Knowledge of God: Mediate or Immediate?

In this post I’ll be responding to an article written by Josh Sommer. The article can be found here. Josh takes issue with Van Til and Bahnsen and the idea that knowledge of God is immediate. However he makes some mistakes that I shall point out.

The first of these mistakes is his confusion of what is meant by “immediate knowledge”. He writes:

Both Van Til and Bahnsen thought immediate knowledge, in terms of which they understood innate cognition of the divine, was underived in terms of one’s possession of it. They thought it was content original or natural to the creature. Bahnsen, for example, says, “Unbelievers have a true knowledge of the existence and character of God, which is justified by the evidence directly apprehended in God’s clear and inescapable natural revelation of Himself (Van Til’s Apologetic, p. 261).”

Notice, Bahnsen does not say the unbeliever has this knowledge through the evidence directly apprehended in God’s natural revelation, but only that the unbeliever’s knowledge is justified by such. In the same place, he calls this “immediate knowledge,” and opposes it to derivative knowledge, “This is immediate knowledge, rather than knowledge derived by inferences and discursive arguments.” Van Til says, “In the sensus divinitatus, then, we find a welling up within the consciousness of man an immediate awareness of the fact that God is the creator and sustainer of the world (Ibid., 186).” But Bahnsen had just described Van Til’s doctrine of natural revelation as consisting of “the created order… a medium of constant, inescapable, clear, preinterpreted information about God… (Ibid., 185).”

First of all, it is not clear that there is a relevant difference between gaining knowledge through certain evidence and having one’s knowledge justified by said evidence. Bahnsen is saying that the knowledge of God is a justified true belief and the true belief is justified by the evidence gained from God’s revelation in nature. Josh seems to be splitting hairs.

He then goes on to say:

This is odd because Bahnsen wants to insert a medium into an equation concerning immediate knowledge. These two things are mutually exclusive. One cannot have immediate knowledge and have mediate knowledge at the same time and in the same relationship. Such would be a violation of the law of noncontradiction. Van Til appears to agree with Bavinck and even Turretin in the above quote until he equates the sensuswith immediate knowledge. If Van Til believed that, according to the sensus divinitatus, rational creatures find welling up within their consciences an awareness of a God, as Bavinck likewise held, then he would certainly be incorporated into the canon of Protestant Reformed orthodoxy on this point. But he did not.

This is Josh’s mistake: he erroneously thinks that “immediate” means “not mediated” or “not gained through any medium whatsoever”. But this cannot be further from the truth. By “immediate”, Bahnsen and Van Til meant “not mediated through discursive arguments” or “non-inferential in nature”. There is no violation of the law of noncontradiction. This interpretation is supported by even a cursory reading of Bahnsen. For example:

God has revealed Himself to all men, providing evidence that justifies belief in His existence and character; this revelation is “mediated” through the evidence of the created order and man’s personality. However, this evidence or justification for belief is not inferential or discursive. Rather, the evidence for God is immediately perceived—indeed, it is inescapable and undeniable (even though men in their perversity attempt to deny it).

Van Til also writes:

As Christian theists, we could certainly never allow that the universe was originally known to man before God was known to man. The cosmos-consciousness, the self-consciousness, and the God-consciousness would naturally be simultaneous. . . . Man would at once with the first beginning of his mental activity see the true state of affairs as to the relation of God to the universe as something that was known to him. ... He would know that God is the Creator of the universe as soon as he knew anything about the universe itself.

Bahnsen further says that:

This knowledge of God is mediated in the sense of being caused by the stimulus of the external world and man’s internal constitution, but it is apprehended immediately without argumentation, computation, or self-conscious reasoning.

All these quotations are pulled from the same section which Josh quoted in his article so one is left wondering how he missed these crucial points of clarification. Knowledge of God is both immediate and mediated. It is immediate in the sense that it is non-inferential and directly apprehended. It is mediated in the sense that it is gained through certain stimuli. Josh’s claim is therefore false. 

Josh goes on to lay out some consequences of knowledge of God being immediate. He writes:

There are massive implications for asserting an immediate knowledge of the divine, rather than a derivative knowledge through one medium or another. The greatest implication is perhaps a slip into pantheism. Pantheism holds that God and the world are identical in essence. To know the world is to at once know God because God and the world are the same thing. For one to have immediate knowledge, it would seem the world would itself need to be God, either the conscience of man is God, or the stars in the heavens are God, or both. Either God and the stars are the same thing, leading to immediateapprehension. Or God is known through the stars leading to mediate apprehension. But these propositions cannot both be true.

