Dr Greg Bahnsen - A Short Synopsis of Van Til: Kuyper, Warfield, Dooyeweerd and Schaeffer (Part 3)

Last evening we took a look at the main thrust of Van Till's apologetic. Our aim was to simply lay before you the crucial theses of Van Til's thinking. We noted that apologetics deals with religion, and for that reason apologetics deals with ultimate commitment, the ultimate commitment of the believer, the ultimate commitment of the unbeliever. Since it's an ultimate commitment that we're talking about, then the kind of argument that takes place between the believer and unbeliever is not going to be your garden variety form of disagreement. If I disagree with you about the price of eggs down at the market, we're not dealing with an ultimate commitment there. We're not dealing with something that affects the very framework of our thinking and the way in which we reason and live. And so it's possible for us to come up fairly easily with a method for resolving our disagreement. Usually, let's get in the car, go down there and we'll take a look. But when you start talking about what is the nature of man, the nature of the world, the nature of knowledge and truth, when you're dealing with ultimate commitments, you need something that's a little tougher intellectually than just let's go out and observe for ourselves. We noticed as well that Van Til teaches us that apologetics is a matter of epistemological self consciousness. Now, did you all work on saying that last night? We want you to be able to say that if you're good Vantilians, you know that comes very easily to you say, oh yes, well, you're not being epistemologically self conscious. That's your problem. Now, obviously you don't usually talk to the unbeliever in that way. That's lingo that's known to us, but it's very important. It captures a crucial element of Van Till's approach to knowledge. Van Till tells us that we must regiment our thinking. First of all, as believers, we must regiment our thinking to the lordship of Jesus Christ so that if we are self conscious, our theory of knowledge will be developed, the method of thinking will be developed in a way that is consistent with our final conclusion. Or, if you will, our final conclusion is also our starting point. We want to conclude that Christ is Lord, and so we start with that Christ is Lord and that governs the method by which we approach the unbeliever. But the unbeliever needs to be epistemologically self conscious too. You're going to find even the most intellectual, most educated unbelievers are really babes in the woods when it comes to this sort of thing. This has surprised a lot of people. It's even surprised me to a certain extent when I have debated intelligent unbelievers at secular universities about the existence of God and other sorts of things. They simply do not stop to think about the tough questions philosophically. They just take many things for granted. A few weeks ago when I debated Edward Tavish at the University of California at Davis, I concluded at the end of the debate by pointing out, not in a name calling way, please understand, it was intended respectful way, but a critical way. I concluded that atheists are intellectual adolescents. They simply have not grown up and face the tough questions because they think they can just take for granted. What did I tell you last night? That the toothpaste is going to squirt toothpaste out when I squeeze it. And why do they take that for granted? Well, because everyone takes that for granted and it's based on past experience. But analysis requires you to add to the claim that in the past it's happened this way a premise which turns out to have great metaphysical significance. And that's that the nature of reality, or at least the reality that we know in our experience, is such that the future resembles the past. So if in the past squeezing the toothpaste tube led to the paste coming out, so in the future we would expect it to do so as well. So much do we have a commitment to this inductive principle in our reasoning that when we find the future not conforming to our expectations, we don't. And this is amazing. Unbelievers I've never seen in any scholarly setting an unbeliever say, well, yeah, what do you expect in a random universe? No. Unbelievers say, hey, there's something wrong here. There's got to be another factor that hasn't been taken into account. Okay? And in that debate I used as my example the, the fact that when the expected orbit of Uranus was not found to be what scientists thought it should be, given the factors known, they didn't just say, well yeah, you see, it's a chance world and you just can't expect that the planets are going to end up where you think they're going to end up. Rough approximations as good as we can get. Boy, we should be really happy. We can even roughly, no, you don't get any of that kind of stuff. You get rather there's some factor we don't know about. Eventually, of course, you postulate the presence of Neptune and that gets confirmed and the whole advance of secular science depends upon not just that hidden premise, what we might in a pedestrian way call the uniformity of nature, but a commitment to it, that it will actually regiment our thinking and our research conclusions we draw. Okay, well then you ask this intelligent unbeliever, on what basis do you assert the uniformity of nature or the inductive principle? Listen to the debate. I think you'll be surprised as well. Now, I did a favor of sorts for my opponent. I said, now I realize that there are unbelieving philosophers who have reflected on this inductive principle and the question of how it can be established. So I quoted for him from David Hume and Bertrand Russell, two men that are clearly antagonistic to the Christian faith. And both of them said, we cannot found the inductive principle on an appeal to experience, the attempt to do so is begging the question. Alright, so I laid it out for him. We already know that the atheistic approach doesn't say experience. Intelligent atheists know that experience can't be the foundation for the inductive principle. And so I challenged him to tell me what his thinking is on this subject. So here's a man who makes not a living, he's got another job, but he spends a good deal of time trying to promote atheism, a rational approach to the universe, and getting rid of the superstition of theism and Christianity in particular. So he's given some thought to it. He's willing to go public with his thinking. And you ask a question like that, you would think, obviously you're going to have that thought through and have an answer. Nothing. He said, well, it's experience that is the basis for the inductive principle. You want to kind of say, have you been listening to the debate? Now, I have already quoted your buddies here, Hume and Bertrand Russell. Experience can't be the foundation, because that's begging the question. So intellectuals need to be pressed for epistemological self consciousness. They need to start thinking about the different elements of their worldview and how these comport or don't comport with each other. And then I said finally that since apologetics deals with religion and thus ultimate commitment and epistemological self consciousness is called for in the believer. And it's the sort of thing we press the unbeliever for, that the proof for God and for Christianity in the Bible ultimately comes down to the impossibility of the contrary. We demonstrate, as Proverbs 26 tells us, we demonstrate to the fool how foolishness he is, lest he be wise in his own conceit. Take the fool, answer him according to his folly, lest he be wise in his own conceit. On the other hand, you don't answer the fool according to his folly. You've got to present your own point of view according to that has been given by the wisdom of God and not rest upon the fool's presuppositions lest you be like unto him. Okay, so if I go into a debate and I say, okay, what can we agree on methodologically? And once we agree on that now, we'll proceed to see who's done his homework correctly, who's right here, the Christian or the non Christian? Well, if I agree with the fool in his foolish presuppositions, the Bible warns me, I'm going to end up like him. So be cautious. Realize your method reflects your conclusion and your starting point. And so you want to challenge the unbeliever to make good on any method he proposes. If he wants to be scientific, if he wants to be logical, if he wants to talk about ethical absolutes or human freedom, human dignity, press him to see that his worldview destroys those very things that he wants to take for granted. Then we spent a little bit of time last night rehearsing the career of Van Til and some of the controversies in which he was engaged during his lifetime. Now tonight, turns