Vantilian Shadow Boxing – Round Three

It’s appears that after 2 rounds of shadow boxing, Paul Manata threw in the towel as he was unable to form any cogent arguments and was reduced to mindless assertions along the lines of, “The senses are a source of knowledge.”  Well, of course they are Paul.  They must be.  After all you said they are.  Meanwhile, Manata’s tag-team partner, Steve Hays, keeps punching away practicing his combinations and upper cuts and actually attempted to advance an occasional argument.  However, and along the way, Hays slipped on his own sweat and made some colossal blunders exposing how little Clark he has actually read, much less understood.

Here is a sample:

While we’re on the subject of “outright and open heresies,” what about Clark’s pantheistic idealism, when he reduces human beings to nothing more than divine ideas? What about Clark’s modalism, when he collapses the immanent Trinity into the economic Trinity (cf. The Incarnation, p55)?

Pantheistic idealism? Modalism?  First, modalism or Sabellianism is the idea that God is a single Person and the designations of God the Father, Son and Holy Spirit signify distinct activities of the one divine Person as opposed to three distinct Persons.  How modalism can be ascribe to anything Clark has ever written, much less anything found on page 55 of The Incarnation, is a mystery.  Since Hays would not extend the courtesy of actually demonstrating his charge, but instead only cites a page number from Clark’s monograph I suppose in the hope that Triabloguer’s would just nod their heads in agreement, I’ll have to just assume he is referring to the following:

Though they [the Persons of the Godhead]  are equally omniscient, they do not all know the same truths. Neither the complex of truths we call the Farther nor those we call the Spirit, has the proposition, “I was incarnated.”  This proposition occurs only in the Son’s complex.  Other examples are implied.  The Father cannot say, “I walked from Jerusalem to Jericho.”  Nor can the Spirit say, “I begot the Son.” Hence they Godhead consists of three Persons, each omniscient without having precisely the same content.  If this is so, no difficulty can arise as to the distinctiveness of human persons.  Each one is an individual complex.  Each one is his mind or soul.  Whether the propositions be true or false, a person is the propositions he thinks.  I hope that some think *substance* to be a subterfuge.

Such then is the first conclusion of this study: *substance* and some other terms are meaningless, and very few can be salvaged by definition.  The slogan is, Discard or Define! – [54-55]

The above is admittedly only part of a handful of concluding thoughts Clark draws from pages of preceding arguments and observations, however, I find it hard to imagine any view that could be further from modalism.  Could this be another example of the dangers of punching oneself silly in a vain attempt to impress the Vantilian readers of Triablogue who are already predisposed against Clark and who seemingly get their information of what Clark taught from the jaundice pen of Van Til, his sycophantic and devoted followers, or even from someone calling himself “Aquascum”?

In spite of Hays’ gross mischaracterization of Clark, you’ll note that Clark clearly differentiates the three divine Persons simply because each Person does not think precisely the same set of thoughts.  If Clark were a modalist, as Hays falsely charges, then all three Persons would think exactly the same thoughts simply because God would be numerically one Person. Each of the three “Persons” would be different expressions of one Person.

Another way to express this idea of modalism might be to say that the three Persons are co-extensive of each other to the point that the oneness and threeness of the Godhead would be a distinction without meaning.   Or, to put it another way, God could be said to be one and three in precisely the same sense. Perhaps Hays has confused Clark with Van Til who wrote: “We do assert that God, that is, the whole Godhead, is one person”…[W]e must therefore hold that God’s being presents an absolute numerical identity. And even within the ontological Trinity we must maintain that God is numerically one. He is one person.”  There is your modalism.

While Van Til can perhaps avoid the charge of modalism simply because he also asserts that the Godhead consists of three Persons, or rather three “personal subsistences,”  he can’t avoid the charge of theological irrationalism, which is arguable a  more damning charge than modalism.  As Clark observed long ago:

Strange to say, a recent theologian has renewed the logical difficulty or perhaps has invented a new one. Cornelius Van Til asserts unity and plurality of the Trinity in exactly the same sense. He rejects the Athanasian doctrine of one substance and three Persons, or one reality and three hypostases. His words are, “We do assert that God, that is, the whole Godhead, is one person” (An Introduction to Systematic Theology, 229. The mimeographed syllabus on its title page says that it is for classroom purposes only and is not to be regarded as a published book. What this means is unclear. The author teaches it in class and so makes it public. There is no reason for not regarding it as his own view).

