We Cannot Start from God
God is first in the order of being, but not in the order of knowing.
Politics must be built on the foundation of a religious worldview, argued Dr. James Orr on a recent episode of my and King Laugh’s podcast The Flâneur and the Philosopher. Different moral and religious worldviews arise from competing, deeply felt moral intuitions. These intuitions are pre-rational and ultimately incapable of rational contestation.
I presented a different theory, that our different moral perspectives arise from different experiences. Our differences arise from the limitations of our experiences. None of us have experienced everything, and many of us have only experienced a small fraction of what the world has to offer.
If worldviews arise from limited experience, then they are capable of update in light of experience. What is more, experience can be a point of common ground between people of different worldviews and a foundation for non-sectarian political communication and legislation.
Dr. Orr objected that experience is mediated by our worldview and moral intuitions. Often partisans of opposite moral perspectives can look at the same news stories and come to opposite conclusions. They can have the same on-campus experiences and remain on opposing sides of campus politics. They can read the same studies and take opposite morals from them.
Watch a 4 1/2 minute selection of the exchange below:
Can We Start from God?
While Dr. Orr is otherwise friendly to philosophical arguments from nature to God, his political theology implies a fideist conclusion: If you don’t start from God, you’ll never get to God. If we want to arrive at a Christian worldview, we must begin from Christian intuitions.
This is a powerful argument for an explicitly religious or metaphysical politics, in contradiction to the anti-metaphysical liberalism of John Rawls, the religious libertarianism of David French, and the two-kingdoms theology of David Van Drunen, to name a few examples.
However, as I argued in defense of Oren Cass, this argument wrongly entails that the order of knowing must match the order of being.
God is the source of being. Christianity the source of Western moral wisdom. Therefore, our knowledge must start from God and Christianity. God is first in the order of being and in the order of knowing.
Start from Common Ground
But Cass himself is a counter-example to this claim. Cass already agrees with Christian moral wisdom, e.g., Catholic social teaching. We agree on the morality. The further question, the metaphysical one, is what is the explanation in reality for morality’s validity and normativity.
If I had the opportunity to discuss with Cass, I would begin from our common ground, the wisdom of the Christian moral tradition. I would leverage that point of agreement against his proposed evolutionary explanation of morality and toward a non-naturalist account of morality.
God may be the first thing in the order of being, but he must come later in the order of knowing.
If we want to know God, we must begin from things better known to ourselves that indicate his existence and attributes. To paraphrase Romans 1:20, “For the existence and attributes of God are clearly revealed in the things that have been made.”
In fact, I think it is fair to say that Dr. Orr argues as much in the realm of natural philosophy. He does not argue there that the natural order can make no sense without God, that the laws of nature must have a law-giver. Rather, he argues that we can make sense of nature on its own terms as possessing natural powers, dispositions, and capacities - a Neo-Aristotelian natural philosophy.
I think the same can be said for finite, human ethics and politics.
What about how Christianity changed the world?
Now, it is true that Christianity introduces new principles into the world. For instance, as Hannah Arendt argues, modern political life requires as its basis forgiveness. With the demise of Christian thinking in public life, politics has become vindictive, without any basis for forgiveness, repentance, and reconciliation.
But this is not to say that politics was simply impossible before the coming of Christ. It was limited; it was imperfect; but it was, to an extent, functional.
Likewise, it is not as though only Christians can recognize the loss that has occurred with the abandonment of forgiveness in public life. I have lost count of the number of podcasts concerning cancel culture and racial injustice, by secular liberals or ex-liberals, who perceive this loss and desire, on secular grounds, a return to an ethic of forgiveness. (In fact, I’ve never heard this better articulated than by Alain de Botton and Ayishat Akanbi in this discussion.)
We Must Start Where People Start
I agree with Dr. Orr that God is the foundation of all things; I agree that our politics has need of Christian wisdom. In this, I concur with Van Til, the theonomists, Catholic integralists, Neo-Thomists, communitarians, and many more.
However, I disagree that we must come to agreement on theology or metaphysics before we begin well-founded political discourse. Our political arguments should appeal to people where they are.
People must begin the path of knowledge where they are, not somewhere else.
We don’t start from God; we have to start where people are. There’s no starting somewhere else.
“As the farmer told the tourist who asked for directions, ‘You shouldn’t start here.’”
- Classical Apologetics, by Sproul, Gerstner, and Lindlsey, p. 212
Want to understand better the distinction between the order of knowing and the order of being? Sign up for my course, Theological Epistemology.
The deepest divide in the Christian theory of knowledge is on the matter of how the order of being relates to the order of knowing. God is the first thing in the order of being. Is he the first thing in the order of knowing also?
That is the subject of this fifth lecture of my course Theological Epistemology. If you want to understand better the argument for what I call Christian empiricism, and is sometimes called “classical apologetics,” or Thomism, you’ll want to subscribe to get access to today’s lecture.
In this lecture we’ll consider why theological fideists and theological rationalists are actually on the same team: Team “Start from God.” The opposing team are theological empiricists, who trace their philosophical heritage to Aristotle, and their theological heritage to Aquinas. Appearances are also made by Hegel, Van Til, and the authors of Classical Apologetics, R. C. Sproul, John Gerstner, and Arthur Lindsley.
The introduction to the lecture is free, but you’ll have to subscribe to access the rest of the lecture.