out our outline is still on the board. We're going to try to get through this material in the time allotted. I want to talk first of all about Vantil's relationship to Kuyper, Warfield, Dohevard and Schaeffer because I think that helps you see the distinctiveness of his approach. But as I said last night, I'll repeat tonight, we're not doing this because we want people to think that Kuyper and Warfield and Doygurd and Schaeffer were all wet. There's nothing to learn from them. We're all in the Reformed family together and there's a great deal of help we can get from all of these men. So please do not interpret this as okay, we got the Van Till school than all these other schools and I'm here as the cheerleader for the Van Til school. This is not a football game after all. This is a strategy session where we're all getting together, comparing notes and in that, Van Till does have something distinctive. Over against these other four Reformed scholars. We'll talk a bit about that. And then particularly I'd like you to leave tonight knowing what Dantil's view of theistic proof was. And Van Till's view of evidences. Because repeatedly in the evangelical community, when people write about Van Till, they get this wrong and not just a little bit wrong. I mean, that happens in scholarly circles. They get it like major wrong, just inside out wrong. And if you understand what Van Til said about these two things, again by way of contrast, you're going to be closer to his method. Understand what it is to be on target with Van Till. What was he really trying to do? Well, enough. Introduction first of all, then, Van Till's view of the usefulness of apologetics over against the position of Abraham Kuyper, the appropriateness and the necessity of apologetical argument with unbelievers has to be asserted. Obviously it has to be assertive against the anti intellectualism and the false piety of our day. But equally it has to be asserted against the sophisticated opinion of someone like Abraham Kuyper, the opinion that apologetics is in fact intellectually futile. Kiefer well understood that all men conduct their thinking and their reasoning in terms of an ultimate controlling principle, a most basic presupposition or perspective or mental attitude for the unbeliever. Kuyper said, this is a natural principle in terms of which man's thinking is taken to be intelligible without recourse to God. On the other hand, the believer operates under a supernatural principle based on God's involvement in history and experience, and notably in regeneration, whereby we have a framework provided that is necessary for making sense of anything. So to put it simply, Kiefer recognized that there were two ultimate commitments. Last night we talked about apologetics being religious, two ultimate religions, you could say, one is naturalism, the other Christian supernaturalism. And these two ultimate commitments are logically incompatible. Being logically incompatible with each other, they seek to cancel each other out. And so, using Kuyper's language, he said they must in principle create two kinds of science. Okay, so you have a science. Remember, science here doesn't have to be naturalistic science. That's what we tend to think of in American studies. But that word science, both in Dutch and English for that matter. But tracing it back historically has to do with intellectual methods, that which is not arbitrary, that which is well founded, that which can be known. Kuyper said, in principle, the believer and the unbeliever create two kinds of science, where each perspective in principle contradicts whatever the other perspective says and in fact denies to it the noble name of science. Well, he was right on target here, wasn't he? That's what happens? The unbeliever is not going to get down to details. In arguing with the believer. When all is said and done, he wants to dismiss us as simply not being scientific. If you know anything about the creationist debates in this country, you have a great illustration right there. The CRI has an open invitation to go on secular university campuses and debate evolution, evolution and creation and so forth. And I've done some of that myself. And we find that anymore, rather than debating us, the evolutionists on these campuses don't want to talk about it at all. And the reason they don't is not because they can't answer. And by the way, they can't. It's incredible to me. Praise God, by his grace and power, they come out looking like real ninnies when they do these debates. But when all is said and done, they don't want to be ashamed. And so rather than debate, they say, well, you see, these Christians, they don't understand the nature of science, and a debate format doesn't allow us to educate them. And so they mislead our audiences, and we found it better not to debate at all. Well, it's just like Kiefer said. They want to deny to us the noble name of science. They're not doing science, they're doing religion. Okay. And that's specifically what I like to debate with people, what the nature of science is and the nature of religion, as though you could set them apart and against each other in this fashion. Well, continuing with Kuyper, Kuyper says, thus the unbeliever is bent on distorting and reinterpreting and ultimately rejecting any evidence or argumentation which is set forth in support of and which is controlled by the believer's ultimate commitment. These two ultimate commitments in principle, want to destroy each other. To be consistent, the unbeliever cannot even allow for the possibility that the Christian proclamation is true. If you're reading Kuyper, and here I'm summarizing for you his principles of Sacred Theology, you want to really pay attention to that. There's a fantastic insight here. It is not the case that the unbeliever takes us seriously and says, well, you see, Christians, they're doing pretty good work intellectually, and we're doing pretty good work. But I think we've got a little bit better argument than they do. As Kuyper points out, in principle, the unbeliever can't even allow for the possibility that we might be right. Why is that? Because the unbeliever has a different philosophy. About possibility, a different philosophy of reality, a different epistemology and theory of knowledge. Kuyper saw all this, but sadly from it he drew a fallacious conclusion, namely, that Christian apologetics was useless, that there was no pressing need to reason with the darkened understanding of the unbeliever. So let me quote him at one point in the Principles of Sacred Theology. He says, it will be impossible to settle the difference of insight. No polemics between these two kinds of science can ever serve any purpose. This is the reason why apologetics has always failed to reach results. End of quote. However, that conclusion does not follow from the insight about two sciences or two controlling principles of thought. That conclusion doesn't follow when other equally biblical insights are taken into account. For instance, as Van Till teaches us, the unbeliever's intention may be to follow his life naturalistic principle consistently, and he may claim that he is doing so. But to do so, to follow the naturalistic principle consistently in practice, is actually impossible. The unbeliever cannot escape the persuasive power of God's revelation around him and within him. Indeed, by the common grace of the Holy Spirit, he is restrained from successfully obliterating its testimony. He conducts his life and his reasoning in terms of God's revelation, since there is no other way for man to learn about and make sense of truth in this world, all the while, of course, verbally denying it and convincing himself that it's not so. In light of these things, not only is the the apologist able to mount a compelling argument against the cogency of the unbelievers espoused philosophy and the adequacy of his interpretation of the facts, but the unbeliever can also be expected to understand and to feel the force of the apologist reasoning. Apologetical argument. Intellectual reasoning which goes beyond mere test testimony to the unbeliever must not therefore be disparaged or ignored. Van Till writes, we must not reduce it to an effort that is futile because of the subjectivity and ultimate perspective or presupposition and the difference between the believer and the unbeliever. Vantil says that Christianity must be presented to men as the objective truth, and provably so. It is not only a moral lapse, it is not only a moral lapse, but also an unjustifiable intellectual error to reject the message of God's revealed word. And so, for the sake of time, I'm not going to give you all the material that I've prepared. Let's just note that Van Til argues for the the usefulness of apologetics over against