humans have an innate knowledge of god essay

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• Apr 9, 2022
• 14 min read

What is the innate, and the acquired knowledge of God?

Updated: Dec 1, 2022

In this article, we will attempt to distinguish between the Cognitio Dei Insita (innate knowledge of God), and the Cognitio Dei Acquisita (acquired knowledge of God). Significant for us to note in this regard, is that Van Til writes his chapter on the Innate and Acquired Knowledge of God in his Introduction to Systematic Theology after the chapter on the Incomprehensibility of God . This article will draw heavily on this work in an attempt to throw much-needed light on the subject.

This subject is important because it touches on the idea of natural theology. We first note that Christians reject the rationalist notion that man has innate ideas; he also rejects the notion that man is, at the outset of his experience, a tabula rasa [the idea that our minds begin as blank slates]. Nor is it possible for a Christian to accept some kind of cross between rationalism and empiricism.

This might seem counter-intuitive. What other position is there for Christians to take?

In essence, because God is the absolute incomprehensible God of the Bible, this has certain implications for us as His creatures.

What is innate knowledge?

* In this section, we are mainly concerned with the contemporary definition of innate knowledge, and not with a specific Christian view of innate knowledge.

The innate knowledge thesis asserts the existence of knowledge whose source is our own nature : we are born with this knowledge; it doesn't depend, for its justification, on our accessing it via particular experiences. Our innate knowledge is not learned through either experience or intuition/deduction.

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

That is, innate knowledge is the knowledge that is "simply ours". We just have it, and we can access it when reflecting on our own nature. This type of knowledge is also called a priori knowledge.

This type of knowledge can most famously be seen in Plato [ possibly 348/347 BC ] and in Descartes [ 31 March 1596 – 11 February 1650 ].

Plato postulated a world of forms that we innately know from a previous life, and when we encounter these forms in their various instantiations in this life, we can name them as such (e.g. Dog, Horse, Cow, Justice) by recalling these forms [Note that we capitalise the names of the forms to magnify their exalted status over against dogs, horses and cows tainted by the particularities of this world). The knowledge of the forms is "simply ours". Our knowledge is of abstract, eternal forms, which lie beyond our sensory experience. The forms are independent, for their justification, of our experience [ 1 ]. According to Plato, we have knowledge in the form of a memory gained from our soul prior to its union with our body. We also lack some knowledge because, in our soul’s unification with the body, it has forgotten the knowledge and now needs to recollect it. Thus, learning allows us, in effect, to recall what we already know.

Related, but slightly different to this view of Plato, is the innate concept thesis of Descartes.

According to the Innate Concept thesis, some of our concepts have not been gained from experience. They are instead part of our rational make-up, and experience simply triggers a process by which we consciously grasp them. The main concern motivating the rationalist should be familiar by now: the content of some concepts seems to outstrip anything we could have gained from experience. An example of this reasoning is presented by Descartes in the Meditations .

A critique of innate knowledge

According to Christianity, God is the absolute, personal self-existent being who created the universe including humans. There is nothing in the make-up of humans that is "simply ours" in the sense that it does not find its origin in our Creator.

A critique of Plato's innate knowledge

Plato, therefore, falls short in that his innate knowledge thesis does not recognize that all knowledge of man presupposes revelation [ 2 ]. As indicated above, according to Plato, knowledge is just a recollection of what we already know, but have forgotten when our souls were unified with our bodies.

If this were the case, then man is not created by God or dependent on Him. Our knowledge depends on nothing but ourselves, and if God is brought into the picture at all, his knowledge of the forms would be identical to our knowledge of the forms.

Granted that Plato believed us to "recall" these forms from a previous existence and that our current existence in the world where the forms are "tainted" is punishment for choices we made in our previous life [ 3 ]. The point remains, however, that as we exist today, are not as creatures (created beings) of the Christian God, not even as dependent beings, but as beings that have all the forms of knowledge already within us. God, if He exists, cannot reveal to us anything that we don't already know, and if He does try to reveal something to us, it would be subject to verification as God in no way has inherent authority over us which we ought to accept.

We see, therefore, that Plato's philosophy negates the Creator-creature creature distinction from the outset and begs the question against the Christian answer to the problem of knowledge.

Plato's conception of innate knowledge is based on the idea of human autonomy and self-sufficiency.

A critique of Descartes's innate knowledge

In the same way, like Plato, Descartes assumes that man can, to a large extent, obtain knowledge by simply eliciting what is in himself, apart from God [ 4 ].

Descartes is most famous for his radical scepticism which he consistently applied to find a surefire foundation for knowledge. Descartes believed that if doubted everything he possibly could, he might be able to arrive at one thing that he cannot rationally doubt (this method is called Cartesian doubt ). Descartes, therefore, started to put all beliefs, ideas, thoughts, and matters in doubt. However, he reached an endpoint where it became impossible to doubt any further: Cogito, ergo sum (I think, therefore, I am). Descartes realized that to doubt that he is doubting is self-refuting, therefore, to doubt requires that he exists.

From this starting point, Descartes believed he found a surefire foundation of knowledge within himself from which he could build his philosophy.

However, shortly after, he raises the possibility that he might have been created by a deceiver God that makes him believe what might be clear to him but is actually patently false. He then proceeds to argue for the existence of God. According to Descartes, he has an idea of an infinite being in his mind. And since, “there must be at least as much reality in the efficient and total cause as in the effect of that cause” [ 5 ], he writes, content that represents infinity requires an infinite being as its cause. Moreover, an infinite being must be a perfect being, and a perfect being is not a deceiver “it is manifest by the natural light that all fraud and deception depend on some defect” [ 6 ].

In short, notice how Descartes moves from ideas and knowledge he has in himself that is "simply his", to the idea that God exists and how God must be like based on these principles.

Van Til does not go easy on Descartes. He writes, "Whichever way we may interpret Descartes, he is thoroughly antitheistic. To conceive of the individual human consciousness as the ultimate starting point on which conclusions are to be based with respect to universal laws makes man instead of God the source of law. On the other hand, to start with a general law such as “whatever thinks exists,” without asking whether such a law exists by itself or is dependent upon God for its existence, does not give that originality to God without which no true theism can exist." [ 7 ]

And so we see that like Plato, so Descartes negates the Creator-creature creature distinction from the outset and begs the question against the Christian answer to the problem of knowledge.

Descartes' conception of innate knowledge is based on the idea of human autonomy and self-sufficiency.

Christian innate knowledge

Our starting point, following Van Til who followed Bavinck, is to say that there has never been and cannot be a natural theology. “In one word,” says Bavinck, “there is not one religious or ethical truth which is recognized ubique, semper et ab omnibus [that is, always everywhere and by everyone. Universally accepted, agreed upon, or practised]; we cannot speak of a natural theology any more than we can speak of natural jurisprudence or a natural morality.” [ 8 ]

Thus, Christians and non-Christians are not agreed (when their principles are consistently worked out) with regard to a certain thought content when it comes to God.

For example, in a recent interview with Elon Musk, the Babylon Bee asked him about his religious beliefs. In passing, he mentioned that he does believe in God, and then clarified that he believes in Spinoza's God [ 9 ]. Is the God of Christianity the same as Spinoza's conception of God, Descartes' conception of God, Plato's conception of God, or Aristotle's conception of God? No . So when we together with these men say that we believe in God , it simply means that we are agreed upon in our formal statement of what they say about God (e.g. that He is the supreme being). But, it does not mean that we've placed the same connotation on the meaning of God , and supreme [ 10 ].

What it does mean, then, is no more than the fact that God’s general revelation within man persists in cropping up in spite of all that the sinner can do to keep it under. It is in spite of himself that man must recognize something of the revelation of God within him. This is his sense of religion [ 11 ].

The boy with measles

Van Til illustrates his point by alluding to a boy that has measles. In children, measles is a relatively serious illness if left untreated (especially in Van Til's day).

Suppose a boy has the measles. They are first internal, and the boy feels uncomfortable. He feels that there is something wrong with him; he feels “cranky.” In short, he is abnormal. He insists, however, that he is feeling fine; that he is quite normal. Then the measles begin to appear on the skin, and he can see them for himself; yet he insists that there is nothing wrong with him. At last he reluctantly admits that he is not top-notch, and that he is not interested in football for the afternoon

Van Til, An Introduction to Systematic Theology

We first note that the boy was ill. He feels uncomfortable, knowing that something must be wrong with him. Yet, despite this, he insists that he is fine despite the abnormal feeling the measles is causing in his body. Even when he is able to see the measles appearing on his skin, he keeps insisting that he is fine. The illustration ends with the boy admitting the is not top-notch, and not interested in football.

The boy's admission when the illustration ends is not a victory for the boy's mother or the doctor. The boy needs serious medical attention.

Like the boy refuses to acknowledge the measles despite the constant and involuntary surges within his own body that something is wrong. His admission at the end is evidence that something is wrong, but even this is still a suppression of the truth and itself a part of the evidence that something is wrong that is not being admitted openly.

