Epistemology and Arguments for the Existence of God. Romans 1:27-32
From
Romans 1:18, 19 we know that God says that He has constructed the creation in
such a way, and the human soul in such a way, being in the image of God, that
there is an inherent knowledge of God within every human being. This inherent
knowledge of God also is connected in some way to an external testimony of who
God is by His creation. We can look at His creation and there is something
non-verbal that attests to the power of God and His invisible attributes. That
is not the same thing as the so-called arguments for the existence of God,
which are an attempt to articulate this in a philosophical structure. This
knowledge is prior to an argument. Philosophical arguments are different. This
is prior to an argument. This is when a person first comes to God-consciousness
before they ever hear any kind of argument for the existence of God. There is
something inside them that tells them without a shadow of a doubt that God
exists. When they look on God’s creation it is as if God has branded everything
in His creation, from the smallest element inside of a molecule all the way up
to the largest element, with His brand. So when a human being is growing up and
he comes to self-consciousness where we realize we are not a dog or a cat and
we identify where those boundaries are where we stop and everything else
begins. And then sometime after that he comes to a recognition that God exists.
This is not an intellectual or rational construct. It is not mysticism,
it is just this sort of internal connection that God builds into every single
person so that they know He exists. When they look on these external things
that God created they see that brand. Everything God created speaks out as to
who the creator is. And it is the rejection of that that is the basis for God’s
judgment on mankind within human history. In that denial of truth there is a
basic substitution of that which is true with a fantasy that is conjured up by
the rebellious human soul.
Once
a soul rejects God it seeks for explanations of ultimate existence,
explanations of knowledge, explanations of right and wrong on its own terms
apart from God. That is the essence of rebellion. In the garden of Eden Eve is
going to evaluate whether God knows what He is talking about when He said if
you eat from the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you will
surely die. So what is the basis issue there? The issue of
authority. It is an issue of truth, an issue of how you know something
is true. It is really those ideas that reverberate down through history and
each individual has to make up their own mind in relationship to that. Romans
1:20 NASB “For since the creation of the world His invisible
attributes, His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen, being
understood through what has been made, so that they are without excuse.” Romans
1:20 states that since the creation of the world God’s invisible attributes are
clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made. Notice that comes
after verse 19 which puts the internal knowledge of
God prior to verse 20. Verse 19 says that what may be known of God is manifest
in them for God has shown it to them. Then verse 20 explains how God shows it
to them.
Then
there are questions about the basic issues of life. Why are we here? What is
right or wrong? How should we conduct ourselves or live our lives in certain
areas? This is in the arena of ethics where we talk about marriage, family,
law, politics, economics, things which have to do with social structures. But
ultimately it is, how should we conduct ourselves?
Then the question is: if you are going to say that is right and this is wrong,
on what basis do you know that? That is epistemology, truth claims. How do you
know what is true? Then you say because God told me or, because I just feel it
in my heart, or whatever the answer is; and that is an appeal to authority. So
once again what we have is a truth claim that is resolved by an appeal to
authority.
General
revelation has to be interpreted in the light of special revelation, which is
the direct verbal self-disclosure of God to His creatures. Mostly for us this
refers to the Scriptures. The problem is that in getting it from the Scriptures
we have this fallen nature that gets in the way. Jeremiah 17:9. This isn’t the
Calvinist view of total inability. In that view they misunderstand that
metaphor about being spiritually dead and they think it means that a person
can’t do anything at all towards God. In Romans 1:20 we have words like
“clearly seen, understood,” words that relate to knowledge in these verses.
They became futile in their thoughts, in their thinking. “Futile” is mataioo [mataiow] which means
to make worthless. So once a person makes the ethical or spiritual decision to
reject God then it has an epistemological consequence. In other words, if you
make a decision to reject God is starts messing with your thinking, and the
more you reject God the more it distorts your thinking. The more your thinking
gets distorted the more you create a fantasy world and you live in them. The
word for thinking is dialogismos [dialogismoj] which has to
do with their reasoning. It is not that they can’t come up with logic, but
their starting point is wrong so their end point is wrong. Their reasoning
processes have become distorted because they have rejected the starting point,
which is God.
