Adult Sunday School - Epistemic Certainty

Silicon Valley Reformed Baptist Church

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All right, 588, you can go ahead and stand. Come we that love the

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Lord, and let our joys be known.

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Join in a song with sweet accord, and thus surround the throne.

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Let those refuse to sing that never knew, but children of the heavenly

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King may speak their joys abroad.

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Joys have found, glory begun below.

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Celestial fruits on earthly ground from faith and hope may grow.

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The hill of Zion yields 1 ,000 sacred

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Swedes. Before we reach the heavenly fields or walk the golden streets, then let our songs abound.

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And every tear be dry. We're marching through Emmanuel's ground to fairer worlds on high.

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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.

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In Jesus' name, amen. All right, well, I'm going to start off with the same apology I made last time

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I taught Sunday school, which is last few times I taught

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Sunday school. It was a last minute notice. Today is the same, so they're going to be.

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Yeah, hopefully this is still edifying. I think it was last time, but thank you.

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I appreciate that. But what I would like to do today, well, first, a recap.

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Who here was at the last Areopagus Forum? Or at least watched it. I know some people were watching it online.

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So the pastor who came and spoke, there was a question asked.

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I asked him, I said, 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?

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And his answer was, I'd say it's about 90%. Wasn't that the number he gave? It was 90%.

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I was very surprised by this, in part because we had talked about this beforehand.

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And yeah, I thought I kind of made it clear what kind of a position

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I was looking to be represented from our side. But also, boy,

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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,

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I'm just talking about whether or not he existed historically. But the rest of the

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Christian faith is contingent on him existing historically. So that number would be lower. He says, oh, yeah, yeah.

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So I was very surprised by that. Basically, the chances of our faith being true are less than 90 % from what he was saying.

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So anyway, the Christian faith is a certain faith. This is something we can rest in.

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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.

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Either it's certain or it's false because it claims to be certain. Now, how we're going to go through this is

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I wrote a paper on this topic back in seminary. I was hoping that by the time I got to teach on this,

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I would have condensed it down into something more digestible for us. But I didn't have a chance to do that.

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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.

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And we'll see how this works out. All right, who knows what epistemology is?

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So epistemology is the study of knowledge, right? So epistemic certainty is having a certain knowledge.

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This is not mere psychological certainty. A psychological certainty is the phrase people usually use for meaning a feeling of certainness.

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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, is playing the lottery and thinks that they will win the lottery, right?

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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.

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Anyway, like I said, I would like to just read this and try to explain each paragraph as we go through.

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I 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.

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OK, so epistemology, the study of knowledge, is the most fundamental branch of philosophy and plays a fundamental role in the

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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.

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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

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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.

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So people generally go about knowing things, but do they know that they know those things?

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And a lot of times, people won't be willing to admit that they know that they know them, right? They aren't sure whether or not this is, you know, our knowledge is complete in this way.

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You know, could you just be in the matrix, right? Could you be a brain in a vat? There's a lot of questions that people ask that they don't have answers to.

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Oh, maybe that's just an unfalsifiable speculation. Maybe we could be in the matrix.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Sorry. Regarding the latter, we will offer a basic understanding of how we can have any confidence apart from epistemic certainty.

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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.

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Immediate, general revelation, immediate general revelation, and special revelation. Maybe those categories are familiar to you.

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If they're not, general revelation is referring to God communicating just through nature.

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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.

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Lastly, we will note the distinctions and certainty between the redeemed and the unsaved.

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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.

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So hopefully the purpose of this is clear. Yes. Yeah. Well, yeah,

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I did intentionally avoid that. We'll get to it. But yeah, God creates us with an understanding of who he is.

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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.

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You know, ah, well, mountains are beautiful. God is therefore all powerful and beautiful himself.

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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.

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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.

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If the statement were not made with certainty, then such a lack would be an admission that certainty is indeed possible.

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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?

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That's not how this works. You can know things, otherwise you have a self -refuting position.