Kuyper. Now, if you're familiar with the intramural debate in Reformed and Evangelical circles over apologetics the last 20 to 25 years, perhaps you're immediately, if you didn't already know this, set back by, well, now wait a minute. So many of Van Til's opponents think of classical apologetics for old Gerstner Linsley. So many of Van Til's opponents say, well, our problem with Van Till is that he sides with Kuyper. Is that true? Is that false? Is that half true? Well, he does side with Kuyper, if what you mean is Kuyper said there are two controlling principles which in principle want to destroy each other, two sciences. But Van Till openly disagrees with Kuyper when Kuyper says apologetics, therefore is useless, you can't argue with the unbeliever. Van Till disagrees with Kuyper and clearly supports Warfield when Warfield said Christianity is provably true. And so people have really misconstrued. And it may be the case for you that you've misconstrued Van Till when he talks about the warfare between these two pre presuppositions that therefore you really can't reason with the unbeliever. He doesn't hold to that point of view. So let's go on to the next point. And that's Van Till's view of the interdependence of apologetics with theology, with philosophy and with evangelism. And this will give us an opportunity to see the distinctiveness of his approach over against Warfield, Dohyevard and Schaeffer. So first of all, the interdependence independence of apologetics over against Warfield's view that it's separate from theology. Artificial conceptions of the work of apologetics often lead to the conclusion that apologetics is different from theology or different from Christian philosophy, or different from evangelism. Of course, the false distinctions which people sometimes promote here entail just as much artificial conceptions of theology or a philosophy of evangelism too. I think it'd be helpful to see just what apologetics has in common with theology, philosophy and evangelism, as well as what makes it different from them. The key here will be to recognize differences of degree between these activities and not escalate those differences of degree into categorical differences of kind. Apologetics, theology, philosophy and evangelism each involve the use of our minds for gaining and propagating knowledge. Though they work with different kinds of questions, different kinds of audiences, different settings, each of them are nevertheless expressions of the Christian's underlying approach to intellectual method in general or a Christian theory of knowledge, his view of reasoning, particularly the relationship of faith to reasoning. It would be philosophically incoherent, and it would be damaging to hold that apologetics, theology, philosophy and evangelism in embody entirely discrepant epistemologies. After all, the Bible teaches us that in Christ all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge are deposited. Colossians 2, 3. So it turns out on Van Till's analysis. Theology applies the Word of God, evangelism applies the Word of God, Christians philosophy applies the Word of God, and guess what? Apologetics applies the Word of God. Now, these four disciplines apply the Word of God in different settings with different audiences, somewhat different vocabulary, with different problems on the horizon, perhaps. But they're all aiming to do the same thing, to stand in submission to the Word of God and apply it faithfully and obediently. It ought to be clear, then, that these different tasks at least share a common commitment to the authority of God as revealed in His Word. When believers attempt to answer questions through the question excuse me, find answers to the questions of philosophy, they should attempt to do so in a manner which is true to, and aims to draw conclusions in harmony with their Christian commitment. If they don't do that, then they're acting as and using their reasoning ability just like unbelievers. They're not acting like believers at all. The way in which we conduct our minds is just as much subject to the moral authority of God as the way we conduct our bodies. We cannot serve two masters, Jesus teaches us. We can't serve two masters with our bodies or with our minds. When believers attempt to evangelize unbelievers and bring them to a knowledge of God's truth, they should themselves be submissive and responsive to that truth as well as portraying it correctly. Or else they're going to lack persuasiveness in what they are doing, and they'll mislead those who are already in the dark. If you evangelize an unbeliever and use his perspective, then, as the Bible says, that's like the blind leading the blind. When believers, in whatever their situation, situation or particular need, ask theologically about God's person and acts as well as about man's relationship to him, their answers must be expected to reflect what God himself has said. Or else they're only serving themselves and showing that they know nothing, according to the Bible. As it happens, then, if you listen to what I've just said about theology, evangelism and philosophy. The apologist defends what the theologian has learned with the tools and insights refined by the philosopher for the evangelistic purpose of seeing the unbelievers heart and mind changed. Let me say that to you again. The apologist defends what the theologian has learned with the tools and insights refined by the philosopher, with the evangelistic purpose of seeing the unbelievers heart and mind change. On the other hand, the work of the theologian and the work of the philosopher and the work of the evangelist cannot be truly carried out without engaging in some degree in defense of the truth of Christianity. That is, theologians must be apologists, and evangelists must be apologists, and philosophers must be apologists. All of these tasks are both positive and defensive in nature. Or to put it another way, they are interdependent. There are truly shades of difference between apologetics, theology, philosophy and evangelism. Differences in the primary audience, the type of questions addressed and the immediate aim. But all of these tasks come under the common umbrella of applying God's Word to the hearts of men. This is what we're made for, to receive God's Word and apply it to our lives. Now, Adam was expected to do that in the garden. But because sin has entered the picture, the application of God's revelation to our lives now takes on a redemptive character. Now the Word must be applied in a setting where faith and obedience to what God has revealed is either immature or openly repudiated. Nevertheless, in everything we do as Christians, from understanding the world in terms of God's revelation, to persuading men to acknowledge that system is true and vow to the Savior, we're always engaged in responding to God's Word and applying it to ourselves and others. We are always, as Paul puts it in 2nd Corinthians 10:5, bringing every thought, every thought captive to the obedience of Christ, every theological thought, every philosophical thought, every evangelistic thought, it makes no difference, because all of life is unified under that. We are to receive God's Word and apply it obediently. And so apologetics, according to Van Til, is a way of doing theology. It's also a way of doing evangelism. It can be seen as a way of doing philosophy. If the work of these other areas is in varying ways an application of God's Word, so the work of the apologist can be seen as the application of God's Word. If we don't see apologetics in this light as interdependent with philosophy, theology and evangelism, what happens is the way has been opened for the Christian scholar to operate autonomously as, as though he were intellectually self sufficient apart from God. He should be the basic authority over how to reason and he has the right to be the final judge of what to believe or to disbelieve. And it's just here that Van Till said in a pained way, not with any glee or pharisaical self righteousness, but in a pained way, Vantil said that. That. That tendency to allow the unbeliever to be self sufficient in some specific way, some narrow way. That tendency is evident in those who separate apologetics from theology as did Warfield, or who separate philosophy from theology as did Beloved, or those who separate apologetics from evangelism as strangely enough, Francis Schaeffer did. In every case, apologetics ends up proceeding to establish its conclusions apart from presupposing the word of God as the necessary condition of all intelligibility and as though there were something more philosophically certain or more authoritative than God's revelation. Now let me stop and remind you what I said about our family relationship with these other scholars. Put that bluntly, would