Alright. This little series is causing a bit of stir! That’s good. Some may think that I admire Clark too much. Well, maybe. But, for me, Clark is not just a man. He represents a viewpoint shared by many able Christian philosophers and theologians, past and present. It’s like “Luther”. “Luther” turns into “Lutheranism” because it became a viewpoint held by many. There have only been a handful of Christians that have their last names represent entire viewpoints. Calvinism, Lutheranism, etc. It’s not that we are following a mere man. Clark’s writings draw heavily from noted sources (Clark Chaired Butler University’s Department of Philosophy for forty years). Usually, when a name becomes so associated with a view, it is usually because the person did make a contribution to the subject at hand that turned the tide a bit. Einstein did this. Newton did it before him. And, the Polish astronomer did it before them with his De revolutionibus orbium coelestium. Clark, then, represents a viewpoint that many hundreds of thousands have come to embrace within Christedom. I am one of them.
Now, having dispensed with that, let us move on to chapter 5 of the book we have been using in this series. First, Clark has stated, quite plainly, that he does not endorse the view that Man is a “combination”. Man is the soul, the Person. “Body” does not define Man. Now, because of certain readers, I have to point out that Clark did affirm the resurrection of the body. Got that? Did that go over your head? can we move on? Okay.
1. Man is the soul which resides in the body.
2. Image is the rational capacity of Man as it regards reason.
3. Likeness and Image are synonyms.
4. Knowledge is involved in the renewal of the Image in Christ. Notice here that the Image is not “lost” – it is “renewed.” Nowhere does the Bible say Man lost his Image. The lady I helped jumpstart the other day at a gas station did not lose her battery. She needed a renewal of the cells in the battery. The cells in the battery were not lost. They were dead. She had a “dead” battery.
Clark now comes to “Apriorism” in chapter five. He notes again that in the history of Apologetics, the last half of the twentieth century have produced a great deal of development for this subject. Evidentialism (Lee Strobel, Josh McDowell, and in more scholarly works, Stuary Hackett, Gordon Lewis and John W. Montgomery) represents the empirical, Christian school. They “implicitly [base] all knowledge on sensation” (19). R.C. Sproul fell into this category when Clark penned this book, but I am not sure Sproul is in that group today.
The history of this view comes from Aristotle, who was deliberately combined into the Christian revelation by the great Thomas Aquinas. John Locke followed it (the famous British empiricist), Augustus Toplady, John Gill, Charles Hodge and B.B. Warfield (19). Clark follows more the philosophy of Plato and Augustine (19). Augustine modified Plato (but that’s another story).
Now, if you remember, Locke came up with the “blank mind.” At birth, we know nothing at all. It is through “experience” that we gain knowledge. Clark asked how “experience” can cause abstract ideas from memory images, and one gets a sense (!) that Clark is toying with the reader here. Be that as it may, Clark’s theory is thoroughly biblical. Adam talked, so he must have had innate equipment. He conversed with God, so he must have understood God. He talked with Eve, too. Communication involves logic, and apparently, their appeal failed to be based on logic, but rather on sensations, and so they “fell”. Adam also named the animals (categorization, classification – all logical, systematic arrangements). So, the “skimpy material” (21) of Genesis would seem to suggest that the “blank mind” theory is false. Adam was created with “intellectual equipment to understand” (22).
“There is more, too. Adam not only understood the commandment: He understood that it was God who gave it. Are we to suppose that he worked out the cosmological argument, including the physics that underlie it? And did he derive the concept of moral responsibility from his sensations?” (22). Of course not. Now, Adam did not “know” all things, and certainly was created to learn things as he went along in his original righteous state. However, the equipment to learn was there already. The “tools” of learning are innate. The data that would come to him through sensations is not “knowledge.” It’s data. The processing of that data into propositions is knowledge. Here is a rare admission from Clark: “Sensation at best might possibly give some factual information; but though this would be knowledge of what is, empiricism can never produce a knowledge of what ought to be” (22). Archeology may give me some proof of a guy name David that lived sometime in the B.C.E. era in ancient Israel. But, that’s about it.
Science, too, runs into this problem. Clark uses the pendulum. “…the period of the swing is proportional to the square root of the length” (23). This is the law of the pendulum. “The law is a universal proposition, that is, it has no exceptions. Clearly, this law cannot have been deduced from experiment or observation, for no one has observed all present pendulums, or all past pendulums, and no one has observed all future pendulums. Hence, empiricism can never justify any laws of physics” (23). Now, this is a “fact” of the failure to observe all pendulums, and to get around this “fact”, scientism has to somehow explain how they come to “believe” in what they cannot possibly demonstrate. But, the minute you accuse science of having “faith”, they will nail you to the cross and say, “our faith is not the faith of religious nuts.” Really? Does empiricism furnish another definition of “faith”?
