First Principles

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Welcome listeners to the many sided world, one creation, many sides, a podcast brought to you by the Cantero Institute.
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My name is Stephen Martins, and I serve as the Institute's Director.
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I'm coming to you from our podcast studio at Worview Campus in Wellingport, Ontario.
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As an institute, we believe that the world around us is neither a collection of disconnected facts nor the product of blind chance, but a wonderfully diverse and coherently ordered creation, governed by the laws of its creator.
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From the A in astronomy to the Zed in zoology, we explore the many dimensions of reality through a distinctly Christian worldview.
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Join us as we discover the wonders of God's world, challenge prevailing assumptions, and explore how the many sides of reality testify to the wisdom of their creator.
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One creation, many sides.
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This is the many-sided world.
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The Chinese philosopher Lao Zhu once said, a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.
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Well, if we're going to embark on a journey through the many-sided world around us, we had better make sure that our first step is taken in the right direction.
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And that means getting our first principle straight.
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First and foremost, we presuppose the truth revealed in the inspired Word of God.
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Though the Bible is not a textbook on astronomy, biology, chemistry, or any other scientific discipline, it nevertheless provides us with the foundational principles, the parameters, and, if you will, the spectacles through which we are to view, interpret, and understand God's created reality.
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The Church Father Augustine famously expressed the relationship between faith and understanding in the Latin phrase crede ut intelligas, meaning believe in order that you may understand.
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Augustine recognized that faith provides the foundation from which understanding proceeds.
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This is particularly important because knowledge does not begin in a vacuum.
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We all approach reality with certain presuppositions about what exists, how we can know it, and why the world is intelligible in the first place?
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As Christians, we maintain that it's only upon the foundation of God's revelation that we can ultimately account for the intelligibility of the world around us.
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Why is mathematics universally applicable?
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Why do two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom form a water molecule under the appropriate conditions?
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Why does gravity operate according to consistent physical laws?
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And why is information intelligible at all, rather than merely an assortment of meaningless, undifferentiated data?
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These are not simply questions about how things work, but questions concerning the very conditions that make knowledge, scientific investigation, and rational inquiry possible.
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And this brings us to a fundamental conviction.
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There are no brute facts.
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There are no autonomous, religiously neutral, uninterpreted facts existing independently of God.
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There are only God's facts, because we live in God's world.
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Every fact belongs to the created order.
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Every law finds its ultimate origin in the Creator.
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And every field of inquiry necessarily operates within a reality that God has already established and comprehensively knows.
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Now, this doesn't mean that only Christians can make scientific discoveries or arrive at accurate conclusions.
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Far from it.
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Through God's common grace, men and women of every conviction have made remarkable contributions to our understanding of the world.
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The question, however, is not merely whether someone can discover a fact, but whether their underlying worldview can ultimately account for the intelligibility of that fact.
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And this is where our philosophical foundations become especially important.
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Drawing upon the inspired scriptures and the richness of our Christian heritage, particularly the Protestant Reformation, we find a tradition that calls us to recognize the Lordship of Christ over all of life.
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John Calvin, for example, famously compared Scripture to a pair of spectacles.
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Just as spectacles enable someone with impaired vision to see more clearly, so Scripture corrects our distorted understanding of reality and enables us to recognize the Creator whose glory is displayed throughout creation.
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Building upon this reformational heritage, two particularly important figures emerged in the 20th century who sought to develop a consistently Christian approach to knowledge and reality, free from the uncritical adoption of philosophical assumptions foreign to the Christian faith.
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These men were Cornelius Van Til and Herman Doyovert.
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Cornelius van Til was a reformed theologian and apologist whose work helped establish what became known as presuppositional apologetics.
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Herman Duivert was a Dutch Christian philosopher who developed what he called the philosophy of the law idea, also known as cosmonomic philosophy.
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Although their approaches were not identical, both men insisted that Christian thought must begin with the biblical distinction between the creator and his creation, rather than with the supposed autonomy of human reason.
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Let me briefly explain their contributions and how they relate to one another.
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For Van Til, the most fundamental distinction in all of reality is the creator-creature distinction.
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God alone is self-sufficient, self-existent, independent, and the source of all things.
