Keith Devens .com

Glad to see a link here to Vincent Cheung. I would say that he is one of the top Christian philosophers alive, and probaly THE best apologist in our time.

Hi Michael. Yes, he seems to be excellent judging by what I've read so far. I'm surprised I'd never heard of him until now. I happened across his name "by chance" in one of the reviews for Greg Bahnsen's Van Til's Apologetic on Amazon (which I had looked up while I was writing the weblog post that follows this one).

I've been so disappointed that Bahnsen was taken from us so young so it's a huge blessing to now have a man like Mr. Cheung to learn from.

Thanks for responding. I also enjoy Bahnsen -- his VAN TIL'S APOLOGETIC and ALWAYS READY.

Michael, you didn't leave your e-mail address, so I have no way to contact you. I hope you're still checking back here.

Are you familiar with Mr. Cheung's academic background? As I read more, I'm finding that a lot of the philosophy he's expounding is extremely strange. I'd be interested to know if he has a philosophy degree from anywhere.

Glad I checked back. My email is antiprotest@yahoo.com, but I don't check even this email that often. So if you email and want an answer, you might have to wait, but I will eventually try to get back to you.

Yes, I can understand why Cheung's philosophy might sound strange to some people; however, it is not altogether unheard of. It seems that he overlaps with Augustine, Malbranche, and Gordon Clark, among others.

Now, he is different from Bahnsen/Van Til. For example, he thinks that induction is a fallacy, and that science commits the fallacy of affirming the consequent. People don't like to think this, but I think I will have to agree with him. And again, he is not altogether original here, for even some atheists recognize the difficuties.

As for Bahnsen, he thinks that induction is fallacious UNLESS you base it on a good presupposition -- i.e., Christian theism. But I think that Cheung would say, does a good presupposition rescue what is really in itself a fallacy (induction, empiricism, affirming the consequent)? Does a good presupposition make a false proposition true?

Notice that his approach frees him from having to defend things that are probably not defensible, like empiricism. You may have heard debates in which someone would use Bahnsen's approach to say that, yes, sensations give you knowledge, but you can't account for it. The debate then becomes a little muddled, although I think Bahnsen's approach still wins out.

On the other hand, Cheung just shuts down their empiricism altogether, and his opponent can't even speak another word unless he lets him.

Again, "strange", yes, in the sense that few people adopt his position, but not strange as in new, since he is very similar to Augustine, Malbrache (occasionalism), and Clark, etc.

Hope this helps.

Me again. In case you are interested, or in case you do not already know, Gordon Clark (Clark himself has been dead for a while, of course) is at:

http://www.trinityfoundation.org

He has several MP3 files that you may want to hear:

http://www.trinitylectures.org/MP3_downloads.php

In particular:

http://www.trinitylectures.org/MP3/How_Does_Man_Know_God.mp3

Sorry to post so many times, but it just occurred to me that Cheung's view is not so much different from Carl Henry's, either. See Henry's TOWARD A RECOVERY OF CHRISTIAN BELIEF, although I agree that Cheung has made some crucial improvements.

So he is "strange" in the sense that his view is unpopular, but certainly not wrong, unorthodox, or "made up."

Cheung's positions lead him to posit things like that when you see something, you're not actually seeing it, but God Himself is channelling the sensations your body has directly into your brain. So, you're not actually sensing the things yourself, but God is sort of sensing them for you. Why then do we even have bodies? (I might be slightly inaccurate about what he says right now (I'd have to go back and quote his book), but to me that was the gist of one of his positions.) To me it fails the rule of parsimony. Why would God set up the world how He did if we can't learn anything about it?

It also seems to be against how the Bible characterizes us. In the Bible people go about and see and learn things. But Cheung says that what's really happening is they're not actually seeing or learning anything, but God is implanting visual images in their minds and implanting whatever knowledge they would have gained had they actually been seeing things. It seems strange to me to set God up as an explicit "middle man" mediating between our every sense and the world. Of course, in Him we live and move and have our being, but the Bible and common sense tell us that God set the world up in a way that we can know about it.