you expect Warfield to say, oh yeah, that's what I want to do, I want something to be more authoritative in God's Word? Of course not. Francis Schaeffer had nothing in mind like that. This was not their intention, it was not the self conscious aim of their thinking. But Van Till said, hey, a skunk has entered your home, okay? You don't want it there. We're sure you think it stinks too, but I'm trying to help you here. Now you can't see apologetics in relationship to theology, philosophy or evangelism the way that you have and be true to your best profession as a reformed scholar. In their own way, each of these dichotomizing positions shares the view of faith and reason advocated by Thomas Aquinas rather than the view advocated by Augustine. I'm going to be over simple here, but simply, simply put, Augustine argued that man's understanding and reasoning function only upon the foundation of faith in God. Reason has no self sufficient ability to interpret experience and it has no true authority to judge the veracity of the faith. And so Augustine said in his famous aphorism, I believe in order to understand understanding, the use of reasoning, drawing conclusions, explaining experience, understanding, he said, presupposes faith, presupposes the truth of the Christian message. And so Augustine repudiated any autonomous philosophy or use of man's intellect. Now, if you're a student of Augustine, you know that that was his heartfelt desire. That's what he aimed for throughout his career. Career. He got better and better at that. Augustine himself recognized at the end of his life when he published his retractions, that he had not been true to that goal throughout his life. And so when I say that's what Augustine did, I mean that's what Augustine aimed for and he would have us to do. It could be said that Aquinas reversed this and held that faith in God had to be founded upon the individual dependent results of man's reasoning and understanding. The Thomistic approach assumes that fallen man is capable of exercising reason in a proper way prior to repenting of sin and submitting to the Savior. And that knowledge and intelligible interpretation of experience are philosophically possible apart from God's revelation. That is possible in terms of a basic perspective different from the Christian worldview. Well, not different in the sense that it was 180 degrees in opposition to it, but rather different in that the Christian worldview is really an expansion of and the perfecting of what men think in terms of their natural abilities. And so you have the realm of nature where all men should draw the same conclusions, think the same way, they're using their brains properly, and that will give us elementary truths of the faith that opens the door to now accepting supernatural revelation as perfecting what natural thinking would tell you about the existence of God. But in that way, faith and reason are different because reason lays the foundation which faith then perfects. Man's own intellect, when used at its best, is thus granted the ability and the moral right to pass judgment on the credibility of God's word, its worthiness of faith. You have to understand, our problem with Aquinas here is not that he drew the wrong conclusion. Aquinas professed to be a Christian. He drew the conclusion that the Bible is worthy of faith. So many people look at that and say, well, that's great. That's what we should do. Van Till stands back and says, you never have the right to put yourself in that position to begin with, because as a matter of fact, reason does not operate properly apart from faith. Reason, set up as a judge, not simply used as a tool, takes a privileged position as the vestibule to faith. Once you dichotomize apologetics from theology, philosophy, or evangelism. Now, I'm trying to watch the clock here and stay on course. Let me hurry through this. We'll say a bit about Warfield. I'm going to have to summarize Delia bear, there's just too much technical stuff. But beginning with Warfield, Calvin says, excuse me, Van Til says, BB you still see, you intend to be Augustinian, and your theology is very Augustinian, and I love your book, the Plan of Salvation and so forth. However, your view of the relationship of apologetics to theology is kind of like that skunk that has come in the back door. And you really act much more like a Thomas in this regard than you do an Augustinian. Warfield and the old Princeton tradition held that apost apologetics must lay the foundation upon which systematic theology could work. If you've been listening to what I said, all of a sudden you say, well, that sounds very much like Aquinas, doesn't it? Apologetics lays the foundation. There's reason at work. And then systematic theology, faith takes over. The inspiration of the Scriptures was not the foundational doctrine upon which the Christian scholar should proceed. For Warfield, he said openly, explicitly and insistently that the last and crowning conviction to which the Christian comes based upon the authentication of the general trustworthiness of Scripture by man's right reason. The crowning doctrine is inspiration, not the foundational doctrine. It's the final thing. It's like what we put on the top of the pile after we've done all of our work. And so I quote Warfield, surely he must first have Scriptures authenticated to him as such before he can take his standpoint in them. Faith has grounds in right reason. Faith has grounds in right reason. Here's what Aquinas said. Reason lays a foundation. All men in common can reason and come to the same conclusions about God. And then faith is placed upon that fundament. And this is exactly what Warfield tells us. We thus see two things about the epistemological perspective which Warfield encouraged the apologists to take. In the first place, he held that apologetics and its theory of knowledge must be outside of a commitment to Scripture, and two, it must be in agreement with the right reason of the unbeliever. Now, when you put those two things together, isn't it rather obvious then that, in a word, Warfield said, apologetics is autonomous, and it is this kind of apologetic, where Christ is not the final authority which prepares for and is the authoritative foundation of systematic theology, where, for Warfield, Christ is the final authority. So you begin with man's reasoning ability which authenticates the Scriptures, and that reasoning ability does not work upon the authority of Jesus Christ. And you lead up to the conclusion that the Bible is the authoritative word of God. And now we do systematic theology on that assumption. Last, I used the example of Ludwig Wittgenstein in his Tractatus, what he said about his own analysis, he said, anybody, this is at the end of the Tractatus. He says, anybody who has understood and believes what I have written realizes that everything I've said before is meaningless. You have to use what I've said before as a ladder to climb up. And then once you get to the roof, you throw the ladder away. And so Warfield is like Witkin in that way. And then he says, you have to not assume the lordship of Jesus Christ. Use your autonomous reason to prove that Jesus is the Lord. And then of course, you throw the latter away and you do systematic theology. And you never question what the word of God says. Well, those of us who love Warfield, I certainly do. And Van Till certainly did love Warfield because as a theologian he was heart and soul committed to the authority of Scripture. But in apologetics he said, we can't be, we shouldn't be. And so we find two fatal flaws. First, there's the schizophrenia of making Christ your final authority only after he's been authorized by your own reasoning. But who's the final authority then? Put it all together in principle. Each and every teaching or action of Christ could then be expected on its own to pass the scrutiny of man's reasoning, lest that particular provide the reason for refusing to have general or implicit trust in Christ. Am I going too fast? If I were an intelligent unbeliever and I'm listening to Warfield, who is a real intelligent Christian, give me his apologetic and I discern that I have to see the reasonableness of the what he's presenting. Before I give up my autonomy and come to Christ, you know what I'm going to do? I'm going to take him to those mysteries of the faith, the things that Warfield admitted were mysterious and say on that basis, I can't accept what you're offering me. Warfield has, without intention and certainly not consistently, that Warfield has in principle handed the unbeliever the very tool he needs to reject Christianity. Because Warfield understood that the Trinity, predestination, hypostatic union and other things were mysteries. He didn't think there were logical contradictions