Shaeffer and Epistomological Despair

Autonomy and Despair: A Defense of Francis A. Schaeffer's Thesis

Francis A. Schaeffer asserted that when modern humans adopted rationalism, they thereby gave up rationality.¹ At the heart of this claim is the distinction between rationalism and rationality. Schaeffer considers the essence of rationalism to be belief in “the uniformity of natural causes in a closed system.”² The key to this idea, and the resulting despair, is the phrase “closed system.” He sees the assumptions that the universe is all there is and that humankind is autonomous as necessarily leading to despair, not just in epistemology, but in all of life. My thesis is that Schaeffer was right about this and that recent developments in epistemology have confirmed what he said.

Rationality and Rationalism

Schaeffer's distinction between rationalism and rationality is important. The former is a philosophy. It is laden with presuppositions about the nature of humankind and the universe. “I would suggest that a serious question would have to be faced as to whether the reason why modern men reject the Christian answer, or why they often do not even consider it, is because they have already accepted with an implicit faith the presupposition of the uniformity of natural causes in a closed system.”³ This means that historical, theistic answers must be categorically rejected. If we live in a closed system universe there is nothing or no One transcendent to the universe to provide answers to our most basic questions. Even the significance of human thought must be called into question. Conversely, the Biblical answer that the personal Trinitarian God created humans in His image gives a basis for rationality. Schaeffer explains, “The Scriptures give the key to two kinds of knowledge — the knowledge of God, and the knowledge of men and nature.”⁴

That Schaeffer was a presuppositionalist is common knowledge. But he was not one who rejected rationality or thought of faith as a “blind leap.” He wrote extensively against those ideas. One's presuppositions lead to conclusions, either livable ones that make sense of the data of the real world and human aspirations, or unlivable ones that end in despair or nihilism. Thus evidence and rationality are given a high value in Schaeffer's understanding. The following quotation shows this:

I want to suggest that scientific proof, philosophical proof, and religious proof follow the same rules. We may have any problem before us that we wish to solve; it may concern a chemical reaction or the meaning of man. After the question has been defined, in each case proof consists of two steps:
A. The theory must be non-contradictory and must give an answer to the phenomenon in question.
B. We must be able to live consistently with our theory.⁵

The last statement shows a streak of pragmatism that was certainly part of Schaeffer's thinking. It was not, I think, pragmatism as a conception of truth, but a pragmatism that was based on his fundamental beliefs: God made humans in His image, gave us rationality, placed us in an environment to which our basic faculties are suited, and has spoken to us through special revelation, etc. Therefore it is reasonable to expect that we can know truth and that such truth will be livable.⁶ God has made us and the universe in this way. Therefore it can be expected that what turns out to be unlivable is untrue, because God's truth is livable.

The following further shows his thinking on the matter of knowing truth over a wide range:

It is an important principle to remember, in the contemporary interest in communication and in language study, that the biblical presentation is that, though we do not have exhaustive truth, we have from the Bible what I term `true truth'. In this way we know true truth about God, true truth about man and something truly about nature. Thus on the basis of the Scriptures, while we do not have exhaustive knowledge, we have true and unified knowledge.⁷

The rationalistic approach that trapped humans in an autonomous state with no possible valid knowledge of God, leads to epistemological despair.

Schaeffer often spoke of the contemporary despair of having a unified field of knowledge. How did we get into such a situation? Mark Worthing sees the events of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as pivotal: “What the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries witnessed was the dissolution of a unified world view and epistemological system that had been accepted by philosophers, theologians, and scientists alike for at least two millennia.”⁸ According to Worthing, “Science and theology split away from each other.”⁹

Operating epistemologically from these premises, no transcendent God who created the universe, no creation of humankind in God's image, and no possible subsequent verbal and propositional communication from God, means no hope of a unified field of knowledge. Despair is the only reasonable conclusion of rationalism; this is Schaeffer's position. Rationality is a God-given human faculty that enables us to distinguish categories and to reason from premises to conclusions. Rationalism is a humanistic philosophy.

