give priority to considerations of both the empirical data experienced and the a priori principles that make sense of it. Hackett’s application of a priori logical principles provides a greater objectivity in knowledge than a pure empirical approach does. The starting points of Rational Empiricism expand the notion of experience to include analysis of our own thought processes and account for the universality and necessity of the law of noncontradiction. Hackett’s starting points improve upon those of the empiricists, for they are not sufficiently complete. In addition to the empirical and logical data, however, Hackett might well have included a third methodological starting point of inner-existential and axiological data.

Although Hackett’s methodological starting point is an improvement over that of Empiricism, he has not changed the starting point in terms of content. He, like Buswell, thinks that one can start reasoning from any point in the world of human experience and eventually arrive at a conclusion about God through the principle of causality. Both varieties of Empiricism need a more explicit starting point in terms of the content of the worldview, because no one has a blank mind in assessing the empirical evidence. At times, Hackett does impose the Christian alternative as a hypothesis to be tested along with other hypotheses. But in proposing a Christian perspective for consideration, like a distinctively view of Jesus or of the Bible, he has jumped from the assumptions of Rational Empiricism to the illogical starting point of another approach to reasoning.

Another closely related criticism is important also. Hackett’s utilization of Kantian categories is commendable, but he does not sufficiently address the primary issue Kant raised concerning their applicability beyond the phenomenal realm to the realm beyond physics; that is, to metaphysics. We will be studying other approaches that explicitly bridge that major gap. They show why it is reasonable to believe that the categories of human thought processes are in harmony with those of the world in itself and of



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God in Himself.

Second, what about Hackett’s view of common ground? It is helpful as far as it goes. I agree that all people have the same physical data presented to them and all have minds structured to receive that data and are capable of making judgments of truth and falsehood regarding them. But Hackett’s view of common ground also is incomplete. It could be strengthened by adding the data of shared inner-experiences of oughtness and guilt, for not being what we ought to be. He could include other existential types of data from experience and specifically religious conversion experiences. I am saying that a philosopher’s analysis of human experience should pay attention from the beginning to existential and mystical data. The data from a logical inner-experience is important also. It should provide part of the basic data which needs to be accounted for. It should not be relegated to a brief ten-page chapter on the Bible and religious experience that Hackett tacked on at the end of his recent 349-page book. We shall find more on this vital aspect of experience in some of the approaches yet to be studied.

Third, what about Hackett’s test of truth? It involved a coherence of the inner-rational categories and the outer physical data. Again, it is good as far as it goes, and it is more complete than the approach of Pure Empiricism, but it does not go far enough. It fails adequately to subject truth claims to the test of coherently accounting for all of our inner-experiential data, including those of values and religious experience.

Fourth, what about Hackett’s view of the role of reason? He assumes it functions both critically and expositionally, and hermeneutically reason functions accurately to state what one is asked to believe. An important aspect of apologetics is to state the doctrines of God, Christ, and Scripture with theological integrity. Hackett does that. Many who deny the truth of the Christian faith, in contrast, attack childish notions of it that responsible scholarly presentations do not recognize. College and university students, for example, are working on rather high philosophical levels at times in their courses, and they are comparing the challenges to Christian truth claims with what they received in the primary or junior department of Sunday school many years before.

Hackett has taught theology and does a much better job of formulating the Christian position on these basic issues than many apologists. If you have not had a good theology course, when you finish this one you will want to take such a course or



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study my three-volume work entitled Integrative Theology on your own. But in Hackett reason does more than state well what we are to believe. Reason also has a critical function. Critically it is reason that determines why one should believe a view, however well stated. Reason is responsible for distinguishing truth from falsehood, reality from unreality, and right from wrong. People in Old and New Testament times were responsible to use reason to distinguish true from false prophets, apostles, and messiahs. We will study approaches that want to limit the use of reason to a mere statement of the Christian faith. Many will say we are simply to declare that faith, we do not need to defend it. But Hackett is right in using reason to determine what faith is worth expounding. A critical use of reason decides why a proposed philosophy should receive assent and appropriate action. These two uses of reason, then, of exposition and criticism are commendable in terms of both biblical and historical precedent and they are crucial in view of present need.