Clark continues to dispense of scientism, so rampant in our culture today, easily before moving on to chapter six, “Behaviorism.” The point in all of this is that the Christian doctrine of creation affects a great deal of other issues in contemporary society. If God made Man in His Image, Behaviorism fails. Freudian psychoanalysis is obliterated. Empiricism is eradicated. Yet, this is exactly the forces in culture that run our societies. We are a culture inundated with statistics, data, feelings, emotions, psychology, mental illnesses, behavior modification, scientific methodology, sensations, sensations, sensations and more sensations. Does the Bible address these things at a fundamental level? If God made Man, then Man, whether alive in the 3rd century B.C.E. or in the 22nd century C.E., is still the Man God made, faced with the same good and evil choices presented to him in the beginning. The questions are: what is Good? What is Evil? And, How do we know? What is Truth? Fundamental questions, indeed. They never leave us alone.
Before he gets into this subject, Clark makes a remark that I wish to comment on that is not really pertinent to his material. “The most vigorous opponents of Platonism, Augustinianism, apriorism, intellectualism, rationalism or whatever one wishes to call it, are not the Christian evidentialists. These gentlemen adopt an inconsistent amalgam of empiricism and the Biblical doctrine of the Image” (25). At least these men, in other words, are Christians attempting to work out a biblical system that honors God and the Bible. For that, they are to be commended, even if inconsistent. Clark is generous here. “…as J. Gresham Machen used to say, most people are saved by blessed inconsistency” (44). Let that one sink in, folks.
Now, for the Logical Positivists, the Behaviorists, the Scientism advocates (Naturalists) are the most vigorous opponents of Christianity. There is no after life. No God. No good. No evil. No soul. No spirits. “Man is entirely physical” (25). Man doesn’t think. Man is stimulated. This is the exact opposite of the biblical material that Man is created in the Image of God. The biblical material exalts Man with divine purpose and meaning. All men, even the worst man, even the most ugly man, and the most shunned whore in society, is the image of God. They can be raised from the gutter, from the hatred, from the bitterness of soul and transformed into a beautiful flower with a new name, a new face, and a new Father who wipes away their tears. A Father who cares for them. Who created them. Once this doctrine of God’s Image is defaced, so is the purpose and meaning of Man.
But, of course, the Behaviorists want meaning and purpose, too. Samuel Harris, the Hutch of Atheism (of Starsky and Hutch), goes on to great lengths to explain why atheism can grant purpose, morals and a wonderful life. He fails, of course. Nonetheless, John B. Watson and B.F. Skinner are the founders of this school of thought. But, there was one more before them, John Dewey. This view basically teaches that man does not “think”. Man is a collection of cells, impulses, nerves and a brain. Man is entirely chemical. He is called a machine. There are defective machines, and good machines (Dewey). The problem is that Man must now decide what the Good machines are from the Evil machines (the ones with bad brains). The State then coerces the bad machines, and eventually destroys them. Is it any wonder sinful Man heads towards a totalitarian State? America was not founded on such nonsense. “All men were created equal.”
See, one, Clark argued, must account for the chemical reaction in the muscles and brain that comes up with Christianity. Christians have bad brains. But, how can Watson, Skinner and Dewey decide “good” from “evil”, and are we not right where Man began in the Beginning? What is the knowledge of what is Good and what is Evil? How does Man come to this differentiation? How does he come to determine this? Revelation and God do not exist. Only the superior tools of scientific methodology benefit the machine. Anyone that stands in the way of this are simply bad machines. And, who determined this? How does Watson know that he is not a bad machine? “Behaviorism has committed the suicide of self-contradiction” (29). Clark goes on in this material to offer devastating arguments, utilizing Plato’s Phaedo, and Leibniz.
Let’s conclude from Clark’s doctrine of the Image of God of Man to the results of those who reject it: These atheists certainly want “to reconstruct society. Christianity is a source of evil. It must be eradicated. Some form of socialism or communism can then impose a happy state of society. Prisons and penalties will all be abolished because all punishment is anti-social; parents will be prohibited from teaching their children religion, and capitalism will be destroyed” (32). Sound familiar? It’s today’s headlines. God, may we return to the biblical message that exalts the Word of God above all things, and demolish all arguments that exalt themselves against Christ! Let us start “in the beginning.”
