This review appeared in Perspectives of Science and Christian Faith 59 (3) (Sept 2007): 239.
ESCAPE FROM REASON: A Penetrating Analysis of Trends in Modern Thought by Francis A. Schaeffer. Downers Grove, IL: IVP Books, 2006. 123 pages. Paperback; $8.00. ISBN: 10: 0 8308 3405 2.
Schaeffer is incredibly difficult to pin down. He has been described as a (compassionate, inconsistent and modified) presuppositionalist , an inconsistent empiricist and a verificationist– this is, I suspect, because he is more an evangelist and apologist than an academic philosopher. Schaeffer's books have been incredibly influential, not least his trilogy of which Escape from Reason (EfR) is the second part – the first being The God Who is There and the final part He is There and He is not Silent. EfR is the shortest of the two and has sometimes been mistaken for the introduction to the trilogy.
Reading Schaeffer is a bitter sweet experience. I rejoice at his desire to see the lordship of Christ expressed over every area of life, but get frustrated at his broad brush strokes that often over-simplify. Schaeffer is rarely subtle!
The villain of this piece is Aquinas. It’s perhaps an understatement to say that Schaeffer is a little hard on Aquinas; a better Reformed analysis of Aquinas is found in Arvin Vos’s Aquinas, Calvin, and Contemporary Protestant Thought. Nevertheless, Schaeffer does highlight the problems scholastic dualism has caused Christianity.
He sees the most crucial problem facing Christians today as being rooted in the Middle Ages and in Aquinas in particular. It was Aquinas that opened the way for autonomous rationality. According to Schaeffer, Aquinas claimed that the human will but not human intellect is fallen. This assumption, once popularised, provided the fertile soil for the belief that humans could become independent, autonomous.
In EfR Schaeffer he examines the relationship between ‘grace’ and ‘nature’. He argues that nature has slowly been ‘eating up’ grace. Yet a ‘line’ or ‘gap’ exists between the supposed upper realm of grace and the lower realm of nature. Western society has gone below this line and it has led to despair. This despair is revealed first in philosophy; subsequently, it spreads to art, then music and general culture, before reaching theology.
Schaeffer had a way of communicating Christianity to modern culture – we need more like him today. He awoke his generation to the presence of secular humanism and showed that it was possible to think and be a Christian at the same time. This book provides an excellent introduction to his ideas, though it shows its origin in the lecture format: there are few footnotes and references. His analysis is often derivative of the Dutch Christian philosopher Herman Dooyeweerd. Schaeffer's close friend Hans Rookmaaker once remarked that ‘Escape from Reason is Schaeffer's version of what Dooyeweerd develops in [In the Twilight of Western Thought].'1
It is a shame that this book is not illustrated, for Schaeffer makes some excellent points regarding grace and nature using descriptions of art works and having them illustrated would have greatly enriched the reading experience.
1 ‘A Dutch view of Christian philosophy’ in The Complete Works of Hans Rookmaaker edited by Marleen Hengelaar-Rookmaaker Vol 6 Part III The L'Abri Lectures. (Piquant, 2005).
10 comments:
I'm intrigued as to why he is described as a verificationist. Do you think there is anything in that? (Or does it rank alongside the charge made a few years ago that Roy Clouser is a positivist!)
I'm a big fan of verificationism, but I'd be surprised if Schaeffer was as well!
It was Gordon R Lewis in 'Schaeffer's apologetic method' Reflections on Francis Schaefer ed R W Ruegsegger (Zondervan, 1986) p. 86 (cited in S R Burson and J L Walls C S Lewis and Francis Schaeffer (IVP< 1988) that described Schaeffer as a verificationist.
I suspect that what Lewis meant was that he compared hypotheses with the various data to see what makes best sense. I'm not convinced that Schaeffer was a verificationist; probably, more an inconsistent presuppositionalist.
Thanks Steve.
I take it that verificationism in apologetics and in philosophy is quite different.
Verificationism is a dummy label. You can be a verificationist about meaning, i.e. something has no meaning unless it can be verified empirically. You can be a verificationist about truth. Something can't be true without being verifiable. And so on.