In the context, Van Til denies that the “paradox” of the three and the one can be resolved by the formula, “one in essence and three in person.”

This departure from the faith of the universal Christian church is indeed a paradox, but it is one of Van Til’s own making. That there are paradoxes in Scripture is undoubtedly true. One reader is puzzled at one point and another exegete is puzzled at another. But when a line of argument results in a recognizable contradiction, such as an object is both three and one in exactly the same sense, it should be a warning that the argument is unsound. The piety that accepts contradictions is not piety, but something else.

Furthermore, when a theologian asserts that a given paradox cannot be solved in this life by any human being, he is making an assertion that requires omniscience. That a scholar has failed to find in Scripture the solution of a difficulty does not prove that none is there. Before such a conclusion could be reasonably drawn, it would be necessary to trace out all the inferences derivable from Scripture. When all are set down, only then could one reasonably assert that the solution is not there.

So much for Hays’ charge that Clark was a modalist.

As far as Hays’ even wilder charge that Clark is guilty of “pantheistic idealism” for defining a person as  a congeries of thoughts, I suppose Solomon was also guilty of “pantheistic idealism” when he wrote; “For as a man thinks within himself, so he is.”  Of course, since no two people think precisely the same thoughts, no two people are the same person. This would also apply to the Person’s of Trinity.  Consequently, and contra the unthinking calumny of Hays, Clark easily solves the problem of individuation, defined precisely what he means by “person” and did so according to the Scriptures, completely avoids meaningless words like “substance,” and clearly maintains God’s oneness and threeness without confusion or contradiction.  Obviously this last accomplishment is something intolerable to confused Vantilians like Hays where God is said to be one Person and three Persons at the same time and in the same contradictory sense as they prattle on about the “one and the many.”

Moving on to a few more examples of Hays’ dazed confusion:

[Sean] can’t learn what the Bible teaches through the use of his senses, for Scripturalism rejects the senses as a source of knowledge. The Bible is the only source of knowledge.

Indeed, no man can learn what the Bible teaches through the use of his senses.   Contrary to Hays, this is not a view exclusive to Scripturalism.  Paul said, “But the natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God: for they are foolishness unto him: neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned” (1 Cor 2:14).  The things of God are “spiritually” and not, as Hays would have us believe, physically or sensually discerned.  Hays seems to think men learn with they eyes in their heads and even come to Christ via his untenable and unbiblical theory of “sense knowledge.”  Yet, his epistemological Arminianism is refuted everywhere in Scripture. Consider the following account given in Matthew 16:

Now when Jesus came into the district of Caesarea Philippi, He began asking His disciples, saying, “Who do people say that the Son of Man is?”  And they said, “Some say John the Baptist; and others, Elijah; but still others, Jeremiah, or one of the prophets.”  He said to them, “But who do you say that I am?” And Simon Peter answered and said, “Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God.” And Jesus answered and said to him, “Blessed are you, Simon Barjona, because flesh and blood did not reveal this to you, but My Father who is in heaven.

Notice, those who saw Jesus with their eyes, heard Him teach, witnessed His miracles, and who were perhaps even healed by the touch of His hand, all drew the wrong conclusion about who Jesus was with the exception of Peter.  Did Peter simply have better eyesight whereas the rest needed glasses?  Were his auditory nerves more sensitive while the rest were in need of hearing aids?  Of course not.  Jesus said that God the Father had revealed the truth about Jesus immediately to Peter’s mind and to the saving of his soul.  Jesus said that Peter did not come to this knowledge by the means of “flesh and blood,” which is just another way of saying Peter did not come to the truth of Christ through Hays’ empirically discerned and oxymoronic “sense knowledge.”  Besides, and according to Jonathan Edwards, “light and knowledge is always spoken of [in Scripture] as immediately given of God,” and if immediately given, then it follows that “light and knowledge” cannot be mediated through the senses.  Edwards would have little in common with Hays.