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Everything else, including mankind, is created, dependent, and subject to him.
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This distinction has enormous implications for how we understand knowledge.
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God's knowledge is original, comprehensive, and independent.
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Our knowledge, on the other hand, is derivative, limited, and dependent upon his revelation.
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We do not stand above reality as autonomous judges, deciding whether God may be admitted into our understanding of the world.
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Rather, we're creatures living within a reality that God has made and already interpreted.
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This is why Van Til rejected the notion of religious neutrality.
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No scientist, philosopher, or historian approaches the world without presuppositions.
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Everyone begins somewhere, and that starting point influences how the evidence is understood.
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Presuppositional apologetics, therefore, challenges not merely the conclusions and of opposing worldview, but its very foundations.
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It asks whether that worldview can consistently account for the rationality, morality, order, and intelligibility it necessarily assumes.
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Put simply, Van Till reminds us that we cannot properly understand God's world while pretending that we are independent of its creator.
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One cannot legitimately borrow intellectual capital to deny the very foundation upon which one stands.
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Just as a child must climb onto his father's lap to slap him in the face, so the unbelieving world must stand upon God's truth even to raise its hand against him.
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Now, whereas Van Til was particularly concerned with the foundations of knowledge and the defense of the Christian faith, Hermann Doyovert was concerned with the nature, structure, and diversity of created reality.
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Doyvert argued that the created order is governed by a rich diversity of God-given laws.
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Creation is not a chaotic assortment of disconnected things, nor can its complexity be adequately explained by reducing everything to a single principle, such as matter, motion, biology, or human reason.
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Instead, reality possesses a remarkable diversity of distinct yet interconnected aspects.
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In his philosophy of the law idea, Doivert identified 15 such aspects, which he called modal aspects.
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The numerical, spatial, kinematic, physical, biotic, sensory, analytical, historical, lingual, social, economic, aesthetic, juridical, ethical, and faith aspects.
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Now I realize that sounds rather technical, but the underlying idea is actually quite accessible.
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Consider something as ordinary as a tree.
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We can examine it numerically, measuring its height, counting its branches, or calculating its age.
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We can investigate its physical composition, its biological processes, and its relationship to the surrounding ecosystem.
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But we can also consider the tree's economic value, its aesthetic beauty, the legal responsibilities associated with its preservation, and the ethical obligations we have concerning its care.
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Each perspective reveals something meaningful about the same created reality.
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And here is Doivert's central insight.
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None of these aspects can be reduced entirely to another.
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The biological cannot be adequately explained away as merely physical processes.
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The ethical cannot be reduced to the economic.
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The juridical cannot be reduced to the biological.
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Each aspect possesses its own distinctive character and law-governed structure while remaining inseparably connected to the others within the unity of creation.
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This is what Doiver described as the sovereignty in its own sphere of each modal aspect.
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And it is precisely this diversity within unity that makes the world so wonderfully many-sided.
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This is also how we can understand the very idea of a university, an institution of higher learning where a diversity of disciplines is brought together in the pursuit of knowledge, each distinct in its field of inquiry, yet all united within the coherence of one created reality.
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Now, how do these two thinkers complement one another?
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Perhaps the easiest way to understand their contributions is to imagine reality as an enormous map.
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Van Till reminds us that God owns the map.
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He is its creator, its sovereign lord, and its ultimate interpreter.
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We cannot understand the map properly if we begin by denying its author or imagining ourselves independent of him.
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Deoverd, on the other hand, helps us understand the structures represented on that map.
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He directs our attention to its diverse features, the boundaries and relationships between them, and the different laws governing the various dimensions of created reality.
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Van Till helps establish the foundation upon which we approach the world.
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Doivert helps us appreciate the remarkable structure and diversity of the world we are approaching.
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Of course, this is only an analogy, and the contributions of both thinkers are considerably more extensive.
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Nor should we imagine that their respective philosophical systems are identical or without differences.
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Nevertheless, their insights provide us with a valuable foundation for pursuing a distinctly Christian understanding of reality.
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And this brings us back to the purpose of the many-sided world.
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Our objective is not simply to collect interesting scientific facts, nor is it to impose biblical language artificially upon scientific discoveries.
