tellville
Puritan Board Junior
Vincent Cheung has posted a blog entry against Van Tillian apologetics.
http://www.vincentcheung.com/2006/11/01/students-in-the-real-world-3-3/
The second kind of apologetics is presuppositionalism. This approach refuses to assume unbiblical first principles as the starting point and make the case for the faith on that basis. Instead, presuppositionalism debates these first principles as well as the very idea of first principles, and commends divine revelation as the necessary foundation for all thought and knowledge, showing how it authenticates itself and destroys all opposing views.
This approach is vastly superior to evidentialism. It engages the unbeliever on a whole other level. Since evidentialism stands on an irrational foundation, the best that the Christian can do with it is to show that he is less irrational and that the non-Christian is more irrational. But it cannot provide positive information about anything or justification for any claim. If it is used at all, its function is negative and its result is partial. On the other hand, presuppositionalism reaches the very foundation of rationality and knowledge, and the principles and contents of necessary truths.
However, before we continue, we must make the distinction between pseudo-presuppositionalism and biblical presuppositionalism. This is because there is a school of thought that calls itself presuppositional apologetics, but in reality it begins from non-biblical presuppositions, so that it possesses none of the advantages that apply to true presuppositional apologetics.
Pseudo-presuppositionalism affirms that many of the intellectual tools that the unbelievers use are indeed rationally sound, including sensation, intuition, induction, and science. However, two problems arise when they use them. First, although these intellectual tools reliably perform their expected function, the unbelievers cannot account for them, and cannot provide rational justification for them. Second, without divine revelation to provide the controlling intellectual principles or presuppositions, the unbelievers will misuse these tools, so that they will permit and produce false conclusions.
There are in turn two fatal problems with pseudo-presuppositionalism.
First, its adherents embrace intellectual tools and ideas that are inherently irrational, so that even if they first hold to divine revelation as their foundation, they still cannot justify or account for them. Thus it remains that these tools and ideas will permit and produce false conclusion no matter what. And it follows that to introduce them into their worldview is to poison the entire system.
For example, while confronting the unbelievers and even the evidentialists, they marshal all kinds of arguments against the certainty of empirical investigations. Although they do not say that sensations cannot provide knowledge at all, they do insist that the unbelievers cannot account for their reliance on their sensations, and that their sensations at least sometimes deceive them.
But after they have asserted divine revelation as the necessary precondition for all knowledge, they never proceed to offer a precise demonstration on how it accounts for a reliance on sensations or the belief that our sensations provide a basically reliable way to obtain knowledge. They simply assert that it is so, and at times they would even throw around several biblical passages that they claim to support their view without actually showing their relevance or showing that they indeed prove what they claim that they prove. They likewise fail to account for or justify intuition, induction, and science, among other things.
Second, not only do they fail just as miserably as the unbelievers in justifying or accounting for their reliance on sensation, intuition, induction, and science, they even admit that these irrational ways of knowing and reasoning are necessary in order to discover the contents of divine revelation. In other words, although they claim that it is revelation that accounts for, say, our sensations, our sensations are what allow us to access revelation in the first place.
The result is not just one vicious circle disintegrating into a mess of confusion and nonsense, but worse than that, they have placed themselves in the exact position of the unbelievers – they make themselves and their own human investigation the center and precondition of all knowledge. They explicitly place revelation under sensation, intuition, induction, and science. And many ways, this is even worse than even an explicitly anti-Christian philosophy that has enough sense to question irrational epistemologies.
It is futile to assert that this system of thought consists of a web of belief rather than a self-destructive circle. The idea is only plausible if sensation can indeed access revelation, and if at the same time revelation indeed affirms the reliability of sensation. Since they cannot demonstration the latter, the former remains unaccounted for and unjustified. Thus there is no self-sustaining or self-justifying "web" at all, since the various points within this so-called web is in fact hostile against one another.
