Epistemology

Epistemological Man

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Epistemology

Genre: Lecture

Lesson: 5 of 10

Track: 04

Dictation Name: RR101C5

Date: 1960s-1970s

[Rushdoony] Let us begin with prayer. Our Lord and our God, indeed Thy word is truth. And we thank Thee that we walk, not in darkness, but in Thy light. We thank Thee our Father that by Thy grace we have been redeemed from the darkness of sin and brought into the glorious light of Thy gospel. Grant, our Father, that we always in Thy power and in Thy spirit. Shed abroad the light of the gospel of Jesus Christ, and bring to a dark world the glory and the radiance of our King Jesus, in His name we pray, Amen.

Our subject today is epistemological man. We have touched on the temptation of Eve in the garden, and it is important for us to turn to that again, because it is central to epistemology. The tempter offered to mankind in the Garden of Eden a new epistemology, a way of knowing divorced from God. So that as he approached Eve, he first of all denied the truth of God’s Word. Yea, hath God said? And in every false epistemology, the Word of God is either openly denied, or is bypassed for a way man feels is better. The way that man feels better may have some high sounding and semi-Christian terms, but it is man’s way if it does not begin with the Word of God.

It is a significant fact that the Church tradition in which there has been in this century the keenest and the most intense struggle between modernism and orthodoxy has been in the Presbyterian tradition. Now this is not my assessment of it, but the assessment of various Church historians; Church historians who are not orthodox. Why, in the Presbyterian tradition, has this been true? Their attitude is, of course, a highly critical one, but basically it boils down to this; it’s the Westminster Confession. It begins, unlike any other confession, with a chapter on Scripture. It affirms that God has spoken, that His Word is truth, and that our knowledge begins with that presupposition. But the tempter denied the truth of God’s Word, yea hath God said? He implied that truth was something divorced from God. He gave it a separate existence, as something that both God and man might equally know. So that, in the picture that Satan offered to the world, truth was out here, God and man were over here separate from the truth, both able to learn the truth, to speak the truth, or perhaps to be wrong as they made a statement. So that, instead of truth being an aspect of God’s being, being truth, truth being what God says, truth is separate. And of course, Platonism is very much like this, this is the essence of Platonism, but it’s not Platonism exclusively. Scripture, however, declares Thy Word is truth; John 17:17. In Psalm 119:142, Thy Law is truth. When Nebuchadnezzar became converted, he declared that God is Lord and all His works are truth. God’s Word, God’s Law, God’s works are truth, Scripture declares. By separating God from truth, the tempter made God irrelevant to epistemology. So that if you’re going to develop a system of epistemology, the tempter said, if you want to have knowledge, it isn’t necessary to have God.

Let’s put it on this basis, if you want to know truth, you don’t need me. After all, I have no vital connection with truth. I may speak the truth, on the other hand, I may speak something that is highly inaccurate. There’s no infallibility, there’s no inherent authority about anything I might say. So if you’re going to work out a system of epistemology, you definitely do not need R.J. Rushdoony. I have no inherent connection with the truth. Now, in terms of the tempter’s premise here, you could say God is fine, He stands for a great many wonderful things in the universe, or tries to, but if we’re interested in truth, why, we might as well go directly to truth, we don’t need a middle man. We’re concerned with the truth. Because God Himself has to work to discover the truth. God Himself has an epistemological problem. How will He know the truth? Now, in essence, this is the type of thing men do when they separate various things from God and use them to judge God. You see, here truth can be used to judge God. Or they can say, well God doesn’t love men if He sends them to hell. But how can you say that when God is love, and God is justice. And they say a just God wouldn’t do this or that, or a merciful God would not do this and that. So they divorce these things and make them into various Platonic forms or ideas or laws which are over God and men alike, supposedly. But since love or justice or mercy are what I say they are, ultimately what it means is that I am over God. Because I say thus, and so constitutes love, and God doesn’t meet my standards of being a loving God or a just God or a merciful God, and therefore I say that I have found Him wanting, wanting in terms of the scales of my mind, my justice.

