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THE GROUND OF DIVINITY BELIEFS

Roy Clouser


I. The Christian Position

Now that we have a handle on what divinity beliefs are, and on some of the major
types of them, the next question that naturally arises is the ground on which they are
believed. Starting once more with Christianity, the question can be posed this way: on
what ground do we believe that the true Divinity is the Triune Creator God who mani-
fested himself incarnate in J esus Christ? Often the first answer I get in classes and
discussion groups is: Belief in Gods reality is a matter of faith; we take it on faith that
God exists. And because this is such a widely accepted answer, it is all the more
important to see right away why it is sorely in need of clarification.

The main reason for this need is because there are so many misunderstandings
about the meaning of the word "faith." It's well known that Mark Twain once quipped
that "Faith is believin' what you know ain't so" and many other writers have done almost
as badly. It has been defined as "belief beyond the evidence," or "belief despite the
evidence," and it is widely assumed to mean blind trust no matter how else it is further
defined. So it is important right at the outset that we take some time to see how the
writers of the New Testament use the term. The first clarification must therefore be to
notice that they never use "faith" in any of the senses just mentioned (no one can possibly
believe what they know to be false), and the second is to notice that they employ the term
in three different senses. The first of these is when term is used to refer to the whole of
the Christian religion. This happens when they use it as a noun to refer to Christianity as
"the Faith." For example, they use such expressions as: "the Faith once delivered to the
saints" (J ude 3) or "... continue in the Faith firmly established..." (Col. 1:23). A second
sense in which they employ the term is the same as the one we commonly use in
everyday speech. In this second sense, "faith" means trust or reliance in something or
someone. It is this sense of the term that we find used when New Testament writers
admonish us to trust in God to keep his promises, and when they praise believers of the
past for having done so. For example: "For we walk by faith not by sight..." (II Cor 5:7)
and "... all these died in faith without having received the promises..." (Heb 11: 13).

What especially needs to be noticed for our present purpose, however, is that the
New Testament writers also use "faith" in a third way, a way that refers to belief that is
also knowledge - belief which is experiential certainty. For example, St Paul chides some
of the members of the church at Galatia for thinking they must earn their salvation by
keeping religious regulations. In rebuttal he asks them: "Did you receive the Holy Spirit
by hearing [the gospel] with faith or by the works of the Law?" There the term faith
cannot mean trust in God's promises nor can it refer to the Christian religion as a whole.
It refers instead to belief in God's reality and in his offer of salvation in the gospel. But

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that is the very same belief which is even more often referred to as knowledge throughout
the New Testament. Another place where the term "faith" is used to mean belief which is
certain, is Hebrews chapter eleven. There we are told that "Without faith it is impossible
to please [God], for whoever would come to him must believe that he exists and that he
rewards those who seek him." (Heb 11:6) This same belief, however, is also described
elsewhere as "trustworthy and deserving of full acceptance" (I Tim. 1:15), and equivalent
to knowing God (J ohn 17:3; I Cor. 8:6,7; I J n 4:16)). Moreover, those who have faith in
this sense are spoken of as ones who "believe and know the truth." (I Tim. 4:3)

Keep in mind here that recognizing the difference between belief that is merely
opinion or trust, on the one hand, from belief which is certain knowledge on the other, is
a common one. You dont have to be a philosopher to be aware that often you are
justified in being sure of a particular belief, and to be equally well aware that at other
times beliefs you hold are merely opinions you trust in some degree that is less than
certainty. I like the way this point was put by one of my favorite mystery writers:

Theres knowing and theres knowing for sure and
theres a space between the two of them a man can get
lost in.
i


For example, the belief that you will get to bed before 10 oclock tonight, or that next
month will be unusually sunny, are opinions. They may turn out to be true but you have
no good reason to be certain of them in advance. Included among the beliefs we are not
justified in being certain of, are promises we take on trust. If, e.g., a friend promises to
keep a secret, we can't be completely certain the promise will be kept until it has been.
Most of the beliefs we accept on the say-so of othersare in the same boat, such as your
belief in the accuracy of a friends report of an auto accident you did not witness.
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From
now on I will speak of the opinions we form, including promises we believe and reports
we take on trust from others, as beliefs we accept rather than know. And I will use
know only for the ones were justified in being sure of beyond a reasonable doubt. On
this use of the terms your belief in a friends account of the auto accident is an opinion
you accept, while your belief that 1 +1 =2 or that you are now seeing these words on
this page is knowledge.

Because this distinction is the common property of people everywhere, it should
not surprise us that the writers of the New Testament were also aware of this difference
between opinions and certainty. I have just pointed to a number of places where they
speak of some Christian teachings not as matters of faith in the sense of trust in God's
promises, but in the sense of teachings we believe and know.
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And what is most
important about this point right now is that neither the New Testament authors nor any
other Bible writers ever speak of the belief that God is real as faith in the sense of mere
opinion or hoping a promise will be fulfilled. Rather, they always speak of it as faith
which is also knowledge. It is for this reason there is a long tradition of Christian
theologians and other writers who recognize this third sense of "faith." And not only do

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they recognize that New Testament writers use it, but they employ it the same way in
their own writings. So even though they, too, do not always distinguish the three senses
of the term, or specify which they are using at any given point, they do all make clear that
they use it (at times) as equivalent to certain knowledge. For example:

Augustine:

Aquinas: "From the doctrines held by faith the knowledge of other truths can be
developed... from principles to conclusion... the truths of faith are first principles of...
Christian theology. " (Opusc. xvi, Exposition, de Trinitate, ii, 2.)

Luther:

Calvin: Faith is a knowledge of the divine favor toward us and a full persuasion of
its truth. (Inst. III, 2, 12.)

Pascal: By faith we know [God's] existence... (Pensees, #343)

One final point on this topic: even when "faith" is used in the second sense to
mean trust in Gods promises, it never means blind trust. As Hebrews 11 makes clear, the
ground on which those who know God are urged to rely on his promises is that God has
been faithful to them in the past. There is nothing in any of the senses of "faith" that
amounts to a leap into the dark." Instead, Bible writers always admonish us to trust
Gods promises for the same reason we would trust another human to keep a promise,
namely, the promisor's past record of faithfulness.

To sum up so far, the term "faith" is used in the New Testament in three senses:

1) It can mean the Christian religion as a whole;

2) It can mean taking Gods promises and other revealed
information on trust. Even this is not blind faith, however,
because it is based on God's record of covenant faithfulness;
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3) It can mean belief that God is real and offers us the gospel,
which is something we both believe and know for certain.

But if believing that God is the one and only divine Creator is faith in the sense
of knowledge, what is the basis for this certainty and how do we come to acquire it?

The New Testament actually answers this question quite clearly despite the fact
that a myriad of writers on the subject have preferred to ignore what it says and construct
their own theories instead. The New Testaments own answer is that we know God is real
by experiencing God. It mentions quite a number of different ways people can and do

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experience God (and there are even more ways than those it explicitly mentions). For
example, we all know the story the book of Acts tells of the experience of Saul on the
road to Damascus. In fact, however, that experience is not unique. Take the case of Sadu
Sundar Singh. Singh had been a devout Sikh all his life. Eventually he became
discouraged with Sikhism and set out to find God, but he did so with the pre-conviction
that anything might be the truth except Christianity. Early one morning, he says,

In the room where I was praying I saw a great light. I
thought the place was on fire....Then the thought came to
me that this might be an answer that God sent me. Then
as I prayed and looked into the light, I saw the form of
the Lord J esus Christ...whom I had been insulting a few
days before.... I heard a voice saying in Hindustani How
long will you persecute me? I have come to save you;
you were praying to know the right way. Why do you not
take it? ...[So] I fell at his feet and got this wonderful peace
which I could not get anywhere else.
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Another sort of experiencing God is one in which nothing is seen or heard, but God's
presence is sensed. There are tens of thousands of such reports over many centuries
(whch are amazingly alike), but here is one that was related to me by the person who had
it:

I was alone for the evening and decided to try reading
the gospel of J ohn as you suggested, convinced it could
make no difference to my skepticism about God. I picked
up the Bible, turned to J ohn, and suddenly I was over-
whelmed by a presence that filled the room. I closed the
book and decided my mind was playing tricks on me; I'd
get a shower, calm down, and come back to it. I felt foolish
at being spooked. It's just a book! I said, laughing. But
when I tried to read again the presence was more over-
powering than before. It wasn't threatening in fact it was
powerfully loving but I yelled, Go away and leave me
alone! I like my life the way it is! Yet it persisted, and
when I tried again to read the gospel it all looked undeniably
true.
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There are yet other sorts of experiences of God besides visions and the sense of
his presence, such as that of a mystical union a oneness with God that is literally
indescribable. There are also instances in which otherwise ordinary events become
transparent to their dependency on God, or are experienced as revealing God's will. But
we need not try to enumerate them all. It is not important to the certainty of the beliefs
generated just which type of experience generates them, any more than it matters

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precisely what the object of the experience is. No matter whether the avenue of
experience is ordinary perception (sight, touch, sound, smell, taste), extraordinary
perception (a sense of God's presence, or mystical union), memory, reflection, or
whatever, the crucial point is that the experience generates a belief that is self-evident to
the person who has it.
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This is why Thomas Hobbes got it exactly wrong when he
quipped that "when a man says God spake to him in a dream he says no more than that he
dreamed God spake to him." What Hobbes missed is precisely the quality of self-
evidence that can attach to a dream and assure the dreamer that it is communication from
God. This is why what I am pointing to here is not only true of beliefs conveyed by
statements. Often believers experience God's presence, nearness, comfort, judgment,
encouragement, etc., via a wide variety of ways each of which includes that it is self-
evident it is God who is experienced. That said, it remains true that the primary means of
revelation is still through God's word as recorded in scripture. I'm calling this the
"primary" experience because whether or not a person has any of the more unusual
experiences (and most don't), every Christian experiences the gospel to be self-evidently
the truth about God from God.

For these reasons it follows that an experience isn't only religious provided the
furniture flies around the room; the expression religious experience doesn't apply only
to very strange experiences. Rather, a religious experience is any experience that
generates, deepens, or confirms a religious belief - as religious belief was defined in
chapter one. Of these three outcomes, I will confine my attention from now on to
experiences that generate or confirm divinity beliefs and thus have to do with their truth.
That is why the important question here will be whether such an experience can not only
generate a divinity belief but justify it as well. More specifically, can an experience
which generates belief in God do so in such a way that justifies us in saying that we know
it was God who was experienced? From now on I will not only confine myself to that
question, but will further confine my attention to the one specific type of experience
which I called "primary," the experience of hearing God speak through his word. So
when we are told in the Psalms in your light we see light (Ps. 36:9), and your light is
truth (Ps. 43:3), we should connect that to the New Testaments talk about the light of
the gospel shining into our previously darkened hearts, and of our being enlightened
by the Holy Spirit so that we see Gods truth with the eyes of our heart (Rom. 1:21 &
Eph. 1:18).
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This, says the New Testament, is the main way that people come to know God:
his Spirit opens our hearts so that we "see" the truth of the gospel (Rom. 8:16). In what
follows, I will argue that the opening of a person's heart is equivalent to what has been
called self-evidence in the history of math, logic, and philosophy. If this is correct, it
serves as the answer to skeptical questions about the more unusual experiences
mentioned above (such as the Sunday School child's question, How did Abraham know
it was God who was talking to him?). It also answers the question of how we can know
the Bible is the record of the covenants God made with humans. In every case these
beliefs are justified by the self-evidence of the experience that it is God who has made

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himself known in these writings; the experience of the gospel includes the element of its
direct, self-evident, truth-recognition, and the person having that experiencecan be said
to have heard God speak. This is also why the resulting belief is not a theory, and that in
turn is why it needs no proof. What we experience in this way doesnt need proof; it is
theories - educated guesses - that need evidence and proof. (Well return to this point in
some detail in chapter four.)

Earlier I remarked that many writers have preferred to construct their own
theories about the basis for belief in Gods reality, ignoring what the New Testament
itself teaches. But I will now quote two thinkers who did not ignore the New Testament
on this topic, but captured and expressed its teaching beautifully. One of these is a
theologian and Protestant; the other is a scientist and Catholic. The first is J ohn Calvin:

As to the question, How shall we be persuaded that
[scripture] came from God...it is just the same as if we were
asked, How shall we learn to distinguish light from darkness,
white from black, sweet from bitter? Scripture bears upon
the face of it as clear evidence of its truth as white and
black do of their color, sweet and bitter of their taste.
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[unbelieving] men think that religion rests only on
opinion and, therefore, that they may not believe anything
foolishly, or on slight grounds, desire and insist to have it
proved by reason that Moses and the prophets were divinely
inspired. But I answer that the testimony of the Spirit is
superior to reason.
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Scripture, carrying its own evidence along with it,
deigns not to submit to proofs and arguments, but owes
the full conviction with which we ought to receive it to
the testimony of the Spirit of God.