In some analogous way, the natural (non-Christian) man feels that there is something wrong with his interpretations of life. Involuntarily there surges up within his consciousness the pressure of the testimony of the Spirit to the existence of God. He does his best to suppress this testimony; he seeks a psychological explanation for it. If he is highly sophisticated and educated, he may succeed to a large extent in searing his conscience with a hot iron. If not highly sophisticated, he may express agreement with the idea that there is a God in a formal fashion; he may do the works of the law, and so seek to ease his conscience. But he will always be “persecuted” with the testimony of the Spirit to the revelation of God within him [ 12 ] .

Christian innate knowledge defined

Once we presuppose the Creator-creature distinction, it by implication means that there is no sphere of creation where it is not dependent on God for its meaning or its existence. As Calvin says, the consciousness of man and the consciousness of God is involved in each other. The former is completely dependent on the latter.

The principle at work when defining the Christian concept of innate knowledge is that it must be defined within the context of a Christian theistic universe. We should at all points be conscious of the Creator-creature distinction (i.e. the absolute God, and the absolutely dependent creation). The fundamental question is whether the mind of man should ever have been thought of in separation from the mind of God (like in the case of Plato, Descartes, and the entire history of non-Christian philosophy)? How can the human mind know anything about any of the facts of the universe if these facts as well as the mind itself are not related upon the basis of a more fundamental unity in the plan of God [ 13 ]?

We should, therefore, speak of the innate knowledge of God in man as the revelational thought-content that arises with man's self-consciousness, inasmuch as man's own constitution is revelational of God (this follows from the creation doctrine) [ 14 ]. It is a God-given activity within man that needs to feed upon factual material which is itself the manifestation of the self-contained plan of God [ 15 ].

Man, being a dependent creature in all spheres of his existence has no place within his consciousness where he can escape the revelation of God. Every aspect of his being and consciousness is dependent on God. There are no inner workings of our being and consciousness that fall outside the scope of God's act of creation. Hence, the Christian concept of innate knowledge should itself be seen within the broader context of the Creator-creature distinction and is itself a revelational activity of God in man. No human autonomy can be allowed.

Note, however, that Van Til also believed the innate knowledge of God (in the Christian sense) feeds on the factual material of the world (e.g. the objects of experience). This immediately leads us to investigate the acquired knowledge of God ( Cognitio Dei Acquisita ).

Christian acquired knowledge

The acquired knowledge of God would refer more specifically to the knowledge of God as gained from contemplating creation (natural theology in a qualified sense).

Another school of philosophers who opposed Plato and Descartes is known as the empiricists . The empiricists believed the mind of man to be a tabula rasa (blank slate), that needs impressions from experience to imprint on it. All knowledge is therefore acquired knowledge .

However, the mind of man cannot be a blank slate. The mind of man as created by God cannot be a tabula rasa . When Adam first opened his eyes, he immediately reacted in an ethical way to the revelation of God (either responding in covenantal obedience or disobedience). The situation has not changed but has become more complicated with the entrance of sin: Now we can only respond with disobedience if left to our own devices.

If the mind was a tabula rasa , it would mean that the response would be neutral, which lends itself to the idea of God's revelation being something that needs independent verification before it can be believed, which breaks the Creator-creature distinction.

Hence, thinking back to the idea of the innate knowledge of God for a moment, we cannot make the mistake to think of it as the mere ability/potential to see God's revelation if and when it comes. The human consciousness is (as discussed in the previous section) itself revelational of God and his plan.

So, with respect to the acquired knowledge of God, we note that the Christian knows he would interpret nature wrongly, due to the sin that is within him, unless he is enlightened by Scripture and guided by the Holy Spirit. Hence, the Christian cannot refer to "two independent sources" (i.e. nature and Scripture) when he makes a general interpretation of life. Rather, the Christian should look at nature through the lens of Scripture [ 16 ].

In this way, the innate and the acquired knowledge of God may be said to be involved in one another. Neither of them is intelligent by itself. To say that innate knowledge is intelligible by itself is to fall back upon a Cartesian (like Descartes) or Platonic basis. To say that the acquired knowledge is intelligible by itself is to fall back upon non-Christian empiricism. Innate knowledge and acquired knowledge are mutually interdependent [ 17 ].

Interdependence of innate and acquired knowledge

Only if first we presuppose God and therefore think of all created reality, including the self-consciousness of man, as revelational of God can we think truly of both innate and acquired knowledge. Van Til called them limiting concepts of each other. It is not our purpose here to discuss Van Til's idea of limiting concepts (you can read more about it here ), but in a nutshell, it means the following: A limiting concept for Van Til is one that needs another if it is to be properly understood. It implies a complementarity. It is something that should never be employed by itself. Two limiting concepts are seen as implying each other.

On the one hand, if we say that innate knowledge is intelligible by itself, it means that it is "simply ours". It would mean that we can first identify ourselves in terms of ourselves and what we discover in our being, and from this identify God as well. This breaks down the Creator-creature distinction. There is nothing in man that is not dependent on the Creator for its existence or meaning. Christian innate ideas, following Calvin, are simply based on the idea that man is created in the image of God. It is for this reason that Van Til insists that innate knowledge is a revelational thought content: To avoid the idea that's based on the autonomy of the human mind.

On the other hand, if go to the other extreme and say that the acquired knowledge is intelligible by itself apart from innate knowledge in the sense that nature is something known independently of God from which we can then reason to a God of whom we don't know, we can only end with a finite deity. This also breaks down the Creator-creature distinction. In the same sense, therefore, Van Til argues that the acquired knowledge of God reveals the same God and can only properly be seen if it is seen as the creative work of the self-contained God also revealed in the constitution of man.

In both, the above cases the ruling assumption is that man is his own ultimate starting point. Rather, God is the ultimate starting point and we are merely the proximate starting points. Negating ourselves as ultimate, we ought to see the innate knowledge of God as a revelational activity on the part of God, revealing Himself to us in our very constitution as we are dependent on our Creator for every breath, thought and intuition we might take or have. We also ought to see nature as dependent on this same God. The same God reveals Himself in our constitution, reveals Himself in the facts that surround us ( outside ourselves).

Following Calvin, the Christian concept of innate knowledge is based upon the idea of man’s creation in the image of God. And as such, it is correlative to the idea of revelation to man mediated through the facts of his environment which are also created by God [ 18 ].

God witnessed to us through every fact of the universe from the beginning of time. No rational creature can escape this witness. It is the witness of the triune God whose face is before men everywhere and all the time. Even the lost in the hereafter cannot escape the revelation of God. God made man a rational-moral creature. Man will always be that.

As such man is confronted with God.

Man is addressed by God.

Man exists in the relationship of covenant interaction.

Man is a covenant being.

To not know God, man would have to destroy himself. He cannot do this.

There is no non-being into which man can slip in order to escape God's face and voice. The mountains will not cover him; Hades will not hide him.

Nothing can prevent man's being confronted "with Him with whom we have to do."

Whenever a man sees himself, he sees himself confronted with God [ 19 ].

[1] Rationalism vs. Empiricism (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy). 2022. Rationalism vs. Empiricism (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy). [ONLINE] Available at: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/rationalism-empiricism/#:~:text=The%20Innate%20Knowledge%20thesis%20asserts,either%20experience%20or%20intuition%2Fdeduction. . [Accessed 01 April 2022].

[2] Cornelius Van Til, An Introduction to Systematic Theology (The Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Company: Phillipsburg, NJ, 1979), 195.

[3] Plato (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy). 2022. Plato (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy). [ONLINE] Available at: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/plato/ . [Accessed 07 April 2022].

[4] Cornelius Van Til, An Introduction to Systematic Theology (The Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Company: Phillipsburg, NJ, 1979), 195.

[5] René Descartes (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy). 2022. René Descartes (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy). [ONLINE] Available at: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/descartes/#PhiDev . [Accessed 07 April 2022].

[6] René Descartes (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy). 2022. René Descartes (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy). [ONLINE] Available at: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/descartes/#PhiDev . [Accessed 07 April 2022].

[7] Cornelius Van Til, A Survey of Christian Epistemology (The Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Company: Phillipsburg, NJ, 1969), 104.

[8] Cornelius Van Til, An Introduction to Systematic Theology (The Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Company: Phillipsburg, NJ, 1979), 194.

[9] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jvGnw1sHh9M

[10] Cornelius Van Til, An Introduction to Systematic Theology (The Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Company: Phillipsburg, NJ, 1979), 194.

[13] Cornelius Van Til, A Survey of Christian Epistemology (The Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Company: Phillipsburg, NJ, 1969), 108.

[14] Cornelius Van Til, An Introduction to Systematic Theology (The Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Company: Phillipsburg, NJ, 1979), 194.

[15] Cornelius Van Til and Eric H. Sigward, The Articles of Cornelius Van Til , Electronic ed. (Labels Army Company: New York, 1997).

[16] Cornelius Van Til, An Introduction to Systematic Theology (The Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Company: Phillipsburg, NJ, 1979), 197.