Now the second thing, as we saw previously when we were discussing again this passage, the tempter denied the eternal decree of God. All things are not under the control of a predestinating God, ye shall not surely die. It’s not a certainty, possibility, but not a certainty. Just as if one of you were angry with me, and I had threatened that if anyone did thus and so I would kill them, and you defied me, there might be a chance I might get away with it and kill you, but then there’s no certainty you see. So, the tempter said, God is pretty big, He’s the big bully of the universe, He can push you around, but it’s not a sure thing. And He may do it to you and to your children and to your children’s children, but one of these days we’ll get the better of Him. Give us enough time, let us evolve far enough, let’s overcome death through our science, and we’ve got Him licked. Behavioral engineering, the attempt to break the genetic code and so on. These and many other areas of science are aimed precisely at that, that man may not die, and man can say that God has been beaten at His game. He shall not surely die.

Then third, since knowing good and evil is separated from God, and man now can determine for himself what constitutes good and evil, man’s word is as valid as God’s Word. Man’s word is as valid as God’s Word. Now this is the meaning of a temptation and of original sin, the temptation in the garden of Eden was epistemological, know for yourself, you do not need God’s Word. Because of the temptation, man has opposed his word to God’s Word, and his law to God’s law. Man now refuses to submit to anyone save himself or to no reality except in terms of his own fiat reason. But, some say, Montgomery for example, if we can only convince man of the facts of the resurrection, they will have to be Christians. If they only know this fact and that fact, this is their hang-up, this is their problem, now let’s work with them on this, and then we will win them. But, can we convince men by facts, can we save them by knowledge? Dr. Van Til comments on the matter very tellingly in a little pamphlet which I commend to you, and you will find a help in the writing you are going to do. I am sure it is at your bookstore and I am certain that it’s not there, it will be in the library. Paul at Athens; Paul face to face with the philosophers of Greece, and having an opportunity to speak to them. When Paul preached concerning the resurrection, the philosophers of Athens heard about Paul’s preaching and so they were very definitely interested. Quite a remarkable thing, there’s somebody in town that says that a man has actually risen from the dead. We all can hear about it. Why were they interested? Van Til says and I quote, “They believed in ‘the mysterious universe’, they were perfectly willing therefore to leave open a place for ‘the unknown’. But this ‘unknown’ must be thought of as the utterly unknowable and indeterminate.” Unquote. They believed in brute factuality. They believed that the world was made up of meaningless, senseless facts, out of which anything could emerge. As a result, the Greeks, like Aristotle, were very, very curious about any new report. Their science has an overwhelming interest in {?}. That seems surprising at first glance. Let’s think of it a while, they were evolutionary in their perspective. If they believed in anything, it was the universe was a product of chance, and out of that chaos various things had happened. Now since it was a product of chance, if a freak occurred you might say oh ho, this may be the next development in the world. Was somebody born with six fingers or six toes? Maybe man or mankind is going to move in this direction. Or was there a two headed cat born? Very interesting, we’ve got to investigate this, perhaps this is the next kind of thing that is going to happen, since everything happens by chance, maybe this is a tangent now that creation is going to take. And so they were believers in open possibilities, in chance, no law, no order, just freak events which might indicate that the universe is going to go off on a tangent like this.

