Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel is a fascinating figure in the history of philosophy. Hegel provides a grand metaphysical system that encompasses all elements of reality and perennial questions. For example, Hegel believes that the role of philosophy is to explicate the development of “reason,” or “idea” as it unfolds in world history, political life, and every aspect of culture and society. According to Hegel, when exploring the philosophy of history (how one is to understand the meaning and significance of history), it is important to understand that human events are the ordered development and process of the Idea or world-mind, “The concrete Ideas, the minds of the nations, have their truth and their destiny in the concrete Idea which is absolute universality, i.e. in the world-mind” (116). Whether Hegel is discussing the philosophy of right (systems of right actions, ethics, and contractual law) or the grand purpose of human affairs in history, it is “reason,” “idea,” and world-mind that fundamentally guides reality and leads to all truth, and in fact, knows all things (165-166). Hegel explains further, “This vast congeries of volitions, interests and activities, constitute the instruments and means of the world-spirit for attaining its object; bringing it to consciousness, and realizing it” (171). Hegel’s far-reaching metaphysics touches on all reality. To further grasp Hegel’s metaphysical system, however, it is important to more closely examine his concept of the “world-mind” and its implications for understanding the world.
In both his Philosophy of Right and Philosophy of History, Hegel uses the terms “world-mind” or “world-idea” and “reason” as a kind of immaterial guiding force for all reality and Being. Sometimes, he even uses the theological German term “geist” to capture this notion (88, 147, among others). For Hegel, world-mind is the one ultimate substance that binds and guides all things in the universe (163). The one essential nature or character of Being is mind. One of the great questions Hegel explores is the nature and character of reality (or what is known as “Being”). Being is the formal object of study for the metaphysician and it involves exploring reality, itself, along with how and why things exist as they do. In metaphysics, the study of being seeks to explore the ultimate foundations and causes of all that exists. The study of Being is a far-reaching inquiry which explores what it means for a thing to exist, the various ways in which a thing can exist, and the metaphysical principles which make possible a thing to exist in the first place. Being, then is not the study of one thing among the already existing things which exist; it is the study of why and how the universe is the way it is and explores the fundamental principles of its existence. In the classical Aristotelian sense, the study of reality (being) takes being as it is and attempts to carefully demonstrate the first principles of reality and describe what it means for a thing to exist.1 Through a careful understanding of ontology (what it means for a specific thing to exist), philosophers find clues for what it means for the universe to exist.
Hegel, however, does not take the classical approach of examining the properties of reality such as the logical laws of noncontradiction, identity, and excluded middle, or the various modes of existence (rational, mental, and intentional being and the relationships among being), and develop a metaphysical system from there, rather, he begins with the “world-spirit” and its organic processes and development in the universe. Hegel reduces all being to mind, idea, or world-spirit and this is why his conceptual scheme for reality is known as “idealism.” In metaphysics, idealism is any theory which reduces all reality to mind and its ideas. Idealism makes the mind or “world-mind” (in Hegel’s case) the ultimate character, or substance of reality and makes all reality mind-dependent.
As pointed out, Hegel believes that all reality is driven by a world-spirit or world-mind. This world-spirit, is not the transcendent Christian God, but a nonphysical spiritual force that is immanent, indwelt, and part of the universe itself—what is known as metaphysical monism. Since Hegel reduces all reality to only one thing, mind or spirit, his position can also be identified with theological pantheism or panentheism (the idea that all is in God). The universe is in continual change and development due to the careful guidance of the world-spirit. Hegel’s position is known as idealism because he believes that all reality is based on, or consists of spirit, idea, or mind. Hegel connects this notion to his overall understanding of idealism, “Now it is the interest of spirit that external conditions should become internal ones; that the natural and the spiritual world should be recognized in the subjective aspect belonging to intelligence; by which process the unity of subjectivity and being generally—or the idealism of existence—is established” (231). Hegel argues that idealism is established if one can reduce all reality to the subjective aspect of intelligence or mind. He believes that the subjective intelligent individual serves as a kind of microcosm of the universal world-spirit or intelligence (162-163). If the universe is reasonable, there must be an ultimate intelligence or “reason” that is at work, infused into, and guiding the universe. Humans have the intellectual capacity of discovering reason at work in reality. Hegel applies this notion of “reason” to all aspects of life and the world, including this unfolding of idealism to history and human events.