Such, then, is a conviction that asks not for reasons...
a knowledge which accords with the highest reason,
namely, knowledge in which the mind rests more securely
than any reasonsI say nothing more than what every
believer experiences in himself though my words fall far
short of the reality.
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The second is from Blaise Pascal:

We know truth not only with the reason, but also with
the heart. It is in this latter way that we recognize first
principles, and it is in vain that reason, which has no part

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therein tries to impugn them For the knowledge of first
principles - for example space, time, motion, and number,
[is] as sure as any of those procured for us by reason. And
it is upon this knowledge of the heart and instinct that
reason must rely and base all its arguments...
Those, therefore, to whom God has imparted religion
by intuition are very fortunate and very rightly convinced.
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It should be obvious that despite the differences in their wording, these two writers are
making essentially the same point. For both of them, the belief that God is real and has
made covenant promises to humans is known by direct experience. Calvin holds that once
the Spirit of God removes the blindness of a persons mind, seeing the truth of the gospel
is analogous to the self-evidence of normal sense perception. Pascal, on the other hand,
calls the experience an intuition of truth and compares it to recognizing the self-
evidence of first principles (axioms).

This understanding of the NT position as an appeal to self-evidence, is supported
by the way its writers employ the same visual metaphors to describe the experience of
being enlightened to the gospel which had long used by philosophers and scientists to
speak about other self-evident truths. I mentioned a few such New Testament phrases a
little while ago, but they are worth repeating: it tells us that whereas we were born
blind to the truth about God (Matt. 13:1316; 15:14; Jn. 9:39), now the light of the
gospel shines in our hearts (Jn. 1:6-9; II Cor. 4:4; I Peter 2:9) so that we see with the
eyes of our heart (Eph. 1:18) the truth of Gods revelation. And as with the normal sense
perception or the intuition of an axiom, this seeing-for-oneself is not an inference; it is
not a chain of reasoning with God as its conclusion. It is the experience of directly
recognizing the truth of the gospel. Thus the NT presents the removal of the blindness of
a person's heart by the Holy Spirit of God as a species of the experience of self-evidence,
and for that reason sees belief in God as knowledge.
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Keep in mind here, that chapter one already pointed out that this sort of knowing
is not mere intellectual assent. The experience of seeing the truth about God is the
result of the work of God's Spirit; the New Testament asserts that point clearly, as is
acknowledged by both the authors just quoted. Keep in mind too, that according to the
New Testament, that work is performed in the heart of the person enlightened where
heart is used in the biblical sense of that term. For Bible writers, I remind you, heart
does not refer to emotion rather than intellect, but to the central unity of a human being.
So whereas you or I are used to speaking of head knowledge as opposed to heart
knowledge and use such expressions to mean intellect as opposed to feeling, the Bible
writers speak of the human heart as the unity of intellect, emotion, will, talents,
dispositions, and all else that makes up a person.
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For this reason when the heart is
enlightened the intellect sees the truth with the eyes of the heart and so knows God,
while the emotions are turned toward the love God, and the will is inclined to please him.
Thus enlightenment by God's Spirit is seen as conversion - redirection - of the whole

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person; the whole person was lost to the sin of belief in a false god, and the whole person
is now initiated into the process of being restored to the true and living God. So although
my emphasis here is on self-evidence and knowing, it should always be understood as not
merely intellectual but seated in the deepest dispositions of the heart; when God is known
in this way not only the intellect but the emotions, will, and all else are enlightened and
restored.
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To sum up once more:

1. Faith that God is real and has made covenant promises to
humans is not a matter of faith as trust in a promise, let alone
blind faith, rather

2. it is self-evident knowledge acquired by direct experience,
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which is why

3. Faith that God is real and offers us the gospel is neither a
theory nor in need of proof.

4. Faith in God, by contrast, goes beyond knowing God is real.
It is taking God at his word concerning all he has revealed,
and results in living in obedience to the commandment to love
God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength, and our neighbor
as ourself.

Since I introduced the term self-evident above, let me explain this term. This is
all the more necessary because most people are acquainted with it only from its (mis)use
in the famous lines of the American Declaration of Independence: We hold these truths
to be self-evident, that all men are created equal and have been endowed by their Creator
with unalienable rights. So the first thing that needs to be said is that the Declaration
uses self-evident in a way that is partly right but partly wrong. The part it got right is
that in philosophy, mathematics, and logic a self-evident belief is one whose truth is so
obvious that no proof is necessary and there is no point in debating it. The part the
Declaration misses is that self-evident truths are not supposed to be derived from any
others; they are not known by inferring them from other information. But the belief in the
equality of all humans and that they possess rights was definitely derived from the Bible.
It is an inference from the doctrine that all humans are created in the image of God. And,
in fact, the first draft of the Declaration acknowledged that when J efferson wrote: We
hold these truths to be sacred and undeniable. The term sacred was his allusion to the
biblical roots of the idea that all humans have rights. But Franklin talked him into
changing sacred and undeniable into self-evident, which had two effects. First it
removed even the oblique reference to the biblical roots of the idea of equality and rights,
and second it conveyed the implicit claim that such rights were truths obtainable from
reason alone without the aid of revelation. That is why their existence was supposed to be
beyond debate. But the truth is that neither J efferson nor Franklin really thought that the
equal worth of all humans was not derived from the biblical teaching that all humans are

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created in the image of God, nor did they think that equal rights was something as
obvious to everyone as 1 +1 =2. What the appeal to self-evidence intended to convey to
George III was: we wont debate this with you even if you disagree and think others are
not equal to you because you are a king.
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The second thing that needs to be said is that the claim that Gods reality is self-
evident to anyone enlightened by the Holy Spirit will appear outrageous to those
acquainted with the history of the idea of self-evidence in western thought. Let me
explain.

The Grand Masters of the western intellectual tradition concluded long ago that a
belief is genuinely knowledge rather than mere opinion provided it is either self-evident
or proven. Moreover, that conclusion has been remarkably dominant for over 2300 years,
having few dissenters.
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This might sound congenial to what I've been saying because it
acknowledges that self-evidence justifies a belief so that it counts as knowledge. But the
fact is, thinkers such as Aristotle and Descartes not only acknowledged self-evidence but
also put restrictions on it. And it will probably not surprise you to hear that those
restrictions rule out that belief in God can be genuinely self-evident - which is why
Christians have so often been asked for proof that God is real. So if my summary of the
New Testament position in points 1 - 4 above is to stand up, those traditional restrictions
will have to be shown to fail. This requires a more involved discussion that may not
interest all readers, so the critique of those restrictions will be given separately in part two
of this chapter.

One final point. The traditional view of knowledge is, as I said, that we are
justified in being certain of a belief (including the belief in God's reality) provided it is
either self-evident or proven. So before going any further with this subject, I want to
explain why Christians should never even consider trying to prove it. There is something
seriously wrong with supposing that the basis for belief in Gods existence can be an
argument with God as its conclusion. The reason for this is not simply that the New
Testament itself offers no proof, and it is even more than the additional fact that the New
Testament specifically mentions experiencing God as the basis for belief in his reality
instead of proof. The further reason is nothing less than the most fundamental doctrine in
Christianity, the teaching that God is the Creator of everything visible or invisible (Col.
1:16). Taken at face value this requires that God is the Creator

of all the laws found in the
cosmos including the laws of proof, the laws of math and logic. Since these are
invisible, they too are created
3.
But in that case, the laws of math and logic do not
account for their own origin.
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They are created laws that hold true for creatures
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(and
for God's "energies" or manifestations in the cosmos). But since whatever can be proven
by use of them must be subject to them, nothing that can be proven by using them could
be their uncreated
123
origin. Therefore proof of the reality of Gods being is impossible
because whatever can be proven would thereby not be God.


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In addition to the point that attempting to prove God's existence reduces him to
that status of a creature, there is another objection which the NT itself gives as a reason
against such a project. It teaches that those who do not believe in God fail to do so
because their hearts are already captive to another divinity belief. We already touched on
this point a few paragraphs ago when we noticed the section of Romans 1 where St Paul
describes unbelievers as those who regard something God created as divine instead of the
true Creator. This is an important point. It means that the failure to believe in God is not
merely a lack; it is not just a matter of missing information. It is a matter of seeing
something else to possess divine status, and that any such false perception of divinity is
sufficient to undercut every evidence and argument for God's reality in the eyes of those
who believe in a God-substitute. The NT puts the point this way: "A natural man does not
receive the things of the Spirit of God, they are folly to him and he is unable to know
them for the are spiritually discerned." (I Cor. 2:14 emphasis mine). In other words:
holding a false divinity belief is sufficient to prevent the acquisition of the true one unless
God's Spirit enlightens the person holding the false belief. This is why no argument
however clever, and no evidence however compelling, will ever seem convincing to those
who do not already believe that God is real but believe in a different divinity.

Perhaps the following analogy will help make this point clearer. If I look out my
office window and see someone jump out from behind a bush and stab another person
who then falls to the ground, I dial 911 and rush out to give first aid. But if I'm attending
a magic show, and on stage I see someone stabbed and fall down I applaud with the rest
of the crowd. I don't dial 911 and rush onstage to give first aid because my belief that
what I'm seeing onstage is part of the show guides the beliefs I form about what I see
there. Confronted with the same perceptions in both cases, I therefore form utterly
different beliefs about them. My belief about what to expect at a magic show is the
background assumption which prevents me from forming the belief that a crime has been
committed despite the fact that I see the same chain of events. J ust so, I take the NT
position to be that a person who believes in a divinity other than God will be guided by it
in evaluating every piece of evidence and every argument for God's reality. The force of
any arguments and evidences will thus be blocked by that false divinity belief in such a
way that they will fail to convince such a person of the truth of God's reality. Pascal saw
this point clearly when he said:

The prophecies, the very miracles and proofs of our religion,
are not of such a nature that they can be said to be absolutely
convincing. But they are also of such a kind that it cannot be
said that it is unreasonable to believe them... But the evidence
is such that it surpasses, or at least equals, the evidence to the
contrary; so it is not reason which can determine men not to
follow it, and thus it can only be lust or malice of the heart.
And by this means there is sufficient evidence to condemn, and
insufficient to convince; and so it appears in those who follow
it, that it is grace, and not reason, which makes them follow it;

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and in those who shun it, that it is lust, not reason, which
makes them shun it.
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Keep in mind that by "malice" and "lust" Pascal means illicit religious desire, the desire
for a false divinity. This is why elsewhere he adds:

We will never believe... unless God inclines our hearts. And we
will believe from the moment he does so incline them.
xxi


The upshot is that offering arguments and evidences for God's reality is both
wrong-headed and to no avail. Wrongheaded, because it demotes God to being subject to
the laws he built into creation while elevating those laws to divine status. To no avail,
because the heart captured by a false divinity belief cannot see the truth that God alone is
the self-existent origin of everything visible or invisible. This conclusion should not be
disturbing despite the long history of Christian thinkers who mistakenly supposed God's
existence either could be or needed to be proven. The reason it shouldn't be, as we have
already seen, is that all along the New Testament declared that it is only the Spirit of God
that can remove the blindness of heart that naturally afflicts all humans from birth, and
that once that happens the person to whom it happens sees for him or herself that it is
self-evident that God is real.

II. The Position of the Other World Religions

But if Christianity teaches that the ground for our belief in God's reality and how
to stand in proper relation to God is the experience of its self-evidence, what do the other
major world religions have to say about the ground of their core beliefs?

Get ready for another surprise. If we again confine ourselves to the primary
sources of other world religions as we did for Christianity, we find that Hinduism,
Buddhism, and J udaism all say the same thing that Christianity does!
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They all say their
central teachings about what is divine and how humans can stand in right relation to the
divine are to be known by directly experiencing their truth. Those scriptures also urge
their readers to experience for themselves the truth of what they proclaim, although they
use different terms for the experience and prescribe different methods for inducing it. For
example, in Hinduism the experience is most often referred to as Moksha. In Buddhism
the experience has several names: Prajna, and Zen, for example. And the J ewish
scriptures speak of being enlightened or converted (think of the quotes from the
Psalms given above). The New Testament of course continues to employ the J ewish
terms and adds a few more of its own, as we have already seen. So while the scriptures of
the various traditions play different roles in relation to religious experience (as we shall
detail in later chapters), they nevertheless all agree on the point that the correct ground
upon which (at least some of) their teachings are to be believed is the direct experience of
their truth.


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Islam might at first seem to be an exception to this point because its scripture, the
Koran, doesnt explicitly comment on the topic of the grounds for belief in God. Thats
why the point was a matter of debate among Muslim theologians for some time before it
was decisively settled by Al-Gazhalis famous twelfth-century work, The Revival of the
Religious Sciences. In that book he took the position that both the practice and theology
of Islam are empty without religious experience. He held that with such experience a
person may be ignorant of theology altogether but nevertheless have a right heart before
God. And since it is Al-Gazhalis position on religious experience that came to be the
standard Muslim position, it turns out that Islam is also in agreement with the other
traditions on this point, even though explicit teaching on this point is absent from the
Koran itself.
xxiii
As startling as it may be, then, it is nevertheless a fact that there is
general agreement among the major world religions that the ground of their divinity
beliefs is a spiritual enlightenment which results in experiencing their central teachings as
self-evidently true. Thus, despite their many differences, Hinduism, Buddhism, J udaism,
Christianity, and Islam all agree not only on what it means to be divine, but also on the
proper grounds for holding a divinity belief. None of them expects blind faith; each of
them asks that people believe it because they see for themselves that its identification of
the divine and other central teachings are true.