there, but he knew that these were not things that man's reason validates. We accept it because God has revealed it to us. Well, if apologetics is showing the reasonableness of Christianity based on the unbelievers way of thinking, the unbeliever simply going to go to the mysteries of the faith and say I can't accept this. Here's the second flaw. There's the mistake of taking the autonomous non Christian as capable of right reason. I noticed some of you when I read the Warfield quote, kind of chuckled or smiled a bit when he said that, and we should. I've already told you of my love for Warfield. But it is painfully humorous to see somebody so committed to a Calvinistic view of man talking about men using right reason. Where does someone who is totally depraved find the ability to reason rightly? The clear testimony of the Bible is that unbelievers abuse their minds and they have an axe to grind against God. Romans 1:21. They become vain in their reasoning. First Corinthians 2:14 cannot receive the things of God. God's Spirit is anything but foolishness or Proverbs 1:7. The unbeliever hates knowledge. If Warfield had been consistent with this understanding, thankfully he wasn't. But if he had been consistent, he would have ended up with both bad theology where man is the final authority, as well as bad apologetics where the unbelievers fundamental approach is unobjectionable. Okay, so for all of the good that we find in Warfield, and I've already indicated Van Till sides with Warfield against Kuyper, that Christianity is provable, objectively provable. For all of that, we can't agree with Warfield in his view of the relationship of apologetics to theology. Now, the case of deliberate is somewhat parallel to that of Warfield. Warfield gave apologetics the responsibility for laying the foundation of systematic theology. Delaverd has taught more broadly that philosophy must establish the presuppositions of all the sciences in general, including the science of theology. Okay, so this is overly simple, but it's a good place to begin so you know when you do the reading. How to refine this. Warfield says apologetics lays the foundation right reason for theology to proceed. Dolliverd goes one better. He says philosophy establishes the presuppositions of all of the sciences, including theology. Theology is for Doliverd, a theoretical discipline alongside of other sciences like history, psychology, economics, biology, math, what have you. All of these are distinguished as theoretical sciences by the fact that they draw rational distinctions within one's experience and study. One of the undifferent. Excuse me, one of the differentiated. That mistake is a real bad one. The whole point is that it studies one of the differentiated aspects or modalities of experience in an objectified logical way, which is unlike the naive or sometimes called pre theoretical experience of things in their undifferentiated wholeness. Now, not to embarrass anybody, but just help me so I can help you. How many of you are lost already? For how many of you is this gobbledygook, all this language of theoretical. Pre. Theoretical one honest, one man. Okay, Good. According to Doyvard, it's the task of philosophy to provide a coherent and total view of temporal experience in terms of the mutual relations, inner structure and nature of these various special sciences. The different sciences, including theology as a science, cannot provide that total view within which the sciences are schematized and ordered and regulated. Only philosophy can do that. And therefore doiliverd maintains that philosophy delimits theological science. Theological science, and I quote him, is in need of a philosophical foundation. And I quote him again. Theology in its scientific sense is bound to philosophical fundamentals. This is where I'm going to save time in my life lecture, because all of you are so familiar with this kind of talk already. Those quotes kind of give it away, don't they? In and of itself, theology is bound to the fundamentals of philosophy. Early in Van Til's career, when he was in the Netherlands, he met Doyouvard and he felt that they had a lot in common because Doilyvard was primarily doing the critique of the pretended autonomy of unbelievers and their scholarly work. Later, when Doyvard visited this campus, Van Til came to realize, this is the late 50s, that Dooyevard's transcendental critique did not take its starting point in the transcendent revelation of God, but rather the transcendent revelation of God, theologically analyzed, is subject to the philosopher who lays the foundations, presuppositions, limits, interrelationships and rules for all the special sciences. And so they didn't see eye to eye on this. And you'll notice if you pick up Jerusalem and Athens, Van Til's festrift and Doiliverd's contribution comes right out and accuses Van Til of scholastic rationalism. Because Van Til dares to make the Bible the foundation for all the different sciences, when in fact the Bible is controlled by the theological, the theoretical approach to things, which is theological and therefore itself must be governed by philosophy. Had we the time. I have a couple of pages where I go through what is troubling about doyouverd's conception of philosophy. What I want you to leave with tonight is it's troubling just from the standpoint of the Christian reading the Bible and seeing that the Authority of Jesus Christ cannot be made subject to the philosopher. In Christ, all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge are found. Well, then that means in Christ, all the treasures of the presuppositions and interrelations of the theoretical disciplines is found too, and not vice versa. But if we had the time to go through this, I would be happy to explain to you in some detail that Doyouvard was not simply doing bad exegesis and bad theology. In that sense, he was doing equally bad philosophy. It fascinates me that in the Reformed world, well, as I see it, and it's only one person, my perspective might be narrow. But as I see it, most people today are ignoring Doge because, frankly, he's not an easy read. You pick up, do you verde, and you read a couple of pages and you say, boy, if I were really disciplined, I'd finish this book. But I'm not. Most people put it aside. But in past years, in the good old days, when I was at Westminster and everybody read these things. Yeah, right. In those days, many people, I thought, were kind of bamboozled by this language and vocabulary used by Doyevaert and his followers. I've already indicated to you that my training is more in the analytic tradition of philosophy, and I realize that there are pitfalls there. I'm not denying that. However, I do appreciate the fact that analytical philosophy is willing to say, hey, you know, the King has no clothes, you idealist. That's a bunch of obfuscation by means of vocabulary. You're not clarifying anything and making any sense or proving anything by that. And that's my feeling about Delavert as a philosopher. He's simply not a good philosopher. But many people are intellectually bullied. When you can write a book, well, in many volumes, you know, that goes through all this kind of stuff. Now, what makes it tough for people to see that they're being intellectually bullied is, and this is of course not the confusion, but the awkwardness and intelligence, ambiguity in Van Till's response to doyouvaert. Is that mixed in with all of that nonsense, there are some really brilliant insights about the pretended autonomy of the unbeliever. And you look at that, and when that makes sense, you say, well, maybe the other stuff is pretty good too. But the long and short of it is it isn't. Not in my estimation and not in Van Til's. When we turn to the relationship between apologetics and evangelism, we must again disagree with those who suppose that the unbeliever's Thinking can intelligibly study and interpret experience, while at the same time denying the truth of the Christian worldview. Francis Schaeffer does this by isolating apologetics from evangelism and making apologetics a preliminary or preparatory vestibule for faith. What Schaeffer called many times over pre evangelism, Apologetics is pre evangelism. Now, what did I just say a minute ago about doyevaird? What gives doilyvaird credibility is that mixed in with a lot of really bad philosophy was some really good analytical, critical material. And what makes Schaeffer so compelling for many of us who are reformed is that though he says in theory that apologetics is pre evangelism, he didn't live his life or conduct his ministry that way. That makes it kind of tough. And sometimes you read Schaeffer and he's acting very. How can I put it? Bantillian. He's using a transcendental critique, and it's very helpful. But at other