Scripture and Natural Law

And we have a special episode for you today. I mean, every episode's special, but this is a little bit outside of what people know me for, right?

I focus a lot on social justice stuff and what's going on in the evangelical world on socio -political matters,

I suppose. But I wanna talk about apologetics. And some of you may know this, some of you may not, but apologetics was a big focus.

In fact, before Conversations That Matter, when I just had, I still have the YouTube channel that you're probably watching this on now, if you're watching or listening.

I started that mostly because I was focusing on apologetics. It was the, they called it the new atheists.

And I was debating them and coming up with videos, and I even did some formal debates.

And that was the thing, like, I guess I'm dating myself, but 15, 20 years ago.

And things have progressed and moved on, and there's different debates and so forth now, but that's still something

I'm very interested in. And I've taught apologetics at my church, and obviously put out videos online, like I said.

So when I saw this article, when I read the article that I'm about to reference,

I thought to myself, self, we need to have the author of this article on. And of course, what

I'm referring to is an article, it's actually on a sub stack, but it's an article on responding to Brian Mattson.

Brian Mattson wrote an article called An Apologetic Thermopoly. And there was a response to it.

And the response is what I wanna focus on. And it's from the natural theologian, Joel Carini, who joins us now on the podcast for the first time.

Welcome, Joel. Thank you, John. Glad to be here. So Joel, I see debates in the

Christian world concerning natural law versus presuppositionalism becoming more and more prominent.

Am I right? Is that becoming a bigger topic of discussion? Yeah, you might have your finger on the pulse more than I do.

I got into the subject, I feel like when this was just getting started, and then

I started to see, the rise of interest in like classical theism and natural theology, and basically whether Protestants can appropriate and do some of that stuff, or if it's just Catholic, just kind of continuing to arise over the last decade.

But yeah, I do think, especially say in the social justice discussions and the questions about the future for Christian conservatives in politics and such, there's a question about the foundation of that.

There's a question about how we respond to unbiblical ideologies that are afoot right now.

Do we come back with our own set of presuppositions and we can't get below those presuppositions?

And so we just give people the Bible? Or do we say on secular or philosophical grounds, we can oppose that?

Can we team up with secular opponents of social justice or wokeness, et cetera?

And do we have to say that those figures really ought to start from biblical presuppositions?

Or can we say they're seeing something that's just correct? So I think some of the natural law apologetics debates have showed up partly because of that as well.

Well, you wrote an article, and the title is, The Natural Man Does Not Accept the Things of the Spirit of God, but He Can Accept Natural Theology, which of course is a response to this article

I mentioned by Brian Mattson. And Mattson is a presuppositionalist, a theonomist,

I believe. And I am somewhat familiar with that world because I read a whole lot of Greg Bonson.

The apologetics is what got me into it, but then I'm reading theonomy. That's kind of the two -step there. A lot of people have made that progression.

And you make a good point, I think, in this article. Basically, if I could summarize the article, you're saying that Mattson is wrong.

When Mattson says that reformed theologians who defend natural law and natural theology aren't actually doing their due diligence in the text.

And if they really understood 1 Corinthians 2, six through 16 about the natural man and not receiving the things of the spirit of God, they wouldn't appeal to natural law.

And you're saying that's all wrong. And in fact, Mattson's understanding, which comes from a guy named

Richard Gaffin of 1 Corinthians 2 is in error as well. And so what

I wanna do in this episode, just so people know, is I want to get into some biblical texts.

And if that's the only one, that's fine. Maybe we'll get into some others. But I want to see whether or not from the text itself, we can determine if there's an anti -natural law bent going on, or if it precludes using natural law.

I think that's an important discussion. Because as you pointed out, I think this is what's bringing the topic up, whether or not you can have co -belligerency or partner in some way, in an uncompromising way at least, with people from other traditions, namely

Roman Catholics, to fight some of the social stuff that's going on. And whether or not people that are unbelievers can get some things right, as far as temporal good, not heavenly good that pleases

God, but temporal good. And natural law comes up in that. So, maybe let's start with your article.

You wrote against Mattson. What do you think, where is

Mattson off, or Gaffin, I guess, where is Gaffin off in interpreting 1

Corinthians? Yeah, so the, Mattson was arguing that this debate between presuppositionalists and natural law folks tends to bypass the biblical exegetical support for either.

There's a lot of kind of philosophical slinging, oh, circular argument, oh, we need biblical presuppositions.

And Van Til himself, Gaffin says this at the opening of the article, he was accused, and he actually conceded, that he didn't do a lot of biblical exegesis.

Like a lot of his, I mean, what people remember Van Til for is just these sweeping images up on a chalkboard and connecting one philosophy to another, and which inspired a lot of people.

But Richard Gaffin in the article is trying to give an exegetical foundation to Van Til's presuppositionalism.

And so he goes to 1 Corinthians 2, which is a totally sensible place to go because it has a statement like, the natural man does not understand the things of the spirit of God.

So we've got there potentially noetic effects of sin, we've got the natural man's inability to understand things about God.

It sounds like a rebuke of natural theology. It sounds like a rebuke of the attempt to prove things to unbelievers apart from scripture and apart from them, say, being regenerated by the

Holy Spirit as well. And I had someone raise that to me as I write a substack called

The Natural Theologian, a few weeks back before I was thinking about the Gaffin article. So it's a great passage to go to, to explore.

Whether it - So you already had an article and then the situation arose that made it applicable,

I suppose. Well, a little bit of both. Somebody had mentioned that passage to me. So it was on my mind in that way.

I had actually read Gaffin's article a decade ago when I was headed to Westminster Seminary myself where Gaffin was professor.

So I had thought about this before and when Brian Madsen said, you can't talk about natural law and natural theology if you're not gonna deal with Gaffin's exegesis,

I said, I can do that. So Brian Madsen says he's working on his reply.

So looking forward to that. Oh, okay. So you're going back and forth, I see. Yeah, hopefully. Oh, that's good.

Maybe I should have had you both on or something, but we'll get your side of it. I think people who aren't maybe as deep into this debate need to just kind of understand in simple terms what's going on.

It seems to me like at the root level, this argument hinges on what are the things of the spirit of God?