By contrast to the major world religions, the assorted versions of the Naturalist
worldview have no scriptures and no unified position on this point. In fact, as we noted in
chapter one, many of its advocates wish to deny that the divinity beliefs they presuppose
are religious at all. The reasons they most frequently offer for that denial are: 1) no
worship accompanies what they believe to be self-existent, 2) they dont look to their
divinity for any sort of salvation or life after death, and 3) they base their beliefs on
reason not faith (where "faith" is misunderstood as blind trust). But neither 1) nor 2) can
support this denial because there have always been - and still are - religions that have no
worship and no salvation in the sense of personal life after death. So the lack of those
ingredients does not exempt any divinity beliefs from being religious. As to 3), we have
just now seen that belief in God is not treated as a matter of faith by the Christian
scriptures, nor are the divinity beliefs of any other world religion. So the alleged contrast
between faith and reason also fails to cancel the religious character of Naturalistic
divinity beliefs. In fact, though most Naturalists have tried to defend their position simply
by arguing against Theism (which does not justify their own position), in recent years
some of them have begun to recognize that the real basis for their belief is the same sort
of experiential seeing for oneself that is commended by the world religions. For
example, the biologist Richard Lewontin put it this way:

It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow
compel us to accept a material explanation of theworld, but
on the contrary, we are forced by our a priori adherence to
material explanations to create an apparatus of investigation and
a set of concepts that produce material explanations no matter
how counterintuitive, no matter how mystifying to the

13
uninitiated. Moreover, the appeal to materialism is absolute, for
we cannot let a Divine foot in the door. (New York Review of
Books, J an. 7, 1997, p. 31)

Of course, by divine Lewontin means here only to reject God, not his own belief in the
divinity of matter. Another Naturalist who recognized his materialism to be a belief he
brought to theories rather than derived from them, was the philosopher Paul Ziff. His way
of phrasing the point makes even clearer the experiential basis for Naturalism as a prior
adherence:

If you ask me why Im a materialist Im not sure what to say.
Its not because of the arguments. I guess Id just have to say
that reality looks irresistibly physical to me. (Lecture at the
University of Pennsylvania, March, 1962)

This, of course, is essentially the same reason Calvin and Pascal gave as the ground of
their belief in God.

III. Two Major Consequences of this Position

A. For Relativism

In the previous section I gave reasons why Christians should not be lured into the
project of trying to prove the truth of God's existence or that God has revealed any of the
other information scripture conveys to us. I pointed to fact that the New Testament itself
not only avoids giving proofs, but gives a different account of how people come to see its
teachings as true. I also pointed out the striking similarity between its talk of seeing the
truth of the gospel with the eyes of your heart and the way philosophers,
mathematicians, and logicians had spoken for centuries of the self-evidence of axioms. I
proposed that the similarity is so great that the experience of seeing the truth of the gospel
should be understood as a case of self-evident belief. In this way the New Testament's
own account of the grounds of belief in God is preserved: a person comes to believe the
gospel, on this account, because the Spirit of God remove the blindness of his or her heart
so that some cluster of gospel teachings appears prima facie and irresistibly true.

At the same time, I also mentioned in passing that some major restrictions have
been put on self evidence in western philosophy. And I said those restrictions would have
to be shown false for this account of the grounds of Christian belief to be correct (I will
do that in part two of this chapter). For now, however, I need to say enough about those
restrictions to be sure you know why they are to be rejected. The first of them says that to
be genuinely self-evident, a belief must be recognized as such by everyone. The second
says that only laws (necessary truths) can be self evident, and the third says that any
genuinely self evident truth will also be infallible. Already, even without the arguments
of part two, you should be suspicious. After all, your belief in your name, address, and

14
telephone number all flunk these tests. So does the belief that there are objects around
you and that other people have minds. So ask yourself: is it really the case that you have
no right to be sure of your name, address, and phone number? Should you really accept
that you can't be certain there are objects around you or that other people have minds?
Are those beliefs merely theories - guesses we make? Or are they prime examples of
genuine knowledge for the reason that they are all self-evident truths?

As promised, the exact reasons why these restrictions on self evidence are false
will be offered in part two of this chapter. For now, please be assured that on the view I'm
defending, not only are the beliefs just mentioned knowledge but so also is God's reality.
Since the traditional restrictions fail, when the gospel is experienced as self evidently the
truth about God from God it makes no difference that it isn't self evident to everyone, or
that it's not a law, or that nothing about us is infallible. On the contrary, belief in God is
knowledge rather than mere opinion because it has the same basis in the experience of
self-evidence as do normal sense perceptions and the axioms of math and logic.

We have already touched on the teaching of Romans 1 in this connection. But
since it is so important, I want to explain its relation to what I've just been saying in more
detail. St Paul begins by reminding his readers that God had made himself known from
the very beginning of the human race. But, he goes on, humans did not remain faithful to
God. Instead they rebelled and changed the truth about God into a falsehood, and
worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator. This sinful inclination did
not, as Paul traces it, involve only Adam and Eve but all people: all humans are born with
an innate tendency to regard something God created as divine in place of God. Let me
now rephrase this so as to clarify its bearing on the position I've been defending. The
human self-evidence antennae work well for truths of normal sense perception, math,
logic, introspection, memory, and many other beliefs. That's why it is, e.g., self-evident to
us when we have a headache, that there are objects around us, that other people have
minds, that 1 +1 =2, that contradictory beliefs cannot both be true, and that it is wrong
to steal. But when it comes to what is divine, we are born with faulty equipment. Our
antennae pick up something in the universe (or the whole of it) as the divine reality
instead of its true Creator. Because of this, it is not only our affections or wills that have
fallen and become sinful, but our reason as well. That doesn't mean we can know no
truth, any more than the fallenness of our wills means we can never want anything that is
good or the fallenness of our emotions means we can't ever truly love anything aright.
But while the fallenness of our reason doesn't rob us of all truth, it does mean that our
self-evidence antennae don't work properly concerning what is divine. What is worse,
their failure is not that they deliver no information whatever, but that they falsely identify
something other than God as the divine origin of all else. That is why they need to be
repaired by God's Spirit before a person can see for him or her self the truth that only
God is the Divine Creator.
xxiv


Now some Christians have been troubled by this position because it allows that
non-Christians including Naturalists also experience their divinity beliefs as self-evident

15
truths. The fear is that if we admit this we are then plunged into relativism. They are
afraid that if we admit that other divinity beliefs are likewise grounded upon the
experience of their self-evidence, then we must also admit that every divinity belief is
equally true. This fear is unfounded. For while contrary experiences of self-evidence
equally confer justification, they do not equally confer truth; intuitions of self-evidence
are not infallible. In fact, there is a long-standing recognition that there are conflicting
experiences of self-evidence in math and logic, for example.
xxv
From the fact that people
have conflicting intuitions about the proper axioms for math, or about the range of the
application of axioms of logic, it doesn't follow that all those points of view are equally
true. What does follow is that there is no neutral (non question-begging) way advocates
of one point of view can force its truth upon those with another point of view. In this
respect the disagreements between contrary divinity beliefs are just like the dis-
agreements between contrary views of math and logic: admitting that there is no neutral
ground on which people may stand so as to prove a divinity belief to those who see a
different one to be true, does not make them all equally true any more than the same
inability makes the contrary views about math and logic equally true. In both cases, it is
precisely because they are logically contrary to one another that if one is true the others
aren't. What logically follows isn't that they are all true, but simply that there is no
neutral way for anyone to convince someone else which view is right. But that, too, is the
New Testament's own position! It clearly holds that only the Spirit of God can enlighten
the heart of a human so that he or she sees the light of the gospel.

B. For Christian Witness

What, then, of the presentation of the gospel to those who do not believe? Isnt
this undercut by the admission that the only way to discover which divinity belief is true
must be through a new experience? Surely not. Rather, it means that the way to approach
non-believers with the gospel is not to attempt to argue them into belief but to challenge
them to make an experiment in which they put themselves in a position to have a new and
different experience. The experience to be sought is that of hearing God speak through
his word, and the experiment is to undertake to read scripture (starting, say, with the
gospel of J ohn) and to precede each reading with the words: If youre really there, God,
show me.
xxvi
The experiment should also include attending Christian worship as an
observer. This is because seeing ordinary folk who make up the community of believers
struggle with their understanding of the gospel is part of exposing oneself to a new
experience of it. After the experiment has been pursued for a while, it might also include
reading of some devotional and theological works as supplements. In all this, participants
in the experiment need only assume that it is possible for them to have a different and
belief-altering experience in which God speaks to them. If they wont admit this is even
possible, then theres little point in the experiment. (But in that case Id love to hear the
reasons why it's supposed to be impossible.)

The important thing here is that the reading-plus-worship observation experiment
be undertaken with the express purpose of hearing God speak. It is not to see if there is a

16
coherent system of doctrine, answers to specific questions, or merely to gather
information. If the reading is done assuming the gospel is a theory and it is read to see if
holes can be picked in it, theres no doubt they can be found. If its searched for
inconsistencies, theyll turn up as well. But that sort of thing is beside the point. The
point of the reading is to discover whether any cluster of its central teachings are
experienced as the truth about God from God. And please notice that this experimental
approach is nothing different from what we would recommend to a geometry student who
failed to see the truth of, say, the axiom things equal to the same thing are equal to each
other. Wouldnt we recommend using it to construct proofs and to see how it fits with
other geometric truths? Wouldnt we compare its use to trying to do geometry without it?
Wouldnt we recommend working on geometry along with others to see how they
employ it? Such recommendations may or may not result in the student experiencing the
axioms self-evidence, but it is the only way such a student could be put into a position to
see its truth.

Christians should be prepared, of course, for counter-proposals to this approach.
As we ask non-Christians to make the experiment of reading the New Testament and
being open to hear God speak, non-Christians may very well ask us to do the same with
another scripture or with reading criticisms of our scriptures and expositions of
alternative divinity beliefs. They may also ask us to attend other rites or practices as an
observer. If they do, we should be willing to agree to all those things. We should also be
prepared for those who would reply to the proposed experiment this way: Ive already
tried that experiment. I was raised in a Christian home and my parents took me to church.
So Ive often heard the scripture read and even had to memorize bits of it as a kid. So
what would be the point of my doing it again? But although this may sound reasonable,
its not. Consider a parallel case. Suppose Id been raised by parents who were big
Shakespeare fans. They regularly took me with them to weekly meetings of a
Shakespeare Society where I heard 10 20 lines of several different plays read aloud
each week. On reaching adulthood I concluded that I dont need any more exposure to
know theres nothing special about Shakespeare. Is that a fair judgment? Of course not.
Id have reached it without reading any of his works from beginning to end, let alone all
of them. My exposure would have been sporadic and piecemeal, and would lack all the
background information that could make his plays come alive. What is more, I'd have
heard those piecemeal readings prior to becoming an adult. In this way, my early
experience, despite being spread over many years, was both immature and insufficient to
justify my conclusion. These same points are even more apropos with respect to the
Bible, because the primary purpose of the experiment is to read it so as to hear God
speak. In my experience, most of those who object to the experiment by saying they've
already heard the scriptures read, have not read them as adults, with guidance, and while
listening for God to speak.





17
CHAPTER TWO
Part Two

SELF-EVIDENT TRUTH

I. The Traditional Restrictions on the Experience of Self-Evidence

We have already taken note that the Grand Masters of the western intellectual
tradition - Plato, Aristotle, and Descartes, among others - came to a consensus on the
question of how to distinguish beliefs that are merely opinions from beliefs whose
certainty is justified. The consensus was that a belief counts as knowledge rather than
mere opinion provided it is either self-evident or proven. Over the centuries there have
been thinkers who wanted to add beliefs arising from normal sense perception of
everyday experience to that list, but with that exception the consensus has enjoyed
remarkably wide acceptance. Of course, allowing that a belief is knowledge if self-
evident or proven does not guarantee agreement on what those terms mean, and ever
since this agreement was first reached (over 2300 years ago) the debates over what
proven means have raged unabated. But self-evidence was considered a settled matter,
and for that reason never got the critical evaluation it deserved. There isnt even an entry
under that heading in the Encyclopedia of Philosophy, for example, and the settled view
of it has never been seriously challenged. That is about to end right here and now. I am
about to show why the traditional restrictions on self-evidence both presuppose a
Naturalist divinity belief, and thus beg the question against the self-evidence of God, are
utterly unjustified, and that there are excellent reasons to think every one of them is
false.
xxvii
Most western philosophers have held all three of these restrictions to be correct,
though occasionally some have accepted two or even only one. The restrictions require
that to be genuinely self-evident a belief must not only be directly recognized as true
without being inferred, it must also: 1) be recognized as true by all who understand it, 2)
be a necessary truth, and 3) be an infallible truth.

