Last night I spent a few minutes, at the request of my daughter Anna, with a college student who was denying the existence of God. He was a Empiricist / Verificationist who was demanding physical sensory evidence for proof of God’s existence. He refused to accept the absurdity and self-defeating nature of his position. With that conversation still ringing in my head I thought I would quote Bahnsen on the problem of Empiricism / Verificationism.
“When the unbeliever contends that nothing in man’s temporal, limited, natural experience can provide knowledge of the metaphysical or supernatural, he is simply taking a roundabout way of saying that the Biblical account of God who makes Himself clearly known in the created order and Scripture is mistaken.
This begging of the question is sometimes veiled from the unbeliever by his tendency to recast the nature of theological truth as man-centered and rooted initially in human, empirical experience. However, the very point in contention between the believer and the unbeliever comes down to the claims that Christian teaching is rooted in God’s self-disclosure of the truth as found in the world around us and in the written word. There is no reason to think that theology would be intellectually required to be built upon the foundation of human sense experience, unless someone were presupposing in advance that all knowledge must ultimately derive from empirical procedures. But that is the very question at hand. The anti-metaphysical polemic is not a supporting reason for rejecting Christianity; it is simply a re-wording of that rejection itself.
PHILOSOPHICAL SELF-DECEPTION
We are brought, then, to number (1) above, the first and foundational step in the case against metaphysics. What are we to make of the assertion that ‘all significant knowledge about the objective world is empirical in nature.’? The most obvious and philosophically significant reply would be that if the preceding statement were true, then — on the basis of the claim — we could never know that it were true. Why? Simply because the statement in question is not itself known as the result of empirical testing and experience. Therefore, according to its own strict standards, the statement could not amount to significant knowledge about the objective world. It simply reflects the subjective (perhaps meaningless!) bias of the one who pronounces it. Hence the anti-metaphysician not only has his own preconceived conclusions (presuppositions), but it turns out that he cannot live according to them (Rom. 2:1). On the basis of his own assumptions he refutes himself (II Tim. 2:25). As Paul put it about those who suppress the truth in unrighteousness: ‘They become futile in their speculations (Rom. 1:21)!
FURTHER DIFFICULTIES
There are other difficulties with the position expressed by (1) as well. We can easily see that it amounts to a presupposition for the unbeliever. What rational basis or evidence is there for the position that all knowledge must be empirical in nature? That is not a conclusion supported by other reasoning, and the premise does not admit of empirical verification since it deals with what is universally or necessarily the case (not a historical or contingent truth). Moreover, the statement itself precludes any other type of verification or support other than empirical warrants or evidence. Thus the anti-metaphysical opponent of the Christian faith holds to this dogma in a presuppositional fashion — as something which controls inquiry, rather than being the result of inquiry.
That anti-metaphysical presupposition, however, has certain devastating results. Notice that if all knowledge must be empirical in nature, then the uniformity of nature cannot be known to be true. And without the knowledge and assurance that the future will be like the past (e.g., if salt dissolved in water on Wednesday, it will do likewise and not explode on Friday) we could not draw empirical generalizations and projections — in which case the whole enterprise of natural science would immediately be undermined.”
Dr. Greg Bahnsen
Always Ready — pg. 187-188