Bill Roach on the Debate over Thomas Aquinas and Natural Theology

Welcome to the Conversations That Matter podcast. My name is John Harris. And before we get to the topic today and our special guest, if you wonder what I'm drinking today for my special Conversations That Matter mug, it is an American Christian brand of tea called Gold River Company Tea.

And they are sponsoring this episode. And I'd love it if you went and got yourself some of this tea because it's cold outside, it's winter. It's winter. What you need is tea. It's not coffee. I know the coffee drinkers, they all say that that's what you need.

It's not what you need. It's tea that you need. That's the quintessential, original, believe it or not, American drink. Even before the Revolutionary War, that's what Americans drank. And so I'm just going back to the traditions of my forefathers and drinking some good mint tea.

And you can get yours at Gold River Company Tea, GoldRiverCo .com, GoldRiverCo .com. And put in the promo code Conversations to get 10 percent off. Well, we have a special guest with us today, Dr. Bill Roach, who is the president of the International Society of Christian Apologetics.

You can go to their website at ISCA-apologetics .org. And if you go there, you're going to find out there's actually a conference coming up engaging culture with true truth. And that's coming up March 25th through 26th at the Southern Evangelical Seminary and Bible College.

And I'm not sure if I can make it yet. I'd love to go and I'll see if I can. It's only a Friday and Saturday, so you can just fly right in. Charlotte's a hub and then fly right out. Tickets actually shouldn't even be that expensive since it's in Charlotte.

So they're going to talk about the woke movement and social justice. And they have tons of breakout sessions. I'll let Bill talk about that more. But we're also going to get into another topic today, and that is Thomism.

And we'll just see where the conversation goes. So with that, welcome to the Conversations That Matter podcast, Dr. Bill Roach.

John, it's a pleasure to be on here with you today, and I'm so thankful for all of your hard work and how you have truly just been a stalwart on this issue. Your conviction has just shown through, and we're just so thankful for the way that you've been that bright light on this issue for the church during our day.

Well, thank you, Bill. It's definitely a mutual feeling that we have. And you've actually been on here at least once before, if not twice.

I think once or twice. We did something on hermeneutics and how it affects the wokeness movement and then a couple other things we've discussed. So we're starting to have a multi-show relationship that's gone on.

Well, I have to know, do you drink coffee or tea?

Let me tell you this, if America could be founded on something, it would be founded on coffee right now. And you don't ever see Duncan saying America runs on tea or something like that. We run on coffee.

Yeah, that's true. Tea's coming back, though. It really is. And I don't know if it's because of the Boba stuff. My wife loves that, the Eastern stuff. But now I see a lot more even like European and British tea and stuff.

But OK, well, I'll forgive you for the coffee thing.

I actually never really drank a lot of tea until a roommate of mine from South Africa slash London. He lived in both. And every day, Bill, turn on the kettle. Bill, turn on the kettle. And I just couldn't help it.

I mean, he would make gallons of tea every day. And I just kind of got immersed in all of it. And it was worth it. So.

Yeah. Yeah. So I have a friend from Kenya, a good friend and same thing. Yeah. Just everything's tea. And so I didn't grow up drinking it, but I do now. So. All right. Well, let's talk about this conference a little bit.

And I know that there's some breakout sessions you have. Michael O 'Fallon is your keynote. Talk to me about what people can expect if they come.

True Truth and the Conference on Social Justice

So one of the things we're looking at is this idea of true truth. And anybody who has studied the history of apologetics in the 20th century, you know, that is coming from Francis Schaeffer. And Schaeffer was real big on this notion that people have this idea of truth.

But is it actually a true understanding of truth? Is it one that corresponds to the reality that God has given us? And he looked at different things during his era on. Well, is it existential truth? Does my background and all of my my being in that sense determine truth?

He said, no, that whole existential method or postmodernism and and all the different avenues. So what we're doing is we're having a conference on true truth, but we're going one step further. And this is what's going to make it unique.

We're actually going to look at that as it applies to the social justice movement. And in many ways, we're drawing a line in the sand for the apologetics movement. We spent so much time defending true truth that we're not going to let it be undermined by this sort of racialized methodology and epistemology and interpretation of the Bible.

So we're bringing in speakers from all over the country to do breakout sessions on various topics. But the plenaries are going to specifically address that topic within the church.

Excellent. Excellent. So you're taking out the standpoints, the epistemology and just this relativism that seems to permeate. And it's not even just social justice. I just I sense it everywhere. Like everywhere you look, there's a relativism of some kind.

