Divine Incomprehensibility
There is a tired old parable that people tell in order to appear profound. It goes like this.
Once upon a time, there were six blindfolded men standing around an elephant, each grabbing at it, and each arguing with the others over what it was that they were touching. One said it was like a rope, another that it was a tree trunk, another like a leather bag, another a spear, and so on with the others. By this time it is clear that the elephant represents “ultimate truth,” or perhaps even God. And the moral of the story is that each world religion has a “part of the elephant,” but not the whole. That explains why no one can name the whole and so forth.
There is just one little problem with this story. How do any of us know it is an elephant? For the matter, how did we come to find that there were six blindfolded men there? It took a seventh onlooker—an onlooker not blindfolded—in order to see the whole. Every form that agnosticism takes begins to reveal this same double standard, as we shall see.
Although the word “agnostic” seems to have emerged with T. H. Huxley, the philosophical impetus for it came in the movement from David Hume to Immanuel Kant. Better philosophers than the ones who tend to obtain government funds have recognized these infamous arguments as self-contradictory. For example, Hume ended his Essay Concerning Human Understanding by laying down a standard for any meaningful statements about objective reality:
“If we take in our hand any volume; of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance; let us ask, Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence? No. Commit it then to the flames: for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion.”1
The problem is very simple: Hume’s statement is neither purely analytical nor purely empirical, and thus falls by its own weight. Now Kant remarked that it was reading Hume that awoke him from his dogmatic slumbers. He should have gone back to sleep. What he offered instead was his two-tiered reality, where human reason could not attain knowledge of the real, objective way that things are. God, the self, and the thing in itself, belonged to the “noumenal” realm, while we are left with what he called the “phenomenal” realm, that of the appearance of things.
The basic trouble is that what he meant by “appearances” was precisely not the essence of anything: even of the appearances. Granting that he was not denying the reality of the appearances, nor even the things that appear. However since one cannot measure anything, from mind to mind, that ever gets beyond perception, the phenomenal realm of science is slain on the altar of the Critique every bit as much as theology.
These mistakes have been regurgitated in late modern and postmodern thought. The verification principle was nothing but a repackaging of Hume’s dichotomy, substituting words like “definitional” and “empirical,” and concluding that all “God-talk” is “not even false,” because it doesn’t even rise to the level of objective predication. A more detailed analysis of the rise and fall of Ludwig Wittgenstein and A. J. Ayer’s formulations are easy enough to find and subject for another time.2 We can begin on simpler ground.
The Incoherence of Agnosticism
The very form of agnosticism—no matter how diverse the forms of the agnostic claims may seem to take, the basic form is singular—is a violation of the most basic law of logic. But let us first define our terms. The word ‘agnostic’ comes from two Greek words: 1. a (no) and 2. gnosis (knowledge). To be agnostic, then, is to claim no knowledge. But there is what we might call a “soft agnosticism” and a “hard agnosticism,” the former of which is only a personal or individual agnostic stance. Here one simply says, “I do not know.” However, that is not usually what is meant by the term. Generally speaking, agnosticism is of the harder variety. It claims that no one knows and no one can know. And it comes in many forms.
The Supernatural cannot be known.
The finite cannot contain the infinite.
God is too big of a concept.
Truth is relative.
Reality is an illusion.
Now notice what all five of these statements have in common. Obviously they are all denying our ability to know the object in question: whether Supernature, infinity, God, truth, or even reality. What might be less obvious, perhaps because it is so basic to our language, is that each one of them is a categorical statement: each featuring a subject and a predicate. Now as we all know, the subject of a sentence is what a sentence is about, and the predicate is what is true about the subject. Not everything of course. But every predicate is saying at least one true thing about its subject.
At this point you may have caught something rather inconvenient to the very form of agnosticism. Is not the agnostic position precisely that we can know nothing about something (whether about Supernature, infinity, God, or truth)? Agnosticism means no knowledge—not some, not any! But isn’t “knowing nothing” really just a synonym for “knowing not-one-thing”? If I can know even one thing in x class, do I really know no-thing about x? And yet if anyone will examine those five sentences, each of them predicate one thing to their subject. In fact the whole argument depends upon those predicates. “God is too big of a concept.” Too big, you say? But what is this “big-ness” you speak of? Is it no-thing or one-thing? What about infinity to a finite mind? What kind of a thing is infinity that makes it the kind of a thing that we cannot know even one thing about? Hopefully we are starting to see the trouble. I think someone has tried to smuggle an elephant and some blindfolds back into the room.
Even being most extreme in our skepticism will not work, as Geisler points out about the “Reality is an illusion” path.
“An illusion is defined as a misleading perception of reality … However, if objective reality did not exist to provide a contrast, there would be no way of knowing about the illusion … we only know what an illusion is because we have some idea of what it means to be real. If everything were really an illusion, we would never come to know about it. Absolute illusion is impossible!”3
Now that basic law of logic I was referring to is the law of noncontradiction (A ≠ ~A). In layman’s terms: “A cannot be both A and non-A at the same time and in the same relation.” Applied to these four expressions of agnosticism, we cannot say of our subject (God) that we both know one thing (A) and not-one-thing (~A), at the same time and in the same relation. In other words, whatever species of agnosticism one wants to use, the expression will be a violation of the law of noncontradiction. That eliminates agnosticism from the options of anyone who wants to have a rational worldview. But it is important to notice here that just because denying the possibility of any knowledge is illogical, that doesn’t prove that there is any knowledge of this or that thing. Demolition work is one thing. Building a new foundation is another.
