“If you are merely a sceptic, you must sooner or later ask yourself the question, ‘Why should anything go right; even observation and deduction? Why should not good logic be as misleading as bad logic? They are both movements in the brain of a bewildered ape?’ The young sceptic says, ‘I have a right to think for myself.’ But the old sceptic, the complete sceptic, says, ‘I have no right to think for myself. I have no right to think at all.’”
G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy[1]
An excellent article by James Anderson about a frequent claim of Classical apologists against the Presuppositionalist view of apologetics:
Occasionally one hears classical apologists (especially those of a Thomist persuasion) claim that presuppositionalists are guilty of “confusing ontology and epistemology” or “conf…
Source: Does Presuppositionalism Confuse Ontology and Epistemology?
Dr. Richard Howe, professor at Southern Evangelical Seminary, was interviewed in a video posted on April 9, 2020, to YouTube under the title “A Sound Refutation of Presuppositionalism with Dr. Richard Howe” (here). This is my response in defense of Presuppositionalism. (Quotes from Howe are in italics.)
Summary: Howe claims that the Presuppositional approach is fideistic, rejecting the appropriateness of giving arguments for God’s existence; but Presuppositionalists offer arguments anyway, in which case they are acting like Classical apologists. My response is that Presuppositionalists, particularly the two main ones that Howe discusses, Van Til and Bahnsen, very clearly do not reject giving arguments for God’s existence. The propriety of giving an argument for God’s existence is not the issue between the Presuppositional approach and Classical approach. Howe never shows an awareness of the real complaint of Van Til and Bahnsen against the Classical view, which is that the Aristotelian view of the Unmoved Mover, knowledge, and causality that are adopted by Aquinas is contrary to the Christian view of God, knowledge, and causality. The problem is not that Aquinas offered arguments for God’s existence, or that he appealed to causality to prove God’s existence, but that he offered faulty arguments. Continue reading
This is an excerpt from my essay “Christian Civilization is the Only Civilization – Part II: A Critique of Specific Disciplines and their Christian Reconstruction” under the topic “Civil Government and Law.”
Cornelius Van Til has said, “There is no alternative but that of theonomy and autonomy”[1] – either God’s law or man’s self-made law is the ultimate source of law for society. If man is going to act like God and make his own law, he has two basic choices: Abstract unity or abstract diversity. Modern philosophy of law reflects this in presenting the two basic choices as between natural law, claiming that law derives from abstract unity, and positivist law, claiming that law derives from abstract diversity.[2] Continue reading
This is an excerpt from my essay “Christian Civilization is the Only Civilization – Part II: A Critique of Specific Disciplines and their Christian Reconstruction” under the topic “Art.”
Defining art has been a perennial problem, but regardless of what the definition should be, regardless of whether the definition is in the form of necessary and sufficient conditions or in the form of family resemblances à la Wittgenstein, defining art is impossible in terms of non-Christian philosophy because defining anything is impossible if God does not exist. Predication is impossible if God does not exist. To define art is to impose a unifying, abstract category on a diversity of sensible phenomena. It is a matter of relating a unity to diversity. It is flatly contradictory to begin with particulars that, by hypothesis, exclude abstract universals, and then try to relate these abstract particulars to abstract universal.[1] There must be an eternal concrete universal in order for particulars and universals to be able to relate to one another. Continue reading
In the August 2019 issue of Ligonier Ministries’s magazine Tabletalk, Keith Mathison writes a lengthy essay titled “Christianity and Van Tillianism,” which is written from the perspective of Reformed Thomism in criticism of Cornelius Van Til’s apologetic program. He has republished it in PDF format at academia.edu as well. J.V. Fesko published a book earlier this year, which I reviewed here, which also criticizes Van Til from the position of Reformed Thomism. Mathison makes many of the same arguments that Fesko and other Reformed Thomists, and more broadly, Protestant Thomists, have made against Van Til. Mathison continues the legacy of R.C. Sproul, who founded Ligonier Ministries, in defending classical apologetics against Van Til’s presuppositional school. Mathison begins with a gracious introduction in which he acknowledges that Van Til was a brother in Christ, was dealing with complex issues, that neither he nor Van Til or infallible, and that we should not become mindless cheerleaders for either side. My comments here are offered in hopes of furthering a thoughtful discussion. Continue reading