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However, our hope for certainty is not founded merely on the foolishness of the contrary position, but on the revelation of God.

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So, yeah, that's, and that's what I'm getting at here. There is another paper

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I wrote on basically, you know, how we can know that revelation from God is true.

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But this is getting at, if you are affirming Christian beliefs, what does the

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Bible say about whether or not we can have certainty? Because it doesn't say nothing, right?

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And it's not, well, it doesn't leave you room to say, well, it's 90 % certain, right?

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You have to be able to affirm this wholeheartedly. A Christian epistemology is a revelational epistemology.

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So there are different kinds of epistemologies, right? Different kinds of ideas of where our knowledge comes from.

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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.

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There's all kinds of, you know, different epistemologies. But the Christian epistemology, I believe, is rightly called a revelational one.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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God communicates to us through various means in order to make himself known. And making himself known, he makes known his works, his creation.

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This trust in both God's desire to communicate and his ability to communicate is what gives the

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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?

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Because not just that God is able to reveal things to you, but that he is willing to reveal things to you.

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He has declared that he desires people to know. He, both unbeliever and believer, he will hold unbelievers to account.

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Why? Because they do have knowledge of him. Right, he has an aim to reveal.

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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.

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But there are many things that God is trying, and not just trying, but succeeding in making people understand.

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As Hermann Bavink wrote, since humanity's entire wheel and woe depends on religion, only that certainty will do that is absolute and obtainable by all, even the simplest of people.

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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.

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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.

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We've been given everything that's necessary in order to make that possible so that we will be held to that standard.

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And God has given us everything, everything we need to perfectly know who he is so that we may love him completely.

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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.

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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.

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So, if you later find out that I was misrepresenting some of these terms, don't hold it against me.

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Yeah. All right, so foundational epistemologies.

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What's that? Yeah. Okay. Consider Descartes' Cogito, I think therefore

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I am. Cogito ergo sum, probably you're familiar with that phrase. I think therefore

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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.

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I think therefore I am, and from my own existence, I will build all other facts with some degree of confidence from that truth.

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Okay, it's validity depends on assuming the conclusion, the existence of I. I think therefore

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I am. You already had I in the premise, right? It's not really a valid syllogism in that way.

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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.

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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.

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Nothing else, nothing else exists. Everything else is just your own illusion, a product of your own mind.

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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

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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.

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I gotta use a pencil to keep track of where I am. Yeah, other foundations may do better, but not by much.

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If someone, James, do you have a pen I could use back there? So I keep losing my spot and it'd be easier if I were just marking where I was.

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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.

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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.

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It provides a beginning in that revelation of God is a certain standing point from which knowledge is built.

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It provides an end in that we are also given the Lord's goals in his revelation. It does not merely provide revelation by which we may or may not arrive at correct conclusions.

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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.

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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.

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He does not merely provide revelation, oh, sorry. One might imagine being given a true revelation that all pervert or repress.

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However, the Lord gives revelation with the express intent of men arriving at true knowledge of himself and his creation.

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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.

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This Christian epistemology does not just hold men up from underneath as other epistemologies attempt to do, but also pulls men up from above.

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Of course, our imperfect and fallen nature gives us opportunities to misunderstand or even repress

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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.

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Regardless of the rhetorical point he makes, it is not the case that our imperfect reason correctly applies our presuppositions.

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So, yeah, knowing things that are built on certain things, that doesn't make those things you know certain.

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You know, it makes them justified by something else that's certain. Therefore, much of our knowledge is subject to doubt.

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However, there is still reason to press forward in gaining knowledge God's intent to communicate his truth.

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Van Til writes of the Christian. Also, a lot of this is me, I end up quoting Frame and Van Til a lot.

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If you end up studying this, there are a lot of people who are considered

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Van Tilians 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.

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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.

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Recognizing the fact of evil and its noetic consequences, he does not therefore despair of true knowledge.

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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.

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Okay, who knows what noetic means? Yes. Yeah, the mind, right, yeah.

