When the word “right” disguises a demand

12 Tuesday Jul 2022

Posted by memoirandremains in law, natural law

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An opinion piece in the Los Angeles Times makes the argument that public restrooms are a “human right”: “However, like food, water and shelter, access to safe sanitation is a fundamental human right.”

That is interesting language. I agree that access to restrooms is extraordinarily useful in a society that requires a great deal of constant movement, often far from one’s home or place of work. I agree that developing and maintaining such facilities makes good policy sense at the level of government, in that it creates a broadly useful public good, like roads and fire departments. The economic interest in merely maintaining bathrooms at private expense seems limited.

(There is of course the fact that the government seems incapable of even maintaining the sidewalks in a safe manner. And the public transportation system has become a mobile hotel for those otherwise “unhoused.” Creating small, enclosed structures would likely merely create a new avenue for danger.)

My question concerns not the strength of the policy argument, but the phrasing of such a policy as a right? To prove the point, the writer cites to a UN document which calls sanitation a “right”. It is a public good. It is good for human beings. It makes life safer and more pleasant. But how is it a “right?”

The word “right” seems to mean a policy position which we will assert on the basis of our rationality which we think only the ignorant, bigoted, or otherwise vile would contest. While it uses the language of “rights” such as a “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”, it refers to something far different than that asserted the signers of the declaration of independence. A review of the thought of the founders, particularly as it relates to English law and political theory can be found here.

A further consider behind the limitations on government can be found in Lutheran political and legal theory which imposed limits on the authority of the state over the person:

“Finally, the Lutheran jurists found both in Scripture and in conscience a general right of resistance to tyrannical rule. Conscience was the seat of both civil obedience and civil disobedience. When positive law contradicts natural law, the conscientious Lutheran Christian is torn between his duty to obey the divinely ordained “powers that be” and his duty to obey his own divinely ordained sense of justice. A contemporary.” Harold J. Berman. Law and Revolution II: The Impact of the Protestant Reformations on the Western Legal Tradition (Kindle Locations 1595-1597). Kindle Edition.

This understanding of right is a limitation of the government over the individual. It also derives from understanding of God imposing a pre-political order.

The use of the word “right” in the UN Declaration on “rights” and the “right” to a public restroom is a complete inversion of the concept of “right.” First, rather than a freedom from government control, it is a power to make a demand upon the public to receive something with direct cost to me. I have a “right” to health care; which means I have a power force someone else to pay my medical bills. The “right” to a restroom is the power to compel others to pay for the construction and maintenance of a facility.

Second, the power does not derive from a pre-political source. Rather it is a matter of positive law: it is a demand made by a constituency which is then enacted as law by a government.

Third, at the stage of this opinion piece, the word “right” actually means a demand which I am making upon you: It is rhetorically structured using the older and quite foreign language of “right” as a means to make disagreement impossible. The older use of “right” by definition is something which cannot be contradicted (it being rooted in nature or nature’s God, at the very least).

In short, this contemporary use of the word “right” is a strategy to make use of the evocation of the older version of “right” while making a demand upon another to provide some good or service.

Note, this does not mean a particular good or service may be appropriately provided at public expense, such traffic signals. But it is far more honest to argue for the public benefit by means of a cost benefit (or other appropriate argument), than to say I have. “right to traffic signals”, or a “right to storm drains,” or any other public good.

(There are other uses of the word “right”. This is not meant to be an exhaustive discussion of the ways in which the word “right” is used in contemporary discourse.)

Natural Law, “Philosophy of the Founding Fathers” (3)

09 Monday May 2022

Posted by memoirandremains in natural law

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James Madison, natural law, Rights, Thomas Jefferson

The prior post in this series may be found here.

The question about what constitutes the fundamental law and rights of the people, and who can articulate the existence of those rights underwent further development prior to the American Revolution. Dean Pound argues that with the Glorious Revolution of the 1688, Britain took the position that the highest law was the positive law as declared by Parliament. This was a movement away from the legal and philosophical position of Coke and Blackstone.

Thus, a philosophical conflict was set up in the streams of English law. The Americans took a position consistent with the earlier understanding and different than that developed in Britain after 1688.

