Dr Greg Bahnsen - Mid-Level Apologetics: Unity and Diversity (Part 10)

This recording has been released into the public domain by the Bonson Institute, where we aim to bring into captivity every thought to the obedience of Christ. When all your ideas correspond. I mean, did you ask about the coherence or correspondence? The correspondence view is that when the idea in the mind corresponds to the reality outside the mind, then you've got the truth. You have an idea that the barn is red, and then outside the barn is red. And so then that's truth correspondence. Whereas for the coherence view, the statement of the barn is red. If that's coherent with every other idea you have, merges with all the other ideas, then it's true and it's part of a theory that's consistent. Okay, I'm going to give you a choice here. I have two more illustrations before I go to a third basic idea. And I know that I'm over the halfway point and you may be tired. I'm tired. I want a drink of water, but it might be better to let me finish. Take five more minutes and then we'll take a break. Is that okay? I thought you'd agree. Especially since I'm passing out your exams tonight. I knew you'd be cooperative. This will make it a lot easier. Let me get beyond metaphysics and theory of knowledge, type things and talk about politics, philosophy of politics. Those who emphasize the discreteness of things, the discontinuity or the separateness or the manyness of reality. When they do political theory, the problem for them is to find a domain of the state to define a way in which the state has authority over against individuals. The guys who approach things from the atomistic, pluralistic approach, they take for granted that individuals have freedom. Then the real problem is, well, how can the state have any authority? That is, they take the manyness for granted. And they wonder, how do you get oneness in the state? How can the state have any authority? And you get things like the social contract view and all that, where the many have granted to the state, they've given up part of their authority and freedom. So the state can have. So in political theory you can tell where a guy's coming from when he tells you. That's one of the basic problems. How can you justify the state? He's assuming. Well, of course the individual is justified, but then how do you justify the state? On the other hand, you have people who emphasize the oneness. In political theory, there's no question in their minds that community takes precedence over individuality. And for them the problem is how do you preserve the rights of Individuals, because on their view, individuals are just phases of the basic reality of community life. They see everything as monistic and continuous. The important thing is that all human beings are part of a community. And so then how do you grant any freedom to those individuals since really their basic reality is community reality. Some of you may have taken a political theory course in college and you've seen that you have some theories that struggle with the issue of individuality and take community for granted. You have some theories that take individuality for granted and say, how then can you have any authority for the state? It's a natural problem when you have the one and the many conflicting with each other in your philosophy. All right, one more example. Logic. How do you view logic? Well, if you start with this discrete, diverse, discontinuous, atomistic approach to philosophy, if you're in that syndrome, when you look at logic, you say there are really two distinct, discrete categories of truths or claims. There are consistent claims and there are contradictory claims. Everything gets pigeonholed. It's either logically consistent or logically inconsistent. That's what you think. By the way, you all probably take that for granted because you have been raised in an Anglo Saxon or English and American approach, which almost always tends toward the atomistic, discontinuous approach in philosophy, the more European way of thinking is monistic and continuous. As a generalization for Hegel, the laws of consistent and contradictory claims are not definitive. They're only provisional for a while. Given one conceptualization of reality, it seems that these truths are consistent, these truths are inconsistent, but that changes. That's just a tentative way of looking at things. It's kind of like you realize that reality moves from being a tadpole to a frog. That's the nature of reality, this unfolding development. And from a tadpole perspective, it seems you have truths like this and truths like that you know very well. By the time you mature into a frog, then you see things a little bit differently. So at any point in the process of human thinking, every truth of logic is a provisional truth of logic that will be developed and perfected as time goes on. Whereas for the other guys, those over here on the atomistic side, look, it's just a matter of consistent or not consistent, and that's it. Billiard balls, my friend. Some go in this hole, some go in that hole, and that's the way we do it. And what I'm trying to push here and now we're going to take a break. What I'm trying to push here is, you see, when philosophers get Together, they are not arguing over the facts. Let's go outside and look at the trees and decide who's right or wrong. This is not an argument over the facts. This is much deeper than that. This is an argument over what should you emphasize in reality, the permanent side of reality or the process side of reality? Should you emphasize the monistic, continuous part of reality or the atomistic, discontinuous part of reality? They are not arguing over who's got the facts right. They're arguing over how do you conceptualize the world and your experience. And arguments between schools of thought in philosophy, therefore, tend almost always to be unrewarding. Now, a lot of people make fun of us who are philosophers when they comment on that. And there's a certain measure that the pride of the philosophers should be popped by that recognition. But, you know, there's something very profound about that. When schools