Some Clarifications On General Revelation

In light of some of the discussion generated by my post Moore Or Less To The Point, I have decided to make some clarifications on my views of general revelation. I do not have all the answers, but while looking for the answers I am most definately working within a particular framework of presuppositions.

First, all revelation, whether general or special, is propositional. A proposition is the meaning of a declarative sentence. An imperative, for example, is, strictly speaking, meaningless. "Run up the stairs!" is neither true nor false. However, when someone says, "Run up the stairs!" we understand this by means of a proposition that can be expressed by the declarative sentence: "So-and-so is commanding me to run up the stairs." This statement is true or false. When God, in the Scriptures, commands, "Repent and be saved!", we understand this by means of a proposition that can be expressed in the declarative sentence: "God commands me to repent and be saved."

Any talk about revelation being personal is lost upon me if one means anything other than God is a person and reveals propositions to us, who are also persons. If one wants to retreat to mystic metaphor, neo-orthodox encounter, or whatever, then I have no notion of what is being said. This view that I am espousing implies that a tree is not a revelation. Revelation must be a proposition and a proposition alone.

Second, propositions are expressed via language, and all propositions can, in principle, be expressed in language. One must make allowances for a broader understanding of this point. For instance, it is, in principle, possible to express the entirety of the Scriptures via smoke signals; however, one might run out of wood before the Pentateuch is completed. There also may be a language where they have no word for "happy", but it is not the fault of language but of the vocabulary of that particular language. One could easily make up a word for happy.

With this stated, there is no thought cannot be expressed with words. There are no thoughts about God that are beyond words. The only things that are "beyond" words are, I would say, nonsense and qualia. Qualia is the subjective experience of sensation. When I look at a tomato, I can tell you about the tomato, but I cannot express the actual color that I experience when I see it because the color red, in this instance, is not an object of knowledge but of experience. This is to say that revelation is not approximately true or analogically true. It is literally true. To say that God is good is not to bring God down to our level; it is not, as some pious souls would have you believe, more untrue than it is true. Language does not bring God down to our level, but, in some sense, it is God bringing us up to His level.

Third, language consists in signifiers that point in some way to things that are signified. The letters "G-O-D" are not special letters, but per our convetion of language we recognize that this combination of letters signifies God. Or, similarly, the letters "R-E-D" are simply, according to our convention, the combination of letters that signifies the qualia that we experience when we look at a ripe tomato or blood, for instance. (Wittgenstein's discussion of this subject--his beetle in the box analogy--is quite interesting; maybe I'll do a post about that later). With this said, signifiers do not have to be words as understood in common parlance. Hand signals in Sign Language would qualify as signifiers. In fact, it is quite possible that blinks of an eye, stones on the ground, or puffs of smoke from a campfire could be signifiers of propositions.

Fourth, what makes something a signifier is a convention between people. I assume one could say that a convention of language could be made with oneself: Daniel has made for his book a language that only he himself knows. However, the language could not be used to communicate to someone else. So, in order for there to be a language, there must be a convention amongst people as to what counts as a signifier and what the signifiers mean. Of course, this is a little compressed: one would need to understand more than semantics; one would need syntax and, presumably, pragmatics. With that said, one can not look at a sheet of Cuneiform and expect to understand it without having partaken of the convention that stipulated what each signifier in Cuneiform represented. This is what we do when we learn English in school; namely, partake of the convetion of the English language.

One would need to know the convention of a particular language before one could understand what is being signified. And once one knows the convention of the language, they can understand what is being communicated. Now, if one wanted to assert that nature, in some way, is a language, albeit a very simple language, then one could do so. By calling nature a language I would mean that the mountains and hills and rivers are somehow signifiers much like the letters on this page are; they are meant to signify something. However, one must understand and believe the convention of that language prior to "reading" nature. And since, given the previous discussion, general revelation would not be nature itself but the conventions of the language of nature (or to say it in another way: general revelation would be the propositions about God and the creation that we would need to know prior to seeing the attributes of God declared in nature), we must conclude that general revelation is something innate in us.