Now to evaluate whether Schaeffer was a verificationist, I'd need to know what he is supposed to have been a verificationist about. It's certainly not truth or meaning, and it's nothing that entails any sort of empiricism either. My suspicion is that it's just an inaccurate label.
As for Aquinas, I wouldn't trust anything Schaeffer said about him. Schaeffer may not have been a verificationist, but he certainly wasn't a careful historian of philosophy either. He blamed things in the Enlightenment on things in Aquinas that had nothing to do with what happened in the Enlightenment. I started reading How Shall We Then Live? and gave up a few pages in, because his treatment of thinkers was so ridiculously straw mannish that I really didn't want to bother wasting my time continuing.
As for presuppostionism, I think Schaeffer did call himself that but only because he didn't understand what the view amounts to. He wasn't anything like Van Til, Clark, Bahnsen, or any of the other standard cases of presuppositionalism. You might call his view soft presuppositionalism or something like that. The hard presuppositionalist thinks it's inapppropriate to offer arguments for God's existence based on the premises that non-believers accept, leaving the presuppositionalist with no choice but to give question-begging arguments that will accomplish absolutely nothing. Schaeffer was willing to give arguments. He just thought the best way to do it was to start with the presuppositions of non-believers and then examine them. So in the end he was doing something with presuppositions. It was just the very thing that presuppositionalists forbid.
(This being said, it's hard to resist pointing out that presuppositionalists endorse transcendental forms of the classic arguments for God without admitting that those arguments are the same classic arguments found in Aquinas and so on, just presented from a different perspective. So presuppositionalism is just confused to begin with, and maybe what Schaeffer is doing isn't as far from what they actually do, even if it's contrary to what they say they can do.)
Jeremy,
You wrote:
"The hard presuppositionalist thinks it's inapppropriate to offer arguments for God's existence based on the premises that non-believers accept, leaving the presuppositionalist with no choice but to give question-begging arguments that will accomplish absolutely nothing."
That's not how I'd say it. I think it's more like this: it is inappropriate to accept arguments about God's non-existence that are based on premises that cannot be explained by a godless universe -- premises such as math, reason and logic, for example, or any other epistemological method.
We have a universe that appears to have been finely tuned to permit life. We have thought processes that we treat as authoritative in scientific or philosophical discourse, such as logic, reason, and the concept of evidence. At the most basic level, we have symbols for abstractions (such as numbers) that are employed by us as if they have real existence, though in atheistic terms that makes no sense, it's just pure nominalism. Where does the number 3 live?
Atheism's premises cannot explain why we should respect any abstract thing as containing truth, because there are no absolutes; there is no abstract knowledge that isn't subjective in nature. There isn't one truth, but "your truth" and "my truth" and "his truth" -- more than six billion truths. Abstractions are useful, of course, but why are they useful? Why should an accidental universe reinforce the usefulness of abstractions? I would expect chaos to beget chaos. The atheist should be forced to explain how chaos begat reason. If he cannot, then we should not permit him to stand on our turf to defend his.
The believer in Christ understands that logic and mathematical abstracts can exist objectively if they are patterned on God's own immeasurable mind. And that's also what makes them eternal and absolute, and why understanding them is useful in understanding His creation. That's our turf. Jesus said, "I am the way, the truth, and the life." That's a philosophical statement. "I am the truth." The further you are from Jesus, the further you are from the truth.
The atheist needs to explain his presuppositions and why he thinks we should trust them. So far, atheism's children are postmodernism, nihilism, and dialectical materialism, and it has worked out about as well as you'd think. The modernists, when throwing God away, thought they were keeping the baby and throwing out the bathwater. They got it backwards. They kept the bathwater. The postmodernists are only saying what is obvious: without the baby, the bathwater is of no use.
We all beg the question, at some point. Immanuel Kant acknowledged his own dependence upon presuppositions. He didn't offer any proof for them.
That is my understanding of Van Til. If you want to criticize presuppositionalism, I'd love to hear your thoughts. But whatever presuppositionalism is, it is not easily dismissible as mere question-begging.
It's inappropriate for Christians to accept arguments that (on your view) an atheist can't accept? That's a weird conclusion to draw.
It's inappropriate for atheists to accept arguments that follow from their own views (even if some of those views aren't properly supportable from their framework)? That's a weird conclusion also.