In part two we will explore how Hegel applies the notion of the world-spirit to history itself.
1 Aristotle takes the primacy of being, or the fact of existence, as his philosophical point of departure. This is the point of his famous phrase “being as being” in book IV of his Metaphysics (522).
Works Cited
Hegel, Georg. Philosophy of Right. Translated by T. M. Knox. The Great Books of the Western World, edited by Mortimer J. Adler et al., Vol. 43. Chicago: Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc., 1996.
— Philosophy of History. Translated by J. Sibree. The Great Books of the Western World, edited by Mortimer J. Adler et al., Vol. 43. Chicago: Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc., 1996.
Have you ever come across children arguing about something on playground? One says “is so” and the other “is not”? Each is emphatically stating that something is or is not the case. Each is attempting to persuade the other about reality. Perhaps unknowingly, each is making a metaphysical statement and assuming an ultimate truth belonging to reality. Each is tacitly assuming there is a reality to argue about. Reality is assumed. To say something is the case is to already assume “what is,” to assume reality. No one can deny that Being is. The question arises, however, because Being is so fundamental to our human experience, how does one go about presenting a definition of Being?
The inquiry into Being is the most foundational question of all. It is the basic starting point of ontology, or the study of Being and existing things. It is the study of reality. This fundamental and most basic feature of reality, that Being is, perplexed the great mathematician and philosopher, Blaise Pascal. He thought that any attempt to define what is, or Being, amounts to a tautology. In On Geometrical Demonstration, Pascal writes:
There are even those who go to the absurdity of explaining a word by the word itself. I know of some who have defined light in this way: “Light is a luminary motion of luminous bodies,” as if we could understand the words luminary and luminous without understanding the word light [lumière].
We cannot undertake to define being without falling into this absurdity, for we cannot define any word without beginning with these words it is, either explicitly or implicitly. Therefore to define being we would have to say it is, and thus use the word defined in the definition.
It is sufficiently clear from this that there are words incapable of definition. And if nature had not made up for this defect by giving a like idea to all men, all our expressions would be confused; whereas we make use of them with the same assurance and the same certainty we should have if they had been explained in a perfectly unambiguous way, because nature itself has given us, without words, a clearer understanding of them than we gain through art with all our explanations.1
The perplexity Pascal is pointing to is that Being, or “what is” is defined as that which is and seems to be circular because the words “it is” belong to the definition of Being. In a very strict sense, Pascal is correct. It is difficult to precisely define Being without using the terms “what is.” The reason, logically, is that Being is the most fundamental aspect of reality. It is the most basic point of departure for the metaphysician. No one can deny that Being, or something, is. Long ago, Aristotle pointed out that philosophy must have some very basic starting points and it is the mark of ignorance to not recognize this fact. We must have these first foundational starting points in order to avoid an endless regression of explanations. So, when the metaphysician starts from the basic assumption of what it is, and then explicates what is, he is not engaging in circular reasoning. Being is the fundamental principle of reality and why Pascal points out that it is difficult to define. The most fundamental aspects of reality are difficult to define ontologically. Pascal correctly points out that Being is so basic that it is intuitively correct—And if nature had not made up for this defect by giving a like idea to all men, all our expressions would be confused. Being is both the logical and intuitive starting point for the metaphysician.
Being, is not as much a tautological worry as Pascal feared. And he partially answered his concern. I do believe that Being can be correctly defined even if it is a little imprecise. As Aristotle pointed out, Being can be said in many ways. Different kinds of being exist in different ways. Fictional characters such as Hamlet exist in a different way than my writing desk. But the philosopher is not alone regarding the difficult nature of ontology, or being. The physicist can give a definition of energy (a capacity for change) but can not explain its ontology (being). Definitions are elusive indeed. No one, however, denies that things that things like fictional characters exist in one way, while things like energy, or tables exist in another. The nature of Being forces us to re-examine the claims of children who passionately question what is or what is not.
