Adult Sunday School - Epistemic Certainty

Epistemic Certainty and the Christian Faith

All right, 588, you can go ahead and stand. Come we that love the Lord, and let our joys be known. Join in a song with sweet accord, and thus surround the throne. Let those refuse to sing that had never knew our God.

But children of the Heavenly King may speak their joys abroad. Of grace have found, glory begun below. Celestial fruits on earthly ground, from faith and hope may grow. Of Zion's and sacred Swedes. Before us awoke the golden streets.

Then let our songs abound, and every tear be dry. We're marching through Emmanuel's ground to fairer worlds on high. Dear Heavenly Father, thank you for this morning. I pray that you would bless our time studying theology, studying what you have said about yourself and how we should think about you.

In Jesus' name, amen. All right, well, I'm going to start off with the same apology I made last time I taught Sunday school, which is, yeah. Last few times I taught Sunday school, it was a last minute notice.

Today is the same. So they're going to be, yeah, hopefully this is still edifying. I think it was last time, but thank you. I appreciate that. But what I would like to do today, well, first a recap. Who here was at the last Areopagus Forum?

Or at least watched it. I know some people were watching it online, yeah. So the pastor who came and spoke, there was a question asked. I asked him, I said, you know, what do we mean when you say that Jesus really existed?

Do you mean that he certainly existed or that you just think it's more likely than your opponent here thinks? And his answer was, I'd say it's about 90%. Wasn't that the number he gave? It was 90%. I was very surprised by this, in part because we had talked about this beforehand.

And yeah, I thought I kind of made it clear what kind of a position I was looking to be represented from our side. But also, boy, I'm not even sure a secular historian would give a number that low. And I spoke to him and I asked him, well, he explained, well, I'm just talking about whether or not he existed historically.

But the rest of the Christian faith is contingent on him existing historically. So that number would be lower. He says, oh, yeah, yeah. So I was very surprised by that. Basically, the chances of our faith being true are less than 90 from what he was saying.

So anyway, the Christian faith is a certain faith. This is something we can rest in. In fact, if it's not, then it is a false faith because it says it is a certain faith. So you really don't have a way around that, right?

Either it's certain or it's false because it claims to be certain. Now, how we're going to go through this is I wrote a paper on this topic back in seminary. I was hoping that by the time I got to teach on this, I would have condensed it down into something more digestible for us.

But I didn't have a chance to do that. So I'm going to pass out the paper. We're going to go through it paragraph by paragraph. And I'll stop and explain as much as I can, ask questions. And we'll see how this works out.

All right, who knows what epistemology is? All right, so epistemology is the study of knowledge, right? So epistemic certainty is having a certain knowledge. This is not mere psychological certainty. A psychological certainty is what the phrase people usually use for meaning like a feeling of certainness.

You know, I can really feel certain about something. I give the example later of someone who's about to win the lottery, or someone who, sorry, thinks or is playing the lottery and thinks that they will win the lottery, right?

You can have all kinds of fools that have great psychological certainty about the matter, but no real epistemic certainty where the knowledge is true and coming from an actual source of 100 confidence.

Anyway, like I said, I would like to just read this and try to explain each paragraph as we go through. Probably won't get through all of it. Maybe we'll do that another time, but this will be available for you to keep reading if you find this worthwhile.

Okay, so epistemology, the study of knowledge, is the most fundamental branch of philosophy and plays a fundamental role in the Christian's life. So of course, that should be obvious. If you're talking about philosophy, how do we know certain things, then in order to know those things, you have to know how you know them.

It is very, this is as fundamental as it gets. The believer's knowledge of self, God, and the world is key, not only in salvation, but in daily Christian living. People operate from day to day, confident that their beliefs are true, yet it is not always readily agreed that we can know things with complete epistemic certainty.

So people generally go about knowing things, but do they know that they know those things? And a lot of times, people won't be willing to admit that they know that they know them. They aren't sure whether or not this is, our knowledge is complete in this way.