Hays continues:

He can’t learn what the Bible teaches through innate knowledge, in part because he has no innate knowledge of the Bible. We’re not born knowing what the Bible teaches.

Indeed, that would undermine the very notion of a public, historic revelation. God revealed himself through the medium of speakers and writers. The spoken word and the written word. And the written word is also the record of the spoken word.

The above is one of many pinaetas Hays has formed in his own mind and for his own destructive amusement.  Too bad it has nothing to do with the Scripturalism of Gordon Clark.  Nowhere have I said that we learn what the Bible teaches through “innate knowledge.”  Nowhere has Clark said that we learn what the Bible teaches through “innate knowledge.” Clark did argue that all men possess the apriori or innate equipment that makes knowledge possible.  For example, in his book, The Biblical Doctrine of Man, Clark makes an extended argument that the image of God in man is logic and the forms of logic make up the architecture of man’s mind and which presupposes  communication between God and man, man and man, and even righteousness and sin.  We also learn in Romans that men have God’s law written on their minds and that even apart from the revelation of the law given to Moses, their conscience bear witness to the Law as “their thoughts alternately accusing or else defending them (Romans 2:15).” Consequently, what we know of the apriori in man, while somewhat limited in Scripture, is sufficient to account for revelation.  Quite apart from the revelation of Scripture it would be impossible to know anything about the apriori in man.  I hardly think even Hays would want to replace the Biblical apriori for, say, Kant’s categories?  But, who knows?  Perhaps Kant’s categories are “properly basic” and constitute “knowledge” for Hays as well.

I will say that somehow and somewhere Clark’s critics seemed to have picked up the idea that Clark argued that all true propositions are innate in man and that coming to the truth in Scripture is merely a stimulus for recollection of propositions already present or residing within man.  I don’t know if that is the cause of Hays’ error here, but I suspect it is.  Regardless, and contrary to Hays’ straw man, what Clark denied is that knowledge is mediated through the senses and that  so-called “sense knowledge” is nothing more than an unsupported and giant petitio. Admittedly, it would help if Hays would actually read Clark and made sure he understood Clark’s theory of knowledge before pretending to refute it.

Another example of where Hays misses the mark is when he asserts:

If Scripturalism is true, then he can’t even know that Adam, Abraham, David, Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John ever existed.

Well, that doesn’t follow. We know the above saints existed and still exist because the Scriptures say so. The saints listed above are accounted for in accordance with the axiom of the Christian faith; the Scriptures.  Does Hays really believe the Scriptures are some kind of paper pope that he can  parade around when he’s pretending to do “apologetics?”  Rather than ink marks on the pages of a black book, the Scriptures are the eternal thoughts of God who alone is Truth.  Hays seem to be under some delusion that if knowledge is not acquired through the senses then no knowledge is possible at all.  If Hays’ arguments (or, better, assertions) were true, then God could also know nothing for the simple reason that God has no sense organs.

Admittedly, Hays makes a vain attempt to save his beloved “sense knowledge” from the trash heap by attempting overcome the problem of induction or what Bertrand Russell called the “unsolved problem of logic.” Unfortunately, Hays breezes over this central problem in the philosophy of science as if there wasn’t even a bump in the road:

One of the stock objections to sense knowledge which Scripturalists like to raise is the problem of induction. Can we infer the future from the past? Can we predict the future in light of the past? Does the future resemble the past?

The objection goes back to Hume: can enumerative induction justify a universal inference? On the face of it, the answer is no, since the breadth of the inference is underdetermined by the breadth of the evidence.

Hays does seem to grasp where the problem lies and that it is a logical one.  The problem is he just ignores it.  Induction can never justify any universal inference.  The problem with induction is that it is always fallacious (unless it is a complete induction something science, along with the rest of us mere mortals, is unable to obtain).   To get around this problem Hays simply sacrifices logic in order to save his claim to “sense knowledge.”  Hays continues:

To take a stock example, if I observe 999 black ravens in a row, that doesn’t mean the 1000th raven I observe will be black.

What are we to make of this objection? I’ll make three brief points:

1.While enumerative induction illustrates the limitations of sense knowledge, it doesn’t begin to demonstrate the impossibility of sense knowledge.

If I observe 999 black ravens, then I’ve learned something: observation has taught me that at least 999 ravens are black.