Like what do we contain in that, right? And so more presuppositional minded folks have used this passage to say, and I guess you're saying

Vantill has done this perhaps, or at least, or I guess Gaffin came and tried to use what

Vantill was already saying. Okay. So Gaffin has said this, but they have used this to say that this includes all knowledge essentially.

And you're saying, no, that's not what the passage says. And as a plain reading of the passage, I don't see that jump out at me either.

Maybe we should read the passage. I don't know, just so people have a sense here, but 1 Corinthians chapter two, if you guys want to turn there,

I'm reading from New American Standard 95 edition, but it says, to us

God revealed, well, actually maybe let's go back to verse six. It says, yet we do not speak among those who are mature at wisdom, however, not of this age, nor of the rulers of this age who are passing away, but we speak

God's wisdom in a mystery, the hidden wisdom which God predestined before the ages to our glory, the wisdom which none of the rulers of this age had understood, for if they had understood it, they would not have crucified the

Lord of glory, but just as it is written, things which eye has not seen and ear has not heard and which have not entered the heart of man, all that God has prepared for those who love him.

For to us, God revealed them through the spirit, for the spirit teaches all things, even the depths of God, for who among them knows the thoughts of a man except the spirit of the man, which is in him, even so the thoughts of God, no one knows except the spirit of God.

Now we have received not the spirit of the world, but the spirit who is from God, so that we may know the things freely given to us by God, which things we also speak, not in words taught by human wisdom, but in those things taught by the spirit, combining spiritual thoughts with spiritual words, and here's the passage here, but a natural man does not accept this spirit, the things of the spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him, he cannot understand them because they are spiritually appraised, but he who is spiritual appraises all things that he himself is appraised by no one, for who has known the mind of the

Lord that he will instruct him, but we have the mind of Christ, and so when you look at this, there's a contrast between wisdom, it's like a lot of other passages, you have the wisdom of God, wisdom of the world, and there's a certain sense in which unbelievers are on the outside of God's knowledge or wisdom here, so what do you take it to be then, what do you think the wisdom being discussed here is?

Well, so their case, or Gaffin's case, is that there's a reason to generalize it to wisdom concerning all things, so he does it for a passage from the gospels that he sees as background to this, where Jesus speaks of these things being hidden from the wise, but revealed to little children, and then he says, look, all things have been given unto me, and so you see, in the first place, we've got special set of things that are hidden and only revealed to those who come humbly and with the

Spirit of God, in the second place, we have Christ now claiming authority over all things, so if you think about like Abraham Kuyper, you've got, there's no square inch over which

Christ doesn't claim his lordship, and so the idea is that now that Christ is

Lord over all things, if you don't understand the things, the word of Christ in the language of 1

Corinthians, these hidden things, you now lack the sort of epistemological key to all things, there's a generalization, and Gaffin finds the same here when,

I don't see the exact spot, oh, well, the spiritual person judges all things.

There's another phrase, I'd have to look back at the article where it mentions Christ's authority over all things, so yeah,

I'm looking for it, don't see the exact spot, so you've got the sense that now knowing about Christ, knowing the word of the gospel is going to matter for everything, we can't just say it's only matters of salvation, it's now matters of politics, it's matters of philosophy, it's matters of morality, where not being able to understand the things of the spirit of God is going to matter, so that's

Gaffin's exegetical argument, it kind of depends on that, increasing the scope of the things of the spirit of God to include everything.

Okay. Okay, so I'll let you look for that quote, I guess, if you need it, and.

Yeah, I'll just pull this up. Well, I'm thinking of where to take it next, so this has a lot of implications because if what

Gaffin is saying is true, and I guess Matt and who agrees with him and others, then that means, oh, did you find it?

The spiritual person judges all things is the phrase he leans on, which is what

I was thinking of, so it's just the same generalization to all things. Yeah, and you include a few comments or quotes from him,

Paul's statement are a virtual commentary on Christ's teachings about hidden things in Luke 10 and Matthew 11, I think that's what you were referencing earlier.

Yes. He says, it appears that this kingdom qualification somehow limits the scope of all things, but to the contrary, according to the

New Testament, there is nothing in the entire creation that is relevant to the kingdom, right? Absolutely nothing falls outside of the eschatological rule of Christ, and then another quote, and some according to Jesus' revelation is the exclusive and comprehensive principium foundation and norm for human knowledge, so that's his argument, or at least his conclusion from the argument he presents, which is an exegetically driven argument, he's saying that scripture teaches this, it's not a philosophical strictly argument, and the implication this would have is if that is true, then we should not expect unbelievers to be able to really understand anything out there.

I think the escape hatch for presuppositionalists is that they have a

Christian worldview, at least partially, whether they realize it or not, they, right, by Romans 1, that that's a

Christian worldview and they have that, but you're saying that that's, I think what you're arguing is that no, actually, there are some things people do understand because God has programmed them that way, he's created them that way, it's natural to understand them, and it's not because they're just deceived into thinking they don't have the

Christian worldview when in fact they do or something along those lines. More practically speaking, how do you see this being, because that does sound very heady to some people, like how does this play out in conversations with atheists or social justice warriors, et cetera?

Yeah, I mean, it plays out in whether you are willing to argue with them on common ground.

It plays out in whether you're willing to acknowledge that non -Christians sometimes get things right and not for a biblical reason, or not even from borrowing from the

Christian worldview, but instead gaining things from the world or by being made in the image of God themselves.

And so the real question for Gaffan's exegetical argument is whether it proves everything he wants it to prove, which he says that it's the death knell for natural theology and natural law.

And I think that's where that's contentious. I was thinking of another passage towards the end of the book of 1

Corinthians, which is 1 Corinthians 15, 46, where you see this contrast between the natural and the spiritual come up again, talking about the resurrection, and you have the contrast between Adam and Christ, and it reads, but it is not the spiritual that is first, but the natural and then the spiritual.

And that's a key framework I see in developing a Christian theology of the natural world and the realm of creation and how it relates to the realm of redemption.

You know, an idea like grace restores nature, it says we can't just say that nature has been completely obliterated and destroyed.

You know, if man was made in order to have some perception of God, to be morally accountable to him, to have some awareness, both of God's law and of God's existence, then to say that that's completely gone, that he's completely covered up, he's completely suppressed it, would be to deny that he's any longer human.

