All men are without excuse, not for inviolable non-belief but for willful and intellectual unbelief. It is the truth of what is known of God that is suppressed in unrighteousness.
Unless our apologetic is informed by Scripture, the Christian apologist will operate with the same autonomous mindset of the unbeliever. In order to avoid epistemological inconsistency, the Christian apologist must adopt a Reformed understanding of man’s fallen condition as it relates to morality and intellection, and apply it to the apologetic endeavor. Once we adopt a Reformed understanding of man’s fallen condition as it relates to the human mind and moral affections, we can begin to self-consciously treat unbelievers from God’s perspective, as covenant breakers who seek to psychologically escape from their knowledge of God while denying they know him in conscience through the things that are made.
A presuppositionalist claim is that the Christian worldview (CW) is necessary in order to make sense of human experience. However, even if the CW is consistent, coherent and explanatory, how would that prove that it is connected to how things truly are in the world? What if the external world can be organized by the CW only subjectively and pragmatically but not actually or truly? Although the CW offers answers to important questions pertaining to origin, virtue, deliverance and purpose, what makes the CW true? What if Christianity is merely a philosophical ideal that provides a way of organizing experience but does not actually bring us in touch with reality? How might we prove that our minds are actually designed to correspond with the external world, and that the CW and none other must be true in order to avoid philosophical skepticism?
Before addressing the question, what might be helpful is saying a word or two about (a) context, (b) sin’s influence on the mind, (c) apologetic goals, (d) antithesis and common ground, (e) proof vs persuasion, and (f) transcendentals.
Context
Our apologetic methodology must be informed by the biblical contextual reality in which it operates, otherwise it will oppose the worldview it is intended to vindicate. In other words, in order to argue for a coherent Christian worldview, our methodology should obviously cohere with the same. This means treating unbelievers according to what the Bible declares about them and not according to what unbelievers admit about themselves!
Unless our apologetic is informed by Scripture, the Christian apologist will operate with the same autonomous mindset of the unbeliever. In order to avoid epistemological inconsistency, the Christian apologist must adopt a Reformed understanding of man’s fallen condition as it relates to morality and intellection, and apply it to the apologetic endeavor. Once we adopt a Reformed understanding of man’s fallen condition as it relates to the human mind and moral affections, we can begin to self-consciously treat unbelievers from God’s perspective, as covenant breakers who seek to psychologically escape from their knowledge of God while denying they know him in conscience through the things that are made. Hosea 6:7, Romans 1:20, 5:12
Sin and apologetics
All men are without excuse, not for inviolable non-belief but for willful and intellectual unbelief. It is the truth of what is known of God that is suppressed in unrighteousness. Consequently, the mind’s suppression of God is of itself a perpetual unrighteous-act. Indeed, there is a moral dimension to how unbelievers misuse their natural mental capacities that were designed to love and obey God, but instead are marshaled to deny the unbeliever’s covenantal obligations toward their maker and sustainer.
Whereas all Christians understand men sin, Calvinists have particular appreciation that men sin because they’re sinners. Moreover, consistent Calvinists take things even one step further. The Reformed apologist not only understands that the fall affects the moral image of God in man; he is also keenly attentive to the fact that man’s natural image of God is fallen too. Due to sin, not just the unbeliever’s religious affections are totally depraved but his reasoning is in willful, sinful, and emotional opposition to God (and by extension to the Christian witness). Consequently, man’s fallen rebellion manifests itself not just in deeds of the flesh but of the mind too, which the Bible teaches is hostile to God apart from saving faith. Romans 8:7
Given the unbeliever’s intellectual enmity with God, the goal of Christian apologetics is not to persuade the unbeliever to believe what he already knows, but to expose what he has decidedly chosen to deny. After all, if the goal of apologetics is to persuade men that God exits, then the defect of unbelief is rooted not in man but in God’s failure to communicate! Man would not be in a broken relationship with his creator and sustainer if he is in need of being persuaded that God exists. Man would merely be invincibly ignorant – a passive non-believer rather than an active unbeliever who intentionally rejects his creator and sustainer.
Desire vs Goal
Although our desire is that all men confess the truth and be saved, our apologetic goal is always achievable. Therefore, the goal of apologetics must be apart from the results God may or may not grant. The goal is that in obedience to Christ we destroy arguments and all arrogance raised against the knowledge of God. 2 Corinthians 10:5 Consequently, a Reformed apologetic happily comports with prayers that the Holy Spirt would grant repentance unto life to anyone who has been shown to be hoping against hope by willfully denying not just Christ as the only way back to the Father, but Christ as the only way back to understanding the Father’s world!
Antithesis and common notions:
With appreciation of the stark antithesis between believers and unbelievers, a Reformed Christian apologetic makes use of divinely-established points of contact with unbelievers, which are at the presuppositional level of one’s worldview. Apart from recognizing the common grace basis for shared points of contact with unbelievers, the requisite tools for apologetic engagement are often treated simply as neutral tools for gospel discourse as opposed to the common battleground that is to be reclaimed for Christ’s sake. Consequently, rather than calling the unbeliever to give an account for the requisite tools of rational interchange – e.g., logic, memory, universals and particulars, moral absolutes, etc. – the foolish apologist surrenders these (shared) common notions, treating them as neutral ground and perfectly intelligible apart from the Christian worldview or any reference to God as a necessary precondition for their reliability and usefulness. Proverbs 26:4
Proof vs persuasion
God’s general revelation to all men declares his glory and grounds all human knowledge. Psalm19:1-4 Of course, unbelievers deny this claim and, unfortunately, popular apologetic methodologies cater to this lie.