Their
“foolish heart was darkened” – “foolish,” asunetos
[a)sunetoj], they are
senseless, foolish because of their thinking. God doesn’t have a very high
opinion of these thought capabilities of triple Ph Ds from Harvard who reject
God’s existence. Romans 1:22 NASB “Professing to be wise, they
became fools” – fools: moraino
[mwrainw], from which
we get our word “moron”; wise: sophos
[sofoj]; and combined
this words come to “sophomore,” somebody in the second year of a course or
curriculum and he thinks he knows more than he does.
In
all of these verses what is the basic problem? That man’s foolish heart is
darkened? That his reasoning process is out of kilter? No. The basic problem is
that he rejects God, negative volition. That is what starts everything going.
His basic problem is spiritual. There is a spiritual rejection of God and this
changes the person’s view of reality. These same words are picked up in
Ephesians 4:17-19 as Paul describes the Gentiles. NASB “So this I
say, and affirm together with the Lord, that you walk no longer just as the
Gentiles also walk, in the futility [matiaothj] of their mind
[nouj], being
darkened in their understanding [dianoiow], excluded
from the life of God [the ultimate cause] because of the ignorance that is in
them, because of the hardness of their heart; and they, having become callous,
have given themselves over to sensuality for the practice of every kind of
impurity with greediness.”
The
issue that we have seen here is knowledge: how does a person know God? If you
are talking to an unbeliever how are you going to talk to him about the gospel?
Option A is to shoot him with your gospel gun, a drive-by. That is the wrong
answer because that doesn’t necessarily mean anything to somebody. What do you
mean by believe on the Lord Jesus Christ? Who is that? The more we live in a
pagan world the more we have to pay attention to that.
The
basis for knowledge: This relates to authority. Authority answers the question:
how do you know something is true? To what authority do you appeal? If you are
a Christian and you are talking to an unbeliever and we assume that unbeliever
is consistent within his thought pattern and you are consistent within yours,
how are you going to communicate to them? To what authority will you appeal
when you say the Bible makes truth claims? The unbeliever says, how do you know
it is true? You can’t just say the Bible says so. 1 Peter 3:15 NASB
“but sanctify Christ as Lord in your hearts, always {being} ready to make a defense to everyone who asks you to give an account for the
hope that is in you…” Often when we are witnessing to somebody it is not a
monologue, not a drive-by one-shot decision, it is a conversation, a dialogue.
So we have to think about these things.
There
are four ways in which man has developed his sense of authority in terms of
knowledge. The first three are ways that are valid in a limited sense. You can
apply any one of them in isolation and come up with some things that are true,
but only the last one gives truth with a capital T. The first system is
rationalism. In its pure sense it is the idea that we were born with certain
innate ideas and we can start with those innate ideas and through a method of
logic and reason we can answer all the questions in life; we can come to
truth—decide what is right and wrong, the nature of man, whether or not
there is a God, and make all kinds of decisions.
Empiricism
in its technical sense is based on sense perception. The idea was among the
empiricists that there is no total depravity, no fallen nature; we are just
like an erased tablet, a blank slate, and our knowledge comes from whatever we
experience—taste, touch, sight, whatever. Rarely do we meet people
outside of the philosophy classroom that are pure rationalists or pure
empiricists. Usually they are a mix of the two, and that is what most
scientists are. They mix rationalism and empiricism and what is critical is
that their method is the same; it is an independent use of logic and reason. So
if you grant their assumptions about whatever it is they’re talking about, and
if they are consistent in their use of logic, then their conclusion will
follow. That’s where it gets slippery because they approach things with the
assumption that God is not there. If they are an unbeliever they are
approaching with the assumption that the God—not just any god—of
Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, the Trinitarian God, isn’t there, the God of the
Bible isn’t there. That is their starting point. And what did Paul say earlier
in Romans about how that affects their dialogue, their ability to reason? It
messes it all up; it becomes empty and worthless. We have to be aware of the
fact that nobody out there is just neutral. The other thing is that they are
operating just as much on faith as you and I are. This is one of the real
problems that came out of the Middle Ages and came out of the Enlightenment:
this attempt to juxtapose faith and reason. This really came out of a lot of
Roman Catholic theology in the Middle Ages because they were blending the
Scripture with the study of Greek philosophy, first Plato and then later
Aristotle.
Every
system always operates on faith. At some point you have to believe something.
