A Critique of Theonomous Epistemology

A convert to Orthodox recently shared “The Contingency of Knowledge and Revelatory Theism” by Tom Mannion, an essay that he cited as most influential in his adoption of theism. While Mannion does provide a decent summary of epistemology’s history, he contrives a problem where none exists for me, as well as a completely self-defeating solution.

Mannion opens the essay by setting up a duality:

“There are two fundamentally different ways to understand the world: intentional and accidental. An intentional world is one that comes about on purpose and for a purpose. It is a world that is what it is, because someone intended it to be that way. In contrast, an accidental world is one that comes about by pure chance, for no purpose and for no reason.”

This duality is assumption-heavy. Even first sentence doesn’t quite pass the smell test for a legitimately exhaustive duality in “intentional and accidental.” There is a legitimate category for things that are not necessarily either intentional or accidental: incidental. The existence of knowledge itself is a compelling example. Knowledge is contingent on the existence of nervous systems. There is no need for a world to contain nervous systems however. Such systems came into existence not because they had to but because this world’s laws permitted it. The size and durability of the world made it probable. Purpose presupposes nervous systems sufficiently advanced to model an application for which something is created. In the Misesian sense all human action is purposive. Our nervous systems create behavior that achieves certain ends. When there is a mismatch between a certain behavior and a certain end we say that the end is not that behavior’s purpose and vice versa. With respect to that end, the behavior lacks purpose. Purpose as a concept still applies however, because our nervous systems’ creation of behavior is inescapable. Purpose does not apply to that which was not created, which is everything that is not a means to integration with a modeled application.

There is a question as to whether it is possible to create something without purpose. Ludwig von Mises, maintains that the answer is no. For example, a person cannot choose heads or tails in a way that satisfies the mathematical definition of randomness.ⁱ Their choice is legitimately arbitrary, but not random. This is another subtle but significant distinction that Mannion misses in his relegation of everything not purposeful not “pure chance.” Adults arbit age of maturity for youth but not with a random number generator¹. In terms of programming math, it is correct to say that purpose for non-created things is not zero, but a null value. Any non-zero number divided by 0 is not any number, but undefined. Most life on Earth is not created, but it is the product of approximately random genetic mutation combined with highly non-random environmental selection. The environment is the ultimate arbiter of how nervous systems, and therefore purpose, comes to be. Is there not some circularity however, between genes and environment? Are not genetics an environment of their own? Indeed they are, but circularity is not the problem Mannion thinks it is, and we will see why later.

Mannion maps the preceding duality onto another:

“The first story is of an epistemology in which man is aided. It is an epistemology that is grounded, not by man but someone who is in a position to know. It is grounded by God. It is a theonomous epistemology.

The second story is of an epistemology in which man is not aided. It an epistemology that is grounded in man and by man. It is an autonomous epistemology.”

There is a certain tendentiousness in Mannion’s presentation. Theonomous epistemology describes the relationship between man and God as one where only God is in a position to know. There is a definite echo, however, between “autonomous man” and “only God.” In characterizing views conflicting with his own as “autonomous” he begs the question of “autonomous with respect to what?” That would in Mannion’s opinion of course be his god, but there are many non-Christian theists in the world who agree with his epistemology, but with the very significant exception of regarding his as “autonomous” with respect to their own god. He describes his epistemology as one where man is aided by his god. This seems to be an immediate contradiction with the epistemic exclusivity he assigns his god. “Aided by” of course, does not usually mean “completely dependent on.” There is only slight overlap between the two in practice, but it is only this overlap that permits Mannion’s terminology. There are polytheists who accept Mannion’s concept of epistemology and do not necessarily even disbelieve in his god, but believe that his is aided by or even completely dependent on their chief deity for knowledge. This suggests at least the possibility that Mannion’s proposed solution to the alleged problem of knowledge does not solve the problem but merely pushes it back a step.

Mannion states his thesis thusly:

“The history of epistemology demonstrates that man, unaided, has not, and cannot, attain a foundation on which to base a theory of knowledge. We will see that any theory of knowledge that originates solely from man must be characterized as arbitrary, ambiguous, and incoherent. But, if man has no coherent theory of knowledge, then his beliefs are without warrant, and if his beliefs are without warrant, then he can make no claim to be in possession of knowledge.”

