How do we know things? Not just in a flippant or provisional way of knowing, but certain knowledge that has true ultimacy. Is such knowledge possible? Is so-called knowledge that is not certain really true knowledge?

These questions are debated by philosophers…and with the advent of the internet, debated by people, who do not have formal philosophy degrees. There are two principle answers to the question of ultimate authority: human reasoning or revelation from God. So, what is the ultimate and grandest authority for knowledge? Is it mankind’s reasoning or is it revelation from God? One’s epistemology (theory of knowledge) will determine many other aspects of a person’s worldview, so answering the question of how people ultimately obtain knowledge is an important question. Let’s evaluate

Is Human Reasoning the Best Epistemology?

I’ve been told by online philosophers that human reasoning is the ultimate authority. One in particular made the claim that human reasoning is the ultimate source of ALL worldviews. In his syllogism, premise 1 is true, but we will scrutinize premise 2. So, let’s look and see if human reasoning is the ultimate epistemology

To start, Christianity is imminently reasonable because it is the only worldview that can sufficiently account for reasoning and knowledge, but that’s only a by-product of God’s revelation. Christians ultimately rely on God’s revelation as the authority of our worldview, and by God’s grace we find that trusting in God’s revelation, we have a home for reason. Reasoning with Christian presuppositions now makes sense.

To directly attack Premise 2, we look to Rom 2:15 “They show that the work of the law is written on their hearts, while their conscience also bears witness, and their conflicting thoughts accuse or even excuse them.” As image bearers of the Creator, humans have been “hard-wired” with the laws of God built-in. God has revealed his expectations within the human conscience.

Now, my interlocutor may object by saying “but you must reason to understand, decipher, and interpret the Bible itself…therefore, reasoning is more basic.” But this is not true logically, it is simply chronologically prior…not logically prior. The Bible is the *justification* for the logical primacy of God’s revelation. So, even though I may need reasoning to read the Bible, reasoning remains secondary to God’s revelation within humanity. Dr. Jason Lisle explains in more detail (bold is not included in the original):

Many beliefs are justified only after the fact. This confuses some people, and an example may clarify. We must believe that our sensory organs are basically reliable in order for us to have confidence in anything we read. When we then read the Bible, we can see that our confidence in our sensory organs was justified because God created them. The truth of the Bible is logically more foundational than the truth that our senses are basically reliable because the former justifies the latter. However, we discover the truth in the pages of Scripture (that God designed our senses) after we have already trusted our senses. Our belief in reliable senses is chronologically first, but the biblical truth that God designed our senses to be basically reliable is logically primary.

By analogy, suppose you are driving up a hill. As you reach the top, you see a house on the other side of the hill. The first thing you see is the roof because the lower portions of the house are still obscured by the hill. As you continue to round the top of the hill and descend, you then see the top story of the house, and finally the lower level as the house becomes visible. You never actually see the foundation of the house, but you suppose it is there since all houses require a foundation. So the order in which you discover the sections of the house is: roof, second story, first story, foundation.

But this is not the order in which the house was built. A roof cannot exist without the supporting walls of the second story, which cannot stand apart from the first story, which cannot stand without the foundation. Obviously, the foundation was laid first, then the first story was built upon it, and the second story upon the first. The last thing to be constructed would be the roof because it logically requires all the other structures to be already in place. So the logical order in which the building was constructed was the opposite of the chronological order in which we become aware of the building.

Likewise, there can be no doubt that human beings are aware of self and their sensory experiences long before they read in the Bible the justification for those things. Yet, the truth of the Bible is logically prior to sensory experience, since our sensory experiences are only ultimately justified by appealing to the God of Scripture. Many well-meaning Christians argue against the presuppositional apologetic due to this misunderstanding. They argue (contrary to Proverbs 1:7) that knowledge begins with self, not with God. But God is logically prior to all our knowledge of anything, and apart from His revelation we could know absolutely nothing.

While the example above mentions senses as being justified by what is revealed in God’s Word, the same is also true for human reasoning. Human reasoning has validity only because of what God has revealed in the Bible. God’s revelation is logical authoritative but chronologically successive to human reasoning.

Additionally, the foundations of Christianity cannot be reasoned to; they must be revealed. It does not mean that Christianity is unreasonable; it means that because God revealed these pillars of reality, they are irrefutably true. Here are some examples:

• The Trinity. God is One God in three persons. It is not unreasonable, but one cannot reason to this conclusion. It had to be revealed by God (Isa 45, 1 John 5:7, Matt 28:19, 2 Cor 13:14)
• Hypostatic union. The eternal God could be incarnated as a man. The eternal Creator, Jesus, took on human flesh (John 1:1-14)
• Virgin birth. One does not reason to the conclusion that Jesus was born to a virgin. It had to be revealed from God.
• Peter’s recognition of Jesus as the Messiah recounted in Matt 16. Jesus says “Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah, for this was not revealed to you by man, but by my Father in heaven.”
• Resurrection from the dead. One cannot reason that a dead body would rise again. It was revealed to the eye-witnesses of the resurrection through their senses. And it has been revealed to us today through the scriptures of the resurrection of Jesus.
• “Whoever humbles himself like this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven.” – Jesus Matt 18:4. This is a concept that one does not reason to since it is counterintuitive, but it has been revealed as truthful by the Creator.

There are many others. The point is clearly that reasoning is not the ultimate source of Christianity. Consistent Christians accept what God has revealed to be true since many of those things cannot be reasoned to

Another point that should be addressed here is that the effects of sin in the world has affected the reasoning of mankind. Mankind cannot reason correctly without the help of a regenerated spirit and the work of the Holy Spirit (Rom 1:18-32, 1 Cor 2:14, Rom 7:14-25, Rom 12:2). Sometimes people refer to this doctrine as Total Depravity.

Lastly, humans are notoriously unreasonable. Were humans perfectly reasonable, we would never consume sugar, never be dishonest, exercise daily, avoid narcotics/alcohol/tobacco, never waste time, never gamble money, among many other imminently reasonable proverbs of wisdom. It is unreasonable to count on human reasoning as the ultimate source of authority.

As shown above, the claim that reasoning is the ultimate source of Christianity fails. God, who knows all things, has revealed Himself to humanity in creation, in the Bible, and in the incarnation. This is the epistemic source of knowledge. By God’s grace, He also granted humans the ability to reason. By this reasoning and with God’s revelation as the ultimate source, humans can have knowledge.

Conversely, without God, there could only be a non-reasoning source for human reasoning. Therefore, human reasoning would be untrustworthy. It’s written out by Timothy McCabe as a syllogism like this:

Without God, reasoning is unreasonable. In his autobiography Charles Darwin recognized the futility of assuming that human reasoning is trustworthy if it comes from an accumulation of accidental changes over time from lower animals for the purpose of survival

God is the starting point of all reasoning. Without God, human reasoning would be impossible.