I. INTRODUCTION
Each day, a person reveals his worldview simply in the way he speaks, decides, and acts. Philip Graham Ryken observed that “wherever we bump into the world, our worldview comes spilling out”. The conflict between creationists and evolutionists is such a bumping of worldviews. Can the universe be known? According to John Henry Newman, the universe must be knowable if religious truth is “a condition of general knowledge” instead of a portion thereof.
Moreover, if a part of reality is phenomenal (called imminent reality), then that reality it can be known because the human mind contains the components (i.e. categories) that can be structured to make that reality understandable. However, another part of reality cannot be known too (called transcendent reality) because those components found in phenomenal reality are not available or acquirable. If that is so, how then can the secular worldview be distinguished from the Christian worldview? Is there a central distinguishing characteristic present or absent in either that permits clear differentiation between these worldviews.
Moreover, how can these differences relate to the concept of “ontology before epistemology”? How can these differences make learning the nature of reality essential to the knowledge of reality instead of the other way around? Is it possible to know reality before knowing the nature of reality? Or, perhaps, there has been no relationship, anyway.
This paper will explore differences and relationships in as much clarity as possible. First, the differences between the secular and Christian worldviews will be address. Then, relating these differences to the concept of “ontology before epistemology” will follow.
II. THE CHRISTIAN AND THE SECULAR WORLDVIEWS
All worldviews are essentially religious because, at the core of who people are, there lies a fundamental conviction, of what they believe. Atheists, for instance, believe that there is no God. For Christians, it is in their core that they believe in the existence of God. The Christian worldview reflects the core belief in God. Saint Paul wrote to the Corinthians: “For us, there is one God”. God is triune, omnipresent, omniscient, omnipotent, and existing before time without beginning and end.
Conversely, the secular worldview reflects the person’s lack of belief on something pertaining to religion, including the Christian religion. Even those who recognize the importance or validity of religion, such as Ronald Dworkin, insists that religion can exist without God. In essence, the secular worldview looks at the world and life without God or do not need God.
Thus, the distinguishing characteristic between the secular worldview and Christian worldview is the belief in God, specifically. Some secularists can recognize the role of religion in life but without God in it, often not even the idea of a Higher Power.
III. THE IMPORTANCE OF ONTOLOGY BEFORE EPISTEMOLOGY
Ontology must come before epistemology because before knowledge of reality occurs the nature of reality must exist first. Nature must precede knowledge. A reality that does not exist cannot be logically known. However, it does not always follow that an existence of nature makes the nature necessarily knowable. Divine nature, which is that of God or in a sense God, cannot be known with certainty because this nature is beyond the natural capacity of human intellect or reason to know. Any attempt to understand thoroughly the structure of the triune God through rational means is set to fail.
Despite this effort, the evolutionist perspective left some ontological questions unanswered. What made the chemical event happen? What is the source of this chemical event? A chemical event cannot happen without a trigger to that event. Moreover, there is another issue that was unaddressed. Where did that chemical come from in the first place? A chemical, assuming an event trigger exists, must first exist before it can be triggered. Is this chemical eternally existent? And, if it does, what defines eternity? How did eternity exist? If eternity is a phenomenon, it is absurd and indefensible to assert that a phenomenon exists by itself without a source. Moreover, what is the nature of this chemical? Anything in this world has its own unique nature. Chemical being so has a nature, too. The question is, how is the nature of chemical defined and came to exist and reside into a chemical?
In all these revealing questions, there is one constant Source from where all these existent matters (e.g. chemical, DNA, etc.), which evolutionists continue to refuse acknowledgement. These gaps in the philosophical argument continue to baffle the evolutionists themselves, resulting to these gaps in their statements. By refusing to at least acknowledge the Christian worldview, the ontological perspective of secularists will remain missing and unexplained or clarified. Drozdek observed that reliance on rationality inevitably refuse anything suprarational; thus, since God suprarational, it automatically refuse to recognize God.
The Christian worldview offered a more plausible, although admittedly, not scientifically accessible explanation (i.e. because it is supra-natural) in God as the cause of the human origin. However, Christianity is more than the issues on human origin. The core essence of Christianity Jesus of Nazareth, his existence, his actions, his destination, and his historic personality. It is his paradigm that each Christian receives in the Church.