Could you just be in the matrix? Could you be a brain in a vat? There's a lot of questions that people ask that they don't have answers to. Oh, maybe that's just a unfalsifiable speculation. Maybe we could be in the matrix.

The purpose of this brief essay is to put forward a Christian conception of epistemic certainty. We will seek to delineate facts of which we can have complete certainty from facts of which we may only be confident.

Regarding the latter, facts of which we can be confident, we will offer a basic understanding of how we can have any confidence apart from epistemic certainty, because there are some that say if you don't know it certainly, you can't know it at all, which is not what I'm saying.

First, we will assert that one may have certainty, sorry, regarding the latter, we will offer a basic understanding of how we can have any confidence apart from epistemic certainty. Sorry, I did just read that.

First, we will assert that one may have certainty through God's revelation. Then we will examine three different types of revelation, immediate general revelation, immediate general revelation, and special revelation.

Maybe those categories are familiar to you. If they're not, general revelation is referring to God communicating just through nature, and then special revelation is him communicating either through scripture or the voice of an angel or something beyond just what's available to us in nature.

Lastly, we will note the distinctions and certainty between the redeemed and the unsaved. You know, do I have a kind of certainty that the unbeliever does not about the things that he encounters? Occasionally, we will stop to interact with opposing views within the reformed camp.

Okay, so hopefully the purpose of this is clear. Yes, yeah. Well, yeah, I did intentionally avoid that. We'll get to it, but yeah, God creates us with an understanding of who he is, you know, a sense of the divine.

The Latin term is sensus divinitatis. That is different than learning things through general revelation just by observation. You know, ah, well, mountains are beautiful. God is therefore all-powerful and beautiful himself.

The Possibility of Epistemic Certainty

All right, the possibility of certainty. So before discussing the mechanics of certainty in any specific arenas, we must first establish that epistemic certainty is indeed possible. First, to say that certainty is entirely impossible is a self-refuting position.

Such a statement, if made with certainty, would in fact be a demonstration of certainty. If the statement were not made with certainty, then such a lack would be an admission that certainty is indeed possible.

So hopefully that made sense. You know, if someone says, well, you can't know anything, well, do you know that you can't know anything? That's not how this works. You can know, you can know things, otherwise you have a self-refuting position.

However, our hope for certainty is not founded merely on the foolishness of the contrary position, but on the revelation of God. So yeah, that's, and that's what I'm getting at here. There is another paper I wrote on basically, you know, how we can know that revelation from God is true.

But this is getting at, if you are affirming Christian beliefs, what does the Bible say about whether or not we can have certainty? Because it doesn't say nothing, right? And it's not, well, it doesn't leave you room to say, well, it's 90 certain, right?

You have to be able to affirm this wholeheartedly. A Christian epistemology is a revelational epistemology. So there are different kinds of epistemologies, right? Different kinds of ideas of where our knowledge comes from.

A lot of people are empiricists, right? They think, okay, well, I observe things, and if they seem to be true over a given period of time, that makes it more likely to truly be true. There's all kinds of, you know, different epistemologies.

But the Christian epistemology, I believe is rightly called a revelational one, we know things because God has revealed them to us to be true. Now, he's either revealing them through nature and our senses, et cetera, or he's revealing them directly to us, he's revealing them through scripture.

He has a lot of ways of revelation. But the way that we know things is not a reliance solely upon self. And some things, it is partially, you know, based on our reason and intuition and things like that.

But ultimately, it is all contingent upon God revealing things to us through whatever means he chooses. God communicates to us through various means in order to make himself known. In making himself known, he makes known his works, his creation.

This trust in both God's desire to communicate and his ability to communicate is what gives the Christian knowledge about himself, the world around him, and God himself. So why can you have, you know, why can you know that certainty is possible?

Because not just that God is able to reveal things to you, but that he is willing to reveal things to you. He has declared that he desires people to know. Both unbeliever and believer, he will hold unbelievers to account.