And so I'm really glad you're doing this. Where can people go if they want to sign up for this? Is there is there a sign up? Can they just show up? How does it work?

The way that they can sign up is they can go and pre-register on our website. And you listed that at ISCA apologetics dot org. And there's a little button there for you to register. And one thing that we're doing with it is we're having a pre-registration.

We're hosting it in Charlotte, North Carolina. And the one thing we're doing is we're actually going to make the plenary sessions open to the public. So to come to the full conference, you would need to sign up and register.

But if you are somebody who wants to come and hear the plenary sessions, we're going to have the schedule released very soon. You're welcome to come because we want to equip you and your church on those topics.

Now, we would more than love for you to show up for the whole conference. We think the full package is definitely what's needed. But those key sessions will definitely be able to equip you and your church to deal with these issues on a day to day level.

Awesome. Awesome.

All right. Well, I'm looking forward to this. And I hope I can make it. And it's right there at the website, ISCA-apologetics .org. It's like a top of the website for register. And it looks phenomenal.

Thomism, Natural Theology, and the Debate over Epistemology

So I want to talk to you about something that's been a controversy lately. It's a little outside of my wheelhouse because I've been, as most people know, talking about the social justice movement and how it's made incursions and evangelicalism.

And this is related. As I'm sure your description you just gave of the conference would indicate. But there's a controversy right now that I've noticed in the evangelical and I mean, conservative evangelical world over what some would call tomism or natural revelation.

It's a metaphysical argument over reality itself. And there seems to be two sides. And on one side, I don't know if these lines are strict or not. Maybe you can help me with this, Bill. But you have maybe more people of a more presuppositional kind of apologetic outlook that are very skeptical of Thomas Aquinas.

And then and then you have people on a classical apologetic outlook that they love Thomas Aquinas. I don't know if the lines are exactly there because I know of a number of presuppositionalists who do see value in Thomas Aquinas.

So maybe you can help me with this and navigating it. What's going on there? What's the controversy over in your mind?

So there's a controversy, like you said, going on right now between a whole host of people. It's not really a large number, but it's really an issue of coming down to epistemology and what they see is the grounds of doing different types of theology.

And this is nothing new. This has been something that's gone on for generations now. And I think probably the height of the debate that people have in their minds was between R .C. Sproul and Greg Bonson.

And they actually had a discussion on this matter several decades ago, probably 30, 40 years ago. And R .C. Sproul was just an ardent Thomist and Greg Bonson was obviously Vantillian. And they were they're heralding those positions.

And I think one of the reasons that it's coming about is that you're seeing these claims made today that we don't want to have syncretistic epistemologies, which is basically just saying you have this biblical epistemology and usually everything else.

So if it's sort of CRT plus the Bible syncretism, if it's Thomism, which is viewed as Aristotelianism and the Bible, that's syncretism. And they just play this out. Think of any other thing you can make it with.

And I think what's going on there is that they're almost claiming too much when they're saying that. I think people are laying too hard of a category. And it's because we can find counterexamples on what actually qualifies as syncretism.

For example, what about logic? Is that syncretistic? What about fundamental features of reality and looking at it with the Bible? Does the Bible have a metaphysics of a door when Jesus says that he is the door?

And those are some basic things that we can look at. I mean, I know you have more examples on it, but it's a debate that's gone on for a while between the methodology on different competing groups today that has gone back into the Reformation, post-Reformation.

But you see it come to its head and the difference between classic and historic worldview theory. So really, Kuyper versus B .B. Warfield, Sproul versus Greg Bonson, and then some of the advocates today.

That's a very bird's eye view of it. There's a lot of specifics that can get into it.

So for those who might not understand everything you just said, they're not perhaps introduced to some of this philosophical terminology. When you talk about metaphysics, you're talking about the nature of reality.

What kinds of things are out there?

What is reality? Right. And exactly. So metaphysics is what is reality? Epistemology is how do I know reality and make justified claims about reality? And that even gets into linguistics. How do I communicate reality or hermeneutics?

How do I interpret what was communicated about reality? So that's really what it is. What is real? How do I know what's real? How do I communicate what's real? How do I interpret what was communicated to me?

And you do teach all of these subjects, I'm assuming, as a philosopher, right?

I do. In fact, I regularly teach metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of hermeneutics. So these are avenues that I'm regularly just having to immerse myself in. It's kind of, you know, whenever people take, say, a foreign language class, sometimes they just use that foreign language all of the time and they don't think anything of it.