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So evil has noetic consequences, right? Because this is called the noetic effects of the fall.

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I heard once of a book that accidentally published the poetic effects of the fall as a phrase.

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That's not what this is. This is the noetic effects of the fall. It affects the mind so that we suppress

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God's truth and unrighteousness, right? It says in Romans one. He does not therefore despair of true knowledge.

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He allows for the possibility that through evil, his relation to God may have changed and therefore seeks for revelation, right?

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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.

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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.

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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.

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So that which we can't know 100%, we could still have confidence about.

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You know, it's not a one or nothing. It's not zero confidence. You know, I could be a brain of that versus 100 % confidence where I absolutely know it.

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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,

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I suppose, in which it is based on God's revelation. So to what degree is something based on God's revelation?

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That is degree to which you can be certain that you have not muddied it and come up with something else.

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All right, certainty and immediate general revelation. All right, and maybe,

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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.

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A general revelation, that revelation which God gives through creation, so I already explained that.

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That's, you know, both the sense within ourselves as well as being able to observe nature and see who

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God is, may be broken down into the categories of immediate revelation and immediate revelation.

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Immediate general revelation is given directly to the intellect without being mediated through some other objects in creation outside of oneself.

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Primarily, if not exclusively, this includes that knowledge we have of ourselves in God by virtue of being made in the image of God.

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The imago dei communicates the sensus divinitatis, the sense of the divine.

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Imago dei is the image of God. So being made in the image of God, we already have a sense of God, right?

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We know his existence just through our very being apart from, you know, analyzing the world around us and deductively making conclusions.

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God has embedded in us an understanding of himself that we would be held perfectly accountable to.

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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.

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What Romans 1 is talking about is God having revealed himself to the hearts of men.

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By God's design of us, we are aware of both God and ourselves. And if you ever read

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Calvin's Institutes, this is what he begins with. He starts off with, you know, the whole purpose of religion is to know

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God and to know yourself. You can't know God without knowing yourself in relation to him. You can't know yourself without knowing

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God in 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

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God is. But this is the interesting thing of knowledge is to know who you are.

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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

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Van Til referred to as brute facts. Okay, so a brute fact is a fact without meaning to it.

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For example, if you say Jesus raised from the dead, but it comes without the interpretation that that proves that he is

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God or all the things that that means, it's fairly meaningless, right?

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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.

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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.

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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.

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But do you really know one plus one is two if you don't know all the implications that come from math, right?

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Someone without exploring the world is able to think through that and realize, oh, okay.

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Well, that implies also that, you know, multiplication should work this way and division should work this way, et cetera, et cetera.

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And you can build, just out of addition, you can build the whole rest of, you know, very certain mathematics.

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There's different branches of mathematics where you start with different axioms, but, you know, the arithmetic that you're familiar with, you build it out of that.

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So someone knowing one plus one is two doesn't really mean that they completely know the idea of one plus one is two.

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There's more to be understood there. So all that to say that you can't know yourself in isolation to God.

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That's not really a complete knowledge. Yes. Right, yeah, and it's not necessarily,

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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.

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He has implanted in us, with the image of God, both an understanding of who we are in relation to him and him.

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That presupposition foundation is both God and self at the same level.

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I mean, I'm not saying we're equal with God, but at the same level for building our epistemology. Right. In relation to self,

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I know that I am existing in God. 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, like the

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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.

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What I was saying with God being the starting point, that was basically for pedagogical reasons, you know, for reasons of teaching,

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Calvin is asking, well, which point do we do first since we gotta talk about these one before the other? Since they're both, they're both in you, they're both intertwined, you can't, you can't divorce them, you can't separate them, but we have to talk about one first.

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The answer, he chooses his God. It's just, for him, it's a lot. It's the, yeah, it's the pedagogical starting point.

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Yeah, pedagogical meaning having to do with teaching. All right, so the second paragraph on page three.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Okay, so God has revealed himself plainly to man and man rejects that in his sin.