Why? Because they do have knowledge of him, right? He has an aim to reveal. Now, it's not always the same aim people think it is. Look at Jesus' parables. He made it very clear that he wasn't trying to make sure everybody understood.

But there are many things that God is trying, and not just trying, but succeeding in making people understand. As Herman Bovink wrote, since humanity's entire will and woe depends on religion, only that certainty will do that is absolute and obtainable by all, even the simplest of people.

If religion is to be what it is said to be, that is, the service of God, the love of God with all one's mind, heart, and strength, then it must be grounded in revelation and a word from God that comes with his authority.

So if we are commanded to love God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength, not that any person is capable of perfectly doing that, but our inability to do that would be based on ourself, not based on any lack of what we've been given.

We've been given everything that's necessary in order to make that possible so that we will be held to that standard. And God has given us everything, everything we need to perfectly know who he is so that we may love him completely.

All right, so compared to other forms of foundationalism, epistemologies that seek to begin with an unobjectionable truth from which other truths are built, a revelational epistemology is superior on multiple counts.

Okay, so different kinds of epistemologies. Also, I wanna be real clear. This is me trying to wrestle with a hard topic, not me being a philosophy expert. So if you later find out that I was misrepresenting some of these terms, don't hold it against me.

All right, so foundational epistemologies. What's that? Yeah. Okay, yeah. Consider Descartes' Cogito, I think therefore I am. Cogito ergo sum, probably you're familiar with that phrase, I think therefore I am.

Right, how do you know that you exist? Well, Descartes saying, how can you know anything? Well, I have to start with something foundational, and that is myself. I think therefore I am, and from my own existence, I will build all other facts with some degree of confidence from that truth.

Okay, its validity depends on assuming the conclusion, the existence of I. I think therefore I am. You already had I in the premise, right? It's not really a valid syllogism in that way. And does not justify the assumption by further proof.

Invalidity aside, the foundation can only give one enough to affirm a solipsistic worldview where I is all that exists. If you don't know the word solipsism, it's the idea that basically you are the only person that exists, not only are you in the matrix, but you're the only person in the matrix.

Nothing else, nothing else exists. Everything else is just your own illusion, a product of your own mind. And it's interesting, a lot of these things, I don't know if you all had similar thoughts as a kid.

I occasionally speculated this as a kid, like maybe I'm really the only person who exists. You know, this does like creep into the human mind, the self-centeredness of things like this. Boy, I gotta use a pencil to keep track of where I am.

Yeah, other foundations may do better, but not by much. If someone, James, do you have a pen I could use back there? Because I keep losing my spot and it'd be easier if I were just marking where I was.

All right, other foundations may do better, but not by much. Even apart from its particular robustness, a revelational epistemology stands out above the others in that it not only provides a beginning, but an end.

So it's not foundational in that, okay, God reveals things and we can build off that revelation. There's more to it than that. It provides a beginning in that revelation of God is a certain standing point from which knowledge is built.

It provides an end in that we are also given the Lord's goals in his revelation. He does not merely provide revelation by which we may or may not arrive at correct conclusions. You know, God reveals lots of things and people reject lots of things.

So him revealing stuff is, that foundation isn't really sufficient to say that, okay, well, therefore knowledge is possible because you could still not know anything. It's only possible because there's also an end.

There's also a goal to this revelation, which is him, yeah, him truly revealing stuff to us that we might know it. He does not merely provide revelation, oh, sorry. One might imagine being given a true revelation that all pervert or repress.

However, the Lord gives revelation with the express intent of men arriving at true knowledge of himself and his creation. If we take, for instance, the Bible, it is not given merely as knowable, but with a guarantee that it will be known by many.

This Christian epistemology does not just hold men up from underneath as other epistemologies attempt to do, but also pulls men up from above. Of course, our imperfect and fallen nature gives us opportunities to misunderstand or even repress God's truth.