[18] Cornelius Van Til, The Defense of the Faith. (The Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Company: Philadelphia, 1955), 152.

[19] Cornelius Van Til, The Defense of the Faith. (The Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Company: Philadelphia, 1955), 152–153.

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• March 21, 2016

Romans 1 and Man’s Knowledge of God: A Response to Fred Butler

By Adam Tucker,

A few weeks ago I had the pleasure of participating in a cordial dialog with Fred Butler, of Grace to You Ministries, on the merits of classical vs. presuppositional apologetics. The original discussion can be found here .

I wish to briefly respond to Fred’s comments and hopefully clear up a few misconceptions and misunderstandings. First, it is interesting that the post begins with a poisoning the well/begging the question fallacy as Fred classifies his brand of presuppositional apologetics (as opposed to my classical apologetics) as “what [he] like[s] to call biblical apologetics.” [1] Of course, that is the very thing in question. Merely labeling one’s position as the “biblical” position from the outset is not an argument, and as our two hour dialog demonstrated, we both consider our differing views as the “biblical” view (in the sense that it is in line with what Scripture reveals about man’s knowledge of God).

Fred’s main contention in the post is that I insist “man’s knowledge of God is mediate [known via sensible reality], whereas [Fred] believe[s] it is immediate [known in some innate sense].” Commenting on thesis 22 of the 24 Thomistic Theses, Fred says, “The commentator seems to suggest that human intellect can only gain knowledge about material things, or things that are experienced with our senses. That would then exclude spiritual things because they are not perceived by our senses, or so I guess.” And Fred would guess correctly in a certain respect but not in another.

Given the kind of being man is, we gain knowledge about reality, at least initially, by sensing, and forming judgements about, sensible things. Thus, we do not have the divine essence of God as something we can directly know. That does not mean, however, that we are incapable of knowing truths about spiritual things, including the existence and nature of God. As Etienne Gilson says, “The human mind cannot have God as its natural and proper object. As a creature, it is directly proportioned only to created being, so much so that instead of being able to deduce the existence of things from God, it must, on the contrary, of necessity rest on things in order to ascend to God.” [2]

In other words, just as the Scriptures attest (cf., John 1:18, 6:46; 1 Tim. 6:16; 1 John 4:12), we do not have direct knowledge of the divine essence. We reason from effect to cause resulting in finite, but true, knowledge of God via things (1 Cor. 13:12). That finite knowledge of God provides us the tools with which we are able to accurately understand what God has further revealed about Himself via the special revelation we call the Bible. As Frederick Wilhelmsen says, “I do not know God’s Being [or the Divine Nature in itself] as a result of having demonstrated that He is; all I know is the being-true of the proposition which states that ‘God is’ (emphasis mine).” [3] And from this knowledge we can reason to many of the classical attributes of God and how to properly understand God’s self-revelation.

The fact that we reason in this effect-to-cause type manner should be obvious to anyone with children. Even Fred has eluded to this in his other writings and in our discussion. Children do not come out of the womb knowing that the trinitarian God of the Bible exists. They come out of the womb sensing things, and, given that they have human natures, their intellects are capable of being written upon in certain ways so that they can know things, learn about the world around them, and reason to the truth of immaterial realities.

Fred disagrees and says, “I believe man’s knowledge of God is immediate and by intuition.…[The unbeliever] already knows God exists.” He then attempts to use Paul’s words in Rom. 1:18-20 to support his assertion. Fred says, “Notice the word “within” [in Rom. 1:19]. What is known about God is evident within them. That is knowledge internally known, not experienced and learned over time. Notice it further states the reason they know about God is the fact God has made it evident to them. He actively created man with that knowledge (emphasis in original).” I would argue this is a classic example of eisegesis, or reading a view into a text rather than extracting the meaning from the text.

There is no reason to conclude from the English phrase “within them” that Paul is talking about innate (or preprogrammed if you will) knowledge of God. As much as Fred chides those holding my view (built as it is from the thinking of Thomas Aquinas and thus from Aristotle) for adopting “pagan Greek philosophy,” Fred is espousing a view of innate knowledge that would be right at home in the writings of Plato and Enlightenment philosophy. [4] That does not make his view wrong. It simply illustrates how philosophy informs one’s theology, and it must, which is precisely why good philosophy is critical for doing good theology. For more on the problems with innate knowledge and how it leads to a troubling representational epistemology (i.e. how man knows things), I refer the reader to here .

The very next verse tells us, “For His invisible attributes, that is, His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen since the creation of the world, being understood through what He has made” (Rom. 1:20). Paul essentially says that we can argue from effect to cause (via sensible reality) and reason to God’s “invisible attributes, eternal power, and divine nature.” There is no reference here to innate knowledge of God. Fred is reading that into the text based on his particular views of epistemology. In fact, the word used for God making His existence evident via creation is the same word Jesus used in John 17:6 when He said, “I have revealed Your name to the men You gave Me from the world.” Jesus obviously taught these men, performed miracles as signs for these men, etc. and did not reference some innate knowledge of Himself these men were supposed to have. Furthermore, we see an appeal to creation as it relates to knowing God’s existence and nature in many places throughout Scripture (cf., Ps. 19:1-4; Acts 14:16-17, 17:24-29). We also see this demonstrated with the plagues God sent on Pharaoh, the fire on the mountain called down by Elijah, and elsewhere when God performed signs (i.e. effects) that resulted in people concluding the cause was the one true God (there were no appeals to innate knowledge).

Once again we see certain philosophical and theological positions pushing Fred towards eisegesis rather than exegesis. These misunderstandings continue to fuel his other incorrect assumptions that conclude his blog post. The above should suffice to show that given what Fred has argued thus far, there is no reason to conclude that man has some innate or “immediate” knowledge of God. That is not to say that everyone will believe in God because they have studied the arguments of Thomas Aquinas or anyone else. They may simply blindly believe or believe because a trusted authority taught them to believe. They may even believe the right things about God for very bad reasons! Even Aquinas acknowledges that most people do not believe on the basis of argument and investigation. That does not mean, however, that one cannot believe in God’s existence on the basis of argument and investigation or that argument and investigation are never needed because man has innate knowledge.

Moreover, it does no good to repeatedly say “man already knows God exists.” For this conversation, it it is irrelevant whether, how much, and for what reason man suppresses his knowledge of God. The question here is how does man know God’s existence and nature? As we have seen, philosophy and Scripture confirm that man knows God’s existence and nature via sensible reality. And much like many today need reasoning and argument to remind them of the things every person is naturally able to know via abstraction from their interaction with physical reality, like the law of noncontradiction for example, many also need reasoning and argument to show them that the existence of God (including most of the classical attributes like eternality, omnipotence, goodness, etc.) is necessarily true given the evident fact that any part of sensible reality exists.

NOTE: For a good discussion between two classical apologists on the Romans 1 passage see here  and  here .

http://percolate.blogtalkradio.com/offsiteplayer?hostId=206845&episodeId=8323697

1. The poisoning the well fallacy occurs when one attempts to influence in a negative way how the audience perceives one’s opponent prior to any argumentation. The begging the question fallacy occurs when one assumes one’s conclusion from the outset or as a premise in an argument as opposed to the conclusion of a valid argument.

2. Etienne Gilson. Methodical Realism (Kindle Locations 578-580). Ignatius Press. Kindle Edition.

3. Frederick D. Wilhelmsen. Being and Knowing: Reflections of a Thomist (Library of Conservative Thought) (Kindle Locations 4884-4885). Transaction Publishers. Kindle Edition.

4. http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/rationalism-empiricism/

5. The Holy Bible: Holman Christian Standard Version. (Nashville: Holman Bible Publishers, 2009), Ro 1:19.

6. Zodhiates, Spiros. The Complete Word Study Dictionary: New Testament . Chattanooga, TN: AMG Publishers, 2000.

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The Historical Controversies Surrounding Innateness

We are as we are and we live as we do because of the interplay of our inherent natures and the world around us. This much is uncontroversial. But one may wonder about the extent of the contributions of the two broad factors and about the nature of the interactions. This is where the innateness controversy begins. In the history of philosophy, the focus of the innateness debate has been on our intellectual lives: does our inherent nature include any ideas, concepts, categories, knowledge, principles, etc, or do we start out with blank cognitive slates ( tabulae rasae ) and get all our information and knowledge from perception? Nativists defend some variant of the first option, while Empiricists lean towards the second.

To modern ears this sounds like a straightforward empirical question that can only be addressed scientifically. But even if we grant that the philosophical controversy was to some extent premature – like Greek speculations about the ultimate constituents of the world – it is important to understand that the question loomed large in philosophy not only because of its inherent interest, but primarily because of what followed – or was thought to follow – from the competing positions. The innateness question was taken as a lynchpin in settling questions in morality, religion, epistemology, metaphysics, and so on.