Lets start with the religious background to these restrictions. For both Plato and
Aristotle the rational order of the cosmos was divine. For Plato that divine order was the
Forms, for Aristotle it was rational (secondary) substances. Both thinkers therefore took a
Naturalist position with respect to the divine, as both identified the mathematical and/or
logical order of the cosmos as (parts of) the realm of divine beings.
xxviii
Moreover, both
included in their idea of divinity not only that it is what exists independently (which
everyone agrees with), but also added that it is changeless (which not everyone agrees
with). These points all have to do with their divinity belief and their theory of reality, but
both are important for their theory of knowledge. This is because these thinkers took the
position that there must be a parity between reality and knowledge. That is, they thought
that what is most real must also be most knowable (most certain), and thus they wanted to
restrict sure and certain knowledge to beliefs about those things that have the most certain
(divine) existence. This led them to deny, for example, that normal sense perception ever
yields knowledge at all! For them, perception can only yield uncertain opinion because

18
perceptions are changeable and thus non-divine. By contrast, the rational truths of logic,
math, and certain ontological axioms, have independent existence and never change and
thus can be certainties. Here's another way to put their point: the only beliefs we can be
sure of are ones that can't change because what they are about can not fail to exist and
can't change. So just being self-evident in the sense of arising from experienceand not
inferred from other beliefs, will not be enough to make a belief genuinely self-evident.
On the contrary, unless a belief also meets the three restrictions and thus supports their
rationalist idea of the parity of reality and knowledge, it is to be rejected as genuinely
self-evident belief. To summarize: Aristotle allows only what is self-evident, or proven
from self-evident beliefs, to be certain and then: 1) allows only beliefs which are
necessary truths (laws) to count as genuinely self-evident so that all seemingly self-
evident beliefs concerning anything that is changeable must be dismissed; 2) restricts
self-evidence to beliefs that are necessary truths, and declares all self-evident beliefs
about necessary truths are known infallibly (thus conflating certainty with infallibility);
3) and, finally, takes the position that any genuinely self-evident truth will be recognized
as such by every expert (rational thinker) in the field in which it arises.
xxix
In this way he
delivers to the western tradition a tight package of restrictions concerning what is allowed
to count as self-evident knowledge, a package whose contents presuppose his divinity
belief: self-evident knowledge is what all rational experts believe about the rationally
necessary truths which are guaranteed to be infallible because they are immutable
rational principles.

The really interesting part about this reductionist view of self-evidence is that
Aristotle nowhere argues for it! It's what he wanted to be true, so he simply declared it to
be so. While he gives examples of instances of self-evident mathematical or logical truths
which are necessary truths and which were agreed on by all the experts he knew, he
nowhere gives any reasons why all self-evident truths must be like the examples he gives.
Moreover, as we will shortly see, these restrictions have absolutely nothing to
recommend them other than his wishful thinking. So the extent to which even thinkers
who didn't share his divinity belief have bought into his restrictions anyway is truly
amazing. This includes Descartes, who not only endorsed Aristotle's restrictions but
contributed to them. It was Descartes' proposal to expand on restriction 3) that says all
experts will recognize a genuinely self-evident truth. It's not just the experts, says
Descartes, but anyone in the least degree rational will recognize a genuinely self-
evident truth provided that he understands it.
xxx
It is Descartes' democratized version of
this restriction which then came to be regarded as the very hallmark of self-evidence by
the 20
th
century.

Before going further to evaluate these restrictions, I want it to be clear that I'm
starting my critique of this traditional position from the standpoint of the experience of
self-evidence. The notion that self-evidence is a property of a proposition (or belief) is
only half of the truth about it. In order to be evident, a belief must be evident to
someone. It makes no sense to say that a belief is evident in itself, for evident is an
intentional term a term that requires both a subject and an object. For example, it

19
makes no sense to say that something is seen though no one sees it, and it makes no sense
to say someone hears if that person doesn't hear anything. J ust so, it makes no sense to
say that something is evident unless there is someone to whom it is evident. The
importance of this point is that it forces us to recognize that self-evident is a relation
which requires a knowing subject as well as a known object; it requires that someone
actually experience the self-evidence of a belief if its truth is to be more than merely
potentially evident.
xxxi
For these reasons, self-evidence needs to be understood as an
experience, and that experience needs to be described. Here, then, is my proposal for that
description:

A belief, B, is self-evident to a person P provided that:

1. B is directly produced in P by experience
and is not believed by inferring it from other
information,
xxxii


2. B is experienced by P as prima facie true, and

3. B is irresistible to P.
xxxiii


Let me briefly explain each item. The first one recognizes that self-evident beliefs
all have in common that they are simply produced in us by some experience rather than
being inferred from other information. By experience let's refer for now only to the
ordinary and reliable modes of acquiring information
xxxiv
as normal perception, memory,
introspection, or rational reflection, regardless of the particular object of the
experience.
xxxv
(Later it will become apparent why experiences which are not ordinary
can also be self-evident.) These ordinary modes of experience are ones which we all
confirm over our lifetimes as reliable practices for gathering information as opposed to,
say, the hunch or feeling that today I'll win the lottery. We all form beliefs every day
which are produced in us by each of these reliable modes of experience, and many of
them have the quality of self-evidence because they satisfy the three conditions
mentioned above. An example of a self-evident belief produced by perception is your
belief that the words you are now seeing are before you. You are not drawing an
inference that they are there; rather, your experience of seeing them is directly producing
in you the belief that they are really before you. Self-evident memory beliefs include your
name, address, and telephone number. The experience of remembering them reactivates
in you those beliefs in a direct way that differs from inference. Likewise, you can
introspect and find that you are tired or theres an ache in your back or whatever. Such
introspective beliefs are also simply produced in you rather than being conclusions at the
end of a chain of reasoning. Finally, there are beliefs that arise just from reflecting upon
something the sort of experience many thinkers have called rational intuition. For
example, you can think of 1 +1 =2 and just see that it is true. None of these sample
beliefs are arrived at via a process of reasoning from other information; rather they are
produced in you by one or another normally reliable mode of experience.
xxxvi


20

As to the second point of the description of self-evidence, please notice that all
the examples given in the previous paragraph are also experienced as prima facie true.
Their truth is not a guess (hypothesis), nor is it suggested by other beliefs or believed on
the recommendation of other people; in each case the beliefs themselves look glaringly
true. And as regards the third part of the description, these beliefs are all ones you find to
be irresistible. This means that once you form them you cant get yourself to disbelieve
them no matter how hard you try.
xxxvii


Please notice that there are several things many people associate with self-
evidence that I deliberately did not include in my description. For one thing, I did not say
that a self-evident belief is one that must be seen to be true immediately upon under-
standing it (some are, some are not). Nor did I say that seeing a truth as self-evident
doesn't involve reflection or judgment. Reflection and comparison are also experiences,
of course, and it is rare that they are not indispensable accompaniments to the experience
of self-evidence. For example, many years ago I learned to tune pianos. It took an
apprenticeship of ear training for me to learn to hear whether a tone was sharp or flat
compared to another. But now that I have learned how to do that, it is self-evident to me
whenever one pitch is out of tune with another. This example also serves to dislodge
another mistake that is often assumed about self-evidence, namely, the idea that it takes
no background information or conditioning to apprehend a self-evident truth. Not so. An
even more striking example of this point is given by Tobias Danzig who tells of a tribe in
Africa whose language contained only words for one, two, and many.
xxxviii
Without the
concept and word for 4 it couldnt be self-evident to those people that 2 +2 =4, while for
those who have been initiated into arithmetic the judgment 2 +2 =4 is as self-evident as
anything can be.

Since seeing the self-evidence of a belief does not exclude reflection or
comparison, and since it need not happen instantaneously, there is no inconsistency in my
now claiming that parts 2. and 3. of the description of self-evident I just offered are
themselves self-evident. You need only to compare them to your own experiences of self-
evident beliefs to confirm their accuracy, and as I've been saying - comparing them to
your experiences wont disqualify them as a genuinely self-evident. And that is exactly
why I've proposed them. They are the results I get when I reflect upon and compare my
own experiences of self-evident beliefs, so that it is self-evident to me that the parts of the
description are indeed elements of those beliefs. But I mean by this that the description
fits them as we actually experience them, aside from the restrictions placed on them by
Aristotle and Descartes. So what are we to make of those restrictions? If genuine
knowledge consists of beliefs that are self-evident or proven, then surely it is fair to ask
whether these restrictions are self-evident or proven. That is the question which has
never been asked over the many centuries of their nearly universal acceptance. But it
needs to be asked. For if they themselves are neither self-evident nor proven then they
cannot count as knowledge. They may, then, be nothing more than unjustified wishful
thinking we are entitled to dismiss if our experience differs from them.

21

II. A Critique of the Traditional Restrictions on Self Evidence

A. Lets start with the restriction insisted on by Descartes, and which is now so
widely accepted that it is often treated as the very definition of self-evident. It is what I
call The Everybody Requirement. It says that for a belief to be genuinely self-evident,
every person who is in the least degree rational and understands the statement of it,
must see it as self-evidently true.
xxxix
The question now before us is: Is this restriction
itself proven or self-evident?

Ill begin with whether its proven, and start by calling attention to something
very peculiar about it. The peculiarity is that it needs only to be stated to leave us
wondering how anyone could ever prove whether any belief meets its demand. How
could we discover for any belief that it is, was, and forever will be, experienced as self-
evidently true by everybody who understands it? You see, everybody cannot mean just
those now living; it has to mean all humans no matter when they lived or will live. So
even if we could discover that every person on earth now sees a particular belief to be
self-evidently true (which would be hard enough to do), that would tell us nothing about
whether all the dead have also seen it to be true or whether all the unborn will agree with
it in the future. For this reason we cannot discover for any particular belief whether it
meets the requirement. That's bad enough, but it's not all. Because there is no way to find
out whether all self-evident beliefs in fact have this characteristic, there is no way to
prove that it must be true of them all. For the restriction to be correct it would have to be
both universally true and necessarily true, and the second presupposes the first. So if we
can't establish the first we can't establish the second. For that same reason if someone
tries to reply to this criticism by saying that the restriction is merely being stipulated, then
the result will be that no beliefs whatever can be known to be self-evident. but in either
case there is simply no way to prove the restriction is true.

Let me put this point in another way to be sure it's clear. The inaccessibility of
what people believed in the past or will believe in the future is not merely a practical
snag, but is fatal to any proof of this restriction. Since we cant survey everyone, no
belief whatever can be known to meet its requirement. Therefore there can be no
inductive evidence that the everybody requirement applies to any self-evident truth let
alone to every one of them. But if we can't even know that all beliefs experienced as self-
evident in fact have this characteristic, then we're in no position to argue that they all
must have it. We cannot gather inductive information that would give us premises from
which to infer its necessity, and we cannot propose premises alleged to be self-evident
from which to deduce it without begging the question. Hence this restriction is not merely
in fact unproven, but is unprovable in principle. Therefore, if it is to qualify as
knowledge, the everybody requirement must be self-evident. Is it?

The answer is no because it is not self-evident to me. I am not alone in that
respect, but even if I were the restriction would still fail its own requirement for self-

22
evidence. Thus it is hoist on its own petard. And since it is neither self-evident nor proven
it is not knowledge but mere opinion.

Perhaps this shouldnt be too surprising. After all, if correct, the restriction would
- as I keep saying - rule out of self-evidence such beliefs as that these words are now
before you, that there are real objects around you, that other people have minds, and your
name, address, and telephone number. So the really surprising thing is not that this
restriction fails to qualify as knowledge, but that it was ever taken seriously. But taken
seriously it certainly was! Since the time of Descartes, dozens of the best minds have
tried for centuries to prove that there are really objects around us, that other people have
minds, and that God exists, etc., and the only reason they thought such a project was
needed in the first place was that the self-evidence of those beliefs had been ruled out by
this restriction and its companions.

B. The next restriction is one proposed by Aristotle which insists that to be
genuinely self-evident, a belief must be a necessary truth. That means it has to be a law of
some kind, i.e., a truth that either cannot be conceived to be false or which cannot be
altered by any power or change of circumstances in the cosmos. Here are some examples
of necessary truths: 1 +1 =2; things equal to the same thing are equal to each another;
nothing can appear red and green all over at the same time; all bachelors are unmarried;
and 79 x 125 =9875. (Before we go any further, notice that since it is not a necessary
truth that these words are before you, that there are objects around you, or that other
people have minds, this restriction rules out the self-evidence of those beliefs every bit as
much as the everybody requirement did.)