At one point in his doctrine of the knowledge of God, John Frame says that we might call all knowledge certain knowledge given that it stems from our certain presuppositions. Regardless of the rhetorical point he makes, it is not the case that our imperfect reason correctly applies our presuppositions.

So, yeah, knowing things that are built on certain things, that doesn't make those things you know certain. You know, it makes them justified by something else that's certain. Therefore, much of our knowledge is subject to doubt.

However, there is still a reason to press forward in gaining knowledge, God's intent to communicate his truth. Van Til writes of the Christian. Also, a lot of this is me, I end up quoting Frame and Van Til a lot.

If you end up studying this, there are a lot of people who are considered Vantilians because they were students of Van Til. Frame is one of them. Kind of what I'm doing is showing that Frame's views are very different than Van Til's views.

So that's just a side note of part of what I'm accomplishing and quoting some of these people or trying to accomplish anyway. Recognizing the fact of evil and its noetic consequences, he does not therefore despair of true knowledge.

He allows for the possibility that through evil, his revelation, excuse me, his relation to God may have changed and therefore seeks for the revelation already necessary without the fact of sin that will bring to him true knowledge of God and of himself and the relation to one another.

Okay, who knows what noetic means? Yes. Yeah, the mind, right, yeah. So evil has noetic consequences, right? Because this is called the noetic effects of the fall. I heard once of a book that accidentally published the poetic effects of the fall as a phrase.

That's not what this is. This is the noetic effects of the fall. It affects the mind so that we suppress God's truth and unrighteousness, right, it says in Romans 1. He does not therefore despair of true knowledge.

He allows for the possibility that through evil, his relation to God may have changed and therefore seeks for revelation, right? Even though his mind is corrupt, he knows that he seeks a relation to God.

Therefore seeks for the revelation already necessary without the fact of sin that will bring him true knowledge of God and of himself and their relation to one another. So relation still gives true knowledge even despite the noetic effects of the fall.

These noetic effects of sin will be considered in slightly more detail in further sections as we look at the different categories of revelation. However, this fallibility in man gives us reason to form some heuristic by which we may measure justification for knowledge, the degree to which we should have confidence in our beliefs which are not epistemically certain.

So that which we can't know 100%, we could still have confidence about. You know, it's not a one or nothing. It's not zero confidence, you know, I could be a brain in a vat, versus 100 confidence where I absolutely know it.

We can actually have likely knowledge of something. Given a proposition P, our belief in P can be said to be justified to the degree in which, I suppose, in which it is based on God's revelation. So to what degree is something based on God's revelation?

That is the degree to which you can be certain that you have not muddied it and come up with something else. All right, certainty and immediate general revelation. All right, and maybe, I don't know how many sections we're gonna get through, maybe we'll get through, well, we'll probably get through this section, I don't know about how many others.

General revelation, that revelation which God gives through creation, so I already explained that, that's, you know, both the sense within ourselves as well as being able to observe nature and see who God is, may be broken down into the categories of immediate revelation and immediate revelation.

Immediate general revelation is given directly to the intellect without being mediated through some other objects in creation outside of oneself. Primarily, if not exclusively, this includes that knowledge we have of ourselves in God by virtue of being made in the image of God.

The imago Dei communicates the senses divinitatis, the sense of the divine, imago Dei is the image of God. So being made in the image of God, we already have a sense of God, right? We know his existence just through our very being apart from, you know, analyzing the world around us and deductively making conclusions.

God has embedded in us an understanding of himself that we would be held perfectly accountable to. You can't just say that, oh, well, you know, I'm a little slower than others, so I wasn't able to deduce that God exists out of the creation around me.

What Romans one is talking about is God having revealed himself to the hearts of men. By God's design of us, we are aware of both God and ourselves. And if you ever read Calvin's Institutes, this is what he begins with.

He starts off with, you know, the whole purpose of religion is to know God and to know yourself. You can't know God without knowing yourself in relation to him. You can't know yourself without knowing God and your relation to him.