Therefore, pseudo-presuppositionalism presents a mere smokescreen against the unbelievers — its confusion is its only strength. And it leaves as its legacy one of the greatest embarrassments in the history of Christian thought. To our disappointment, this is also the predominant school of presuppositionalism. It makes strong claims and it has numerous followers, but in reality it makes the Christian faith no less vulnerable than any other irrational worldview, since its very foundation is anti-Christian irrationalism.
It makes a presuppositional critique of evidentialism, but in the end it makes the very principles of evidentialism its own epistemological starting point. It thrives on the willingness of believers to think that they are submitting all their thoughts to Christ without truly questioning their commitment to anti-biblical principles. Like evidentialism, it is unbiblical, irrational, impractical, and also hypocritical. However, as with evidentialism, there are indeed more than enough irrational and gullible unbelievers in this world for it to attain some measure of success. In addition, the great confusion that it generates can often cause unbelievers to hesitate before realizing that the whole approach is nothing more than self-contradictory nonsense.
And here is Vincent Cheung continuing, presenting reasons for his position.
http://www.vincentcheung.com/2006/11/02/students-in-the-real-world-3-4/
So we reject not only evidentialism, but also counterfeit presuppositionalism. Instead, we turn to embrace a biblical presuppositionalism – the approach that truly affirms revelation as the only foundation for rationality and knowledge. This approach can be aptly designated by several terms, each emphasizing a different aspect of it. To distinguish it from pseudo-presuppositionalism, names such as biblical foundationalism and biblical rationalism are preferred.
Christians tend to recoil from anything that comes under the label "rationalism," but here we are using the word in a literal sense and not its historical or popular sense. Some forms of rationalism claim to grasp truth by "reason" alone, and reject revelation from the beginning. This is, of course, not what we mean by rationalism in this context. Both Christians and non-Christians have invested the word with so much extra meaning that it seldom stands for mere rationality, but it is usually burdened with false assumptions about epistemology.
Thus by "reason" alone, some people include the idea of using intuition to obtain the needed premises, but they have no justification for doing this. It is also popular to identify reason with the use of sensation and science. This is why some people complain that I abandon reason when I reject science as a rational way of knowing anything about reality, although I do so precisely because science fails to stand up under the simplest logical analysis. It is because Christians have also accepted this loaded concept of reason that they avoid putting too much emphasis on it, for fear that they would exalt man's powers over divine revelation. However, this concern is unnecessary once we unload the extra baggage that has been attached to reason.
Now, the first definition in Merriam-Webster for "rationalism" reads, "reliance on reason as the basis for establishment of religious truth." And its second definition for "reason" says, "the power of comprehending, inferring, or thinking especially in orderly rational ways." There is nothing in either of these definitions that requires us to reject revelation from the start.
Then, since God's mind is perfectly rational, and since his revelation is perfectly rational, this means anything that contradicts divine revelation is irrational. From this perspective, there is nothing wrong with outright identifying revelation with reason – that is, revelation is reason with content. In fact, instead of adopting one of the traditional positions – faith against reason, faith and reason, faith above reason, and so on – we take the biblical position that faith is reason. To avoid confusion, "reason" can refer to logically valid thinking without referring to content, and "Reason" can refer to reason with content, that is, the self-disclosure of the mind of God, or Christ the Logos.
The confusion over the word "reason" partly comes from the fact that reason or logic itself is without content. By itself, logic cannot proceed anywhere or reach any conclusion, but one must feed it with premises to begin the thinking process. And this in turn requires an epistemology, a way of knowing these premises. Perhaps because of this, people have come to identify their favored epistemological principle with reason itself. However, if the epistemology is itself faulty – that is, if it supplies false premises, or has no way of justifying its premises – then logic will only lead the thinker from one error to another.
On the one hand, biblical rationalism places a greater emphasis on reason than any other system of thought. And on the other hand, its sole reliance on Scripture as its source for true premises means that no stronger emphasis on revelation is possible. Beginning from God's infallible revelation, it proceeds to deduce one's entire belief system, to defend this belief system, and to refute all non-Christian religions and philosophies. It refuses to rely on intuition and sensation in its epistemology, because they cannot yield true premises needed for rational thought. And it refuses to accept conclusions reached by inductive and scientific reasoning, because these are logically invalid methods of processing information.