And so for this passage back in 1 Corinthians 2, I think the thing is that this is really talking about what it's been talking about since 1

Corinthians 1 .17, which is the word of Christ, 1 Corinthians 1 .18,

the word of the cross. This is about the gospel. This is about this new, the object of special revelation, not general revelation.

You know, Romans 1 says like, knowing that God exists, has certain attributes, you know,

Romans 2, that his law is something that we're accountable to, that's supposed to be given in general revelation.

All reformed theologians agree that that's there in general revelation.

The question of not understanding the things of the spirit of God, this is gonna be the object of special revelation, which is gonna be information like, you can be saved from your failures to live up to the law of God.

Things like God is a trinity. Things like God became man, the incarnation.

So redemption, incarnation, trinity, these are objects of only special revelation.

Now, Gaffin says that they have implications for everything and I'm totally on board with that.

That's Abraham Kuyper's observation. That's what I think everyone who believes in the whole matter of Christ and culture wants to say.

Yeah. That our Christian faith matters for everything. Right. The question is, does that require us to say that all of the information we have is from the

Bible and our Christian worldview? Or was some of it prior to special revelation?

Like a sense that, like I think a lot of people before becoming a

Christian gain a sense of their moral accountability. They gain a sense of guilt.

I'm thinking even of some particular people who have been inching towards faith.

Everything that they've come to realize so far is not the trinity, incarnation, or redemption. It's the natural law.

It's the pangs of time. You're thinking of Jordan Peterson, aren't you? Well, Peterson and people who are kind of following that path.

Friends I have who, they've left behind the kind of relativism and pure secular liberalism to now think, they're kind of like Socrates or Plato who believes in moral reality against relativism.

Like, I don't know about this Christianity stuff. I don't know about the details. I don't know about theodicy.

But I do know that there's right and wrong. Because I've seen it. I've seen people try to live without it.

I've tried to live without it. And that doesn't seem right. And so I think that fits right in with, for example,

Romans 2 in the category of a natural law written on the heart. I think it fits with an apologist like Francis Schaeffer who talked about pre -evangelism.

He talked about the idea of, well, Romans 1 talks about people suppressing the truth.

Francis Schaeffer talked about this step of pre -evangelism where the sort of roof that people have built over themselves to keep reality out, you take the roof off.

And all of a sudden, like God gets in, the natural law gets in. And as Matson and others would say, well, this is only sufficient to render them accountable to God.

It's not sufficient for salvation. Absolutely. Everybody up to and including Thomas Aquinas says that. It's only sufficient to render us accountable to God.

You know, there's some debate about how much can people make use of this. You have neighbors down the street who seem to be living upstanding lives without Christ.

You know, we can basically discuss how much is that them living up to the natural law or is this just pure hypocrisy or what is this?

But the natural law seems to be there. It seems to be having some effect. Yeah, let me see if I can give an example.

You tell me whether this fits in with what you're saying. I think it does. For me, one of the things that has caused me to reevaluate some of the presuppositional teaching that I've imbibed, and also some of the things that I've said publicly, or at least in public settings to churches and so forth, is the masculinity debate, if you wanna call it a debate, but this idea that there's rooted in creation, a masculine and a feminine, that God has established an order there.

And when you look at passages, because the woke folks always challenge you on this, the social justice crowd, the

Me Too crowd, they'll say, you tell me, you show me in the Bible where it says that a man has to be this

John Wayne type character. This is really tough. Men can be weak. Come on, women can be strong.

They can be in the military. They can be in police jobs. And so that drove me to the text on these issues.

And when I looked at the various texts on this, in fact, 1 Corinthians is one of them, he doesn't elaborate on what it means to be a man.

Act like men. Okay, right, Paul, where's the 10 steps? Give me the definitive, what is a man?

And the Philistines say this. I was just reading in Isaiah. I forget which chapter it was the other day, but God is judging one of these pagan countries and saying that your men shall be as women, right?

It's like, right, like he's saying this is a really bad thing. Everyone knows it's bad.

This is universally understood when you read the passage, but he doesn't go into detail about what that means. It's clear that you can pick up some things about strength from this.

And I suppose leadership qualities, that kind of thing. But it's basically, it's implied, it's assumed that people reading this kind of understand already what being a man is, what being a woman is, these are qualities.

And for me, that was a huge thing. I just thought, okay, the Bible's assuming here, the authors of scripture are assuming more.

They're not giving you sort of like an ideological, here's the 10 comprehensive points.

And I think that is important, right? Because if that's true, if there are things God's wired into creation, which we're gonna be held accountable for understanding and submitting ourselves to, and the non -Christians as well as Christians, that does mean that there can be a non -Christian, like a

Jordan Peterson, for example, who understands maybe a little better what it means to be a man in the temporal world than someone who has the gospel, who's been born again, who seems to think that men can be effeminate and weak.

And I've seen so many examples of that. So is that, am I tracking? Absolutely, yeah. One, I wanna get back to that one, but one kind of more humorous example

I've used is like when the Bible says Jesus rode on a donkey. Am I supposed to get my category of donkey from the

Bible? Like, no, I'm supposed to already know what a donkey is. Maybe I've seen one.

I'm like, oh, Jesus rode on one of those. Similarly, Contra, Bart, and a lot of the

Bartians, Bart's like weird Van Til on steroids, who's slightly heterodox.

Bart says we learn what man is from Christ, which I think we learn new things for sure in Christ.

But when the Bible says that God became man, it means man, like that thing you are, and I am.

This thing that already existed as part of God's creation, God took on flesh, like that.

It's not this brand new category. And I think what you said is important too, because that's part of shifting through the fact that we live in a time in which what it is to be a man is very contested.

When we say that it's part of the natural law, it's even before the natural law, like the natural order to distinguish the two sexes.

That's something that is just like, that's just there. Slightly lost the train of thought here.

It's the same on questions of like, we were talking beforehand about you're Italian, right? And I was saying,

I live in a very, a lot of it, but I'm not like, how do we understand that category of Italian if we don't have a natural understanding of it?

I can't look in scripture. I can see Romans and figures that I guess, might've been your ancestors, but I can't understand what a modern

Italian is or what pizza is, right? Is that what we're just - Sure, sure. There's that. What I wanted to get to was, okay, things are contested.