Now as Van Til analyses the attitudes of the hearers of Saint Paul in terms of what we know from their own writings. He says, and I quote, “They were a bit suspicious, shall we say, because of what they had heard Paul say about Jesus and the resurrection in the market place. But he is no common revivalist; so let us hear him out. Let us take him away from the rabble and ask him to make clear to us what he means by Jesus and the resurrection. Maybe there are such things as resurrections. Aristotle has told us about monstrosities has he not? Reality seems to have a measure of the accidental in it. And if anywhere, history is the realm where the accidental appears. So maybe he has something strange to tell us. We have an auditorium in which there is some vacant space.” Unquote. In other words, they saw history, time, as the area of potentiality and possibility. And so, they said, let us see what the new possibility is. It’ll be very interesting, that this is going to be the next freak development of nature, and after we die, we pop up again. If this really happened, this is the way nature is going, we as the philosophers of Greece should be the persons to investigate it. But, Saint Paul, as he spoke to the philosophers of Athens, said that the resurrection of Jesus Christ, in the context of sovereign decree of God, and the inescapable fact of God’s judgment on sin, he spoke of Jesus Christ as one who was to come as the judge of men, and the reaction then was either to mock Paul, or to brush him off. We will hear thee again on this matter. Saint Paul had challenged their concept of the unknown god, of the unknown potentiality in time and nature, of the unlimited possibilities that could pop up accidently. He had challenged their entire philosophy by asserting the sovereignty of the revealed God of Scripture. He had, in effect, declared as Van Til points out, and I quote, “What is the relation between the gods you say you know and the god or gods you say you do not know? Is it not the same reality, the same universe of which in one breath you say that it is wholly unknown and also that it is wholly known? If there is that in the universe which, on your system, is wholly unknown, and if this which is wholly unknown has an influence for good and evil on that which you say you know, do you then really know anything at all? Why not destroy all the altars to the gods you say cannot be known? On your basis it is impossible to know anything unless you know everything, and since by admission you do not know everything you should admit that the whole of your religious activity is an irrational procedure. And what is true of your religion is true of your science. You do not know what water, earth, air and fire are. You appeal to some common principle above them all from which as a common source they spring. But then this common source has, as Anaximander said, no positive quality at all. It must be without quality to be truly beyond and thus truly common, and when truly beyond and therefore without quality, it cannot serve as the explanation of anything that has quality in the world that you claim to know. Your worship is therefore one of ignorance, of ignorance far deeper than you are willing and able on your assumptions to own. On your basis there is no knowledge at all; there is nothing but ignorance. But worse than that, your ignorance is not only much deeper than your own; it is of a wholly different character than you think it is. It is ethical, not metaphysical in character. You are making excuse for your ignorance on the ground that you are finite and that the world is infinite. And you make an altar to a god whom you speak of as un- known. Well, God the true God, is not unknown to man at all. He is not unknown to you.” Unquote.

This is the impact philosophically of what Saint Paul said, and it’s no wonder the philosophers of Athens turned away. He had denied everything that they held. They could not answer him, they walked away from him. Saint Paul had preached the judgment and the resurrection, in the context of God and His plan. Now autonomous man knows the impasse his epistemology leads him into. But he prefers to continue in his sin, to be his own god, even if it means being an idiot god, rather than being a learned man under the true God. And that is the choice. We have seen as we have been analyzing epistemology, that man is left in such a fearful bind by epistemology, he really knows nothing. But he prefers to be an idiot god, than to be a learned man under God. He clings to his epistemology for religious reasons, he wants the religion of man rather than the religion of the true God. The tempter, as we saw, separated truth and the knowledge of reality from God. It proves that knowledge exists in a world of brute factuality, then only exhaustive knowledge can manifest them. But exhaustive knowledge is impossible of brute facts, they are meaningless, they are irrational, they cannot be classified, they are totally pointless. It would be tantamount to my taking unlimited type, tossing it into the air, and having the type setter set it in jumbled fashion, and insist upon me reading and translating to me what it says. You would have to say but it makes no sense, it’s as nothing, you can’t pronounce it, how could I interpret it? When you take God out of the world and say it’s a world of brute factuality, that it has no law, no rhyme, no reason to it, and no fact is related to any other fact on principle, it’s like playing this game with type. Now, as I said before, it is done intellectually, not scientifically, it is done so that when you think intellectually, they can say but you cannot prove God. But of course you don’t prove God, we assume God as the basis of all proof. We’ll return to that again on another day.

