Dialogue on Calvin, nature and the knowledge of God

From an online discussion with other "Fresno Bookies."

Craig is the author of "The Trial of Man: Christianity and Judgment in the World of Shakespeare and writes at VDH, which is high up on the coolness index.

Duns Scotus wrote:

Thanks to Simplicimus, Scholasticus, and Teleologus for the great thought you've put into this discussion. It's teaching me a lot, but I continue to be troubled by things I've brought up earlier.

I'm just not seeing that big a gap between what little I know of Calvin's thought about ways of coming to know God and what I'm finding in the Catholic Catechism.

From the Catholic Catechism, paragraphs 31 to 34, in part:

31. Created in God's image and called to know and love him, the person who seeks God discovers certain ways of coming to know him. These are also called proofs for the existence of God, not in the sense of proofs in the natural sciences, but rather in the sense of "converging and convincing arguments" which allow us to attain certainty about the truth [query: what is meant by "certainty" here?]

32. The world: starting from movement, becoming, contingency, and the world's order and beauty, one can come to a knowledge of God as the origin and the end of the universe.

As St. Paul says of the Gentiles: For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. Ever since the creation of the world his invisible nature, namely, his eternal power and deity, has been clearly perceived int he things that have been made.

And St. Augustine issues this challenge: Question the beauty of the earth, question the beauty of the sea, question the beauty of the air distending and diffusing itself, question the beauty of the sky...question all these realities. All respond: "See, we are beautiful." Their beauty is a profession [confessio]. These beauties are subject to change. Who made them is not the Beautiful One who is not
subject to change?

33, The human person: With his openness to truth and beauty, his sense of moral goodness, his freedom and the voice of his conscience, with his longings to the infinite and for happiness, man questions himself about God's existence. In all this he discerns signs of his spiritual soul...

[Although the above refer to proofs, it also seems to include something much more direct and intuitive than any of the classic arguments for God's existence.]

Now Calvin, and I take this from an online article by Alvin Plantinga:

http://www.leaderu.com/truth/1truth10.html

Taking it for granted, for example, that there is such a person as God and that we are indeed within our epistemic rights (are in that sense justified) in believing that there is, the Christian epistemologist might ask what it is that confers justification here: by virtue of what is the theist justified? Perhaps there are several sensible responses.

One answer he might give and try to develop is that of John Calvin (and before him, of the Augustinian, Anselmian, Bonaventurian tradition of the middle ages): God, said Calvin, has implanted in humankind a tendency or nisus or disposition to believe in him:

"There is within the human mind, and indeed by natural instinct, an awareness of divinity." This we take to beyond controversy. To prevent anyone from taking refuge in the pretense of ignorance, God himself has implanted in all men a certain understanding of his divine majesty . . .

Therefore, since from the beginning of the world there has been no region, no city, in short, no household, that could do without religion, there lies in this a tacit confession of a sense of deity inscribed in the hearts of all.[2]

Calvin's claim, then, is that God has so created us that we have by nature a strong tendency or inclination or disposition towards belief in him.

Although this disposition to believe in God has been in part smothered or suppressed by sin, it is nevertheless universally present. And it is triggered or actuated by widely realized conditions:

Lest anyone, then, be excluded from access to happiness, he not only sowed in men's minds that seed of religion of which we have spoken, but revealed himself and daily disclosed himself in the whole workmanship of the universe. As, a consequence, men cannot open their eyes without being compelled to see him (p. 51).

Like Kant, Calvin is especially impressed in this connection, by the marvelous compages of the starry heavens above:

Even the common folk and the most untutored, who have been taught only by the aid of the eyes, cannot be unaware of the excellence of divine art, for it reveals itself in this innumerable and yet distinct and well-ordered variety of the heavenly host (p. 52).

And now what Calvin says suggests that one who accedes to this tendency and in these circumstances accepts the belief that God has created the world-perhaps upon beholding the starry heavens, or the splendid majesty of the mountains, or the intricate, articulate beauty of a tiny flower- is quite as rational and quite as justified as one who believes that he sees a tree upon having that characteristic being-appeared-to-treely kind of experience.

Back to Duns Scotus: I do not see a vast gap here, defined by Protestant fideism v. Catholic rationalism. Going back to the quotation of Paul in the Catholic Catechism, he says that ever since the creation of the world this knowledge has been WIDELY available, presumably to nomads in 1000 BC, who didn't know from Aquinas. Paul and Augustine seem to be describing an apprehension of God which follows so close on the experience of just being in the world that it is much closer to apprehension than deduction.]

Always looking for shortcuts,

D. Scotus

Good points that raise an interesting question.

It may not be apparent, but most of my interest in these topics are historical. I'm interested in what people thought at various points in time and how that informed their view of the world. I'm not as up on Calvin and Calvinism as I'd like to be, but I have some clues from different sources.

For example, Calvinism tends to be systematic and logical in its approach to theology. If you communicate with Calvinists, you can see how they ride a few first principles to absolutely logical conclusions. I understand that this style comes from Calvin's Institutes. Presumably, this feature of Calvinist thought was what made it a force to be reckoned with by both Catholicism and Lutheranism.

It also appears that Calvin straddled a middle position between intellectualism and nominalism. Check out this article.