But this does not follow at all. Immediate knowledge does not require that the world would need to be God. For instance, one may immediately apprehend and know that a certain signature on a paper belongs to his friend. But this does not mean his friend is identical in essence to the signature. Josh is once again operating on a faulty idea of immediate knowledge.  

Josh makes another mistake when he writes:

The precommitment to immediate knowledge is, perhaps, one reason why Van Til irrationally makes the ontological Trinity both the starting point and the conclusion of the theistic proofs, “To be constructed rightly, theistic proof ought to presuppose the ontological trinity and contend that, unless we make this presupposition, all human predication is meaningless (Ibid., 621).” A surprising statement to be sure. On this assumption, the trinity must be known through nature. And for Van Til, that would mean innately so. Why is this the case? Because if something is presupposed in an ultimate sense, then it is not concluded in any sense. It is held prior to and in back of any and all discursive or intuitive conclusions. This begs the question of the place of faith and the function of Scripture. And it gives the impression that Van Til thought the doctrine of the trinity is a mixed article (revealed in both nature and Scripture rather than Scripture only), right along side the goodness, power, and wisdom of God.

But it is simply not the case that if something is presupposed  in an ultimate sense, then it is not concluded in any sense. Even though all discursive activity presupposes the Trinity for its intelligibility, one can still have the Trinity as the conclusion of arguments. What follows is that it is not the argument that grants us knowledge of the Trinity. It is the Triune God of Scripture that is known through nature. So the Trinity is revealed both in nature and in Scripture. But as always, it is special revelation (Scripture) that general revelation must be interpreted in light of. Josh continues:

More importantly, however, it shows the subjectivism baked in to Van Til’s line of thought. Unless a mental presupposition is made, then all predication is meaningless. Thus, the ontology referenced by the predication would also be meaningless unless the proper epistemological disposition were to be adopted. How can this not end in utter relativism at best or magic at worst? When one thinks rightly (presupposes the right thing), predication becomes meaningful, or so thought Van Til. In his attempted escape from “neutrality” Van Til has banished any and all common objectivity. This is why we hold that Van Til has confused epistemology with ontology. At bottom, the validity of ontological statements are determined by epistemological posture.

This is another mistake Josh makes. Predication is a mental or epistemological activity. And this activity presupposes God as its precondition. That is, unless one’s epistemology (and ontology) contains God, such activity is impossible. A should come as not surprise that a mental or epistemological activity requires the right mental or epistemological posture. It is not clear how this implies subjectivism or relativism. It seems Josh does not appreciate the fact that certain features of human experience are impossible or incoherent upon certain worldview commitments. Human experience, and things like predication, is not something that is neutral to worldviews. However, because of common grace, it is impossible to not presuppose God. We all live in God’s world and have received His revelation and so predication is objectively possible. 

Finally, Josh writes:

Van Til reveals a capitulation to Hume’s skepticism when he writes, “The words ’cause,’ ‘purpose,’ and ‘being,’ used as universals in the phenomenal world, could not be so used with meaning unless we may presuppose the self-contained God (Ibid., 621-622).” The meaning, not only of the words, but necessarily the concepts they signify, are completely reliant upon our thought. This, of course, is not all Hume’s influence. For our purposes here, Hume only cast doubt upon causality, a doubt which Van Til erroneously appears to take seriously. But the influence upon Van Til is also Kantian (and critical) evinced by the assumption of a separation between objective meaning and phenomenology. What would reconcile the noumena to the phenomena, for Van Til, is a belief or presupposition.

Here Josh makes the common mistake of thinking Van Til was Idealist or Kantian. For Van Til, there is no noumena/phenomena divide. There is no separation between how we conceive of the world and how it really is. Such a distinction would land us in epistemological skepticism (as it did Kant). In fact, Van Til criticized Kant’s system in this very point. Van Til’s point was that it is the self-contained God that makes such terms intelligible. It is because God has revealed Himself to us that we are able to talk intelligibly about cause and order in the world. All of human experience presupposes for its intelligibility the Triune God. If we don’t presuppose God, they cease to be intelligible.