Ultimate Reality

One Circle People v. Two Circle People

The One and the Many

Great Chain of Being

Faith-Reason Two Story House

"It is exceedingly dangerous to confuse the orthodox concept of the incomprehensibility of God with the ultimate mysteriousness of the universe as held by modern thought.   Modern thought in general, and modern logic in particular, holds . . . that God is, at most, an aspect of Reality as a whole.  Hence, God is himself surrounded by darkness or mystery, just as man is surrounded by darkness or mystery.  In other words, modern thought believes in an ultimate irrationalism, while Christianity believes in an ultimate rationality.  It is difficult to think of two types of thought that are more radically opposed to one another.  It is the most fundamental  antithesis conceivable in the field of knowledge. . . .  The very foundation of all Christian theology is removed if the concept of the ultimate rationality of God be given up."
-- Cornelius Van Til, An Introduction to Systematic Theology, (Phillipsburg, NJ:  Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing, 1995), p. 13 (latter emphasis added).

        Van Til's characterization of the Christian and non-Christian worldviews is a radical challenge, a virtual Copernican Revolution, to the understanding of religion that dominates modern culture.  It is common to hear in our day that faith and reason are mutually exclusive areas of life.  The famous Marxist evolutionist Stephen Jay Gould of Harvard called it the doctrine of NOMA, or non-overlapping magisteria ("magisteria" means teaching authority).  "The net of science covers the empirical universe: what is it made of (fact) and why does it work this way (theory). The net of religion extends over questions of moral meaning and value. These two magisteria do not overlap. . . .  To cite the arch cliches, we get the age of rocks, and religion retains the rock of ages; we study how the heavens go, and they determine how to go to heaven." (Gould, "Nonoverlapping Magisteria")  Gould's essay is focused on science but this division of authority is often conceived more broadly as the distinction between reason and faith.  On this view, the realm of reason has no need of, and cannot co-exist with, divine authority.  Reason is the realm of science, politics, law, and objectivity.  Faith is the realm of the non-rational, emotion and pure subjectivity.  Thus a person can, and should, participate in the rational areas of life without any concrete direction from God.  A person operating in the realm of reason can rely on God for emotional support, for a "sense of purpose," but that is all.
        This means that as human reason advances, the need for faith should diminish.  Faith is an explanation for things that reason cannot explain.  Faith was more needed when man was more primitive and faced a world of overwhelming mystery and terror.  Freud taught that the origin of the idea of God is as a projection of primitive human minds that a loving father was in control of the fearful mysteries of the universe in order to give comfort to those primitive people.  But as human reason advances, the need for God should fade away like the smile on the Cheshire Cat.
        Framed in such a manner, the issue of the truth of Christianity versus atheism is a simple one.  Atheism is the rational belief and Christianity is devoid of rationality, because reason has been defined to exclude faith.  End of discussion.
       But that was too easy.  Who came up with the definition?  The definition of faith as a leap beyond reason makes sense in terms of the atheist worldview because in that view an Absolute Mind is denied, making the world ultimately non-rational.  The ultimate mind in the universe is the finite human mind (or maybe a finite alien mind); thus anything beyond the finite human mind is beyond reason.   This means that the argument above for atheism begs the question of atheism.  When Freud characterizes religion as a leap beyond reason, he is describing the irrationalism that is inherent in the atheist worldview because irrationalism is ultimate in the atheist worldview.  Faith that is a leap beyond reason is atheist spirituality, not Christian spirituality!  Freud assumes the materialistic evolutionary worldview when he describes primitive human consciousness emerging through purely non-conscious, non-rational, materialistic evolutionary forces.  He assumes rather than proves that human minds thinking about God and the forces beyond their control are thinking about the non-rational realm from which their minds emerged, and thus are only self-delusionally God-dependant. 
       The Christian faith in things beyond human reason is not an appeal to the non-rational but to the absolutely rational.  The Christian trusts in God, who is absolutely rational and is sovereign over all that exists.  Humans are created in the image of God; thus they originally exist in personal relationship with God, not inventing the idea of God to make up for their ignorance.  Christianity represents the dominion of the Logos (John 1:1), the Word, the Reason.
       With this understanding, the tables are turned on the atheist.  The debate between atheism versus Christianity is not a matter of reason versus faith.  As Cornelius Van Til points out in the quote above, the debate is between a worldview in which the non-rational is ultimate (atheism) and a worldview in which the rational is ultimate (Christianity).  There is a formal similarity between the two worldviews.  Both include an appeal to faith, mystery and spirituality; but these similar words hide a substantial difference between the two—that the atheist is expressing belief in an ultimately non-rational universe when he uses these words, and the Christian is expressing belief in an ultimately rational universe.
       With the atheist view that the finite mind of man is the ultimate mind in the universe, the universe becomes philosophically anthropocentric (and geocentric, since humans live on earth).  As Copernicus overturned the geocentric view with the heliocentric view, Van Til has overturned the atheist view that man's mind is autonomous with the view that God's mind is autonomous.  The universe is theocentric rather than anthropocentric.