I'm not sure what the inappropriateness is here, unless it's just pointing to the fact that they have unsupported or maybe contradictory views. But that's what classical and evidential apologetics get into. They are all about analyzing premises, seeing what follows from them, questioning assumptions, and so on. They do philosophy, in other words. So I'm not sure what the complaint here is.
But I think you also have an odd picture of what atheist philosophy has led to. You picked out three narrow views among the many approaches atheistic philosophers have settled on. Materialistic scientism isn't in your list, but that's one of the more common ones. And I think the most common is just to accept most of our other views but deny God's existence. Whether that can consistently be maintained is an important philosophical conversation. But that's a conversation that is in fact engaged in among those who do evidentialist and classical apologetics. I'm not sure what presuppositionalism as you are conceiving of it is doing differently if that's all you think presuppositionalism is about.
Jeremy,
You said: "It's inappropriate for Christians to accept arguments that (on your view) an atheist can't accept? That's a weird conclusion to draw."
Apparently that was offered as a response to what I said: "it is inappropriate to accept arguments about God's non-existence that are based on premises that cannot be explained by a godless universe -- premises such as math, reason and logic, for example, or any other epistemological method."
Your interpretation of what I said is not the same thing as what I said, or at least intended to say.
What I'm saying is the atheist wants to use reason, logic, etc. to defend his viewpoint. That's only natural. Reason and logic exist. We can both see that. They are there to use. An atheist can use reason and logic without acknowledging that they are of God's essence, the same way he can enjoy a steak dinner without acknowledging that God created the cow. But I do think the atheist is obligated to explain why he believes reason and logic exist and are there to use, given his acceptance of the Godless Universe presupposition.
This is the essence of Van Til's argument: the atheist is obligated to explain why abstractions such as reason and logic hold authority over the acceptance or rejection of truth claims, because his world view does not allow for the existence of authoritative and binding abstractions. If the universe is nothing but a happy accident, why should we even expect it rational thinking to be real, let alone explanatory?
This line of argument has echoes throughout philosophical history, I think, perhaps beginning with Aquinas' realism vs. Occam's nominalism. Occam was not an atheist, but he did believe that universals don't exist -- he was a nominalist, in other words. Universals included things like "cats" to describe all animals with certain traits and I think that's how Occam was using "universal." But if universals include all abstractions, such as math, reason and logic, why should those things even exist?
Given that God exists, universals can exist in the mind and character of the eternal, all-wise, all-good, all-powerful God. This would give them meaning; it would give them authority; it would give them real existence. He spoke our universe into existence, after all. His very thoughts are more real than the reality we know. Where does the number 2 live? Easy for the believer. It lives in the eternal mind of the Lord and as such is part of our reality. It is objective. So too are math, logic,, goodness, beauty (arguably), and so forth. Things that are universals have a home.
But now we have to consider the atheist's perspective. If universals exist, they have to be parked somewhere. Where would that be? And what kind of form do they take? Reason is not physical, we know that. Neither are numbers. If these things only exist as abstractions in the minds of living beings who are not God, then these universals are not universal. They can't be.
They can try using the the Buddhist notion that universals are part of our universe. But that hardly explains what they are, or even why it would matter. We still can't prove they're really there. If we take their existence for granted, without empirical proof, we're playing the same game on universals that atheists play with God. It's faith.
This means the atheist is stuck with subjectivity. Reason is not a thing, not an eternal part of an eternal Lord's eternal mind, but merely a human perception, a convenient abstraction.
This reduces reason and logic and math and numbers to be mere abstractions. And, as such (Van Til would argue) they can hold no authority. Postmodernists seem to understand this better than modernists.
One other thing...
There are atheists who do not concede the subjectiveness of universals. Rand was such an atheist. I admit I'm not an expert on Randian philosophy, such as it is, but I have read enough to know that she employs some bits of circular reasoning. In one of her articles on "values", for example, she insists that values depend on life, and just a couple of paragraphs away, she insists that life depends on values. Well, which is it?
Rand wants it both ways. She wants universals but rejects the best explanation for them.
If my views on atheism are somehow too narrow, I'd be interested in hearing why.
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