Mannion’s thesis is highly aggressive. There is an empiricist implication in his appeal to history. He states that history has demonstrated not only that man, unaided, has not attained a foundation of knowledge, but cannot do so. Even if it has not yet been shown in history, that does not mean it will never be. His appeal to history, a product of man, seems to conflict with his position that knowledge is the product of a being who exists outside of history altogether. He cannot claim any participation in history on God’s part as an out either, for he explicitly states earlier that the crucial epistemic advantage God enjoys is from his position not in our world but “in back” of it. His thesis also implicitly asserts that a foundation for a theory of knowledge is conceptually meaningful, let alone necessary. He characterizes all epistemology that conflicts with his own as stipulating that knowledge “originates solely from man,” which as we have recently explained is a fallacy of the excluded middle. He claims that without a theory of knowledge that is “coherent” in his view, man “can make no claim to be in possession of knowledge.” Man obviously does possess knowledge however, if not knowledge of the supernatural surety that Mannion demands, so if it can be shown that either a foundation of knowledge is not necessary, or that an alternative foundation works, Mannion’s thesis would be falsified.

One of Mannion’s premises is that man, his knowledge, and the universe as a whole is “infinitely improbable” without God. This appears to refer to the fine-tuning argument for creationism. The argument goes that because the mathematical parameters that undergird our universe have such a low tolerance for deviation, it would be highly improbable if they were not consciously designed. The standard rebuttal is that this does not at all necessarily make such a designer likely, because it is no less plausible that our universe is one of many universes, and that the parameters are simply the outcome of the law of large numbers. This is known as the Anthropic Principle. There is subtlety to the fine-tuning question however that is usually lost on both sides. Hunter Ash explains ⁱⁱ:

“Our laws of physics have certain free parameters in them. These are numerical constants that are determined experimentally, such as the mass ratios of various particles, or the relative strengths of the fundamental forces. The structure of the laws of physics permits a range of possible values, not just the particular values we observe…

Why do we live in a universe with one of the tiny minority of possible parameter sets that permit life? All that follows is speculation, but we can grade the speculations on plausibility:

1. We do not know the true, fundamental laws of physics. It may be that the fundamental constants only seem like free parameters in our current approximate models, but are actually fixed by the structure of the true laws. However, no major proposed unified theories fix the constants. For example, in string theory they are encoded into the shape of space, but many shapes are possible, so the parameters are still effectively free.

2. [critique of the Anthropic Principle] A multiverse with a flat distribution over the space of constants does not match what we observe. In the space of constants, the vast majority of the volume is near the edge. That is, a randomly selected life-permitting universe will be *barely* life-permitting. Just on the edge of habitability. This is not what we observe. Our constants are comfortably nestled in the interior of the life-permitting region. Discoveries like the one below emphasize this: our laws of physics are actually quite conducive to the production of life, rather than barely tolerant of it. If the distribution over parameter space is not flat, then its concentration in the life-permitting region is just the same mystery restated.

3. Religious explanations. If you assume our universe was intentionally designed for life, then this resolves the mystery. Of course, this just shifts the improbability to the immeasurable domain of metaphysics.

4. Evolutionary cosmology. Consider the genome. The vast majority of possible sequences of As, Gs, Ts, and Cs do not produce viable organisms. Only a tiny minority of possible genomes actually code for life. The fact that almost all the genomes we observe are viable is explained by evolution: starting from a single barely-functional replicator, mutation and selection gradually concentrate probability in the region that produces viable organisms. What if something similar explains the fundamental constants? Physicist Lee Smolin posited a possible mechanism for universe reproduction: black hole formation. Though the details are quite technical, it is at least possible that every time a black hole forms, a new universe that exists “inside” the black hole experiences its big bang, with slightly mutated values of its parent universe’s fundamental constants.”

Ash goes on to raise the possibility of hyper-advanced civilizations creating new, biotically propitious universes by harvesting of black holes for energy. This could account for why our universe’s parameters are so comfortably within the habitable zone. Although the existence of such a civilization would be extremely rare with an initially flat distribution of physics parameters, it only takes one to spawn a great brood of life-friendly parameters. It also, in Ash’s opinion, would account for why our universe is so amenable to mathematical modeling. Ash’s discussion should make clear that the nature of the universe and our knowledge of it is not nearly as simple as “God or chance.”

