“For from him and to him and through him are all thing. To him be glory forever. Amen.” Romans 11:36
If the triune God of Scripture doesn’t exist we can’t make sense of anything. That’s the most powerful evidence for God right there. For literally any fact whatsoever to be a fact it must be a fact within the framework of God’s word. The alternatives are chaos and meaningless. If He isn’t the ultimate truth and authority there simply can’t be derivative truths or authorities. How can a lesser authority exist without a greater one? How can moral order exist in a universe that’s ultimately impersonal?
Being finite beings, and dependent upon God for the proper definition of the facts of reality, when we reject His identification of facts we play a game of brute factuality. As Cornelius Van Til would have described it, sinful man slices and dices the facts of life so that they’re like different foods on a plate – or even different courses. The modern mind looks at knowledge without an integrative principle because one simply can’t integrate without Christ.
All knowledge, according to Christian philosophy, is revelatory of God because all things were created by God and have their place in God’s redemptive/historical plan. In other words, for anything to be a fact at all it must derive its “factness” – that is, be interpreted – by God’s word. A fact that doesn’t need to be interpreted would, in essence, be God.
Modern education, rejecting the Bible as the basis for knowledge, makes sure that students can’t think in anything resembling philosophical consistency because now, by default, all facts are uninterpreted. This is what we mean when we say that we’re in an era of brute facts. To ask people of their theory of knowledge, the nature of truth, the source of ethical good, the goal of life, and so on is like asking a child to compare War and Peace to A Farewell to Arms. They simply don’t possess the reference points through which they can think rationally about the world. This is the great tragedy of our time. Billions of dollars are spent every year on a so-called education that, in point of fact, subverts and obliterates true knowledge. It does this on purpose in order to suppress the obvious truth about God (Romans 1:18-21; Psalm 19:1).
How does this work out? Let’s use American football as an example.
Every fan knows Tom Brady, the great quarterback. When they think of him, they think, rather naturally, of his Super Bowl victories – more than any other player in NFL history. To do this, the fan thinks of Mr. Brady’s current team, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. After this, one thinks of other teams that aren’t the Bucs and so on. They think of other teams in other eras too. Historically, they think of Bart Starr, Joe Montana and Terry Bradshaw. They think of how the game of football has changed over the years – especially in regard to protecting the quarterback from injury. In other words, the thought of Tom Brady requires quite a few ancillary points of fact in order to provide context. This is how knowledge works. All of this is “running in the background” when we mention Tom Brady and his being if not the greatest NFL quarterback of all time, certainly one of the best.
We can further break this down.
The NFL is the organization in America that runs the commercial game of professional football, played for profit as an entertainment for millions of viewers, both at live games and watching on TV. See how this works? Once, we get to the subject of entertainment, we get to ads and profit and stadiums and all that. Then we get to owners and players and contracts. We can, if we like such exercises, take Tom Brady and bring knowledge of him through all of that and bring it right back to God’s word. How? Because there’s an ethical standard ungirding it all.
Tom Brady is a football player who owes no one anything (Romans 13:8). I’m not forced to watch him and he’s not forced to play. He plays freely and if I watch him, I watch freely. Modern football is an aspect of man’s creative freedom, given to him by God. It is established analogically in God’s world, using rules and having referees enforce those rules as fairly as they can so that the competitors can play the game and fans can enjoy watching. If there were no refs and rules, the game would be utter chaos. The players, the rules and the refs, in this way, show us the nature of God’s created order and man’s place in it. Athletes like Tom Brady can excel at their disciplines but in order to do this they must compete within rules. And because of man’s nature as a sinner, refs are needed to enforce those rules.
In this way, starting with Tom Brady, we see God’s majesty, creativity, and order displayed. We have coaches and trainers – like parents and leaders – guiding players who train and practice to achieve a goal. And everyone is divided into teams and when they play, to make sure that cheating (sin) doesn’t ruin the whole enterprise, refs (like the civil magistrate) enforce the rules. This is what we mean when we say that man and women create things after God, or analogically from within God’s framework. Only God and His plan are perfect, but we do a million things – in arts, entertainment, service, sports, industry, etc. – that reflect this perfection back at Him. For this reason, God created men and women and placed us in families in the garden-temple of the Eden He created, which declares His great glory. Mankind was ejected from the garden when our first parents sinned by insisting upon their own evaluation of things rather than upon God’s. Our way to the garden, to God’s presence, is cleared once again through the finished work of Jesus Christ who died for our sins once and for all. This sacrifice of Christ fulfills all of God’s legal demands against us sinners and does away with the old contract (Old Testament laws) with its sacrifices and offerings and now we’re free to serve God again through faith in Christ. Therefore, a man might be a football player, a janitor, a writer, an accountant, a salesman, or anything else that can serve his neighbor and do it all in the Lord.
And…that all started with Tom Brady.
You see? There’s no such thing as a brute fact. For any fact to have factness – to have reality – it must get its context from its place in the plan of God. This is how we avoid the twin terrors of nihilism and skepticism. All thinking requires the integrative principles at work here. All thinking is and must be predicated upon an ultimate reference point or else there’s a destruction of knowledge.
The modern mind, however, doesn’t do this.
With politics, for example, it starts midstream. Moral proclamations are bandied about all the time without every qualifying them. “No one should have to…” or “everyone deserves…” are statements of ethical obligations that absolutely must be defined, but they never are. The modern man doesn’t define their standard because they’ve been trained and encouraged to embrace the sin-principle of autonomy. Invariably, this includes brute factuality, which is, at the bottom, irrationalism. In other words, when the autonomous principle is acted upon and facts are considered outside of the plan and authority of God, men and women try to be rational while being ultimately irrational. The exercise is something like saying:
“What I’m saying makes sense although nothing ultimately makes sense and neither one of us can ever share the exact same premise. So, there’s no use in talking but we’re gonna talk anyway and pretend that the conversation is meaningful so long as neither of us ask the other how we know anything at all. Oh, and whatever you do, don’t ask why any of this conversation is meaningful to persons in a universe that’s impersonal and random!”
It’s like this that non-belief is the world’s greatest con-game.
It’s the same thing with love. People are fond of saying vacuous things like “love is never wrong.” This has the appearance of nobility and wisdom and makes people feel all warm and fuzzy inside, so it’s an easy thing to say. The problem is, one is compelled to ask, “love according to what?” There must be a standard by which one understands love or else it’s nothing at all. This is what God’s word does. He tells us that true love is the fulfilling of His law. Love cannot, therefore, be lawless; it can’t be in violation of His moral order.
Thus, again, by virtue of the fact that God created us and everything else, we can’t make sense of life unless we presuppose Him in all our thinking (Proverbs 3:4-5).
Recent Comments