Van Til Was A Genius For This

 Hey, 

Take a look at this passage from Van Til’s An Introduction to Systematic Theology:

“...in all non-Christian forms of epistemology there is first the idea that to be understood a fact must be understood exhaustively. It must be reducible to a part of a system of timeless logic. But man himself and the facts of his experience are subject to change. How is he ever to find within himself an a priori resting point? He himself is on the move. …Every effort of man to find one spot that he can exhaustively understand either in the world of fact about him or in the world of experience within, is doomed to failure. If we do not with Calvin presuppose the self-contained God back of the self-conscious act of the knowing mind of man, we are doomed to be lost in an endless and bottomless flux.”

Many people may have seen this quote, but I don’t think many appreciate how much it displays Van Til’s genius. Let’s break it down piece by piece…

“...in all non-Christian forms of epistemology there is first the idea that to be understood a fact must be understood exhaustively. It must be reducible to a part of a system of timeless logic…”

In the first sentence, Van Til points out that non-Christian epistemologies set before themselves the ideal of exhaustive knowledge. On the face of it, this sounds absurd. It seems clear that I don’t need to know a fact exhaustively in order to know some parts of it… Right?

Well, the second sentence helps us understand what Van Til means. He is pointing out that to know a fact is to know it as part of a system of timeless logic.

But what does “system of timeless logic” mean? 

Simply put, “system of timeless logic” means system of universals. Van Til is making the point that to know any particular thing, we must be able to place it in relation with other things. For example, to know a particular apple, we must be able to predicate things about it - we must be able to ascribe certain qualities/properties to it. We can identify its sweetness, its redness, its roundness, etc. These are all qualities it shares with other objects - i.e. they are universals. If there was any object that had no qualities in common with other objects, it would be unknowable because we would be unable to predicate anything about it. It would be utterly mysterious to us.

Universals facilitate relations between facts. So to know any fact, we must be able to incorporate it into our system of universals. This system is timeless. Universals differ from particulars because they are not restricted by time or space. A red car and a red apple are related by the universal redness regardless of time or place. 

So Van Til says that to know any fact is to reduce it to a system of timeless logic (universals) because any fact that cannot be incorporated into such a system would be unknowable.

This next part is really insightful. Van Til says:

“But man himself and the facts of his experience are subject to change. How is he ever to find within himself an a priori resting point? He himself is on the move…”

Brilliant!

Why is this brilliant? Because Van Til’s observation here captures the futility of non-Christian epistemologies.

You see, as Van Til rightly observes, both the subject of knowledge (us) and the objects of knowledge (the facts of experience) are subject to temporality and change. And this makes it impossible to find an “a priori resting point”.

What is an “a priori resting point”? The system of universals we mentioned earlier!

We’ve established that to know a fact, we must be able to incorporate it into a system of universals. What this implies is that this system of universals must be available prior to our experience of the facts. In other words, it is an a priori system. 

But how exactly are we to obtain such a timeless system prior to experience? We are temporal and changing. The facts are also temporal and changing. So how are we to arrive at a timeless, changeless system of universals that can incorporate every single fact? It’s impossible. The facts would exist in total isolation from our system of universals. We have no control over history so we cannot force the facts to conform to the system we just happened to find in our minds. 

If we try to construct a system by experiencing individual facts, such a system can never be universal. Because everything is temporal and changing, we can never know what effects unexperienced facts would have on the system we have constructed.

This is what led Van Til to say:

“Every effort of man to find one spot that he can exhaustively understand either in the world of fact about him or in the world of experience within, is doomed to failure. If we do not with Calvin presuppose the self-contained God back of the self-conscious act of the knowing mind of man, we are doomed to be lost in an endless and bottomless flux.” 

The argument is simple:

Knowledge of facts presupposes a timeless, comprehensive system. But such a system cannot be gained from a finite, temporal world. Therefore, all non-Christian approaches to epistemology, which fail to presuppose the revelatory activity of God, end up in skepticism.

I love quotes like these because they illustrate the genius of Van Til. 

I go in-depth into this line of reasoning in Chapter 7 of The Folly of Unbelief. The chapter is titled “The System and the Facts” and it’s  one of my favorites in the entire book! Check it out here.