He also denies free will altogether. If we don't have free will, then God is unjust in holding us accountable for our actions. You don't have to be an Arminian (I'm a Calvinist, just so I'm clear) to hold to some doctrine of free will.

Anyway, I could go on. I'd like to go on to read the rest of his materials and let him justify his positions more before I make final judgements. Thanks for the links to the Gordon Clark materials. I'll check them out. IIRC, Bahnsen dealt with Clark and his ideas quite a bit, so I'll be able to go back and see what he said as well. Also, there was no need to post your e-mail address in your comment -- you could have just posted it in the e-mail field. I'm going to take it out so that it doesn't get harvested by spambots.

Thanks, Keith.

Again, regarding sensation, his position is like Augustine and Clark.

Also, I don't think it follows that just because God created the physical world and the senses, then he definitely intends for the senses to gain knowledge. There is a missing premise there that needs to be justified.

Moreover, Cheung gives ample exegetical arguments for his views, and in fact shows that Scripture itself illustrate the unreliability of sensations.

Even if one were to maintain that sensation can gain knowledge, he will have to answer Cheung's challenge to establish its rationality; otherwise, it is just an unjustified assumption.

As for free will, I think that his position is the same as Augustine, Luther, and Calvin, only that he uses his terms a little more consistently. By denying free will, he means that he denies that we are in ANY sense free FROM GOD. I think that this is the traditional Calvinist position, but not all Calvinists use these terms with consistency and precision.

As for "If we don't have free will, then God is unjust in holding us accountable for our actions," Cheung also answers this in several places.

I encourage you to read more from his books, and see what you can learn from it, if anything, even if you disagree. Give it a chance.

I don't frequent blogs that often, so I probably won't be back. I hope this wraps things up well enough.

As for free will, I think that his position is the same as Augustine, Luther, and Calvin, only that he uses his terms a little more consistently. By denying free will, he means that he denies that we are in ANY sense free FROM GOD. I think that this is the traditional Calvinist position, but not all Calvinists use these terms with consistency and precision.

Yes. That I can agree with.

As for "If we don't have free will, then God is unjust in holding us accountable for our actions," Cheung also answers this in several places.

Good, that's why I said I want to read him more to let him justify his statements.

I encourage you to read more from his books, and see what you can learn from it, if anything, even if you disagree. Give it a chance.

Yep, like I said I'm going to continue reading his materials. I've already learned things from him apart from things we've been discussing that I might disagree with. Anyway, thanks for your input.

to all Cheung fans:

read:

http://www.proginosko.com/aquascum/cheung.htm

and:

http://www.proginosko.com/aquascum/

quoting Cheung:

Although the evil we are speaking of is indeed negative, the ultimate end, which is the
glory of God, is positive. God is the only one who possesses intrinsic worth, and if he
decides that the existence of evil will ultimately serve to glorify him, then the decree is
by definition good and justified. One who thinks that God's glory is not worth the death
and suffering of billions of people has too high an opinion of himself and humanity.

from his: http://www.rmiweb.org/other/problemevil.pdf

There are grave difficults with cheung's epistemology as well as that of Gordon Clark's. (Cheung is following Clark's scriptualism in this regard). Besides what aquascum points out (which alone clearly refutes Cheung) The question that should be posed to him is: "How do you know that you are married?" Since he hardly deduced that truth from the scripture the implication is that he cannot know that he is married! An epistemology that implicates that we cannot even know such truths may strike us as mildly implausible . . .

Ainigma begs the question that one can know his spouse. He should at least tells us how one can know his spouse instead of assuming that he can. If Cheung's or Clark's epistemology is wrong, it's not based on anything Ainigma has shown.

Again, if Cheung or Clark is wrong, the argument isn't in anything the comments or Aquascum has shown. It would also be nice, if not just plain honest, to also affirmatively tell us what the correct, biblical theory of epistemology is. None of which anyone criticizing Clark or Cheung has done.