Now many (but not all) necessary truths are known because their necessity is self-
evident; that is, you can just see not only that they are true but that they can not be
made false by any conceivable change in circumstances. 1 +1 =2 is an example. But the
fact that many necessary truths are known because they are self-evident is not in
question. What is in question just now is different. It's whether only necessary truths can
be self-evident. That is the restriction we must now examine to see whether it is
knowledge or mere opinion. So lets do what we did with the everybody requirement,
and ask whether the necessity requirement is itself self-evident or proven. In order to
answer this question, lets start with whether it's self-evident. To know whether it is self-
evident, we would first have to know whether the restriction meets its own requirement.
That is, we must know whether it's a necessary truth that all self-evident beliefs must be
necessary truths. Is that self-evident?

But right away there is an insurmountable difficulty for anyone wishing to claim
that it's self-evident that the restriction meets its own requirement and is thus itself a
necessary truth. The difficulty is that the claim is hopelessly circular. We would have to
know the requirement to be necessary in order to know it is genuinely self-evident, while
we would have to know it to be self-evident for us to know it is a necessary truth! So
although it must be both or neither, we are left with no way of telling which. As a result,

23
the necessity requirement cannot itself be knowledge on grounds that it is self-evident. So
can its own necessity be proven?

First off, I cannot resist pointing out that no one has ever even tried to offer a
proof that this restriction is true - or even that it meets its own requirement. Think of that.
No proof has even been attempted in the more than 2300 years since it was proposed! No
doubt thats because its hard to imagine what a proof of it could possibly look like. What
could serve as undoubtedly true premises from which to deduce this restriction? How
could any proposed premises be so undeniable as to make us give up the experienced
self-evidence of such (non-necessary) beliefs as that these words are now before you? No
doubt it is obstacles such as these which have prevented attempts at proving this
restriction. Of course, the fact that no one has ever deduced it from other premises isn't
conclusive all by itself because there is yet another way to argue that a belief is a
necessary truth. That other way consists of showing it has a self-contradictory denial.
Here's what that means.

Take the statement: All bachelors are unmarried. To deny that, wed have to
assert: Some bachelors are married. Is the concept of a married bachelor self-
contradictory? Surely it is. But if some bachelors are married contradicts itself, that
constitutes a proof that All bachelors are unmarried is a necessary truth. Heres another
example: No circles can be squares. To deny this we must affirm: There is at least one
circle that is also a square. Is a square circle an absurd self-contradiction? It sure is. And
in that case No circles are squares is proven to be a necessary truth. But now try this
same test with the necessity restriction on self-evidence. Here is its denial: There is at
least one self-evident truth that is not a necessary truth. Is that patently self-
contradictory the way married bachelors or square circles are? Is it an absurd contra-
diction to think that its self-evident that the words you are now seeing are really before
you? Of course not! There is not the slightest reason to think that if you deny the
restriction you contradict yourself. But if the necessity restriction cannot be proven from
other premises to be a necessary truth and cannot be shown to have a self-contradictory
denial, it cannot be proven to be a necessary truth at all. And since we have already seen
why its necessity cant be self-evident, the conclusion must be that this requirement also
fails both conditions for being genuine knowledge: it is neither self-evident nor proven.
Thus it, too, is hoist on its own petard every bit as much as is the everybody
requirement. They are both in the same (sunken) epistemological boat. Neither of them
has any proof, and each fails to meet its own requirement for being self-evident. (Of
course, each also fails the requirement of the other for being self-evident as well!) They
are therefore not knowledge but mere opinions.




Bad opinions.

24
The reason they are bad opinions is that the evidence against both restrictions
persists in everyone's experience all day every day. I mean experiences that produce
beliefs which fit our description of self-evidence but do not meet the everybody and
necessity requirements. Once again, these beliefs include such examples as perceptual
beliefs (there are objects around us including the words you now see), memory beliefs
(our names and addresses), introspective beliefs (that you have a slight headache). And
surely there are many more self-evident beliefs produced by rational reflection than the
necessary truths such as 1 +1 =2: there are divinity beliefs and the belief that other
people have minds, for example.

C. The last of the three restrictions on what is allowed to count as self-evident
knowledge is also from Aristotle and was repeated by Descartes. It requires that if a
belief is genuinely self-evident it must be infallibly true.
xl
Now please do not confuse
infallibility with certainty. For a belief to be infallible it would have to be impossible for
us to be wrong about it, and we do not have to be infallible to be certain of something
beyond a reasonable doubt. No doubt you are certain that the words you are reading right
now are really before you, and you are justified in that certainty because their existence is
self-evident to you. But that doesnt mean that it's impossible for you ever to be mistaken
about anything you see, so you are not acquiring that belief by means of an infallible
capacity. Please understand, then, that the infallibility requirement is an extremely strong
claim. It means that all genuinely self-evident beliefs must be ones which could not
possibly be false under any circumstances. So if a belief is formed by a capacity of ours
that can ever be mistaken, or if there is any conceivable circumstance under which it
could be false, it is not an infallible belief.

There are several things amiss with this restriction.

First, I think there is a broad, general objection to this requirement that stems
from an attitude engendered by our Christian heritage. That attitude warns us against
thinking of ourselves more highly than we ought to think. (Rom. 12:3) The objection
begins by asking ourselves: what would ever tempt us to suppose we have any belief-
forming capacity that is infallible? To this question there is, in Genesis, a scary answer.
For Genesis records that the Fall into sin occurred when humans caved in to the
temptation of wanting to be divine! Keep in mind that the temptation was not simply to
eat forbidden fruit. Rather it went like this: If you disobey God you will be just like him,
knowing good and evil. So there is something very sinister about being tempted to think
there is any capacity we have for knowing as God does for having knowledge that is
infallible. Consider: our perception is generally reliable but not infallible; our memories
are generally reliable but not infallible; introspective beliefs are likewise reliable but not
infallible, and our reflection and reasoning is generally reliable but not infallible. What
good reason can we have, then, to suppose our capacity to experience self-evident truths
is any different? Since we can still be justifiably certain of a belief without being
infallible, lets leave infallibility to God.


25
Second, this restriction can't be defended by claiming it's self-evident because that
would involve the same vicious circularity we found to be the case for claiming the
necessity requirement is self-evident. We would have to know the restriction to be
infallible to know it is self-evident, and we would have to know it is self-evident to know
it is infallible. Thus it could be neither just as well as it could be both, and we are left
with no way to decide.

Finally, there is no proof for this restriction either. In this case, too, no one has
ever so much as attempted a proof that every genuinely self-evident belief must be
infallible, and I doubt anyone can even imagine what such a proof would look like. The
reason for that doubt is that there seems to be a conceivable set of circumstances under
which almost any belief, no matter how certain it seems, could possibly be mistaken.
Take for example the belief that 1 +1 =2. Wouldnt that look just as true if Alpha
Centaurians were bombarding our brains with Tachyon waves so as to make it look
certain when it is really false? (Notice that a set of circumstances doesnt have to be real
to defeat the infallibility of a belief; it only needs only to be conceivable.) The
conceivable circumstance that some force is controlling your brain so as to make you
believe that 1 +1 =2 or that the words you're now seeing are really before you, is enough
to show that you dont know those things infallibly. And this point all by itself is enough
to defeat the infallibility of the infallibility requirement. Ask yourself: is the belief all
genuinely self-evident truths must be known infallibly itself an infallible truth? The
answer can only be no because even if it looks true to you it could still be false if some
force were controlling your mind to make it look true. So this restriction also fails to meet
its own requirement. As with the necessity requirement, it is therefore neither self-evident
nor proven.

At this point I can anticipate that some readers will say, Not so fast! There are
surely some beliefs that are infallible, namely the ones we call 'incorrigible' beliefs
beliefs about our own internal states. These just could not be false. This is surely right.
We can't be mistaken that, e.g., our head seems to hurt, even if it were only because
Alpha Centaurians were making us think so. But this does not defeat my point here,
because such beliefs are still not formed by a capacity that is infallible. They are formed
by introspection which is notoriously fallible - when it comes to our own motives, for
example. Moreover, even incorrigible beliefs involve judgment, and we do at times revise
those judgments. I may tell you in all sincerity that I have a headache but on later
reflection come to believe that what I really experienced was a toothache. These
examples do not, however, undermine the point that we have beliefs about how things
seem to us at a particular time that we cannot correct and which are (taken individually)
unfalsifiable even if acquired by a fallible capacity. But the fact that there are such beliefs
doesn't show much. All it shows is that a very limited class of beliefs about how our
internal states seem to us cannot be falsified. That, however, doesn't give us the slightest
reason to suppose that all genuinely self-evident beliefs must be like them in that respect,
or that they alone are the only genuinely self-evident beliefs. (And isn't it ironic that the

26
beliefs which best qualify as incorrigible all fail to satisfy the everybody and necessity
requirements?)

The conclusion of this discussion is obvious. None of the restrictions can count as
self-evident, and none of them has any proof. Furthermore, none of them meets either its
own requirement or the requirements of its companion restrictions. So our conclusion
must be that none of them is knowledge. They are but mere opinions. Moreover, they are
opinions held (as I keep saying) in the face of the dogged fact that they are at odds with
everyones experiences of self-evidence every day. They are, therefore, among the most
unwarranted influential proposals ever to burden an intellectual tradition. There is not the
slightest reason for allowing them to control and overrule everyones experiences to the
contrary. Rather, they should be dismissed with prejudice, and the Grand Masters of our
intellectual tradition should no longer be allowed to dictate from on high what they will
permit us to count as self-evident. Its time that self-evidence be understood from the
bottom up rather than from the top down; from the reports of what people in fact
experience to be self-evident, not from what a few philosophers wish to restrict them to
be. If we do that not only will such beliefs as the reality of objects around us, our names,
addresses, and telephone numbers, that other people have minds, and that the words you
now see are really there, turn out to be self-evident; so will the belief that God is real for
those who experience it as self-evident. There is simply no good reason to dismiss as
spurious the experience of billions of people who find it self-evident that the gospel is the
truth about God from God. On the contrary, they are as entitled to be as certain of that as
you are that these words are before you.
xli

III. Clarifications Concerning the Self-Evidence of Christian Belief

Now there are just a ton of possible misunderstandings that can arise concerning
what Ive just said, so Im going to take some time to head off at least a few of them.

A. First, it is important to keep in mind that the intuitive certainty which is part of
the experience of self-evidence should not be confused with the feelings of certainty
which normally accompany such an experience. Our feelings are variable with respect to
a great number of self-evident truths owing to a wide variety of factors, many of which
are subjective. This is especially true of self-evidence as it plays its role in our personal
relationships, in contrast to other self-evident truths especially the truths obtained by
reflection - the ones I mentioned earlier which are often called "rational intuitions." There
is little room for variation in our feelings about 1 +1 =2, for example, as we simply don't
have any (or at least they are weak and few). By contrast, there are many variations in our
feelings concerning what is self-evident in our relationships with other persons including
God. This can lead to the mistaken judgment that perhaps these differences indicate
degrees of certainty rather than differences in our feelings about it, so that belief in God's
reality is actually less certain. The way to see the fault in that judgment is to set aside
feelings for a moment and check belief in God against the three hallmarks of self-
evidence. Is your belief in God the product of hearing the gospel rather than an inference?

27
Is God's reality prima facie true for you? Is it irresistible for you so that you can't get
yourself to believe that it's false? If so, then what does it's truth lack that the truth of 1 +1
=2 does not lack?

B. Second, it should already be clear that since the everybody and infallibility
requirements are groundless, the fact that it is self-evident to Christians that the gospel is
the truth about God from God is not being offered as a reason why anyone else should
believe it. The only one who can actually give another person a change of experience so
as to produce belief in God is the Holy Spirit of God. As I've already pointed out: people
have contrary experiences of self-evidence, and when they do there is no neutral way for
them to settle their differences (and as I also said, this is true not just for divinity beliefs
but also for fundamental truths in logic, math, ethics, etc.).
xlii
That fact, however, does
nothing to diminish the importance of self-evidence as a means of knowledge. What is
self-evident for a person is knowledge for that person and there is no better justification -
and often no other justification - for a belief than its self-evidence. Keep in mind that
there are many important beliefs that cannot be known any other way, and that there can
be no proof of anything unless we already have self-evident truths without proof. This is
because unless the rules of proof were self-evident they would themselves require proof.
But since they could only be proven by their own use, every attempt to prove them would
beg the question. Not only that, quite aside from the rules of proof, the premises of an
argument would also have to appeal to self-evident beliefs at some point or else they
would require an endless chain of proofs. That is, unless the series of proofs for premises
ended with self-evident truths, it would go on forever in an infinite regress of proofs and
nothing would ever actually get proven.

C. I deliberately avoided saying that if a belief is experienced as self-evident it
can never be overturned. At times, people experience a conflict of self-evident beliefs
forcing them to reject one or the other. And at other times, a self-evident belief can be
overturned by an accumulation of many other convincing beliefs even if those are less
than self-evident.