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Rather, we seek to investigate the created order on its own God-given terms, recognizing both the distinctiveness of its various aspects and their coherence within the unity of God's creation.
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Whether we're examining the genetic information contained within a living cell, the movements of distant galaxies, the fossils buried beneath our feet, or the philosophical assumptions underlying modern scientific theories, we want to ask not only what do we observe and how does it work, but also what does it mean?
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And how does it fit within the broader structure of God's created reality?
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For the world is neither an accident nor a collection of unrelated facts.
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It's the wonderfully diverse, coherently ordered, and intelligible handiwork of the living God.
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One creation, many sides.
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That is the world we intend to explore.
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Having now addressed first principles, we can turn to the question that underlies this entire podcast series, The Many Sided World.
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What practical difference does a Christian worldview make when studying archaeology, astronomy, genetics, literature, paleontology, or zoology?
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Well, let me answer that question with an illustration and a subsequent explanation.
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Here at Worldview Campus, we have a few Ammonite fossils on hand.
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These are marine fossils that can be found all around the globe, even on mountaintops.
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The largest specimen we have weighs at least 100 pounds and measures approximately 18 inches across.
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Of course, there are much larger ammonite fossils out there as well as incredibly small ones.
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Now, imagine presenting an ammonite fossil before a round table of specialists from various scientific disciplines.
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A geologist would examine the sedimentary rock in which the fossil was found.
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A paleontologist would study the fossil's morphology and biological classification.
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A chemist would investigate its mineral composition.
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A physicist would examine the physical processes associated with its fossilization, and a philosopher would ask what distinguishes an observation from an interpretation, as well as what makes scientific knowledge possible in the first place.
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Notice carefully that these individuals are not studying different realities.
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No, they're investigating the same created reality from different perspectives, different sides, so to speak.
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There are three points I want us to consider.
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Firstly, facts are never independent of God.
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The Ammonite fossil is not an autonomous object existing outside the creator's sovereign domain.
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Its existence, its physical properties, and its intelligibility presuppose an ordered creation.
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Secondly, observations and interpretations should not be confused as one and the same thing.
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They must be distinguished from one another.
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The physical evidence is both real and accessible to investigation, but the reconstruction of the fossil's history requires theoretical judgments and underlying assumptions.
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This does not mean that all interpretations are equally valid.
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Interpretations must be examined, tested, and evaluated in light of the evidence and the presuppositions upon which they rest.
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Thirdly, creation cannot be understood reductionistically.
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The fossil can be investigated through several sciences, but no single scientific discipline exhausts everything that can meaningfully be known about it.
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And this brings us back to the central conviction behind the many-sided world.
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In order to investigate creation faithfully, we must recognize both its unity and its diversity.
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We must resist the temptation to reduce the whole of reality to any one of its aspects or to treat any particular discipline as though it possesses the authority to explain everything else.
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Each discipline has its proper field of inquiry, its methods and its limitations, and each contributes something meaningful to our understanding of God's world.
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This is precisely why we must concern ourselves not only with the discoveries made within the various disciplines, but also with the philosophical assumptions that inform how those discoveries are interpreted.
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Our task is not to impose a Christian veneer upon otherwise supposedly neutral scholarship, but to pursue a genuinely Christian understanding of the world from our most fundamental presuppositions to our particular investigations.
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And that is what we hope to accomplish through this podcast.
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In the episodes ahead, we will engage with science, philosophy, scholarship, and thinkers from across the disciplines, examining the remarkable complexity of creation, considering competing interpretations, and exploring what it means to approach these subjects from a distinctly Christian worldview.
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Our purpose is not merely to dispute how the world has been understood, but to recover a sense of wonder at the world itself.
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For the deeper we investigate the created order, the more we discover a reality of astonishing diversity, remarkable coherence, and an inexhaustible complexity.
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Whether we look through a microscope or a telescope, whether we examine a fossil or contemplate the foundations of mathematics, we are investigating the same world.
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God's world.
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And that is precisely why it's worth exploring.
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Join us for our next episode as we jump into astronomy and the cosmos, the many sided world, one creation, many sides, and the same.