How is God the foundation of all knowledge?

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How is God the foundation of all knowledge? Using both biblical and philosophical arguments, Dr. James Anderson explains how God is the foundation of all human knowledge.

How is God the foundation of all knowledge? Well, there are several ways we could answer that question.

Biblical Foundations

First, we could observe that God is the foundation of all knowledge because he's the foundation of everything. Romans 11:36 says, "for from him and through him and to him are all things." Everything ultimately depends on God and finds its foundation in God. And that would include, of course, knowledge. Second, and more specifically, we could observe that God is the foundation of all human knowledge because he is the ultimate source of all truth and knowledge. God is perfect in knowledge. All of his knowledge is original. His knowledge is not derivative. It all begins with him, finds its origin in him. But our knowledge is not original. Our knowledge is derivative of God's knowledge. And what that means is that our knowledge is ultimately a gift of God.

We are designed to think God's thoughts after him. All of our knowledge comes from him as the original and perfect knower.

We are designed to think God's thoughts after him. All of our knowledge comes from him as the original and perfect knower. All this to say, Christianity has what we would call a revelational epistemology. And that's just a fancy way of saying that all human knowledge is ultimately based on divine revelation. We only know things because God has revealed things to us: things about him, and things about the world that we live in and about ourselves. And this divine revelation would include both natural revelation—the way that God has revealed himself in the natural world and the creation itself—and also special revelation, specifically the Scriptures, the divinely inspired Scriptures.

Philosophical Foundations

Now, everything I've said so far has been drawn from Christian sources. We're taking this, for example, from biblical revelation. Put simply, we believe that God is the foundation of all knowledge because the Bible says so. However, it is also possible to make philosophical arguments for the same conclusion. We can reach that conclusion from Scripture, but we can also reach that conclusion on the basis of philosophical reasoning. Let me just give you a couple of sketches of that kind of argument. The first is an argument that really goes back to Augustine, and that is that truth itself is grounded in God.

Insofar as truth depends on God, knowledge also depends on God.

Truths are things that we can discover—what philosophers call true propositions—but they also have the properties of thoughts. But they can't be our thoughts because truth is what it is, regardless of how we think about it. And so a good argument could be made that truths are, in fact, divine thoughts, and you can't have knowledge without truth. So, insofar as truth depends on God, knowledge also depends on God. Another argument, which has been developed by the philosopher Alvin Plantinga, is that human knowledge depends on properly functioning cognitive faculties. And to say that all faculties have a proper function presupposes that there's a design plan for our cognitive faculties. Now, to say that our cognitive faculties have a design plan that makes sense in a theistic worldview, but it makes really no sense within the naturalistic worldview where there isn't a designer of our cognitive faculties. All this to say, there are different arguments that can lead us to the same conclusion that God and God alone is the foundation of all human knowledge.