That's kind of what theologians and philosophers do. But don't let it get puffed up. It's really just a simplistic way of describing terms. Instead of saying that, you know, this using 10 words to qualify something.

Sometimes we try to just shorthand it and call it one. You know, we do that in like picture. If you went to go have your car replaced and said or your engine replacing, can I get the metal thing that it causes the gas to explode with it?

You mean the engine? Yes, the engine. That's what we're talking about. So that's what we're trying to do with some of the bigger terms.

So the controversy here is over metaphysics and over whether or not you can take biblical revelation. What the Bible teaches us about reality is it makes claims about what's out there, what God's created.

And then are you able to then merge that or or use, in addition to that, some like the Pythagorean Theorem laws of mathematics that pagan philosophers have even discovered? Like, is that valid? Is that OK?

Or is that an attack on the sufficiency of scripture? Are you taking away from scripture when you do that? Right. Am I am I tracking with you so far?

That's a big part of it. Yeah, it's dealing with the metaphysics and the epistemology. So not only what is there, but what can we know and how do we come to know? So they're they're linked together. There's a distinction between the two disciplines, but they come together within philosophy.

And one of the key issues is, is that, you know, when we look at the sufficiency of scripture, that's an issue of authority. The Bible and the Bible alone presents all the divine words necessary for faith and practice.

Now, think about what I'm saying there. If we need a divine word on something for faith and practice, how we live our lives and what the essence of Christianity makes up, that's the issue of the sufficiency of scripture.

But then there are other things that the Bible assumes, which is a common doctrine of humanity about the fact that God created a world that all people live in. So, for example, let's give just a few examples here.

You don't find any divine words on how to fix your computer or on how to change your tire because they're not necessary for faith and practice. But you do define find divine words on things related to how do I go to heaven?

What is the nature of justification? Is there such a thing as, say, the perseverance of the saints and all of these different sort of essential doctrines in that regard? But you brought it up right when you're looking at things like how do I look at things like the Pythagorean theorem?

How do I look at issues with science? You know, I don't have this sort of appendix in the back that gives me Einstein versus Newton and their different theories on quantum physics of other figures or relativity from Einstein.

So what do we do with that? And the historic answer has been is that God has given us two books, one of nature and one in the text of scripture. And what comes from the book of nature comes from a common doctrine of humanity that says all people are made in the image of God.

They have rationale. They're able to understand reality. It's something that's cross-cultural, cross-individual. So two people at two different times, two different places can come to know these things.

And it doesn't attack the sufficiency of scripture in that regard because it's God giving us common knowledge through a common doctrine of creation. With common humanity found in the image of God in those individuals.

So what's the controversy, because everything you said makes sense to me, right? There's natural revelation, there's special revelation. God's given us a way to sense the world through our mind and our sense perception.

And we can understand in such a way that some things we know for certain. I don't see a I don't see any problem with any of this. But there there's there is one somewhere. So I think maybe the key to this is Aquinas or natural theology.

That's those are the words that I see the most being used by some on the more conservative Christian side. Those are the people that the person and the term that they attack and say that's taking away this whole line of thinking that came from Aquinas from the Bible.

And it's an attack, actually. I mean, I've seen some brutal things Bill said online about Aquinas. So what's the deal there? What's going on? I mean, is he this Trojan horse, Catholic, pagan philosopher that's coming into evangelicalism being brought into certain seminaries?

Or is there something that can be learned from Aquinas? Is there something valid there?

Natural Theology, Infallibilism, and the God of the Philosophers

Well, I think the issue that comes down to it is when it comes to natural theology, first of all, it's it's an issue where people think if you're doing natural theology, you're by default making this God of the philosophers, which is in their idea, an idol as such.

So what it is, is it's a zeal to preserve the integrity of the God of the Bible. But when we start to look at different things, if something has the same attributes, then we recognize that there's something similar about it.

So, for example, if the God of the Bible is eternal, immutable, simple, and these kinds of things, and we can find a natural theology where there's a being that has those exact same characteristics. And we know that there can't be two beings that have those same characteristics is talking about the same being from two different avenues.

So what they're trying to say is, is that if you take the natural theology avenue, you're leading yourself into idolatry because you have false interpretations of who God is. You're not infallible in the way that you're reading the book of nature.