Next time, we’ll begin our study of Hegelian idealism and the nature of Being. Hopefully, this excursus helped to clarify the foundational nature of Being.
1 Blaise Pascal, The Provincial Letters; Pensées; Scientific Treatises, ed. Mortimer J. Adler and Robert McHenry, trans. W. F. Trotter, Second Edition., vol. 30, Great Books of the Western World (Chicago: Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., 1990), 432.
Being is the sphere or subject-matter of knowledge, and knowledge is to know the nature of Being.
—Plato, The Republic
I will soon post a short series on the metaphysical idealism of Georg Hegel. What follows is a prolegomena which seeks to lay the foundation of what will come and provide some helpful interpretation of the concepts discussed. I am critical of idealism—the notion that the mind determines reality or that all reality is ultimately reducible to mind. Dr. Mortimer Adler once called idealism “the greatest of all modern philosophical mistakes.”1 So we will begin this introduction by discussing the concepts of “idea” and “reality” in order to see why idealism is such a significant error, and more specifically for this series, Hegelian idealism. Finally, we will discover that reality is not monistic (reducible to only one thing) but pluralistic due to the three modes of existence (real being, mental being, and intentional being). Monistic Hegelian idealism is an over simplification of reality.
To begin, we will start with Being or reality. In philosophy, the term ‘being’ most simply refers to the fact that something exists. It can be further analyzed into abstract being (such as ideas, mathematical entities, fictional characters, etc. that exist mentally) and concrete being (people, furniture, and things that can be experienced with the senses). Aristotle taught that the study of being as being is the primary concern for the metaphysician. In the realist tradition, the fact of being and theories about it are two distinctly separate ontological and epistemological questions (because one’s epistemological theories about reality might turn out to be wrong). Being, therefore, is another term for reality or that which is or exists in some way.2 Philosopher John Macquarrie provides this helpful etymology,
“To ‘exist’ or ‘ex-sist’ (Latin: ex-sistere) meant originally to ‘stand out’ or ‘emerge’. Thus the verb probably had a more active feel about it than it does now. To exist was to emerge or stand out from the background as something really there. Putting it more philosophically, to exist is to stand out from nothing”. 3
To exist, or to stand out from nothing applies to individual things and the universe as whole. It is important to keep in mind, however, that Being is not the study of one thing among the already existing things which exist; it is the study of why and how the universe is the way it is and explores the fundamental principles of its existence. When looking at the universe as whole, Being is not a genus. This will be helpful when it comes to understanding Hegel’s metaphysical understanding of the world. For Hegel, the fundamental principle of the universe is what he calls “world-spirit” or mind.
The series will explore the three modes of being—real being, mental being, and intentional being. These modes of being help us to understand that ideas are always about something. Ideas themselves do not create reality or have productive power. Aristotle is a helpful guide here. In his Metaphysics, he states, “It is not because we think truly that you are pale, that you are pale, but because you are pale we who say this have the truth.”4 Aristotle is saying three important things. First, the being of the mind is different from being in complete reality.5 Second, just because we ‘think’ something is the case, does not make it so. Mental being, although real being (because the individual mind exists in reality), is not the same thing as external or actual real being (complete reality in Aristotelian terms). Third, there is a primacy in Aristotelian metaphysics of that which is in ‘act’ or physical existence. There is a primacy to external reality in classical metaphysics. The reason for this emphasis is that it is impossible to deny that being is. Mental being is different in kind, from physical reality. As we will see, intentional being, demonstrates that ideas are always of something else, and are grounded in both external reality and mental being.