times he translates, tries to be consistent with what he wrote about apologetics. And that's some of the worst stuff Schaeffer has written. In fact, it's some of the worst stuff evangelicals have published during the lifetime of my own student days and teaching. Because of the popularity of his writings. That probably accounts for the statistic that I'm more often hammered by unbelievers when I go on secular campuses about Schaeffer's scholarship, or lack thereof, than anybody else. I have an article on the notion of antithesis, which you can read, in which I talk at some length about Schaeffer's view of antithesis and particularly his interpretation of Hegel. A little Novocaine before the cut here. Let me tell you something. When I was in college, I was one of the leading defenders of Schaeffer. He was reformed, he was presuppositional of sorts. And when people went after him, I was the first to speak up for him, and I'm happy to speak up for him now. I love his work. I love him as a man, as a minister, so forth. But the fact of the matter is that his reading of Hegel is shamefully bad. If I were to write this up, even as an undergraduate, frankly. But if I were to write up that interpretation of Hegel and submit it in a class in philosophy, I would outright fail. And of course, I can't, as a Christian, be happy about that. You know, I can't be happy that somebody who is generally doing good work, nevertheless is so sloppy that he presents people in a light which virtually falsifies what Hegel was trying to say. And so, though I'm going to be criticizing Schaeffer here for just a few minutes about his view of pre evangelism, I want to make it clear that, praise God, both Schaeffer and Greg Bonson were not consistent with the worst aspects of their writings. Schaeffer does not contend or did not contend that the non Christian's worldview is philosophically unintelligible. He argued that at many points that the non Christian's worldview was incomplete. You see the difference between those claims? Van Till says to the unbeliever, in principle, what you're saying is unintelligible. Schaeffer, on the other hand, says what you're saying doesn't go far enough, assuming it is intelligible as far as it goes. But you need to push it further. It's all right as far as it goes. As he puts it at one point, it's half the orange, but it leaves out the supernatural, which he calls the other half of the orange. Now, in light of that dichotomy between an area of natural understanding that doesn't need Christian presuppositions half the orange, and then an area of supernatural understanding which calls for the Christian worldview the other half of the orange, we can understand how apologetics becomes for him a first step, with evangelism following as the second step. And let me quote him from the God who is there, page 129. The truth that we let in first is not a dogmatic statement of the truth of the Scriptures, but the truth of the external world and the truth of what man himself is. This is what shows him his need. The Scriptures then show him the the nature of his lostness and the answer to it. This, I am convinced, is the true order for our apologetics in the second half of the 20th century. Well, that's stinging, isn't it? I mean, that's really bad. It's very Thomistic. This understanding of our procedure assumes that the unbeliever's philosophy can readily interpret both the external world and man himself in an inter intelligible fashion, on the basis of its autonomous presuppositions and rejection of biblical authority, can understand them well enough to see that the unbeliever has a spiritual need. And after this preparatory work of reason has been done, the evangelist can then appeal to the unbeliever to repudiate his autonomy and accept the dogmatic truth of the Scriptures which answers that spiritual need. And thus Schaeffer's Outlook suggests that apologetics and evangelism operate intellectually with different standards, different goals and different methods. You have a twofold approach. I mean, he calls it that the first step, and then after that step, a twofold approach, which is true, the traditional Thomistic model. Suffice it to say Dr. Van Til did not believe that, that any of these dichotomizing approaches of Warfield, Dohe Verd or Schaeffer is true to the biblical witness. He felt that there is a difference of emphasis, a difference of audience, a difference of questions and vocabulary. Maybe. But in each case, the method, the epistemology, is the same. And for him, trying to be a consistent Augustinian, the epistemologist says, if you don't have the Christian faith as your presupposition, you're not able to make intelligible use of your reasoning ability, your encounter with the external world, or your understanding of man at all. Faith is necessary for reason to work at all. Another commercial, and then I'm going to let you take the floor and ask me questions for a few minutes here and we'll take a break. One of the dialogues with unbelievers that's available in our tape library is one with George Smith. I didn't look. I should have in the library when I was there yesterday. I hope you have in your library George Smith's book Defense of Atheism. Prometheus Press, which puts out atheistic evangelistic material, if you can put it that way, has published this, in which he goes through what he thinks are all the arguments for God and all the evidence against God and so forth. And out in Southern California, one of the apologetics radio shows, Jon Stewart's invited me one afternoon to dialogue with George Smith about his book and so forth, and the very point that he had missed and which kind of, I think, flustered him from the outside of our dialogue, is that he tells us in the book that for the Christian, faith takes over where reason leaves off. And I told him in this dialogue, I hope maybe some of you will pick up the tape and listen to it. I said, george, the problem is that isn't our view of faith and reason, although some Christians have talked that way, and I'm sorry, you know, that I have to correct them here. They are my brothers. But the fact of the matter is our view is that reason can't operate apart from faith. Now what's he going to say to that? Well, as you might guess, he'd say, well, that's ridiculous. Non Christians reason all the time. To which I Say as a yes. And that's because they have faith in God. Well, we certainly do not. We repudiate God. He said yes. Outwardly, you do. In your heart of hearts, you know this God. And you're resting upon the worldview of the Christian when you use reason. So you have to understand that what we're arguing here is not the advantage, the public advantage, as a debater, if he lets the audience think this way is, well, naturally, I, the unbeliever, the atheist, I'm going to be resting on reason. And Bonson over here, the theist, he's going to be resting on faith, faith understood as what reason can't touch. And so I wanted to reverse the table. So I'm going to say no, what we really have here is you're resting on my faith and not being willing to admit it in order for reason to work at all. That's the relationship of faith and reason. So how far back do I go? 30 seconds. Okay, the point here is that Van Till was trying to be a consistent Augustinian and arguing that the use of. Of man's reason, whether we're doing theology, whether we're doing philosophy, whether we're evangelizing people, the use of man's reason already presupposes the Christian faith and that the authority of God's word governs all of these things. They cannot be taken as a vestibule. Evangelism isn't the vestibule. That's the second step for Schaeffer. But for Doyouvard, philosophy is the vestibule for warfare. Apologetics is the vestibule to theology. And it's all these dichotomizing approaches that Van Till encouraged us to get rid of and to see them rather as just a difference of emphasis. The apologist is helping the Old Testament scholar do his work. At one point in my lectures here, I quote Van Till and he had some really wonderful and homey illustrations of. And he portrays the apologist at one point as kind of running around to all the departments saying, how can I help you? How can I help you? The apologist doesn't set himself up, you see, in some kind of arrogant position to say, okay, now I'll establish the presuppositions for the rest of you to use and so forth. He says, no, I'm in the same thing with you New Testament scholars and also you guys that are teaching, preaching and so forth, because it's all a matter of emphasis. Different sides to the same coin. I'll let you ask some questions for a few minutes, and then we'll take a brief break. When we come back, I'll try to clarify the question of theistic proof and evidences right here. Okay. The question should