A survey of the philosophical career of innateness reveals that although it is an easy doctrine to attack, it is a hard one to kill. Innateness has been in the philosophical limelight in two periods – each time flaring, and then receding. In the ancient world, it played a pivotal role in Plato’s philosophy, but was excluded from the Aristotelian system that came to dominate subsequent philosophical thinking. In the 17th and 18th century, it was revived. It played an important role in Descartes’ theory of knowledge, Locke mounted a sustained assault against it at the very beginning of his Essay, and Leibniz produced a detailed rebuttal against Locke. But the Lockean Empiricist approach carried the day, and innateness was written off as a backward and discredited view. Nineteenth century Kantianism, although potentially friendlier to innateness, left it on the sidelines as philosophically irrelevant. Recently, however, prompted by Noam Chomsky’s claims that findings in linguistics vindicate Nativism against Empiricism (see Chomsky 1965 for an early example), innateness has made a strong comeback; it is once again the subject of philosophical and scientific controversy.

1. Prehistory: Empedocles vs. Anaxagoras

2. plato (and the aristotelian tradition), 3. the rationalist deployment of nativism: descartes & leibniz, 4. empiricism and the attack on nativism: locke and hume, 5. the kantian turn, 6. the (temporary) triumph of anti-nativism, 7. conclusion: choosing sides, primary sources, secondary sources, other internet resources, related entries.

Even before the competing positions on innateness were delineated, reflective thinkers were drawn to one or the other pole of the controversy. We can already see a precursor of the debate in the opposing theories of knowledge of the pre-Socratic philosophers Empedocles and Anaxagoras.

The poetic Empedocles, who speculated that reality is the product of ever-recurring cycles of Love and Strife, held that sensation, perception, and even wisdom, is a matter of knowing “like by like”. [ 1 ] His rival Anaxagoras held that “perception is by opposites”. [ 2 ] One way to read these obscure fragments is to see them as emblematic of two different ways of thinking about the mind. For Empedocles, the mind is made for the world. Mind grasps reality because it is pre-tuned to the world and resonates with it. For Anaxagoras, the world has to impress itself upon us; to shape our unformed minds into its form. This image of the world ‘informing’ the knower becomes the tabula rasa of 17 th century Empiricism. But there is another connection. Empedocles, with his cycles of Love and Strife, is unabashedly speculative. Anaxagoras, on the other hand, comes down to us as “dry, clear-headed, …[having a] common sense attitude”. This difference in intellectual personality is reflected in the subsequent debate. Empedocles would be very much at home with the Nativistic Rationalist philosophers and their “rather dreamlike vision of the universe”, as Bernard Williams has put it. The British Empiricists are more likely to share Anaxagoras’ commonsensical impatience with such flights of fancy.

One last parallel worth noting while we have these early figures in view is the very radical nature of Empedocles’ Nativism. The fragment can be read as saying that all our modes of understanding are somehow mirrored in our makeup. Despite their very different philosophical commitments and interests, ancient, modern, and contemporary Nativists are all drawn to this totalistic version of the doctrine. It is not so much that they all defend this radical position, but they are all at least attracted to it. The prevailing thought is that something about the nature of concepts (ideas, knowledge etc.) per se pushes us to the Nativist position.

As with most philosophical matters, Plato is the first in the Western tradition to address the innateness question directly and to work out some of its broader implications. The issue first comes up in the Meno, where he puts forth the doctrine of anamnesis , which holds that all learning is recollection, that everything we will ever learn is already in us before we are taught. [ 3 ] According to this view, perception and inquiry remind us of what is innate in us. In the dialogue, Socrates supports this view by showing that by simply asking an uneducated slave the right questions, the slave can ‘discover for himself’ a version of the Pythagorean theorem. Socrates does not elaborate the anamnesis claim as much as we would like. Among other things, it is not clear what counts as knowledge in this context, what exactly is innate, or how the innate interacts with perception and/or inquiry to give rise to knowledge. Still, Nativists have treated the slave-episode in the Meno as a touchstone for their view (‘Platonism’ has at different times referred to the innateness doctrine). Apart from the interpretive problems just noted, the Meno has never been treated as a significant defense of Nativism, because it is too easy to doubt Socrates’ claim that the slave has not been told the solution. Skeptics see Socrates’ ‘questioning’ as really implicitly feeding the slave the right answers. The upshot is that the demonstration has remained famous as a pedagogical tour de force , but not as a compelling defense for the doctrine of recollection.

In the later dialogue Phaedo, Socrates argues that the notion of equality involved in perceiving a pair of sticks as equal could not have its source in experience and therefore must be innate. [ 4 ] Here the focus is not on knowledge per se , but on concept-application, and Plato introduces the theory of forms as part of his explanation: we have an innate grasp of the form Equality, and this (grasp of the) form is somehow involved in our perceiving sticks as equal. Here again the case is less than compelling for at least two reasons: first, it is hard to pin down exactly how the equality argument is supposed to go, and second, we are still not sure about the content of Plato’s theory of forms.

Despite the weaknesses in the arguments, Plato’s discussions begin to put key Nativist pieces into play. One could argue, following Whitehead’s famous remark, that all the key elements in subsequent Nativist theorizing are anticipated in Plato. Especially important is (i) the form of argument (now termed the poverty of the stimulus argument ): some x must be innate because of the inadequacy of sensory experience, and (ii) the focus on mathematical knowledge and concepts.

Though the innateness doctrine is, strictly speaking, an hypothesis about cognitive development, it is attractive to Plato because of its deeper metaphysical and methodological consequences. In the Meno, innateness solves what is sometimes termed the paradox of inquiry. The paradox: inquiry into the nature of x only makes sense if we don’t know the nature of x , and we have a way to determine if a candidate account of x ’s nature is correct . But if we don’t know the nature of x , how are we supposed to determine whether a solution is correct? Plato’s anamnesis solution sees inquiry as a kind of deep memory recall. The right answer to our question is already within us. Inquiry, when successful, reminds us of that answer, in the same way that we are reminded of the name that goes with a face. Once the name is consciously brought to mind, we (somehow) know we have it. In this way, innateness provides a rationale for Socrates’ philosophical practice. We once grasped the transcendent Ideas that represent the real nature of things. The trace of that earlier understanding remains in our souls, waiting to be awakened by inquiry. So it makes sense to embark on a philosophical search for the nature of Truth, Justice, Piety, Courage, and so on.

Given innateness, Socrates ultimately arrives at a doctrine of pre-existence – that there is a stage of our existence, before this life, in which we came by our knowledge – and he goes on to use pre-existence in an argument for the immortality of the soul. This connection between innateness and immortality prompts Socrates’ deathbed discussion of innateness in the Phaedo, where the topic of discussion is the immateriality and immortality of the soul. Plato seems to be aware that the connection between Nativism and immortality is tenuous, but the purported tie will haunt (or edify, depending on one’s perspective) Nativism as it evolves in the modern period.

Plato is the ur-Nativist, so one might have expected Aristotle to be the ur-Empiricist. They do disagree on innateness, but assigning Aristotle a place in the innateness controversy is complicated. Aristotelian thinking rejects Platonic Nativism, in large part because it rejects Plato’s poverty of the stimulus argument. The key here is the Aristotelian rejection of the theory of transcendent forms. For Aristotelians, the form of a thing is not a transcendent reality that the thing strives for and fails to reach, but is rather part and parcel of the thing itself. Material things are forms embodied in matter. For Aristotle, our grasp of the nature or form of things is based in perception, which he understands as a process in which the form of things – the sensible as well as the intelligible form – is conveyed to the mind (and the matter left behind). [ 5 ] So there is no poverty of the stimulus to motivate the Nativist account. Variations on this anti-Nativist approach dominated European thought for two millennia, and Aristotle’s more down-to-earth and less-speculative approach to philosophy is reflected in 17 th and 18 th century Empiricism. But it would obscure too many differences – especially in their views of perception and reason – to put Aristotle at the head of the Empiricist line.

Intelligibility is at the heart of the revival of the innateness doctrine in the modern period. From the very start of the Western tradition, it has been widely accepted that we not only sense the world, but that we also make sense of it; that it is not only sensible but also intelligible . Platonism explains intelligibility in terms of the innate forms that we are reminded of by sense-experience. Aristotelianism explains intelligibility in terms of a richer theory of perception – viz., it holds that we receive the intelligible nature of things from the things themselves. The scientific revolution of the 17 th century, with its stress on the distinction between primary and secondary qualities and its materialist conception of the physical world, undercut the Aristotelian view of perception completely. The problem can be illustrated with the new account of vision. What happens when we see, according to the new scientific picture, is that light bouncing off an object carries a pattern of motion to the eye. These motions cause motions in the brain, and (somehow) conscious visual experience results. How can we explain the richness of our conception of the world given that only motions reach the sense organs? There seems to be no natural way to incorporate the transmission of Aristotelian intelligible forms into this account, so the problem of intelligibility returns. In the Second Meditation, Descartes exposes this gap between what the senses receive and what the mind knows and understands. Considering a piece of wax, which presents itself to us as a contingent set of actual and possible sensory images, he asks how we come to understand it in the way scientists must – as an inherently colorless, odorless, persistent object with an underlying nature that is subject to mathematical laws? The answer, for Descartes, is that we all have an abstract, non-sensory idea of a physical object. Sense-perception makes it possible for us to ‘fill out’ this abstract idea with the contingent details of our actual situation. But intelligibility, our most general understanding of the world – of physical objects, of space, of causality, of God, and so on – is grounded in these abstract ideas. But where do these general abstract ideas come from, given the ‘poverty’ of sense? Nativism now seems an attractive answer. We must come into the world pre-loaded with the categories (concepts, principles, general ideas, etc) that will enable us to make sense of what we actually see, hear, etc. Reason can mine this innate endowment to arrive at an apriori understanding of things.