Mannion’s approach emphasizes metaphysics as a necessary foundation. He gives examples of the pre-Socratic Greek philosophers as representatives of the Autonomous Story. Their metaphysics were elemental: Thales believed that “ultimate reality” was water; Anaximenes, air; Heraclitus, fire; Parmenides, being. The term “ultimate reality” is Mannion’s. He uses the term as though it is meaningful, but it is not at all clear that it is. What distinguishes “ultimate reality” from “reality?” Is there any difference between this distinction and the distinction between the set of “everything” and its subset of everything knowable to us?

Regarding rationalism, Mannion cites the discovery of non-Euclidean geometry as evidence of rationalism’s shortcomings. Here Mannion makes the basic error of taking incompleteness for wrongness. He claims that the current model of the universe as finite yet unbounded disproves Euclid’s Axiom of Parallels. He is imprecise in this claim, because although the physics of General Relativity within this model uses non-Euclidean geometry, this model per se does not exclude Euclidean geometry. This is because the existence of a fourth dimension of spacetime curvature does not exclude the standard three-dimensions of space, within which Euclidean geometry is no less valid than if the fourth dimension did not exist. Indeed, non-Euclidean geometry cannot exist without Euclidean geometry, because the concept of curvature is meaningless without the concept of flatness. Euclidean geometry cannot exist without non-Euclidean either, it is incidental that we discovered the former first, but also illuminating here because the reason we did so is because it is in fact true and maps on to our everyday world quite well.

Mannion provides a historical overview of empiricism as well, identifying aspects where he believes it falls short. He correctly identifies empiricism’s failure to justify itself without reference to a priori concepts like causality. Some of his other criticisms fall short however. Mannion illustrates George Berkeley’s critique of empiricism thusly:

“Let’s assume we see a desk in front of us. What we are tempted to say is, “I have a perception of a desk in front of me, therefore, there is a desk in front of me.” The first assertion, “I have a perception of a desk in front of me” is empirical and not controversial. But, the second assertion, “There is a desk in front of me” does not follow from the first. It has no logical connection. It is not empirical. It is a bold metaphysical assertion.”

Here Mannion claims a sharp metaphysical difference between percepts and objects. The metaphysical difference is not at all clear however. “Percept” and “object” are both concepts. They both exist as such. The difference between them is on the conceptual level, not the metaphysical one. Arguing against the metaphysical soundness of either is a performative contradiction, for any argumentation presupposes that they are real. Otherwise an argument (an object) could not be assimilated (a perception). “I have a perception of a desk in front of me” is a statement that relates two things: Me and a perception of a desk. The statement “There is a desk in front of me” is the same, just omitting the unnecessary verbiage of “perception.” This verbiage would only have utility if we thought we were hallucinating. It is Mannion’s assertion that the statements have no logical connection that is the bold metaphysical one.

Mannion moves on to David Hume’s attacks on rationalism, and on the entire edifice of epistemology. He discusses Hume’s critique of identity and causality. Mannion defines identity as “the concept that there is some continuity in the nature of an object over time.” Hume claims the possibility that such continuity is illusory, that the person reading the beginning of a paragraph is not the same as the one reading the end, or that an object perceived at one moment in time is not the same as what appears to be exactly the same object at another. If we are to accept Mannion’s definition of identity as time-dependent however, this would contradict his belief in God, who is identified as a being existing outside of time. Identity is not time-dependent however. Time is a function of change in state. To perceive such a change we must be able to identify one state versus another. It is time that is identity-dependent. Identity is not “continuity in time” but the mere fact that existence entails that some thing exist. For a thing to exist is for it to be what it is. Hume is simply concatenating concepts nonsensically. What does it even mean for something to comprise exactly what it was before, yet not be still that thing? No, it means it is still that same thing. Hume’s critique of identity is a distinction without a difference.

Hume’s critique of causality uses the example of billiard balls colliding. Hume states that he looks at the event and sees contact between the balls, that he sees one action follow another, but cannot see a necessary connection between the two. Yet contact itself is a kind of connection. The balls have a certain identity, which is to move when momentum is transferred to them. Causality is identity in action. Because identity is a necessity of existence, causality is also necessary.

Of Hume’s critique, Mannion writes:

“Causality, like identity, and external and internal substance, are properties of our minds, not of the world. They are the products of our imagination. The reason we believe in the external world, the self, and identity is not for logical or empirical reasons, for there are none. It is psychological; it is a habit of the mind.”

