If God is the being that Scripture claims, then man’s knowledge must correspond to God’s knowledge if there is to be any human knowledge at all. Not only must man’s knowledge correspond with God’s, Scripture informs that God makes human knowledge possible. Human knowledge obtains when God enables us to think his thoughts after him on a creaturely level.
Yet when the believer engages the unbeliever on the question of God’s existence the unbeliever cannot rid herself of her moral rejection of God as a necessary precondition for the very possibility of knowledge. In her professed desire to be objective in her pursuit of the possibility (or actual existence) of some greater truth, she prejudicially dismisses God as the one who makes intellectual pursuit possible! Due to the effect of the fall, the unbeliever is anything but neutral in her approach to the question of God’s existence. The unbeliever presupposes at the outset that the requisite tools of rational investigation (e.g. logic, inference, memory etc.) and the context in which they function (e.g. reality and providence) are not God dependent. In other words, the unbeliever‘s bias is that any mind-world correspondence is perfectly intelligible apart from any reference point other than the finite human mind itself. Little if no consideration is given to the question of why the subject and object of knowledge should correspond, or how there can be a fruitful connection between the knower and the mind-independent external world that can be known. By the nature of the case, the unbeliever imagines that if God exists, he must be discovered through autonomous reason that is capable of functioning apart from God. In doing so, the unbeliever not only rejects a God who must make reason possible – she actually is not even seeking such a God at all! The unbeliever is seeking a god who does not make knowledge possible and has not plainly revealed himself in creation, providence and grace. The unbeliever is seeking an idol of her own making.
Given such antithesis between God and man, what sorts of things might the Christian want to be cognizant of when engaging the would be atheist? God willing, I’ll take a look at some of those things in the weeks to come.
Philosophical Theology 