That doesn’t tell me that all ravens are black, or even that most ravens are black. But it does tell me that some ravels[sic] are black. I know something, as a result of observation, that I wouldn’t know absent such observation.

For a second there I thought sub-Vantilian Hays was interested in knowledge and how, in combination with sensation, he might arrive at “sense knowledge.”  Silly me.  Hays simply ignores the problem of induction entirely and skates right by it.  First, Hays claims to know through observing 999 ravens that 999 ravens are black. The problem is, Hays’ observations do not permit him to conclude anything true about ravens or anything else for that matter.  The most he can say is that some ravens are black, but he can never know if the proposition “ravens are black” pertains to all ravens that are now, were, or forever more will be.  This is but one reason Karl Popper said:

…in science there is no ‘knowledge’ in the sense in which Plato and Aristotle understood the word, in the sense which implies finality; in science, we never have sufficient reason for the belief that we have attained the truth. What we usually call ’scientific knowledge’ is, as a rule, not knowledge in this sense, but rather information regarding the various competing hypotheses and the way in which they have stood up to various tests; it is, using the language of Plato and Aristotle, information concerning the latest, and the best tested, scientific ‘opinion’. This view means, furthermore, that we have no proofs in science….In the empirical sciences, which alone can furnish us with information about the world we live in, proofs do not occur, if we mean by ‘proof’ an argument which establishes once and for ever the truth of a theory. (What may occur, however, are refutations of scientific theories.)

There is no “knowledge” in the sense Plato, Aristotle, Clark, Van Til, Bahnsen, or the Bible would have understood the word in Hays’ theory either.  Hays’ “sense knowledge” is reduced to nothing more than guesses or opinions that are always open to refutation. Observing that 999 ravens are black isn’t to arrive at any “knowledge” at all and provides us with no final truth (pardon the redundancy), no knowledge about ravens, or anything else.  Not surprisingly, the problem of induction remains unsolved.  Any conclusions that Hays might make about ravens from his multiple observations must remain tentative at best.  His argument, provided we simply grant that it’s true and that he even observed 999 ravens, is that some ravens are black. Some ravens might be brown, white or blue too.  Hays’ “sense knowledge” is left merely echoing Popper who said “…we do our best to find the truth, we are conscious of the fact that we can never be sure whether we have got it.”

Knowledge, properly understood, is concerned with the truth, not whether something might be true, or  may be true in “some” cases, but that which is always true and in every case. Induction can never arrive at one universally true statement like “all men are sinners.” There is no “all” in inductive arguments, there is only “some” and “maybe.”  This is the real limitation of Hays’ so-called “sense knowledge.”  It can never arrive at the knowledge of anything at all.

Further, Hays simply begs the question when he claims to have observed 999 black ravens.  He has never demonstrated his claim, he merely asserts it.   He doesn’t show how one can start with sensation and arrive at the true proposition that even1 raven is black.  Hays hasn’t even defined what he means by sensation, nor has he shown that men have them, but I suspect it has something to do with his “observations.”   Not only does Hays simply drive right past the problem of induction, he positively ignores the problem of empiricism.  Hays is engaged in sophistry, not epistemology, something he seemingly learned from studying so-called “Reformed Epistemology.”

Consider the following maneuvering by Hays:

I’m typing this sentence on a computer keyboard. I believe that if I depress a particular key, it will probably produce a particular letter. Likewise, I believe that if I depress certain keys in a certain order, it will probably produce a particular sequence of letters.

Why is that? Well, it’s partly a result of experience. In my experience, when I depress a particular key, it produces a particular letter.

But there’s more to it than bare experience. My computer keyboard was designed to function in a particular way. It was designed so that, if I depress a particular key, it will produce a particular letter. It was designed so that, if I depress certain keys in a certain order, it will produce a particular sequence of letters.

My experience of using the keyboard is essentially confirmatory. Before I use the keyboard for the first time, I don’t know if the keyboard suffers from a design flaw. Using it is a way of testing it. Does it do what it was designed to do?

It is, of course, possible for the keyboard to malfunction. It’s possible that in a random number of cases, a keystroke won’t yield the corresponding letter.

However, even in the case of malfunction, that presupposes an underlying design. Proper function.

