An Author Interview from Books At a Glance
You may not know this about yourself, but you are a philosopher. That’s what John Frame says, and in fact, it’s the title of his new book, We Are All Philosophers: A Christian Introduction to Seven Fundamental Questions. It’s brief, it’s straightforward, and it’s a very informative and enjoyable read.
I’m Fred Zaspel, editor here at Books At a Glance, and we have professor Frame with us today to talk about his new book.
John, welcome – always good to have you back with us.
Frame:
Good to be with you, Fred, and with your listeners.
Zaspel:
I’m pretty sure there are a lot of people who don’t think of themselves as philosophers. What are you telling them that they don’t already know about themselves?
Frame:
Well, most people have a worldview. I guess the term worldview is a little easier to follow than the term philosophy. We have some idea of how the whole world is connected up, what it’s like. Some people believe that it’s the creation of God; some people believe that it’s made up of matter and motion alone; some people believe that it’s an illusion that we conjure up in our minds. But everybody has some kind of an idea of how everything comes together. It’s usually not very precise, it’s not very clear, it’s not very detailed, but philosophers have the job of analyzing worldviews. Usually a philosopher will defend his own worldview and criticize other people’s worldviews or else he will just engage in some detailed analysis of some worldview proposal.
Zaspel:
So, we are all philosophers. We may not be very good ones, but at least at some level we’ve got a view.
Frame:
That’s true.
Zaspel:
How do Christianity and philosophy relate? The New Testament has some not so nice things to say about philosophy, after all.
Frame:
Well, that’s right. In Colossians, Paul warns the church about philosophy and vain deceit. If you go to 1 Corinthians, it has a lot to say in the early chapters about the wisdom of the world. And I think, there, Paul at least had partly in mind the Greek philosophers, although he’s probably also referring to some Jewish theories of things. But the Bible warns us against that. And what it means is that we should not go off trying to figure out the world in our own wisdom without seeking God’s truth, without seeking his revelation, without seeking what he has told us. But as we read the Bible, we find out that God has told us a lot, because the Bible has a very unique worldview. It’s the worldview of the Creator and the creature. The Creator is a personal being who brought the world into existence through his own word. And that’s very different from philosophical positions like materialism and idealism and a Buddhist nothingness and all the other alternative worldviews that there are out there. There is such a thing as a Christian philosophy and we ought to be articulating that and using it and applying it.
Zaspel:
So, it’s not philosophy per se that the biblical writers are opposing, it’s a human philosophy, one that’s not grounded in divine revelation.
Frame:
That’s right.
Zaspel:
How might it be helpful for Christians and/or ministers to have some acquaintance with the various philosophical approaches to big questions?
Frame:
The last task that Jesus gave us was the great commission where he said to go into all the world and make disciples of all nations, teaching them to observe everything that I have commanded you. And, of course, he has commanded us to think in a certain way, to think according to his revelation. So, when we go into the world and we preach the Gospel, among other things, we are preaching the Christian worldview which is probably very different from the worldview that people already believe. And so, this is a part of the missionary task, really, to put the biblical worldview into a form that people can understand, where they see that it’s different from the alternatives and that they need to repent from thinking in an unbelieving way.
Zaspel:
Tell us what your book is all about. Can you give a brief overview?
Frame:
Well, I’ve been teaching philosophy and theology for many years and I wrote this great big history of philosophy that was published in 2015, and then I thought that it might be a good idea to simplify it a little bit and write a short book. In my old age, I’ve learned how to write short books, now. So, instead of trying to follow the history, I decided to take seven representative philosophical problems and analyze them from a Christian standpoint. The publisher gave the subtitle something like a Christian response to seven important problems. My own subtitle was different, and I wish I were quicker on the draw and were able to tell them that the subtitle should really be A Path Through Philosophy to Jesus. Which they decided not to use and I’m disappointed in that, but nevertheless, the subtitle they used indicates that I’m taking seven representative philosophical problems and trying to analyze them and trying to evaluate them from a biblical perspective.
Zaspel:
Chapter 1 takes up the question, “What is everything made of?” That’s a big question especially in the Greek philosophies, and your brief survey is quite a handy introduction to their various approaches. How does Christianity distinguish itself from all these?
Frame:
Well, I picked that out because I thought it was something that most everybody would relate to a little bit. If they don’t know the ancient Greek philosophers, at least they know modern science, how many scientists try to reduce everything to molecules and atoms and protons and neutrons and quarks and so on. So, I thought everybody would be online with that kind of discussion. What does it have to do with God? Well, the biblical God is the Creator. And what I’ve discovered, and what I think is very interesting, is that the more you divide up the world, the more you keep trying to find smaller and smaller particles, the more you try to make a judgment about what the whole world is made out of, the more you run into mystery. You know, we’ve got it down to molecules and atoms and protons, neutrons, electrons, quarks, bosons – all those things. I’m not the world’s greatest scientist, but I guess a fairly recent theory is that the world is basically made out of vibrating strings; but, I tend to ask dumb questions. I tend to say, “well, what are the vibrating strings made of? What if you cut one in two, what would you find?” That just illustrates the difficulty of all of this. The further down you go, the more you chop things up into smaller and smaller pieces, the more difficult it is to find what these basic components of the world are.
