An Excerpt from What Can Really Know? by David Andersen

In order to assess any arguments for or against God’s existence, we must suppose that arguments and reason are valid. Most of what’s presented in this chapter assumes just that, but there exists a rather strong tradition known as fideism that rejects the notion that one can provide arguments for God’s existence or for a particular religion. To give this idea a bit more precision, Kai Nielsen has defined the fideist as one who generally believes that fundamental religious beliefs rest solely and completely on faith. Finite and sinful people can’t come to know God by the use of their unaided reason, and this implies (logically) for the fideist the parallel assertion that belief and unbelief are intellectually on a par. Religious experience is therefore ambiguous as to the reality of its object, and the existence of God can never be established by empirical investigation or philosophical demonstration. God, according to the fideist, remains a mystery and a scandal to the intellect; i.e., intellectually speaking, many fideists have contended that a belief in God is absurd. The believer can only trust that she’s not “whistling in the dark” and not believing in something illusory when she accepts the God revealed in scripture as an ultimate reality. She must simply take the leap of faith without any intellectual assurance that she’s leaping in the right direction. [2]

Kai Nielsen has defined the fideist as one who generally believes that fundamental religious beliefs rest solely and completely on faith.

From a Protestant perspective, fideism has been represented in both the Reformed and Lutheran traditions. On the Reformed side, Cornelius Van Til insisted that when we think about the interpretation of reality, there are only two possible reference points: God and man. The triune God, he posited, who created and sustains all things, is the ultimate principle of interpretation of the universe, which means that a fact is true only if it receives its interpretation from the God of the Bible. For Van Til, the sinner is incapable of any knowledge in the proper sense, either in the spiritual or scientific realms. This is because facts must be correlated with universals, and—apart from God, by whom everything derives its meaning— understanding anything is impossible, since there is no facticity or truth; that is, without presupposing the universal of the ontological Trinity. Thus, for any fact to be truth, it must be a theistic fact. In his sinful condition, man has discarded God as the ultimate universal and has therefore discarded everything. Hence, there is no epistemological common ground between the believer and unbeliever. Bruce Demarest explains as follows:

Because autonomous human reasoning leads nowhere, Van Til asserts that the Christian must address the sinner by way of presupposition. ... The presentation of isolated facts adduced from nature or history independent of God, the ultimate referent, is a futile venture. ... That is, only as one boldly begins with the idea of the self‐contained God does the data of the space‐time world become intelligible and reason become a reliable interpretative tool. A sound and convincing case for biblical theism cannot be constructed by the traditional, empirical, rational, or verificational systems. The commonly employed empirical‐historical method guarantees the overthrow of biblical Christianity. [3]

For Van Til, the only “proof” of Christianity is that, unless its truth is pre‐ supposed, there’s no possibility of “proving” anything at all. The truth of the gospel in authoritative scripture is always self‐authenticating and self‐ validating, meaning that, apart from any inductive or deductive reason‐ ing, the person who allows himself to be confronted by the Word of God becomes existentially persuaded of it truthfulness. From this it follows that general revelation (knowledge of God through the workings of nature) gives the sinner no light.

While stating his case differently, the Lutheran dogmatician, Francis Pieper, articulates a similar position. Concerning the question of how we recognize the divine authority of scripture, he begins by distinguishing Christian certainty (fides divina) from natural, or scientific, certainty (fides humana). [4] Christian certainty, he argues, is created solely by the self‐testimony (or “self attestation”) of scripture, through which the power of the Holy Spirit creates faith in itself and secures its acceptation. Such certainty isn’t accomplished by the employment of human proofs. Scripture is rather an object of perception that creates its own organ of perception, faith. Hence, Pieper admonishes Christians assailed by doubt about the divinity of scripture to have intercourse with it; i.e., they must read, hear, and meditate on scripture and permit it to act on themselves. “Then the self‐testimony of the Scriptures, the testimonium Spiritus Sancti internum, will dispel all doubts.” [5]

Further, because the divine works bear the “divine stamp”—by which human reason can see that they’re not the product of human beings—Pieper assigns to the role of apologetics one of proclamation, not defense.

And as a natural, rational observation of the creation reveals God as its Creator (Rom. 1:18 ff.), so, too, a natural, rational study of Holy Scripture points to God as its author. When we compare the Holy Scriptures according to content and style with other “Bibles” in the world, e.g., with the Koran, the other Sacred Books of the East, etc., when we think of the victorious march of Christianity through the world, though its teaching is an offense to the Jews and foolishness to the Greeks, when we recall the astounding effects of the religion taught in the Scriptures on individuals and whole nations, then a reasonable reason cannot do otherwise than conclude that the Scriptures must be divine and confess that it is more reasonable to grant the divinity of Scripture than to deny it. This is the domain of apologetics. [6]

Thus, the apologist is to preach Christian doctrine to the world, but he doesn’t attempt to prove its truth by rational or philosophical arguments.

And when the Gospel has wrought faith in the Savior of sinners in him, he rejoices in the saving divine truth and does not ask to have this truth demonstrated to him scientifically. That is the meaning of the axiom: ‘The best apology of the Christian religion is its proclamation’.” The apologist then is only in a position to show that it would appear more reasonable to accept the claims of Christianity as true than to reject them as false. It’s not the apologist’s business to demonstrate the truth of Christianity to the unbeliever; rather, it’s to uncover the insincerity of unbelief, since all who reject Christianity do so because of their evil will and not because of their “pretended” intellectual honesty. Thus, with a long tradition of fideists, Pieper insists that there “are no scientific reasons or rational proofs against the truths of Christianity. [7]

But critics (such as Nielsen) have been quick to point out that, if there can be no scientific reasons or rational proofs of Christianity and if the faith is to be believed because it’s absurd (along the lines of Tertullian’s famous acclamation “I believe because it is absurd”), how could the believer understand the utterances about God at all? How could he accept or reject them, for he literally wouldn’t understand what he’s accepting or rejecting? If such utterances are to be meaningful at all, they must be intelligible to at least some men. But if we don’t understand what “God” means or what it would be like for “There is a God” to be true or false, then to say that we accept God on faith is logically equivalent to saying we accept “There is an Irglig” on faith. That is, before we can make the leap, or before we can accept a claim on faith or refuse to accept it on faith, we must at least have some minimal understanding of what it is we’re accepting or rejecting. Thus, despite the fideists claims, faith can’t at this level be a way to understanding. As Nielsen points out, “Faith cannot ensure the meaningfulness of religious utterances; quite the contrary, faith presupposes that the discourse in question is itself meaningful (intelligible).” [8] If the fideist still maintains that it is a fact that there’s a God, that he created the world, that he loves us, etc.—and it seems that if he has a truly Christian theology, he must—then how can we meaningfully assert that they’re statements of fact if we have no idea of what it would be like for such statements to be either true or false? It’s generally accepted that, in order for a sentence to serve as the vehicle for a factual assertion, one must be able to say what would count for the truth or falsity of this putative assertion. It must, in other words, have that much meaning. [9]