Unless my keyboard suffers from a design flaw, it’s basically reliable. Indeed, highly reliable.

It’s not totally reliable. It can wear out. Or need to be repaired.

But it’s sufficiently reliable that I can make plans for the future based on my keyboard. I can plan to write something tomorrow, using my keyboard. And most of the time, my confidence is well-placed.

Notice what Hays does here in this long convoluted example. He has substituted his own pragmatic assumptions concerning the reliability of his keyboard for knowledge.  He doesn’t know that when he hits the symbol “A” on his computer keyboard that an “A” will appear on his desktop, he just assumes it will simply because he assumes his keyboard is “functioning properly.” How this “proper functionality” is supposed to equate to knowledge Hays doesn’t say.  Not only does he admit that it is possible that a “random number of cases a keystroke won’t yield the corresponding letter,” it only has to occur once to disprove his truth claim.

Could anything be more bankrupt or more paltry than Hays’ “knowledge” claims?  He confuses his own “well-placed confidence” in the reliability of his keyboard with knowledge. Notice too, it’s his psychological state of mind — his own “well placed confidence” — that magically transforms the thoughts in his mind concerning his keyboard into knowledge so-called.  He hasn’t established the truth of any proposition, much less the proposition, “when I depress a particular key, it produces a particular letter.” Hays isn’t interested in epistemology.

Hays is left like all other empirically minded and sensate men with simply begging the question.   He just assumes, based on a subjective notion he calls “proper function,” that his conclusions concerning his keyboard, ravens, and evidently everything else that pops in his head, are true. Can a more glaring example of simply begging the question be found?  I suppose so, because if the above illustrations weren’t bad enough, Hays insists on plowing ahead:

This is analogous to sensory perception or memory. The senses sometimes deceive us. Memories sometimes fail us. But our memories and perceptions are sufficiently reliable that we can use them to plan for the future.

Sometimes our plans fall through. But that’s quite different from a dream world which is so mutable and unpredictable that you can’t make any successful plans.

To a great extent, it’s possible to successfully plan for the future on the basis of induction. For induction, like using my computer keyboard for the first time, need not be the ultimate source of our belief in natural patterns. Rather, it’s confirmatory. Observation is a way to recognize natural patterns. To recognize design.

Hays talks about memories being “sufficiently reliable,” but sufficiently reliable according to whom?  Also, it would seem sense perception is synonymous to memory.   If so, Hays is really building his theory on sinking sand.  Memory is notoriously UN-reliable along with eyewitness testimony (which, I would think, is another case of “sense perception”).  Perhaps Hays should spend some time on jury duty.  But, even if he never enters a courtroom, he should at least spend some time considering the epistemic implications of the musical, Gigi.  For those with perhaps better memories, you might recall a clever  duet sung by Maurice Chevalier (who played Honore) and Hermione Gingold (who was his Mamita) called, “I Remember It Well.”  The song went in part:

H: We met at nine
M: We met at eight
H: I was on time
M: No, you were late
H: Ah, yes, I remember it well
We dined with friends
M: We dined alone
H: A tenor sang
M: A baritone
H: Ah, yes, I remember it well
That dazzling April moon!
M: There was none that night
And the month was June
H: That’s right. That’s right.
M: It warms my heart to know that you
remember still the way you do
H: Ah, yes, I remember it well

Despite that powerful testimony from the learned epistemologists who wrote Gigi, even Hays admits that senses “deceive us” and that “memories sometimes fail,”  yet  he claims that through the deceptions and failures he can deduce “natural patterns” and “recognize design.” Hays says that we are to plan for the future based on these deceptive sensations and failed memories.  So much for truth.  Besides the epistemological Arminianism implied in his view, Hays is either a pragmatist or is simply a relativist. I’m inclined to believe the latter, but to be charitable I’ll assume the former.

In contrast to Hays irrational trust in his failed memories and faulty “sense perceptions” as he “plans for the future,” James tells us that all such planning is sinful:

Come now, you who say, “Today or tomorrow, we shall go to such and such a city, and spend a year there and engage in business and make a profit.” Yet you do not know what your life will be like tomorrow. You are just a vapor that appears for a little while and then vanishes away.  Instead, you ought to say, “If the Lord wills, we shall live and also do this or that.”  But as it is, you boast in your arrogance; all such boasting is evil.