One can see the concept of innateness at work behind the scenes in Descartes’ wax argument, but that passage is designed more to rid us of the idea that our deepest understanding of things comes from the senses than to defend innateness. It is in working out the implications of the wax discussion that we arrive at an innate abstract concept of spatial extension. Innateness is also at work, but again behind the scenes, in the central argument of the Meditations that takes us from the fact that we have an idea of God to the existence of God outside the mind. This (innate) idea of an infinite being (God’s ‘signature’ in us his creatures, as Descartes has it) is what makes it possible for us to know that there is a world beyond our thoughts and that our thoughts are not systematically mistaken. But in the discussion in Meditation III, Descartes again does not feature the concept of innateness – when and how we’ve come by our idea of God is less to the point than that we have it and could not have constructed it from our thoughts about our own mind. What’s more, that argument takes as a given a causal principle to the effect that the cause of an idea must have at least as great a ‘degree of formal reality’ (read: reality) as the ‘objective reality’ (read: the degree of reality of the object/content) of the idea. The principle is arcane, and it’s hard to imagine how Descartes could have explained its availability to the Meditator except by claiming that it rests on a clear and distinct insight into the nature of causality, which would presumably have to be given innately. In both these arguments, as in most of his main works, Descartes does not address the concept of innateness head-on (the outburst in his Notes Directed Against a Certain Program, which includes a defense of the radical view that all our ideas are innate, is the most notable exception). Part of the problem might be that it is not easy to integrate the claim that there are innate ideas or principles with Descartes’ identification of mind and consciousness. What is innate is in the mind prior to experience. He suggests at one point that ideas may be in the mind innately in the way that gout may run in a family. To the extent that this is read as a propensity theory, it will come in for heavy criticism in the Empiricist attack on innateness.

Leibniz, the other important Rationalist defender of innateness, elaborates the theory in a number of important ways in his New Essays on Human Understanding. He famously challenges Locke’s analogy of the mind as blank slate with a competing image of the mind as a block of marble whose veins already mark out the shape of Hercules (52). A more significant point is his sharpening of the poverty of the stimulus claim. He argues that our experience of the world is always of contingent particulars, but our knowledge can be general, and sometimes necessary (50). Going back to the Meno example, the slave can see that the squares Socrates has scratched out in the dirt stand in a certain relation, but he ends up knowing that such a connection must hold of any possible set of squares that meets Socrates’ initial description; that it holds – to use a phrase Leibniz introduced – in all possible worlds . Leibniz argues that rationality must involve more than induction from contingent experience. It must ultimately rely on innate ideas and principles that allow us to grasp not just how things happen to be, but also why they must be that way.

Leibniz also addresses the question of how the innateness doctrine needs to be integrated into a broader epistemology and theory of mind. Among his most important contributions in this area: (i) the defense of unconscious mental states (53), (ii) the suggestion that not all of our innate endowment needs to be realized as (unconscious) ideas and thoughts, but might instead be ‘procedural’ – inborn ways of thinking and reasoning (84), (iii) a clear distinction between something’s being innate in us and its being known innately, and (iv) the provocative idea, also hinted at in Descartes, that our innate endowment is not simply a grab-bag of elements that God thought it would be good for us to start out with, but is in some way a systematic reflection of our nature – for example, the fact that we are substances and can reflect on our natures somehow provides us with the innate idea of substance (as Leibniz has it: we are “innate to ourselves” (51–2)). Leibniz, like Plato, saw the innateness issue as being the most important point of disagreement between himself and Locke, and perhaps as the central issue in philosophy. He suspected that Locke’s anti-Nativism was an indirect attack on the immaterial soul and therefore a challenge to the idea of the afterlife and immortality, and therefore a challenge to religion, to ethics, and to public order.

Finally, we note that there are really two distinct but related Leibnizian philosophies. The foregoing represents Leibniz’s attempt to ‘mainstream’ his thought and contribute to the broader 17 th century controversy over science, epistemology, and innateness. But there is another Leibniz that we find in his more speculative, more Empedoclean, metaphysical writings, particularly the Monadology. Leibniz’ goal there is presciently like the work of contemporary string theorists – i.e., to look behind the scientific picture and lay out the still-deeper ontological and metaphysical nature of reality. The relevant point for us is that the ultimate simple elements in this system – the individual ‘monads’ – contain representations of the world beyond themselves, but these representations are not caused by the world. For Leibniz, world-to-mind causality is only an appearance. The reality is that each monad contains, as part of its essential nature, a preloaded set of representations of the world. The sequential ‘unfolding’ or ‘playing out’ of these representations can be thought of, in the case of minds, as a stream of consciousness. But the monads do not interact; instead, the streams are coordinated by a pre-established divine harmony (Leibniz’s analogy is a pair of synchronized clocks). The upshot of all this is that we arrive (again) at the radical conclusion that all thought and experience is innate. There can be no external origin for a mental element in Leibniz’s monadology, and the same can be said for the metaphysics of Spinoza, the third of the great Rationalists.

The three Nativist thinkers we have so-far discussed also happen to be Rationalists; that is, they all hold that Reason allows us to go beyond experience and to arrive at a more profound grasp of the world. There is a natural affinity between Nativism and Rationalism, but it needs to be stressed that despite the tendency to identify the two, they are different. Nativism is about the initial conditions of our mental life. Rationalism is about the character of what we can know. Nativism is a supporting element in these larger Rationalist philosophies. But this raises a question that perceptive critics of 17 th century Rationalism asked – viz., even if it were granted that there are innate concepts and principles, how can they support Rationalism unless we know independently that they are correct? Otherwise, we have no warrant to hold that these innate materials reveal the ultimate nature of the world (let alone all possible worlds). It is tempting to think that the 17 th century response would be to add the premise that such innate ideas and principles are God-given, and God would not deceive us. But this reply is inadequate. First, it is hard to avoid the charge of circularity, but second, it is also dogmatic about God’s plans. How do we know, as one critic put it, that the (purported) innate materials we start with are not meant to be burnt away by experience, in the manner of the natural wild growth of soil before it is cultivated?

As it happens, the Rationalist can resist the temptation to invoke God, and avoid the dead-end to which it leads. For Descartes, the presence in us of innate materials is of course a contingent fact, but the warrant for the deeper truths we derive from what is innate does not involve any premises about their origin. It is because we have innate ideas that we can think of mind and extension in the abstract way we do. But the principle that matter (extension) cannot think is an a priori truth (according to Descartes) because we see clearly and distinctly that it is holds. Clarity-and-distinctness as a criterion of truth raises its own difficulties, but the difficulties are not the obvious and devastating ones raised above. Once we disentangle Nativism from Rationalism, we can look back and identify the non-Nativist Rationalist elements in Aristotle, and see Rationalist elements in the Empiricist and arch anti-Nativist Locke. Both present us with forms of Rationalism without Nativism. By the same light, contemporary nativists inspired by Chomsky’s Linguistic Nativism are emphatically anti-Rationalist. [ 6 ]

The modern debate about innateness really begins with Locke’s polemic against innate principles and innate ideas in the opening chapters of his Essay Concerning Human Understanding, which happens to also be the founding document of modern Empiricism. The point of the polemic is to delegitimize innateness as a candidate explanation of our knowledge and understanding, and to thereby leave the field to the Empiricist account that is developed in the rest of the Essay. The thrust of Locke’s arguments is two-fold: first, that the facts Nativists cite in favor of their views are not facts at all; second, that even if the facts were granted for the sake of argument, Empiricist accounts are preferable, because they are simpler. The simplicity resides in the fact that both parties accept a role for experience in knowledge acquisition. Empiricists presume there is only experience; Nativists think there is experience plus innate principles and ideas. If we can account for knowledge without innate ideas, principles, and so on, the Empiricist wins. Given the logic of the situation as Locke understands it, the whole polemical negative attack on innateness is almost beside the point. The real epistemological prize he is after can only be won by providing a satisfactory positive innateness-free account of how knowledge is produced from experience. But Locke is probably right in thinking that his Empiricist doctrines will be more convincing if there is no Nativist alternative to challenge them.