Mannion attempts to diminish identity and causality by reducing them to “products of our imagination.” By “imagination,” Mannion really means “consciousness.” Setting aside his poor word choice, he is still wrong. Consciousness is an axiom implied in the grasping of identity. To grasp that something exists, we require an awareness of existence. Such awareness is consciousness. Existence and its corrollary of identity are primary, not consciousness. To be conscious is to be conscious of something more than consciousness. A consciousness conscious of nothing but itself would be a contentlesss consciousness, a non-awareness, and thus not a consciousness at all. Not anything. Literal non-sense. Mannion again distorts language in terming our awareness of the world as mere “belief.” Here he again conflates metaphysics and epistemology. The very identity of our existence is as conscious beings. We don’t “believe” in the world we experience, we perceive it. It is only following the integration of percepts into concepts that the concept of “belief” even becomes applicable. Belief necessitates the possibility of error in concept or proposition formation, but perception itself is inerrant. When we see a straight stick partially submerged in water, the image is not the distortion of a non-submerged stick to appear bent, but perception of the nature of water to refract light. What Mannion is doing here is setting up what he believes to be be a weak version of primacy of consciousness, which he seeks to replace by what he believes to be the correct primacy of consciousness, the primacy of God’s consciousness.

Mannion also brings up the analytic/synthetic dichotomy attributed to Leibniz and reprised by Hume. Mannion dismisses Hume’s analytic category as being one of “mere tautologies.” The example he gives is the statement “all sisters are women.” Mannion is being facile with this. The most immediate evidence is the wording of his example, a wording that inverts the natural order of abstraction from low to high. The concept of “sister” is an abstraction from the more basic concept of “woman.” Even the basic concept of “woman” however, must be integrated from percepts of different people. This, however basic, is still a conscious, volitional, and individual achievement in its own right. It is facile only after the fact to treat the results of a process that becomes rapid and automatic with our development as goods merely given by society or nature. Harry Binswanger calls this error “retroactive self-evidency.”ⁱⁱⁱ Mannion is guilty of this error when he says such a proposition “may tell us something about how we use language but it tells us no new information about the world.” The very ability to describe a higher concept’s subsumption of a basic one presupposes an epistemic hierachy built by gaining new information, in this case, that one of the relationships a woman can have with another woman is the sharing of parents. Mannion’s presentation of Hume’s analytic category tells us nothing new about knowledge, but it does illustrate how language can be manipulated in a way that diminishes the significance of secular knowledge, or in the case of Mannion’s thesis, inflates the significance of knowledge’s unremarkable limitations.

Moving to the other side of the dichotomy, an example of a “synthetic” proposition would be “women get pregnant.” This example is mine, not Mannion’s. I use it because it shows that if the analytic/synthetic dichotomy is real, it is not a very sharp one. In a literal sense “women get pregnant” is not a definition, because of course some women don’t get pregnant. But the capacity to become pregnant is, in a teleological sense, defining of womanhood. The dichotomy also underappreciates the significance of the difference between a concept and a proposition. In How We Know: Epistemology on an Objectivist Foundation, Harry Binswanger criticizes the dichotomy for reducing a concept to the “common belief that a concept is only a shorthand tag for its definition, which is a proposition.”^iv A concept however, is like an open-ended file folder, to use an analogy of Ayn Rand’s. Such a folder can contain all knowledge of the instances of a concept, or “units” that can be classified within the concept’s conceptual range. A summary description of the folder’s classification criteria is a plain different thing from the folder itself. This description is a definition. A definition is a proposition with a consistent form. Consistency is maintained when it refers to a firm locus in a conceptual hierarchy, a locus bounded by its logical relation to other concepts in the hierarchy.The analytic/synthetic dichotomy creates an arbitrary, simplistic hierarchy of its own that bestows unearned superiority (in the view of thinkers like Mannion at least) to non-definitional propositions over definitional ones. A concept is the means of knowledge formation; a proposition is the end. Means are often considered subordinate to ends, yet ends are nothing without means to achieve them. Subordinate means of lower rank order, but it does not necessarily mean of inferior value, epistemic or otherwise. Derogating definitions is like saying a journey is inferior to its destination for being defined by it.