And he says, what do you even begin with? And he concludes somewhat tentatively, it seems best to begin with God, and then he begins speaking of who God is. But this is the interesting thing of knowledge is to know who you are, you have to know yourself in the context in which you live.

Otherwise, it's somewhat meaningless information, or it's, yeah, they would be, it's what Van Til referred to as brute facts. Okay, so a brute fact is a fact without meaning to it. For example, if you say Jesus raised from the dead, but it comes without the interpretation that that proves that he is God or all the things that that means, it's fairly meaningless, right?

And same thing about your own existence, right? You're meaningless without understanding any of the purpose that comes from you in relation to God. Another way of thinking about this, because a lot of people have trouble saying, well, how, of course you can know things in isolation, because that's the way they think about it.

I know one plus one is two, right? And I don't need to know everything else in the universe in order to know that. But do you really know one plus one is two if you don't know all the implications that come from math, right?

Someone without exploring the world is able to think through that and realize, oh, okay, well, that implies also that multiplication should work this way and division should work this way, et cetera, et cetera.

And you can build, just out of addition, you can build the whole rest of very certain mathematics. There's different branches of mathematics where you start with different axioms. But the arithmetic that you're familiar with, you build it out of that.

So someone knowing one plus one is two doesn't really mean that they completely know the idea of one plus one is two. There's more to be understood there. So all that to say that you can't know yourself in isolation to God.

That's not really a complete knowledge.

Yes? So that God hasn't revealed himself to us in our creation. Demarco Dei, as you said. So the presupposition is I've got enough knowledge of God simply in the image that's implanted in me. Is that sort of?

Right, yeah, and it's not necessarily, I mean, he's giving us knowledge of both us and himself, right? We don't, he doesn't start with himself and then we learn about us later. He has implanted in us with the image of God both an understanding of who we are.

In relation to him and him. That presupposition foundation is both God and self at the same level. I mean, I'm not saying we're equal to God, but at the same level for building our epistemology. Right.

In relation to self, I know that I am existing and God has revealed himself in the image and in creation.

Right, but I'm not, yeah, and I'm not saying, okay, you start from there and then you, and then you build off of that like the cogito. It's, you know, the Bible's revealed to us that God has a purpose in revelation, et cetera.

So it's, there's much more to that. What I was saying with God being the starting point, that was basically for pedagogical reasons. You know, for reasons of teaching, Calvin is asking, well, which point do we do first since we got to talk about these one before the other?

Since they're both, they're both in here, they're both intertwined, you can't divorce them, you can't separate them, but we have to talk about one first.

The answer, he chooses his God. For him, it's a logical starting point.

It's the, yeah, it's the pedagogical starting point. Yeah, pedagogical meaning having to do with teaching. All right, so the second paragraph on page three. Though he communicates directly to us, this direct communication does not prevent us from suppressing that truth of his existence and the honor due to him, our relationship to him being one of inferiority.

If you're not familiar with Romans 1, 18 and following, let me just do a quick reading of that because this really is kind of in the background of almost everything that I'm saying here. All right, Romans 1, 18.

For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth. Okay, so they're suppressing truth. They already know truth and they're suppressing it.

For what can be known about God is plain to them because God has shown it to them. For his invisible attributes, namely his eternal power and divine nature have been clearly perceived ever since the creation of the world and the things that have been made.

So they are without excuse. For although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became foolish, futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened. Claiming to be wise, they became fools and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and creeping things.

Okay, so God has revealed himself plainly to man and man rejects that in his sin. However, we are still held accountable. In fact, it is because of the certainty of this revelation that we are held accountable.

One could not be completely obligated to believe the truth if there were legitimate reasons to doubt them by the sensus divinitatis. All excuse is swept away. So, you know, consider that. Let's say we couldn't have certainty about God's existence or about whether or not Jesus really existed or whether he raised from the dead.

Let's say that these things were just likely. Let's say there were 99 .5 nines of, you know, and computing a lot of times you measure things by how many nines, you know, 99 .9999. So let's say we've got 10 nines of certainty about this or we're 99 .9 et cetera percent certain.