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However, we are still held accountable. In fact, it is because of the certainty of this revelation that we are held accountable.

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One could not be completely obligated to believe the truth if there were legitimate reasons to doubt them by the sensus divinitatis.

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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

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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

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nines of, you know, and computing a lot of times you measure things by how many nines, you know, 99 .9999.

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So let's say we've got 10 nines of certainty about this or we're 99 .9

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et cetera percent certain. If there is any reason to doubt, that is the degree to which

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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.

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Now, maybe he could hold us partially, but not perfectly, yes. I would say that we suppress the truth in unrighteousness.

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So what does that mean? Like, how do you distinguish between these two kinds of knowledge? The way

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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?

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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?

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They have like this psychological suppression. I guess in what sense do you go?

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Yeah, it is hard to define. And like the best I have is distinguishing it from what has been corrupted.

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Well, it's our willingness to say it. It's our feeling of certainty about it.

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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.

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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.

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We may say that immediate general revelation always produces epistemic certainty, though it does not always produce psychological certainty.

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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.

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Whatever level of warrant is required for epistemic certainty, it must be a level that gives us psychological confidence.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Psychological certainty is epistemic certainty. What I'm arguing here is

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Romans 1 demands something different because it really says that people know who

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God is. And we also know, and ourselves having been unbelievers at one time, we also know that experience of not believing in God.

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So if we are to affirm what scripture says and also the rest of what scripture says, and speaking at the heart of the unbeliever and his rejection of that truth, how do you hold those two together?

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Psychological and epistemic certainty do have effects on each other. However, they may also be significantly divorced.

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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.

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So all kinds of fools can feel like they know something but have no real knowledge of it.

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Okay, part four. Certainty and immediate general revelation.

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Other knowledge given through general revelation is mediated. That is, we often gain knowledge through objects and creation outside ourselves.

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For example, we learn that mountains exist, that clouds form in the sky, that wood is a decent material for building, et cetera.

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Through mediated general revelation, we also learn of God's character. So Psalm 19, one says that the heavens declare the glory of God.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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In this regard, the believer finds himself in the same seat as the unbeliever, examining the world around him with fallen senses.

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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?

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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.

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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.

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Rather, nature serves to stir that a priori knowledge that is already within us. A priori knowledge, just like I said, there is knowledge that you already have.

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You know, the spider comes out of its egg already knowing how to spin webs. It's just got that a priori knowledge.

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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.

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All we can know is what it tells us of God, and so it is that knowledge that we already have through the imago

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Dei, that senses divinitatis, that sense of the divine, being stirred up by our senses.

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And we're not actually learning anything new through creation. This is not what I'm saying.

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This is a view called scripturalism. Thus, Gordon H.

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Clark said that a man cannot know who his own wife is.

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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.

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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

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Holy Spirit, and hence interpret general revelation correctly, acknowledging God's work in creation.

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However, this does not mean that the unbeliever and the believer cannot study mathematics side by side.

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While one will understand who controls the rules of mathematics, and the other will not, both can ascertain the same theorems.

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We should therefore further distinguish between these types of general revelation. Some general revelation is suppressible, and other general revelation is insuppressible.

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God's power, morality, et cetera, would be suppressible, whereas the existence of stars, the hardness of concrete, et cetera, would be insuppressible.

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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.

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So, yeah, there are things that we can have more or less certainty of. Some of that is because of sinful repression.

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Some of that is just we're fallen. And so, still the effects of sin, but not culpable effects of sin.

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You know, we don't have perfect eyesight. We don't have perfect reasoning. And so, yeah,

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I'm kind of in the middle of handling this section talking about, well, can we really know things around us, or can we just know what they say of God?

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We can really know the things around us. We can know, for example, mathematics, and yeah, even observing things in creation around us.

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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.

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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.

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Now, I still think he's wrong, but he's kind of right on this point. Jacob didn't know who his spouse was.