Since biblical rationalism merely processes and applies divine revelation, it remains simple and flexible, in that it is at the same time a system of theology, philosophy, and apologetics. Unlike pseudo-presuppositionalism, because it practices a true reliance on divine revelation, and revelation is infallible, biblical rationalism itself is true, coherent, and invincible in intellectual conflicts. And because it pays attention to its own basic principles and those of others, it deals a death blow to the unbeliever's system of thought in every argument it advances and every answer it supplies. At every turn, it strikes hard at the foundation of the non-Christian's thinking. Again and again, it exposes his intellectual futility and moral depravity. And at any point in the conversation, it is able to present the light of God's revelation through Jesus Christ.
The non-Christian appeals to his own way of knowing, claiming that he has information that gives him a way out. Instead of saying that the unbeliever merely cannot account for this information, or that although his way of knowing might be reliable, the information is somehow wrong, biblical apologetics destroys all of this nonsense and destroys all that he depends on, all at the same time, leaving him without help and without excuse, and holding out the gospel of Jesus Christ as his only hope.
Moreover, although it is always appropriate to prepare as much as possible, because its sole dependence is on revelation and rationality, the biblical apologist can enter into any debate against any person fully assured of his own victory, even without first knowing what kind of person he is debating, or what kind of arguments and objections will be brought up.
That said, because the biblical apologist understands the true nature of false epistemology and invalid reasoning, he can freely select from the whole range of classical and evidential arguments in the course of debate. He does not rely on them to prove his own case, but only to show that the unbeliever is defeated even if his non-biblical principles are allowed. In other words, he shows that the unbeliever cannot wield even his own weapons, although these weapons are powerless in the first place. And since the biblical apologist makes it clear that he employs these classical and evidential arguments to perform a negative function, they can never backfire against him.
http://www.vincentcheung.com/2006/11/01/students-in-the-real-world-3-3/
The second kind of apologetics is presuppositionalism. This approach refuses to assume unbiblical first principles as the starting point and make the case for the faith on that basis. Instead, presuppositionalism debates these first principles as well as the very idea of first principles, and commends divine revelation as the necessary foundation for all thought and knowledge, showing how it authenticates itself and destroys all opposing views.
This approach is vastly superior to evidentialism. It engages the unbeliever on a whole other level. Since evidentialism stands on an irrational foundation, the best that the Christian can do with it is to show that he is less irrational and that the non-Christian is more irrational. But it cannot provide positive information about anything or justification for any claim. If it is used at all, its function is negative and its result is partial. On the other hand, presuppositionalism reaches the very foundation of rationality and knowledge, and the principles and contents of necessary truths.
However, before we continue, we must make the distinction between pseudo-presuppositionalism and biblical presuppositionalism. This is because there is a school of thought that calls itself presuppositional apologetics, but in reality it begins from non-biblical presuppositions, so that it possesses none of the advantages that apply to true presuppositional apologetics.
Pseudo-presuppositionalism affirms that many of the intellectual tools that the unbelievers use are indeed rationally sound, including sensation, intuition, induction, and science. However, two problems arise when they use them. First, although these intellectual tools reliably perform their expected function, the unbelievers cannot account for them, and cannot provide rational justification for them. Second, without divine revelation to provide the controlling intellectual principles or presuppositions, the unbelievers will misuse these tools, so that they will permit and produce false conclusions.
There are in turn two fatal problems with pseudo-presuppositionalism.
First, its adherents embrace intellectual tools and ideas that are inherently irrational, so that even if they first hold to divine revelation as their foundation, they still cannot justify or account for them. Thus it remains that these tools and ideas will permit and produce false conclusion no matter what. And it follows that to introduce them into their worldview is to poison the entire system.