The conflict is distilled in the argument over the Declaration of Independence, which the author of the essay (Manion) calls, “the best possible condensation of the natural law-common law doctrines as there developed and expounded in England and America for hundreds of years prior to the American Revolution.” (16)

It was those arguing on behalf of Parliament against the Americans who were taking the innovative position:

In 1776 the British Government was insisting that the “law of the land” and “the immemorial rights of English subjects” were exclusively and precisely what the British Parliament from time to time declared them to be. This claim for parliamentary absolutism was at variance with all the great traditions of natural law and common law as recored through the centuries from Bracton to Blackstone. (16)

At the time the Americans were insisting upon the Declaration of Independence, they saw themselves not as advancing new arguments as insisting upon old understanding of the law. Thus, ironically, the Revolutionaries were fighting against revolution.

This also means that we must be careful not to attribute the American Revolution to arguments advanced by Locke (certainly not solely to Locke). In fact, Locke contains elements which militate against the natural law arguments made in the Declaration. For instance, Locke contends that once the government has been properly instituted, “the majority have the right to conclude the rest.” (19) Natural law would argue that the majority have a limited right. They cannot deprive a minority of their natural rights.

Thomas Jefferson, writing to Francis J. Gilmer on June 7, 1816 explained that the duty of the legislature is to protect the natural rights of the citizen:

Our legislators are not sufficiently apprised of the rightful limits of their powers: that their true office is to declare and enforce only our natural rights and duties, & to take none of them from us. No man has a natural right to commit aggression on the equal rights of another; and this is all from which the laws ought to restrain him: every man is under the natural duty of contributing to the necessities of the society; and this is all the laws should enforce on him: and, no man having a natural right to be the judge between himself and another, it is his natural duty to submit to the umpirage of an impartial third. when the laws have declared and enforced all this, they have fulfilled their functions, and the idea is quite unfounded that on entering into society we give up any natural right.

Reference was also made to James Madison’s argument in the case Robin v Hardaway 1772, before the Virginia General Court. The argument is remarkable on many grounds:

The Indians of every denomination were free, and independent of us; they were not subject to our empire; not represented in our legislature; they derived no protection from our laws, nor could be subjected to their bonds. If natural right, independence, defect of representation, and disavowal of protection, are not sufficient to keep them from the coercion of our laws, on what other principles can we justify our opposition to some late acts of power exercised over us by the British legislature? Yet they only pretended to impose on us a paltry tax in money; we on our free neighbors, the yoke of perpetual slavery. Now all acts of legislature apparently contrary to natural right and justice, are, in our laws, and must be in the nature of things, considered as void. The laws of nature are the laws of God; whose authority can be superseded by no power on earth. A legislature must not obstruct our obedience to him from whose punishments they cannot protect us. All human constitutions which contradict his laws, we are in conscience bound to disobey.

How then would natural rights be protected? The American contribution was to divide the power:

The effective limitation of sovereignty and government by division, judicial review, and democratic forces, was thus held to be a necessary corollary to the doctrine of unalienable rights….Revolutionary America believed that such an evil institution as government would certainly get out of hand unless closely checked from every side….It was not enough … to belabor sovereignty with sound philosophy. Sovereignty had to be split and checked and degraded to the point where it was obviously a servant of the people’s God-given rights. (21-22)

There were debates about the timing of the Declaration. But the philosophical argument made concerning the excess of the British government was not questioned. The pre-political rights of the people was understood by all American Founding Fathers.

This essay ends as follows:

Meanwhile, and ever more and more precariously, we continue to be the one remaining country on earth where the individual may protect his God-given rights against his own government and everybody else. (29)

Something which seems inherent in this discussion of rights is what mean by “right.” If a “right” is a pre-political “right” inherent in the individual and given by God, then it is coherent to say the government may not take away that right.

What then if the government (not God) is the source of a “right.” Such a right is merely shorthand way of naming some privilege I currently possess. But if that privilege comes only from the government and is not grounded in anything beyond the positive exercise of power by the government, depriving me of that “right” is quite different. Yesterday, I had the right to drive 45 mph on this street. Tomorrow I may only drive 35. The government’s action may be capricious, but have I really lost a “right”?

The giving or taking of such “rights” contains no moral component: I may or may not approve such a change in position, but I cannot really say I have been wrongfully treated. To say that I will not be punished or I will be punished for some behavior is all one. But calling the absence of punishment a “right” is to equivocate on “right.” If some appropriately instituted governmental authority exercises its power in some way or another, there has been no real change of “rights” even if their has been a change of law.

“Right” means merely I do not want to assert an argument and I want to prevent you from advancing an argument against my position. A “right” means something it would be morally wrong to take. But where the rights are not “natural” but merely political, then “wrong” means nothing more than what I want. Immoral thus becomes a matter of counting noses (assuming a democracy).