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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,

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I'm sorry, I thought you were my wife. Yeah.

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Let's see. However, a more nuanced view of certainty is required in order to establish a biblical view of mediated general revelation.

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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.

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Does everybody have a paper? Anybody missing one? Okay. Clark objects it is not strictly necessary to know who's one wife is in order to avoid the command to commit adultery.

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One could be celibate. So, 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,

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I didn't realize that was someone else's property. I didn't know, you know. I didn't know she wasn't my wife.

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This is, yeah, anyway, and so Clark is trying to respond to that objection with some serious sophistry here, in my opinion.

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Well, you could be celibate and then you would not be breaking that command. This, of course, would be to disobey the command given in 1

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Corinthians 7 .3, which is that you should not deny your spouse marital relations.

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So one could argue this knowledge is strictly necessary in order to obey God's commands.

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A right understanding of the world is necessary for one to have right interactions with it. If this is the case,

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God must give us knowledge about the world around us. In other words, to be held accountable for things as the

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Bible says he does, that would require him to give us revelation by which we might be held accountable for those things.

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So once again, you can have that certain knowledge that will hold you accountable. Now, that's not to say that we know everything, certainly, but we can certainly know things.

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Furthermore, it is manifestly not the case that one can know Scripture any more easily than he can know whether a tree exists to his right or to his left.

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So this is Clark's position, right, that Scripture can be known with certainty.

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The world around us cannot be known with certainty. Special revelation does offer to correct our understanding of the world around us, but not in such a way as to bypass our same fallen senses that prevent us from correctly perceiving general revelation.

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One uses his eyes to read the Bible as much as he does to observe that grass is green. We will examine special revelation in more detail momentarily, but it should suffice here to say that there's nothing to be gained by offering such a low view of general revelation.

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So the point is that those things that you're saying are faulty when it comes to analyzing the world around us, you know, our reason, our senses.

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Those apply when reading Scripture as well. So you can't just say, oh, well, Scripture can be known certainly because those things aren't involved, those fallen senses and reasoning aren't involved.

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No, they're involved with both reading Scripture and observing the world around us. So that's not where our hope of certainty comes from.

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Having established that one can both misunderstand mediated general revelation and that one must have knowledge of the world around them in order to be held responsible for his sin, we are left with a need to articulate some view that accounts for both.

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Perhaps it may be said that though we often have first -order knowledge of the world around us, for certain classes of propositions, we cannot have second -order knowledge.

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So that's first -order meaning, you know something, second -order meaning, you know that you know it.

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In other words, we frequently do believe right propositions regarding the world, and this constitutes knowledge by virtue of the fact that God has revealed it.

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However, regarding the specifics of the created world, we may not always have certain knowledge that we indeed do know these things.

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I may know my wife's identity without having certainty that I know my wife's identity. So you will be held accountable because you do truly know these things, even if you can't make a case for the epistemic certainty of each thing.

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So there is a knowledge that you can have, even a certain knowledge that you will be held perfectly accountable without knowing whether or not you have that certain knowledge.

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Hopefully that makes sense. Some knowledge of the world needs no justification.

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If a statement is broad and universal enough, we can know it with certainty. For example, I can know for certain that there is a world around me.

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However, as we descend into specifics, at some level certainty cannot be obtained. For example,

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I cannot know my age for certain since knowledge of this relies on the fallible testimony of my parents. However, at this point, we may begin to speak of such knowledge apart from certain knowledge, justified knowledge.

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This knowledge is not merely justified subjectively based on one's psychological confidence in the matter. Rather, it is justified objectively, proposition

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P being justified to the degree that one has demonstrated proposition P to be congruent with the set of all facts.

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On one hand, we may call this justification a grounded empiricism. So I explained earlier what empiricism is, right?

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Empiricism is observing the world around you and knowing things that way. And so what

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I'm saying is there's a Christian way of thinking about things empirically, even though I wouldn't,

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I would call our knowledge revelational rather than empirical, but. Unlike standard empiricism, which offers an arbitrary starting point for knowledge, we begin with the assumption of God's revelation that the world is orderly, and from there may gather empirical evidence to justify belief in P.

