THE IMPLANTED KNOWLEDGE OF GOD Part 1 Innate Ideas in Philosophy (From Greece to the modern period)

 Last time we looked at how God reveals himself.  Bavinck moves on and then talks about the incomprehensibility of God in Christian Theology.  However, I have touched on this is past blogs and may return to it later.  Today I want to focus on epistemology in relation to the Divine (epistemology= the study of knowledge).  This is a very important topic and although I am not an expert it is the grammar of all sciences.  

I took this photo when the fog was on the move.

 

Whatever science we look at there has to be foundations on how we perceive the real world and so forth.  Yet for all intents and purposes various scientific branches (by the way science comes from Scientia which means knowledge) will have their own game rules.  I sometimes heard Colin Gunton at KCL university mention Coleridge and I used to wonder why.  After all Coleridge was a poet.  For me Poets strung words together to give beautiful messages but why Coleridge.  I now understand this. 

Up to Coleridge’s time science was being done mechanically and everything had to be dissected.  The Romantic Movement was a move against this and that it was more important to look at the whole without destroying:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanticism_in_science

Science is a lot bigger than looking down through a microscope or peering into the stars.  The lesson we learn is that a scientist ought to use the appropriate tools for the job at hand.  T F Torrance’s book, Theological Science, for up coming theologians is well worth a read.  I just wanted to get the record straight about ‘knowing, scientia’ before looking into Bavincks understanding of the Knowledge of God in chapter 2 of the second volume of his Reformed Dogmatics.  The above are some reasons why Theology is a Scientific discipline.

We are going to begin by looking at Bavincks section on ‘The Implanted knowledge of God’; page 59.

He is going to look at:

·        Innate Ideas in Philosophy

·        Innate ideas in Christian Theology x2

·        Natural Theology

·        Objections to Innate Ideas

·        Innate Disposition

·        Acquired Knowledge of God

A Small Reflection

We need to be careful how we tread this ground of understanding because he is being a teacher of these ideas, but it does not mean that he agrees with them. So too when you read my blog that from my perspective that I am possibly closer aligned with Herman Bavincks position.   Being a Religious Educator myself I have touched on Islam, Hinduism and other religions; it doesn’t mean I completely agree and a lot of the time I would not agree. 

We ought to show respect to the various religions because God has commanded us to love our neighbour and I remember in the past that one RE book I read showed the Golden Rule to be found in all the major religions.  It does not mean I agree with a comparative way of looking at religion.  One major reason I have a problem with the comparative way of looking at religion is because some of the writers have an agenda of evolutionistic bias towards all religions becoming one.  This assumes that the ‘particular ideas’ of various religions would have to assimilate somehow!  As a Christian I do not want to assimilate through some type of Hegelianism of thesis, antithesis and synthesis and become some type of new world religion.  This sort of thinking drives a wedge between religions and distrust  because it is a threat to their understanding of Truth, Goodness and Beauty (Science, ethics and aesthetics) and hence their rationale of what faith actually is for them. 

THE IMPLANTED KNOWLEDGE OF GOD

Innate Ideas in Philosophy (From Greece to the modern period)

We saw that Bavinck is going to go through certain topics but even the beginning of this section is very interesting:

“Materialism may only take into consideration gravity, temperature, and electricity, but faith, hope, and love, which are very different forces, have nevertheless governed humankind and kept it from sinking into bestiality. Augustine was right when he wrote that the truth of spiritual things is actually much more certain than that of visible things. “Nothing can be more absurd than to say that the objects we see with our eyes have being while the things we discern with our intellect do not, since only a fool would doubt the fact that the intellect is of incomparably higher rank than the eyes.” From reformed Dogmatics; Volume Two; pages 59-60; Hermann Bavinck

Some sciences have focused on gravity, temperature, and electricity but the human world is much greater we also have faith, hope and love. Without faith, hope and love the world would be so much uglier than it is.  This is a very important point perhaps the Greek philosophers got the idea for innate ideas by the way humans are naturally conditioned. Whatever the case might be Christian theology has over the centuries looked at innate ideas.  Herman Bavinck is going to take us on a learning expedition searching for the metaphysical gold.

If we have studied or read the Institutes of the Christian Religion, we already know that we accept some aspects of the knowledge of God had been implanted in us but because of the Fall we cannot fully grasp the knowledge of God. 

Bavinck does not start from the above, but I am sure later on he will touch on this topic.  For the time being Bavinck is looking at world knowledge particularly from ancient Greece looking at how we get innate ideas in general.  From that point of view this is philosophical knowledge. 

So, Bavinck asks the question:

 “The question in the world humans could possibly gain knowledge was an enormous problem to this philosophy. Certainly, two possibilities exist: either we already know something and hence cannot learn it anymore, or we do not know anything?” from page 60

Bavinck says that Plato solved this problem through the theory of recollection.  Before the soul had joined the body, the soul memorized deeply these Ideas. We find Plato’s teaching on this in a form of a dialogue between Socrates the teacher and Meno.  They look first at what a virtue is and if there is a universal that holds all these virtues together.  Through question and answers they delve into Plato’s theory of recollection.  In other words, the soul before it joined the body had learned something and later on as ‘full humans’ there is some type of recollection in the soul as this part is said to be immortal.  In summary we know somethings instinctively and we have not learned it, but it is a part of us. As well as the virtues we are also imbibed with some type of grammar for maths even though we never studied it. 

He then looks at Cicero:

“He speaks of “notions impressed on the mind,” “implanted or innate thoughts,” and assumes the existence of a knowledge of an array of truths prior to all experience and observation. According to him, there are “inborn principles of the virtues,” “faint notions of the greatest things,” which nature implanted in the soul “without prior instruction,” an innate knowledge of God. “By nature, we believe the gods exist.” Pages 61 -62

From these foundational innate ideas Bavinck goes into:

·        Descartes

·        Leibniz

·        Malebranche

·        Kant

Bavinck then explains to us that Socinianism rejected Innate Ideas with other thinkers such as

·        Locke

·        Hobbes

Thus, innate ideas was squashed by some scholars but Herbert Spencer an evolutionist gave it room. As Bavinck says on Spencer’s teaching:

“This mind, he (Spencer) said, did not come into existence all at once, nor was it endowed from the beginning with an immutable set of capabilities, but gradually became what it is now. With a view to these very earliest beginnings, therefore, empiricism was correct, and the human mind was a blank. But the experience of countless generations had gradually so shaped that mind that it can now be deemed to of forms and ideas possess an array by which it is naturally adapted to its entire environment, and that is the truth of nativism.” Pages 62 -63

Reflection

Innate Ideas (nativism) is by no means a dead and dusted subject.  In the world of idea outside of the Christian framework the theory is very much alive.  At this point Bavinck isn’t making any theological point but is laying the groundwork before moving on to how Christian theology has dealt with the subject of innate ideas.  I have certainly read about it in the Institutes of the Christian Religion by John Calvin That we are born with certain things such as an instinct for justice or belief in God.  Next time we will touch on Innate Ideas in Christian Theology.  By the way before I finish, it is well worth reading Plato’s ‘Meno’.   It isn’t such a long read and it is a great primer for looking at some issues surrounding innate Ideas from 500BC!