Brian writes,
In Van Til and Romans 1: 18-20 you accused Paul of begging the question in Romans 1 when he characterizes the natural world as ‘created’. The question you have in mind – the one presumably being begged by Paul – is whether the world is a divine creation.
BV: That's right, but let's back up a step.
Paul is concerned to show the moral culpability of unbelief. He assumes something I don't question, namely, that some beliefs are such that, if a person holds them, then he is morally culpable or morally blameworthy for holding them. We can call them morally culpable beliefs as long we understand that it is the holding of the belief, not its content, that is morally culpable. I would even go so far as to say that some beliefs are morally culpable whether or not one acts on them.
So I don't question whether there are morally culpable beliefs. What I question is whether atheism is a morally culpable belief, where atheism in this context is the thesis that there is no God as Paul and those in his tradition conceive him.
So why does Paul think atheism is morally culpable? The gist of it is as follows. Men are godless and wicked and suppress the truth. What may be known about God is plain to them because God has made it plain to them. Human beings have no excuse for their unbelief. "For since the creation of the world, God's invisible qualities -- his eternal power and divine nature -- have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made . . . ."
We can argue over whether there is an argument here or just some dogmatic statements dressed up as an argument. (The word 'for' can reasonably be taken as signaling argumentative intent.) Suppose we take Paul to be giving an argument. What is the argument? It looks to be something like the following:
1) It is morally inexcusable to refuse to acknowledge what is known to be the truth.
2) That God exists is known to be the truth from the plain evidence of creation.
Therefore
3) It is morally inexcusable to refuse to acknowledge that God exists.
This argument is only as good as its minor premise, (2). But right here is where Paul begs the question. If the natural world is a divine creation, it follows analytically that God exists and that God created the world. Paul begs the question by assuming that the natural world is a divine creation. Paul is of course free to do that. He is free to presuppose the existence of God, not that he, in full critical self-awareness, presupposes the existence of God; given his upbringing he probably never seriously questioned the existence of God and always took his existence for granted.
And having presupposed -- or taken for granted -- the existence of God, it makes sense for him to think of us as having been created by God with an innate sense of the divine -- Calvin's sensus divinitatis -- that our sinful rebelliousness suppresses. And it makes sense for him to think that the wrath of God is upon us for our sinful self-will and refusal to acknowledge God's reality and sovereignty.
For him to have begged the question here, wouldn’t Paul’s burden of proof have to be that the world is a divine creation? This does not seem to be his burden in Romans 1. It seems to me that Paul is accounting for why people are under the wrath of God. His answer is that: (1) they know God; and (2) they fail to honor Him as God. If (1) and (2) are the case, then this accounts for why they are under God’s wrath.
Your talk of burden of proof is unclear. You seem to think that the burden of proof is the proposition one aims to prove. But that's not right. So let's not muddy the waters with 'burden of proof.'
We may be at cross purposes. What interests me is the question whether atheist belief is morally blameworthy. I read the passage in question as containing an argument that it is. I presented the argument above, and I explained why it is a bad argument: it commits the informal fallacy of petitio principii. To answer my own question: it is not in general morally blameworthy to hold characteristic atheist beliefs, although it may in some cases be morally blameworthy.
What interests Brian about the passage in question is the explanation it contains as to why the wrath of God is upon us. Well, if you assume that God exists and that venereal disease and the other bad things Paul mentions are the effects of divine wrath, then, within the presupposed framework, one can ask what accounts for God's wrath. It would then make sense to say that people know that God exists but willfully suppress this knowledge and fail to honor God. Therefore, God, to punish man for his willful refusal to acknowledge God's reality and sovereignty, sends down such scourges as AIDS.
I have no problem with this interpretation.
So far so good. But, this is not all that Paul says. The key section for our purposes is how Paul argues for (1), the proposition that people know God. Paul claims that they all know God because He made Himself evident to them through creation. Is Paul now be begging the question because of his use of ‘creation’? Again, I do not think so. Here is the pertinent passage:
For since the creation of the world His invisible attributes, His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen, being understood through what has been made…(Rom. 1:20 NASB).
But now I do have a problem. Brian has not appreciated the point that, to me, is blindingly evident. What is MADE by God is of course made by GOD. But this analytic proposition give us no reason to think that nature is MADE, i.e., created by a divine being that is transcendent of nature. It ought to be obvious that one cannot straightaway infer from the intelligibility, order, beauty, and existence of nature that 'behind' nature there is a supernatural personal being that is supremely intelligent, the source of all beauty, and the first cause of all existing things apart from itself. One cannot 'read off' the being instantiated of the divine attributes from contemplation of nature.
Suppose I see a woman. I am certain that if she is a wife, then there is a person who is her husband. Can I correctly infer from those two propositions that the woman I see is a wife? Can I 'read off' from my perception of the woman that she is a wife?
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