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On the other hand, to draw connections to another branch of epistemology, we may call this a grounded coherence theory of knowledge.

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So coherence theory is, well, something is, you can know something in as much as it coheres with all other things.

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Unlike a standard coherence theory of knowledge, which also begins arbitrarily, we recognize the one who provides a basis for believing that facts cohere and do not contradict.

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From there, we may seek to categorize the facts that testify to P or against P. So these different epistemologies, what

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I'm saying is if you recast them in light of the fact that God exists and desires to reveal things to man, and then, you know, what

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I'm doing is throwing the word grounded on them because they have God as a foundation as opposed to just sitting out there arbitrarily, then you can reframe these things in such a way that they're actually quite reasonable ways of thinking about the knowledge that we have.

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It's just, if you have these epistemologies, if you have these ways of knowing things without a foundation of God who created the world, they don't get you very far in the end because they end up being ungrounded.

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They're only true if we can assume that they're true. Regarding our concept of grounded empiricism, it may seem problematic to determine the justification for belief

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P by other beliefs that are not certain, but only justified as being reasonable.

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If we have built a pyramid of facts, one mistake could cause the entire structure to collapse.

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You know, so many of your beliefs are based on other beliefs and assuming that those are true. And, you know, if that's the case, and, you know, if anything at the bottom is not true, it kind of, the whole thing kind of collapses, which is what the power behind those questions, like what if we're all in the matrix, that kind of thing, because that's pulling out the bottom levels of the pyramid and then the whole thing collapses.

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If we have built, each stone relies on all the stones beneath it. However, at the foundation are certain truths.

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Furthermore, as previously expressed, one of these certain truths is that we will generally be able to understand the world around us.

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So this is saying, okay, well, if you have this grounded empiricism, then it is, yeah, that foundation level would be that God exists, his, it's

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Christian theism is that grounded level. One of the certain truths is that we will generally be able to understand the world around us, though a majority of the population may suppress what it indicates about its creator.

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Since God desires us to know the world around us, not only do we have a solid foundation, but this goal of revelation is a tether from heaven that holds our pyramid upward by the pinnacle stone.

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So it's not just, okay, well, we have a foundation, so at least some of the pyramid will be there if you pull facts out.

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It is that, just as I said in the opening, that we are given not just a foundation for having true beliefs, for certain beliefs, but God has also expressed his goal in revealing things, which makes us, yeah, which confirms that we can indeed even know those facts that are based on many other things because God desires that we know them.

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These things regarding who we are, who he is, the world around us in a way that we'd be able to interact with it and be held accountable for our sins, et cetera.

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Regarding our concept of a grounded coherence theory of knowledge, it may also seem problematic to compare one fact to all facts.

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Mere mortals do not know all facts, so one cannot undertake such a task. However, so yeah, if something is true to the degree to which it coheres with everything else, all other facts in the universe, well, how could you handle all the facts in the universe?

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Your mind is not infinite. Of what use is that since the amount of facts you will be able to compare your other fact to will always, always be just vastly, vastly greater?

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Well, the answer is mere mortals do not know all facts, so one cannot undertake such a task. However, God has made universal statements regarding his creation in the

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Bible. From such, we are given limits on all possible facts. For example, when a philosophy teacher offers the famous syllogism regarding Socrates' mortality, he's expected to point out the potential flaw in the premise.

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Okay, so Socrates' mortality, anybody know that syllogism? Bob, you wanna tell us?

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All men are mortal? Yeah, all men are mortal.

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Yeah, all men are mortal. Socrates is a man, therefore, Socrates is mortal.

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So the flaw with the syllogism is that we do not know for certain that all men are mortal, right?

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That's one of the, the syllogism is valid, but the premise, you know, is questionable.

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Do we know that all men are mortal? You'd have to go around and, you know, wait for every last person to die before you would know.