When Descarte said “I think, therefore I am” and
starts there, thinking he can get to the existence of God through the rigorous
use of logic, his faith is in human ability. The same thing happens with
empiricism: the thought that you can get from sense perception to the existence
of God. So it is always faith in human ability.
Mysticism
also puts faith in human ability. It starts with inner private experience.
Where are innate ideas and rationalism? Inside your head.
Where are inner private experiences? Inside your head.
So they are both starting with something that is inside your head but the
difference is that the mystic uses a non-logical, non-rational, non-verifiable
method to reach his conclusion; he is not getting there through logic. That’s
why it is so hard to talk to somebody who says: I just know it is true, don’t
confuse me with facts. You can’t argue with me because it is true, I just know
it. It is totally experience based; it is a mystical experience.
Some
people blend all three of these together. The difference is that all three are
operating in human autonomy or independence from the authority of God. And that
is the last category: revelation. Sometimes you will even see this classified
as authority: that we are told something by an authority. The issue is
rejection of what God has said in His Word. When we start with the objective
revelation of God—whether it is the non-verbal general revelation and
then we go from there to special revelation and build on that—we use
logic and reason but our starting point is different; we are using it under the
authority of God to get to our conclusion. There are those who will say you
have to use reason. Really? All they have is an autonomous use of reason.
Aren’t they compromising themselves to go over there? If they say it is
empiricism they have the same problem; mysticism, the
same problem.
So
as believers, whenever we are talking with an unbeliever we have to make sure
we don’t compromise the integrity of the Word of God in the process. Basically
what that means is that we have to realise that the person we are talking
already knows God exists through internal evidence and external evidence. What
God is going to use us to do is, in the communication of the gospel and how we
can answer questions or ask questions to get them to think, we are going to
expose the fact that they have got something stuffed down in a box in the
corner of their soul, and it is that knowledge of God that is going to pop out.
Sometimes when it pops out people get mad at us because they don’t like the
fact that all of a sudden we have reminded them that there might be a God to
whom they are accountable.
When
we look at rationalism and empiricism we have to realise that the problem man
has is that he is finite and his amount of knowledge or experience is extremely
limited.
In
terms of common ground each of the arguments for the existence of
God—cosmological, teleological, moral, anthropological,
ontological—presuppose that there is a common ground between the believer
and the unbeliever that is either going to be reason or history. What is the
problem there? If the common ground is above revelation then you’ve compromised
your authority by appealing to an idolatrous authority. Truth is not
established by history. History can validate and be a witness to truth but it
doesn’t establish truth; it is not the authority. The authority isn’t
experienced, isn’t reasoned in logic.
So
if you appeal to experience, reason or intuition what you’ve done is basically
said: I am going to step out of my truth zone, and I am going over to this
pagan unbeliever who is thinking consistently within his system and says, this
is what I believe establishes truth. What have you done? You have compromised
your truth rather than, in terms of a strategy, say, okay let’s just think
about what you just said establishes truth and see if there are any problems
with that. Can you really live on that basis or does it have problems?
Paul
says there gospel is truth; there is one truth. In Galatians 1:6 he castigates
the Galatians because they had gotten away from this and had brought in
something else. It wasn’t a reliance upon grace and
God’s provision but a reliance upon trusting God and doing something. So he
says that he is amazed that they so quickly turned away from “Him who called
you by the grace of Christ, for a different gospel”—different of another
kind, which is not another of the same kind but it is categorically different;
it was a works based gospel. This verse uses the word “gospel” in a narrow
sense: deliverance from eternity in the lake of fire.
Jesus
also said in His high priestly prayer to the Father in John 17:17 NASB
“Sanctify them in the truth; Your word is truth.” He
presupposes an absolute truth, an absolute body of doctrine that is the basis
for our spiritual growth and spiritual life, and that is embedded within God’s
Word, God’s revelation.
Colossians
1:5 NASB “because of the hope laid up for you in heaven, of which
you previously heard in the word of truth, the gospel [6] which has come to you, just
as in all the world also it is constantly bearing fruit and increasing, even as
{it has been doing} in you also since the day you heard {of it} and understood
the grace of God in truth.” Fruit: the results that God intended; production. “the grace of God in truth”—here we have that “in”
clause in Scripture in the Greek indicating by means of truth. The only way we
know the grace of God is by means of the truth. And the truth is where? In
God’s Word.