We could argue from some pragmatic position, which will be raised in the next essay in the Natural Law Institutes recorded proceedings, “The Natural Law and Pragmatism”.

Natural Law and Abortion

24 Sunday Apr 2022

Posted by memoirandremains in Uncategorized

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abortion, natural law

This case involved a challenge to the then-existing abortion statute. The defendant claimed that abortion should be regulated by “natural law”. The defense then takes an interesting twist: if it is a matter of “natural law” it should not be a matter of statute. Rather than “natural law” requiring the protection of life, natural law should permit abortion (under the guise of individual autonomy and health care):

The statute under which appellants were accused is section 274 of the Penal Code. Appellants in effect contend that the care of one’s corporeal tenement concerns no one but himself; that the forceful withdrawal of a fetus from the womb of a woman is a matter which should be governed by ‘natural law ‘ and not by an artificial statute rudely conceived by man for the purpose of interfering with and controlling the conduct of society and the individuals who compose it. Under American jurisprudence the State has but little to say as to the manner of a person’s care of his body. He is restricted in his movements when stricken with a contagious or communicable disease. Otherwise, he is free to go unshaved, unshod or unbathed. In such matters his behavior is deemed not to affect the welfare of society. But as to the interference with a woman’s natural process of procreation, the whole of society asserts a protest. The State confides to its legislature the power and discretion to enact statutes for the purpose of conserving the race even in the stream of gestation.

People v. Gallardo (1952) 243 P.2d 532, 535

The court could have turned the argument on its head: natural law abhors the killing of one’s own child. Instead, the court rejected the existence of natural law:

The realm of statecraft acknowledges no such thing as a ‘natural law .’ While certain proposed laws have been in the midst of crises so designated, such terms were then plausibly applied in the orator’s zeal to achieve his aim of enacting a law which he deemed sacred. Indeed, the principles embodied in the Bill of Rights are so allied to the happiness and freedom of people as to persuade many men to believe they were the direct gift of the Deity. Not so. They are the products of the human brain after a long travail of freedom. Had they not been conceived we would still have had a social order, a state.

People v. Gallardo (1952) 243 P.2d 532, 535. This court thus anchors human rights as whims of the State. To call something natural law is a mere rhetorical flourish. To anchor these right “as products of the human brain” mean that the rights have no real existence beyond the arbitrary grant of power. The court goes onto say that the loss of these rights is thus perfectly conceivable: “Had they not been conceived we would still have had a social order, a state.”

On this logic, what evil is there in slavery? The majority population could deprive a minority of its “rights” — wait, the minority has no rights unless they have been acknowledged by the state. Murder would disrupt the entire social order; but the utter degradation of a minority could not damage the overall social order.

A people is not restricted in the establishment of rules and laws for the welfare of the mass to any greater extent than in legislating for the individual. When they impose limitations upon society for the general welfare their acts are not to be thwarted by those rebellious agencies who deny the existence of the right of the people to regulate and govern themselves. The state is the paramount creation of man. It derives from the family. The evolutionary processes by which it evolved afford no basis for discount of the power and the obligation of the modern state to discipline, preserve and perpetuate the race. It has supplanted the tribe and the clan and succeeded to all the privileges and duties of the family. Either through a monarch, a dictator or a legislature, the modern state maintains the office of the patriarch who had succeeded to the functions of the primae val father to prescribe rules and to regulate and administer family affairs. Laws created by its lawmakers have the absolute control of society except to the extent abridged by its organic law.

People v. Gallardo (1952) 243 P.2d 532, 535-36 (emphasis added). Restrictions on abortion are permissible, because the State has that power. Thus, if the State determines that such protections are not given, there is no court of appeal in reason or morality.

This is really breath-taking language. It is unabashed idolatry of the State. That argument was referenced in a 2019 decision Kansas which found a pre-political natural right of the woman to autonomy which includes abortion:

We conclude that, through the language in section 1, the state’s founders acknowledged that the people had rights that preexisted the formation of the Kansas government. There they listed several of these natural, inalienable rights—deliberately choosing language of the Declaration of Independence by a vote of 42 to 6.

Included in that limited category is the right of personal autonomy, which includes the ability to control one’s own body, to assert bodily integrity, and to exercise self-determination. This right allows a woman to make her own decisions regarding her body, health, family formation, and family life—decisions that can include whether to continue a pregnancy. Although not absolute, this right is fundamental. Accordingly, the State is prohibited from restricting this right unless it is doing so to further a compelling government interest and in a way that is narrowly tailored to that interest. And we thus join many other states’ supreme courts that recognize a similar right under their particular constitutions.