And I see that as a mark of God’s creation. God is one and many; he is one God with three persons, the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. He has made the world to resemble him in that way. The world is one, and the world is many, and you can’t understand the many without the one. This is what scientists and philosophers are trying to do – they are trying to find a many, a tiny little component of the world that can be understood apart from the other things of the world. But you just can’t do that. Once you get down to talking about quarks and so on, in order to explain what they are, you have to use analogies to things that we are more familiar with. And you can’t really understand the micro world until you’ve understood the macro world. And you can’t really understand the macro world until you’ve understood the micro world. So, the two of them go together and they can’t be taken apart. The conclusion I draw is that if you really want to know what’s important about the world, if you really want to know what the world is made of, you need to go to the Creator, and you need to ask him in prayer to show you more. And you need to read the Bible, and you need to learn how to live in this world where God has placed you.
Zaspel:
Okay, in chapter 4 you take up the question, “Does God exist?” Tell us how you think it best to go about answering that question.
Frame:
A lot of people have tried different ways of proving the existence of God with arguments about causality and ontology and so on and so forth. I think the best way to do it is to… What I do in my book, I have the first three chapters. The first one, What Is Everything Made of? And I say, in order to talk meaningfully about that, you need to be presupposing God. The second chapter is Do We Have Free Will? And I answer, yes, in one sense; and no, in another sense. But free will doesn’t make any sense unless you assume that God is somehow behind it. There is no such thing as free will without any cause, just sort of out of the blue. And then the third chapter is How Can We Know Anything? I argue there, that you can’t know anything unless you can trust somebody who is in authority and who has the final word on what we ought to know, what we ought to confess. And then I get to chapter four, and I say, well, look, we’ve seen the need to bring God into the picture with regard to the material composition of the world, with regard to free will, with regard to knowledge, and if we can’t account for any of those things without referring to a personal Creator, then of course God exists. We’ve already shown that God exists; we don’t need any more arguments.
And I think that’s the way the Bible does it. If you go to Romans 1, it says that God is clearly seen in the world he has made. So, you really shouldn’t need any super difficult arguments to figure out whether God exists or not. In my work in apologetics and philosophy, I’ve always tried to find a simple way. How is it that people who don’t have philosophical training, and who don’t have scientific training, how is it that people can actually see God clearly in the world? Part of the answer is that when we talk about anything else, when we talk about the ingredients of the world, when we talk about our own free decisions, when we talk about knowledge, when we talk about ethics, as I treat later in the book, we can’t do that unless we are recognizing at some level of our consciousness the reality of God and the necessity of God.
Zaspel:
Okay, a broader question. It’s well known that you follow a presuppositional apologetic method, a method developed by Cornelius Van Til. Take your time here if you like – who was Van Til? Just what is presuppositionalism, and what is its distinctive approach?
Frame:
Van Til was a Dutch boy who migrated to Indiana with his family and was raised on a farm and he was a very down-to-earth person. He was the first of his family to get a higher education and he took an interest, amazingly enough, in philosophy. He really did have a down-to-earth view of philosophy, although he used a very complicated vocabulary and had a huge reservoir of knowledge about the history of philosophy and theology. I had the opportunity to study with him at Westminster Seminary in Philadelphia. He died in 1987. In his life, he wrote a number books and developed his main purpose, which was to bring our thinking into line with the word of God.
Now, preachers are always telling us we ought to live by the word of God; we ought to make our ethical choices by the word of God; we ought to let the word of God rule our sex life and our financial life and all these things. But you don’t hear very often people saying that the word of God has to govern our thinking or our philosophy, our academic work. A lot of people, and even people who claim to be Christian theologians, think that, yes, the Bible is infallible and we try to follow the Bible, but of course, when we’re doing intellectual work, we have to just follow our own reason and sense experience and traditions. Van Til is utterly opposed to that. He says if you are a Christian you’ve got to learn how to think according to the Bible. Passages like Romans 1, and 1 Corinthians 1-3, and Colossians 2, and so on came up a lot.
The method of apologetics – he taught apologetics, which is defending the faith over against unbelief, and how do we do apologetics? A lot of people say you can’t assume the Bible if you are talking to an unbeliever, because unbelievers don’t believe the Bible. And Van Til’s answer is you have to treat every unbeliever the way he is. You have to understand where he’s coming from. You don’t just quote Judges 3 when he’s never even heard of the book of Judges. So, you have to bring them up-to-date on some of these things.