Binswanger provides further clarity on the difference between concepts and propositions:

“Concepts are the elements of thought; propositions are the thoughts. Accordingly, a proposition does not have the kind of unity that a concept has. Propositions are not integrations — not in the sense that concepts are. A proposition is an organized combination of concepts (or proper names) not an integration of them: the parts of the proposition — the individual words — remain apparent as components.”^v

A proposition is the use of concepts to identify things. The concept of pregnancy refers to a state of womanhood, one with significant medical implications among others. If the concept of pregnancy did not have “analytic” definitions relating it to reproductive biology, aiding a pregnant woman in an emergency would be badly confounded because a salient fact about her would have to be synthesized. But the concepts of that synthesis would also need to be synthesized and so on. Propositions such as “women get pregnant” or “that woman is pregnant” work because of the earned automaticity of the conceptual definitions they draw upon, and the very development of higher order concepts such as “pregnancy” cannot occur without the use of propositions.

Concepts however, are permanent. They refer to all that a thing is, regardless of how much any of us know about it at a particular time. When we learn, we update our personal understanding of a concept but do not alter its ontological status as such. We store them with words, but the same is not true for propositions. Even the highly generalizing proposition “women get pregnant” is not stored, certainly not in the way that its component words, definitions, and concepts are. Even much more common, particularized propositions such as “this woman got pregnant” are not stored. Our memory of a woman getting pregnant is different from the proposition that identifies it. A memory is an integrated (or more precisely, reintegrated) experience. The act of identifying the memory, however, is the act of combining the concept of memory with relevant other concepts describing it: “I remember the day she told me she was pregant.” It is not an integration however, because “memory” is not integral to “pregnancy” and vice-versa. A temporal concept like “day” does integrate with “memory” of course, but the point is that unlike concepts, propositions do not have to be integrative. They are not stored but are formed as needed by their emergent applications. We can update our concept of pregnancy with say, a first hand experience of the fact that a pregancy can conclude prematurely, but this would not be an updating of the original proposition “I remember the day she told me she was pregant.” The component concepts of propositions do have to be integrative however. The must be integrative both unto themselves by nature, and with one another by their definitional, logical relation in the hierarchy, a hierarchy that as we discussed previously, is not given but intellectually achieved. The analytic/synthetic dichotomy divorces knowledge formation through propositions with the prerequisite storage of their components.

Mannion goes on to discuss foundationalism, the question of how to “justify why we ultimately believe something.” This is a reprisal of Mannion’s belief in an “ultimate reality” distinct from reality mentioned earlier, from a different aspect. What Mannion does not do is justify the question. Of those who do not answer such a question he writes: “[Their] belief is arbitrary and fideistic.” He does not consider that belief in an “ultimate reality” is what is arbitrary and fideistic, that the non-answerers respond in this way out of rational recognition that the concept of “ultimate belief” is meaningless. In the discussion of identity earlier we referred to three metaphysical axioms:

1. Existence exists.

2. Something exists.

3. Consciousness exists.

They are axiomatic because no attempt at refutation can be made without using them as premises. It is hard to imagine anything more foundational than these. Mannion initially writes instead about the problems faced by those who answer the question. He describes how answerers allegedly fall into infinite backward regress or circularity. If one’s epistemology is properly grounded however, they will ultimately arrive at the above axioms.

Mannion does go on to discuss the concepts surrounding these axioms, albeit critically. He claims that Berkeley, Hume, and Kant demonstrated that “man cannot justify belief in the existence in the external world.” All they have actually demonstrated is that even men held up as great philosophers make propositions that are blatantly self-contradictory. The very concepts of justification, belief, and external world are all impossible without consciousness, and consciousness can only exist in a world that also contains a part external to consciousness.

He quotes W.V.O Quine:

“Physical objects are conceptually imported … as convenient intermediaries … comparable epistemologically to the gods of Homer. For my part, I do … believe in physical objects and not in Homer’s gods … But in point of epistemological footing the physical objects and the gods differ only in degree and not in kind …”

Objects are available to perception; gods are not. Quine here is making a relativistic assertion that ignores this by arbitrarily designating objects as “intermediaries.” Intermediary to what? Blank-out. Quine’s relativism derives from his dismissal of the inherently hierarchical nature of knowledge. Quine’s makes this dismissal explicit elsewhere in his writing:

“Any statement can be held true come what may, if we make drastic enough adjustments elsewhere in the system. Even a statement very close to the periphery can be held true in the face of recalcitrant experience by pleading hallucination or by amending certain statements of the kind called logical laws. . . . Revision even of the logical law of the excluded middle has been proposed . . . . [Quine 1953b, 43]”

Harry Binswanger rebuts Quine:

