Dominic Bnonn Tennant

I recently received the following email from my friend David Parker:

I’m sure you are busy these days, but I’ve been reading your book, The Wisdom of God. In the process I have been engaged in a 3 month long debate with Dawson Bethrick over at www.bahnsenburner.blogspot.com

He has challenged my founding worldview proposition—”The Bible is the Word of God”—on several grounds.

I was hoping if you had time, you could offer advice on where to look for responses etc. I will include the substantive portion of his comment below:

Dawson Bethrick said

Well, for one thing, your founding affirmation assumes the truth of mine [he is a Randian objectivist—his founding proposition is "existence exists"]; mine would have to be true before you could chance to propose yours. See for instance my blog Theism and Its Piggyback Starting Point. Also, in tandem with my previous point, the affirmation you propose as your founding truth is not conceptually irreducible, which means that it assumes prior truths which would need to be identified and explored for any prior assumptions they make. Also, the statement “the Bible is the Word of God” does not identify a perceptually self-evident fact. Even if we accept it as true, it would have to be the conclusion of prior inference, which itself would ultimately need to be rooted in the perceptually self-evident. We could spend days and weeks exploring why one might accept it as truth, where as ‘existence exists’ identifies a fact which is perceptually self-evident, undeniable, inescapable. Another concern is that it is not undeniable: I can deny the assertion that “the Bible is the Word of God” and I am in no way undercutting truths which I do affirm or contradicting facts which I accept as facts. Another problem (and I’ll stop with this), is: what exactly is it referring to? It certainly does not have the scope of reference that ‘existence exists’ has (since ‘existence’ is the widest of all concepts, it includes everything which exists), and seems to be irrelevant to pretty much everything. Its applicability is wholly artificial, forced as it is as an interpretative filter on a reality which has no need for such notions. To justify the claim that it has relevance in our world, the one affirming this claim would probably resort to the claim that the universe and everything within it were created by said “God.” But this again is not perceptually self-evident; that the universe was created by an act of consciousness (e.g., “God spoke the universe into existence”) is a claim for which I have certainly seen no good evidence whatsoever.

I respond briefly as follows:

I must confess I don’t really understand Dawson’s argument. He seems to be assuming that any first principle which implicitly presupposes some other self-evident proposition must then defer to that prior proposition. But why? This doesn’t seem different, in principle, to the oft-repeated objection leveled by empiricists: they will say that, since we Christians must first be able to read the Bible before we can formulate the proposition that it is the word of God, we are actually presupposing empiricism to be able to affirm revelational foundationalism. Well, even if this were true, it remains that empiricism does not constitute a viable worldview. Maybe it is true in itself (I don’t think it is since I deny that knowledge comes directly through the senses; I draw a careful distinction between physical and non-physical events in terms of causation); but it doesn’t provide us grounds for believing that it is true in itself, nor for believing pretty much anything. So, at best it is merely part of a larger body of truth, and must be incorporated into that body of truth by way of some overarching, governing principle (like the proposition “the Bible is the word of God”). The same is true of the proposition “existence exists”. That’s a pretty bally meaningless first principle. What useful propositions can be deduced from it without relying on unjustified subjective beliefs or perceptions?

Of course, a Christian certainly believes that existence exists. He incorporates this into his worldview by way of his governing principle. In fact, from this first principle, he is able to discover a far more sublime and useful variant on that proposition, as revealed in Exodus 3:14: “I AM WHO I AM”. That is necessarily presupposed in the proposition “the Bible is the word of God”. But it is not in itself useful for building a framework of epistemology, metaphysics, and ethics. That is why we take the whole Bible as our starting point; not merely some proposition therein. We need far more than an existential affirmation to build a worldview. We need a great deal of information about existence: including its origin, its essential nature, and our relationship to it. And that is information which can only truthfully and certainly be gleaned from the revelation of God.

It sounds like Dawson wants to require of you that you take only self-evident or properly basic propositions as foundational. I suspect that traditional foundationalism might require this, though I haven’t a clue why (I haven’t read widely on it I’m afraid). I can’t see any non-arbitrary reason for this stipulation; and it’s also obviously self-refuting since no such proposition (or combination thereof) can be used to deduce enough of a worldview to justify the stipulation itself. Remember that first principles must contain enough information to deduce themselves and their context, as well as the rest of the worldview. The whole point of them is to bootstrap our grounds for knowledge. So not only is there no good reason to require first principles to be self-evident or properly basic, but there is very good reason to require that they not be.

An even better reason can also be given: we can trivially show that the only sure justification for knowledge in toto must be based on the revelation of a personal God, because without this we are forced to ground universals in our particular experience. This is formally fallacious, and thus useless for justifying anything. We can therefore exclude any other kind of proposition as a useful foundation for an entire worldview—so on what basis is he making the sorts of claims you quote him making? (Cf The Wisdom of God, 2.4 & 2.5.)

To summarize, I think Dawson is confusing the chronological priority of propositions (what must be true to even formulate the biblical worldview?) with logical priority (how do we logically justify these chronologically prior propositions?) The whole point of revelational foundationalism is that there are a lot of things which are obviously true (“existence exists”; “an external world exists”; “events we perceive are correlated to events in the external world”; etc), but which we cannot rationally justify or give account for without reference to God’s objective revelation. Revelational foundationalism works backward by first assuming these truths, so as to find justification for them; then justifying them with reference to Scripture.