If there is any reason to doubt, that is the degree to which God cannot hold us accountable to know these things which we are supposed to know. If we have a legitimate reason to doubt, he can't hold us perfectly accountable to have known these things.

Now, maybe he could hold us partially, but not perfectly, yes. I would say that we suppress the truth in unrighteousness. So what does that mean? Like, how do you distinguish between these two kinds of knowledge?

The way I end up distinguishing them in a few sentences here is between epistemic certainty, like knowing God in a way that is truly knowing him and knowing him in a way that's just a psychological feeling of knowing him, right?

And so what you have because of the noetic effects is people who do truly know him, but don't feel like they know him, right? They have like this psychological suppression. Yeah, it is hard to find. And like the best I have is distinguishing it from what has been corrupted.

Well, it's our willingness to say it. It's our feeling of certainty about it. Yeah, that's the best I have. All right, interestingly, man is then left with a philosophical certainty regarding the existence of God apart from a psychological certainty.

There we have what I was just talking about, the feeling of confidence. While the unbeliever, in some sense, knows that God exists, he feels entirely opposed to this truth. We may say that immediate general revelation always produces epistemic certainty, though it does not always produce psychological certainty.

This idea of certainty stands contra frames position. In my judgment, epistemic certainty, however it be defined, is not something sharply different from psychological certainty. Whatever level of warrant is required for epistemic certainty, it must be a level that gives us psychological confidence.

Indeed, if we are to accept some technical definition of warrant, we also must have psychological confidence that that definition actually represents what we call certainty. So it may be said that epistemic certainty is reducible to psychological certainty, but it is also true that we should try to conform our psychological feelings of certainty to objective principles of knowledge so that our doubts and feelings of certainty are reasonable rather than arbitrary or pathological.

So perhaps it is best to say that psychological and epistemic certainty are mutually dependent. So what he's saying there is, there is no difference. Psychological certainty is epistemic certainty. What I'm arguing here is, Romans 1 demands something different because it really says that people know who God is.

And we also know, and ourselves having been unbelievers at one time, we also know that experience of not believing in God. So if we are to affirm what scripture says and also the rest of what scripture says, and speaking of the heart of the unbeliever and his rejection of that truth, how do you hold those two together?

I think one of the best ways is to distinguish these two different kinds of certainty, the psychological feeling of certainty and the truth having actually been revealed in the way that it is known without that suppression.

You know, the beach ball analogy everyone always uses about pressing the beach ball down into the water and how difficult that is to do. The beach ball's there inside the soul still, right? Even if, it doesn't matter how far down it is.

You know, the level down would be the psychological certainty but the fact that the beach ball exists is the epistemic certainty. Psychological and epistemic certainty do have effects on each other. However, they may also be significantly divorced.

In the case of the unbeliever who has certain knowledge of God, he has very little feeling of certainty regarding the matter. The one who thinks he will win the lottery has very little epistemic certainty, though he has great psychological certainty.

So all kinds of fools can feel like they know something but have no real knowledge of it. Okay, part four. Certainty and immediate general revelation. Other knowledge given through general revelation is mediated.

That is, we often gain knowledge through objects and creation outside ourselves. For example, we learn that mountains exist, that clouds form in the sky, that wood is a decent material for building, et cetera.

Through mediated general revelation, we also learn of God's character. So Psalm 19, one says that the heavens declare the glory of God. Unlike with immediate general revelation, this knowledge of God is gained indirectly, and in so learning indirectly, we additionally gain knowledge of the world around us.

Okay, so the heavens declare the glory of God. So not only do we know God immediately through being made in his image, but we also know him through observing creation around us. And in the process, we learn more about that creation as well.

As mentioned previously, the noetic effects of sin cause us to repress revealed truth. Do you have a sheet? Does someone have an extra to hand in? As mentioned previously, the noetic effects of sin cause us to repress revealed truth.