Because there’s no evidence for God out there, there’s no {?} either, no {?}, there’s nothing. Instead of the {?} of God, Thy Word is truth, the modern man says we must declare man thy word is truth, man’s word is truth. Man’s fiat word is true, and knowledge, and man is the new ultimate. Anything on any other premise is untenable, it is not scientific. For example, I was talking with a major in science in a university, who was making some very bold and far-reaching statements about evolution, and I said well that’s strange, and I listed several men, men of science, men with doctorates in the sciences, with high standing, who have important research to their credit, and I cited this one man who is a geneticist with eleven degree, eleven international prizes in genetics, what was the response of this student? “Oh, he’s not a scientist.” Oh, why isn’t he a scientist? “Well, none of them are scientists.” Why? “Because they believe in creationism.” You see, by definition they are not scientists if they do not begin with man is ultimate. And I said, is that a scientific statement? Is it not a religious statement? Your faith says that by definition, you who don’t have a degree in science, you don’t have your BS yet, are a scientist, and you can rule out men of science because they don’t hold to your faith. But this is precisely what we do face, you see. It rests on a religious premise. Because man has made himself the ultimate point of reference, he has excluded God specifically, it has meant far reaching implications for his epistemology. And as Van Til has pointed out, and I quote, “For the question of knowledge this implied the rejection of God as able to identify himself in terms of himself and with it the rejection of God as the source of truth for man. Instead of seeking an analogical system of knowledge, man after this sought an original system of knowledge. (And in an analogical system of knowledge, you think God’s thoughts after Him. In an original system of knowledge, truth is what you say it is. So that just as God said, let there be, and there was, and God’s Word is truth, when man denies an analogical system of knowledge for an original system of knowledge, he says my word is truth; what I say is so. To continue with Van Til) And this meant that God was reduced with him, with man, to the necessity of seeking truth in an ultimately mysterious environment. In other words, it implied that in setting up himself as independent, man was declaring that there was no one above him on whom he was dependent. But man even then knew he was not ultimate. He knew that he had no control of reality and its possibilities, so what his declaration of independence amounted to was an attempt to bring God down with himself into an ocean of the irrational. This effect on knowledge, it may be indicated in passing, is equivalent to the effect of bringing God down into the realm of abstract possibility in the field of being. Abstract possibility and metaphysics and ultimate mystery in epistemology are involved in one another. To this must be added that in ethics this involves the denial of God's right to issue any commandment for man.” Unquote.

As Van Til goes on to say man and God now are together afloat on a vast ocean of chance; a vast ocean of chance which is meaningless, shore less, and bottomless. There’s no place to go, nothing to do, and no meaning. This is what their philosophy leads to. Neither God or man can know anything that they are, and this perspective they have no essence. Men prefer this condition to God’s world. The reason for this is not ignorance but sin. Man knows the truth of God, but suppresses the truth in unrighteousness. Now man, as I indicated, does not get a pretty picture in modern thought, since Darwin, and we dealt with Freud’s analysis of man. A couple of writers of late have given perhaps an even sorrier picture of man. Robert Ardrey, a very stimulating and interesting writer and evolutionist, has depicted man not only as an animal, but as a beast of prey. So he says that the idea that man can have peace or love or brotherhood is nonsense. Man is a beast of prey, and a beast of prey kills, and he’s out to kill. But after you’ve read Ardrey, his picture of man is very, very flattering compared to a book that has just come out, by Colin Turnbull, entitled The Mountain People, The Mountain People. When you get through reading about the tribe that Turnbull deals with, you will have to say that the Calvinist position about total depravity is a very mild statement about man. So, the evolutionists are winding up with a very nasty picture of man. A very grim one, but they will not still see man as sinner. Man is seen in his light only, and as a result, seen in his own light, he is seen as an animal, yes, but still the only god the universe has. A beast, more depraved than anything Calvin was ever supposed to have said about man, yes, but still god. It’s an ugly picture, that the only god they will permit is themselves. The basic reality for modern man is himself. In fact, the only reality for modern man is himself.

Arthur Schopenhauer, who was the forerunner of Friedrich Nietzsche, is a very interesting philosopher in terms of epistemology, and a very important one. Arthur Schopenhauer, his dates are 1788 to 1860, gives you an idea of his period. He spend his life, incidentally, hating life, hating people, hating women especially let me add, finding life to be undiluted misery, he was the perfect house-guest, in other words. He is never known to have done anything except to complain. But in the famous first passage of his book, The World as Will and Idea, 1890, he made the logical conclusion, I quote, “The world is my idea. This is a truth which holds good for everything, everything that lives and knows. Although, man alone can bring it into a reflective and abstract consciousness. If he really does this, he has attained to philosophical wisdom. It then becomes clear and certain to him what he knows is not a sun and an earth, but only an I that sees the sun, a hand that feels an earth, that the world which surrounds him is there only as an idea, that is, only in relation to something else, the consciousness which is himself. If any truth can be asserted a priori, it is this, for it is the expression of the most general form of all possible and thinkable experience. A form which is more general than time or space or causality, for they all presuppose it. And each of these is valid only for a particular class of ideas, for as the antithesis of object and subject is the common form of all these classes, is that form under which alone any idea, whatever kind it may be; abstract or intuitive, pure or empirical, is possible and thinkable. No truth therefore, is more certain, more independent of all others, and less in need of proof than this; that all that exists for knowledge, and therefore the whole world, is only object in relation to subject, perception of a perceiver, in a word; idea. This is obviously true of the past and the future as well as of the present; as of what is farthest off as of what is near. For it is true of time and space and cells in which alone these distinctions arise. All that in any way belongs, or can belong to the world is inevitably thus conditioned through the subject and exists only for the subject. The world is idea.” Unquote.