What will be developed in future posts are what classical philosophers call the three modes of being—real being, mental being and intentional being. Real being, is physical reality—that which exists apart from the mind and independent of it. Real being exists exist whether or not the mind perceives it and is completely independent of the mind. Mental being includes subjective and objective acts of the mind. Mental being includes the subjective feelings that would not exist apart from the individual and the objective acts of memory and fictional characters. Antigone is a mental character but objective, a real character of literary fiction. The same is true regarding historical figures. Joseph Stalin once lived in reality but now is an objective figure of memory and history. Not all mental being is strictly subjective. Intentional being can only exist when there are two or more minds that can communicate about an object. The object could be an act of the mind or something in physical reality. In a sense, intentional being, is a via media, or middle way, between real being and mental being. Intentional being points to the ability of the individual mind to be “about,” bent towards, stretched out to, or focused on something. It is an act of cognition and includes the immaterial or universal nature of being because the mind is immaterial. The mind itself understands through a mode of immaterial existence. Through perception, the intellect receives the universal or essence of the object. This is possible, because the human mind can make abstractions about physical reality. What must be remembered, however, is that intentional being completely relies on both real and mental being. As we will see, all of this is collapsed in Hegelian idealism. To be an idealist one must deny real being.
Intentional being points us to at least two important concepts. The first is classical realism and how universals are to be understood and, secondly, that ideas are always of something (the primacy of real being). Daniel Sullivan provides a very helpful understanding of classical or moderate realism:
The view of philosophers in the tradition of Aristotle and St. Thomas is that what is known exists as universal in the intellect, but as individual outside the mind. This position is called Moderate Realism. It is called realism because the universals really do exist in the intellect; moderate, because their existence stops there. Since the form universalized in the intellect is identical with the form individuated in the thing, we can say, following the traditional formula, that our ideas are universal in the intellect only, but have a foundation in things. Implied in this view of the nature of the idea is the spirituality of the intellect (otherwise the universal could not exist there) and the matter and form composition of all corporeal substances, including man.6
When it comes to understand Hegel, is important to realize that he was correct about the immateriality of the mind. What Hegel failed to understand is that Being is composed of both the material and immaterial. Mathematicians know that this is intuitively correct. Even Max Planck, the father of quantum physics, understood this, “As there is a material object behind every sensation, so there is a metaphysical reality behind everything that human experience shows to be real.”7 Part of real being is that it demonstrates mathematical and immaterial qualities. But Hegel mistakenly makes all reality part of an immaterial world-spirit. In this sense, Hegelian idealism (and idealism in general) is Gnostic—the theological error which denies or denigrates the existence of real being.
The second point, that ideas refer to something else is best illustrated by Dr. Mortimer Adler:
In view of the fact that ideas are natural signs which signify, refer to, or intend objects as their natural referents or significates, it would seem appropriate to speak of the mode of existence possed by objects as intentional existence… ideas are intentions of the mind. Their intentionality consists in their having significates or objects. Objects, as intended or signified, have intententional existence.8
In other words, ideas are the signs which signify reality. They are descriptive of the world around us, but not the world itself. Before Kant and Hegel, no philosopher in the Western intellectual tradition confused or conflated the concept of idea with reality.
After Aristotle, Augustine was among the first to point to intentional existence and the ability of the human mind to discern it. Regarding immaterial principles of reality such as mathematics and the laws of logic (noncontradiction, identity, excluded middle), Augustine explains, “I have heard the sounds of the words by which their meaning is expressed when they are discussed, but the words are one thing and the principles another. The words may sometimes be spoken in Latin and at other times in Greek, but the principles are neither Greek nor Latin.”9 Intentional being is possible because the mind can hold the principle as an object of thought and discuss it regardless of the language used. The idea points to the thing signified (object of mental being or object of real being). Intentional being is not the thought itself. Augustine further explicates this idea in his book On Christian Doctrine. The mind holds a middle way between the immaterial (the mind, mathematics, logic, moral truths, aesthetics, questions of value and meaning, etc.) and the empirical material worlds. Human existence lives between these two worlds. Regarding the mind, Augustine reminds us, “… it holds a middle place between the unchangeable truth above it and the changeable things beneath it…”10 In classical terms, the mind holds a middle place between real being and mental being. Intentional being brings these worlds together and helps us to make sense out of reality.
