Are there ‘brute’ facts?

Reformed apologist Cornelius Van Til (1896-1987) said that antitheistic thinkers consider the facts of of man’s environment as “not created or controlled by the providence of God.” They are brute facts, products of a random universe, generated by chance. They are then also mute, lacking any interpretation except that as supplied by the mind of man. It is up to man to relate these facts one to another and to mankind.

This presents a major challenge to coming to any true knowledge of the way things are. Man, since the Fall, does not even have true knowledge of himself. What he does have is a deceitful heart that suppresses the truth in unrighteousness. Even if the facts were brute they could not be properly related to man because man lacks true knowledge of himself. But the facts are not brute. The Westminster Confession states in Chapter V that “God the great Creator of all things doth uphold, direct, dispose, and govern all creatures, actions, and things, from the greatest even to the least, by his most wise and holy providence, according to his infallible foreknowledge, and the free and immutable counsel of his own will, to the praise of the glory of his wisdom, power, justice, goodness, and mercy.

Van Til, in Van Til’s Apologetic, sums this up nicely:

The basically important point about all this is that the scientist as well as the philosopher and the theologian, unless he be converted to Christ by his Spirit, follows the method that was introduced into the world by Adam when he listened to Satan. The essence of this method is that man starts and finishes his interpretation about any and every aspect of life with the assumption of his own autonomy, with the assumption of the brute factuality of the material with which he deals, and with the assumption of abstract formality of the logic which he uses to relate the brute facts to one another.

The Christian, on the other hand, has been saved by the blood and tears of Christ from this God-insulting and self-destroying methodology.

The question for comment is: How does this relate to Tim Keller’s argument against evolution as presented in Chapter Six?

randy