Christian Civilization

Given that all facts are interpreted facts, if the human mind were autonomous, then everything outside the human mind would be unintelligible. The human mind would be trapped in a solipsistic cage, unable to know the irrational, external world.  On the other hand, given  that all facts are interpreted facts, there can be a world of intelligible facts external to human cognition only if there is an Absolute Knower, one who has interpreted the facts of the world prior to human interpretation.   The Absolute Knower would have to be independent of the human mind, but also the source of the human mind and the particulars of sense experience in order to provide a bridge between human thinking and the facts of the external world.    Continue reading →

Materialism and the Crisis of Meaningful Existence

The beginning of the twentieth century was the best of times and the worst of times for atheism.  Science was making stupendous discoveries and technological advances faster than any time in history, and science was interpreted as a product of atheism.   Darwinism had triumphed in the highest levels of all the institutions that governed the world.  The Great War (World War I) was welcomed as an opportunity for a great evolutionary leap forward for humanity by culling the weak and allowing the fit to triumph.  Yet the scene of massive misery, destruction, and death caused by the war was revolting.  The triumph of atheism that was supposed to be a triumph for humanity forced intellectuals to confront Nietzschean nihilism.  The term “crisis” became the word of the day among academicians in Europe, which called for an existential philosophy that addressed whether human life had any meaning.  Max Scheler wrote, “In our ten-thousand year history, we are the first time period in which the human being has become fully and totally ‘problematic’; the first time period in which the human being no longer knows who he or she is, but also knows that he doesn’t know.”[1]  The machines built by science threatened to destroy the self, the spirit, the soul.

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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 →