In fact, I find that not just philosophers and scientists but quite ordinarily folk -
those whom David Hume colorfully described as "the masses of the ignorant, unlearned,
children, and savages" - regularly test the beliefs they experience as self-evident. This is
common practice for the self-evident beliefs we form about what we see and hear, for
example, as well as for memory beliefs, beliefs delivered by introspection, and those we
see by rational reflection - including even axioms. We routinely do this in a number of
ways (which is a sign that we have an innate sense of our - and their - fallibility). For
example, we compare them to our other self-evident beliefs; we compare perceptions
with other perceptions, and check axioms for mutual consistency. We also check self-
evident beliefs against everyday experience and practice to see if they are compatible
with the wider context of our total experience, and with how they contribute to making
greater sense of that wider context. We compare our experience of them with the
experiences of others. And even average folk, as well as scholars and scientists, at times

28
check on how well they fit into, and contribute to, some more systematic explanation of a
segment of our lives such as a science or a law or a theology. All these and more - are
normal, common practices. And they are all employed upon belief in God by those for
whom that belief is experienced as self-evident. In this way, belief in God achieves its
full status as knowledge not merely because of an instantaneous flash of insight (though
there may be one), but ultimately earns our confidence through the constant testing and
confirmation that comes by living with it, in it, and through it. An initial flash of insight
(if there is one) is the beginning of the process, not the end.

D. I said if there is one in the last sentence because not everyone whose heart
has been opened to the truth about God has had that take place as an episode they can
recall or date. Many people have been raised as Christians so that they can never
remember a time they didn't believe it. This is analogous to being raised in a home where
your father and mother were mathematicians and not being able to recall the first time
you ever heard the axiom: things equal to the same thing are equal to each other. That
would do nothing to diminish the axiom's self-evidence and your belief in it would be no
less genuine. Of course, whenever a divinity belief is overturned and supplanted by belief
in God it is indeed because of a new experience which might well be recalled and dated
as is the case with any other newly acquired self-evident insight.

E. Another important point to notice is that I nowhere suggested that it is the
entirety of Christian teaching that is seen to be self-evidently true. In fact, that is never
the case. Rather, it is always some cluster of teachings that are seen to be self-evident,
and both the number of teachings in the cluster and just which ones are in the cluster
varies from person to person - although every cluster either explicitly includes God's
reality or beliefs which presuppose it. Thus God's reality is included either directly or
implicitly, and is one of the self-evident beliefs recognized as the truth about God from
God. Of course, there is always more in anyone's cluster than just God's reality; it is also
self-evident that God has made himself known through Christ as it is that "rewards those
who seek him."

Moreover, the contents of the cluster can grow over time for the same person;
teachings that are at first not seen to be self-evident may come to be self-evident to a
person as he or she matures in relationship with God. Meanwhile, the rest of the
teachings of scripture which are not individually experienced as self-evident are accepted
by faith in God's authority. That is, since it is self-evident that God is the Creator it
follows that it is God who has brought it about that the teachings which are not self-
evident have been conjoined to the ones that are self-evident. Thus they have the warrant
of divine authority and inspiration.
xliii


F. Earlier I mentioned in passing that this account of how belief in Gods reality
can be knowledge includes that it is irresistible, and thus not a choice. In fact, this feature
is true of all beliefs that are simply produced in us by experience, not only of the belief
that God exists. No self-evident beliefs are under our volitional control. If you doubt this

29
you can confirm it by an experiment: try to will yourself to believe that these words are
not really before your eyes or that 1 +1 doesnt equal 2. Can you do it? Can you will
yourself to believe that your name is not what it is, or that there are no objects around
you? If not, you have confirmed my point that (at least some) self-evident beliefs are not
under the control of your will. Moreover, you can try the same thing with beliefs you
merely accept and get the reverse result: even though you have accepted a friends
account of an auto accident you can, indeed, will yourself to disbelieve that account.

This last point is often disturbing to those Christians who are used to being told
that unbelievers must decide whether or not to believe in God and whether to accept
Christ as Savior. This sort of talk, common among many Christian preachers, can serve a
practical goal; it can be a way of challenging those who dont believe the gospel to take it
seriously. But while there is no question as to the practical usefulness of this way of
speaking, that doesnt make it theologically or epistemologically accurate. Let me add
right away that there is also no question here as to whether we have free will; surely we
do. The question is only whether our free will can control the acquisition or rejection of
self-evident beliefs the way it can control our choices of action. Im arguing that it
cannot, and that is what I expect some readers to find disturbing. Ive already asked you
to perform a thought-experiment that should give you reason to think self-evident beliefs
are not under our volitional control. But whether you agree that they are all like this or
not, the important point here is that belief in God is surely not under our volitional
control. In support of the same point, consider some of what the New Testament itself
has to say on this topic. As you read the quotes below, keep in mind what we have
already noticed as background to this point, namely, the way the New Testament speaks
of those who do not believe as blind to the truth of the gospel, and of their coming to
see its truth only if the Holy Spirit removes that blindness.

those who believe on his namewere born [into
belief] notof human will, but of God. (John 1:12-13)

No one can come to me unless the Father drags him,
and I will raise him up at the last day. (John 6:44)

My sheep hear my voice and I know themand I give
eternal life to them and they will never perish.My
Father who has given them to me is greater than all, and
no one is able to snatch them from my Fathers hand.
(John 10:27-28)

But although he [J esus] had performed many miracles
among them, yet they [the crowd] were not believing in
him. This was to fulfill the word of Isaiah the prophet
which he spoke: Lord who has believed our report? And
to whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed? For this

30
reason they could not believe. (John 12:37-39)

So then it [salvation] does not depend on the man who
wills but on God. (Rom. 9:16)

But the natural man does not receive the things of the
Spirit of God, they are folly to him, nor does he have
the ability to know them because they are Spiritually
discerned. (I Cor. 2:14)

if our gospel is veiled, it is veiled to those who are
perishing, in whose case the god of this world has
blinded the thoughts of the unbelieving so that they
might not see the light of gospel of the glory of Christ
who is the image of God For God is the one who
has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge
of the glory of God in the face of Christ. (II Cor. 4:4-6)

And you [before you believed] were dead in trespasses
and sins but God made us alive together with Christ
.For by grace you have been saved through faith; and
that is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God.
(Eph. 2:1-8)

The reason scripture gives for why humans are now blind to the truth about God is the
Fall into sin (where sin is religious rebellion against God rather than moral wrong-
doing). Since the Fall, human nature is such that we are unable to see the truth about God
unless enlightened by the Holy Spirit. As I phrased this point earlier: the Fall is the
explanation of why our damaged self-evidence antennae fail when it comes to what is
divine, although they continue to work well for other sorts of truths.
xliv


G. Sometimes when the texts listed above (and there are many others) are pointed
out, the objection is raised that unless people had the capacity to choose to believe in
Gods reality there would be no point in preaching the gospel. That, however, doesnt
even come close to being right. Many scripture texts speak of Gods word as the means
which the Holy Spirit uses to bring unbelievers to see the truth. That is, while the New
Testament says often that it is the work of the Spirit to remove the blindness of peoples
hearts, it also asserts that this happens in conjunction with their hearing Gods word (e.g.,
Faith comes by hearing the word of God, Rom. 10:17). So proclaiming Gods word to
the world doesnt lose one whit of its importance even though unbelievers are unable by
their own power to choose to believe it, any more than it loses its importance because
once they see its truth they are unable to choose to reject it (John 1:12-13, 10:27; Acts
13:48; II Tim. 1:9; Eph. 1:4-5). The Word of God still plays a crucial role, but it is not the

31
role of persuading by argument. Rather, it is the role of being the means by which a
person can have a new experience in which God's reality becomes a self-evident truth.

H. For these reasons it should now be obvious why believing the gospel on the
basis of hearing Gods word is not the same as accepting Christian teaching on the say-so
of the Bible writers or any other human. We do learn the contents of the gospel from the
New Testament, and we are grateful to the Saints who wrote it. We may also hear that
message proclaimed by others who have come after them, and be grateful to them as
well. But we no more believe what it teaches just because of who conveyed it than we
believe an axiom because our math teacher told it to us. To be sure, Im obliged to my
tenth grade geometry teacher for the knowledge that things equal to the same thing are
equal to each other. Shes the one who passed that information on to me. But I believe it
because its self-evident to me, not because she said it. Similarly, the gospel is believed
because it is self-evidently the truth about God from God - in the way explained in H.
above.

I. In the light of all this, what becomes of apologetics? Traditionally, apologetics
differs from witness because it offers arguments formulated to prove, clarify, or defend
Christian belief. On the position sketched above, it should be clear why all divinity
beliefs are the products of intuitions of self-evidence and are not the conclusions of
rational arguments. This implies that we should abandon the first part of the traditional
view, and not attempt to prove the truth of Christian beliefs to non-Christians (recall the
comments of Calvin and Pascal on this point). In addition, we also saw reasons for
concluding that whatever can be proven would thereby not be God. By contrast, however,
there can be no objection to clarifying Christian beliefs, either to Christians or non-
Christians. The question, then, is only where we should stand concerning a defense of
Christian teaching. Put in other words, the question is this: since our divinity belief is like
all others in being based on an intuition of self-evidence, is it possible to offer any sort of
assessment of our experience of self-evidence in comparison with that of other divinity
beliefs?

The basis for answering this question was already initiated in section C above
when I called attention to the fact that people regularly assess their self-evident beliefs
(religious or otherwise) in a number of ways. There I mentioned that two of those ways
were: 1) how well a particular self-evident belief comports with other self-evident and
well-established beliefs; and 2) how well that belief contributes to making overall sense
of our lives and world. In both respects I think a strong case can be made in defense of
the superiority of the Theistic divinity belief over the Naturalist or Pantheist divinity
beliefs, and for the Christian version of Theism over that of J udaism and Islam. And
while a detailed development of this defense will have to await the chapters devoted to
each of those traditions, a short preview of how such a comparative defense could go
seems called for here. For now, however, I'll sketch only how a comparison of Theism
could be developed with respect to Naturalism and Pantheism. Let's take Naturalism first.


32
1. Naturalism

Roughly the assessment goes like this. Attempting to explain the cosmos by
deifying any aspect of it, results in having to deny the self-evident truths that arise in
other aspects of it. There is a long history of this in Naturalism. Naturalists who deified
the logical and/or mathematical aspects of the cosmos denied the self-evidence of sense
perception, and those who regarded perceptions as uncaused tried to deny the self-
evidence of anything other than present sense perception. Likewise, those who regard
matter as divine and the principles of human thought as the products of evolution have
typically tried to deny all self-evident truths despite the fact that any knowledge of the
physical and biological aspects of the cosmos depend on the truths of math and logic, on
sense perception, and on the self-evidence of matter. The problem, in short, is that
deifying any one aspect of the cosmos will unavoidably require the denial of a number of
self-evident beliefs which arise in fields of science delimited by other of its aspects. In
this way the deification of any aspect of the natural world also results in diminishing our
overall understanding of the cosmos and so also fails the second test; the more self-
evident truths we are required to deny, the less coherent is our overall grasp of ourselves
and the world we live in. By contrast, Christian thinkers have long recognized and
maintained a multiplicity of self-evident truths in opposition to the denials of this one or
that which have come and gone with the varying trends in Naturalism.

2. Pantheism

These same two criteria will also clearly favor Theism over Pantheism. In fact,
Pantheists will want to reject those criteria as begging the question against them. This is
because from the Pantheist point of view there is one experience of self-evidence which
alone is genuine and which must be allowed to trump all the others: the experience of
mystical unity with the divine. In its purest form, Pantheism claims that the experience of
mystical unity shows that the inconceivable Divine Reality is really all there is. In other
words, it requires that it is not really self-evident, but is in fact false, that: there are
objects around us, 1 +1 =2, there is a cosmos at all, it is wrong to murder or steal, being
red excludes being green, if P and P implies Q then Q, and every other truth that is
experienced all day every day by everyone to be self-evidently true. From the viewpoint
of pure Pantheism, such intuitions of self-evidence as these are pseudo-self-evidence;
they mislead us into taking illusion for reality; they are therefore not to be judged by
whether they retain the most self-evident truths, but rejected by comparison to the one
that denies the most others. What is wrong with humans, on this view, is precisely that
they regard the self-evidence of, say, normal sense perception and basic rational truths of
reflection as genuine. It is because of that mistake people form attachments to the illusory
world and care about it. (There have been other versions of Pantheism which try to
ameliorate these consequences, as we shall see.)

Pantheists are correct therefore, when they object that our two criteria beg the
question against them and thus cannot prove the truth of the Theistic viewpoint. (Of

33
course, the reverse is also true.) But then we are not claiming that is what the criteria can
do. What we are pointing to is the fact that those are the criteria people ordinarily use to
judge their experiences of self-evidence in order to make sense of the world around them
and of themselves. This is admitted by the less-than-pure versions of Pantheism. They
grant that other experiences of self-evidence are what people need in order to live and
cope with the world around them. But the common ways we have for assessing them
overwhelmingly favor Theism. This is because the less-than-pure versions of Pantheism
all at some point require a violation of the logical law of non-contradiction. Against this
point, I know of no Pantheistic counter-reply which could justify taking the experience of
mystical unity to trump all other self-evident intuitions put together. Indeed, there have
been many Christians and Muslims who have had the same experience, do not interpret it
as doing away with the creator/creature distinction or with all other self-evident truths.