But when you come to the Bible, they're going to say it corrects those things. And in one sense, they're right. There are false pagan views out there. People have false ideas about who God is. And the God of Aristotle is not the God of the Bible because the God of Aristotle is this impersonal being.

But it's not to say that when Christians are doing natural theology, and even when Paul is speaking in Romans about from creation, we can know that there is a creator and his divine attributes. Clearly taught in the text of scripture, there's something that's going on there.

But let's look at it in this sense. Let's back up and throw a term out there, explain the term, and then show how it can apply here. There's something within the discipline of philosophy and epistemology known as an infallibilist epistemology, which basically says that unless you have infallibility, you don't have knowledge about what's taking place.

And where we see this start to come about is really in the debates between Protestants and Catholics. And we know that Catholics will point to tradition that's going to say, you know, when you're reading the Bible, you have your fallible interpretation of the text.

You're not arriving at an infallible certain interpretation of it. So come to Rome and we'll give you the tradition from our infallible interpreter that's then going to help you interpret the text of scriptures.

And you sort of jump that gulf and so forth. Well, we deny that kind of thinking for a variety of reasons. One, you don't have to have an infallible epistemology to have true knowledge. If you don't have comprehensive knowledge or absolute certainty on something, it's not as though you don't have knowledge.

Now, I think you can have certainty. I'm not denying that at all. But here's the whole point. It's that when you look at the Roman Catholics, they don't have an infallible interpretation of their so-called infallible authority.

Well, we as Protestants recognize that the Bible is an infallible authority. And we go, yeah, we don't have an infallible interpretation of our infallible authority. So now we're down to fallible interpretations of infallible authorities.

Now, I'm not saying that Rome is an infallible authority, but I am saying that it levels the playing field. That said, the same argument can be said when we're talking about the doctrine of God. People are looking at you saying, oh, you have these fallible, unregenerate interpretations of nature and you're coming up with an idol.

Well, look at all the different interpretations people have of the Bible. They have a fallibilist interpretation of their infallible authority, and sometimes they come to false conclusions. So in one sense, I use this phrase a lot, what's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.

If I can show you people having errors in their interpretation of the Bible and coming to false conclusions, what's to say you can't do that with God's other book of common nature and nature itself? And we find that in competing ideas that are going on.

But just because groups of people have wrong interpretations doesn't jettison the idea that you can have a true interpretation because in that very claim, people are giving you a true interpretation about errors of reality.

They're sort of superseding that concept. So that's one of the issues that's coming down to is this idea of infallible authority and this notion that if you somehow start with the non-God or with creation or non-Scripture, you're always going to end up in error.

But there's a lot of things that can be said about it. But that's one of the many key issues.

You know, I had someone tell me the other day that in Acts 17, which may be a good passage to talk to to talk about in these regards, that Paul takes words used to worship Greco-Roman deities and then attributes them to the true God.

And that what Paul was doing there was he was changing the interpretation of words. He was he was taking these words for his own purposes and completely changing them. But the more I thought about it, the more I thought, I don't know that that's what he was doing.

It seems to me like more like what he was doing was he was taking a term that already had a meaning. And the pagans, it seems if you read the chapter, it just seems like it flows this way. The pagans were grasping at something they didn't understand.

It was like if a young boy called, said daddy, but they they called them, you know, someone else daddy. They said the mailman's daddy or something like that. And, you know, the mailman's not daddy. This is dad.

It's the interpretation of the word didn't change. It's just that it's it's being applied to the correct person. And that seems like what Paul was doing is like, hey, you're worshiping this unknown God over here.

You've got you're you're you're getting started. You're seeing some things that are true. But let me give you the full story over here. This is this is daddy. This is this is the person that you're actually striving for.

Now, this is this is the John Harris. You know, I'm relying on Bill Roach to just correct this if I got anything wrong in that, because I haven't read any commentaries or anything else necessarily supporting what I'm saying.

But I sensed a dividing line even right there. One one person is telling me that what Paul's doing is fundamentally changing paradigms and giving new meanings to words. And then what I'm saying is I think closer to what you're saying is that it's not a fundamental paradigm change.

Pagans can get some some things right there. There is possible for them to to look at the world, use their sense perception, use their minds and figure out some things. But it's it doesn't mean that, you know, they're going to they're going to get it all the way.

They're not going to find out Jesus died for them and all this. They need special revelation. So I don't know if that that's what popped into my mind.