Fifth, what about Hackett’s view of the basis of faith? In Rational Empiricism faith is neither a blind leap into the dark nor rational proof as in dealing with mere linguistic symbols or mathematics. The basis of faith in matters of historical, scientific, and legal realities is always probability, and in the case of many converging lines of evidence relating to the Christian faith, Hackett is right in emphasizing an overwhelming probability. The case is so rationally plausible as to call for personal commitment and action.

How then does Hackett apply his method of reasoning to the existence of God? First, he has an argument missing in Buswell’s pure empirical approach as he argues from the changeless categories to God. It is admittedly reminiscent of Augustine’s approach from changeless truths whose universality and necessity are known independent of sense perception. Hackett has previously concluded that all knowledge or truth claims run back to necessary starting points of thought like consistency or causality. These a priori concepts and principles have an objective status that is independent of finite minds and objects, he says. From that then these principles transcend the realm of contingent being as necessary conditions of the possibility of that realm. Third, they make thinking possible and constitute the essential nature of what it is to be a mind at all. Fourth, so it is reasonable to regard them as constituting the structure of an absolute transcendent Mind, with a capital M. And fifth, the absolute Mind is the God of theism, the ground of order in a contingent world. We can call this Hackett’s categorical argument.



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By way of evaluation, the argument for God’s existence from the inescapability of our mental categories may help to indicate the presence of similar categories in the mind of the Creator, if there is a Creator. Although the categorical argument in an empirical tradition may bridge the gap between one finite mind and another, it does not bridge the gap between the a priori knowledge of humans and eternal existence. The sole argument of empiricists for God’s existence is the cosmological argument. Their entire worldview rests upon it. Whether they are pure empiricists or rational empiricists, there is basically but one argument for God’s existence— the cosmological argument. Let’s look at that argument then more closely as Hackett has formulated it in his recent reconstruction of the Christian revelation claim.

He rests his case on the a priori principle of causality. He maintains that it is the presupposition of all possible and actual existence. The assumption that knowledge independent of experienced existing particulars can conclude that something exists is a fallacy, he says, in relation to the ontological argument for God’s existence. Yet he uses it in his own categorical argument. It is admittedly accepted as foundational to all other knowledge on a voluntary basis, for if one does not choose to accept that categorical anticipation of what exists without any sense data, Hackett’s primary arguments supporting God’s existence fail.

Look at his formulation of the argument with its two premises and conclusion. Premise one: If anything exists, an absolutely necessary transcendent being exists. Premise two: Something exists. I at least as a thinker or doubter exist. Conclusion, point three, therefore an absolutely necessary and transcendent being exists. Are the two premises true? If so, the conclusion logically follows. Premise two is true because he says it is undeniable in the sense that no one can consistently deny it. One must exist even to deny that one can know anything exists. Premise one then is regarded as true also because otherwise an infinite regress of finite causes would result, but that series of finite causes itself has no adequate cause, and an infinite temporal series would be contradictory and unintelligible. Hence, it is rationally plausible that a noncontingent cause of the entire dependent chain exists. So Hackett considers the whole argument sound, and if so the conclusion does validly follow. But is that first premise sound? For those in the tradition of Hume who limit knowledge to impressions, the universality and necessity of the causal principle will seem to be read into the equation a priori by a kind of philosophical eisegesis.



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John Stuart Mills’ classic work on the scientific method maintained that we can antecedents and consequence, but that we cannot verify a necessary connection universally even in the phenomenal realm. And Hackett’s case for the law of noncontradiction seems to me to be valid, for any objection to that law can hold as good only so long as its validity is assumed. But the case for a necessary connection between an effect and a cause in ultimate reality is not established in the same way. One can argue against it without assuming it. The problem of determining whether causality is one of the a priori principles that the mind brings with it remains.