An appeal to the authority of Scripture to prove all men know God is not invalidated because men refuse to acknowledge God’s voice in Scripture or general revelation of the Divine. After all, when men are converted, the arguments from Scripture don’t all of a sudden become sound. Rather, by the grace of God man’s unbelief is overcome as he accepts the truth that was previously denied. Analogous to this is the skeptic who refuses to accept that his senses put him in touch with reality.
Consider the following:
* The proof that there is a tree in front of the skeptic is constant.
* The skeptic’s perception of the tree is another constant.
* What is not constant is the willingness or unwillingness to accept the truth.
Upon acceptance of the obvious, the tree is not all of a sudden proved to exist anymore than does the skeptic’s perception get altered by acknowledging the truth. Rather, upon accepting that an actual tree is seen, the skeptic’s unwillingness to accept the truth is overcome. The proof didn’t change or become better than it was originally. Instead, proof has given way to persuasion!
Now, obviously, a direct appeal to the Scriptures to prove the Christian worldview is fideistic and our apologetic should not beg crucial questions in this way. Notwithstanding, our apologetic must not deny what Scripture teaches us regarding the unbeliever’s condition with respect to his a priori knowledge of God.
Transcendentals, not fideism
We are to reason according to Scripture without direct appeals to Scripture. With this stricture comes two foundational points for the presuppositionalist. First, the apologist should not cater to the unbeliever’s false claim about his knowledge of God. The second point is the apologist does well to reason indirectly from Scripture for the Christian worldview by employing transcendental argumentation.
Transcendental arguments (TAs) pertain to preconditions for the possibility of the existence of some basic or common experience. That is, TAs put forth necessary precondition(s) without which a generally accepted experience is unintelligible. Another distinguishing feature of TAs is that preconditions for such basic or common experiences are not learned by experience. The preconditions pertain to what can be known apart from experience.
So, for instance, what must be true for there to be unbelief? Well, a number of things! There must be logic for one thing. But what must also be true for there to be logic?! The presuppositionalist’s claim is that it is impossible for logic to exist without God’s existence! No God, no logic. Logic, therefore, God.
Given the unbeliever’s suppression of the truth of Scripture, the presuppositional apologist defends the transcendental premise that logic presupposes God by performing internal critiques of opposing worldviews, showing that (a) they cannot account for logic etc., while also showing (b) Christianity not only can but, also, that to argue against Christianity presupposes conditions for rationality that are only possible within the Christian worldview!** It would be a mistake, however, to think that one-by-one refutations imply that the conclusion of TAG (God exists) and the justification for the transcendental premise rests upon inductive inference. By repeatedly refuting opposing philosophical ideologies the Christian apologist is merely acknowledging that the unbeliever refuses to bend the knee to the self-attesting word of God. Since unbelievers will not accept the truth claims of the Bible, the only thing the Christian can do is refute unworthy and hypothetical competitors, which hardly implies that a formulation of any given TA has an inductive aspect, or that the transcendental premise within such an argument is inferred only after having successfully refuted a statistically sufficient number of opposing worldviews.
It has been said that although TAs are powerful apologetic tools, they under deliver because of the inductive aspect of defending the strong modal claim of the transcendental premise. Accordingly, it’s been suggested that presuppositionalists should dial back the claim to God probably exists. But that challenge completely misses the point. At very least, what makes probability possible? It can’t be a conceptual scheme that makes actual probability possible if the intelligibility of the possibility of any conceptual scheme presupposes God’s existence.
God or ~God:
Lastly, we don’t have to refute an “infinite number“ of “explanations” for the intelligibility of logic to defend God’s existence by the impossibility of the contrary. Either God is necessary for the intelligibility of logic or not. Those are the only two possibilities given the law of excluded middle. Moreover, the refutation of the common feature of any non-revelational epistemology is the refutation of all such epistemologies given the common feature. It’s not a matter of God vs Naturalism, Idealism, Atheism, Platonism or any number of X-isms. It’s not a matter of a, b, c, but a matter of a or ~a. God or ~God reduces to ~autonomy or autonomy, where autonomy always reduces to philosophical skepticism. Similarly, the assertion that p “it is possible that an undiscovered fact or worldview may be the necessary precondition for intelligible experience” presupposes the intelligibility of actual possibility, which further presupposes God’s actual existence! We simply can’t get around what Scripture teaches, in the beginning God.** Genesis 1:1, John 1:1
Closing
Because the unbeliever will not acknowledge a common creator and sustainer of men and things, he lives on borrowed capital while operating as if the rational thoughts of the human mind should have any correlation to the way in which the mind-independent world rationally behaves. Only the Christian worldview, with its revelatory epistemology that is both consistent and coherent, explains that God has created both the mind of man and the external world, while providing the necessary fruitful connection between the two making knowledge and dominion possible.
* So, what about the controversial claim that God is a necessary precondition for logic? We can ultimately defend our knowledge of the premise by appealing to the absolute authority of Scripture. Of course, the unbeliever rejects that authority; nonetheless that the unbeliever is dysfunctional in this way does not mean that an appeal to Scripture is fallacious to justify one’s knowledge of the premise. It is critical at this juncture for the Christian to distinguish for the unbeliever (a) the source of his justification for his knowledge that God makes logic possible, which comes from the Holy Spirit’s work of illumination through the self-authenticating Scriptures, from (b) the proof that God makes logic possible. How we know x is not an argument for x.
**For a fuller treatment of the subject with respect to objections, along with a critique of classical apologetics and evidentialism, go here.
Discussion
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