be 30 words or less. If you expect poor Dr. Bonson to summarize them for the people listening by tape, I'll probably get it wrong, so you help me. The question has to do with, well, the observation at that. It's refreshing that Van Till does want the scripture to speak to us directly in apologetics. But then the questioner says he's sometimes troubled by the way in which Van Till uses the scripture. It appears that sometimes he brings certain assumptions to the text. And can all of this that Van Till is allegedly taking from the text really be found in the text itself? It's a very vague accusation, to be honest with you. And so it's. What I was going to say is it'd be a lot easier if you gave that kind of thing, because about the best I could do is tell you that I know from personal encounter that Van Till didn't want that sort of thing to take place. So if you really showed that he did that, he would be the first to say, I don't want to treat the scripture that way and so forth. My personal testimony is I don't believe that that's the case. That Van Till, I mean, every preacher tends to cut corners and to pull in things from other texts when he's preaching out of this text. And so I don't doubt that Van Til did that, too. But apart from those sorts of things, why don't you give us a specific illustration? I'll do what I can to respond. Yeah, well, thank you for making it easier on me. I mean, obviously I open myself up to deal with anything you might come up with. But that one's an easy one, I think. Easy for me because I'm going to let you read somebody else who's already dealt with that. Van Til makes a great deal of the account of man's fall. And a lot of it is, in a sense, how can I put this? It's kind of like a homiletical freedom there to expand on what the conversation was like and so forth and so on. Now, he's not the only one who does that. My guess is every preacher, you know, has to tell his audience a little bit about what went on between the serpent and Eve and how did Eve get Adam to do this and where was Adam when it was going on and all that. So, I mean, you kind of fill in the story for yourself, if anything crucial in your theology or your apologetic depended on what you filled in, that would be dreadful, wouldn't it? I see Van Til when he does that, actually just illustrating what he already finds in the text. Mantill's major point is that if you look at the account of man's fall, Eve is willing to put Satan's interpretation of the fruit, and thereby the world and her life and so forth and so on, on a par with God's. So that what you have is Eve being the judge between one hypothesis and another. Okay, that. That is what you hear over and over again. And that. And of course, you have the cute filling out of the story by Van Til as well. And the reason why it's easy to answer that is. I think you should pick up E.J. young's Exposition of Genesis 3. It's not one of his scholarly works in the sense of technical. It's a popular work. I think Banner of Truth is the one that publishes it. But Young, who was an Old Testament scholar par excellence and in my estimation does exactly the same thing with this. He apparently thinks it's fond in the text. I do as well, by the way, but much better scholars than me, I think, will stand behind Van Till in that. So on that example, I would say, yeah, get Young. I think it is in the text. Okay. For the sake of the rest of you who might not be running with us on this, let me observe that in my lecture I've talked about, about the relationship of apologetics to theology, philosophy and evangelism. However, our friend's question here, and it's perfectly legitimate, is not a question about what I've been lecturing on. It's a question of what's the relationship between biblical studies and systematic theology. And that, of course, is most seminaries today a lot of fun because you get people very strongly on different sides of the issue. Let me tell you what I think Van Till would say to that issue. I talked to him about it a number of times. I believe I'm right here. Van Till would see that as being resolved in terms of what is now called the hermeneutical circle, that it is wrong to think that biblical studies can be taken as intelligible in themselves and they provide by an inductive study of the particulars, conclusions about God. And then the systematic theologian takes all those inductive generalizations and tries to organize them then into a higher level of coherence and so forth. Mantill also thought it was wrong to believe that the systematic theologian can tell the Biblical scholar, what he's able to find in the text based on his theological preconceptions. Okay, so in terms of the hermeneutical circle, what illustration would we take? This? We'll take a young college student who is not a Christian just yet, but he's been challenged to read the Bible. Now, when the unbeliever reads the Bible, most likely he's bringing certain views of God, Heaven, Jesus, the Cross and so forth to the text, which are really messed up. I mean, if you do much evangelism, it always appalls me. I mean, it's one thing to reject, it's another thing. Not even have the literature downright. It's almost like the naivete of thinking angels float on clouds and so forth. And that's what heaven's going to be like. That's right in the Bible. Like, where is it right in the Bible? How did we get it so wrong? So the unbeliever comes to the Bible and he's already got, in terms of his topical preconceptions, really weird ideas about God or the Trinity or Jesus the cross, whatever. But as he reads the Bible, certain particulars strike him. He says, oh, wait a minute, wait a minute. So Jesus is not the kind of man I thought that he was. This says otherwise. So here you have a case where the preconception is being corrected by the particular of the text. Right? Let's say the man is converted by the power of the spirit. As he reads, reads the Word, he decides he's going to commit himself to Jesus. Now, would anybody hire this person the next day to teach systematic theology? Obviously not. What's going to happen is the unbeliever is now going to go. The now converted believer is going to go back to the text and he's going to reread it. In theory. It'd be nice in my illustration if he had read the whole Bible, became a Christian. Now he's going to read the whole Bible again. It doesn't happen that way, but the loop nevertheless gets started that way. Now we have a real small little merry go round, if you will. He's made one reading of the text, maybe just the Gospel of John, but it's been enough to correct his preconceptions. And he believes in Jesus. But you know, that sanctification is progressive, even the sanctification of his thinking. As he goes back, he's going to improve his reading of the Bible again. And part of the improvement comes from the fact that he now has a different view of Jesus on the cross. He hasn't got everything right, but now he's got the beginning of a systematic theology. You know how some evangelicals like to say, you know, no theology, no creed, but Christ, right? And then we say, yes, what Christ are you talking about? And when they answer that question, you say, well, then you got the beginning of a creed, if not a creed, right there. So the unbeliever, now a converted believer two days later, has come back to the text. And he begins with a very small creed. Lots of mistakes in it probably, too. But as he encounters the text, he goes through that loop one more time. And what's interacting are the specifics of the text and his theological preconceptions. Now he gets to have better theology. And every time his theology improves, his reading of the text improves. And every time the reading of the text improves, his theology does. And so, as Van Til teaches us, then the circle that starts real small works its way out. And as we grow, then our theology is going to be informed by scripture, but our reading of Scripture informed by our theology in a very healthy way. That's about all I can offer you here. We've taken enough time there. Let's go a couple more and then we'll take a break. Yes, sir. Sure. The question is. Well, the request is to comment on Doyevird's view of the laws, the boundary condition between the Creator and the creature, or creation in particular, and Van Till's view of the Creator creature distinction. To put it very simply. If you do a metaphysical anatomy of what doyouvers teaching, the only way you could make sense of many of the sentences, maybe it's just figures of speech, you know, and we have to give him more space. But if he draws conclusions based on these metaphors and then, you know, starts polemicizing on the basis of them, it looks like it's more than just a figure of speech. An anatomy of his metaphysics seems to suggest