The next few posts will explore the nature of being, reality and idea as they are to be correctly understood. We’ll discover why Hegelian idealism is not a helpful view of reality. Why should we put this emphasis on reality and defend the classical view of moderate realism? The reason is that we want to be rightly and correctly related to reality as it actually is. When one is correctly aligned with reality, intellectual integrity and wholeness is brought about. An integrated philosophical perspective will help us to understand and live in reality as it is.
Works Cited
Adler, Mortimer. Adler’s Philosophical Dictionary: 125 Key Terms for the Philosopher’s Lexicon. New York, NY: Scribner, 1995.
———. The Four Dimensions of Philosophy: Metaphysical, Moral, Objective, Categorical. New York: Macmillan Publishing Company, 1993.
Aristotle. Metaphysics. Vol. 7. Great Books of The Western World. Chicago: Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc., 1996.
Augustine. On Christian Doctrine. Vol. 16. Great Books of The Western World. Chicago: Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc., n.d.
———. The Confessions. Vol. 16. Great Books of the Western World. Chicago: Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc., 1993.
Macquarrie, John. Existentialism: An Introduction, Guide, and Assessment. New York: Penguin Books, 1973.
Planck, Max. Scientific Autobiography and Other Papers. Translated by Frank Gaynor. Vol. 56. Great Books of The Western World. Chicago: Encyclopedia Britannica, 1993.
Sullivan, Daniel. An Introduction to Philosophy: Perennial Principles of the Classical Realist Tradition. Charlotte, North Carolina: TAN Books, 2009.
1Mortimer Adler, Adler’s Philosophical Dictionary: 125 Key Terms for the Philosopher’s Lexicon (New York, NY: Scribner, 1995).
2As we will discover, things can be said to exist in different ways, depending on their mode of being.
3John Macquarrie, Existentialism: An Introduction, Guide, and Assessment (New York: Penguin Books, 1973)., 62.
4Aristotle, Metaphysics, vol. 7, Great Books of The Western World (Chicago: Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc., 1996), 577.
5In book IX, chapter 3 of his Metaphysics, Aristotle connects ‘act’ with ‘complete reality’.
6Daniel Sullivan, An Introduction to Philosophy: Perennial Principles of the Classical Realist Tradition (Charlotte, North Carolina: TAN Books, 2009), 72.
7Max Planck, Scientific Autobiography and Other Papers, trans. Frank Gaynor, vol. 56, Great Books of The Western World (Chicago: Encyclopedia Britannica, 1993), 97.
8Mortimer Adler, The Four Dimensions of Philosophy: Metaphysical, Moral, Objective, Categorical (New York: Macmillan Publishing Company, 1993), 113.
9Augustine, The Confessions, vol. 16, Great Books of the Western World (Chicago: Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc., 1996), 95.
10Augustine, On Christian Doctrine, vol. 16, Great Books of The Western World (Chicago: Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc., 1996), 736.
Note: I discuss a few of these thoughts regarding the presuppositional method of apologetics here. In this post I will look at a 17th century version of presuppositionalism drawn from Rene Descartes, who is often considered the father of modern philosophy.
The more I read the great authors of the western intellectual tradition, the more I realize there really is nothing new. This occurred to me once again when I was reading through the works of René Descartes and discovered that he maintained a presuppositional bent in his argumentation for God’s existence. This experience took me back to the time when I first learned the basics of philosophical theology and apologetic method. Like most who begin exploring the field of Christian apologetics, I was introduced to the presuppositional school of apologetics. Mostly, I read Greg Bahnsen, Cornelius Van Til, Gordon Clark, and John Frame. I read other authors related to the presuppositional school but I never found the method to be conceptually coherent or rationally compelling. Interestingly enough, when I went back to re-read Descartes for my doctoral work, I discovered that presuppositional apologetic thinking is not new, certainly not just a twentieth or twenty-first century phenomenon, and the same problems with the method still apply.1 (In many ways the presuppositional school of apologetics closely corresponds to Kantian transcendental idealism and German idealism in general such as Kant, Hegel, Schelling, etc., but that is a topic for another post.) By “presuppositional method” I am referring to any apologetic approach that presupposes the truth of Christianity or the Christian God and then reasons from that point.