Now Schopenhauer followed through on epistemology ruthlessly to the conclusion that Asia had come long before and had stagnated as a result. Civilization reached a peak in China and India far, far before the peoples of Europe were anything but savages. The peoples of Europe had represented people who had pushed out from the civilization of the Middle East, had deteriorated, had gone downhill, had become naked savages, painting themselves blue, for example, in England, and running around naked. And Asia had had high civilization and then stagnated, never made any progress. Why? Because epistemologically, it had come to the same place where our modern philosophers have taken us. And they said, the world is illusion. All is illusion. And the best and greatest goal for man is to die, to attain Nirvana; eternal death. So, Schopenhauer reduced the world to illusion, to an objectification of the will insofar as reason is concerned. Is there a thing in itself, Kant had said, there is something out there. Schopenhauer said indeed there is a thing in itself, it is my will, I am the only reality in the universe. The thing itself is will, and reason is secondary to will. Will is the only reality, and differences are only illusions. Thus, Schopenhauer ended up in a pantheism of man. In other pantheisms, God is everything, in this new pantheism, man is everything, and everything is illusion. This is the way he stated it. I quote, “In this world of phenomena, true loss is just as little possible as true gain. The will alone is, it is the thing in itself and the source of all these phenomena. It’s self-knowledge and it’s assertion or denial, which is then decided upon, is the only event in itself.” Unquote.

Now this certainly leaves us with nothing, except man. Everything is illusion and man is really illusion waiting for the bubble to be pricked and to burst. Is it any wonder that you’ve had in the last century or so, so much insanity among philosophers? It’s been a real occupational hazard. And this is true, the man who by some is regarded as the great philosopher {?} to whom I referred to the other day, Wittgenstein, two of his brothers either committed suicide or ended up in an institution, and Wittgenstein a time or two said he belonged there too. I think he did. And when you read the lives of some of them it is really staggering when you realize their twisted, warped perspective. They reduced the world to themselves deliberately, rather than acknowledge the true God. And our literature has reflected it, it is no wonder that the poet who in this century perhaps has had as wide an influence as any, T.S. Elliot, in the early 20’s, in his best known poem spoke of the modern world as the “waste land”, the waste land. In another poem, he speaks of the men of his generation, “we are the hollow men”. Nothing but scarecrows, dummies, hollow men, all is meaningless. Modern art reflects it. The modern student in his emptiness reflects it. It’s not surprising that the Krishna cult is so popular among many of our college youth, and Zen Buddhism. Because the essence of both of those cults is to say nothingness is ultimate. This is the truth; all things are nothing, nothing. The world will, like Asia which stagnated for two thousand years until the light of the Gospel began to penetrate, will also stagnate, unless the challenge of the Gospel, the intellectual challenge of the Gospel, confronting epistemological man with truth out here, that God is truth. Thy Word is truth, Thy law is truth, all Thy works are truth. That no knowledge is apart, possible apart from God. Only as we challenge men on their own ground and as we give men a sound epistemology and we build for the future, we’re going to conquer because we have knowledge through the Word of God, we have salvation, we have truth, we have the sure foundation. We have time for a few questions. Yes?

[Audience member] {?} Do we on our own thinking seek these out?