I think we may begin to turn to Scripture to see how God’s word handles where we draw the line.
What Divine Incomprehensibility Means (and Does Not Mean)
The Scripture puts it in these terms: “The secret things belong to the LORD our God, but the things that are revealed belong to us and to our children forever, that we may do all the words of this law” (Deut. 29:29).
There are secret things and there are revealed things. We can say that there are an infinity of things we don’t know. There is no logical problem with that. God has not revealed those things. We can even say that a finite mind cannot know an infinity of things, and that is true by definition: “Such knowledge is too wonderful for me; it is high; I cannot attain it” (Ps. 139:6) or “no one comprehends the thoughts of God except the Spirit of God” (1 Cor. 2:11). But none of that is what agnosticism is saying.
The agnostic maintains that one cannot know this or that particular truth: even presumably if God decided to reveal it! And that is really to say that God cannot in fact reveal it. Agnosticism turns out not only to be self-defeating, but also self-deifying. It always winds up reserving for our non-blindfolded friend what it denies to everyone else—even to God.
This is all very crucial because of one divine attribute that we are forced to consider before even getting to the specifics of natural theology; and that is the incomprehensibility of God. In spite of not exploring other uses of the term, Charles Hodge is otherwise quite helpful here:
“It is the clear doctrine of the Scriptures that God can be known … This does not mean that we can know all that is true concerning God … To comprehend is to have complete and exhaustive knowledge of an object.”4
Now it is true that the incoherence of agnosticism does not demonstrate the truth of any particular positive view. But it does at least prove the coherence of positive knowledge. What is helpful to get back on track is not to build knowledge back up with anything like Descartes cogito ergo sum, but rather to ask, Are there any objects of the mind, holding over all finite minds, that are necessary to all possible worlds?
Here is where we want to introduce what R. C. Sproul called four non-negotiables to real knowledge. Geisler lists two—existence and logic5—which has its own advantage. But the advantage of Sproul’s four non-negotiables is that, even though one of them may seem to be dispensable in some possible worlds (sense perception), once we see its epistemological threshold, we will be able to use it in the actual world in which we live. It is important to point out that all four of these principles are presupposed by Scripture:
“1) the law of noncontradiction; 2) the law of causality; 3) the basic (although not perfect) reliability of sense perception; and 4) the analogical use of language. Many of the attempts by atheists to destroy the case for God include a rejection of these foundational laws or grounds of obtaining knowledge.”6
That last point is very significant. Supposing that a particular argument for any view were both (a) essential to the case and (b) logically self-contradictory. By immediate inference the contradictory proposition would have to be true of necessity. That is, if it is a genuine either-or situation, such as “Either God exists or he does not.” Taken as a whole, this statement is a tautology. It is true by logical structure because one of the two sides (disjuncts) must be true, while the other is false. This is a reflection of one of the other three basic laws of logic. This one is called the law of the excluded middle (A v ~A). Hodge lists this as first among necessary truths,
“the opposite of which is absolutely unthinkable. That every effect must have a cause, that a part of a given thing is less than the whole … or that a straight line is the shortest distance between two given points … Again, there are truths which cannot be denied without doing violence to our nature.”7
Greg Bahnsen once spoke of proof by the “impossibility of the contrary.” It was odd for a presuppositionalist to bring this language up (quoting Aristotle no less) in his debate with Sproul. Properly conceived, such a demonstration would apply to the first of Sproul’s non-negotiables a priori, and to the second and third a posteriori, but still showing a necessary reality, while the fourth would only hold in a world that not only includes physical sensation and inductive reasoning, but especially one whose knowledge depends entirely on such empirical reasoning.
Our world does depend on such reasoning. Although a postmodernist may object, surely a modernist who is still confident in empirical science would not want to dispense with the senses and induction! So it would seem that no rational view can afford to do without any of these four.
Now what is the punchline to all of this? Both the modern and the postmodern viewpoints absolutely undermine or attack one of more of the four. The implications of this are crucial for apologetics. This shows both that the skeptic has no rational foundation, and that Christian theism does proceed on the basis of a real epistemological certainty without in any sense suggesting an exhaustive knowledge, or an archetypal knowledge of God.
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1. David Hume, Essay Concerning Human Understanding (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1977), 114.
2. cf. Geisler, Christian Apologetics, 17-24; Baker Encyclopedia of Christian Apologetics
3. Geisler, Unshakable Foundations, 25
4. Hodge, Systematic Theology, I.4.1.1.
5. Geisler, Unshakable Foundations, 21.
6. Sproul, Defending Your Faith, 30.
7. Hodge, Systematic Theology, I.1.1.1, 3.