J . What, then, is to be said of the many sincere church-goers who do not have the
experience of seeing for themselves that the gospel is the truth about God from God?
Surely there are those who, if asked, would say something like: Well nobody really
knows about these things. We hope theyre true, and it would be great if they turn out to
be. Meanwhile we attend church and pray because they could be true and because they
give us hope, comfort in times of tragedy, moral guidance, and promote family unity.
Besides, the church (synagogue, mosque, temple) does a lot of good work in the world.
It is common knowledge that this is the attitude of many worshippers. Ive had J ewish,
Christian, Muslim, and Hindu clergy say to me: If even half those who show up for
worship truly believed, wed really have something.

For people who see belief in God this way it is, indeed, their choice. And for that
reason it is also an opinion they merely accept rather than know. For them, divinity
beliefs are chosen in essentially the same way they choose a political party or where to
invest their money. But the texts quoted in section H. above (along with many others),
show why the NT position concerning them is that however sincere, hard-working, and
self-sacrificing, such people may be (and they often truly are), they are fellow-travelers
who do not believe Christian teachings in the sense the New Testament requires. Hard as
it may be to hear, the New Testament insists (along with all the other world religions)
that genuine belief comes from the experience of seeing the truth as self-evident, and not
merely as a set of hopes devoutly to be wished for (Matt. 13: 18-25).

Please do not misunderstand this point. It does not mean that anyone is a fellow
traveler who, from natural timidity or cultural intimidation, feels hesitant or doubtful
about his or her belief in God. I intend only to characterize as fellow travelers those who
really do not see the gospel to be true, and so regard it as only wishful thinking.

K. The distinction between seeing a divinity belief as self-evidently true as over
against merely accepting it as a fellow-traveler, is also part of the answer to the
accusation that religious beliefs are in fact the products of cultural conditioning rather
than an experience of intuitive self-evidence. This is the criticism that proposes peoples

34
divinity beliefs are all the result of the social-historical influences of their time and place.
After all, isnt it just obvious that most of the people who live in an area dominated by a
particular religion adopt that religion? Most people in India are Hindu; most people in
J apan or Thailand are Buddhist; and most people in the Near East are Muslim. So doesn't
our talk about self-evidence as a deliverance of reason and seeing the truth simply
ignore these obvious facts?

One part of the reply to this criticism is to point to the fact that a large percentage
of people in any particular culture are fellow travelers who dont in fact see its prevailing
religion to be self-evidently true. Of course, it is impossible to say precisely what per-
centage of any population belongs to this category. But its not necessary to know that
because this point is not the whole answer to the historicist criticism. The rest of the
answer begins by agreeing that there is also a higher percentage of true believers as well
as fellow-travelers in those areas where a particular tradition dominates. What explains
that? The answer is that it is due to the greater exposure people have to any beliefs,
there is more opportunity for them to be experienced as self-evident. Consider the way
divinity beliefs are parallel to axioms of math in this respect. Someone raised in, say,
ancient Greece or Egypt would have had a much better chance of being exposed to
axioms of geometry than would a person who lived in another culture that did not have
any geometry or had very little. The greater exposure to axioms accounts for the greater
percentage of people with the opportunity to actually experience them as self-evident.
J ust so, the greater exposure to Hindu teaching in India accounts for the greater number
of people there who really see them as self-evident as well as for the greater number of
fellow-travelers.

One more point needs to be made before finishing with this objection. There are
two ways this claim about the role of cultural influence can be taken, and Ive been
dealing with only one of them. The one I just replied to takes the criticism to mean that
culture provides the setting for, and exerts a slant upon, our beliefs. But if the objection is
intended in a stronger sense, if it's supposed to mean that our cultural-historical setting is
not merely influential but all-determining, then it has overreached itself and become self-
canceling. For if it is claiming that all beliefs are wholly determined by our historical
situation or culture, then that belief itself would also be historically/culturally determined.
It would then be just one more belief that is forced on those who hold it by non-rational
forces, along with all their other beliefs. In that case there would be no genuinely self-
evident beliefs and no proofs either, and nothing whatever could be known to be true. So
the strong version of the criticism from cultural influence fails because it entails that even
if it were true it could never be known to be true. The weak version that says beliefs are
influenced by culture is undoubtedly true, but does not affect my contention that when
belief in God is grounded in an intuition of its self-evidence, it is knowledge not
opinion.
xlv


There is also significant evidence against history and culture being all-determin-
ing for beliefs, namely, the existence of cases of counter-culture beliefs. There are many

35
cases of people being raised in a powerful tradition who never see it to be true but then
instantly see a contrary teaching to be true upon first encountering it. In part one of this
chapter we noticed the case of Sadhu Sundar Singh, but there are many others and they
go in all directions. There have been people who were raised in a strong
materialist/atheist milieu who become Christians upon hearing the gospel, and others
raised in a strongly Christian environment who became Buddhist or materialist or
whatnot upon being exposed to those teachings. If culture were all-powerful in producing
beliefs, such cases would be impossible.
xlvi


L. This position about the experience of self-evidence should be misunderstood as
implying that there is no distinction whatever to be drawn between genuine and spurious
experiences of it. It is indeed possible that someone mistake the emotional attractiveness
(or repugnance) of a belief for its self-evident truth (or falsity). Similarly, it is possible to
confuse being accustomed to an assumption, or simply never having questioned it, with
its being prima facie and irresistibly true. So while the traditional restrictions on self-
evidence fail and need not be taken seriously, that doesn't make every appeal to self-
evidence equally legitimate. Rather, it means that finding criteria for genuine self-
evidence is a trickier matter than the tradition had supposed. On this point, and without
pretending to offer anything close to a complete set of guidelines, I offer a few
suggestions.

1. The obvious place to start in distinguishing genuine experiences of self-
evidence from beliefs which we may merely be accustomed or have never questioned, is
by drawing these very distinctions and reflecting on whether we actually have the
experience of self-evidence as described earlier. This requires brutal honesty of
ourselves. We must question whether the belief at stake is one that was directly produced
in us by experience and which compels our belief or whether we actually hold it on other
grounds. If it fails any part of that description, we must own up to the conclusion that the
belief is not really self-evident for us. (Of course, this is an academic answer to an
academic question about the position advocated here. It does not mean that all believers
are obliged or equipped to engage in such reflection, nor does it suggest that unless they
do they can't be confident that their belief is genuine.)

2. An additional difference between a belief that is only emotionally
attractive and one that is really self-evident is that genuinely self-evident beliefs will
endure the test of time rather than fluctuate with either our external circumstances or
internal states. They will remain though changes due to age, health, altered relationships,
and all the other variable circumstances of life. Notice that this idea comports well with
an old Christian tradition to the effect that those whose trust in God remains steadfast to
death, have thereby been shown to have had genuine belief: He that endures to the end
shall be saved (Matt. 10:22).

M. Finally, there is one more factor that should be mentioned in connection with
confusions about self-evidence, especially as it affects overtly religious beliefs and

36
practices. That factor is the way even self-evident beliefs can fail to be translated into
action owing to other influences, especially group loyalty. For people who identify with
an all-absorbing community of belief or program of action, whether it is religious,
political, national, ethnic, or whatever, the purposes of that community or program may
become controlling in a way that often overrides even the self-evident beliefs of its
members. This is why even people who really believe, e.g., that God has revealed that
murder is wrong, can be induced to acts of violence when a powerful group loyalty seems
to demand that the group's destiny trumps everyone else's rights. We might expect such
inconsistency from fellow-travelers, but it is both surprising and discouraging that it can
also be true of those who experience as self-evident that the prohibition of murder comes
from God himself. The sad truth is that humans are seriously flawed in this respect. Not
only religious beliefs, but beliefs of all kinds which are experienced as self-evident,
genuinely embraced, and fervently promoted, can be trumped in so far as motivating
action is concerned by other influences: the prospect of wealth, fame, and power are well-
known in this connection, but intense loyalty to a group or program must surely also be
counted among them. Because of this great evils have been done in the name of religious
beliefs even when it is not the religious beliefs themselves which drive the evils. In the
same way, great evils have been done in the name of science, justice, progress, national
pride, and patriotism, even by people who had previously experienced those very evils as
self-evidently wicked.

IV. Conclusion

There is, of course, much more that could be said on virtually every point just
covered, and much that has not been covered. This chapter does not pretend to be an
entire theory of knowledge. But I hope that clearing up these particular misunderstand-
ings and objections will be enough to show at least why this critique of the western
intellectual tradition concerning self-evidence deserves to stand. That tradition missed the
boat when it dismissed the most prevalent and persistent sort of self-evidence, normal
sense perception, and the most important case of it, belief in God. Both mistakes were
motivated by a Naturalist belief in the divinity of rational principles, so that in relation to
belief in God the dismissal actually begged the question: it wanted self-evidence
restricted to what it regarded as divine, and on that ground denied self-evidence to belief
in God! This makes it all the more regrettable that so many Christians have accepted
those traditional restrictions. Thinking themselves barred from appeal to self-evidence,
many Christians have attempted to construct proofs of God's existence. And the failures
of the proofs in turn led to yet another step in the wrong direction, namely, the retreat
from holding that belief in God can be proven to the position that since it can't be proven
God's reality is a matter of faith and is thus less than knowledge.

V. A Quick After-Thought

It might occur to some readers to object that if the position defended here were to
become widely accepted it will only serve to divide people further and set them more at

37
odds with one another than they already are. If divinity beliefs are all experienced as self
evident, and there is no way to settle which is right via rational argument, will we not end
up with dogmatism and rock-throwing instead of dialog?

That, I believe, is exactly the reverse of the truth.

Precisely what has led to the worst conflicts in human history is the conviction
that all differences of belief are, in principle, able to be settled by purely rational
argument. It is that insidious idea which has repeatedly led to the conclusion that those
who are not persuaded by the arguments for a particular viewpoint must therefore be less
than fully rational, which is but one short step from seeing the unpersuaded as less than
fully human. And it is that conclusion which has been used to excuse the worst evils in
history. But if that overestimation of reasoning is now replaced by recollecting that there
is more to reason than discursive argument; if we recognize instead that reason also
includes intuitions of self-evidence which are not universally shared and that divinity
beliefs are among these contrary intuitions and so are impervious to argument, then the
way will be opened to seeing differences among divinity beliefs in a new light. Freed
from being forced to say that opposing divinity beliefs must be sub-rational, we may be
able instead to begin the practice of imagining ourselves as if; imagining what it would
be like to have a different intuition and to see things from the perspective of another
divinity belief we do not actually hold. We might then also be able to gain some inkling
of how our own belief and its major practices would look from those other points of
view. And that, I suggest, is the best basis for dialog and mutual understanding that we
can hope to achieve.



















Copyright 2010 Roy Clouser

38


i
ENDNOTES

i Reginald Hill, On Beulah Height (New York: Dell Publishing, 1998), 353.
ii
At times the say-so of others can approach certainty, as when we read of the existence of places
we have never visited. That is because we are aware that accounts of the existence of those places could
easily be refuted were they not true, and that they have instead been confirmed and reconfirmed by
countless people who had no motivation to lie. In such cases the belief that they exist is therefore grounded
upon strong second-hand self-evidence, and in my view can also count as knowledge under the proper
conditions. Therefore I regard not only self-evident beliefs to count as knowledge, but also well-attested
near-certainties because they too are beyond a reasonable doubt..
iii
Luke 1:4; John 6:69; Acts 12:11, 22:30, 25:26; I Tim. 2:4, 4:3; I John 2:3, 4:16, 5:13. Some of
these simply take notice of the difference between opinion and knowing for certain, but others of them also
apply that difference in order to say that we not only believe but know God and the truth of the gospel.
iv
This fits perfectly with what we saw in chapter one about the three senses of the term religious
belief. In Christianity, belief in Gods reality is religious in the first sense and is knowledge. Our beliefs
about how to stand in right relation to God are beliefs in sense three since they are taken on faith in Gods
promises. The second sense of religious belief is partly like the first and partly like the third. We know
that God is the origin of everything other than himself since that is part of the meaning of divine, but we
take on faith the revealed fact that God created by calling all else into existence ex nihilo, rather than by
extension of himself (Heb. 11:3).
v
B. H. Streeter and A. J . Appasamy, The Sadu (London: Macmillan, 1921), 5-7.
vi
There are literally tens of thousands of nearly identical reports from many centuries. See Wm
J ames, The Varieties of Religious Experience (NY: Longmans, Green, 1929).
vii
This was missed by Wm J ames in his monumental work, The Varieties of Religious Experience.
J ames classifies reports of strange experiences and tries to evaluate whether they are pathological or
reliable. What he misses is that whether produced by strange experiences or not, religious beliefs (as I have
defined them) get their traction from their self-evidence. J ames almost sees this when he says of the
stranger experiences: "One may indeed be entirely without them,... but if you do have them at all strongly,
the probability is that you cannot help regarding them as genuine perceptions of truth, as revelations of a
kind of reality which no adverse argument, however unanswerable by you in words, can expell from your
belief." (pp. 72 - 73). No doubt he stopped short of recognizing this as a description of self-evidence owing
to the traditional restrictions on self-evidence.
viii
Most English translations use "mind' where the Greek has "heart." This is an important point
because in the NT view, it is the heart - the unity of the self - which knows, not just the intellect so that
belief is not merely "intellectual assent." Rather, acts of intellectual assent are motivated by the orientation
of heart-belief.
ix
Institutes, 1, vii, 2.
x
Ibid., 1, vii, 4.
xi
Ibid., 1, vii, 5.
xii
Pensees, trans. J . Warrington (London: J M Dent & Sons, 1973), p. 22.
xiii
Many other writers besides those quoted earlier have recognized this point. E.g., Matthew Henry's
comments on John 3 in A Commentary on the Whole Bible (Iowa Falls: World Bible Publishers, no date),
889, 890: "... the gospel is light, and , when the gospel came, light came into the world. Light is self-
evidencing, so is the gospel; it proves its own divine origin."
xiv
This also includes, of course, the exercise of trust or faith. Acts of faith are motivated by the
dispositions of the heart, and are good indicators of its dispositions. Thus what a person trusts
unconditionally reflects his or her divinity belief because only what exists unconditionally could be
unconditionally trustworthy. Luther captured this point when he wrote: "What does it mean to have a God?
As I have often said, the trust and faith of the heart alone make both God or an idol. If your faith and trust
are right then your God is the true God... if your trust is false and wrong, then you have not the true God.

