Christians and Non-Christians Use the Same Concepts

Unbelievers do not use words in ways that are inherently philosophically corrupted. We all use words to refer to the same things in the world, the objects of common human experience.

I’ll be meeting with my dissertation advisor shortly. He’s overseeing my dissertation in philosophy. I’m a Christian, and he is not. It makes me think of something I heard said in my seminary days.

Common Ground Between Believers and Unbelievers?

The seminary I attended taught that there was no common ground between believers and unbelievers. It taught that all unbelieving philosophy was corrupted by unbelieving presuppositions.

But my advisor is an unbeliever, an agnostic, to be precise. (“Science hasn’t been able fully to confirm or disconfirm the God hypothesis.”) I have found a lot of common ground with him. In particular, he and I both have concluded that there is a reality, and human thought is an attempt to grasp that reality.

When he talks to his sociologist friend, the ideas of postmodern philosophy and social constructionism strike him as a total dead-end. Just like they strike me. I’ve seen postmodernism lead people away from the Christian faith. My advisor sees postmodernism as ignoring the real world and the objective, even scientific basis of human happiness and morality.

Some people see conflict there. My worldview focuses on the Christian faith, his on human happiness. Quite the contrary. I also see a real-world basis for human happiness and morality in this life. I also believe that empirical scientific knowledge is possible and beneficial to humanity. In addition, I believe that one time the divine broke into the historical order and offered salvation from death and hope beyond this life. He doesn’t believe that. But up to that, we were in agreement.

Christian and Non-Christian Concepts?

Sometimes my seminary would say that believers and unbelievers have different concepts. That’s another thing I’m examining. It assumes a controversial philosophical position called meaning internalism: The meanings of our words, our concepts, are internal to our minds. That’s why Christians and non-Christians have different concepts. We each create our own in our own heads, or at least within our self-enclosed worldview.

The Christians get their concepts straight from the Bible. We’ve downloaded the correct cognitive operating system. Three cheers for us! (Three ‘cause, well, the Trinity.) Non-Christians get their concepts from bad, sinfully motivated philosophies and ideologies, like naturalism, idealism, and humanism.

But take a word like “man.” “God created man in his own image, male and female he created them.” Does this introduce a novel concept of “man?” On the contrary, when the Bible tells of the creation of man and that he is made in God’s image, it assumes that you know what a man is. Maybe you’ve encountered one before? Maybe you are one? That thing, the thing you’ve encountered before, and are, was created by God in his image.

No new concept of “man” is introduced. Men, in exactly the sense used by ordinary, unbelieving men, turn out to be the creation of divinity and the icon of the Father.

I take this to mean that unbelievers do not use a word like “man” in a philosophically corrupted way. They use it to refer to the kind of being in the world that we are. The meaning of “man,” the very concept, is not something in our heads, differing from believers to unbelievers. It is something in the world, the actual species homo sapiens. That’s called meaning externalism. The meanings of our words are the things and kind of things to which we refer, things that actually exist in the world.

An Objection

I can anticipate the objection: But the meaning of “man” has changed, and unbelievers (and some believers) do use it in a philosophically corrupted way! (Whichever direction you think the corruption goes.)

Actually, if the use of “man” in contemporary discourse has narrowed to human males (or had until a decade ago), then this is a change of words. The word “man” in its universal usage has been replaced by “human.” And believers and unbelievers do not have different concepts of “human.” We’re all acquainted with the type.

What we actually want to say about the difference between Christians and non-Christians is this: Christians and non-Christians say different things about humans. Christians say that we are made in the image of God. Non-Christians (some non-Christians) say we are “apes with ego trips.”

But it’s very important to recognize that we are using the same concept “human.” If we weren’t, then we wouldn’t even be disagreeing. If these are different concepts, human_Christian and human_{non-Christian}, then Christians aren’t even disagreeing with non-Christians. To disagree, we have to be using the same concepts, referring to the same things. But we disagree about what is true of those things, namely, humans. Are they made in the image of God, or are they merely apes with ego trips?

Our Shared World

If Christians and non-Christians do not have different concepts, then we can use common language to speak about our shared world. And if the world is as Christian theology claims, then the examination of that world should bear on whether the Christian or non-Christian claim is true. For example, we can examine and interact with humans. Are they more like what we would expect if they were made in the image of God, but fallen from their chief end, or randomly evolved apes with ego trips?