I gotta have my orange juice.

Here we come to a kind of reductio ad absurdum, or personalist cosmological argument. Every person is dependent upon prior persons to be a person. But where does this end or where does this begin? Is it conceivable that there is an infinite regress of finite persons to account for the reality of any given personality? What accounts for each prior personality that gives rise to the one following? Is prior personality sufficient to completely account for any personality at any given time? We have two choices, and, ultimately, only two. Either we owe our existence to ourselves (which carries within it some manifest impossibilities), or we owe our existence to God. Now my contention is quite simply that we, on a daily basis, are faced with the starkest contradiction imaginable. If we do not acknowledge the reality of the God of the Bible—if he does not exist—then neither do we. On the other hand, if we do exist, then he does too. Now the introduction of this stark contradiction may be ab it breathtaking and perhaps even shocking. But I would contend that our very existence brings us to this cliff, and to this very sharp either/or. In real life, however, it is ameliorated a bit by the recognition that if he does exist, and if we exist, but we refuse to acknowledge his existence, we don’t go up in a puff of smoke and cease to be. Rather, the result (because of God’s mercy and long-suffering with our foolishness) is both cognitive dissonance and existential confusion. Our existence will be at best “thin,” and it will be incomprehensible. We will have no ground at all for our very being and personhood.

John Calvin opened his Institutes of the Christian Religion with this very beautiful paragraph:

Our wisdom, in so far as it ought to be deemed true and solid Wisdom, consists almost entirely of two parts: the knowledge of God and of ourselves. But as these are connected together by many ties, it is not easy to determine which of the two precedes and gives birth to the other. For, in the first place, no man can survey himself without forthwith turning his thoughts towards the God in whom he lives and moves; because it is perfectly obvious, that the endowments which we possess cannot possibly be from ourselves; nay, that our very being is nothing else than subsistence in God alone. In the second place, whose blessings, which unceasingly distil to us from heaven, are like streams conducting us to the fountain.

Human consciousness necessarily involves consciousness of God. If the consciousness of God could be eradicated, then human self-consciousness would also disappear. Self-knowledge is possible only in God.

Of course, grant the premise of creation and a creator God, and everything I say follows. But why should I grant the premise? You should grant the premise because we either exist as a free creative act of this perfect God, and thus participate as created analogues in all of the real existent perfections of God, or we exist ultimately by chance, and partake in all of the analogues of that mistress. There is no third alternative. The analogues of God are (briefly) truth, goodness and beauty. The analogues of chance are chaos, confusion, and disorder. Pure chance is perfectly unknowable. If you or I, or everything and anything, is the product of pure chance, this would be completely unknowable, and the purely unknowable is no different from nothingness.

If you are driven mad by this conclusion this is exactly what the Bible itself would expect, and not a conclusion that the Bible would expect any man to take contentedly or serenely. the Bible (which is a long and difficult book) frankly diagnoses man, in his current state, as functioning everywhere with this epistemological glitch. To be an unbeliever is the natural state of man, and to be otherwise is attributed to nothing short of a miracle. A man’s unbelief is not simply neutral, or a state of being where one chooses to believe or not believe as one would choose a meal from a variegated menu. Unbelief occupies a religious position in a man’s life, and is as decisive for the unbeliever as belief is for the believer.

There are two accounts of unbelief. The first account is that of the unbeliever himself. This is a necessary perspective, and it is not a simple, completely unified voice that speaks. Unbelief has as many voices as there are unbelievers. Not every voice is unique, though, and the absolute variety is not infinite. There are a certain number of objections to the Christian faith that cohere together, and not an uncountable number. Then, there is the diagnosis of the Bible itself concerning unbelief. the Bible has its own internal theology of unbelief and its own X-ray to offer. While the voice of the unbeliever itself ought to be heard, the most important voice is the voice of the Bible. The reason the voice of the unbeliever needs to be heard is in order to demonstrate that the voice of unbelief is really the voice of caviling or of disputing with the judgment that God has already handed down in the court that he has called. This is what “doubt” is: diakrinomoi. The unbeliever is a “debater of this age” (1 Cor 1:20), and his unbelief is closely associated with bringing accusation and bringing charges of an ethical nature against God. The doubter is, in fact, someone who himself calls God to account before his own bar of justice. The doubter is a judge who dares to question God, or dares to question that God, rather than he, ought to be the final judge. In other words, when we doubt God’s existence and his governing power over all things, what we are really doing is ruling him out of court, and inciting that we have the final word. This brings us to all of the above contradictions and epistemologically reduces us to the necessity of self-existence, which is the same as nothingness. Undeniably, man almost compulsively wants to get on in life without this surrender and this necessary belief—man is ethically offended by this. Let me invite you to the next chapter, which examines man’s penchant to always play the judge, even over God. (Rich Bledsoe, Can Saul Alinsky Be Saved?, 23-25)