Kantians would applaud the recognition of Kant’s categories in Hackett, but would argue that even if the causal principle does operate among phenomena, we do not know that it holds in metaphysical realms. We know that they seem to be the same in all human minds, but we do not know in the same way that they apply to things in themselves. Any empirical approach has no answer that begins with sense data to show that the principle applies beyond the realm of sense data. We cannot take the glasses of the categories off to see what reality would look like in itself. Every item known then is shaped by our irremovable software. Hackett’s a priori, universal, and necessary principle of noncontradiction among true assertions is well defended. The human mind has the capacity to conceptualize and therefore to apprehend essences as well as particular things that exemplify them. The question is whether one can move from knowledge of the essence of a thing to its existence. The fact that I can define a million dollars perfectly does not determine whether, in fact, I have a million dollars in any place in the world. But the movement from a rational, causal principle a priori to existence is challenged by all empiricists and that is what the cosmological argument tries to do.

The problems that plague Hackett’s cosmological argument also undercut his teleological, anthropological, and moral arguments. Hackett rejects a mystical apologetic from an experiential volunteerism for several reasons. First, recognition of an experience as religious presupposes a logically prior set of interpreted principles which are therefore more basic. The interpretation also may neglect the person’s cultural context. Second, when a person gives critical priority to his or her account of religious experience over the account of some other person, the procedure is either arbitrary or else it appeals to grounds logically independent of that experience.



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Nevertheless, Hackett summarizes his case for theism as follows: “If a contingent world order is possible and actual, and if the complexity of that cosmos is infiltrated with intelligently, directive, purposive structure, if at the climax of that cosmos there are beings whose unique personhood is inexplicable in terms of impersonal causes, and if the community of such persons constitutes the core of an objective moral order of being, then all this is fully conceivable only if it is suspended on the nature and causality of God.

What then about Rational Empiricism’s defense of Christ? Hackett has richly rewarding material on Christ from critical and theological perspectives and concludes that Jesus is either the ultimate human riddle or else God incarnate and the ultimate truth. And what about his defense of Scripture? Floyd Hamilton’s, The Basis of the Christian Faith, listed a host of lines of evidence making it highly probable that the Bible is divine revelation. We mentioned some of those as the end of the previous lecture. Hackett’s consideration of biblical phenomena concludes, “The Hebrew Christian Bible when rightly interpreted in its total context as an indefectibly, authoritative revelation of the one true God is evidently a holy, reasonable, intellectual, and philosophical thesis.” That is the case even if it exhibits as coherently and plausibly more adequate than any other pertinent alternative on this issue, something less than absolute demonstrableness; that is, conceivable in a formal logical conclusion. In view of the Bible’s revelational claim as centered on Jesus Himself, in view of the internal organic unity of the biblical writings, in view of the fact that properly construed, the Bible and genuine science exhibit no real logical opposition; in view of the reaffirmation of the biblical revelation in Christian religious experience, in view, I suggest of all this, Hackett says, “The conclusion that the revelational claim of Scripture is true is as reasonable as honest reflection could exact responsibly of such a claim.”

Once again, we can gain much value from the study of the specific data offered in both the pure empirical and the rational empirical approaches, and you will want to read the chapters which spell that out in much greater detail in my Testing Christianity’s Truth Claims, and then you may want to follow that up with reading the writings of these authors themselves to which I have referred in the conclusion of each chapter.

Applying the rational empirical approach to apologetics, then, what would a pastor in a church say to Jane who has lost her



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faith as a philosophy major at a university? Initially you would gain her assent to following the evidence of sense perception and the reality of the mental principles, such as the law of noncontradiction that enable us to make judgments on the basis of it. Using the innate principles and the evidence, you would not try to establish everything at once; first seek to help her reason from the existence of herself as a doubter to the eternally existing cause of all contingent existence and all universal and necessary principles by which to make sense of it. You would reason from the order of the observed world to the intelligence of its cause, from persons to the Creator’s personal nature, and from the persistence of moral concerns to the Creator’s moral nature.