“What “adjustments elsewhere in the system” could make it possible to reject the laws of logic? Those laws, including Excluded Middle, are the hierarchical base of all conceptual functioning. The very idea of “revision” implies that the revision is what it is, that it is not what it is not, and that it is not a nothing. What “adjustments” could preserve algebra while denying arithmetic? Or could hold onto the concept “orphan” while denying the concept “parent”?”^vi

Mannion asserts we have no autonomous basis for belief in the self: “We are confident in the assertion “I exist,” only to the extent that it is completely without content and meaning.” This is obviously self-contradictory because “we” is simply the plural of “I,” so if “I” is “without content and meaning,” then no reference to anyone’s perspective, “I”, “We”, “You” has any content or meaning, including Mannion’s assertion.

Mannion questions the reliability of the senses again, this time appealing to inter-species subjectivity:

“We do know, that the sonar of bats, the stereoscopic eyes of man, and the compound eyes of flies all project very different images. Each gives sufficient information for survival, but ‘which’ should be taken as normative?”

Mannion’s premise of objective normativity is invalid. The very concept of norm implies a non-zero variance, and variance between perspectives is what defines subjectivity. That one being’s perspective differs from another’s does not by itself diminish either perspective, or diminish any other. The form of a table always looks different to two different people in the same room because they can never occupy the same vantage point at the same time. No vantage point is superior to any other; they’re just different. In the case of inter-species subjectivity, it is simply the result of how each species evolved to make sense of the environment it inhabits. Knowledge cannot be separated from the biological context in which it forms. Compared to objective normativity, there is no greater merit to the notion that there is some normative number of breasts for a person to have that transcends the fact of half the population having two and the other half none.

Next Mannion discusses the Problem of Induction. He concludes therefrom: “Without justifying inductive generalizations, scientific conclusions cannot be reached, and universal propositions cannot be made.” His conclusion is easily refuted: A proposition consists of a subject and a predicate. Each of the metaphysical axioms we referred to earlier are propositions with a common predicate, the fact of existence, connecting three distinct subjects:

1. Existence exists.

2. Something exists.

3. Consciousness exists.

Each is universal, and necessarily so among the universe of entities who can comprehend propositions. Mannion also claims that full uniformity of nature is necessary to justify scientific conclusions. Our rebutting discussion of the Anthropic Principle earlier however, did not rest on uniformity, only a certain stability. One of the more interesting features of black holes is that the laws of physics seem to break down as their singularity is approached. This feature is interesting however, because it is an exception rather than the rule. No entities capable of studying black holes or the topic of knowledge could exist in a universe where black hole behavior were the rule.

Having criticized induction as incapable of producing universal propositions, Mannion concludes from this that without something else coming to the rescue, deduction and logic are baseless. He asks: “Do we know a priori that Eastern Monism is false? If not, then possibly all is “A” and there is no “non-A.” His question is absurd because the very evaluation of the truth or falsehood of Eastern Monism or anything else requires identification of “True” and “False” as concepts. Mannion’s entire thesis is meaningless absent the terms “justified” or “unjustified,” terms which feature over and over again throughout his essay. Logic, the art of non-contradictory identification, inheres in the second metaphysical axiom: Something exists. For something to be something it can only be what it is, and not what it is not. An entity that can conceive the propositions: “All is A” or “There is no ‘non-A’” has necessarily grasped the first axiom, that existence exists, in his use of “is.” Once again, such grasping is impossible without being an identification of the second and third axioms as well. No identification of an existent is meaningful without being able to also conceptualize the non-existent, i.e. the absence of that thing, which is the same as the presence of something else. There is no conceptual A without Non-A and vice-versa. Existence in its totality itself however, as distinct from the concept of it, does not depend on “total non-existence.” The latter, not only by definition of the former, but by the very act of defining the former, is a contradiction in terms.

Mannion then goes on to discuss Pragmatism, which he characterizes somewhat uncharitably as a “cope” with the alleged failures of epistemology. Mannion tries to diminish the fact that truth exists in the context of its utility to achieving our goals. This diminution is really just Mannion’s personal feelings about this however. There is no objective basis for saying that truth is lessened for its existence in this context. Truth is an epistemic concept, and only conscious beings can conceptualize. Consciousness is a biological phenomenon, the means by which living things process sense data concerning their environment. It is much more plausible to view Mannion’s attacks on objectivity about this fact as a cope for his personal discomfort with it.

