Fr. Deacon Ananias — December 18, 2021
Christianity did not begin in the arms of philosophy. Christ did not walk through Palestine preaching natural law. The early Church was not a philosophical seminar. The Apostles did not embrace the bond of fides et ratio, faith and reason. The Christianity of the first half-millennium marginalized pagan Greek philosophical faith in reason. This Christianity turned to Jerusalem, not to Athens. Although this Church took terms and distinctions from pagan Greek philosophers, it did not ground its theology in their philosophy.[i]
As we will see, with the West’s embracing of the Hellenistic philosophic project[ii] we begin to see the emergence of what is called Natural Theology,[iii] where Christianity is cast in a new light, taking on an identity of its own foreign to the One Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Faith.[iv] For the West, the project of Natural Theology (which is distinct from natural revelation) developed and arguably came to its climax with Thomas Aquinas. Natural Theology is typically defined as being what the human mind, by the “light of natural reason alone,” can know about God apart from revelation. For Aquinas, as with most Natural Theologians, there is the implicit belief that certain truths about God (e.g. that God exists, that there is only one God, that He is Good, etc.) can be known and demonstrated by reason without first presupposing faith in divine revelation. As we will see, the natural theological project of the West makes an essential distinction between the nature of faith and reason, a distinction that depends on certain epistemological assumptions concerning the nature of knowledge in general. In drawing out the differences between the nature of faith and reason, Aquinas argues that the existence of God is not an article of faith but a preambula (a preamble) to the articles of faith.[v] Consequently, natural knowledge is understood to be presupposed by faith, just as he believes nature is presupposed by grace.
These conclusions are the result of Aquinas’ epistemology derived from a classical foundationalist view found in Aristotle. We will discuss classical foundationalist theories of knowledge in detail later, but for now it is enough to note that natural theology commits itself to a particular view where epistemic foundations for the justification of knowledge can exist and function independent (autonomous epistemology) from the epistemological presuppositions provided from divine revelation as the unique justification for human reason (theonomous epistemology). Although Aquinas acknowledges that the human’s ability to reason and obtain truth depends on God as cause, the preconditions for intelligibility need not be located in our presupposing God as the necessary justificatory condition for the possibility of knowledge. This conclusion derives from an epistemological/ontological [vi] distinction made in Aristotle between “what is better known by us” versus “what is better known by nature.” [vii] The idea here is that the natural order of our inquiry/knowledge is to start from the things which are more knowable and clear to us (e.g., sense perception) and to proceed towards those which are clearer and more knowable by nature (e.g., being, God, etc.).[viii] In other words, temporally speaking the effects are known first and then the cause, although in the real order of existence the cause (what is better known by nature) is always prior the effect (what is better known by us). Therefore, according to Natural Theology, the presuppositional first principles of epistemic foundations are not located in the cause but in the effects, that is, sense perception and what is declared to be self-evident (non-demonstrable) principles. However, as we will see, even if this distinction in the order of our knowing (proceeding from what is better known by us to the cause, i.e., what is better known by nature) turns out to be true, asserting this will become problematic, since the truth of this claim depends on having already established that we can know this claim is true. This commits us to circular-reasoning and epistemic-bootstrapping. In other words, the method of discovering the truth of Aristotle’s distinction between “what is better known by us” versus “what is better known by nature” is suspect, and appealing to this epistemic principle will be fallacious, since it begs the question. If our reason and it processes are in question, we cannot use our reason (what is in question) to demonstrate how we know. Therefore, Natural Theology grants a pretended epistemic autonomy to those who do not presuppose their epistemic foundation in divine revelation, which assumes that there is an epistemic neutrality where one can in theory reason from sense experience and “self-evident” principles to certain conclusions and truths. However, as pointed out above and in what will be discussed in the later sections, a pretended epistemic autonomy whereby one grounds their epistemic starting points/first principles in either man or the world, apart from the presuppositions of a theonomous epistemology grounded in divine revelation, will beg the question and fail to establish a legitimate foundation for knowledge.