I especially enjoy reading the earlier thinkers who contribute to philosophy and theology because they often shed light on today’s intellectual issues and thinking in ways that might be overlooked or missed. I’ve read Descartes many times in my academic career and the presuppositional character of his work went unnoticed. Only recently did it stand out to me. That’s the great thing about reading a truly classic author. One can always learn something new.
To begin, Descartes was a rationalist. In contrast to other philosophers, who take the reality of Being as a fact and use that fact (derived from sense experience) as a point of philosophical departure, rationalists such as Descartes think that the truth about reality can be acquired by reason alone. This is an important point which explains why he thinks God must be presupposed when it comes to explaining the nature of reality.
Descartes presents a presuppositional argument for the existence of God based on the idea of God as a Perfect Being. To be fair, Descartes presents several different arguments for God’s existence in his writings. Here, I am mostly concerned with his presuppositional approach found in his Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting Reason, and Meditations on First Philosophy. All his arguments, however, are rational in nature (appealing to reason alone) and based on the idea of God, and establishing the existence of God based on geometrical argumentation. Descartes’s Perfect Being argument is similar to the ontological argument, a kind of proof for God’s existence: God must exist inasmuch as the attribute of existence or, in some forms, necessary existence, is part of his nature. Descartes version of the argument simply contends that a Perfect Being must exist because existence is property of perfection. Descartes attempts to demonstrate that God can be proved the same way one can rationally solve a geometrical equation, simply by following the rules of reason. While contemplating the axioms of geometry, Descartes applies the same rational mathematical reasoning to the existence of God,
For to take an example, I saw very well that if we suppose a triangle to be given, the three angles must certainly be equal to two right angles; but for all that I saw no reason to be assured that there was any such triangle in existence, while on the contrary, on reverting to the examination of the idea which I had of a Perfect Being, I found that in this case existence was implied in it in the same manner in which the equality of its three angles to two right angles is implied in the triangle; or in the idea of a sphere, that all the points on its surface are equidistant from its centre, or even more evidently still. Consequently it is at least as certain that God who is a Being so perfect, is, or exists, as any demonstration of geometry can be. (277)
Descartes Perfect Being exists the way a triangle exists—it must exist the way a triangle has two right angles. In other words, God must be presupposed the same way one presupposes the principles and axioms of mathematical truths. Descartes is aware that such a rational attempt may not be very convincing for some. Following his method of extreme doubt, Descartes shifts his approach and asks about the reliability of our thoughts during a dream. Can we doubt our thoughts and imagination the same way that we doubt our senses? Descartes provides this answer,
And though the wisest minds may study the matter as much as they will, I do not believe that they will be able to give any sufficient reason for removing this doubt, unless they presuppose the existence of God. For to begin with, that which I have just taken as a rule that is to say, that all the things that we very clearly and very distinctly conceive of are true, is certain only because God is or exists and that He is a Perfect Being, and that all that is in us issues from Him. (277, emphasis added)
Notice what Descartes is saying here—one must presuppose God exists because God is a Perfect Being which must include existence. In other words, God is (presupposition), therefore God exists (because a Perfect Being must exist). This is the heart of the presuppositional approach. And it is entirely circular in reasoning. But before we get to the analysis of Descartes approach and the presuppositional method, it is best to look at his basic points of departure.
To summarize, Descartes reasoning is as follows: one can not trust the senses because the senses can be wrong. However, as Descartes famously observes “I think therefore I am”, and he concludes that he can in fact trust his reasoning, because he has to exist in order to think (275, 276). Further, Descartes thinks that because he can think of a Perfect Being, God must exist. God must exist because existence is a property of Being and in order to be the most Perfect Being, such a Being must have the property of existence. Descartes calls this a “metaphysical certainty” (277). If one doubts such a metaphysical certainty, they should presuppose God exists because he reasons that God’s existence will solve the doubts one can experience from thoughts, dreams, imagination, or the senses. In other words, one must presuppose that God exists in order to make sense out of the reality of the world. Descartes makes this even more clear in his Meditation on First Philosophy,
And we must not object that it is in truth necessary for me to assert that God exists after having presupposed that He possesses every sort of perfection, since existence is one of these (320).