Having concluded his history of philosophical attacks on knowledge, Mannion states what he believes to be the only viable theory of knowledge remaining, which is the Transcendental Argument. He quotes Karl Popper’s formulation:

“An argument which appeals to the fact that we possess knowledge or that we can learn from experience, and which concludes from this fact that knowledge or learning from experience must be possible, and further, that every theory which entails the impossibility of knowledge, or of learning from experience, must be false, may be called a ‘transcendental argument’.”

Mannion concludes from this argument that God must exist because in his opinion there is no other possible source of knowledge. Mannion’s argument is an argument from ignorance, and a weak one at that. It could of course be the case, as we mentioned early on, that there is another source we simply haven’t discovered yet. But as we have seen, there is a theory of knowledge that robustly connects our everyday experience as a rational animal with self-evident metaphysical truths. It is the Objectivist theory of knowledge, the modern capstone resting on the redoubtable thought of Aristotle and Aquinas. Mannion is either unaware of it or does not consider it worthy of consideration. This is very convenient for Mannion, because Objectivism represents a serious alternative to the mysticism that he presents as the only alternative to the failures of skepticism.

Theonomous epistemology is really nothing more than a rehashing of the Argument from First Cause for the existence of God:

Everything must have a cause.

To avoid infinite causal regression, at the beginning there must have been an uncaused cause.

That uncaused cause must be God.

—

All knowledge must be justified by other knowledge.

To avoid infinite justificatory regression, at the base of all knowledge must be a knower whose knowledge is self-justified.

That knower must be God.

The conclusion, as we have already identified, is an argument from present ignorance. The second statement is a contradiction of the first. All knowledge must be justified by more basic knowledge. Yet a god’s knowledge is at least part of all knowledge, and the Christian God is said to know all. What caused God? Blank-out. How does God know? Blank-out.

Another issue with this argument is that it confuses infinity with infinite regress. Infinite regress is the product of propositions that are contentless, the most notorious instance being the proposition: “This sentence is false.” If we take its grammatical correctness and validity of its conceptual referents in isolation to be correct philosophical grammar as well, then going on to evaluate it results in an interminable flip-flopping between True and False. But linguistic grammar is not philosophical grammar. The truth about that proposition, as distinct from the truth of that proposition, is that it is not a proposition at all. It is a pseudo-proposition because it refers to no content beyond a self-evaluation. Real propositions however, must refer to content beyond their own evaluation, otherwise they cannot be independently evaluated, thus negating their very purpose as propositions. This does not exclude self-reference however: “This is not a sentence” is a real proposition because it contains content beyond its evaluation, which is the question of its identity as a sentence, not whether the correct evaluation of that question returns True or False. That the correct evaluation is False is neither here nor there. The proposition “This sentence is true” is no less of a pseudo-proposition than “This sentence is true” for this reason. This, as it happens, is in pure essence exactly what the final sentence of Mannion’s article contains: “God’s revelation is self-authenticating[.]” This would be too obvious an instance of infinite self-evaluative regress, so to Mannion adds this obfuscatory premise: “because, by it, everything else is authenticated.” But as we have seen, this contradicts his original premise: That no knowledge can be self-justified. Mannion’s linguistic legerdemain is the substitution of the words “revelation” for “knowledge” and “authenticating” for “justified” that he had been using throughout the essay up until this point. Regardless, Mannion’s premise does nothing to rescue his argument from infinite regress. What he has done is try to support one as-yet unjustified conclusion, that God’s revelation is self-authenticating, by passing off another unjustified conclusion, that God’s revelation has in fact authenticated everything else, as a premise.

We now differentiate infinity from infinite regress. Infinity is a proposition that takes the form: “Operability is not negated by operation.” Subtracting 1 from 3 has no bearing on the ability to subtract 1 from the difference of 2 as well. There is nothing contradictory about a timeline that can be infinitely subtracted from either. As the Theory of Relativity shows, time is a function of motion. Although a local perpetual motion system contradicts thermodynamics, there is nothing in physics that prohibits the spacetime continuum itself from being in a state of continuous change. One theory of cosmology posits a perpetual cycle of spacetime expansion and contraction, alternating between “big bangs” and “big crunches.” There is also Smolin’s “budding theory” of the cosmic lifecycle mentioned earlier. It is not at all meaningful to speak of anything “before” the Big Bang, because “before” and “after” are concepts valid only within a spacetime system, not as attributes of that system itself. This is on top of the fact that as also mentioned earlier, the laws of physics, themselves appear to break down in singularities such as black holes and the one our universe emerged from. Even if the universe can exist in states that we are not physically capable of being aware of, the fact that a state of the universe can exist in a state we can be aware of is immutable, eternal, and self-evident as the fact that existence exists. Just as operation does not negate operability, the potential for a change in state does not negate the fact of that state. There is no contradiction or regression to this, nor can there be.

