Based Belief: On the Possibility of Christian Empiricism

Christianity does not simply claim to be internally coherent; it claims to be true of the empirically observable world in which we all find ourselves.

Alongside my article on Christian empiricism, I am making available an eBook on the strictest form of Christian coherentism, titled, “50 Errors of Christian Presuppositionalism.” Click this link to download.

1. Against Christian Coherentism

My intellectual nemesis, to a certain extent, is Christian coherentism. Christian coherentism argues that what Christianity teaches can only be defended by appeal to other things Christianity teaches. To argue for Christian conclusions, you must start from Christian premises. You say, “But that’s circular,” and they say, “Everyone argues in a circle.” Thus, they really do take the position of coherentism as the best account of human knowledge in general, not just of Christian doctrine in particular. The atheist they accuse of assuming certain atheistic premises in his argument for atheistic conclusions, contrary to the pretense of starting from common, empirically observable facts and science. Au contraire, all thought is circular and has as its only test, coherence. The Christian worldview is more coherent than the atheist and the postmodern worldviews, so it should be preferred. But there is no common evidence to which we can appeal, no premises on which Christian and non-Christian can agree.

But Christian coherentism actually makes shocking concessions to both empiricist atheist and progressive postmodernist worldviews. To the empiricist atheist, the Christian coherentist concedes, “Yes, we have no empirical evidence for the truth of any doctrine of Christianity.” To the postmodernist, the Christian coherentist concedes, “We can only perceive the world from our own partisan standpoint; there is no objective point of view from which to adjudicate competing conceptions of the world. Can such concessions to the predominant worldviews of the day be the appropriate Christian response, truly reflective of a “Christian worldview?”

Absolutely not. In principle, Christian coherentism renders Christian truth claims subjective, “our truth,” true for the Christian community, and them only. In fact, Christianity claims that it is the truth, publicly accessible and ready to be proclaimed to all peoples and nations. Christianity does not simply claim to be internally coherent; it claims to be true of the empirically observable world in which we all find ourselves.

Christian empiricism, by contrast, claims that Christianity is true of the common world in which we found ourselves, and may be known from the world in which we find ourselves. In the broadest terms, Christian empiricism claims that certain fundamental truths that serve as preparation for the gospel - the existence of God, the moral law, the natural order, and human dignity - may be known from created things themselves by experience and reflection. And Christian empiricism claims that the specific claims of the gospel concerning the life, death, and resurrection of Christ are and were publicly available and accessible to common human knowledge.

Today, Christian empiricism is particularly potent because a great experiment in denying the empirically accessible world and the moral order has been underway for at least decades, if not centuries. A failure to recognize the publicly available evidence, which many non-Christians already acknowledge, is an inexcusable oversight on Christians’ part. The best testimony in our day to the truth of Christianity comes from those who have encountered its truth by experience, and often, experience in trying to live apart from that truth. If we give up this evidence and testimony for Christianity, we give up the objectivity of the claims of Christianity and hide our light under a bushel. To which, I say, “No! I’m gonna let it shine.”

2. Wheaton College: Postmodernism

My claims may sound abstract and polemical. But I have seen Christian coherentism play out in real life in the settings of academic institutions, with the real-life consequences that result.

The first of these settings was Wheaton College: At Wheaton, the postmodern subjectivism of our contemporary culture was afoot, subjectivizing the claims of Christianity quite unapologetically. Meanwhile, those of us who were more orthodox or conservative really had nothing to fall back upon but Christian coherentism itself, arguing with the postmodern Christians that it was inconsistent with the premises, i.e., doctrines, of Christianity. Let’s just say, this didn’t really work.

We heard quite often that making objective truth claims was inherently arrogant and prideful. Humility required us to hold Christian doctrine very lightly and to acknowledge the doubt we all, purportedly, experienced.

As an aside, I want to register that I have never really doubted the truth of Christianity. I tried, but the problem is, the upside of Christianity being false would be so directly the freedom to indulge in sin and sensual pleasure that it would be impossible for me to take myself seriously as a truth seeker if I were to abandon the truth claims of Christianity.

And humility, I noticed, could also be displayed in accepting the truth of Christian revelation and submitting to it in obedience.

Because of this postmodernism, no effort was made to test or verify the truth claims of Christianity. I found this odd as the height of my intellectual life in high school had been the study of works of apologetics, like those of Lee Strobel and of Intelligent Design theorists. I found my faith bolstered by this careful intellectual verification of the truth claims of Christianity. Knowledge is not faith, mind you, but it is a prerequisite to faith. In point of fact, my own experience of conversion was subsequent to my reading of these works of apologetics, and not immediately so. I had no illusion that reading apologetics amounted to living faith.