Okay, so the fact that there's a natural law does not mean that everyone is getting this right.

It doesn't mean that every non -Christian is getting answers to these questions about what man and woman are and what masculinity and femininity are, right?

It just says that there's something to appeal to before we even get to the Bible. The Bible has stuff to say about this.

The Bible does pertain to everything, but there's also created realities evident to human senses and our thought and reflection before that, which is why

I've been intrigued by secular thinkers over the last decade who are pointing to these realities.

There's philosophers like Alex Byrne, who is at a very high level spelling out that there are two sexes in the human species and contending this in philosophy journals in which it is very contentious.

But all of us who never studied philosophy already knew that. It was only the people who were corrupted by academia who, which is actually something else that's in the 1

Corinthians 1 and 2 that people don't recognize. There's a big class analysis there, if you will, of the rulers of this age versus the low, humble people who become

Christians. It says - Can we read it? Was it 1 Corinthians 1, verse 20,

I think? Yeah, well, in chapter two, you've got, it's not a wisdom of the rulers of this age who are doomed to pass away.

In 1 Corinthians 1, you've got - The wise man, the scribe, the debater.

Yeah, the wise man, the scribe, the debater. These are like intellectual elites, if you will. You've got mention of the rulers here somewhere as well.

Well, you know, you're not wise according to worldly standards. Many of you were not powerful or of noble birth. So you have a sense that, which

I think maps onto our own time, that it's actually often the kind of elites of a society that are getting the most confused about these things, whereas the average person is still kind of perceiving the basic structure of morality and God.

And so - Because they have to live in the real world, they have to interact with people more than they do ideas.

And that just kind of takes away these abstract, you know, innovative claims.

I think so. You know, another spot I think about as a biblical basis for natural law is the book of Proverbs, where there's a lot about wisdom and God's law being a good thing because it works.

Not just because it is revealed in a special book, but because that's the way the world works. The exceptions being rich and powerful people who can sort of stave off the effects of disobedience.

You know, there is discussion of a king or a rich person who is sort of getting away with evil.

That's in the Psalms as well. But a big theme of the Proverbs is, you know, if you, you know, young man, go commit adultery, it's gonna come back to bite you.

Like, you're not gonna last very long, you know? I was hearing even on like, this is a main theme of Jordan Peterson.

I even heard it on some of these other podcasts like the other day, Theo Vaughn talking to Mark Cuban, and both of them talking about Diddy and how when people get rich and powerful, they think they can get away with anything.

And both of these guys are saying, it seems like that's not the case. It seems like this stuff comes back to bite you in the butt.

So, you know, the idea that none, I think it's good to believe that God's law works.

And that means not believing it just on the basis of the Bible, but from human wisdom and experience, that actually confirms us in our faith.

We say, you know, yeah, the Bible says not to do this stuff, but it's not just a random list of rules.

Like, this is actually, as C .S. Lewis says, the laws for running the human machine. No, go ahead.

Sorry, I didn't catch that. No, that's it. I was gonna say, you know, the presuppositional arguments, like the transcendental argument, right?

That is the argument, I guess, right? His argument's plural, that is the argument. Type of argument, yeah. Well, that's the one they say,

I mean, even Bonson will say like, that's the only one you should use. I've always been more partial to frames like, hey, you can use all these natural arguments, but you gotta start with the premise that God exists and so forth.

But in seeing this on the ground, on college campuses and so forth, the reason this seems to work is actually because I think what you're saying is true.

And I guess, you know, I've always believed this, even though I drank deeply from presuppositional guys, but I've always just realized when you interact with someone who's a skeptic on a college campus, there are some things that they know that God has wired into them.

Now, I don't know that I've ever really thought, like maybe I've said things that contradict this,

I don't know, but the presuppositional framework seems to imply that the reason for that is because they adopt the

Christian worldview. They have the same, it's like, they're just deceived. They don't know they have the same worldview as you, so you have to take off the blinders to let them know that, hey, they have the same worldview.

And that's, it's pretty comprehensive. Like they know about the Trinitarian God of scripture, even if they're speak a different language, you know, in another country, they've never been exposed to scripture or the gospel or any of that.

They have this knowledge. But in actuality, it's because they have these natural instincts that God's given them to not just recognize even design, but just like,

I'm thinking of passages where it talks about, you know, what fathers do, even wicked ones, you're worse than an unbeliever if you don't take care of your kids.

Like the unbelievers do this, right? So you say, Christians, like, hey, if you don't do, you're like, you don't even meet the standard the unbelievers meet, and that's a good thing they're doing.

So all that to say, like that's the powerful weapon I think we have is once you start trying to force them to live by their own presuppositions, they can't do it.

And that is the strength perhaps of the presuppositional approach. But the reason it's strong is I think because of what you're saying.

Yeah. No, that's a very good point. Like a lot of my discussions, people have to go with sort of which way do you push people for consistency?

Do you say, you know, you're a secular person. If you were a consistent, total atheistic materialist, wouldn't there be no moral reason to do anything?

So why don't you just go kill a bunch of people and rape them, you know? And that's one way to push people for consistency.

But another way is to just acknowledge that no one actually really believes that that's good. And so they already have some sort of moral knowledge.

I mean, especially like secular liberal people, some of their main objections to Christianity are deeply moral objections.

They are God is not good if that's what God does or says about people.

You know, if God commanded a Canaanite genocide, if God excludes some people for unchosen features of themselves, you know, those are deeply moral arguments.

And so, you know, Nietzsche would come back at them and say, you know, give up the morality completely.

I don't wanna say that. I think we should say, look, you have this moral perception and moral sense and conscience because you're made in the image of God.

And you could say that that's presuppositional because it's like getting down to the foundation of why morality is the case.

But I'm not saying you have no right to those moral intuitions. Of course you do. You have a right to them because God made you that way.

It's because of the way the world is. It's not because of the worldview you have. And so there's actually a key philosophical distinction here between the order of being and the order of knowing.

This would show up in our classes about Vantill. Like the presuppositional

Vantillian idea is that the order of knowing should match the order of being. So here's what I'm talking about.

In the order of being, that's the way things actually are. What is most fundamental? What is causally and, you know, metaphysically dependent on that?