to me that you have the lawgiver, obviously God, and you have that which is lawed. Pardon me for the bastardization of English, but you know what I'm getting at? That which has been regulated by the law, and then you have a boundary condition, which is the law itself. And Deliberate sometimes will talk about how the light of God, as it comes through this prism of the boundary condition, then gets refracted into the different law spheres or modalities and so forth. And so that too suggests the idea that you really have a third thing metaphysically here, I would grant figures of speech. We all use them and get caught up in them. But again I think it's more, more than a figure of speech. And Van Till found that very wrong headed that there is only. He's a dualist metaphysically very strongly so. So you only have God, the uncreated reality and then you have the creation and there is no boundary condition between them. Some I mean if you look at the human history of theology actually the history of heresies, you notice that this kind of conception is really popular over and over again. You get it with the Gnostics and others, the chain of being, scale of being and so forth. You get it in Thomistic philosophy which is really based upon Aristotle's philosophy. The whole notion that there's a structure on are a law of nature. So you have nature, you have the law and then you have the lawgiver and so forth. And Van Till would not have accepted any of that and I don't either. Right here, 30 words or less, remember? Now come on. I'm putting an expression on the board here to illustrate what I think the ambiguity is and where when Van Til finally clarified that ambiguity saw why he had to oppose Though I've heard you have the notion of science controlled by the Word. Now taken by itself, that should appeal to just about any reformed person I would think. Isn't that what we want? We want science controlled by the Word and all science has to be controlled by the Word. Theological science has to be controlled by the word. Right? History has to be controlled by the Word, physics has to be controlled by the Word biology, math, so forth and so on. Okay, Where N is depending on which denomination of the Doyuvardians 13 or 14, 14 or 15, whatever. So you have the different sciences that are all controlled by the Word. Now the problem is what you mean by the Word in this aphorism. If you mean the scriptures, If that's the hypothesis, then it's appropriate to do exegesis and apply the exegetical conclusions you have to physics or let's say biology or the history of life on earth. You can do exegesis of the Bible and you can say something about the evolution debate. But in fact doyouvard and the Doyouvardians were scandalized by that. They thought that was horrible. You don't do exegesis and apply it to these various sciences. In fact when that was proposed the Doverdians explicitly called it Biblicism. It's not always the case but whenever one scholar says of another scholar he's guilty of an ism, it usually isn't flattering him because it's always possible for someone to say, well, thank you very much. That's exactly right. I'm a biblicist. That's what I want to do. But when the Deuverdians made that claim, it became very obvious, didn't it, that they didn't mean by the word here, the scriptures, it turns out, and they drew this distinction themselves. They were talking about something that they called the power word. It's not the text that controls the sciences. It's the power power of God's word. And so you get metaphors, like people have to be in the grip of the triple motif of creation, fall, redemption, and that sort of thing. The Doyou Verdians would have said it's appropriate for the Scriptures to be used in theology, but not in these other things. These other things as well as theology are controlled by the word. Whereas Van Till, I mean, how can I put it? Vantil was a biblicist. Van Till believed that when you did exegesis, you could draw conclusions applied in an academic classroom of history or biology or physics. And Doy Byrd repudiated that. So I think they really did see theology differently. If you just put it in this context, doesn't it come out a lot different for you? How are you trying to to in a sense, resurrect Do Ubert here from this attack now? That was the question part. You have the right to take the floor now. Well, brother, I wish it were true. I mean, I would much rather say if we read things in the best light, we can harmonize these two. But you're simply mistaken. Doiliver did not mean that Van Till and his followers were not taking sufficient account of general revelation. They said explicitly, you don't go to the text of the Bible to draw conclusions in the specific sciences except the science of theology. And so it's not like do a better job than we will criticize. The theoretical pre theoretical or the theoretical naive distinction which you raised in your question is very important for understanding the debate. I would agree with you there. I would also say that the Doyou Verdeans were mistaken to think that that's a watertight distinction rather than a matter of degree of sophistication or the attempt to use scholarship and rationality to account for experience rather than experiencing things in their undifferentiated whole. As a matter of fact, no one has had such a thing happen to them. No one experiences anything in its undifferentiated wholeness. And so again, we're getting onto the bad philosophy. Let's Hurry on. There was a question back here. Where in that process is the assumption. I missed the rest of the sentence. Okay, I'd love to do this in a detailed way. Let's take the simple approach though, here. When Einstein said we're going to reason on the assumption that the speed of light is constant, he already had a certain metaphysical assumption, didn't he? Now he didn't have a scientific. I mean, it wasn't as though he was asserting the speed of light is constant, because that's the frustration of modern physics. No one knows that the speed of light is constant. But we're going to reason as though, though it's true. It's a heuristic device that enables us, we think, to do certain things. Now it did enable people eventually. I'm not so sure if that was crucial to it, but let me just say it anyway. It did enable the atomic bomb to be exploded to generate the effect that we wanted, we think we wanted there. But the idea of an atomic clock slowing down is the. Not the sort of thing which was provable. But the fact is that whichever way you go with Einstein, successfully or unsuccessfully, it's all assuming something is constant in the universe. But is the universe constant? Is it even possible for there to be constant? It's anachronistic in a gross sense. Well, let's go back and ask Heraclav Heraclitus. How about this? Should we do physics on the assumption that the speed of light is a constant? Heraclitus would have said, well, we already know that can't be true. How do we know that? Well, because we've already got the assumption that everything's in flux. If everything's in flux, then the speed of light fluctuates too. Okay, so what I'm getting at is that even though Einstein is sometimes thought by people to have opened the door to an indeterminacy understanding of reality, even Einstein's assumptions had to assume constants in the universe in order for science to be done. Now we're doing this thumbnail answer about something like Einstein. Even I feel uncomfortable with it. But what I'm getting at is you can't make sense of the procedure, even of Einsteinian physics, without a Christian understanding of reality. I'm having a hard time discerning your words. Yeah. Which is to say Einstein had to act as though it's possible for there to be constants in the universe in order to do the kind of physics he wanted to do. And what I, what my, my hypothetical dialogue with Heraclitus was just a way of saying not every philosopher is going to accept that you know what if we go on the hypothesis that Wednesday really precedes Tuesday and now what kind of conclusions can we draw about history and all sorts of things now somebody might say well yeah I mean you could do that but Wednesday doesn't precede Tuesday so this is all a bunch of nonsense Even though Einstein couldn't prove the speed of light was constant he treated it that way and in so doing had a certain view of reality well I'm aware from a little bit of our informal conversation that I'm talking to somebody who knows much more about these things than I do but my own interpretation of the atomic clock experiment is that it could not have failed or succeeded given the sorts of things Einstein told us But I'm getting beyond my area I came here to talk about Van Til why don't we ask about that? No, actually why don't we talk about.