Hodes & Nauser, MDS, P.A. v. Schmidt (Kan. 2019) 440 P.3d 461, 466. The Court then used this “natural right” to validate an injunction prohibiting the restriction on abortion passed by the people of Kansas.

The dissenting Justice looked to Gallardo and argues that the majority has taken on the unlimited state power exalted by Gallarado

Tellingly, today’s majority shares its government-first assumptions with many courts that have considered challenges to state abortion restrictions under state constitutions. After all, most modern jurisprudence on abortion regulation shares the majority’s underlying assumption that the scope of the state’s police power is unlimited unless expressly constrained by a constitutional provision. This explains the fierce contest to locate a specific “right to abortion” somewhere in the organic law—whether it be federal or state.

Consider the California Second District Court of Appeal’s decision in People v. Gallardo , 243 P.2d 532 (Cal. Dist. Ct. App. 1952), vacated 41 Cal. 2d 57, 257 P.2d 29 (1953). In Gallardo , the California court considered whether the state’s criminalization of abortion violated the ” ‘natural law’ ” right to “the care of one’s corporeal tenement.” 243 P.2d at 535. But, the court said, “The realm of statecraft acknowledges no such thing as ‘natural law.’ ” 243 P.2d at 535. “[M]any men,” the court mocked, have become “persuade[d] … to believe” that “the principles embodied in the Bill of Rights are so allied to the happiness and freedom of people” that they must be “the direct gift of the Deity.” 243 P.2d at 535. To which the California court emphatically responded, “Not so.” 243 P.2d at 535. Rather, rights come from “[t]he state.” 243 P.2d at 535.

The Gallardo court then rhapsodized about the state as “the paramount creation of man.” 243 P.2d at 535. “Either through a monarch, a dictator or a legislature” the state has “the absolute control of society except to the extent abridged by its organic law.” 243 P.2d at 536. Because the California court had not yet achieved the judicial creativity and flexibility of today’s majority, it could find nothing in its organic law establishing a woman’s right to an abortion, so the state was free to regulate in any manner it saw fit. See 243 P.2d at 537.

Even though the Gallardo court and today’s majority desire different outcomes, both share a government-first understanding of the constitution arising from the belief that in the act of constituting a state, the people only retained a small chunk of expressly defined sovereignty for themselves, which was carved out of an otherwise universal grant of power to the state. This starting point naturally leads present-day political actors—including judges—to view the constitution primarily as a rights-granting document. This rights-oriented understanding of the constitution only magnifies the State and its near-limitless power. For the Gallardo court, the legislature was the “monarch” with near “absolute control” to dole rights out to the people as it saw fit. 243 P.2d at 536. For today’s majority, the State’s power is equally broad—and the Kansas Supreme Court has a similar absolute control to creatively find and grant specific, fundamental rights, mentioned nowhere in the Constitution, as a kind of benevolent judicial preferment.So even though results have varied dramatically, this basic assumption—government first, then rights—has become the standard framing in cases adjudicating constitutional rights. If a right cannot be “found” in some constitutional clause (or even a penumbra), then the state is free to act as it sees fit—however arbitrary its action may be. The pressure this puts on judges to be more creative and ambitious in their “search” for “fundamental rights” is largely to blame for the erosion of rigorous—and constrained—constitutional interpretation.

Hodes & Nauser, MDS, P.A. v. Schmidt (Kan. 2019) 440 P.3d 461, 538-39.

All of these parties in actuality are arguing for some sort of “natural law.” They all have a presupposition as to what is right and permissible. The contention that the state has nearly unlimited positive law power is itself a proposition of “natural law” — even if it denies there is any God of nature. The argument from evolution is itself a sort of divine right argument. The majority in Kansas finds a “natural right” to “autonomy” which extends to abortion. The dissent says, you are merely using the rhetoric of “rights” to contend for an unlimited state.

Natural Law “Philosophy of the Founding Fathers” (2)

22 Friday Apr 2022

Posted by memoirandremains in natural law

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Blackstone, natural law, Pursuit of Happiness, The Natural Philosophy of the Founding Fathers

Still from “Philosophy of Founding Fathers” Proceedings of the Natural Law Institute, vol. 1, 1949 The previous post may be found here.