Why, according to Locke, is Nativism not only unnecessary but illegitimate? One prominent theme is that if there were innate principles in the mind – his example is Whatsoever is, is – we would be aware of them, and they would therefore be universally assented to. But, he argues, children and idiots cannot even make sense of such claims, let alone assent to them. He goes on to argue that various fallback positions – assent when they understand, assent when they begin to reason, capacity to assent under appropriate conditions – all reduce the claim to a sort of triviality. The upshot is that innateness is either a real alternative to Empiricism but obviously false, or trivially true but not incompatible with Empiricism.

Underlying much of Locke’s attack is the Cartesian view that to claim something is ‘in the mind’, innately or not, is to give it a place in our conscious awareness. Leibniz’s bold hypothesis of non-conscious mental states would, if successful, sweep aside most of Locke’s arguments against innateness. But we need to keep in mind that the polemics in the Essay, though they were historically influential, are almost a sideshow. The real issue is whether the Empiricist can construct a satisfactory account of human knowledge without adverting to any innate ideas and principles. To meet this challenge, Locke (and to an even greater extent Hume) offered what may be termed adequacy of the stimulus counterarguments. Locke constructs a theory of experience (perception and reflection) as the source of all our ideas, sketches an account of the mental faculties that can be brought to bear on these ideas, and applies these materials to our ideas of infinity, number, space, substance, our understanding of general principles of causality, and so on. These were the abstract ideas and principles that Rationalists had claimed could not be derived from perceptual experience. Locke wants to demonstrate that such ideas and principles can be acquired without the need for any innate ‘pre-seeding’. Locke believes that the key to intelligibility and understanding lies in a proper appreciation of what our faculty of Reason can accomplish when set to work on the ideas received in our experience.

In considering Locke’s execution of this plan in the Essay we discover a trend that grows stronger in subsequent Empiricist thinkers like Hume and his 19 th and 20 th century successors. One can be easily misled into thinking that there was a general agreement on both sides of this controversy about the explanandum : we can call that our understanding, or simply the intelligibility of the world. The innateness controversy would then be about which theory can provide the best explanation of this agreed-upon ‘Understanding’. But this positivistic paradigm of the dynamics of theory-selection does not fit the real debate. A Kuhnian perspective is closer to the truth. Empiricists inevitably reconfigured the explanandum – some elements of the original explanandum were to be (better) explained by the Empiricist account, but a good deal of it was to be explained away as Rationalist over-reaching. Our earlier example of Descartes’ a priori claim that matter cannot think is a case in point. Locke’s system was criticized for not being able to exclude the possibility of thinking matter. But for Locke, that possibility was not excludable, despite Descartes’ clear and distinct perception to the contrary. So Locke does not accept the explanatory burden of providing an Empiricist account of how it is that the Understanding grasps the falsity of materialism and the truth of dualism. Our knowledge of the world does not extend as far as the Rationalist thinks, and the true explanatory burden is therefore lighter than the Rationalist makes it out to be. This pattern of explaining away reaches its culmination in Hume, who sees more clearly than Locke that the fact that the mind can make the world intelligible is itself a philosophical presumption that needs to be explained away. Hume replaces it with a naturalistic account of how we track the way the world appears to us, and collate the results to guide us in the future. Our understanding of the world, in Hume’s philosophy, is thinned out into something the Rationalists would not count as Understanding at all; his conception of human reason is, appropriately enough, a pale shadow of their Reason.

The doctrinally pure(r) Empiricism that we find in Hume also contains a surprising twist for the innateness doctrine. The alternative to innateness, at least in Locke’s shorthand form, is that ideas come via the senses from the world outside us. But it can be argued that Hume’s Empiricism has no room for thinking of a world outside us, and certainly not for ideas as copies of properties of things or as caused by things in that world (a point also stressed by the other prominent British Empiricist, Bishop Berkeley). Hume, perhaps a bit tongue-in-cheek, tells us that the innateness debate is totally wrong-headed and that as he sees it, all our impressions are innate , in that they are original to the mind. [ 7 ] Along these lines, one can argue that for Hume, innateness is a red herring. What matters to Empiricism is not the history of ideas in the mind and the before or after, but the nature of those ideas. Specifically, what’s foundationally important for Humean Empiricism is not anti-Nativism, but what we might call experientialism , the thesis that all our ideas are representations of particular sensory states . We can summarize this and say they must be ‘copies of experiences’, but for Hume, it has no philosophical import if we one day learn how to tinker with a fetus to produce in its mind an ‘innate’ representation of the taste of chocolate. What counts is that the idea produced be experiential in the right sense. For Hume we will never be able to tinker away to produce an abstract idea of causal power, because there is no such idea – all ideas are experiential or constructs of such. (These points, I think, can explain why Hume is so cavalier about the famous missing shade of blue that seems to not be copied from experience – i.e., because it is still an experiential idea.) [ 8 ]

Kant is usually given short shrift in discussions of the history of the Nativism-Empiricism controversy. He is certainly not an Empiricist; he sees his philosophy as a response to the challenge of Humean Empiricism. Nevertheless, he is critical of Rationalist versions of the Innateness doctrine at every turn. In my view, Kant is a Nativist. [ 9 ] The reason for the anomalies is that he is much more than a Nativist, and assigns a very different role to what is innate in us than the role assigned by his Rationalist predecessors.

The ‘more’ here is Kant’s distinctive approach to metaphysics and epistemology; his Transcendental Idealism. Hume had argued that since knowledge is based on experience, our knowledge of the world could not go beyond registering and mining regularities in that experience. The prospect of what Kant called synthetic a priori knowledge – of an understanding of the necessary structuring principles of reality – was beyond us. Kant takes it as a given that we have such knowledge and sets out to construct a system that explains how such knowledge is possible. His response to Hume’s challenge is to argue that the distinctive structure of experience is a function of our nature. We impose regularities. If these regularities are recognized as our contribution, and we understand the structuring principles that are at work, we can make sense of the actuality of synthetic apriori knowledge. But the price we pay is that this is knowledge of the world of appearances , not about things as they are in themselves.

Kant divides these ordering principles into the Forms of Sensible Intuition and the Categories. Space and Time are pre-experiential ordering principles that give us sense experience of a spatial and temporal world. The Categories play a parallel role for the understanding. Through the category of Causality , for example, we impose causal structure on the events that we perceive. This imposed structure allows us to move from the subjectivity of successive sensations to experience of an objective world. Consider an analogy: the pixel structure of every picture that a digital camera takes is the result of an ordering principle imposed on every photograph by the nature of the camera. The pixel structure of the representations does not capture a feature of the camera-independent reality. Similarly, the spatiotemporality and categorical structure of our experience is not a feature of a mind-independent reality.

Kant’s main complaint against Rationalist Nativism was that it accepted that the innate had to correspond to an independent reality, but it could not explain how we could establish such a correspondence or use it to account for the full range of our knowledge. In this, it failed to meet Hume’s challenge. [ 10 ] Kant finds the position guilty of a number of related fatal errors.

• Warrant . How can we establish that innate principles are true of the world? In the Prolegomena he criticizes the Innateness doctrine of his contemporary Crusius because even if a benevolent non-deceiving God was the source of the innate principles, we have no way to reliably determine which candidate principles are innate and which may pass as such (for some). [ 11 ]
• Psychologism . At times Kant seems to suggest that the psychologism of Rationalist Nativism is itself a problem and makes it impossible to explain how we can get knowledge of objective necessary connections (as opposed to subjective necessities). [ 12 ]
• Modal concepts . Callanan 2013 reads Kant as offering a Hume-style argument that Rationalist Nativism cannot explain how we could come to have a concept of objective necessity, if all we had were innate psychological principles.

The root problem of Rationalist Nativism, as seen through the lens of Kant’s Transcendental Idealism, is that it needs to say more than that something – a framework of concepts, ideas, principles, etc. – is innate in us. It needs to say that it is only in us . It must acknowledge that we create the structure that we find in our experience. The problems of Rationalist Nativism all arise from trying to get from the mind’s structuring to the world’s inherent structure. Once we drop the idea that we are aiming for the world’s inherent, mind-independent structure, the problems (should) dissolve.

From Plato until Kant, Nativism was supposed to serve Realism. Whatever the vision of reality was – Forms for Plato, matter and mind for Descartes, etc. – our grasp of that reality was possible because we were provided with a map to that reality before we set out. Kant rejects the Realist aspirations of this tradition. For him, we can never understand the ultimate nature of things as they are in themselves. Our theoretical knowledge can only go as deep as the structure we impose. The only necessity we can grasp is the one we have spontaneously made.