For example, while confronting the unbelievers and even the evidentialists, they marshal all kinds of arguments against the certainty of empirical investigations. Although they do not say that sensations cannot provide knowledge at all, they do insist that the unbelievers cannot account for their reliance on their sensations, and that their sensations at least sometimes deceive them.
But after they have asserted divine revelation as the necessary precondition for all knowledge, they never proceed to offer a precise demonstration on how it accounts for a reliance on sensations or the belief that our sensations provide a basically reliable way to obtain knowledge. They simply assert that it is so, and at times they would even throw around several biblical passages that they claim to support their view without actually showing their relevance or showing that they indeed prove what they claim that they prove. They likewise fail to account for or justify intuition, induction, and science, among other things.
Second, not only do they fail just as miserably as the unbelievers in justifying or accounting for their reliance on sensation, intuition, induction, and science, they even admit that these irrational ways of knowing and reasoning are necessary in order to discover the contents of divine revelation. In other words, although they claim that it is revelation that accounts for, say, our sensations, our sensations are what allow us to access revelation in the first place.
The result is not just one vicious circle disintegrating into a mess of confusion and nonsense, but worse than that, they have placed themselves in the exact position of the unbelievers – they make themselves and their own human investigation the center and precondition of all knowledge. They explicitly place revelation under sensation, intuition, induction, and science. And many ways, this is even worse than even an explicitly anti-Christian philosophy that has enough sense to question irrational epistemologies.
It is futile to assert that this system of thought consists of a web of belief rather than a self-destructive circle. The idea is only plausible if sensation can indeed access revelation, and if at the same time revelation indeed affirms the reliability of sensation. Since they cannot demonstration the latter, the former remains unaccounted for and unjustified. Thus there is no self-sustaining or self-justifying "web" at all, since the various points within this so-called web is in fact hostile against one another.
Therefore, pseudo-presuppositionalism presents a mere smokescreen against the unbelievers — its confusion is its only strength. And it leaves as its legacy one of the greatest embarrassments in the history of Christian thought. To our disappointment, this is also the predominant school of presuppositionalism. It makes strong claims and it has numerous followers, but in reality it makes the Christian faith no less vulnerable than any other irrational worldview, since its very foundation is anti-Christian irrationalism.
It makes a presuppositional critique of evidentialism, but in the end it makes the very principles of evidentialism its own epistemological starting point. It thrives on the willingness of believers to think that they are submitting all their thoughts to Christ without truly questioning their commitment to anti-biblical principles. Like evidentialism, it is unbiblical, irrational, impractical, and also hypocritical. However, as with evidentialism, there are indeed more than enough irrational and gullible unbelievers in this world for it to attain some measure of success. In addition, the great confusion that it generates can often cause unbelievers to hesitate before realizing that the whole approach is nothing more than self-contradictory nonsense.
And here is Vincent Cheung continuing, presenting reasons for his position.
http://www.vincentcheung.com/2006/11/02/students-in-the-real-world-3-4/
So we reject not only evidentialism, but also counterfeit presuppositionalism. Instead, we turn to embrace a biblical presuppositionalism – the approach that truly affirms revelation as the only foundation for rationality and knowledge. This approach can be aptly designated by several terms, each emphasizing a different aspect of it. To distinguish it from pseudo-presuppositionalism, names such as biblical foundationalism and biblical rationalism are preferred.
Christians tend to recoil from anything that comes under the label "rationalism," but here we are using the word in a literal sense and not its historical or popular sense. Some forms of rationalism claim to grasp truth by "reason" alone, and reject revelation from the beginning. This is, of course, not what we mean by rationalism in this context. Both Christians and non-Christians have invested the word with so much extra meaning that it seldom stands for mere rationality, but it is usually burdened with false assumptions about epistemology.