Natural theology, which is the modus operandi of the West, is a distinct project and differs significantly from the Eastern Orthodox understanding of “natural revelation” and the Orthodox’s ordo theologiae. Again, in the West, a pretended epistemic autonomy is granted to what is called “natural reason,” which is assumed to function properly by the light of the intellect alone. This is made explicit in John Paul II’s encyclical letter, Fides et Ratio, when he declares that natural reason “depends upon sense perception and experience and which advances by the light of the intellect alone…”[ix] Not only does the Orthodox Church not grant a pretended epistemic autonomy to natural reason, it makes no separation between natural and supernatural revelation. For as Dumitru Staniloae states: “Natural revelation is known and understood fully in the light of supernatural revelation, or we might say that natural revelation is given and maintained by God continuously through his own divine act which is above nature. That is why Saint Maximos the Confessor does not posit an essential distinction between natural and the supernatural revelation or biblical one. According to him, this latter is only the embodying of the former in historical persons and actions.”[x]
Since Natural Theology is the study of what can be known about God from human reason alone and apart from revelation, it often attempts to show that certain truths about God are demonstrable by reason via a posteriori cosmological arguments. This results in an empirical theology that has been historically committed to a Hellenistic philosophic and metaphysical program (a pagan Greek philosophical faith in reason), whose conclusions arrive not at the Christian God, but the Greek God of the philosophers. This is clearly stated in Aquinas who believes that those things about God arrived at by pagan Greek philosophy are in a sense also contained in Scripture insofar as Scripture speaks of many things which he believes could be discovered by natural human reason alone without God revealing them, or without natural revelation being grounded in supernatural revelation. For concerning Scripture, Aquinas states: “[I]t treats of Him not only so far as He can be known through creatures just as philosophers knew Him – ‘That which is known of God is manifest in them’ (Rom. I. 19)– but also so far as He is known to Himself alone and revealed to others.”[xi]
By embracing Hellenistic philosophy, the West and Natural Theology as a whole, conceives God more as a philosophical concept,[xii] God as substance (ousia) rather than person (hypostasis),[xiii] and therefore differs substantially from the Eastern Orthodox Church in their ordo theologiae.[xiv] This is why many writers have represented “ancient Greek thought as essentially ‘non-personal.’” [xv] However, unlike the followers of Natural Theology who invert the ordo theologiae, the Patristic and Orthodox method is to approach theological questions beginning with the persons Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Therefore, the same errors of Hellenism that the Fathers[xvi] so ardently fought against*,* namely, ancient Greek ontology that considers the unity and ontology of God to consists in the substance of God end up being the same fundamental theological errors in the West. Hellenistic philosophy brings the West “back to the ancient Greek ontology: God is first God (His substance or nature, His being), and then exists as Trinity, that is, as persons.”[xvii] Furthermore, having rejected the Orthodox doctrine of essence/energies, the West has no theological means of mediating God and man, save man’s philosophical ideas of God. Ultimately this adherence to ideas over personhood is what deprived the Christian West, at least theologically, of the experiential communion with the persons (hypostases) of God that is uniquely mediated through His divine energies. This amounted to the worshiping their idea of God rather than the persons of God Himself who exists first and foremost as hypostases of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit revealed in the mediating divine uncreated energies. Hence, Natural Theology by inverting the Patristic method of correct ordo theologiae, together with embracing the paradigms of Greek metaphysics and philosophy, is inevitably led to a scholasticism and rationalist theology that results in the worship of a generic idea of God, rather than the real persons (hypostasis) of as Holy Trinity through His divine energies. For it is the West’s adherence to the doctrine of Absolute Divine Simplicity, a conclusion derived from Natural Theology, to consider God as “a purely intellectual substance accessible to reason, possessing all perfections to an eminent degree, containing all ideas of all things, principle of every order and every reality…”[xviii] However, without a correct ordo theologiae, whereby one’s epistemic principles are assumed within the divine revelation of the Holy Trinity who reveals to us the Orthodox doctrine of the essence/energies distinction, one falls into the error of removing God from the world. For the idea of absolute divine simplicity concludes that God is not directly present in the world via His immanent uncreated activities (i.e., energies), leaving one with nothing more than a materialistic world of mechanistic causes presided over by an unknown and causally inert God – a generic deistic god that is conceived of as an idea, “a purely intellectual substance accessible to reason” and not immanent in the world and encountered through experience.[xix]
Furthermore, if knowledge – as articulated by Aristotle and Aquinas – is always derived from sense-experience, including our knowledge of God, then it follows that none of these created effects amount to a real knowledge of God Himself, since on the Thomistic view, God’s essence is never accessed or experienced at all.[xx] On this theological paradigm, one only knows a series of created causes. And if all we can ever know of God are His created causes in this life, then it should be expected that the Enlightenment would conclude that it makes no sense to believe in God, especially when one’s starting point for theology is empirical (i.e., Natural Theology) and grounded in an autonomous epistemology. Of course the Thomists will argue that we know God’s existence through the analogia entis, but this only further compounds the problem. For how could a posteriori empirical sense-experience ever provide evidence for a being that bears no real relation to the world of created being? According to Aquinas, God is an uncaused absolutely simple divine essence, which means that He is – as St. John of Damascus puts it – nothing like created being. In other words, there can be no similarity between the conditioned “being” of a created, temporal world and an uncreated, unconditioned eternal “Being.” Therefore, it is meaningless to use the phrase analogia entis to call God a first cause within the context of Aquinas’ theology. The Thomistic analogia entis has nothing to say about that which is wholly other, and therefore, it never bridges the impenetrable gap between absolute divine simplicity and created being. Now let us turn to consider Natural Theology’s connection to classical foundationalist epistemology.