Well, why is there a moral law in human beings? Well, it's because of God and the way he made us and that reality isn't fundamentally just matter in motion.

It is personal and moral. Okay, so that's the order of being. But what about the order of knowing?

Do we have to sort of like magically already know the most fundamental features of the universe in order to know anything?

Or can we start, you know, up here in the middle where most of us actually are, which is, you know,

I have some inkling that there's moral truth and it isn't totally relative, but now

I'm asking a philosophical question, which is, what does the world have to be like for that to be the case?

You know, and I could consider the hypothesis of materialism, but I could consider the hypothesis of theism.

I could consider the hypothesis of like a atheistic Platonism, where there are moral realities, but there's no

God to explain them. But all of those, in my understanding, take for granted that just by being human, we all have a right to this moral knowledge.

You know, I'm not gonna, this really plays out for me with my, I'm in a PhD in philosophy, my dissertation advisor.

He's not a Christian, he's an agnostic. He's also a strong moral realist.

So if there's any philosopher out there who says morality is relative, it's, you know, it's not real, evolution debunks morality, he is gonna oppose them as strongly as I would.

And he's gonna do so on different grounds. I mean, he's a philosopher, so he's gonna articulate some stuff based on evolution that like, you know, evolution designed us to pursue what actually works and makes life better for everyone, et cetera, which

I don't think is an adequate metaphysical foundation for morality. But do I wanna discredit his moral knowledge and conviction?

No, I think he's absolutely right that there is moral reality. He actually lives it out remarkably well.

I wanna build on that as common ground to then ask deeper metaphysical questions about the adequacy of his worldview, in a sense.

But I'm not assuming he has to start from the right worldview. And he's gonna get anywhere. Can I just say that doesn't mean that secularism or like a neutral liberalism of some kind, right?

Because that's what I often hear, that's what you're pigeonholed into by some brothers who, you know, are more presuppositional,

I suppose. They say, if you do what you're saying, what you're suggesting, that's, you're buying into this neutral ground that you can both somehow argue on.

And you're not saying that, you're saying there is an actual common ground God has established that he's standing on and you're standing on.

And he's confused about, I suppose, where it comes from and substantiating or justifying it.

But it's real and it's there. It's real and it's there.

I think, not to get too philosophical, but I think we often just confuse our kind of morality with metaethics.

Like metaethics in philosophy is the question, where does morality come from?

And Christians and especially presuppositional apologists, I think often wanna jump to that question. Like this was major in the

Christopher Hitchens, Doug Wilson debate, where Doug Wilson was doing a kind of presuppositional apologetics.

Like, where do you get your moral intuitions from? You know, Christopher Hitchens. But an alternative method would have been possible, which would have been to say,

Hitchens, you are absolutely right to believe that there is moral right and wrong.

And let's start there and then build from that to ask deeper questions.

So that would be to say, look, people's knowledge of morality, while flawed, is real. It's a second question to ask about their metaethics or something, which most people have never considered.

Yeah, that's a good point. I'm thinking of like my daughter. You know, any kids out there who have parents, they have certain features, right?

That my daughter's gonna do similar things to me by instinct and nature.

She doesn't have to confess, you know, that she acknowledges that she received these things from me for those things to be legitimate.

They're just there, right? I don't know if that's a parallel or if that helps understand, analogy that helps people understand what you're saying.

But that's the idea that came to my head when you said that. Yeah, well, I mean, even kids, this is

C .S. Lewis, page one of Mere Christianity. Like even kids know that there's right and wrong.

Like, hey, that's mine, don't take that. You know, they're making moral appeals all the time.

That's not fair. I think like you see this sort of intuitive understanding of morality all over the place down to little kids.

It's often something we even use to excuse our sin. You know, Romans two talks about accusing others and even excusing ourselves with this moral knowledge and ability.

So it's flawed, it's being misused, but it's there. Can we explain it? Can we give metaphysical grounding to it?

No, we usually don't get to that until either advanced Sunday school or college philosophy.

But we're all operating with moral categories and I think real moral knowledge.

Yeah, well, my daughter can't talk yet and she's already doing it, right? She, you know, whines about something that's not right or so, you know.

But okay, so back to the article then and the justification for using a passage like first Corinthians two to say that Christians when they're engaging in these arguments must assume that the non -believer can't actually have knowledge, true knowledge of anything.

You make the argument that there's something smuggled in here to justify this claim.

Because I don't actually see that in the passage too, either with a, you know, getting those understandings out of the way, just to try to make sense of the text without anything else influencing it as much as I can, right?

You know, obviously I have things that I've learned that give me categories for understanding language, but trying to strip it down as much as possible and get into what the author's saying,

I don't see that. But that's what they're arguing. So what are they smuggling in? Yeah, so my argument is that to make the, sorry.

No, you're good. To make the leap from, you know, the natural man cannot understand the things of the spirit of God, okay, like gospel, incarnation, trinity, content of special revelation, to the natural man can't understand anything or at least any natural knowledge of God or of morality and such.

That requires this philosophical doctrine, which is if you can't, knowledge of the whole of everything is prior to knowledge of the parts.

And so if you have a different worldview, you don't actually have agreement about the parts.

And this doctrine is called holism in philosophy. And it was a central doctrine of the

British idealists. Van Til did a PhD in philosophy at Princeton University, not seminary, the real university, and he studied the

British idealists. And he argued that Christianity could do better than the British idealists.

But I see him and then Gaffin, his student, using this philosophical doctrine as a central assumption of the argument.

You know, as you said before, Gaffin's argument is presented as a purely exegetical argument. However, to make that inference from, well,

Christ has power over all things, the spirit of God has implications for all things, to my belief that murdering babies is wrong and my professor's belief that murdering babies, at least outside the womb, is wrong.

I also believe that murdering babies outside the womb is wrong. So that is purported agreement. If you're gonna say, well, because I also believe in the

Trinity and therefore that baby is wrong because of the ontological trinity, which is kind of this

Van Til move, you're saying that there's no agreement between Christian and non -Christian about anything because literally any proposition we say implicitly includes information about the

Trinity incarnation and redemption. I don't think that's right. Like, I think that two plus two equals four.