What does this mean in connection with our discussion? It means that in order for someone to look at nature and "see" the attributes of God, one must already understand and believe the conventions of the language of nature; namely they must already understand and believe truths about God and the created order. In this case, trying to prove the existence of God from nature requires that one already accept that God exists and nature is His creation. This is not a problem for me, because I already believe this. So when I look at creation I can see God's immutable power, because I understand and believe certain truths about God and creation. However, to a Darwinist who does not believe those truths about nature and God, this talk of design and general revelation is nonsense. It is as if we are showing him a piece of paper with scribble from a child. He has first to believe that it is a language and then, eventually, understand and believe the conventions (or propositions) about that language.

If we direct a Darwinist to nature and say: "See, it declares the attributes of God!" He will turn to us and say, "You poor, dear fellow. For you to say that nature tells us anything about God is akin to me pointing to tracks on the ground made by deer and saying, 'See this is an exposition of Euclid's axiomatic geometry!'"

I hope my point is coming across: nature doesn't delcare anything to anyone unless and until they accept certain truths about God and creation. Then and only then does it actually communicate anything to us. But, by this point, we are already Christians! We must first convince that Darwinist that Christianity is true before we can convince him that nature "declares" anything to us at all. But this is simply saying we must get the Darwinist to understand and believe the Bible before we can get them to understand what nature is saying to us. However, this poses a problem because the supporter of ID thinks that this is backwards. He wants some point of contact between the believer and unbeliever, when, in fact, there is none. However, Moore's admission that we have to go to the Bible to get "the truth" about God and creation is telling. Nature isn't enough to prove the truth, in fact, according to Moore it "proves too much", though, of course, I would say it proves nothing. The ID proponent wants to use the Darwinist's own premises to prove the existence of God, but this is impossible because the Darwinist must first accept certain presuppositions of the Christian, which is entirely the point at issue.

Now, this is not to say that pagans do not look at the starry sky above and think that there must be a creator of all this. In this case, it would be a pure accident that this gentleman believed the truth. There are several ways, I suppose, that this could be considered accidental. Firstly, many people look at human history and say, "This shows that man is inherently good." Others look at human history and say, "This shows that man is inherently evil.' Still others look at human history and say, "This shows absolutely nothing about the moral make-up of man." You are going to get men of all three persuasions; I would say that the last gentleman is correct, the second is correct in his conclusion but fallacious in his reasoning. The point is this: there are, presumably, a finite number of options as to nature being created: either it was or it wasn't. You will get pagans opining both options; that some happen to be right does not mean that their method is appropriate. A child may guess the correct problem to a differential calculus equation, but that does not mean that his method was appropriate.

Now, let me try to make it all make sense. God creates us with innate propositions; facts about Him and creation. However, as sinners we either fail to understand these propositions or fail to believe them. So, when we look at nature we do not see creation, but evolution. Or, we only understand and believe some of the propositions so we get a skewed belief about the Creator and the creation. Or, possibly, we do not understand or believe any of these God-given propositions, but through our pagan philosophies we come to believe certain propositions that are akin to the God-given ones that cause us to conclude that there is a really powerful femine god that created the world. And so on. That Moore had to retreat to the Scriptures (always a good thing) in order to make sure that we understand nature correctly only strengthens my point: we must understand and believe the Scriptures before nature "says" anything true to us. But by this point, we are already Christians and it is pointless to point to nature to prove the existence of God because we already believe in Him if we "see" anything true in nature. (Again, there are accidents were people correctly guess something. For instance, a person who doesn't know a bit of Greek may rightly guess that nomos means law, but we would not say that they are correctly reading Greek.)

Revelation is always propositional; nature doesn't "tell" us anything about God unless and until we are already Christians and thus "speaking the language" that God is using in nature. To further complicate matters, there is still the epistemological problems of empiricism and the philosophical problems of science. If you expect the goal of science to be truth, then you are going to be disappointed. However, if you think that the goal of science is to invent useful things, then it doesn't matter what the Darwinist says. Let me know if this makes my position more clear to yall.