That's a big part of it. You know, there are two really big or different interpretations of sort of the act 17. And you can just look at, say, how Sproul has interpreted act 17 and Bonson even has a different interpretation of act 17.

They think that they're both fulfilling the biblical mandate in that regard. But it really comes down to a debate on what's the relationship between faith and reason. And like you've said, there are certain things that reason can know that's coming from a common doctrine of humanity.

And when we look at reality, there are things like the laws of logic. There are certain features about that, the law of identity, how things just exist, how contradictions can't both be true and not true at the same time.

Law of non-contradiction in that sense, a law of excluded middle, law of causality. You know, every effect has a cause and that effect can't rise higher than its cause. These are things that we use to just operate in reality.

But there are limits to that. You can know that God is eternal, immutable, simple, and all of these other things, but that's not going to give you what the special revelation, what faith. And now faith isn't blind faith.

Faith is the articles of faith. And when we look at it, they're nothing less than rational, but they're more than what reason in and of itself can give. It's that which God must reveal to you. And that's things like justification by faith alone, the doctrine of the Trinity, the incarnation of Jesus Christ.

You don't see any of the ancient Greeks or the Platonic or the Aristotelian philosophers buying into that. In fact, they ridiculed that. In fact, that's what we find in Acts 17 that's taking place. So what you actually find is that there are great books related to this.

And I think probably the best book that I've seen on it is God and the Philosophers by Etienne Gilson, who is a top Thomistic scholar. And it doesn't have anything to do with Thomism. He's a historian of philosophy that said there were some radical things that went on from really the death of Christ on in the history of philosophy.

And it was the advent of Christians coming into it. You see figures like Augustine and Anselm and Aquinas taking biblical revelation and correcting what's going on in these pagan philosophers. But they also recognize because of the common doctrine of humanity, that there are certain things that they got right, even if they didn't get everything right.

For example, the pagan who happens to put the wiring inside of my house, he got something right. I'm not going to say that they're wrong every single time. But here's where the crux comes down to. Here's really we can recognize these issues.

Within classical realism, there's this idea that humanity can know reality and that there's a common doctrine of humanity that gives us true knowledge across different times, people, and places. Whereas presuppositionalists are going to say it's not the ontological grounding, but upon the presupposition of the Christian worldview, you can have knowledge.

So unless I have this whole presupposition of the Christian worldview, I can't account for knowledge of anything, mathematics and all of it. Now notice what I'm saying. I'm not saying the grounds of it.

Everybody agrees that the grounds of knowledge have to be the fact that God is the creator who gave us a stable creation that we can know. It's based off of this idea that based upon only this presupposition, can I justify any knowledge claim?

And what classical realists are saying is that I can explain it in a different way. I can say people can justify truth claims, not just based off of that axiom alone. In one sense, it's not just a one-legged stool.

In that sense, I can give you a three-legged stool or just to build off of it, one that has a more sure foundation. So instead of saying that can justify knowledge, I can say, well, how about this? There's a common doctrine of humanity, and we all are made in the image of God, and based upon that, we can justify truth claims amongst both the pagan and the Christian.

And I think that it's, one, based in biblical revelation, and two, it doesn't claim too much because the issue that presuppositionalists run into is, well, how do we actually justify truth claim, not the grounding claim, but the presupposition claim?

And they're going to argue, well, they're presupposing the Christian worldview and what they're saying, but in the next breath, it's going to be whatever the pagan thinks and whatever the pagan does, it's antithetical pagan thought.

And again, you're assuming that in those instances, they have an infallible interpretation of the Christian worldview that they're banking upon when they're then talking about something else, which is axiomatically opposed to what they're trying to claim in every other sphere of knowledge.

Yeah, so this was something I was into years ago. I read a lot of Bonson. Schaeffer was probably the first one, but then that got me into all kinds of other areas. And so this was something I wrestled with, and I actually put, some people have even seen it, a whole course on presuppositional apologetics.

But the thing, you just hit on something that was always a lingering thing in the back of my mind was, I thought about Adam. I thought about the first man who didn't have, he had revelation from God, but it wasn't anything like what we have in our scripture.

And yet, God expected him to live a life that God wanted him to live. And he was able to, I mean, within a very short order, his children are making instruments and building cities and all of these things.

And so there's an order that happens. And so all they really had was the stories that Adam might've told them, the limited stories about his interactions with God, and then the sense perception and the minds that God gave them to interact in the world.