Schaeffer's position on rationalism and despair struck home to me as a young Christian because of an experience I had just weeks after becoming a Christian. In the Fall 1971 I was a junior in chemical engineering at Iowa State University and was enrolled in a class on the philosophy of science. The professor used the first class session to outline his philosophy of science. He said,

There are only two possibilities of obtaining knowledge, divine revelation and the scientific method. Divine revelation is hogwash, it does not happen. The other method is therefore the only way of knowing anything. In the scientific method, we formulate theories. All theories are `true' but many of them only work in some other universe than the one we are living in. Therefore we will only consider those which work on our universe. There is no such thing as “Truth” with a capital T, we only have theories that work for us, or do not.¹⁰

I was quite shocked at his philosophy and rather disturbed that he summarily dismissed the possibility of divine revelation without discussion. So I became the only student present to venture a question. I asked, “Professor, do I understand you correctly, are you saying that it is impossible to ever know if anything is true?” He answered “yes,” which evoked gasps of surprise from my fellow students. How disturbing it is to be enrolled in a school of higher learning and to “learn” that one can never know truth. This professor was more honest than many. He willingly admitted that he had crossed Schaeffer's “line of despair.”

Why Autonomy Leads to Despair

The ironic tragedy of fallen humankind is that we know enough to realize that we do not know everything, but we have a lust to know everything. The Biblical account of humans created in God's image followed by a fall adequately accounts for this. Humans were created in God's image with the rational capacities to know cognitively and relationally. This is shown by the mandate to care for the rest of creation and by their relationship to God and one another (Genesis chapters 1 & 2). Adam named the animals, but was given a wife to whom he was to cleave. This shows both the cognitive and relational aspects of knowing.

That the original humans were finite is shown by the fact of having been created, and by the first law that effectively limited their access to knowledge. The “tree of the knowledge of good and evil” offered the one forbidden fruit (Genesis 2:16,17). It has been suggested that “good and evil” is a figure of speech in which two extremities are used to signify “everything.” Examples from the scriptures are “heaven and earth,” and “alpha and omega.” If this is the significance of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, then the first humans were tempted to seek to know everything. The temptation was to reject their contingent, creaturely status and to seek knowledge that was only the domain of the all knowing Creator. That this was involved is confirmed by the tempter's statement in Genesis 3:5 that by partaking, the first humans could “be like God, knowing good and evil.”

The issue of autonomy is clear. Finite humans can know “true truth” by using their God-given faculties in relationship to Him and dependence on Him. But what and how much they know is limited by their own finitude and by God's decrees. The temptation was that by transgressing the decree and challenging God's sovereignty, they could obtain God's knowledge and become autonomous like Him. The cruel truth of the matter is that their noetic capacities were severely diminished, not expanded like they foolishly hoped. Their relational knowledge was ruined (they hid from God and were ashamed before one another) and their cognitive abilities to interact with the rest of the creation were damaged. What knowledge fallen humans do hold about nature, when held autonomously in relationship to God, is always in question: How much if any of it is true? Deception is a constant and real danger. There is no eternal, omniscient third party to confirm or deny the validity of one's cognitive experience. Human finitude becomes a huge problem once the relationship with the infinite Creator is gone.¹¹ This has important implications for epistemology.

Blaise Pascal discussed humankind’s ability to doubt everything, but yet was forced back into reality by nature: “What sort of freak then is man! How novel, how monstrous, how chaotic, how paradoxical, how prodigious! Judge of all things, feeble earthworm, repository of truth, sink of doubt and error, glory and refuse of the universe.”¹² Pascal thought the cause of this situation is best explained by humankind’s dual nature that results from having been created by God followed by a fall.¹³ The phrase he used to explain this is, “Man infinitely transcends man.”¹⁴ His advice to the skeptics and all others who despair at knowing truth about nature, God and humankind: “[H]ear from your master your true condition, which is unknown to you. Listen to God.”¹⁵ We either listen to God or live in paradoxical despair of knowing even ourselves.

Naturalism cannot explain human longings for truth and knowledge, nor can it give hope for obtaining them. If we are merely the products of the impersonal plus time plus chance, why do we have such longings for meaning and truth? These are personal longings. They are desires that, we are told, have no possible satisfaction. That is why my fellow students gasped when the professor told us that truth could not be known (perhaps also because some wondered how he could know that). Humans long to know the truth but are sinfully in rebellion against the only relationship that offers any hope for truth, a relationship with God. When this relational knowledge is dismissed as “hogwash” truth goes with it. Schaeffer describes this:

The basic position of man in rebellion against God is that man is at the centre of the universe, that he is autonomous — here lies his rebellion. Man will keep his rationalism and his rebellion, his insistence on total autonomy or partially autonomous areas, even if it means he must give up his rationality.¹⁶

Better to live in despair than to hope in God is the motto of humankind in autonomy.

It is only logical that if we are autonomous, we should be in despair. After all, we are finite and contingent beings. We are able to contemplate matters of huge complexity and formulate theories that are quite impressive. But then other humans seem always to be able to interact with any theory (particularly epistemological ones) and poke holes in it. We seem to know so much at a time when epistemology gives little hope of knowing anything.