One Circle People v. Two Circle People

The Greeks often expressed their view of the world in terms of the Great Chain of Being.  The concept was brought into Christian theology through Thomas Aquinas, as well as others who tried to combine Greek philosophy with Christian theology.  Here I have illustrated the relationship between the Great Chain of Being and the Greek view of the One and the Many.  Pure being, which is also pure unity, is at the top of the chain.  Pure non-being, out of which arises matter, the principle of diversity, is at the bottom of the chain. Diversity dissolves and unity increases the higher up the chain of being, until a pure blank is reached at the top.  Man is in the middle, pulled in two directions.  He has a material body from below, but a soul from above; and the soul yearns to escape from matter into the pure unity from which it originated.  This has something of a Christian sound to it when God is equated with the One; but this One is a pure blank, an empty concept, not the living, historically active God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.  Also, this view denies the Creator-creature distinction because man's soul is one being with God; and it poses an irresolvable dialectic tension between the one and the many, which undermines the possibility of human knowledge.

The foremost theologian of the Roman Catholic Church, Thomas Aquinas, held to a distinction between faith and reason that is often expressed as a two-story house.  Reason is the first level.  It is a realm of religiously neutral common ground shared between the Christian and the non-Christian.  On top of this religiously neutral first story the Christian adds the second story of faith.  Aquinas said that the knowledge of God is an area of reason, common between the Christian and non-Christian.   His philosophical evidence for this was Greek philosophers who taught that an abstract principle of reason, called the "unmoved mover" by Aristotle, provided the source of unity for the world.  Because this universal being was achieved by excluding all plurality, the universal being has no content.  Aquinas said, therefore, that by means of reason we can know that God exists, but not the nature of God.  Faith in supernatural revelation tells us the nature of God.  Kant pressed this abstraction of the one and the many to its logical conclusion and said that we cannot not know God at all, because there is nothing to know about a concept without content.  Neither can there be propositional revelation from God because it would have no content.  "Concepts without percepts are empty," Kant famously said.  On Kant's view, religion is not rationally meaningful; it is only emotionally meaningful.  Only an absolutely rational God escapes Kant's criticism—a God who is the source of all the diversity in life as well as all unity, one who is a concrete universal, not an abstract universal.  There is no religiously neutral lower story.  All ground is God's ground.  All of life is religious.  Nothing is secular, except as a false interpretation of life.

"All too often it has been presented as though there is, first of all, that which Christianity has in common with all non-Christian ethics, and then there are special requirements that pertain to Christianity alone. The first may be spoken of as the first story of a house. So Roman Catholicism argues as though Christianity took the four cardinal virtues of Greek ethics as a first story, and merely added to it the three virtues of love, hope, and faith as a second story. But this is not true. The structure of Christian ethics is something that is different from all other systems of ethics. The first story of Christian ethics is built of different material from that of which non-Christian ethics is built, as well as is the second story. And it is to the difference of the first story that we must turn first. . . . This difference is clear as far as the standard of ethics is concerned if only we keep in mind that, according to Christian ethics, the moral consciousness of man has never functioned apart from God, while according to all non-Christian ethics, the moral consciousness has always functioned apart from God."
-- Christian-Theistic Ethics (Phillipsburg, NJ: Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Co., 1980), pp. 127-28.

"Looking back we recall that we started our discussion of the Protestant doctrine of Scripture by an analysis of the views of Warfield and of Bavinck. Both men view the place of Scripture as imbedded in their total outlook on life. They do not build the first story of their house by reason in order then to add a second story built by faith. Their outlook on life is a living whole. For convenience we speak of this total outlook on reality as a world and life view."
-- The Protestant Doctrine of Scripture  (Phillipsburg, NJ: Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Co., 1968), p. 103.

"How then is the Christian believer to proceed as he seeks to win sinners to accept the Christian point of view?  Roman Catholicism answers this question as follows. . . .  Christians must offer their own position as something additional to what the non-Christian already believes. The Christian must tell the non-Christian that there is no defect in what he says about life but that he has not said enough. The Christian must tell the non-Christian that he has only half of the orange and that Christianity has the whole orange.  On this view Christianity is presented as though it were the second story of a house, the first story of which has already been built and built well, by the Greeks."
--  "Scripture And Reformed Apologetics," from The New Testament Student and Theology, edited by John H. Skilton  (Nutley, NJ: Presbyterian and Reformed, 1976), 3:150–59.

"On the other hand faith for Kant pertains to what he calls 'the noumenal realm.' Of that realm man cannot intellectually know anything. If there is to be any contact with what is in that realm, it must be by irrational or non-rational means. In general, it is said to be faith by which we know what is there. And God is said to be there. But then the God who is there is indeterminate. The contact between the two realms is, from both directions, a partially rationalist and partially irrationalist affair. The idea that God has made man in his image, that Adam at the beginning of history knew God by direct revelation in his own constitution and in his environment as well as by direct communication is, on this basis, impossible. Nothing that happens in history, on the days and weeks and years of the calendar, can bear a direct revelation of God. The Son of God cannot come into history on a certain day and die or be raised from the dead on a certain day in ordinary history and thereby effect the reconciliation of man to God."
--  The Theology of James Daane  (Philadelphia: Presbyterian and Reformed, 1959),  Ch.4, § 5




by Michael H. Warren
Permission is granted to use any of the images on this webpage so long as this web page is referenced.

This web page last modified April 1, 2007.