I suspect Hays forgot about James.  Must be his faulty memory and deceptive sensations again.  Or ,would that be his faulty sensations and deceptive memory?

Hays further tries to justify his illogic by claiming Christians are justified in planning for the future and drawing inferences from “enumerative inductions” on the basis of “divine design”:

For a Christian, enumerative induction is grounded in the principle of divine design. God’s plan for the world. Inferences about the future aren’t limited to past samples. They also derive from our belief in a God who made the world to function in a fairly predictable way. Hence, the past is a generally reliable guide to the future.

This doesn’t even require a particular theory of causation. It doesn’t matter whether or not a particular action actually causes a particular effect. It’s sufficient that God has designed the natural world in such a way that these correlations generally obtain.

There are, of course, exceptions to the rule. Miracles.

Even leaving James aside, Hays’ appeal to “divine design” is similar to those who contend that while the methods of science may be fallacious, they are sound when employed by Christians.  Again, it would appear that this is just another example of Vantilians sacrificing logic at the alter of blind faith.  Notice too the many weasel words Hays uses in order to get his “divine design” theory past the uncritical reader.  The past we are told is a “generally” reliable guide.  The world functions in a “fairly” predictable way.  Correlations of cause and effect “generally” obtain.  Of course, the past can be a notoriously unreliable guide, the world often functions in unpredictable ways, and cause and effect are ideas not derived from observation, and, the exceptions to the rule, miracles, completely vitiate Hays’ belief in so-called “sense knowledge.”  Frankly, Hays’ belief in the past, cause and effect, not to mention observation would lead one to conclude that when ax heads are dropped they always fall to the ground, that men who attempt to walk on water always sink, and that those who are dead remain that way forever.

Undeterred, Hays continues:

But that doesn’t prevent us from successfully planning for the future most of the time. It’s not like a dream world where there’s no connection between what went before and what happens afterwards.

And even miracles are purposeful events. These are not random anomalies.

Christians don’t draw a universal inference from enumerative induction. We only draw a general inference from enumerative induction. And the generality of the inference isn’t based on induction alone.

Can there be anything more paltry and pathetic than Hays’ “divine design” epistemology?  Christians cannot draw “a universal inference from enumerative induction,” they only draw tentative or “general” inferences. Of course, the reason that the Christian, just like the atheist, cannot draw any universal inferences from their “enumerative inductions” is because the form of the conclusion is not the same as the form of the premises.  Or, to put it another way, the reason Christians do not draw universal inferences from “enumerative inductions” is because all  such conclusion are fallacious; they are false.  Induction is just as fallacious for the Christian as it is for the atheist.  Nothing in Hays’ “divine design” theory makes any conclusions he might draw from his observations any less fallacious.

Hays is not interested in knowledge.  Epistemology for him is simply a game of chance and what he calls knowledge has nothing to do with truth.  Rather than the acquisition of knowledge, Hays is interested in something that works “most of the time.”  Indeed, observations, memories, and even science work “most of the time.”  The problem is that theses are not sources of knowledge and Hays’ attempt to portray them as such is a complete failure.  And, to be sure, miracles are not “random anomalies”  and  are, without question, “purposeful events.”  One would have thought that at least one of the purposes of such events would be that Christians would no longer rely on sensation, observation or even the vaulted claims of science as alternate sources of truth.  One would have thought that miracles would incline the Christian to “walk by faith, not by sight” and to trust in God’s propositional revelation in Scripture alone.  Not if Hays can help it.

To rephrase atheist Karl Popper in light of Hays’ shadow boxing; “while the Christian does his best to find the truth, he is conscious of the fact that he can never be sure whether he has got it.”  Instead of Christians being the ones who know the truth and who can give a reason for the hope that is within them,  Hays would have us adopt the epistemology of Pagans, who, Paul tells us, are “always learning and never able to come to the knowledge of the truth.”

As we have seen, Hays is, at best, a pragmatist.  He’s not interested in a method for discovering what is true, instead he is interested in finding something that works “most of the time” and that allows him to plan for the future completely apart from and in addition to the propositions of Scripture.

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