The "In Principle" Explanation (2)

Having read my first post, I can almost hear someone clear their throat and hasten to enlighten me with what must have escaped my notice in Van Til — namely, that all this talk about not knowing anything for lack of regeneration in Christ is true "in principle." (See, for example, Scott Oliphint’s “Concern #2” in his article, “Answering Objections to Presuppositionalism” at The Gospel Coalition website.) I suppose that if an unbeliever’s state of unknowing were unqualifiedly, only, and always true "in reality" then the problem as I stated it in my first post remains intact. The implication of the "in principle" explanation, therefore, is that "in reality" and depending on certain conditions, it is or may be otherwise for knowing when it comes to the unbeliever. (That is, all things considered, there is a sense in which an unbeliever can know things.) Admittedly, let us say, for instance, that an unbeliever is true to his natural inclination (because of sin) to reject God and his truth (that he, as Oliphint says, works “self-consciously” from this principle). Then the unbeliever (or so the explanation goes) has “absolutely” (Oliphint’s word) nothing in common as knowledge with the believer. (Given what I say below, “absolutely” as a term seems indefensible.) However, if we consider human beings as made in God’s image and confronted with the truth of God’s existence through creation and the problem of sin, etc. (what I referenced in my last post from Romans 1-3), then there is knowledge of this sort (or a common ground for knowing) that is shared between believers and unbelievers. In other words, from the latter standpoint, there is “in reality” a knowing that an unbeliever is capable of— even a certain shared (however limited) knowing between believers and unbelievers—based on being made in the image of God. Even the “natural man,” in that carefully qualified sense (again, Romans 1-3), knows things in common with those who are born again through faith in Jesus Christ.

Now as we consider this argument, it may have been apparent that in the case of what an unbeliever “self-consciously” elects to do in his natural enmity towards God (as a sinner) he stands on different ground altogether from a believer when it comes to knowing. However, nothing is said by the Van Tilian side about “self-conscious” deliberation with respect to an unbeliever’s knowing God by nature or through creation or things like knowing that one is a sinner (Romans 1-3 knowing). Absent this requirement of “self-conscious” deliberation, the knowledge of the natural man assumed in this latter sense seems to indicate that it is indeed the default or universal mode for human knowing. So what is true “in principle” may only be true “in reality” (at least the unbeliever’s lost and misguided sense of “reality”) when and as an unbeliever is deliberately and “self-consciously” consistent with his godless position. But, in general, what unbeliever is so? (Notice: I am not saying no one does this.) And when Oliphint and other presuppositionalists concede that there is for unbelievers a “natural” knowing based on being made in God’s image they introduce (though they don’t identify it as such) another principle for knowing at work in an unbeliever, one (as just stated) that does not require “self-conscious” deliberation. In sum, on the Van Tilian account of presuppositionalism it is as true “in principle” that the unbeliever is a knower as it is that the unbeliever is an unknower. Because this is true, moreover, it is just as legitimate to claim that there is common ground for knowing between a believer and unbeliever as to claim there isn’t.  

Now I realize that at this point a presuppositionalist will remind me that Romans 1:18 tells us that this knowledge that an unbeliever has is one that the unbeliever “suppresses.” The sticking point, it seems, is what it means to “suppress” knowledge or what the result of such actually is for knowledge. If I know that my tires need air and because I have a lot to do I “suppress” this knowledge, it doesn’t mean that my knowledge that my tires need air somehow ceases to exist. It may for the moment lie dormant as knowledge but that doesn’t mean that it vanishes completely. It almost seems that presuppositionalists are compelled to acknowledge what Romans 1-3 says about the unbeliever’s ability to know truth about God and his world but then point to Romans 1:18 as a strategy to remove with one hand what the other had already offered. It is one thing to have (because of unrighteousness) a psychological disinclination to acknowledge God or any truth pertaining to his world (including one’s sinfulness or the empty tomb of Jesus). However, it is another thing altogether to be incapacitated for such knowledge due to a lack of mental conditions or presuppositions necessary for that knowledge. If the latter is true and regeneration is the only way someone can have the mental presuppositions requisite to know God and truth in any sense, then there cannot be any sense in which the truth of God is being “suppressed” through unrighteousness. There would be, in that case, absolutely no truth to be “suppressed.”