Another Question For Christians

[Aytumious]

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You're welcome and I hope you do continue to investigate your position.

Most of my "apologetic" comes from a theologian who was well versed in idealsim and neo-Kantianism. His name was Cornelius Van Til, and if you're interested I would recommend the book on him by John Frame, An Analysis of His Thought. Bahnsen's book on Van Til is also very good. I don't agree with Van Til completely, and neither does Frame, but it's plausible that Van Til was the greatest theologian of the 20th century. Bahnsen does mostly agree with him, but he made a brilliant presentation of the most important aspects of Van Til. Van Til is certainly worth reading to get the "opposing" view.

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Interesting. I will look into it.

[NotReady]

I appreciate your honesty and I hope I reciprocate when required.

Just for clarification, I don't just assume the existence of God. Though I don't believe any first principle or presupposition can be proved conclusively (otherwise it wouldn't be a first principle), it can be tested, as I indicated earlier, by examining its internal consistency and testing it against what knowledge you do have or think you have. When that is done "objectively" I believe Christianity is at least as convincing as any other worldview. For me, it is far more convincing, but each person has to make up his own mind.

[Aytumious]

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I appreciate your honesty and I hope I reciprocate when required.

Just for clarification, I don't just assume the existence of God. Though I don't believe any first principle or presupposition can be proved conclusively (otherwise it wouldn't be a first principle), it can be tested, as I indicated earlier, by examining its internal consistency and testing it against what knowledge you do have or think you have. When that is done "objectively" I believe Christianity is at least as convincing as any other worldview. For me, it is far more convincing, but each person has to make up his own mind.

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Interestingly enough, I backed myself into the corner of arguing for the need of having valid presuppositions, which you so cleverly pointed out, despite the fact that I agree completely that absolute objectivity is basically an impossibility. I took that angle since the poster I was responding to had a science background and I assumed it would make him consider his positions a little more critically. Most of my arguments are designed to get the other person to critically examine their own positions, as opposed to truly conveying my beliefs. Since I value critical analysis above all else, this form of argumentation is not as disingenuous as it may sound.

[NotReady]

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which you so cleverly pointed out,


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I promise you I wasn't trying to be clever. Though there are several valid approaches to apologetics, all of them have at least some element of presuppositionalism.

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Most of my arguments are designed to get the other person to critically examine their own positions, as opposed to truly conveying my beliefs.

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We do have a lot in common in this regard. Van Til can be divided into two parts. One is his attempt to show difficulties with all other worldviews. The other is his attempt to show the rationality (reasonableness) of Christianity.

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although I would be interested to see how one goes from the initial position to showing that christianity is the only workable worldview.


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If you have a few years, read all of Van Til (He was incredibly prolific over a very long career). Much better as a start would be Frame's book. Frame was Van Til's star student (along with Bahnsen), and his analysis is very much on point. Van Til never wrote systematically, and both Frame and Bahnsen have helped move toward what I hope will eventually be a better organized approach. I should warn you that if you read Van Til first, depending where you start, you may give up quickly. He was often unfair in certain ways, and sometimes flat wrong. I struggled with him for years, sometmes on the point of giving up because he seemed so obviously wrong at times, even self-contradictory. Frame points this out and can save you a lot of difficulty. I think the reason Van Til went in so many directions is he was truly breaking new ground in theology while at the same time having to produce for his students. It is very easy to take things he said out of context and miss the truly insightful ideas he had.

One other word of caution. Bahnsen is well known as the author of "Theonomy" and his ideas on that subject helped form the politics of the religious right, at least to some extent. I reject the idea that Old Testament laws should be applied to New Testament politics. Van Til and Frame also rejected this thesis. I even ran across something recently that indicated Bahnsen felt theonomy could only be applied to a fully Christian state. But he was a brilliant man in many ways and his book on Van Til quotes extensively from his works, so it can be something of a shortcut to plowing through the originals.

[Aytumious]

After reading up a bit on Van Til, I must say he presents a tough nut to crack because he relies on tautology, which makes it basically impossible to argue against him logically. If one must accept that the bible is the source of truth inspired by god, and that this must be so since the bible states it and the bible states the truth, then normal argumentation becomes fairly meaningless. Would you agree that this tautology is the basic principle upon which this movement is based?

"Among all the sources of divine revelation (including nature, history, human beings in God’s image), Scripture plays a central role. Indeed, though the point cannot be argued in detail here, my view is that Scripture is the supremely authoritative, inerrant Word of God, the divinely authored, written constitution of the church of Jesus Christ. Scripture is therefore the foundational authority for all of human life including apologetics. As the ultimate authority, the very Word of God, it provides the foundational justifications for all our reasoning, without itself being subject to prior justification."

Link

[chaosuk]

I've not read this thread, just this initial post:

It appears you are saying 'I am virtually certain that God does not exist'.

I have such a statement to be both arrogant and philosophically naive.

How on earth you can be certain of the non-existance of something that is by definition beyond our physical sensory perception and our reason?

You can be certain in your belief of a thing is , but being certain of something is completely different. Descartes, knew his senses could decieve him and all phenonena experiences could not be trusted. So he concluded that the only truth was that 'I think, therefore I am'. We all have to delve into our minds to find the belief in the existence of a thing, but to find the existence of a thing requires us to go beyond our minds.

You can be certain in your belief that someone is innocent of a crime, but to be certain that the person is innocent requires an abundance of information - there are obvious poker analogies.

I'm rather of the belief 'that if God didn't exist it would be necessary to invent him' - so you might say that I'm certain we'd have religion whether God exists or not.

No matter what I believe, I could never state that I am certain God doesn't exist, since it implies that I could prove it if he does.

i.e. If God exists then this must be true.... and it isn't..

God is almost by definition beyond man's reason, no such question could be crafted.

But to be certain of my disbelief - that's easy - that's just the order of a collection of neurons.

chaos

[NotReady]

Van Til maintained that all human reasoning about ultimate matters is circular.

For instance, you said in a prior post:

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In essence I am a nihilist in regard to all of existence simply because I don't believe man, with his limited capabilities, can understand the meaning of it all. However, I am with Nietzsche in believing that man creates meaning in his own life through his actions, and quite frankly, I find it repugnant to think that anything outside myself gives my life value.


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This is loaded with assumptions and from that you make logical deductions arriving at the conclusion that the universe is absurd.

One of Van Til's strongest statements was that Christianity is the only reasonable position to hold because all other world views destroy the possibility of human predication. Existentialism is a good case in point.

Van Til also sometimes claimed his argument (nowadays referred to as TAG, Transcendental Argument for the Existence of God, not tight-aggressive) was absolutely certain proof of the truth of Christian theism. I believe this is an overstatement, as does Frame. I think a much stronger case can be made if one says "Assuming the universe has meaning, then TAG is correct". The problem is one can't prove the universe has meaning. The strength of TAG is that it's difficult to see how there can be ultimate meaning on the basis of any non-Christian presupposition. You should know this from Herr Nietzsche. I've often considered existentialism as the most honest of non-Christian philosophies. It's really just an extension of Western philosophy since Plato, the inevitable conclusion of a long, drawnout reasoning process that begins with the ultimacy of chance (yes, in essence Plato believed in ultimate irrationality, at least by implication). Begin with irrationality and end with meaninglessness. Of course, such a position is self-defeating as Van Til often noted, and very few if any people really live their lives that way.

The link you gave to Frame discusses circularity briefly and he goes into it in more detail in his book on Van Til.