RazorsKiss on the
Christian God as the Basis of Knowledge
Part 5: Exodus 3:14
Originally published on Incinerating
Presuppositionalism on August 21, 2009.
Continued from Part 4.
* * *
In his interrogation of
Mitch LeBlanc, presuppositional apologist RazorsKiss
(“RK” hereafter) immediately drew attention to a statement found in Exodus
3:14:
God said to Moses, “I AM WHO I AM”; and He
said, “Thus you shall say to the sons of Israel, ‘I AM has sent me to you’.”
It is not clear from his own statements why RK
deemed it important to bicker with LeBlanc over the significance of this
passage, unless it was to demonstrate LeBlanc’s own supposed ignorance of the
historical meaning of the “I AM” clause, which by itself would have no
relevance to the thesis which RK has elected to defend.
Now some Christian apologists claim that this passage contains biblical
affirmation of the law of identity, a fundamental law of logic, in the clause
“I AM WHO I AM.” Gary Crampton, for instance, makes
the following statement:
Also fixed in Scripture are the two other
principle laws of logic: the law of indentity (A is
A) and the law of the excluded middle (A is either B or non-B). The former is
taught in Exodus 3:14, in the name of God itself: “I AM WHO I AM.” And the
latter is found, for example, in the words of Christ: “He who is not with Me is against Me” (Luke 11:23). [SIC] (The Westminster
Confession of Faith and Logic)
I do not know whether or not RK holds the view
which Crampton expresses here regarding Exodus 3:14,
but there are some points to be made against it.
First of all, the passage in which the “I AM” clause is found does not identify
what it states as a fundamental law of logic. (I’m assuming that Crampton means the law of identity, for I have never
heard of a logical law known as “indentity” – perhaps
this is a principle which copyists used in reproducing ancient manuscripts.)
For that matter, the bible nowhere speaks intelligibly of logic as an
epistemological method. The claim that this passage conveys a divinely inspired
statement of a fundamental principle of logic, is a blatant case of trying to
assimilate legitimate philosophical principles into a Christian context and
back-fill them with Christian presuppositions. The law of identity is
axiomatic, so it’s not as if we need an invisible magic being to communicate it
to us, or to “make it true” (which would simply abrogate the objectivity of the
law in the first place).
Moreover, logic as a method of inferring and validating new knowledge is
anathema to what the bible does promote as the believer’s source of knowledge.
RK himself pointed to what he calls the
“sensus divinitatus” as
the faculty by which the believer presumably acquires knowledge. Transmission
of “knowledge” from the beyond into one’s mind by supernatural means is not a
function of logic; reception of “knowledge” via the “sensus
divinitatus” is characterized as a passive process,
while scrutinizing the logical integrity of knowledge claims is an active
process. Also, to suppose that one must submit the deliverances of the “sensus divinitatus” to the
tribunal of logical evaluation in order to determine their validity or truth
value, would only suggest that logic is higher than the source of such
deliverances. This would be an expression of “autonomous reasoning,” i.e.,
taking something other than the revelation of the Christian god as “the
ultimate reference point” in one’s development of his knowledge, and
presuppositionalism scorns “autonomous reasoning” as the fount of all sin. As
presuppositionalist Richard Pratt puts it:
This, then, is the essence of sin: man’s
rebellion against recognizing his dependence on God in everything and the
assumption of his ability to be independent of God. (Every Thought
Captive, p. 29)
Logic, of course, requires intellectual liberty.
It requires that the mind be free to follow logic wherever it leads him,
regardless of who disapproves. This means that logic is not possible apart from
the precondition of independence, the very value which the presuppositionalist notion
of “autonomous reasoning” is intended to vilify. Ayn
Rand put this principle succinctly when she wrote:
These two—reason and
freedom—are corollaries, and their relationship is reciprocal: when men are
rational, freedom wins; when men are free, reason wins. (“Faith and Force: The
Destroyers of the Modern World,” Philosophy: Who Needs It, p. 66)
Those who scorn the value of independence, scorn
reason, scorn logic, and scorn man as a rational animal. This attitude is not
difficult to find in the Christian worldview by any means. In Christianity, the
disposition desired of the believer is that he take
whatever his god tells him unquestioningly. The believer is not to question
what he believes his god has told him, regardless of how his god has presumably
communicated to him. Greg Bahnsen himself makes point this clear when he tells
us that his god’s “word and character are not questionable” (Van Til’s
“Presuppositionalism”).
Submitting statements which are said to have proceeded from the mouth of one’s
god to tests intended to determine whether or not they are logical, is not an
action indicative of the position which rejects independent thought. So if the
believer gets his knowledge of the truth from an allegedly divine source, such
as the so-called “sensus divinitatus,”
then on what basis can he affirm logic as an arbiter of true knowledge, except
he compartmentalize his god-beliefs and borrows from an epistemology which
assumes the independence, or “autonomy,” of the human mind as the proper
standard for man?
But some will nonetheless insist that this is the bible teaching a fundamental
law of logic, in spite of the obvious conflict between logic as a means of
testing knowledge claims and presuppositionalism’s overt rejection of
“autonomous reasoning,” i.e., the position which does not accept assertions
attributed by Christianity to the Christian god unquestioningly. The problem
with this, however, is that the statement “I AM WHO I AM” could, at best, be an
application of the law of identity, not an explicit statement of the law
of identity as such. Certainly the statement assumes the law of
identity, but all intelligible statements in fact do this, not just the clause
found in Exodus 3:14. Exodus 3:14 is nothing unique.
Even worse for Crampton, the statement “I AM WHO I
AM” could not be a statement isolating the law of identity, for it is
restricted to a specific unit (one which is specified by the personal
pronoun “I”), while the law of identity is open-ended (i.e., universal),
and thus not restricted to a specific unit, but applicable to any and
all units, whether persons, places, or things. The clause “I AM WHAT I AM”
is, to put it mildly, far too narrow in its scope of reference to constitute a
statement of the law of identity as such. It is because the law of identity is universal
in its scope of reference that it is is customarily
stated in the form of an equation using an open-ended term, e.g., A is A.
For this reason, the clause in Exodus 3:14 cannot legitimately be taken an
explicit statement of the law of identity as such, for the universality of the
law is not entailed by “I AM WHO I AM.” And while the statement “I AM WHO I AM”
can by rightly and logically uttered by anyone who can speak, such as
actually existing persons (such as human beings), the law of identity applies
not only to animate objects, but also to inanimate objects.
Lastly, in the case of the biblical passage, the statement “I AM WHO I AM” has
simply been inserted by an author into the mouth of a storybook character, so
ascribing the origin of the law of identity to a person who proclaims it a law
(as if the law of identity could be legislated by an act of will) simply
reduces to subjectivism.
To Part 6.
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