Earlier in his concluding section Mannion presents something that bears a passing resemblance to Han-Hermann Hoppe’s Argumentation Ethics, which in a nutshell argues that arguing for violence as a preferable form of conflict resolution is a performative contradiction because the act of arguing itself presupposes preference for peaceful conflict resolution.

“Autonomous man can use reason and his senses while denying belief in God, and can thereby do math, science, and manipulate the world around him. But, he can give no account of reason and senses apart from God. Therefore, just as reason presupposes the actuality of logic whether or not one believes in it, so, reason presupposes the actuality of God and the truth of our first story whether or not one believes in it. This being the case, all arguments are arguments for the existence of God and no argument against the existence of God can be made. For in the final analysis, an argument against the existence of God is like an argument against arguments.”

Mannion’s premise that logic and reason presuppose God comes from his falsely dichotomous argument from alleged ignorance we have already rebutted, including the allegation. It is worth adding here that if argument presupposes anything, it is that reality is objective among the interlocutors to the degree that there is potential utility in in exploring the concepts and propositions they individually form about reality and how they can be further clarified. Reality’s objectivity derives directly from the Law of Identity we have demonstrated as the foundation of logic.

In the beginning of his concluding paragraph Mannion negates the entirety of his preceding content: “God is proven, not as the conclusion of rational or empirical theistic arguments, but as the very ground of argument itself.”

His essay is an attempt to prove two conclusions: that knowledge can only from God, and that God exists. In his effort to prove them he uses throughout the essay, albeit inconsistently, both his rational faculty and empiricism from science and history. That he attempts to conclude therefrom that it is the fact of argumentation, not rationality and empiricism, that proves God, in no way renders his essay any less rationalist and empiricist. His conclusion steals the concept of argumentation, which cannot exist absent rationality and empiricism, a violation of the inherently hierarchical nature of concepts we demonstrated above. His abrupt about face regarding rationality and empiricism at the end is therefore a performative contradiction. Here is another contradiction: If logic/reason/senses are as precarious as he claims, and God is the source of these, then God himself contains something that is significantly precarious.

Here is a much more plausible proposition, which is the opposite of what Mannion argues: It is not knowledge, but God who is contingent. Knowledge is not made in the image of God; Mannion makes God in the image of knowledge. The fundamental problem Mannion alleges with knowledge, contingency, is the very problem with his whole approach: Each of his two conclusions is contingent on the other: God exists because he is the only explanation for knowledge; knowledge only exists because of God. A is true because B says so; B is true because A says so. It is fitting he ultimately comes to steal the concept of argument itself, because his argument is not even an argument at all; it is nothing more than a pseudo-proposition. It is born of the conceptual invalidity of his premises: “Ultimate reality”, “Consciousness beyond the senses,”, etc. To be frank, under the scholarly gloss much of his essay is really just stoner-speak: “How do you KNOW we’re not in the Matrix, man?” “If you were unplugged, how would you know that wasn’t also a Matrix?” “How do you know that you know that you know that you know…” Turtles all the way down.

Mannion’s overall approach to epistemology is to stack up the many mostly real historical failings of skepticism, then to claim they only alternative is his religious version of mysticism. His case ignores the great triangulation against this false dichotomy: the objective approach to epistemology, whose most modern form is fittingly as part of the philosophy called Objectivism. This philosophy derives from metaphysical axioms, that unlike the concept of God, are self-evident. Epistemology is arguably its most robust derivation and its greatest contribution to the history of ideas. If God’s existence is even a possible or meaningful idea, it is not derived from the epistemology that Mannion presents.

1 which itself is not true randomness but a simulation thereof

i Wysocki, I., Dominiak, Ł. Austrian Economics and Compatibilist Freedom. J Gen Philos Sci 55, 113–136 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10838-023-09640-x

ii Hunter Ash. Untitled Post on the Fine-Tuning Argument. 12/3/2025 3:39 PM EST.