In response to the postmodernism around us, those of us who were orthodox and conservative largely argued against postmodernism from our still fledgling knowledge of the truth claims of Christianity. Many of us were trying to learn the breadth of Christian doctrine and teaching; we were not ourselves in the game of verifying these truth claims. We believed them, and we saw that postmodernism undermined them.

However, there was something ineffectual about our arguments against the postmodernists. We would tell them that their philosophy was incompatible with Christian doctrine. But to them, that was the point. The objectivity of Christian truth claims was the hard edge of Christianity they were trying to soften.

Likewise, as postmodernists, they themselves argued that our Christianity was something like a subjective perspective on the world, not something that could be imposed on others as true. Our strategy of understanding better the coherent web of belief that was the system of Christian doctrine was not effective at proving otherwise. Without external evidence, a cognitive starting place from outside the web, Christianity did appear to be just what the postmodernists said it was.

By the end of my time at Wheaton, I saw the problem with Christian postmodernism; but I was only beginning to see the problem with a competing, conservative Christian coherentism. As a result, I found myself in my next educational setting in a hotbed of the strongest form of Christian coherentism: Westminster Theological Seminary, with its “Oatmeal Stout” Van Tillianism.

3. Westminster Seminary: Dogmatism

I went to Westminster Seminary because of my affinity for its Reformed theology. While Van Tillianism claims to be the apologetic or epistemological approach of Reformed theology, I had myself started to leave it behind due to some of my more advanced philosophy courses at Wheaton. I thought the Reformed theology of Westminster would be the overwhelming thing I received attending there and not the Van Tillianism that I, now, could take or, preferably, leave.

Unfortunately, Van Tillianism was the main offering of Westminster. It predominated in systematic theology classes, of course in apologetics courses, and even in hermeneutics and biblical studies. There were noteworthy exceptions, but they were clearly exceptions to the rule.

Van Tillianism claims that Christianity cannot be proven or intellectually supported by premises that are commonly accessible or knowable, but only by specifically Christian premises. To arrive at Christian conclusions, our only hope is to start from Christian premises. To do otherwise is to allow space to “autonomous reason,” which will inevitably head in one godless direction or another. The only arguments Van Tillianism permits are those that are “transcendental,” that is, that argue from the incoherence of a non-Christian worldview to the Christian worldview being the only consistent and coherent alternative.

What was striking was that we never discussed even any of these purported transcendental arguments; we never actually did Van Tillian apologetics. Instead, we argued meta-apologetically. We spent our time denying the validity of empirical and rational proof of Christian truth, and denying it, not as inaccurate, but as morally impermissible. It was not that Thomas Aquinas’s proofs of God’s existence were false, but that they were not permitted. (Note the assumption of what analytic philosophers call “doxastic voluntarism,” acts of the intellect actually being acts of the will which we can choose to exercise or not.)

We were policing the boundaries of a self-enclosed circular argument. We were there to make sure that no one actually used neutral, publicly available evidence, or common human experience to argue for the truth of Christianity. We were there to ensure that Christianity remained the subjective and private worldview of a contingent of backward inhabitants of a liberal society.

4. Roger Scruton: Christian Empiricist?

Through these experiences, I realized that the goal and the method of the Christian intellectual had to be something other than one of these two: 1) to put to rest the arrogance of the fundamentalist youth by introducing them to postmodern philosophy (one of the main methods of the faculty of evangelical colleges, like other colleges), or 2) to run around inside the circle of Christian truth claims that derive from premises that only Christians accept, often an accepted method of Christian theology.

No, the Christian intellectual, at the most basic level, had to be a person who had encountered the world and its many challenges to Christian belief but found Christianity confirmed rather than disproven by experience. Otherwise, what was the point of having smart Christians around? To corrupt the youth or fight internal battles? Not to defend and propagate Christianity intellectually?

It was around this time that I began to encounter and be influenced by a number of intellectuals who were not themselves Christian, but who were being led, by experience and reflection (philosophy) toward particular Christian truth claims. The first of these, whom I encountered in my personal reading during seminary, was Roger Scruton. Scruton was unique among academic analytic philosophers for being politically conservative. I had long seen that Christianity was not unrelated to political and moral conservatism, of a sort, this in spite of the endless pressure among highly-educated evangelical Christians to separate Christianity from conservatism and the Republican party. But the most compelling argument for conservatism, to me, had to come from someone who wasn’t himself a Christian. Otherwise, I would be admitting that progressivism was the inherently compelling idea; it was merely my parochial and doctrinaire creed that led me to conservatism.