For Descartes, God exists because it is presupposed that God has perfection. It is worth pointing out that not every theist that holds to the ontological argument, or Perfect Being theology, is a presuppositionalist or must be a presuppositionalist in order to defend it. Here, I am merely pointing out that Descartes does make his presupposition of God’s existence a central point in his argument for God’s existence. Descartes needs to make this philosophical assertion because he can not start with the trust worthiness of Being or reality itself (for him, those things must be doubted). His argument must be purely rational because that is the only starting point that will provide certainty for him. Descartes philosophical theology is unique in the sense that he does not take Being as his starting point but focuses on rational geometrical proofs and the need to presuppose the existence of God as the foundation of his method. For Descartes, God is a Perfect Being which must be presupposed.
Now a few concluding thoughts about Descartes and presuppositionalism can be said. First, there is nothing inherently wrong with a pure rational argument for God’s existence. Plato would have have agreed with some of Descartes ideas. Many mathematicians have come to theistic conclusions based on the symmetry and principles of math itself. Many, I think, are valid. The problem is that starting with the existence of God and then arguing from that point is bad logic. The thing that always prevented me from taking the presuppositional school of apologetics seriously is the the circularity of the method. Circular reasoning is a logical fallacy which is formally called the petitio principii (begging of the question). This is an error that occurs when when the conclusion of an argument is already present, usually disguised or vague, in the premises. It is seen as circular because the conclusion is present in the premises, and no real progress is made. A more modern example of circular reasoning is this, “You can’t expect seventeen-year-olds to vote intelligently, because they are too young to have good judgment about the issues.” The conclusion of the argument is one of its premises. When the conclusion is one of the premises, the argument is circular and begs the question. Descartes reasoning that God must be presupposed to show that God exists is circular. Finally, it makes little practical sense to tell the non-theist that they must presuppose the existence of God when the existence of God is the central question.
There is another issue with rationalism more generally. Much of modern philosophy, beginning with Descartes begins with epistemology (how we know what we know). When one begins with how we know, and not the metaphysical givenness of reality, a pure rational epistemology can quickly go circular. Descartes gets things only half right here. Existence is a property of being. But there are different orders of being and different kinds of existence. My thought of a flying unicorn with laser beams shooting out its eyes has a very different kind of being than the tree in front of my house. Imagination presents a different mode of being than physical reality. Angels have a very different kind of being than I do. There are different orders to being and different kinds of existence. Descartes is making a rational or conceptual statement and applying it to concrete reality, when in fact, the question really is whether or not such a Perfect Being exists absolutely, not rationally or conceptually. The theist and non-theist can both have the same conception of a Perfect Being but the issue at stake is whether or not such a being actually exists. Starting with what-is and understanding the order of being (and order of knowing) is a far more fruitful project.
It is worth noting here that Benedict Spinoza assumes much of the Cartesian methodology and presuppositions. However, Spinoza was lead through his rational conception of Perfect Being theology that God and the world are one. For Spinoza, pantheism was the logical outcome based on his Cartesian rationalism and presuppositions. Presupposing the existence of God on strict rational grounds does not prevent one from becoming a pantheist. In other words, presupposing that God exists does not necessarily lead one to Christian theism.
As I will always try to explain, when one begins with epistemology, and make that one’s starting point, instead of metaphysical realism, or the givenness of Being, things go bad in philosophy and one’s approach to apologetics.
1Benedict Spinoza in his Ethics often assumes Descartes’s presuppositional outlook, but I hope to develop that later. Interestingly, the father of presuppositionalism, Van Til, developed his school of apologetics based on ethical concerns.
Works Cited
Descartes, Rene. Bacon, Descartes, Spinoza. Great Books of the Western World. Vol. 28. Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc., 1999.
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