And I thought, well, how does it work for them? Are they assuming the Trinity? They don't know about the Trinity. I mean, there's nothing to indicate that they would have known that. And so there was, I think I mentioned to you a book that I read, now I got rid of it.

I had it pulled up here a minute ago, Returning to Reality. I think it's by Paul Tyson, where he talks about Christian Platonism and traces through, especially the New Testament, how Paul constantly uses Platonic terminology to describe things within Christianity.

Like you go to like 1 Corinthians 13, we see dimly, but then we'll see face to face. You know, this is kind of like the world of forms. Like he talks about a lot of these, it's all over the New Testament.

I didn't realize how much. And so there is this place, and I know John Frame has wrestled with this to some extent, where he tries to take even the Thomistic arguments and say, look, these are all valid arguments.

It's just that Christians kind of come with us understanding that God exists. When we apply them, we don't start with, you know, on a man as a autonomous being. And so these have been discussed for thousands of years.

You know, it's not like, you know, someone's going to come along.

We're saying nothing new. I mean, it's just what it is, is it's a bunch of people that are really zealous for a debate that's been going on for centuries now. Right, right. And what I say it comes down to really is it's an issue of how does reasoning function?

And, you know, if you, I mean, I have a whole shelf sitting right over there of book after book after book of presuppositional thinkers, because I wrote my dissertation on presuppositional epistemology on Carl Henry and the avenues of Clark and Van Til.

So this is not something that I'm just sort of opining about. I mean, I had to defend a whole doctoral dissertation. And ironically, I defended it almost in favor of it. I said I used to not only flirt with, but I probably dated presuppositional epistemology.

And it's because I was immersed in the literature. But it comes down to what is the full validity of using the transcendental method about all claims of knowledge and the transcendental method for anybody who's read presuppositional literature, that is, you know, one of the first words you have to learn.

And transcendental methods find their root within what's known as idealistic philosophy, but Immanuel Kant and his transcendental method. And really what it comes down to is, is that knowledge can start in reality, but not all knowledge comes from reality.

You have categories of thought that are trying to sift and put reality together. And here's the analogy that I like to give. If you've ever driven in the snow at night, and you're in your car, and you've got your lights on, and you see the snow, and it's all scattered.

It's coming at you from every which direction. But when it's in the light, you can sort of categorize it. You can see where it's at. Shut the lights off. Well, the snow doesn't have any categories or lights to put it all together.

Turn the lights on, and you can kind of see what's going on. It's giving categories to it. And in many respects, that's kind of what Kant is saying knowledge is like. The world out there is scattered, uncategorized.

And the categories of the mind are like the lights on a car. When they shine upon reality, it gives structure to reality. But he would also say things like, you don't know the thing in and of itself, but only as the mind structures it.

And when you look at these great debates that were going on, and sort of post-Kantian debates with it, you find individuals like Kuyper, who were saying, or Diltai, who would say things, who's a non-Christian in that sense, saying, this is what worldviews are.

It's these whole encompassing ideas that you structure and place upon reality. And the Christians are saying with these guys like Kuyper, when you're looking at reality, you have to presuppose the whole of the Christian worldview to account for any knowledge claim or any uncategorized thing of snow and your car light in that sense.

But you also had figures that said, no, we're not going to buy into transcendental reasoning. I still want to say that we can know reality in and of itself. The mind can have direct knowledge of reality because I don't want to give into transcendental reasoning.

And that's why when you see this shift, you kind of had two big avenues that people were taking. Within more Roman Catholic circles, people were reading more within that Thomistic ground that was going about.

Within more Protestant circles at that time, you had Thomas Reed and his sort of naive realism. And there's a strong similarity between them. Now, the nuances, somebody can shred the nuances, but the reality is both of them, both groups were saying, the mind can know reality.

It doesn't have to be according to transcendental reasoning. And for that, I can make truth claims about reality without having to have the whole idea slapped down to it, sort of in that Kantian sense of the term.

And that was what the big debate was, just taking it one step further between Kuiper and Warfield. Warfield said, no, there's a common science because there's a common knowledge because he wasn't presupposing transcendental reasoning.

Whereas Kuiper was saying, no, there's a distinctly Christian science and a distinctly non-Christian science, and you can't overlap or merge them. And that's what people are doing. Take that exact same debate and play it into any other issue that's going on.

And people are doing it right now with Thomism saying that's just baptized Aristotelianism. And I think we have a better account for it for by one denying transcendental reasoning and full deductive slam down, sort of transcendental thinking like that.