Roger Scruton’s conservatism arose from direct experience of the political world and of the upheaval of the 1960’s. He was not conservative because, born of evangelical parents in the 1990’s, of course he would be conservative (like myself), but because the world didn’t bear out the utopianism of progressivism nor the moral self-congratulation of left-wing activism. Like the neo-cons before him, Scruton was a liberal who had been mugged by reality.

As it happened, Scruton was also on a spiritual journey. He saw the poverty of a materialistic perspective on the world. His primary study of aesthetics reveals that the dimension of life that is most human, the beautiful, is also the most resistant to material and scientistic reduction. He was led to an account of human nature that sees the person as a transcendent perspective on the world, not merely an entity within the world. He embraced the church of England as his own, especially by patrimony, but also by the spiritual core of society that it provides. His final theological position was likely still a form of theological liberalism, recognition of Christianity as mythical and allegorical truth. However, like the early church fathers with the Greek philosophers, I hope that this is enough for God to accept his faith as the best one of his intellectual background could offer. His own cancellation and the sullying of his name shortly before his death places him, for me, in the pantheon of philosophical martyrs.

Scruton, though never an orthodox Christian, gives better testimony than most orthodox Christians to the adequacy of Christian theology to the world of common human experience. He is not saying what he says because he knows the theological conclusion he must reach and is backfilling with evidence and argumentation. Rather, he sees in the world and in moral experience reason to question his own naturally secular assumptions.

5. Jordan Peterson: Christian Empiricist?

The second such secular appreciator of Christianity is probably easy to guess: Jordan B. Peterson. Peterson embodies what I mean by Christian empiricism. Like Scruton, his secular intellectual starting point prevents him from an orthodox confession of faith. Nevertheless, his resistance to such confession is, at once, based in conscience, and is a reason that he receives such a wide hearing. Peterson says that he can’t say that he believes in God largely because, to say this would require that one’s actions bear out one’s recognition of such a reality. In short, Peterson recognizes the gravity of acknowledging God as creator, lawgiver, and judge, something from which many a professing Christian could learn.

Likewise, if Peterson straightforwardly confessed the Christian faith, he would lose a lot of his broad credibility and appeal. It is a fact of our society that direct advocacy of Christian metaphysics and morality very nearly limits one’s audience to professing Christians. The greatest effect of Peterson’s public career has been to earn a hearing from many who would otherwise be New Atheists; a whole intellectual space has been opened up in which it is possible to sympathize with Christianity, to recognize what is lost without it, without explicitly becoming a Christian. Christians should welcome this openness to Christianity, rather than denigrate it as only incompletely Christian.

Peterson’s Christian empiricism is most obvious in that he grounds everything he says about Christianity in empirical science: psychology, social science, and the history of religions. By doing so, he appeals to sources of knowledge that everyone can acknowledge. He does not argue from Christian premises to Christian conclusions, but rather, from secular, empirical premises to Christian premises and some Christian conclusions. In doing so, Peterson makes his arguments epistemically accessible to all his listeners, whatever the condition of their religious perspective.

Even some of the recent critiques of Peterson confirm this. Peterson has taken a more decidedly politically conservative turn, marked by his joining with The Daily Wire. As with claiming Christianity, claiming conservatism narrows one’s audience. It was Peterson’s perception and actual behavior as a neutral, empirical observer, recommending some Christian conclusions and a mix of conservative and liberal political conclusions, that originally gave him such broad appeal.

Several others I will mention only briefly. Leon Kass’s book The Beginning of Wisdom captured for me the psychological and philosophical reading of Genesis, of the kind Peterson also practiced. Kass’s own activities as a scientist and philosopher at the University of Chicago eventually led him to a less secular worldview. Likewise, his reading of Genesis speaks to the human condition and treats Genesis as a philosophical text speaking to all of humanity, not believers only. I wish Kass had been included among Peterson’s interlocutors in his latest Exodus series, in light of second commentary, on Exodus, Founding God’s Nation.

In the realm of political commentary, I have largely lost interest in commentary that is specifically from my own worldview: Albert Mohler’s The Briefing was this for me for several years, Christian coherentist political commentary, without actual secular expertise in political analysis. I have been most interested, in the last several years, in commentators who come to Christian and conservative conclusions (though not exclusively) from a secular liberal starting point. These include Douglas Murray, Dave Rubin, Carl Benjamin, James Lindsay, David Fuller, Ayishat Akanbi, Konstantin Kisin, and Freddie Sayers. Their sympathies for Christian and conservative perspectives come from journalistic observation, political activity, and generally, experience in life that puts their secularism and liberalism to the test.

While some Christians test their media intake by rigorous standards of orthodoxy, I am much better informed as a Christian for hearing the commentary of people who didn’t have to affirm what they affirm. I have also been challenged in the details of my understanding of political and moral matters; it is not as though I am merely seeking confirmation of what I already believe. On the contrary, I am putting my beliefs to an empirical test and finding some of them confirmed.

