Anthony Flood writes,
Beneath a post on his blog, Bill Vallicella commented on a matter of common interest. I stress that Bill wrote a comment, not a paper for a peer-reviewed journal, and that’s all I’m doing here. I offer the following only as a further, not a last word.
Last Sunday, in responding to one Joe Odegaard, Bill wrote:
While I agree that Christianity makes sense of the world and in particular of the scientific enterprise, and while I myself have argued against materialism/physicalism/naturalism and in favor of Divine Mind as source of the world’s intelligibility, it must be borne in mind that Xianity [Christianity] is a very specific religion with very specific tenets such as Incarnation and Trinity. Why should anyone think that such apparently unintelligible doctrines are necessary for the intelligibility of the natural world? (Emphasis added.—A. G. F.)
The short answer is that appearances can be untrustworthy. Unless it can be shown that those tenets are really, not just apparently, unintelligible, the implicit objection (in the form of a rhetorical question) has no force.
BV: Not so, and for two reasons. Trinity and Incarnation may or may not be intelligible doctrines. Either way, the question remains why an account of the intrinsic intelligibility of nature in terms of Divine Mind requires them. That is the question I am posing to Joe, and indirectly to C. S. Lewis, and it is not rhetorical. I am genuinely asking it. But I have found that some people do not understand what a rhetorical question is. In fact, one night I caught the astute Mark Levin of Life, Liberty, and Levin (Fox News) misusing the phrase. So permit me a brief digression.
A rhetorical question is a grammatically interrogative form of words that is not logically interrogative but either logically indicative or logically imperative. Such a form of words is used to issue a command or to make a statement, not to ask a question. For example, Daddy says to teenage girl, "Do you have to talk on the phone while driving?" Clearly, the old man is not asking a question despite the grammatically interrogative formulation. He is issuing a command, or perhaps a recommendation, in a polite way. A second example is from Hillary Clinton. "Do you really think Donald Trump has the temperament to be commander-in-chief?" When she said that in a speech, she was not asking whether Trump has the requisite temperament, but stating or asserting that he does not. And this despite her use of the grammatical interrogative.
Here is an interesting case. Someone sincerely asks, "Does God exist?" and receives the reply, "Is there an angry unicorn on the dark side of the Moon?" (Ed Abbey). The first question is genuine; the second is rhetorical. Another curious case: an uniformed person sincerely asks a genuine question, "Is Mayorkas lying about border security?" and receives in response a rhetorical question that expresses either a tautology, "Is a cat a cat?" or an analytic truth, "Is the Pope Catholic?" End of digression.
And so my question is not rhetorical. I am not asserting anything, I am genuinely asking why Joe or C. S. Lewis, to whom Joe links, or anyone thinks that an account of the intelligibility of nature (including its uniformity, regularity, and predictability) in terms of Divine Mind must also include such specifically Christian doctrines as Trinity and Incarnation. By the intelligibility of nature I mean its intrinsic understandability by minds such as ours. The natural world is intrinsically such as to be understandable by us. As opposed to what? As opposed to deriving its intelligibility from us via our conceptual schemes. If the latter derivation were the case, then the intelligibility would not be intrinsic but relational: relative to us and our conceptual frameworks. (I note en passant that there are other ways of accounting for intelligibility without God. The late Daniel Dennett would probably say that it 'evolves.' I'll come back to Dennett later.)
After all, a Jew who rejects Trinity and Incarnation could hold that nature is intrinsically intelligible only if it is a divine creation. And a Muslim could as well. And our friend Dale Tuggy too! He is a unitarian Christian.
So again: Why does an account of the intrinsic intelligibility of the natural world in terms of Divine Creative Mind require the specific doctrines of normative Christianity? That and that alone is the question I am raising in my response to Joe and C. S. Lewis.
Tony may have a defensible answer to my question. Or he may not. We can discuss it if he likes. But all of this is irrelevant to the initial post and the comment thread it generated. The question I raised in the initial post was whether the knowledge involved when a person knows that the Sun has risen is exactly the same sort of knowledge involved when a person knows -- if he does know --- that Christianity is true.
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