My non -Christian neighbor down the street thinks that two plus two equals four. That proposition, two plus two equals four, doesn't mention anything about God.

We could get into, you know, philosophy of mathematics and ask about why are mathematical truths true and we might end up talking about God.

But the idea that every statement implies the whole of reality has to be assumed if you're gonna get

Gavin's argument to go through. And I'm not persuaded by that argument.

I think people can know individual things. And that's imperfect, you know.

If I know that killing babies outside the womb is wrong, but I don't know that killing babies in the womb is wrong, you know,

I'm missing a piece of the puzzle. If I don't know why killing babies is wrong, because I'm under the impression that human beings are just apes with ego trips, then, you know,

I'm missing a piece of the puzzle. But I wanna say you're still right on that one point.

And if we disregard morality, it's even more obvious. Like the Christian and the non -Christian, you know, medical researcher who both agree that, you know, ribosome 17 in the cell does such and such, like they agree on that.

They might disagree on their philosophy of nature or something like if you got them into talking about religion, they might disagree.

Right. So you have to assume this philosophical doctrine of holism if you're gonna get the argument to go through.

You've already touched on this, but I want to come back around to it because I can already hear,

I mean, they're not in the room, but I can hear them already saying, the people who disagree with you, that this is theonomy or autonomy, man.

And you're making an argument for autonomy here. You're saying that non -believers can, starting with themselves and their own reason, come to conclusions.

And if you do that, it's anarchy because our reason can take us in all kinds of directions. What do you say,

Joel Carini? I say that, well, there's a law built into nature.

There's a created order to things. And if people are understanding the world using capacities

God created, they're understanding the world God created, the way he created it, then this is a kind of knowledge that does no disrespect to God.

It's actually using our created capacities to understand his created world.

Now, in doing so, I think we are using principles of understanding and human capacities that are common to believer and non -believer in virtue of being human, in virtue of what

Paul calls the natural, and the natural precedes the spiritual. And so it's not a specially revealed principle.

It's not one of the principles that's only available through special revelation, like the Trinity, the incarnation, and the path to redemption.

But it isn't like independent of God. Now, again, back to the order of knowing, it might be independent of knowledge of God.

You know, the non -Christian plumber who understands how water works and therefore plums the house correctly, he is working with the law of nature built into things of how things works.

And he and a Christian plumber can both understand that. So I don't think it's autonomous in the sense of independent of God, but I do think it's independent of the special content of special revelation.

Can you help me understand in the audience the difference between what you're saying and what someone who's also critiquing, we'll say presuppositionalism from what they claim to be a natural law foundation, but they do so by,

I wanna say libertarian. I mean, I'm using the political word. I should be using a philosophical word, but the name's escaping me for the philosophical system, but they're doing so from the standpoint of like that man does have reason and it's on the basis of man's reason that they can figure out everything.

So there doesn't seem to be a place for these more instinctual things that God has placed in us.

What system is that? You probably know more than me, but I've come across these guys who will say, oh,

I'm against presuppositionalism and they give a similar reason, but then when I get into it with them, I'm like, you guys really are arguing for autonomy.

You are saying that like, well, as long as man properly reasons, you don't need Christianity in your society.

They argue for liberalism on a social level. They don't want Christian infused mores in the public sphere.

So they really do believe in a neutrality and they think as long as people are reasoning accurately, they can come together.

I don't know if it's like an empiricism or it's some kind of a rationalism, but I've lost these guys.

You know what I'm talking about? Yeah, I mean, maybe I might, on some versions

I would subscribe to elements of what you said, but on others, maybe not.

I'm not doing a good job describing it because it's friends and people that have tried to argue this out with me, but.

No, it's all good. I mean, I think, okay, so one error in the realm of natural theology would be like true religious rationalism, which is

Immanuel Kant, religion within the bounds of reason alone. And that's to say that like, there's no special revelation, like natural revelation, natural law and theology are gonna do it all.

They can even teach us about salvation through our own means. I mean, there's theology versions of that where you can reason your way to the content of special revelation.

Anselm tried to do that a bit. You're thinking more. Like hardcore objectivist stuff.

Like they're just like objectivity only comes through these reasoning processes and get out of here,

Christian, who wants to bring the Bible into this. Yeah, yeah. So I think, okay, let's say like what?

So like for them, it's all common ground. It's all, you wanna arrange a society. You wanna make a decision about how to parent.

You want anything. It's all common ground. It's all like - It's all. Yeah, we don't need to start with the, like get the

Bible out of here. I can give you natural principles or I can reason you to these conclusions.

And that's what we're intended to do. So they make room. I think the only reason this exists is to justify a secular state, to say that there shouldn't be any kind of Christian influence in the public sphere.

And then when Christians operate in the public sphere, it should be for natural rights and in these very common ground principles that's in the

Muslim and the atheist and everyone can get on board with. Okay, okay.

So let's talk about like what Christian influence in politics would look like or should look like.

Like a lot of what we talk about with Christian influence in politics is part of the natural law.

Let's say people are talking about legislating on pornography. That's not

Trinity incarnation redemption. That is disobedience to the second table of the 10 commandments.

And there's secular podcasters making podcasts about how pornography is terrible for you, even based on the science.

Like there is a broad secular case that is compelling to a lot of people against pornography.

There are also a lot of Christians pushing that from a Christian basis.

And so I don't think you have to apologize for the religious foundations for that belief.

I personally think it is a good rhetorical strategy to introduce secular arguments for that.

I don't think you're bound to. I don't think you shouldn't bring the Bible into the public square.

I don't think that Martin Luther King shouldn't have quoted the Bible in arguing against slavery or something or against segregation and such.

Can we use a different example, maybe anti -blasphemy, because that would make it, I think, more clear. Because that's something that's very unique to Christians.

And wanting a Christian society that has Christian characterizations, you're not appealing to common ground stuff,

I guess, at that. Well, maybe, I don't know, maybe you think you are. Well, I think.

So the FCC. Oh, go ahead. Sorry, very public, like atheism.

I feel like there might have been more broad consent from Christians and deists and Jews, maybe in early

America, that there were some views that just ought, they were undermining the foundations of society.