6. Paul Kingsnorth: Christian Empiricist

Most recently, I have benefited from commentators and writers who have, unlike Scruton and Peterson, converted to full-bore orthodox - well, I should admit, Orthodox - Christianity. Chief among these has been Paul Kingsnorth. Kingsnorth’s was an intellectual conversion, like that of C. S. Lewis. Yet in Kingsnorth I see a full affirmation of orthodoxy alongside of an empirical and experiential basis for his Christianity, as well as the retention of a non-Christian readership. In this I see an example of what Christian empiricist writing and thinking can be.

Kingsnorth was a writer and spiritual seeker long before his Christian conversion. He attracted a readership because he was attentive to the world, as an advocate for the natural environment but more an appreciator and lover of the created order. Throughout his spiritual seeking, reflected in the three novels of his Buckmaster Trilogy, and his other collected writings, readers could detect a genuine interest in truth.

When he converted to Christianity, to his own surprise and against his own will, while he lost some readers, (he also gained others,) no one could doubt that he had retained his interest in truth and his attention to nature and experience. As David Fuller’s interview with Kingsnorth demonstrated, Kingsnorth has the attention of non-Christians, and he articulates his Christian conversion as an appropriate end to his spiritual seeking, though not an end to his truth-seeking, and an answer to the problems of the time.

As Kingsnorth has continued to write, his writing has not become merely an elaboration of what Christians believe, but an extension of those beliefs to an analysis of the world as it is and the relation between its technological and natural orders. Significantly, Kingsnorth is not, like some of the other writers I have discussed, a man of the right, but more naturally of the left, an environmentalist and anti-capitalist. In reading him, my own conception of politics has broadened (though these themes were present from the start in Roger Scruton’s own form of conservatism).

I am reminded too of the words Andrew Klavan reports that he prayed upon his conversion: “Lord, I am a writer, and I have become Christian. But please, do not make me a Christian writer.” There is something very significant here. A Christian writer, we imagine, would frame everything he wrote in terms of Christianity. All would begin from Christian premises or presuppositions. In so doing, his audience would narrow to only those who are themselves Christians, whether intentionally or not.

But the other implication is that the writing itself, the observation of the world that one’s writing expresses, and so on, would actually lose something of its genuineness. The novelist who is a truth-seeker does not know what moral his story ought to prove. His story arises from observation of the world, and he does not know how it will end. The Christian novelist knows how every story will end and shoehorns each story into the model of the gospel story.

Now J.R.R. Tolkien argued that every fairy story ultimately reflects the truth of the Christian story, but as we know from his opposition to allegory and denial that his own stories were allegory, this is not a prescription but merely a description. If being a Christian means that creative work can no longer reflect the world as it is and reveal that the Christian is true of the world, but must instead entail an obligation to force everything into a single, evangelical form, then Christians are incapable of testifying to others that the Christian religion is true of the common world we all inhabit.

Paul Kingsnorth, not to mention J. R. R. Tolkien (and Andrew Klavan), show that this is not the only path for the Christian novelist or intellectual. Even Christians can write about the common world, in terms all people can understand, and without presupposing the truth of the Christian faith. Christian coherentism is not the only option. Christian empiricism is, at least, possible.

7. Based Belief

I titled this piece “based belief,” but perhaps in an attempt to remain highbrow, I have not yet mentioned this internet epithet. In a certain corner of the internet, the word “based” has come to be a term of high praise, reflecting at least the user’s approval of a commentator’s political take. But the word has a deeper significance. It connotes the idea of a basis in reality. A “based take” is one that reflects and gives voice to reality, rather than imposing an idea upon reality.

Many think that human speech can be nothing but an imposition on reality. There are competing ideologies, and all human speech involves a taking up of one ideology or another and an imposition upon or construction of reality in line with that ideology. But if some human speech can be based, then this is not always the case. It is possible to use one’s words to simply reflect and express the reality that is before one’s eyes. Perhaps this is even the model of how we should use our words.

My unique recommendation is that Christians, even Christians, can and should use their words in this way, in political discourse, in intellectual activity, and in creative endeavor. Christianity, I hope, is not an ideology. In the face of moral and metaphysical confusion, I hope that Christians are not reduced to appealing to Bible verses in ways that only believing Christians will appreciate.

As a concluding thought, even the Bible should be given more credit than this. What if the Bible itself is not just supernatural revelation but is also the fruit of human and divine witness to the observable nature of the world around us?

Down with Christian Coherentism! Up with Christian Empiricism!

Today, I have made available an eBook on the strictest form of Christian coherentism, titled, “50 Errors of Christian Presuppositionalism.” Follow this link to download.