When she can affirm the existence of a personal, transcendent God, then you would note the fact that persons can choose either to reveal themselves or not. Then seek to show by an application of the mind’s principles to the data of the First Century that God chose to disclose Himself in the historical Jesus and then in the Hebrew Christian Scriptures. As each step in the reasoning of each approach is considered, further critical considerations of empirically oriented apologetics will become evident.

We move then to Roman numeral VIIII in our study guide outline, “Exploring the Approach of Rationalism.” Carl Henry has praised Gordon Clark as one of the profoundest evangelical Protestant philosophers of our time, and since Clark’s approach has been most significant in the thought of the founding editor of Christianity Today, whose articles and many books have made a major impact in the twentieth century, we ought not dismiss Clark’s rationalism too quickly. Here is his biography as condensed by John W. Robbins, who continues to publish Clark’s work. This article appeared in The Trinity Review, number 101, July 1993, “An Introduction to Gordon H. Clark.” It starts out, “Who is Gordon Clark? Clark’s life was one of controversy—theological and philosophical. He was a brilliant mind and his philosophy continues to be a challenge to the prevailing notions of our day. It is his philosophy that makes his biography both interesting and important, for his battles were intellectual battles.

Clark was a Presbyterian minister and his father was a Presbyterian minister before him. Born in urban Philadelphia in the summer of 1902, he died in rural Colorado near West Cliff in the spring of 1985. Clark was educated at the University of Pennsylvania and the Sorbonne. His undergraduate degree was in French. His graduate work was in ancient philosophy. He wrote his doctrinal



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dissertation on Aristotle and he quickly earned the respect of fellow professional philosophers by publishing a series of articles in academic journals, translating and editing philosophical texts from the Greek, and editing two standard texts, Readings in Ethics and Selections from Hellenistic Philosophy.

“Clark taught at the University of Pennsylvania, Reformed Episcopal Seminary, Wheaton College, Butler University, Covenant College, and Sangre de Cristo Seminary. Over the course of his 60-year teaching career, he wrote more than 40 books, including A History of Philosophy: Thales to Dewey, which remains the best one-volume history of philosophy in English according to John Robbins. He also lectured widely, pastored a church, raised a family, and played chess. For the past 15 years,” Robbin says, “I have been the publisher of his books and essays. More of his books are in print today than at any time during his life on earth.

“Throughout his life, Clark was enmeshed in controversy. First, as a young man in the old Presbyterian church of Warfield and Machen where as a ruling elder at age 27, he first fought the modernists and then helped J. Gresham Machen organize the Presbyterian Church of America. Those ecclesiastical activities cost him the chairmanship of the Department of Philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania. Clark’s second major controversy was at Wheaton College in Illinois where he taught from 1936 to 1943 after leaving the University of Pennsylvania. There his Calvinism brought him into conflict with the Armenianism of some faculty members and the administration, and he was forced to resign in 1943. Wheaton College has never been the same since, declining into a sort of vague, lukewarm, and trendy neo-evangelicalism,” according to this writer.

“From 1945 to 1973, Clark was chairman of the Department of Philosophy at Butler University in Indianapolis. There he enjoyed relative academic peace and freedom, but within his denomination, the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, a third major controversy arose and there was no peace. In 1944 at age 43, Clark was ordained a teaching elder by the Presbytery of Philadelphia. His ordination was quickly challenged by a faction led by Cornelius Van Til and composed largely of the faculty of Westminster Seminary. The battle over Clark’s ordination, which became known as the Clark/Van Til Controversy raged for years.” We will be studying the thought of Van Til after completing the discussion of Clark.



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“In 1948 Clark was finally vindicated by the general assembly of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church. His ordination stood. The effort to defrock him had failed, yet this failure of the Van Tilians to defrock Clark has been falsified by some and at least one biographer, the late William White and that alleged falsification of history has become the stock and trade of some proponents of Van Til and Westminster Seminary. Unfortunately, the defeat of Van Til, Westminster Seminary faction did not end the matter.” Robbins continues his biography, “Those who had unsuccessfully targeted Clark for removal next leveled similar charges against one of Clark’s defenders. At that point, rather than spend another 3 years fighting a faction which had already been defeated once, Clark’s defenders left the Orthodox Presbyterian Church and Clark reluctantly went with them.