of philosophy argue with each other, they hardly ever get anywhere. Now, why is that? How do you account for that? You see those who are more like David Hume, standing on the atomistic, discontinuous approach to human experience. They look at those Europeans and they say, your thinking is so muddled. You're always into these metaphors of continuity and flowing and provisionality and all that. And the continental philosophers who emphasize the monistic, continuous approach, they look at English and American philosophers and they say, you guys are so simplistic. You think you've always got things just categorized and fission hold real nicely. Reality's messy. Human experience is messy. You can't get it down just that precisely, fellas. Now, what happens when these two schools of thought argue with each other? The arguments are not going to be over how well you do your homework. See, if we all agree on how to find out the price of eggs, then I can send you out to get the price of eggs in San Marcos. And when you bring your papers back, we know how to resolve the argument there. You might have arguments over how well you did your homework. But you see, arguments between schools of philosophy are not over how well you do your homework. They're over what kind of homework you should do. That's why philosophers can't agree with each other, because they differ over what kind of homework to do. That is, they argue over what are the real problems. If you stand on this side of the philosophical divide, you don't agree with these guys over what's the real problem. And not only do you not agree over the problems, you don't agree over how to resolve the problems. Even if you did agree on them. You don't agree on what analysis amounts to. You don't agree on what standards of thought you use. You don't agree on what methods of argument are fruitful for resolving differences. I know you're having to swim underwater. And I'm going to end at this point for at least five minutes and continue this lecture. I'm going to push it a little bit harder with one more illustration. But do you all, I hope, get my gist here. Between schools of philosophy, there is no rewarding way of arguing because everything's different between worldviews. You have different problems, different standards, different methods, different ideas of analysis. You just do your homework differently. And so we can't get together and say, well, who did it right? You know, who actually got the price of eggs right? Because you don't even agree on how to do that. Yes. Real quick, Larry. Well, it might not be real quick. It's going to be. What's the question? It seems to me that evolutionary philosophy is monistic, yet the particulars within science, the empirical study and so on have to have. They have to have particulars within them. And yet Hume said that in another setting, that Hume completely undermined science by. Yes, he did, but those are true different problems, choosing two things. Hume undermined science because since there was no continuity or necessary connection between things, scientific laws couldn't have any application. They were just habits of the mind rather than an experience of the real world. Hegel and others brought about an evolutionary approach to reality because they saw all of reality as unfolding and developing. And that fit right into what Darwin was trying to say from a scientific standpoint. Let's take a five minute break. All right, now that we're plugged in and we're all back from break up to this point on number three, the nature of philosophical disputes or the. The nature of disputes between worldviews. You have noticed that arguments between different approaches to philosophy tend not to be very fruitful. Because what happens is that philosophers end up arguing over what kind of homework should be done rather than over how well you did this homework or I did this homework. They differ with each other over what the problems are and what kind of analysis is called for, what standards and methods should be used. And that leads me then to my third illustration because there's really different orientations toward the whole subject of doing philosophy. Here I'm going to talk about the outsider orientation and the insider orientation. The outsider orientation would be found in philosophers that stress objectivity. They want to stress being distant, neutral witnesses from outside to the object of truth. They have a spectator approach to philosophy. They consider the scholar someone who stands out there, disinterested, a spectator at a distance trying to be neutral and objective about things. But you see, there's another approach to philosophy. The outsider orientation is what most of you would get in an American Introduction to Philosophy course. Not always, but in our culture, 90% of the time, philosophers present it as the scholar who, at a distance, looks at problems out there. Okay, but that is not the only approach to philosophy. In other parts of the world, what might be called the insider approach or the subjective approach, the participant approach to philosophy is emphasized. And now the preference is given to living through an experience, a direct, personal, empathetic involvement in experience, so that instead of gaining knowledge about your subject, you get an intimate acquaintance of your subject. The insider says, I got to jump into the game here. I've got to be involved. I got to be personally, subjectively affected. I must be a participant in the ongoing process of finding the truth. The outsider says, I must be a spectator. I must be cool, calm, dispassionate, objective. Who's right, who's wrong. You see, when you look at the history of philosophy, you have different styles of doing philosophy. Plato, on the one hand, was this real dispassionate. You know, the truth is out there to be found. It's objective. We are spectators. Gould, on the other hand, said, that's worthless. Get in there and solve problems. If you don't have pragmatic value to what you're doing, it's just a waste of time. He was the, you know, the arch insider in philosophical issues. He didn't care about objective matters. It's a