However, the effects of sin expand beyond the mind, even to the senses. One may imagine he sees a man down his hallway late at night, yet the man turns out only to be a broom. In this regard, the believer finds himself in the same seat as the unbeliever examining the world around him with fallen senses.

May we say that we can have certainty about objects in the world around us, or may we only have certainty of knowledge that this revelation leads us to regarding God and our relationship to him. For example, so what it's saying is, well, maybe one option here is, well, we can't know anything around us by our senses.

We can only know what they tell us of God. Maybe that's all we have. For example, one view of epistemology, known as scripturalism, asserts that there is no mediated general revelation. Rather, nature serves to stir that a priori knowledge that is already within us.

A priori knowledge, just like I said, there's knowledge that you already have. You know, the spider comes out of its egg already knowing how to spin webs. It's just got that a priori knowledge, right?

And so, this is the idea of scripturalism, that, well, there's a bunch of ideas that we already know, and general revelation, we can't really know anything about the world around us that much. All we can know is that, is what it tells us of God, and so it is that knowledge that we already have through the imago Dei, that senses divinitatis, that sense of the divine, being stirred up by our senses, and we're not actually learning anything new through creation.

This is not what I'm saying. This is a view called scripturalism. Thus, Gordon H. Clark said that a man cannot know who his own wife is. Of course, Clark tended to use, tended to only use the word knowledge for certain knowledge, but his intent was to declare that general revelation is insufficient to communicate with certainty, while scriptural revelation is sufficient.

Clark's concern largely revolves around a man's wicked suppression of knowledge. No doubt, it is only through special revelation that one may hear the gospel, be regenerated by the Holy Spirit, and hence interpret general revelation correctly, acknowledging God's work in creation.

However, this does not mean that the unbeliever and the believer cannot study mathematics side by side. While one will understand who controls the rules of mathematics, and the other will not, both can ascertain the same theorems.

We should therefore further distinguish between these types of general revelation. Some general revelation is suppressible, and other general revelation is insuppressible. God's power, morality, et cetera, would be suppressible, whereas the existence of stars, the hardness of concrete, et cetera, would be insuppressible.

This is not to deny that men may come to wrong conclusions, for example, somehow identifying concrete as soft, but to affirm that such wrong conclusions are based on imperfect perceptions and reasoning, not on culpable intent.

So, yeah, there are things that we can have more or less certainty of. Some of that is because of sinful repression. Some of that is just we're falling. And so, still the effects of sin, but not culpable effects of sin.

You know, we don't have perfect eyesight. We don't have perfect reasoning. And so, yeah, I'm kind of in the middle of handling this section talking about, well, can we only, can we really know things around us, or can we just know what they say of God?

We can really know the things around us. We can know, for example, mathematics. Yeah, even observing things in creation around us. Regarding these imperfect perceptions, it must be acknowledged that Clark is correct in asserting that there is a possibility one could not know the identity of his spouse.

Consider Jacob's first wedding night. However, a more nuanced view of certainty, it's funny, because Clark always gets really picked on for this, but I don't think many people are really trying to hear him out.

Now, I still think he's wrong, but like he's kind of right on this point. Jacob didn't know who his spouse was. You know, and how many times have you, well, maybe this is not that many, but you know the situation where you grab a woman by your shoulder thinking it's your wife because you saw the back of her hair, and then she turns around, and you realize it's not, oh, I'm sorry.

I thought you were my wife. Yeah. Let's see. However, a more nuanced view of certainty is required in order to establish a biblical view of mediated general revelation. First, it is based on our knowledge of God's law and our knowledge of our actions that we are held accountable for our sins.

Does everybody have a paper? Anybody missing one? Okay. Clark objects that it is not strictly necessary to know whose one wife is in order to avoid the command to commit adultery. One could be celibate.

You know, in other words, if you can't know the world around you, then how can you be held accountable for your sins if you stumble into sins that you didn't realize, oh, I didn't realize that was someone else's property.