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Not every person has died yet. However, the Christian can conduct the syllogism using the divinely revealed fact that all men are indeed mortal, something a

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Greek philosopher could never truly be certain of. He need not scour the universe to find every instance of man and see whether or not he is mortal.

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He is given the universal statement that all are mortal. Hebrews 9 .27 is a point for each man.

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Once to die and then comes judgment, right? How much time do we have to work with here?

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We do not have enough time to go on to the next section. This would be a good time for questions, and I think there's enough that we could do, maybe a whole nother session on this if we wanted, but I know this was a little denser than we usually do in here, but any questions, any thoughts?

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And just for those who came in late, this was a paper I wrote in seminary, and I thought it would be relevant given the debate we had a few weeks ago where the one guy said that he was 90 % certain that Jesus existed.

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Can Christians have more certainty than that? Yes, yes, we can. One, certainty is possible, and two, the

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Christian faith says that certain things are certain, and it holds us accountable to believe them completely and not 90%.

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So if we were to say that we can't be certain, we would be denying the Christian faith.

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You got a question? Marianne?

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I will give you a not super well thought out answer then. Right, right, yeah.

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Because any, you know, most fundamental points of doctrine do not rely on a single passage, so it's thinkable that you could be wrong about even some of the, some things that, some passages that even talk about those doctrines, because, you know, you remove one of them, and there's a lot of verses where people say, oh, this proves the deity of Christ and may not have anything to do with it, and so they have a wrong interpretation even though they're coming to the right conclusion.

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So yeah, how could you say, well, because Scripture gives us the purpose of revelation, right?

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That's the thing with the tether, is I'm not saying that, you know, our interpretation of each

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Scripture is going to be certain. There's nothing in Scripture that would tell us that, you know, even if we didn't have

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Hebrews 9 .27, that man is mortal. So, yeah, basically, yeah, it comes back to the idea of the tether, that God has given us not just a foundation for certainty to be possible, but for it to be present, actually present, because he's revealed to us the goal that we know his word, right?

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He wants his people to know his word, is what he's revealed to us. If we reject the fact that he wants us to know his word, we've basically rejected the

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Christian faith and we've landed in a place of complete unbelief. So the Christian position requires that God's word is knowable, not in the sense that we are guaranteed to have interpreted every passage correctly, but that we are able to have confidence that he will reveal to us those cardinal points of doctrine.

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Yeah, and we'll, one of the later sections in here is about, you know, what does this mean about our ability to interpret

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Scripture? And, yeah, and even the question of, well, are

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Christians better interpreters of Scripture than unbelievers? You know, it's not necessarily the right way of thinking about, there's a lot of,

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I mean, there's a lot of passages where, you know, I look at secular folks who read the

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Bible and interpret it rightly and then don't believe it at all, that, you know, the interpretation ends up being a lot clearer than some

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Christian interpretations of it, so it's not really that straightforward, but, yeah. Yes?

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All right. All appeals to an ultimate authority are necessarily circular, right?

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If you, yeah, if you make an appeal for an ultimate authority on something that's not that same ultimate authority, it wasn't really ultimate, was it?

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So it's kind of necessary, if God is our ultimate authority, that our appeals be to Him and to His revelation.

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So there's no way around that. Same with the unbeliever, the things that they believe. Like, there's the problem of induction, right?

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The problem of induction is, okay, if you have the scientific method, if you have a, you design, you have a hypothesis, you design an experiment, you run the experiment a bunch of times, if it works out, you can have more confidence about the hypothesis.

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How do you know the scientific method works? Oh, well, it worked a lot of times in the past when I hypothesized it would work and I tried it out, et cetera, et cetera, right?

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And then you're justifying science by what? By science. How do you know science works? Well, because science says it works.

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There's no way around these things. Once you have something as your ultimate authority, yeah, it is necessary to make a circular appeal.