[Rushdoony] A good practical question, and I think a very important one. Now, I think one of the worst things we can do is witness foolishly, pointlessly, where it isn’t wanted. I’ve known people who feel that they are doing a great work for the Lord that way, and they’re only making the name of the Lord ridiculous. Once in Houston I got onto a bus from the airport to the Shamrock Hilton or Shamrock or something, I don’t know, you know, the big hotel there. And there was this young man who got aboard and it was some time in the fall, and the other men, there were I think eight others in the bus, were talking about football, about the game that was on that afternoon, and have you heard the score and so one. This young fellow started to witness to all of them, and wanted them to accept Christ as their Lord and Savior, and was very insistent and interrupted all their conversation, so to get rid of him they all said yes, they accepted Christ as their Lord and Savior and took a tract he handed out to each of them, and when we got to the hotel the young fellow got out first, and when he got out and went to the back to get his baggage, the others who were still in looked at each other and shook their heads and said weesh, what a kook. And that was the reaction he left. But I was in the lobby the next day and I heard him talking to somebody, saying it’s so easy to win souls for Christ, I won eight of them yesterday in the bus. Now, you see, this kind of witnessing is really wicked. Now where are you going to witness? First of all, you can begin where you are. You’re in a church, you’re a pastor, that’s what you’re preparing yourself for. You could begin to have a systematic program of Christian education for old and young, you can see if there’s a need, and I believe there’s an urgent need. Start a Christian school. You can reach out, in one program after another, to education the people in the community, and educate yourself in the process. See to it that you study and you grow, and you have the answers, and then you will have them coming to you for the answers. I don’t have to go out after anybody, they’re coming to me, they’re calling to me from different parts of the country, and I pick and choose where I am going to go now. Why? Because I’m not going after people, but I’ve gone after the answers, and when people feel that you can say something, then they’re ready to hear, not before, but they are hungry. But you develop it, and this is going to mean study, systematic study. And you’re going to find that the Lord will bless you then. There’s a famous episode in which, this is to the credit of John Wesley, it’s one of the few good stories about Wesley that I’m ready to tell. I’m not partial to Wesley, but perhaps I should get over that, we’re going to both be in heaven together no doubt, but probably in different neighborhoods.

[Audience laughter]

[Rushdoony] At any rate, one brother came up to him once and told him how much the Lord had done to win people to Christ through him, and he didn’t need John Wesley’s book-learning, he was a soul winner without any books and so on and so forth. And when he was through, Wesley told him, well praise God that through His wonder working power and grace, He can use even your ignorance. But the Lord has used even my learning. You see, I think there’s a good point there. Any other questions? Yes?

[Audience member] I’d like to ask before {?}. Among many of the {?} I have tried to discuss the presuppositional approach with him, and his complaint with students, professors and so on is that well, you just can’t understand Dr. Van Til anyway. He’s so obscure, academically it needs a lot of other works. I don’t know, I think he’s trying to escape the problem but why is this {?}.

[Rushdoony] Yes, I once in California, when I was still in the pastorate, this was in the mid 50’s or early 50’s, and Dr. Van Til in those days used to spend his summers in California, had him speak at the church, and I worked on all the ministers of the community to get him out. And they came out, I twisted their arm, and I did get them out. I had quite a few laymen out and youth. And when it was over, the thing that amused me was the laymen and women and high school kids and college kids thought he was just wonderful, just wonderful, and he explained so much to them and they understood it all, and the ministers went out and said, well that’s too intellectual for me.

[Audience laughter]

[Rushdoony] And I decided it was just too intellectual for the clergy. Now, this is something I’ve talked to some of you about before, and it is true. The average minister does not study when he leaves the ministry. The only books he ever reads are books of sermons and devotional books that don’t say much, and he gets a little more stupid each year. And his thinking becomes more and more superficial. And in fact I have had ministers tell me that if they change their churches every five years because they’ve run out of their sermons and they’re not going to develop any new ones, they develop a set of them when they got out of seminary on the basis of what their seminary professors said, they’re their sermon notes derived from class teaching. And they change every few years and keep repeating the sermons. It’s no wonder that rust or dry rot or something begins to set into their mind and they cannot understand, they’re telling the truth I’m afraid, that’s the sad fact. Well, our time really is up, why don’t you come up and ask?

[End of tape]