The God of Analogies

Poythress has created a cottage industry in Redeeming Books. Ere now, he has Redeemed Mathematics, History, Philosophy, Science, and Sociology. Redeeming Reason is thus a sort of Ur-Redeeming—before thinking about any subject we must first redeem our reason.

What does it mean to redeem reason? In what way was reason heretofore unredeemed? Wittgenstein encapsulates the error. Poythress notes that Tractatus Logico-Philosphicaus “is remarkable, but very far from a Christian approach,” which is a shocking offhand claim to toss into a footnote. Wittgenstein’s problem—he didn’t ground his method in God.

Apparently all the reasoning that has gone on before Poythress came along has suffered from being improperly grounded in something other than God. It is neither a coincidence no incidental that three-quarters of the footnotes with citations in this book are to other things written by Poythress. This is not a summary of what others in the long history of philosophy have said about reason; indeed, it isn’t even clear that Poythress sees himself as building on that historical foundation.

What is this new way of conceiving of reason? Analogies. All proper reasoning is simply an analogy. We think about God, but God is too complicated for us to understand, so what we do is create analogies of God and the creation of those analogies is reason.

Here is an example, the first one Poythress provides in this book. Logical thought, a subset of reasoning, is an analogy of God. How? Consider the principle of noncontradiction, that two contradictory things cannot be simultaneously true. A and Not-A cannot both be true. It’s simple logic. Now if we think about this idea of a logical principle, what can we say about it? The Law of Non-Contradiction in specific, and logical principle in general, is: omnipresent, eternal, immutable, immaterial, invisible, truthful, reliable, omnipotent, transcendent, and immanent. You know what else is escribed by that exact same list of adjectives? God! Logic is an analogy of God! QED! “The law of noncontradiction testifies to God.”

If you are unpersuaded that the fact that Poythress has found a list of adjectives describing both logic and God is proof that logic only exists because of God, then you are simply still stuck in ways of reasoning which are not analogically based on God.  

In one of the more surprising twists in Poythress’ argument, God Himself is an analogy of God:

Analogy, we have said, involves both similarity and difference. The similarity that belongs to an analogy is a reflection of the unity that is in God. This unity is represented by God the Father. The difference that belongs to an analogy is a reflection of the diversity that is in God. His diversity is represented preeminently by God he Son, Finally, the analogy itself, as a multifaceted relation, is a reflection of the Holy Spirit, who preeminently reflects relations.

It is analogies all the way down! All reason is composed of analogies. A is an analogy of B and B is an analogy of C and C is an analogy of God and God is an analogy of Himself, and so on to infinite regress.

How does this work? Consider arithmetic. As stated above, logic is an analogy of God. Mathematics is a subset of logic in which special symbols are used. 1+2=2 is just a set of symbols. Then when I say, “One apple plus one apple equals two apples,” I am creating an analogy of the set of symbols which is a subset of logic which is an analogy of God who is an analogy of Himself.

This may sound like a simplification of the argument of this book, but it isn’t. Poythress himself collapses the argument of this book to a single page in the conclusion, so the bulk of the book is just a seemingly endless set of examples of analogies based on other analogies. If you want to make sense of Isaiah’s idea that “the daughter of Zion is like a lodge in a cucumber field,” you just need to think through the myriad of ways that phrase can be reasoned out in an analogical sense.

But through the whole book, I could not shake the feeling that I have read all this before. This is where Poythress’ penchant for self-citation becomes problematic. There is another philosopher of some note who has a theory that all our knowledge is merely a reflection of some perfect knowledge that exists outside of our universe. That triangle you see isn’t actually a triangle (lines have no breadth or depth, so we literally cannot see the lines that make up an actual triangle). Rather, the triangle you see is a form of the Ideal Triangle. There is also an Ideal Dog and an Ideal Beauty, and everything we see is just some sort of form of these Ideal Forms. In other words, all human knowledge and all things on Earth are simply analogies of these Ideal Forms, or as they are commonly called, the Platonic Forms.

What is troubling for Poythress’ book is that he is simultaneously arguing that reason must begin with God and presenting a form of reason that sure seems a lot like what Plato was arguing. Now maybe Poythress sees no similarity between his account of reason and Plato’s account, but when the most famous philosopher has an argument that sure looks a lot like your argument, then maybe, just maybe, you ought to at least mention that fact. Surely it would be worth a chapter in a book about how reason is simply an analogy to something outside direct human experience to discuss how your theory is different than Plato’s theory that reason is simply an analogy to something outside direct human experience.

I read this book because of my long fascination with how reason and faith interact. It isn’t Poythress’ fault that this book isn’t about what I assumed it was about. But, I am very stuck on trying to figure out the answer to this question: Who is the audience for this book?

The argument itself is self-contained. If you accept it, well and good. But, is the argument persuasive if you don’t initially accept it? Of course not. If you don’t accept that all reasoning is analogical, then an analogical argument that reason is analogical is by definition not persuasive. To accept the argument requires some form of revelation from God.

Poythress acknowledges this need for revelation, which then complicates the argument of the book. If God has not revealed Himself to the Reader, then there is no way the Reader will be persuaded by this book. That problem is not of much concern to Poythress. But, what if God has revealed Himself to the Reader and the Reader is perfectly willing to accept that God is the Author of All Things? Is it necessarily true that such a reader will also accept the argument that reason is definitionally analogical? If a Reader does not accept the analogical argument because the argument in favor of the argument assumes the argument is correct, what then? Does accepting this account of Reason also require a second revelation from God about the nature of reason? If accepting the conclusion of the book requires God to reveal to you that the argument of the book is true, then why do we need the book?

Who then is the audience for this book? I am truly unsure.

Related Posts
Chesterton, G. K. Orthodoxy “Chesterton and the Elves”
Nietzsche, Friedrich The Genealogy of Morals “Nietzsche and the Apostle Paul”

(Crossway wants to make sure that you The Reader know that the US Federal Government requires me to disclose this shocking bit of news: Crossway sent me a copy of this book so that I could review it here. The Federal Government wants to make sure that you are not deluded if I am only saying nice things about a book because I got a free copy. The oddity of this regulatory burden is particularly apparent when the review being written about the book is nowhere near as laudatory as the advertising wing of a publisher would like. Fortunately for you, Dear Reader, Crossway only asks me for honest reviews and I only write things I actually believe. Shocking, to be sure.)