J.V. Fesko argues in his book, Reforming Apologetics, that Cornelius Van Til rejects natural revelation, and that Van Til rejects the arguments of Aquinas for the existence of God because Aquinas used ideas from Aristotle, which is a use of natural revelation. In the last two posts, I have argued that Van Til rejects neither natural revelation nor Aquinas because of his appeal to natural revelation. Rather, Van Til rejects Christians relying on ideas from non-Christians that are logically inconsistent with Christianity. More specifically, Van Til argues that Aquinas failed to recognize that the oneness of Aristotle’s Unmoved Mover is a different oneness from the Triune God of Christianity. Oneness in terms of the Greek scale of being is different from the oneness in terms of the one, absolute God of Christianity. Part of Fesko’s confusion about the views of Van Til is Fesko’s claim that Van Til adopted ideas of idealist philosophers that are not consistent with biblical teaching. I will address this issue in this last installment of my review of Fesko’s book. Continue reading
So what exactly is Van Til’s beef with Aquinas? First, there is the issue of Aquinas’s claims about Aristotle contradicting the biblical teaching about man’s depravity. That a pagan like Aristotle, who, according to the Bible, hates God, suppresses natural revelation about God, and worships idols rather than the true God (Rom. 1:18-32, 8:7; Col. 1:21; Eph. 4:18), would develop and promote a rigorous proof of the existence of the true God is something that should be unexpected, if not completely ruled out of the realm of possibility. Second, Van Til argues that when Aristotle’s philosophy is closely examined, along with Aquinas’s use of that philosophy, we find teachings that are anti-Christian concerning the nature of God and the general nature of reality. To explain this, let’s start with a statement by Aquinas on the issue: “But there are some truths which the natural reason also is able to reach. Such are that God exists, that He is one, and the like. In fact, such truths about God have been proved demonstratively by the philosophers, guided by the light of the natural reason.”[1] Van Til argues that the oneness of God as conceived by Aristotle logically excludes the Christian God. Aquinas has taken a superficial similarity between the oneness of Aristotle’s Unmoved Mover and the oneness of the biblical God and has failed to realize the contradiction between how each approach understands that oneness. Continue reading
A group of crows is called a murder, a group of owls a parliament, and a group of geese a gaggle. But what do you call a group of strawmen? Reforming Apologetics by J.V. Fesko. I commend the author for a large number of citations to the works of Cornelius Van Til, his main opponent in his defense of Thomistic apologetics; nevertheless, the author’s interactions with Van Til’s writings indicate that he searched for quotes in Van Til’s writings that seemed to support his case against Van Til, but he did not closely read the immediate context of the quotes, much less have a substantial grasp Van Til’s apologetic method as a whole. One of Fesko’s main claims is that Van Til rejected “common notions” between Christians and non-Christians and other ideas related to God’s natural revelation, when in fact Van Til did not reject those ideas. Fesko fails to grasp that Van Til only criticized a particular kind of appeal to common notions made by Aquinas. The strawman argument that Van Til rejected common notions becomes the author’s basis for a factory production of other strawman arguments against Van Til, such as claiming that Van Til claimed that all knowledge comes from the Bible, claimed that all knowledge could be deduced from a single principle, denied a nature/grace distinction, and that Van Til’s argument for God’s existence does not address the correspondence of our ideas to the order of the natural world. In this supposed refutation of Van Til in defense of Aquinas, Fesko never states Van Til’s actual argument against Aquinas. Fesko also never states Van Til’s transcendental argument for the existence of God (TAG), not even in a rough outline form, so the book also fails as a general refutation of Van Til’s apologetic program. Continue reading
“Why do some Christian leaders constantly warn of God’s impending judgment? Why would a Christian believe God judges nations at all? New Testament authors along with Jesus spoke of a once-for-all final judgment .” Andy Stanley, Irresistible (91).
Why? Because the Bible says so. Jesus is “the ruler of kings on earth” (Rev. 1:5), the “the King of kings and Lord of lords” (1 Tim. 6:15). Many modern Christians would argue that these titles are given to Him prospectively – that the title reflects a role that he will take up only after the Great Tribulation. But that option is foreclosed to Pastor Stanley because he takes the view (correctly) that the Great Tribulation happened already in A.D. 70, which was when the Roman army destroyed the Temple in Jerusalem. When writing the sentence quoted above, Pastor Stanley must have forgotten what he previously affirmed in his book, that God sent judgment on Jerusalem in A.D. 70, after the resurrection of Christ. (62-65) Continue reading