Though proponents of the idea that nominalism is the great enemy of natural law have identified the Reformers rather generally in the nominalist school, (12) the via antiqua in fact shaped the thought of several of the prominent Reformers. (13) Calvin is perhaps as difficult as any of them to categorize. Scholars have suggested many but have been able to prove few direct nominalist influences upon Calvin's early thought, (14) and his mature theology reflects a strident opposition to any form of extreme voluntarism that puts God ex lex. (15) Whether Calvin can be categorized as a nominalist or not, however, does not predetermine his status as a theologian of natural law.

Calvin had an idea called De Regnis Duobus - the Two Kingdoms - which I seem to have been misunderstanding, although I was participating in a Calvinist blog with that name, until I got tired of the Calvinist participants' inability to not use terms like "papist" and "Romanist" (and what is it with modern Calvinists who think it is de rigeur to sound like 17th Century bigots?). The article observes:

What then of Calvin's view of human ability to understand the heavenly things, that is, things pertaining to "the kingdom of God, and spiritual discernment?" In regard to knowledge of God and salvation, the first two branches of spiritual knowledge, Calvin believed that "men otherwise the most ingeneous are blinder than moles" and that "human reason makes not the least approach" in its understanding. The "natural man," who excels in all of the things listed in the previous paragraph, "has no understanding in the spiritual mysteries of God." (73) In Calvin's mind, therefore, the possibilities of human achievement in the earthly and heavenly things could not differ more greatly.

And:

For Calvin, the sinful human person, by use of reason and natural knowledge, can attain to great things in the domain of earthly things, that is, of the civil kingdom. By use of reason and natural knowledge, however, the sinful person cannot even begin to make the slightest approach to knowledge of God's being or salvation, that is, of the heavenly kingdom of Christ. Natural law, therefore, has a positive function to play in the life of the earthly, civil kingdom, according to Calvin. However, as he explains in a subsequent section, natural law has only a negative function to play in regard to spiritual things and the heavenly kingdom of Christ, where it serves merely to convict people of their sins and to strip them of all pretexts for ignorance. (74) These conclusions, therefore, show the practical context in which Calvin put natural law to work. He denied that natural law could ever give knowledge of salvation in the heavenly kingdom, even while he affirmed that it provided true and useful knowledge of mundane things in the civil kingdom.

and:

For Calvin, any action performed apart from the saving grace of Christ, arising out of the judgment of reason alone, is sinful and displeasing in God's sight. No such action can earn any merit before God. This conviction, however, pertained to matters of salvation (85) and, therefore, to the kingdom of Christ. The same action, having no value for one's standing in the kingdom of Christ, may be of great value from the perspective of the civil kingdom. The ancient lawgivers of whom Calvin wrote accomplished astonishingly great things for life in the civil kingdom, though their achievements were worthless for attaining life in the kingdom of Christ. Calvin, therefore, could attribute both a wholly negative role and a remarkably positive role to natural law not because of internal inconsistency but because the former was true for the kingdom of Christ and the latter for the civil kingdom. Barth's famous claims about Calvin on the natural knowledge of God are thus only half true. His appraisal would accurately portray Calvin as viewing the natural knowledge of God as wholly negative and merely a possibility in principle, not in reality (86)--if his discussion were limited to matters of the kingdom of Christ. In fact, however, Barth overlooked the importance of the two kingdoms doctrine at this point. His claim that Calvin always viewed the natural knowledge of God in terms of the history of salvation (87) is certainly incorrect and seems rooted in a failure to recognize that much of Calvin's treatment of this natural knowledge occurred in the context of the civil kingdom, which, as defined by Calvin himself, had nothing to do with the gospel or salvation.

So, maybe we can put Plantinga together with this article. It seems that Calvin asserted that man had naturally implanted in him by God some awareness of God. This would not necessarily involve "reason" - which, according to Aquinas, was the application of the intellect to facts obtained through the senses. Calvin's view seems to make the awareness of God prior to the senses.

Catholicism certainly recognizes a desire or an appetite toward God. It can't do otherwise without repudiating St. Augustine's dicta that "we have no rest until we rest in thee." But an "appetite" or a "desire" is simply the tendency of the will to be attracted to a "good." An appetite is not necessarily intellectual - the intellectual appetite is directed toward truth in the same way as the non-intellectual appetite is directed toward good. (Cf. "The good is that which all men desire") Catholicism does not deny that the will is always directed toward some particular good and, moreover, is ultimately directed to the Good which is behind all lesser goods. In fact, Catholicism rather has a patent on that kind of language.

According to the article, Calvin apparently denied the ability of human reason to obtain a knowledge of God's existence. I don't think that Plantinga says anything to the contrary. Plantinga's argument is that knowledge of God is "properly basic," According to Plaintinga, we are instinctively aware of God whether or not we ever open our eyes. Plantinga isn't saying - as Aquinas and para 36 of the Catechism says - that we open our eyes and we see evidence of God's handiwork through our senses from which we can deduce the existence of God.

Thinking about this approach, I can see why Calvinism may take this approach. Calvinism holds - like most nominalism - that there is an alienation of God from Creation. We cannot find God in Nature. Pace Calvin, there are natural laws that God put into Nature and which we can deduce, but those natural laws could have been entirely different. In other words, there is nothing innately good or special about the way that nature is currently ordered - the way things are ordered is good, but only because that's the way God decreed it to be.

Consequently, looking for God in nature is a waste of time, which means that we aren't going to find God in the evidence of our senses, and, therefore, any knowledge of God has to be prior and independent of our senses.

In contrast, Catholicism teaches that nature reflects the Creator and therefore we can achieve some understanding of God by examining nature, which means that it is not a waste of time to look at nature to find evidence of God.

That at least is my present take.