Thus by "reason" alone, some people include the idea of using intuition to obtain the needed premises, but they have no justification for doing this. It is also popular to identify reason with the use of sensation and science. This is why some people complain that I abandon reason when I reject science as a rational way of knowing anything about reality, although I do so precisely because science fails to stand up under the simplest logical analysis. It is because Christians have also accepted this loaded concept of reason that they avoid putting too much emphasis on it, for fear that they would exalt man's powers over divine revelation. However, this concern is unnecessary once we unload the extra baggage that has been attached to reason.
Now, the first definition in Merriam-Webster for "rationalism" reads, "reliance on reason as the basis for establishment of religious truth." And its second definition for "reason" says, "the power of comprehending, inferring, or thinking especially in orderly rational ways." There is nothing in either of these definitions that requires us to reject revelation from the start.
Then, since God's mind is perfectly rational, and since his revelation is perfectly rational, this means anything that contradicts divine revelation is irrational. From this perspective, there is nothing wrong with outright identifying revelation with reason – that is, revelation is reason with content. In fact, instead of adopting one of the traditional positions – faith against reason, faith and reason, faith above reason, and so on – we take the biblical position that faith is reason. To avoid confusion, "reason" can refer to logically valid thinking without referring to content, and "Reason" can refer to reason with content, that is, the self-disclosure of the mind of God, or Christ the Logos.
The confusion over the word "reason" partly comes from the fact that reason or logic itself is without content. By itself, logic cannot proceed anywhere or reach any conclusion, but one must feed it with premises to begin the thinking process. And this in turn requires an epistemology, a way of knowing these premises. Perhaps because of this, people have come to identify their favored epistemological principle with reason itself. However, if the epistemology is itself faulty – that is, if it supplies false premises, or has no way of justifying its premises – then logic will only lead the thinker from one error to another.
On the one hand, biblical rationalism places a greater emphasis on reason than any other system of thought. And on the other hand, its sole reliance on Scripture as its source for true premises means that no stronger emphasis on revelation is possible. Beginning from God's infallible revelation, it proceeds to deduce one's entire belief system, to defend this belief system, and to refute all non-Christian religions and philosophies. It refuses to rely on intuition and sensation in its epistemology, because they cannot yield true premises needed for rational thought. And it refuses to accept conclusions reached by inductive and scientific reasoning, because these are logically invalid methods of processing information.
Since biblical rationalism merely processes and applies divine revelation, it remains simple and flexible, in that it is at the same time a system of theology, philosophy, and apologetics. Unlike pseudo-presuppositionalism, because it practices a true reliance on divine revelation, and revelation is infallible, biblical rationalism itself is true, coherent, and invincible in intellectual conflicts. And because it pays attention to its own basic principles and those of others, it deals a death blow to the unbeliever's system of thought in every argument it advances and every answer it supplies. At every turn, it strikes hard at the foundation of the non-Christian's thinking. Again and again, it exposes his intellectual futility and moral depravity. And at any point in the conversation, it is able to present the light of God's revelation through Jesus Christ.
The non-Christian appeals to his own way of knowing, claiming that he has information that gives him a way out. Instead of saying that the unbeliever merely cannot account for this information, or that although his way of knowing might be reliable, the information is somehow wrong, biblical apologetics destroys all of this nonsense and destroys all that he depends on, all at the same time, leaving him without help and without excuse, and holding out the gospel of Jesus Christ as his only hope.
Moreover, although it is always appropriate to prepare as much as possible, because its sole dependence is on revelation and rationality, the biblical apologist can enter into any debate against any person fully assured of his own victory, even without first knowing what kind of person he is debating, or what kind of arguments and objections will be brought up.
That said, because the biblical apologist understands the true nature of false epistemology and invalid reasoning, he can freely select from the whole range of classical and evidential arguments in the course of debate. He does not rely on them to prove his own case, but only to show that the unbeliever is defeated even if his non-biblical principles are allowed. In other words, he shows that the unbeliever cannot wield even his own weapons, although these weapons are powerless in the first place. And since the biblical apologist makes it clear that he employs these classical and evidential arguments to perform a negative function, they can never backfire against him.
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