But your own argument, what you say about God, whether you say that God is three in one, whether you say that he is immutable, whether you say that he is omniscient, omnipotent, these things, whenever you talk about God, that has to be in accord with what God has revealed about himself in the Scriptures. And so, when you go to the unbeliever, the thing to do is you’ve got to presuppose the truth of Scripture. Now, he’s not presupposing it right then, but you need to talk to the unbeliever and show him that his presuppositions fall apart when they are examined closely. If he is assuming that the world is just made out of material objects, then you have to show that that’s impossible. You can’t show what the material objects are that the world is made out of, and you can’t do any of these things. You can’t do ontology, epistemology, (to throw out some philosophical terms,) you can’t do ethics without bringing into the subject matter a personal authority, somebody who has the right to tell you what the truth is. And that’s the essence of presupposition on apologetics. You tell the unbeliever, you don’t need to use a complicated argument. You may choose to do that or you may not, most people don’t understand those things; but you just get him where he is. If he’s only able to talk about what’s obvious, then talk about what’s obvious. But, whatever you talk about, whether you’re talking about the blue sky or whether you are talking about microparticles, or whatever it may be, talk to him in a way that shows you can’t make sense out of that without the biblical God.
Zaspel:
Just what’s the role of evidence in a presuppositional approach to apologetics?
Frame:
Yes, well, a lot of people think that presuppositionalism and evidentialism are opposed to one another, and certain kinds of evidentialism are not very good, but Van Til never said that we should avoid using evidence. There’s some critics of Van Til that accused him of that, but that’s not what he taught. When people asked Van Til, “why don’t you pay more attention to the evidence?” He would say, “I have other colleagues on the same faculty where I teach who do that kind of thing, Old Testament scholars and New Testament scholars and church historians and psychologists, and so on, so I don’t need to do it all that much.” But it’s fine to use evidences. I mean, if somebody comes up to me and says, “I don’t understand this passage in the Bible. It says that Israel conquered Jericho at a particular time, and I read an archaeologist who thinks that they didn’t do it then.” What do I say? Well, I say, “let’s get out the evidence and let’s look at it.” You may have to find somebody else to do it, that’s not my forte, but you can get out the evidence and see what’s the likelihood that Israel conquered Jericho? What’s the likelihood that Israel didn’t conquer Jericho? You can get into that argument. Lots of Christian scholars have done very well with that kind of thing, and that can be very helpful in an apologetic. But you see, the point is that you can’t do any of that, you can’t do archaeology, you can’t do scientific work, unless you presuppose that there is a personal God and that that personal God has the ability to tell you authoritatively what the truth is.
Zaspel:
Okay, I’ve directed this discussion to some more technical issues, but I don’t want to leave a wrong impression. Just who is your intended audience with this new book?
Frame:
That’s a good question. I sometimes said to some people that it’s too philosophical for Christians and to Christian for the philosophers. I don’t want to discourage anybody from reading the book, obviously. What I’m interested in is getting the book into the hands of people. They probably need to have an interest in philosophical issues, or they would like to be introduced to philosophical issues. They could be in the later years of high school. They could be college students or seminary students. They could be just ordinary believers who are interested in seeing how philosophy ties in with the lives that they are leading, or who are interested in dealing with questions of unbelievers. They may want this for apologetic purposes, to be able to talk to somebody, to talk to an unbelieving neighbor who has questions about Christianity in these areas.
Zaspel:
I have been impressed. I guess I’m not an authority on this subject and I can’t compare it to too many, but I have not seen an introduction to the various philosophies that is simpler, that is more accessible, that is easier to grasp. I think you’ve done a great job of aiming at a very popular level. At the end of each chapter, you’ve got the glossary of terms and you’ve got discussion questions and things like that. I think it’s a very accessible kind of work. I think it’s a great introduction.
Frame:
My editor at one point thought it was too short, so he said we better have some Study Questions here, and we better have a Glossary there, and we need to have a Bibliography there. The editor at Lexham got the idea of taking some of my letters. (They have a collection of letters of mine that they use in the Logos Bible software program.) I’ve written some letters on philosophical subjects, and the editor took several of those and added them to the end of the book as a kind of Appendix. So, if you want to go a little more deeply into the questions that I deal with in the chapters, you can go to the Appendix and read some of those letters, interactions between me and people who have written to me.
Zaspel:
We’re talking to John Frame, author of the new book, We Are All Philosophers: A Christian Introduction to Seven Fundamental Questions. It’s vintage Frame – good, clear thinking on ultimate questions laid out simply. A great little book – small size, easy to read, and very helpful. We encourage you to get a few copies and pass them around.
John, thanks for talking to us today.
Frame:
Thank you, Fred. I’ve enjoyed being with you as I always do, and it’s good to be with your listeners.