We’ve discussed Kant’s main complaint about the Nativist tradition, at least as a reply to the Empiricist challenge. But he also argues that we have no innate representations of Space, of Time, of Causality, or of any of the ordering principles we impose apriori (Zoeller 1989). To return to our earlier analogy: the initial state of the camera includes no pictures/representations of the innate abstract pixel structure that the camera imposes. But unlike the camera, we can acquire representations of these ordering constraints – these Kant terms ‘pure apriori ideas’ of Space, of Time, of Causality, of Substance, and so on. These pure apriori ideas play a crucial role in our understanding of how knowledge of mathematics and metaphysics and natural science is possible. In this respect Kant agrees with Locke that there are no innate principles or ideas to be ‘found’ in us. Both hold that all our ideas have their origin in experience. But Locke thinks that we build these ideas by abstracting from experience and recombining abstracted elements. Kant holds that such representations or ideas cannot be abstracted from experience; they must be the product of careful reflection on the nature of experience. [ 13 ]

The camera analogy can help highlight an important shift. Imagine that our camera is damaged and its resolution in part of the screen is diminished. This newly acquired constraint will be reflected in every subsequent photo, and this low-resolution element would be an ‘apriori’ feature of each photo: it would be a contribution of the representational structure of the camera, not of the scene. The point is that the key feature of Kant’s framework elements is the role they play in structuring experience, not whether they are present as part of the initial condition. In principle, acquired changes could play this role. [ 14 ] In this respect, Kant shifted the epistemological focus away from genetic questions of origins to questions about sources of warrant . It could be argued that this shift moved innateness to the periphery of philosophical concern until its 20 th century revival.

In terms of the historical contest, Empiricism emerged triumphant, and as inevitably happens in such victories, anti-Nativism triumphed over Nativism. The doctrine of innate ideas came to be seen as backward and unscientific, as inextricably tied to discredited metaphysical and theological doctrines, and as therefore incompatible with a naturalistic approach to human nature. Empiricism developed very much along Humean lines (and with Anaxagoras’ anti-speculative hard-headedness). The 20 th century Logical Positivists and Logical Empiricists agreed with Hume that we have no a priori knowledge about the intelligible structure of the world. [ 15 ] A priori knowledge is only possible in the formal sciences, and this is so only because such knowledge is ultimately about the structure of our concepts and/or our language. Others, following Quine, have gone a step further and followed John Stuart Mill’s lead in rejecting all claims to knowledge of apriori necessary truths. For Quine, only our sensory evidence ultimately warrants the claim that 2+2=4. [ 16 ] On both views, once we get straight about the true nature and extent of our knowledge, Nativism turns out to be an unnecessary extravagance.

Even without its 17 th century metaphysical and theological ‘baggage’, the Nativist view, and the entire controversy surrounding it, came to be seen as born in conceptual confusion about the proper task of a theory of knowledge. Real philosophical questions are about the nature of our ideas and about the structure and justification of our knowledge. Nativism deflects attention from these issues, and distracts us with empirical claims about the genesis of ideas and beliefs. Kantianism, the main 19 th century alternative to the Empiricist project, presses many of these ideas. The modern scientific temperament was influenced by both these approaches, and eventually to be identified with Empiricism. We learn about the world only from our perceptual encounter with it; nothing is revealed to us beforehand. So innateness was triply condemned: it was born of superstitious religious thinking, it is empirically false, and it is philosophically beside the point.

Although the battleground for the historical controversy over innateness was epistemology, if we take one step back we see the Rationalist defense of the doctrine as part of a broader set of metaphysical, theological, and ethical commitments. Different Nativists would highlight different elements, but the underlying picture of human nature that emerges from the Nativist side of the historical debate is something like this. We human beings, distinct from all other created things, are not fully of this material world. We are guided in our thought and action by a special gift from our creator, who has seen fit to implant in our souls the deeper truth of the nature of the world, and special guidance about how we are to act in it. We must discover this inner truth, and adhere to it in the face of the often-distracting course of our experience.

Looking at Locke as the voice for the other side of the controversy, we find a very different set of motivations. Nativism makes understanding seem too much like inherited wealth. It suggests that without our innate legacy we would not have the resources to understand the world we live in. To this extent, Nativism stands against the ethos of individual initiative. It can also be too easily abused as a tool of intellectual authoritarianism, because those who are not up to the task of uncovering these rarified innate truths must take their lead from those who are. For the Empiricist this is an invitation to superstition, obscurity, and abuse. The Empiricist does not see our understanding as in any way given to us as a gift. It is the product of our individual labor. God has given all of us the general ability to reason, and this includes the ability to acquire knowledge from experience; it is our job to exercise that ability. We fully own our knowledge: we collect the raw materials and add our mental labor to create it. Locke is more drawn to the dignity of the worker than to the status of the aristocrat who has received a special inherited honor.

The factors that drove Locke’s rejection of Nativism ultimately led, in no small part through Hume’s philosophy, to the now-dominant naturalistic picture of human beings. On this picture we humans are material beings continuous with the rest of the natural world, we have no divine element in our nature and no divine guidance to help us along, and no recourse but to build our understanding of our world on our experience. But I close with two points about these developments. The first has to do with Locke, our arch anti-Nativist, and it is that he would have been horrified at what his Empiricism has wrought. The underlying Rationalist picture I sketched two paragraphs back is a picture that Locke would, with some small reservations, have accepted. He was a dualist and a theist, he believed in an afterlife, and he saw our god-given faculty of Reason as capable of discovering the most important truths about our world and our lives – i.e., the existence of God and the nature of our moral duties. The second point is that even though our contemporary naturalism was inspired by anti-Nativist Empiricism, it has seen a revival of Nativist thinking. The turning point in this revival, Chomsky’s work in linguistics, is an area set apart from the concerns that energized the historical controversy over innateness. [ 17 ] But contemporary research in cognitive development, genetics, evolutionary psychology, and other fields has extended Chomsky’s Nativist thinking to the very concepts and principles that were at the heart of the historical debate (god, morality, personhood/mind, causality, mathematics, basic ontology, etc.).

• Aristotle, De Anima , in The Complete Works of Aristotle , J. Barnes (ed.), Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984.
• Ayer, A.J., 1936, “The A Priori ”, ch. 4 of Language Truth & Logic , London: Victor Gollancz Ltd, 1950.
• Chomsky, N., 1965, Aspects of a Theory of Syntax , Cambridge: The MIT Press.
• –––, 1966, Cartesian Linguistics: A Chapter in the History of Rationalist Thought , New York: Harper & Row.
• –––, 1975, Reflections on Language , New York: Pantheon.
• Descartes, R., 1641, “Meditations on First Philosophy,” in Haldane and Ross (eds.), The Philosophical Works of Descartes , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1911.
• –––, 1647, “Notes Directed Against a Certain Program”, in Haldane and Ross (eds.), The Philosophical Works of Descartes , Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1911.
• Hume, D., 1739, A Treatise of Human Nature , L.A. Selby-Bigge (ed.), Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978.
• –––, 1748, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding , Beauchamp (ed.), Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999.
• Kant, I. [TPa], Theoretical Philosophy, 1755–1770 , D. Walford (ed. and trans.), in collaboration with R. Meerbote, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992.
• ––– [TPb], Theoretical Philosophy after 1781 , H. Allison and P. Heath (eds.), G.Hatfield, M. Friedman, H. Allison and P. Heath (trans.), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.
• Kirk, G.S. & Raven, J.E., 1957, The Presocratic Philosophers , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Kuhn, T.S., 1970, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions , 2nd edition, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, esp. ch X.
• Leibniz, G.W., 1704, New Essays on Human Understanding , P. Remnant and J. Bennett (trans. and eds.), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981.
• –––, 1714, “Monadology”, in G.W. Leibniz: Philosophical Texts , R.S. Woolhouse and R. Francks (trans. and eds.), Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998.
• Locke, J., 1690, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding , P.H. Nidditch (ed.), Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975.
• Plato, Meno , in The Collected Dialogues , Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (eds.), Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961.
• –––, Phaedo , in The Collected Dialogues , Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (eds.), Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961.
• Quine, W.V.O., 1951, “Two Dogmas of Empiricism,” in From a Logical Point of View , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
• Adams, R. M., 1975, “Where Do Our Ideas Come From? – Descartes vs. Locke,” in Stich (1975).
• Beiser, F., 2002, German Idealism: The Struggle Against Subjectivism , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press
• Broughton, J. & Carriero, J. (eds.), 2010, A Companion to Descartes , Malden: Blackwell.
• Callanan, J., 2013, “Kant on Nativism, Scepticism and Necessity,” Kantian Review , 18: 1–27.
• De Pierris, G., 1987, “Kant and Innatis,” Pacific Philosophical Quarterly , 68: 285–305.
• De Rosa, R., 2004, “Locke’s Essay, Book I : The Question-Begging Status of the Anti-Nativist Arguments,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research , 69(1): 37–64.
• Falkenstein, L., 1990, “Was Kant a Nativist?” Journal of the History of Ideas , 51: 573–97.
• Gorham, G., 2002, “Descartes on the Innateness of All Ideas,” Canadian Journal of Philosophy , 32(3): 355–88.
• Harris, John, 1974, “Leibniz and Locke on Innate Ideas,” Ratio , 16: 226–42; reprinted in Locke on Human Understanding , I. C. Tipton (ed.), Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977.
• Jolley, N., 1987, Leibniz and Locke: A Study of the New Essays on Human Understanding , Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987. (Analysis of Leibniz’s response to Locke, with attention to the connection between Leibnizian doctrines and modern discussions.)
• Kemp Smith, N., 1999, Commentary to Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason , New York: Humanity Books.
• Kitcher, P., 1990, Kant’s Transcendental Psychology , Oxford: Oxford University Press
• Nelson, A., 2010, “Cartesian Innateness,” in Broughton & Carriero 2010, pp. 319–333.
• Newman, L. (ed.), 2007, The Cambridge Companion to Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Rickless, S.C., 2007, “Locke’s Polemic Against Nativism,” in Newman 2007, pp. 33–66.
• Schmaltz, T., 1997, “Descartes on Innate Ideas, Sensation, and Scholasticism: The Response to Regius,” in Stewart 1997, pp. 33–74.
• Scott, D., 1995, Recollection and Experience , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (An analysis of Plato’s doctrine of recollection; also traces the development of the innateness doctrine in the ancient world, and compares the ancient sources to the positions taken in the modern period.)
• Stewart, M. A., 1997, Studies in Seventeenth-Century European Philosophy , Oxford: Clarendon Press.
• Stich, S. (ed.), 1975, Innate Ideas , Berkeley: University of California Press. (Includes relevant sections of Plato’s Meno, the Locke-Leibniz debate, and Adams’ interpretive paper on the modern debate on innateness; see below. The papers in the last section represent the first wave of philosophical responses to the Chomskyan Nativist program in linguistics.)
• Vanzo, A., 2018, “Leibniz on Innate Ideas and Kant on the Origin of the Categories,” Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie , 100(1): 19–45.
• Wall, G., 1974, “Locke’s Attack on Innate Knowledge,” Philosophy , 49: 414–19; reprinted in Locke on Human Understanding , I. C. Tipton (ed.), Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977.
• Wendler, D., 1996, “Locke’s Acceptance of Innate Concepts,” Australasian Journal of Philosophy , 74(3): 467–483.
• Winkler, K., 1993, “Grades of Cartesian Innateness,” British Journal for the History of Philosophy , 1: 23–44.
• Zoeller, G., 1989, “From Innate to ‘A Priori’: Kant’s Radical Transformation of a Cartesian-Leibnizian Legacy,” The Monist (Kant’s Critical Philosophy), 72(2): 222–235.