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Now, the way around that, in part, is by demonstrating what

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Van Til calls the impossibility of the contrary, right? So if you, you can't positively demonstrate an ultimate authority on the basis of other things, otherwise it's not an ultimate authority.

01:00:09

What you can do is you can show, well, if this isn't true, then nothing makes any sense.

01:00:15

So therefore, this thing that says it's true must be true. God declaring this truth to us must be true.

01:00:23

So for example, if there isn't a God, then, yeah, logic would cease to exist, right?

01:00:31

If naturalism were true, naturalism being that there's, or just materialism, that there's only matter and energy and nothing else, well, then logic wouldn't be real and we're using logic to talk.

01:00:44

So you can show the impossibility of the contrary and that leaves you with only the original thesis.

01:00:53

Okay, yes? I guess back to that.

01:01:36

Right. Because they're operating on those foundations.

01:01:49

Right, yeah, there's a, that's an interesting way of putting it. Yeah, there's this notion of a virtuous ad hominem.

01:01:58

So an ad hominem argument, you point at the person, right? You say, you know, if Fawn and I are arguing about ice cream and I say, you know, why would you listen to this guy?

01:02:08

You know, I heard he, I don't know, and I make up something, right? And so like I'm pointing out something that has nothing to do about, you know, his favorite flavor of ice cream.

01:02:17

It's just, yeah, it's just something to get people to not like the guy. There's a virtuous ad hominem which basically says you are operating entirely inconsistent with the position that you're holding.

01:02:28

You say that there's no, you know, this guy up here saying that there's no purpose in life and yet he took time out of his week to come talk to us as though this was something important and meaningful.

01:02:41

It's, he obviously doesn't believe what he claims to believe, right? Like just like Miriam is saying, there's a psychological sense in which he believes that everything is purposeless, but the way he's acting, all everything he's basing his entire life on, it's obvious he has that foundation under there where he does believe there's a purpose in life.

01:02:59

He is aware of his creator. Yeah, also

01:03:04

I'd say for those who are new to the world new to this kind of thing, yeah,

01:03:10

I don't know which starting points to really recommend, but I do want to be transparent and disclose like what camps exist.

01:03:20

This is what's known as Vantillianism, you know, Vantill or presuppositionalism, although presuppositionalism falls into different camps, but there's a lot more debate around this right now, especially in Reformed Baptist circles.

01:03:36

A lot of Reformed Baptist circles are kind of opposed to Vantill. I still think he's pretty awesome, so anyway.

01:03:44

All right, yeah, if you, gosh, something I would recommend. Here's something I would recommend if you end up getting into that debate.

01:03:51

The debate between Bonson and Sproul, look up the

01:03:58

Bonson -Sproul debate, because they debated whether or not presuppositionalism was correct.

01:04:04

You know, Vantill's view of knowledge and apologetics. And I think it's very clear, and Sproul is kind of like the hero of the other side of this.

01:04:15

I think it's pretty clear that Sproul's great guy, his is he didn't really understand a lot of what was being said and a lot of the main points.

01:04:22

So anyway, that's a, and I think that's fairly representative of the two sides a lot of times, right?

01:04:35

Yeah, so his view is known as classical apologetics, where you are, so the two steps in classical apologetics are you make philosophical arguments for the existence of God, and then like the

01:04:46

Aquinas's five ways, you know, the unmoved mover, that kind of thing. And then once you convince someone that God exists, you show them that the

01:04:54

Christian God is the true God. Yeah, and the Vantillian two steps is you show them that their belief is false because it's inconsistent with reality, and then you show that the

01:05:10

Christian belief is consistent, and therefore true because the impossibility of the contrary.

01:05:16

Anyway, all right, let's pray. Dear only Father, thank you for your word revealed to us.

01:05:25

Thank you for the knowledge that you've given us, both through creation and through scripture. We ask that you would just give us a great certainty about these matters, that we would not waver with doubt, but that we would be able to move forward with a great confidence in both what you have revealed to be true of our present and past, but even of our future.