Classical foundationalist epistemology has its roots in Aristotle. It was Aristotle who argued that “not all knowledge is demonstrative” and that some knowledge must be “independent of demonstration.” Natural Theologians (e.g., Aquinas, et. al.) agree with the classical foundational epistemology of Aristotle, holding that all knowledge must rest on “first principles” or “self-evident truths.”[xxi]Natural Theology in committing to a classical foundationalist model concerning epistemology assume two requirements regarding knowledge: (1) Our cognitive states are basic, that is, they possess some “positive epistemic status independently of their epistemic relations to any other cognitive states.” And, (2) “Every nonbasic cognitive state can possess positive epistemic status only because of the epistemic relations it bears, directly or indirectly, to basic cognitive states.”[xxii]
Beyond the problems with the West’s Natural Theology project, found in the embracing of the Hellenistic pagan philosophical project with respect to epistemology, a project that inherits a pagan Greek philosophical faith in reason, there are problems with Natural Theology’s commitment to classical foundationalism. The epistemology of classical foundationalism appears to be philosophically problematic, since it assumes there are nonconceptual ‘givens’ that serve as self-evident epistemic foundations/starting points for empirical knowledge. Often the classical foundationalist will argue for the epistemic justification of beliefs by reducing them to what are called basic beliefs.[xxiii] For example, for the classical foundationalists of the Cartesian variety (e.g., rationalists as opposed to empiricists), self-evident epistemic foundations (basic beliefs/givens) are not grounded in empirical sense-data, but in other beliefs experienced within the mind. However, this type of classical foundationalist will have difficulties establishing how it is possible to justify beliefs concerning the external world (the material world) based on beliefs concerning the experienced states of the mind. Since, for Descartes, empirical knowledge is restricted to the subjective states of the mind. Therefore, the challenge and problem revolves around foundational beliefs and how to justify that foundations are in fact proper justifications. Since Rationalists will make innate self-evident a priori beliefs their foundations for epistemic justification for other beliefs, the justification for foundationalist principles or epistemic givens will ultimately be circular, since it will assume such epistemic basic beliefs justify one’s argument that they are foundational and epistemically basic. Likewise with the empiricists, they will make sense impressions their basic epistemic foundations. However, as Sellars points out, “Sensations are no more epistemic in character than are trees or tables, and are no more ineffable. They are private in the sense that only one person can notice them; but they are public in the sense that you can report, and can state the same facts about your sensations that I can report about my own.”[xxiv] Furthermore, foundationalism of the empiricist variety will have the same problems and charges of circularity/question begging that the Rationalists do in their attempt provide justification for the justification criteria (e.g., having 1st principles located in sensation as epistemically given or basic) before establishing they are justified in making such arguments. Sellars qualifies what is meant by an epistemic “given” when he states: “The point of the epistemological category of the given is, presumably, to explicate the idea that empirical knowledge rests on a ‘foundation’ of non-inferential knowledge of matter of fact.”[xxv] Moreover, the nonconceptual content of sensory experience, appears to be incapable of justifying propositional or conceptual beliefs. Donald Davidson states:
The relation between sensation and a belief cannot be logical, since sensations are not beliefs or other propositional attitudes [that is, are not formulated in conceptual terms]. What then is the relation? The answer is, I think obvious: the relation is causal. Sensations cause some beliefs and in this sense are the basis or ground of those beliefs.[xxvi]
However, causation cannot provide adequate justification for beliefs. Causal explanations do not account for how or why a belief is justified.[xxvii] For example, it certainly can be the case that x causes me to believe y at time t and it just so happens that y is true, but is it the case that I have knowledge that y is true at time t? Suppose that a wicked brain-surgeon x artificially induces belief y in me, which just so happen to be false. I would then have x causing me to believe y at time t while y is false. Since the brain-surgeon could of equally caused me to believe something true, the question immediately arises, how would I know y is true at time t if my knowledge is caused by x? The answer seems obvious: I would not. Therefore, causal explanations cannot provide us with an account of knowledge.