39

That to which your heart clings and entrusts itself is, I say, really your God." (from the "Larger Catechism,"
the Book of Concord [Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1959], 365.
xv
Thomas Aquinas got this point utterly wrong. He held that people come to believe in God because
their wills are converted, and their wills then compel their intellects to believe so that "the mind remains
blind" and does not believe "by coming to see the truth." (Contra Gentiles iii, 40). This is the reverse of
what the NT clearly asserts, completely misses the biblical doctrine of the heart, and has had the serious
consequence of miscasting questions about wholehearted belief in God as questions about freedom of the
will. But the genuine freedom our wills enjoy has nothing to do with whether we can will to believe in God,
since no self-evident beliefs are under our volitional control. See part two, section II, of this chapter.
xvi
I first introduced this position in Knowing with the Heart (Eugene, Or.: Wipf and Stock, 2007).
There I not only critiqued some of the usual restrictions put upon self-evident truth, but offered an extended
comparison of belief in God with the axiom of equals which shows them to be in the same epistemological
boat. The critique of the restrictions on self-evidence will be explained in part two of this chapter.
xvii
This is not to suggest that there is no difference whatever between the self-evidence of 1 +1 =2
and God's reality. Simple arithmetical truths are cleaner and more translucent than other kinds. For
example, my wife's existence is also self-evident to me, but beyond that has all the vagaries of any personal
relationship. Our relation to God is similar; while his reality is no less certain, the rest of our relationship to
him has its ups and downs.
xviii
Posterior Analytics, 72, b 5-24; 75 a 31-32. Aristotle's point that self-evident knowledge is basic
to all proof has been denied at times, but even those denials end up appealing to self-evidence at some
point. For example, E. Nagel ridiculed it as the idea that there must be transparently luminous universal
truths which the intellect grasps as self-evident, and tried to substitute pragmatic utility in its place in
Sovereign Reason (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1954), 304. And Stephan Barker even rejected self-evidence as
the proper access to logical laws in The Elements of Logic. He derided the experience as a kind of
penetrating and occult clairvoyance by which we succeed in gazing into the abstract innards of the
universe (NY: McGraw Hill, 1974), 297. But how can Nagel know whether a principle works or Barker
know that a rule of logic holds true in virtue of the ways words are used (p. 301) unless those things are
self-evident to them? For a detailed critique of the pragmatist rejection of self-evidence, see my "A
Critique of Historicism" in Critica vol. XXIX/ no. 85/ Abril, 1997, 41-63.
xix
There is a long history of Platonist thought that claims that the very fact that a law is a necessary
truth does indeed account for its origin, namely, it means it has no origin but is self-existent. (See A.
Plantinga, The Nature of Necessity ( : ), . But this is either a non sequitur or an outright equivocation.
The fact that a relation holds necessarily for its relata does not mean that the relation is itself uncaused and
unpreventable. It does not rule out, i. e., that the relata, along with their de re necessary relations, are
mutually correlated creations of God.
xx
Pensees, Ibid. p. 200. This is reminiscent of a comment of Calvin's to the effect that if scripture
contained no miracle stories, men would say that if it really came from God it would contain miracles to
attest its Divine origin. But since scripture does contain miracle stories, men ask how they can believe it
since it contains miracle stories. Cmp. also Pensees # 728, p, 198.
xxi
Pensees, Ibid.,
xxii
Of course, in every one of these traditions there may be individual writers who say this. But the
scriptures of the major religions speak with one voice.
xxiii
See David Noss, A History of the World's Religions (Upper Saddle River, NJ : Simon & Schuster,
1999), 561-2.
xxiv
Because the intuitively grasped self-evident truths are of many kinds (quantitative, spatial,
physical, sensory, logical, ethical, etc.), intuitions of self-evidence are not to be restricted only to
mathematical or logical truths. Rather, since rationality is rooted in the human heart - the central unity of
all human capacities - intuitions of self-evidence arise in every aspect of experience.
xxv
See Morris Kline, Mathematics, The Loss of Certainty (NY: Oxford University Press, 1980) and
W.V. Quine, Philosophy of Logic (Englewood Cliffs, NJ : Prentice Hall, 1970).
xxvi
This is not begging the question or a sneaky way of getting the experimenter to assume Gods
reality. The words are purely hypothetical, and are spoken in case God exists. Any refusal to do this reflects

40

a prior conviction that God cant exist and so prevents the experiment from being performed in good faith.
The experiment and related issues are also discussed more fully in Knowing with the Heart, 115-120.
xxvii
This does not mean that I have no quarrel with the other part of the definition of knowledge.
Surely we know many things which we cannot prove but which are not self-evident but are unconscious
inferences, for example. Reasons of some sort may be needed in order to show someone else that we in fact
know what we claim to know, but cannot be a requirement of justified certainty for oneself. We do not need
to know that we know in order to know.
xxviii
These thinkers ensconced a tradition in philosophy of supposing that everyday experience is
untrustworthy in contrast to theories which alone give access to reality. But their position is hopeless: it is a
theory that self-evidence must meet the standard restrictions, while that theory fails to meet its own
demands and dogmatically assumes the divinity of whatever it proposes as genuinely self-evident.
Moreover, any theoretical abstraction will also fail to meet those demands, and so fai to impugn ordinary
experience as a trustworthy access to reality. See H. Dooyeweerd, A New Critique of Theoretical Thought
(4 vols.) (Philadelphia: Presbyterian & Reformed Pub. Co, 1955).
xxix
Comp. Meta. 1005 b 12, 1006 a 8-10; Posterior Analytics 70 b 9-12, 73 a 21-22, 74b 5, 23-26; 75
a 18, 31-31; 88 b 30- 89 a 10; and 100, b 512.
xxx
Descartes Philosophical Writings, Ed. N. K. Smith (NY: The Modern Library, 1958), 6-10.
xxxi
This does not rule out, however, that a belief can be self-evident but remain subconscious or
unconscious.
xxxii
This does not, of course, mean it can't be inferred, since any belief can trivially be made the
conclusion of an inference. Rather, it means that it is not in fact believed on the grounds of inference from
any premises which could entail it or show it probable.
xxxiii
This characterization may not be exhaustive; perhaps there are other features of self-evidence that
may be teased out. But these items are at least parts of self-evidence as may be confirmed in our self
reflection.
xxxiv
It was Wm Alston who introduced the notion that justification must start with our doxastic
practices rather than individual beliefs taken in isolation. He gives an exposition and defense of this
contribution in Perceiving God (Ithica, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991).
xxxv
The normal functioning of these modes of experience I take to be well accounted for by the
conditions given by Alvin Plantinga for warranted certainty in Warrant and Proper Function (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1993). Roughly these are: that our faculties are in proper working order, and that
the capacity through which a belief is acquired is appropriately suited to the circumstances in which it is
employed in accordance with its design plan. My difference is that rather than seeing these as
characterizing certainty as Plantinga does, I take them to be conditions of normalcy.
xxxvi
This is not to deny that abnormal experiences can also produce beliefs which are prima facie and
irresistibly true (such as experiences of mystical states) but for now I'm thinking only of the intuition of self
evidence as it attaches to ordinary sorts of experiences which are unquestionably reliable doxastic practices
(perception, memory, introspection, and rational reflection). More specifically, I am speaking of the self-
evidence attaching to reflection (on the gospel) which was chosen because it is the only type of religious
experience common to all believers in God. By contrast, a strong sense of God's presence would most like
the truths obtained by sense perception. See Perceiving God, Ibid.
xxxvii
This is a point on which Descartes led the western philosophical tradition astray by construing a
self-evident belief as one we are unable to doubt. But doubt is not the the opposite of certainty; disbelief is.
And what Calvin says about belief in God applies to many other self-evident beliefs as well: ...we speak
not of an assurance which is never affected by doubt, nor a security which anxiety never assails, we rather
maintain that believers have a perpetual struggle with their own distrust (Inst. 3, 2, 17).
xxxviii
Number, The Language of Science (Garden City, NJ : Doubleday Anchor, 1954), 5.
xxxix
Descartes, Ibid. 6.
xl
The references in Aristotle are given in note 21; the reference to Descartes is Ibid., p. 10.
xli
Anthony Quinton, e.g., has tried to argue that intuitions of the self-evidence of logical truths are
genuine because everyone agrees with them, while that is not true of claims of moral and mystical
(religious) self-evidence. In The Nature of Things (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973), 125, he says:

41

What is significant is the fact of universal agreement, amongst all but the muddled or deliberately
perverse, that a particular set of beliefs are true. Every proposition has been disputed by somebody. But the
dialectician who claims to deny the law of contradiction is insincere... It is the failure of this... requirement
of universal agreement that undermines the claims of moral and mystical intuition. Notice that he first
claims there is a set of beliefs that are universally agreed upon, but that the set then turns out to have only
one member. He then even admits that this single "universally agreed upon" belief actually has dissenters
and so is not universally agreed upon! To compound his felony, he then dismisses them by substituting
name-calling ("muddled or insincere") for argument. In doing so, he willfully ignores not just a few
muddled minds but the the entire tradition of Hindu and Buddhist thinkers who have for millennia denied
his candidate for universal acceptance so that his dismissal of them begs the question.
xlii
This is not true only of different divinity beliefs, but of different intuitions concerning logical and
mathematical axioms: The current predicament of mathematics is that there is not one but many
mathematics and that for numerous reasons each fails to satisfy the members of the opposing schools. It
now appears that the concept of a universally accepted, infallible body of reasoning is a grand
illusion.... M. Kline, Ibid, 6.
xliii
So while God's being the self-existent origin of all else is self-evident (or a presupposition of a
self-evident truth), the information that God created ex nihilo (Heb. 11:3) and concerning those conditions
for standing in proper relation to God which are not self-evident, are taken on faith. That God has made the
covenantal demands and promises scripture records is self-evident; that each promise will be kept is a
matter of faith until we see each one fulfilled - as Heb. 11 affirms.
xliv
The differences among divinity beliefs are, however, responsible for varying interpretations of
other self-evident truths, and this is true in the sciences as well as in philosophy. Even self-evident truths
are interpreted in the light of one's divinity belief so that no single truth or theory is religiously neutral. This
is the central claim of my book, The Myth of Religious Neutrality (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame
Press, 2005).
xlv
The intuition is "rational" because it meets logical and mathematical norms, not because it is
exclusively rational. Knowledge is multi-sided on the view I'm advocating. Moreover, self-evident
knowledge is justified belief and is sufficient for certainty beyond a reasonable doubt even though it doesn't
entail truth. So we are left with the position that contrary beliefs may be equally justified to different people
owing to their contrary experiences of self-evidence. But that is our human condition; it is the actual state
of affairs over the entire spectrum of human experience including the basic disagree- ments in math (see
note 42) and other sciences, not just in religion. We simply are not the embodiments of neutral, divine
rationality that Plato and Aristotle took us to be.
xlvi
On this point I again refer you to my "A Critique of Historicism" in Critica, vol. XXIX / no. 85 /
Mexico, abril, 1997, also reprinted in Contemporary Reflections on the Philosophy of Herman
Dooyeweerd, (Lewiston, NY: The Edwin Mellen Press, 2000).