They shouldn't be widely broadcast. Freedom of speech shouldn't extend to them. If it's blasphemy in the sense of denying the

Trinity or one of the doctrines of special revelation, they're unique to special revelation, you're gonna have to appeal to special revelation in order to defend that.

My question for this, and then you can determine whether I'm in the camp that you're concerned about or different, would be, to what extent does that pertain to our life together, this side of the eschaton, or just like where we are at this point in society where a significant percentage of the populace isn't

Christian? My personal judgment is that people's sexual behavior and family norms have a lot, have very direct public implications for our life together in ways that which doctrines we officially affirm about the

Trinity do not. So that's -

It's in a natural realm. My sense is that there is some, politics is natural in a large dimension.

It's our life together here. It is not the kingdom to come.

And so the natural law does govern it. I don't say you can't open the

Bible to be exploring that. I question personally the prudence of getting into specific

Christian doctrine in politics. So let me bring it back to apologetics and hopefully,

I didn't mean to throw a wrench in that discussion, sorry. I wasn't sure I brought this up, but I think hopefully this is interesting to people as they're listening.

Recently, I don't know if you saw it, Wes Hough went on Joe Rogan. Have you seen it yet or you haven't?

I haven't seen it. I see a lot of people talking about it. Yeah, same. All right, everyone says I seem to watch this and everyone's sending me the link and I haven't yet.

But I watched like the first five minutes and then said, man, I don't have time for this. So hopefully today. But from what

I understand from seeing some of the discussion, Joe Rogan's not a Christian. He's not a believer. And he is recognizing some of the things that we talked about earlier.

There's these, we've kicked against the goads essentially in society.

And we've gotten to these places where he's scratching his head and saying, how did we get here? And there's,

I think, a sense of wanting to go back and figure out where we got off the path. Let's reestablish our ties to tradition and religion and things that would ground us.

So I think it's in that spirit that Wes Hough comes on his podcast. And Wes Hough is bringing arguments that I think he resonates with.

So they're, like, he's already thinking along these lines and Wes Hough is basically saying, okay, yeah, here's why you're thinking along those lines.

Here's an explanation from it. Here's what Christianity teaches, which I think is brilliant. And it's great. Like, I'm glad that this happened, obviously.

That said, I think on a political level, that's also somewhat happening. Like in all of the social spheres, this is happening where people are asking these same similar questions and wanting to find some kind of a moral foundation.

If you look at Western societies, and America is obviously one of these, you have, in God we trust, and invocations from preachers and nativity scenes.

And I mean, there's still actually a lot of infusion of Christianity that's percolated through or mediated through tradition over centuries into our law.

And not just the law, but even the way we treat each other. We say, God bless you after someone sneezes. We never question that, right?

But that's like super religious, right? If you think about it. There's all these things that we do that we don't really give credit to God for necessarily, or we're not self -aware, but these are things that give us a sense of stability, that there is a transcendent standard that we are gonna be held accountable for.

You know, why even put your hand on a Bible and swear an oath of office? Because there's rewards and punishments coming. That's why you do it, right?

These are uniquely Christian things. And I guess what I'm saying is that there are guys out there, there's more presuppositional guys who wanna say,

Joe Rogan's like, you know, not just lost in a salvific sense, but he's lost, like he can't reason at all.

You gotta present the whole Christian view. He needs to receive the gospel right now. There's no way to have a conversation on a common ground with a guy like that and have common, even political unity.

You gotta have like every T -crossed. Then there's also guys out there who will say,

I'm trying to give a good example of this, because most of these guys aren't public figures, they're more personal people I know, but they'll say that, you know, more like an

Ayn Rand kind of libertarian approach. You can be an atheist. You don't need to be a Christian.

You don't need to be a theist. You don't need, like, as long as you have these natural principles you start out with, you can live your life in an orderly fashion.

And this is the last thing I'll say. Christians, I think traditionally have said, of course

God's wired a sense of order into man so that he can understand that there are men and women and there are things that if you do them, you're gonna be outside.

It's gonna be chaos. You're gonna be outside the scope of order. But the natural or the special revelation we're given and the moral law in that and so forth, it parallels, it complements, it, there's nothing contradictory between the natural law and special revelation.

So we would be fools to reject our tradition, our Christian tradition, right?

Am I making sense? Is that? Yeah, yeah. Well, I think it's not, it's not true that our society is only founded on like natural law and natural theology.

It is specifically Christian influence. You know, I think Tom Holland and that sort of thing, you know, you could use

Tom Holland's dominion in service of a presuppositionalist argument. But I think it would be important to figure out like what is the distinctive kind of Christian contribution?

Like, for example, there's an argument that's been made that forgiveness is necessary for political life.

I forget which World War II era, Simone Weil or one of those gals wrote about this.

Like if different groups in society cannot forgive one another, get over past battles, you know, the way

African tribes keep killing each other year after year, like you can't have a foundation of political society.

And that's a Christian contribution. You know, Tom Holland argues in a sense that progressive morality is a secularization and sort of extreme version of Christian morality, which is interesting because that means it's not exactly just an attempt at the natural law that goes really awry.

Ideas like, you know, if you look for biblical descriptions of natural law, it's gonna be like an eye for an eye.

Like everybody has basic principles of commutative justice. Well, that's not the problem in our society. The problem in our society is that people wanna turn the other cheek when the other guy has a machine gun, or they want to, you know, say we have no ability of self -defense.

It's actually a radicalization of Anabaptist political and moral theology.

And so it's a radicalization and secularization of Christ's teaching.

And so a lot of what Stephen Wolfe or Devon Institute guys have been doing is kind of arguing for natural law, partly against Anabaptist impulses in Christian political thought, which are, you know, we can't defend ourselves.

We can't defend our own societies. We can't have boundaries or whatever. And so I think there's a tension there of distinctively

Christian things like hospitality and forgiveness that actually shouldn't be brought all the way to the political level.

You know, on the right, we talk about like possibilities of, you know, blasphemy laws or tell everybody to go to church.

Well, on the Christian left, they're talking about, can we expand forgiveness and hospitality to literally every form?

Yes, yes. So, but both of those are attempts to say something distinctively Christian ought to govern our politics.

Well, the response to those Anabaptist political theologians has been, well, we can't fully enact redemption here on earth.

We suffer under the limits of, if you forget all boundaries and all self -defense, you're just gonna get killed.