The concept of Natural Law being instilled by the Creator is found both in Coke and Blackstone. In his comment on “Calvin’s Case”, Coke writes, in part, “God and nature is one to all and therefore the law of God and the nature is one to all…. This law of nature which indeed is the eternal law of the creator, infused into the heart of the creature at the time of his creation, was two thousand years before any laws written and before any judicial or manicipal laws.” (8)

From Blackstone, “Consequently, since man depends absolutely upon his maker for everything, it is necessary that he should in all points conform to his maker’s will. This will of his maker is called the law of nature.” (10)

As an interjection, the logic of this argument is something I have seen made by those who would deny any personal creator. For those who contend for general limitations on human depravation of our fellows, there is the Darwinian argument that such is good for all of us: we as a species need such limitations to survive. The fact we think in this way is a product of our evolution. Likewise, those who argue for what Albert Mohler calls “erotic liberty”, indeed to the point of disregarding the reality of one’s own body, the argument is we are without any creator beyond our own imagination. And thus the absence of any conscious maker makes us our own maker.

It is curious that the argument for what is permissible and what should restrained often have this same structure of argument. (I am not saying every argument has this structure, just that this structure appears in situations where the “maker” is purposefully denied.)

To return to Blackstone:

In consequence of which mutual connection of justice and human felicity (God) has not perplexed the law of nature with a multitude of abstract rules and precepts … but has graciously reduced the rule of obedience to this one paternal precept that man shall pursue his own true and substantial happiness. this is the foundation of what we call ethics or natural law: for the several articles into which it is branched in our systems amount to no more than demonstrating that this or that action tends to man’s happiness and therefore very justly concluding that the performance of it is a part of the law of nature; or, on the other hand, that this or that action is destructive of man’s real happiness and therefore that the law of nature forbids it. (11)

Again, we can see how the structure of this natural law argument is routinely used as the basis of making arguments which would be unthinkable by Blackstone. For example, the arguments in favor “erotic liberty” such as “love is love” are in effect arguments from “happiness” (love being a means for happiness).

Since the purpose of the law is to protect this happiness, and since the happiness is something which can only be experienced by a subjective person gives rise to the need to protect the freedom of the individual (Blackstone again):

The absolute rights of man considered as a free agent endowed with discernment to know good from evil and with power of choosing those measure which appear to him to be most desirable, are usually summed up in the general explanation and denominated the nature liberties of mankind. This natural liberty consists properly in a power of acting as one thinks fit without any restraint or control unless by the law of nature, being a right inherent in us by birth and one of the gifts of God to man at his creation when he endowed him with the faculty of free will. (12-13)

Natural Law, “Human Nature” (1)

15 Friday Apr 2022

Posted by memoirandremains in natural law

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Human Nature, Metaphysics, natural law, Natural Law Institute, The Natural Philosophy of the Founding Fathers

I happen to have copies of the Natural Law Institute’s proceedings held at the University of Notre Dame. There are five volumes covering the years 1947-1951. This series will be unsystematic notes and quotations from the published proceedings.

From “The Natural Philosophy of the Founding Fathers”

The Constitutional structure of US law provides a remarkable power to the individual which stands in direct opposition to democratic, majority rule. This essay begins with the lawsuit of five brothers who successfully obtain a decision overturning the “National Industrial Recovery Act”, a fundamental restructuring of the economy. This is remarkable in legal regimes. This decision is an example of

The practical importance of natural law to the citizen of the United States. Nowhere else in the world of 1935 could individual citizens of any states challenge and set aside an official act of their Government on the theory that such act violated the citizens’ reserved personal rights. (4-5)

It seems that the difficulty of this unique aspect of American law is a live-issue at present. Freedom of speech sets the individual against the majority; with the majority (or at least the most politically demanding minority) acting to limit the speech of others. The question, “How can these few others challenge the right of the majority to do as it pleases?” is a common political argument.

The right of the individual to limit the power of the majority exists within our constitutional system. The question thus raised, how can such anti-majoritarian right be justified:

If our system of constitutional limitations is an end in itself, it is defensible only as a tradition and the sands of purely traditional values are rapidly running out today. On the contrary, if the letter of these limitations is merely insulation from a well defined concept of man’s inherent and imperishable nature, then a knowledge and evaluation of this concept is and must be required of every American judge and all American lawyers whose terrible and continuing responsibility it is to uphold and defend our presently besieged system of American Law. (6)

Before I consider this essay further, some questions come to mind: The majoritarian argument (at least for a distinct advocacy group) is making an argument which is based upon a very different metaphysics of “human nature” than is used in this quotation.

