Alex (95:43)
Yes. I wanted to ask you about like if the argument is made stronger by saying that our justification for knowledge comes from divine conceptualism and that God has some sort of, you know, conceptualization of truth and that gives us our own sort of justification for everything else. I don't think define conceptualism. I don't, I wouldn't go go that way. First of all, I've argued along with Russ Manion that because God's transcending in him, all things move and live and have their being. He sustains them, he's created them and their natures. He's obviously in a position to know. So I don't think you need to get into divine conceptualism. But the, the person who's in a position knows, also in a position to reveal. And so I don't have to rely on epistemic bootstrapping in which part of all of the. And there's several kind of dialectical kind of tension arguments. So you can show the failure of autonomous epistemology obviously results, because as modern epistemologists have put it, there is no epistemic exile. There's nobody that's outside the system, but there is. And, and only that one who's outside, in a position, no, in a position to reveal, could solve that problem. And it reveals. So it's a negation of the, the problems, the epistemic problems that result from the finitude and the, the kind of dialectical tensions that therefore we accept as the condition the impossibility of our position, which is the other category, which is revelatory theism. But I don't think you need to go into divine conceptualism. Well, I asked, I'm asking that because, for example, right, if we're going to say like that God is in the position to know, we would then have to ask the question, like, what's the, what's the sort of mode in which that he's knowing these things? Does he, does he know these categories because it is just himself, or is he like somehow grounding them as abstract objects? Right. Because that would become another problem about epistemic bootstrapping in terms of God having to have the property to create other abstract objects. So that's why I would say, like, maybe the second that we can prove God through this argument, but then we talk about the knowledge in terms of how God is grounding it. Wouldn't we need to get more into how he knows all these other things? I don't know. That's a good question. I can tell you how he does know. That the things that are known. So you know, as if we're speaking Aristotelian terms. Right, the forms. The forms are grounded and exist and he's created them that way from the divine logo. Yeah, so he knows his divine logo and he knows the things by which he creates. The same way that, that you would if you, if you created a, a table or something, an eidos or an idea of a table, you obviously know the thing that you created because it was created from your idea. So something like that with God. But the question isn't, again, the bootstrapping problem isn't does somebody know something? It's how do we just actually justify knowing? Yeah, I'm not talking about like that. I'm just saying if we were to say, for example, if we're going to talk about like modal knowledge and how do we justify mobile knowledge, Right. That's like a pretty serious problem about how we know possibilities and stuff like that. We can point To God, Right. But then I would be asking, like, does God and the like, the abstract objects, right, that ground knowledge that is from God, are those things just Him? Does he create it in one act? Right. Or is it dependent on Him? Or are they just Him? Because if they are dependent on him, then it seems like if he's creating them, he would need the property to create such abstract objects. Right? So it would become a problem about how God himself has to pick Himself up from his own bootstraps to create other properties. Because I can see how this argument's like, like really good because it shows essentially that you have to have an external source. But when we get into the nitty gritty about how does God know things and how does that help us, right? How is he in the position to know something? I feel like we would need some kind of. I don't think you have that. Like, I can give an answer to that. I don't think you have to. To say that, well, he's on this and he's not bounded. So again, it's just a principle of negation. It's like, I don't know. Yeah, I can see how epistemic problems happen. It's because the limited scope, infinitude and, and this is why we use apophatic theology is that whatever that is, God is not. But what I can say in terms of a positive. And I don't think it's dependent on it, but like. And as far as revealed, the created things aren't him, but yes, in an analogous way, they possess the properties by which the. The divine ideas of the logo he creates them from. But they're not identical. The divine logo are much more than. Why? Because they're eternal.