And that's not loving to the people around you. So there's a tension there between just the principles and the order of our natural lives together, which are governed by natural law and the way that God has built things and the

Christian gospel, which is able to transcend that a bit.

Yeah, that's a good point. And they, I mean, I would say, I think the

Anabaptist impulse is misapplying personal moral principles and universalizing them to other realms in which they don't exist and that, or they shouldn't be thought of in those ways.

But, you know, I think maybe the recognition happening today and I'm seeing this more and more, even from, you know,

Elon Musk is another good example of this. That he wants this more powerful, bold Christianity. He's not a

Christian, but he's coming to terms with the fact that Christian identity seems to be somehow linked to even these natural law principles.

Like keeping them, like Christian societies are the places where these were best maintained and protected and forwarded.

And when we lose our Christian identity, that's when things are starting to go awry. And that man is doing what's right in his own eyes.

He is being autonomous in these kinds of things. And our Christian identity seems to have held that back.

I think you would agree with that, right? Absolutely. I mean, and this is part of like Aquinas' teaching about natural law is he doesn't deny the noetic effects of sin.

He says, look, people's knowledge for the natural law is pretty iffy. Like every society out there at his time, he has plenty of room for prostitutes, has plenty of room for killing and raping your enemies.

Like there's some real issues with people's knowledge of the natural law, which is why he said, one of the reasons

God wrote it down again in the Bible for us. He's like, let me just write this down for you.

Cause you guys don't seem to be having this or getting this knowledge perfectly. And so it's absolutely the case that Christianity has republished the natural law and it is

Christian societies where we have it affirmed in scripture that we preserve those principles best and even discover their implications anew.

For example, with the abolition of slavery, which comes from people like William Wilberforce. So there's, it's, yeah,

Christianity has, and that's really that cultural thing you're talking about is, recently

I've been defending both natural law and civilizational cultural Christianity because I do think those are connected together.

There's something presuppositional about saying, oh, everybody who has sympathy for cultural

Christianity, that's meaningless. Joe Rogan is no closer to the gospel now that he's admitted the good of cultural

Christianity than before he did. Of course he is. He now sees many of the good things that Christianity has brought and Jesus said, look at the fruits.

Yeah. It should bear fruit. So I think those things are tied together.

Natural law shouldn't be a kind of secularism, but. That's it.

That statement right there is what I was getting at. I should have said it in four paragraphs. That's what I'm saying.

Like, is that an argument for secularism, I suppose? No, that's good.

An example I just thought of too, and I know we got to wind down because we've been going over an hour, but monogamy, that's such a

Christian thing. You look at societies where Christianity is introduced that weren't monogamous, they're monogamous.

And this was God's intention in the natural world. This was God's intention from the beginning. And yet this was something that has been disregarded widely.

There's evolutionary arguments even today for polygyny and these kinds of things. And it's in Christian societies where they've been able to channel even some of that masculine and feminine energy.

And you do the study and you can say, this works, guys. This actually works. Your society is better for having monogamy.

And this is something Christianity brought, but it's also something that parallels

God's intentions for the natural world. And so I guess hand in glove, and it's a beautiful thing.

And, you know. Yeah, and I think - There's both of those things. You know,

I was thinking and talking about Christian worldview recently. And like, there are enormous implications of having a

Christian worldview, you know, that monogamy has come about, that slavery was eventually abolished and seen as incompatible with Christian faith, you know, and on and on and on.

And that's not at all what we're attempting to deny. The denial is that none of that is visible in the created order itself.

Like when someone asks me whether a man can become a woman or a woman become a man,

I wanna say, I don't wanna jump right to the Bible. You know, I wanna point to the created order.

And if Christianity was relatively unique in affirming monogamy against polygamy or polygyny,

I wanna be ready to find the sociologist look into that one and say, yeah, and it's actually better.

Like it, you know, I saw recently that women were treated a lot better once monogamy was introduced through Christianity, you know, and those societies would have still been called patriarchal.

And yet by having one man to one woman, that man's gonna treat that woman a lot better.

Especially when he doesn't believe divorce is legitimate and so on and so forth. I just saw the other day, the

Daily Signal was publishing, I think it was some study that showed that women who stayed home are happier and that you're gonna actually have healthier children and husbands live longer.

It's like all these things that Christianity teaches, like, oh, wouldn't you know, like you actually follow them and things go better for you.

So yeah, no, I appreciate, I'm sorry if that was, I definitely threw a wrench into it and steered the discussion in a different direction.

But I think the point of this - It's important. It is important, but more than anything is, the point of your article is that arguing from the text of scripture and specifically in 1

Corinthians 2, we don't see an idea that you can't have common ground with unbelievers, work with them on political things or cultural things, simply because, you know, they don't have your entire worldview and agree with you on everything regarding doctrine.

You can actually do that. You need to be careful, right? You don't wanna have fellowship in the sense of like implying that they're going to heaven with you or they have the correct doctrine on these special revelation issues, but you can work on things with them.

And this is an important point, I think, for the era that we are entering, where there are a lot of non -Christians recognizing we've gotten off the track socially and we need to get back on very fundamental things.

What is a man? What is a woman being? Of course, one of the big ones. But yeah, maybe we don't have time to obviously talk about it now, but if you've done any thinking on the

AI and the transhumanism stuff, I think that's the next frontier where we're gonna be wanting to bring order in and find it somewhere, because it's gonna probably take us to places that we're not ready for.

Anyway. Yeah. Thank you. We're gonna hit an Icarus moment on a lot of this stuff where you realize we can't do this.

And I think it's already happening with transgenderism, but people are gonna come back to the church saying, believing

I could change myself. I could become more than human. I could become something else.

I could reach to the sun. That's gonna come kind of crashing down. And that's when the fact that Christianity was saying it all along actually becomes a comfort to them.

Yeah. Well, Joel Carini, thank you for being on the podcast. And if people wanna check out your stuff, they go to, is it thenaturaltheologian .com?

What's the website again? Joelcarini .substack .com. It's called The Natural Theologian. So if you just search for that on Substack.

I'm also on YouTube under the same name and on X. Hey, God bless. Thank you once again.

And if anyone wants to reach out, go check it out at socials. Sounds good.