As a preliminary thought, I think an argument can be made that those who oppose the concept of an “inherent and imperishable nature” are still arguing metaphysics and also a kind of natural law. Arguments which are based in “sexual liberty” or “choice” or “fairness” or “love” are making natural law arguments based upon a distinct metaphysics and moral theory. They are certainly not bare positive law arguments (although they may later be defended upon positive law grounds).

Book Review (Part Four): Inerrancy and Worldview: Answering Modern Challenges to the Bible, Vern Poythress

12 Friday Apr 2013

Posted by memoirandremains in Apologetics, Book Review, Vern Poythress

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Apologetics, Brian Morley, idolatry, Impersonalism, Inerrancy and Worldview: Answering Modern Challenges to the Bible, materialism, natural law, personal God, Presuppositional apologetics, Presuppositionalism, Vern Poythress

Part Four: The Impersonalist Misreading of Scripture

Poythress identifies two basic worldviews. On one hand, he identifies the biblical worldview of a personal God who “upholds all things by the word his power” (Hebrews 1:3): “The laws derive from God’s speech, which is the speech of a personal God. But our modern culture has moved away from this kind of regularity” (52).

The opposing worldview sees such regularity not as the kind action of a loving God, but rather as the blind action of an enormous machine, “[O]ur modern culture has moved away from this kind of conception of regularity. The nineteenth century saw the triumph of natural science in interpreting the physical aspect of the cosmos. Nineteenth-century natural science produced a kind of mechanistic model of the universe, which could be easily interpreted as implying a kind of mechanistic model of the universe …a universe governed by impersonal law” (52). He calls this worldview “impersonalism” (30).

Drawing out the theological implications, Poythress notes that the impersonal view begins without God’s existence: “[I]t substitutes the God of the Bible for a kind of god of its own invention, in the form of impersonal laws. The god is the substitute for the real thing, and that sense, an idol” (53).

But what of polytheism? Poythress notes that if all things are ultimately and only physical matter, human beings and trees really are the same. The natural human desire for some spirituality combined with a materialism has a tendency to invest the physical world with spirits.

Such a thing is seen in ancient polytheism, where physical things: winds, ocean, rivers, stars, et cetera are understood to be gods worthy of reverence. In modern times, a full-fledged religion is rare as with respect to physical items (although it is not completely absent). More often it takes a more diffuse superstition, “Everyday people within advanced industrial societies are looking into astrology and fortune-telling and spirits ….That direction may seem paradoxical. But ….If a materialist viewpoint is correct, all is one” (31).

I spoke recently with a scientist and professor from one of the most prestigious universities in the world. He casually mentioned that his materialist science colleagues were “very superstitious”. When I questioned him, he thought the matter beyond quibble.

Poythress goes onto draw out the religious commitment of such pantheism: When a viewpoint includes spirits and gods, it may in a sense appear to be personalist. But ultimately it is impersonalist, because the “one” dissolves what is distinctive in persons” (31).

In the book, Poythress demonstrates and works out the impersonalist convictions which underlie modern disciplines of science, history, linguistics, history, sociology, anthropology and psychology. In particular, he shows how such presuppositions necessarily will undermine any value for the Bible, but assuming at the outset that the Bible is cannot be true: What he means is that the Bible describes a personal God uphold the world. The impersonalist presuppositions which underscore modern study assume such a God cannot and does not exist.

To demonstrate the nature of such misreading of Scripture, Poythress interacts with the biblical texts in light of various disciples. By drawing out the impersonalist presuppositions in such disciplines, he exposes the manner in which such disciplines create conflict and confusion – not because it exists in the text, but rather because the presuppositions cannot account for or incorporate the claims of Scripture.

I remember my anthropology professor in college discussing his works among pygmies in Africa. The pygmies lived in the forest and rarely saw anything more than thirty feet away (I don’t remember the precise distance, but it was not far – due to the extremely dense vegetation). When he took some people out to the plains and showed them large animals at a great distance, they thought the animals were very small – not far away. Their understanding of the world did not include the fact that things far away would look small.

The impersonalist cannot rightly see the universe or Scripture, because he cannot admit to the evidence of God’s personhood – even though such denial comes at the cost of one’s own humanity.[1]

[1] Poythress does note that the regularity – but not utter and absolute uniformity – of God’s interaction with creation permits impersonalist “laws” to approximate some aspects of reality. For the good and value of God’s consistent regulation of the natural world, see God in the Shadows, by Dr. Brian Morley.