How to cite this entry . Preview the PDF version of this entry at the Friends of the SEP Society . Look up topics and thinkers related to this entry at the Internet Philosophy Ontology Project (InPhO). Enhanced bibliography for this entry at PhilPapers , with links to its database.

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concepts | Descartes, René | Descartes, René: epistemology | Descartes, René: theory of ideas | Hume, David | innateness: and contemporary theories of cognition | innateness: and language | Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm | Locke, John | Plato: middle period metaphysics and epistemology | rationalism vs. empiricism

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Do humans have innate knowledge?

For millennia a key philosophical debate is to whether human beings have innate knowledge and ideas or not. An innate idea is said to be something that we is universally acknowledged and that we are born with. However the idea of innate knowledge actually seems quite bizarre, since the very definition of knowledge is skills or ideas that are acquired through experience of education, therefore it can be argued strongly that knowledge is acquired after birth not before. One of the earliest backers of the idea of innate knowledge was Plato, he believed that a person’s soul is ever-present both after and before birth. His theory was that of an ideal realm. In the ideal realm, we are said to have encountered the perfect archetype of every form of knowledge, then through the trauma of childbirth we forget all the knowledge but it is recovered through education. This theory has been widely dismissed by later philosophers and replaced or improved. People who are in unison with innate knowledge are called rationalists and those who disagree, empiricists. I hold a slight rationalist point of view.

One of the most famous rationalist philosopher whom argued for innate ideas, was Descartes. Unlike others Descartes defines knowledge in terms of doubt. He argued that to be comfortable with a posteriori knowledge alone we have to have complete faith in our senses, which unfortunately we cannot have. This can be understand using the analogy of a building. Think of a building and the foundations of which it is built on, if the foundations are damaged or structurally weak then the safety of the building is at risk. This can be compared to a person’s knowledge. The building itself represents a person’s knowledge which is based on the senses as foundations. The only way that the building can be safe is if the foundations are impossible to doubt which Descartes argues they are not. He laid out his argument in three waves of doubt which cover illusions, dreams and an evil demon controlling your brain. When something is far away to the human eye it looks small, this is an illusion proving that our senses can deceive us, likewise when we are dreaming we take it as real life. He further argued this point using his wax argument. If a person was presented was presented with solid wax and watched it melt into liquid form, unless they watched the transformation the person would not be able to make the connection between the solid and the liquid wax form, they may even identify them as two different substances, showing that we cannot trust our senses. However of course we do have to trust our senses to an extent as so we could acknowledge the transformation. Among the ideas Descartes took to be innate were the existence of the self, “cogito ergo sum” meaning I think, therefore I am, the existence of God, and some logical propositions like, from nothing comes nothing. Descartes argued that the only thing that we can be completely sure of is our selves. If we were not real, we couldn’t think and by thinking we prove our existence.

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John Locke was a key opponent of Descartes and rationalism. He argued that if certain ideas were innate they would be universally held and used, which is not the case. As throughout history attitudes and what is generally excepted have changed continuously. Even in today’s society our ideas will be very different to those of people who live in very remote places. Therefore it must be our experiences that make us who we are and not innate knowledge. A child bought up in a mountain tribe will quickly adapt to their surroundings and become experienced at survival, whilst a child born into the aristocracies of the English will not. This is Locke’s “Tabula Rasa” argument, meaning blank slate. Our minds are empty at birth to be filled with knowledge fed to us through education and experience. Locke also argued that there are two sources of our ideas which are sensation and reflection. A distinction is made between simple and complex ideas. The former are undisputable, and are broken down into primary and secondary qualities. Primary qualities are essential for the object in question to be what it is. Without specific primary qualities, an object would not be what it is. Primary qualities are those that convey fact such as motion and solidity. Whereas secondary are those that are thought to bring about properties that produce sensations in observers, such as colour, taste, smell, and sound. Locke also argued that if we were born with an understanding of everything or at least some things then even the most dim-witted person would have the ability to understand things such as geometry, which unfortunately they don’t.

Per contra to John Locke’s belief was another rationalist, a philosopher of the modern day, Noam Chomsky. As well as being a philosopher he is a linguist and is often regarded as the father of modern day linguistics. His ideas on innate knowledge come from his deep understanding of language. Chomsky argues that all human languages are far too complicated for the undeveloped brain of an infant to understand and then to learn near to completion. He goes on further to say that there is simply a “poverty of stimulus” meaning that grammar is unlearnable given the relatively limited data available to children learning a language, and therefore that this knowledge is supplemented with some sort of innate linguistic capacity. Chomsky has maintained that much of this knowledge is innate, implying that children need only learn certain parochial features of their native languages and are assisted by LAD’s, which are metaphorical language acquisition devices in our brains. Based on Chomsky’s ideas many experiments went ahead, to test if other intelligent animals who are thought not to have access to innate knowledge could also pick up language. The experimenters tried to communicate with animals using very simplified language that the animals could be able to physically do, the experiment was not a complete failure and did have limited success. A famous grey parrot named Alex learned 150 words and could put pairs of words together to identify up to 50 objects, chimpanzees have also learnt sign language to an extent. However no species except us have been able to master all different concepts of language. This shouldn’t be since a dolphins IQ is far higher than that of an infant. So the main limitation of language in animals lies in their inability to form abstract symbol vocabulary which they can then subject to manipulation, reorganisation into meaningful patterns. The capacity of humans to systematically turn conceptual ideas into limitlessly creative word sequences is truly unparalleled in nature. This led Chomsky to the conclusion that human beings unlike all other animals must have been gifted with innate knowledge. On the other hand, many do not agree with Chomsky and his linguistically theories, as they believe that he has not taken all factors in to account. Some may say that Chomsky’s statement that children are faced with poverty of stimulus s whimsical and completely false. As unlike the minds of adults, the minds of children are not cluttered. Non-cluttered minds, or as John Locke argued brain with a blank slate, can take more input and absorb it quickly. This may be the reason that children can pick up language so fast without a language acquisition device. Therefore language can be picked up purely from sensory experience rather that from innate ideas of language.

In conclusion, even though rationalism has one more entity, in innate knowledge that exists therefore going against Occam's Razor whom believed that the simplest explanation is the correct one, I believe in a rationalist point of view. As from a young age humans are capable of extraordinary things such as the mastery of a language which may not be possible without innate ideas of language. Furthermore our five sense of which empiricists rely cannot give us a sense of right and wrong or morality in general. This knowledge must be built in before birth. Finally our knowledge of perfection, whether in nature or perfect triangularity has not come from our experience for we have never seen two completely straight lines, yet we can still identify what two perfectly straight lines would look like. This is where my opinion of innateness comes from, or maybe it was always there…

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