I am, as you all know, pretty much convinced that the claims of Open Theism best describe the sort of world we encounter when reading the Bible. I was raised that way, I continually see what looks like abundant confirmation of that position when I read the Bible, and Greg Boyd‘s explanations of why he holds open theism, as opened to his previously Calvinistic views, have certainly helped solidify the case in my mind. I’ve known Calvinists who have considered standard Arminians heretics. If an Arminian is a heretic, an Open Theist is doubly so. It would be an understatements to say that I and Calvinists have some disagreements.
Nevertheless, I’m coming to like Van Til and those he influenced quite a bit. My first introduction to Van Til’s primary legacy, presuppositionalism, came in the form of a Creation magazine article, when I was perhaps eleven years old. Either the article garbled it or I misunderstood it. It seemed to be saying that we can prove that the Bible is flawless and inerrant by assuming that the Bible is flawless and inerrant, and then taking that assumption to its logical conclusion: the Bible is inerrant. Furthermore, we were warned, this is the only valid approach, because starting with anything other than the Bible will lead us to unbelief and hell for certain, and because starting from any point other than the assumption of the Bible’s absolute flawless inerrancy would lead to anti-biblical results. I was naturally quite annoyed at an approach that only pretending to engage in logical argument and was nothing more than a dressed-up intellectual version of the childish tactic of screaming, ‘You should believe me because I’m telling the truth! You can’t just choose not to believe the truth! You’re not stupid enough to believe a lie, are you?’ Or at least that’s how I understood the article at the time. I may have been mistaken.
I’ve gotten to know Van Til a little better since then, and though I don’t know all about presuppositionalism, the approach that he pioneered, and which is used extensively by Greg Bahnsen and Gary North, is mind-blowingly effective and revealing. They start with epistemology, and point out that philosophically there is no neutral ground on which to pursue truth. They develop this idea of non-neutrality by taking apart challenges to biblical thinking by stripping them down to their underlying presuppositions, which are internally contradictory or incoherent.
Gary North takes just such an approach in his Coase Theorem, in which he takes apart the idea of a value-free economics. He demonstrates that economic must either operate ‘value-free’ by creating imaginary worlds to analyze, or it may speak about the world we live in by smuggling in ethical assumptions of one kind or another. He dissects the work of Coase in particular to show how value-free economics always surreptitiously jumps back and forth from thought experiments in impossible imaginary world to ethically loaded statements about the world we presently live in, concealing the jump it makes by a variety of obfuscations which give it a false appearance of ‘scientific’ validity. If he is correct, the entire science of economics, to the extent that it imagines itself a value-free science with valuable things to say about the real world, is a deception.
If North is right, and I think he is, then every supposedly neutral academic discipline that provides any sort of policy proposals for personal or public life rests on a foundation of epistemological and ethical claims which are either in agreement with the claims of the Bible, or in opposition to them. If so, the entire idea of public institutions which do intellectual work while remaining religiously neutral is a sham. Which, the longer I have interacted with public ‘neutral’ institutions, the more I agree with.
However, North goes places with his attack on neutrality that I am not sure what to do with. His vision of the entire Christian worldview and practice being based on the truth-claims of the Bible leads to an uncomfortable place politically. If we take North’s claims to their logical conclusion, he is demanding government which practices justice as outlined in the Bible. And most American Christians, myself included, get the shakes when something starts too look too much like what we would call a ‘theocracy’. But if we do not base our law on God’s standard of justice, what other ruler can we use?
I’m not sure.
2 Comments
I would love to hear more about North’s approach to economics as not being value neutral. It sounds almost eerily post-modern.
I’ve come to dislike the word ‘post-modern’. Everyone uses it, but nobody outside of specialized circles knows what they mean.
North builds on, but fundamentally departs from, the hyper-subjectivist school of economics known as Austrian economics — the stuff developed by Bohm-Bawerk, Carl Menger, Ludwig von Mises, Murray Rothbard, and to a lesser extent F. A. Hayek.
The subjectivist school has pointed out that the only scientifically measurable ‘value’ for a good is the market price of the good, and that anything else is an artificial construct. They also, starting with Mises, have explained the fall of socialism as an informational problem, rather than just an incentive problem. Their work is elegant, understandable, and freakishly self-consistent. They’ve torn down every other school of value-free economics.
So all that’s left is Austrian economics, which, being radically subjectivist, provides no way of measuring the social cost of anything, and has no moral content. North pulls it apart and demonstrates that economics cannot provide any policy prescription of any kind, nor can it provide statistics, without smuggling in intuitions and ethicals principles in secretly.
Specifically, this book focuses on the Coase theorem, which is an attempt to economically prove that rights don’t matter as long as a market exists. The Coase theorem is widely considered to be ingenious by economists, and it is cited as a way to protect economic interests that damage people’s property, such as by pollution.
North tears apart the notion that economics can measure social costs or individual real costs of any action, when without an ethical framework. And unlike many critics of economics, he’s not sloppy about his work, he’s not trying to tear down economics to justify some pie-in-the-sky social utopia, and he knows economics inside and out.
It’s an impressive work.