Christian Civilization

Descartes and the Beginning of Secularism

René Descartes (1596-1650) can be given a great deal of the credit for initiating modern philosophy and modern atheism.  His philosophy marks, as those who endorse this philosophical change call it, the transition from the Age of Faith, or Age of Authority, to the Age of Reason.  Descartes wrote during the Protestant Reformation, when there was a crisis of religious authority prompted by the rejection of the authority of the Roman Catholic Church and its scholastic philosophy that merged Aristotelianism with Christianity.  Although Descartes was a Roman Catholic, like many in the Protestant Reformation, he sought to overthrow the intellectual dominance of Aristotelianism.  Like the Protestant scientists, he insisted that the material world could be described mathematically.  But his approach did more to encourage a search for a purely secular foundation for knowledge than promoting a Christianity free from Aristotelianism.    Rather than really being a move from faith to reason, the transition in thinking is better characterized as one from the autonomous authority of God’s rationality to the autonomous authority of Man’s rationality.   As I will defend more fully below, science had its origin in the Middle Ages, a product of the belief in the rationality of the Creator.  Yet beginning with Descartes, philosophers sought to justify scientific knowledge on more and more consistently secular grounds.    Continue reading →

“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]

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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 →

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 →