“Years later he told me that he would have liked to have stayed in the Orthodox Church, but felt a sense of loyalty to those who had defended him. After he left, the Van Tilians had no serious intellectual opposition within the Orthodox Presbyterian Church.

“Clark entered the United Presbyterian Church, not the large denomination which was not called the United Presbyterian Church at that time, but a small more conservative group. There he fought another battle about both doctrine and church property. When the United Presbyterian denomination joined the mainline church in the 1950s, Clark left that church and joined the Reformed Presbyterian Church, which later merged with the Evangelical Synod to form another group. He remained a part of that church until it merged with the Presbyterian Church of America in 1983. Clark refused to join in the Presbyterian Church of America on doctrinal grounds and for about a year he was the Reformed Church.

“Some months before his death in April 1985, he affiliated with the Covenant Presbytery. During the life time of Clark, he never settled on a name for his philosophy. At times he called it Presuppositionalism; at other times Dogmatism, and still other times Christian Rationalism, or Christian Intellectualism. None of these names, I fear, catches the correct meaning.” Robbins says, “Let me explain why. Every philosophy, as I will explain in a moment, has presuppositions. Some philosophers just won’t admit it. All philosophies for the same reason are dogmatic, though some pretend to be open-minded. And the phrase, “Christian Rationalism” is an awkward and misleading way of describing Clark’s views since Clark refutes Rationalism



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in his books. Nevertheless, one can see why Clark used the terms Presuppositionalism, for it was the term he used to distinguish his views from Evidentialism. Dogmatism was the term he used to distinguish his views from both Evidentialism and Rationalism. And Rationalism and Intellectualism were the terms he used to distinguish his views from Religious Irrationalism and Anti-intellectualism. Clark, of course, always maintained that his philosophy was Christianity rightly understood, but since there are so many views claiming to be Christian, it is useful to name Clark’s philosophy and thus easily distinguish it from the rest.

“Therefore I would like to begin my talk, he says, “by naming his philosophy and rather than calling it Dogmatic Presuppositional Rationalism or Rational Dogmatic Presuppositional or Presuppositional Rational Dogmatism, rather than letting its title be determined by its theological opposite, I shall give it a name that discloses what it stands for—Scriptuarlism. It avoids all the defects of the other names and it names what makes Clark’s philosophy unique, an compromising devotion to Scripture alone. Clark did not try to combine secular and Christian notions, but to derive all of his ideas from the Bible alone. He was intransigent in his devotion to Scriptures. All our thoughts, there are no exceptions, are to brought into conformity to Scripture for all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge are contained in Scripture. Scripturalism is the logically consistent application of Christian, that is scriptural ideas, to all fields of thought. One day, God willing, it will not be necessary to call his philosophy Scripturalism, for it will prevail under its original and most appropriate name, Christianity.”

I thought you would like to hear a biography of this controversial writer from one who was a devoted follower of his. Other portrayals might not be as complementary. Robbins statement that “Clark refutes Rationalism in his books,” points out the need to define that term. It is used in different ways in different context. Philosophers use it in contrast to Empiricism, for an epistemology that assents to knowledge independent of sense perception or a priori. In that epistemological sense, Clark is not an empiricist and not even a rational empiricist; he is a pure rationalist. Others in theology often use the term Rationalism for a person who does not give assent to the truth of anything that does not seem reasonable to him or her. And what seems reasonable may end up being little more than one’s taste to a pure empiricist or mystic and a Rationalism with naturalistic assumptions that led to a destructive higher criticism and the loss of biblical authority.


Christ-Centered Learning — Anytime, Anywhere

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The Rational Empirical Approach IILesson 12 of 24

In our next lecture, we will seek to explain the philosophical and apologetic approach of this unusual person.

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