Thus, the reality of God is no longer a phenomenal reality, but a transcendent (noumenal) reality. In this reality, human reason has no material to base its engagement. Before the Supra-natural, rationality will attempt to grasp straws its hands cannot hold. According to Drozdek, “left to its own devices, intellect cannot break out from its human for, from what can be grasped of its own strength, from what is limited and finite.” The ‘how’ in human reasoning is trapped by its need for a ‘what.’ Indeed, God is the ultimate reality that not one in the created world could ever fully understand, although his movements in life can be known or, more exactly, discerned.
The Christian God has, by nature, the motivation to make all of creation, including that proverbial “chemical cause”. That motive is love because God himself is love and he exists from the beginning. “In the beginning was the Word, the Word was with God and the Word was God. Through him, all things came to be”. However, although the exact nature of God is a reality of the highest order and is beyond the grasp of the human reality, which is of lower order, he can be known through human reason because the knowledge of God is an immanent reality, but only up to a certain point and only for a specific reason.
How then can we ontologically argue in favor of the existence of God? First, it should be understood that, based on the arguments presented above, creation cannot exist without God because it is in the nature of the created to require the existence of a Creator. It is in the nature of the created to need the creative action of the Creator in order to be created. A creation cannot be created from nothing without the Creator of things. It cannot create itself from nothing. It also cannot exist from all eternity because the created does not have the capacity to create itself. If the created has the capacity to exist from all eternity, then it too has the capacity to create. However, that will contradict its nature because it is the nature of the created to be incapable of creating something from nothing. Only the Creator, which exists through all eternity and does not need to be created, have the natural, or more accurately supra-natural, capacity to create the created, or the nature of the created, and the nature wherein the created exists. A creation cannot create itself. Thus, the uncreated nothing can only be created by an uncreated Something because only this Something has the capacity to create. For instance, the number “0”, which essentially are replacement symbol (i.e., a symbol to replace a numerical reality that does not exist) cannot create itself into a 1 or a 2 or a 3, etc. Someone must replace the symbol “0” with the symbol “1” or “2” or “3”.
However, given that creation has to be created by the Creator, how can we understand the nature as the uncreated Creator? The limit of human rationality reaches its peak at this point. In order to understand supra-nature (i.e. divine nature), the seeker must leave the inherent limits of the human form in order to observe supra-nature where it exists, which is impossible to a nature that has no capacity to attain the state of the supra-nature. For the nature of the Creator be known, the Creator must reveal himself to the created because only the Creator knows the means to reveal himself to the created without destroying the nature of the created, like the sun destroying anything that will attempt to embrace it. Rationality is only possible through the Creator. Without the Creator revealing himself effectively to the created, the created is helpless even in its best attempts at understanding the nature of God.
This is one of the important mission of the Word: “The Word was made flesh, he lived among us”. The Word was sent to initiate the contact of God with man so that revelation of who God really is will occur. This is an initiative that man can never do because man is held down by the limit of its nature. By his own nature, man has no access to God under his will. God must first take the initiative and will the contact with man. Without God’s participation, and even initiation, the contact of man with God that will reveal God’s nature to man, apparently in a limited way in accordance to the limits of man’s nature, will not happen even with the best of man’s science and technology. The supra-nature of God is just beyond the grasp of the infra-nature of man. Thus, the initiative of the Creator to reveal his nature to mankind was made effective in the sending of Christ among men because “no one has ever seen God; it is only the Son, who is nearest to the Father’s heart.” In effect, only the Son, who possesses both the nature of man and of God, understands perfectly how the nature of God be revealed to man.
In understanding the supra-nature, rationality is secondary. Reason can only become effective when revelation is given and when enlightened by faith. Reason can never understand what is not revealed of God’s nature. Consequently, it is this revelation that makes epistemology possible. It is Christ who mediates between the revelation of God’s nature and man’s potential knowledge of God. Ontology before epistemology.
IV. CONCLUSION
People perceive the world through their worldviews of the world. In effect, their interaction with the world and those in it (i.e. each other) is mediated with personal worldviews. In fact, people interact with each other through their respective worldviews. A person perceives and understands his immanent reality through his uniquely constructed worldview, which, in a manner of speaking, also helped in the construction of his worldview.
However, the battle between the Christian and the secular worldviews are bumps in the world that cannot be avoided like the bumps between creationists and evolutionists because one worldview perceives an almost opposite reality. In this interesting relationship, one worldview often has no choice but to defend its perspectives and refute the other’s at least for the interest of the “truth”, which each worldview holds as theirs to protect and uphold. Each worldview believes that the other worldview is wrong and its perspective right.
Nevertheless, believing that one’s worldview is correct does not necessarily mean that it is on the basis of what is really. Thus, the debates and arguments will not, and cannot, end.
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