question of what helps human experience along. And so there are some philosophers who distrust their feelings, and they put the emphasis upon formal proof. Here's Descartes. Descartes says, you can't trust your feelings. You know, you've got to have objective, formal proofs. But then there are other philosophers like Schopenhauer and Bergson, who really denigrate reason. Say, when you try to be objective and pull back from things, you're really falsifying and distorting the world. The real important thing is intuition and experience and insight that's more reliable than this reasoned approach to reality. These two different approaches create a kind of reductionistic approach. Those who want to be objectivists, the outsiders, say things like whatever cannot be expressed, and explicit verbalizations verifiable by science are meaningless. There's logical positivism for you, but then you have the opposite Looking for a pure language as well. When the insider says, we don't want a neutral language about neutral objects, we want the language of poetry, mysticism and commitments, philosophy, you have the mystics and the Zen Buddhist. Now, when different approaches to philosophy look at each other, obviously the other side is deluded. But how do we account for that delusion? See, that's interesting too. If you take the objective outsider approach to philosophy, you tend to, they tend to look at the problem in those other committed subjectivistic philosophers as being a metal headedness. They confuse knowledge with mere emotion. That's their problem. But you see, if you're on the side of the insider participant approach to philosophy, you tend to see these other guys. Their delusion is due to psychological projection of their own insecurities on the world and their psychic need, you know, for stability. So what you see, you have this personality problem that you're projecting on the universe. So they can't even argue with each other over how they make their mistakes because they have different ways accounting for the mistakes that are made in philosophy. If you're on the outsider approach, you say the way to prove your point is giving evidence using arguments and logic. If you're on the insider subjective approach, you say the way you make your approach, the way you persuade people, is by means of aphorisms and introspection and epigrams. You try to jerk people into feeling the right thing rather than to proving the right thing. Do you know how these two can argue with each other? The one says, hey, I want a logical argument. The other says, hey, I want my feelings jolted into the right position. They can't even talk to. I mean, they can, they can speak English or German or Chinese to each other, but philosophically, ideologically, they can't even talk to each other. And thus what amounts to making a case for your position, what counts as plausible and implausible, depends on your orientation. It doesn't depend on the nature of the argument of the evidence you offer. And so we observe to bring this to something of a conclusion. So we observed that philosophical disagreements tend to be inconclusive. Philosophical disagreements tend to be inconclusive. A concentration of effort by acute and important minds does not and has not led to consensus in the history of philosophy, but only to such a diversity of opinion that certain schools find it unrewarding, if not downright impossible to communicate with each other. They certainly cannot convince each other. Why are philosophical differences so inconclusive? Now we're coming to the pure meat of this part of the lecture. I'M almost done with it. Why are philosophical disagreements, why do they tend to be so inconclusive? I'll write the answer for you. Underlying the inconclusive disagreements between schools of thought are profound differences of worldviews. It's because they have different presuppositions that the different schools of philosophy cannot fruitfully or successfully dispute with each other. Different presuppositions make arguments inconclusive because what kind of presuppositions are we talking about? Or just erased it? Presuppositions about the nature of change, presuppositions about unity and diversity. Presuppositions about objectivity and subjectivity. And your approach to philosophy, when we have different worldviews and different presuppositions, those presuppositions determine what is puzzling and in need of explanation. What are the problems of philosophy? The two different approaches don't even agree. They write different kinds of textbooks on philosophy. They don't see the problems the same. For the most part, those presuppositions determine what is certain and non negotiable about reality. That is, what are your starting points? They don't agree on the starting point, they don't agree on the problems, they don't agree on the starting point for resolving the problems. And those presuppositions lead to differences over the nature of analysis. A different view of explanation, a different view of argument. To put it simply, a different view of standards and methods. So one worldview, one kind of worldview creates these kinds of problems. This kind of starting point indicates this method for resolving things. But a different approach about the nature of reality and human knowledge and conduct and how we approach philosophy creates different problems, a different starting point and different method for resolving things. So when we get these schools come together to talk, then they all talk German and they all talk English, but they don't talk the same ideology. And so they don't convince each other. Well, conceivably, I could have given this lecture in a secular university in the philosophy department. Like I told you, the initial idea for it actually comes from a presidential address in the American Philosophical Society. Why did we bother with it tonight? I'm wondering if any of you can tell me what have we learned about philosophical disagreements that should help us understand the apologetical process that we want to be part of? Well, it shows us that unless we understand where the other person's coming from, there are presuppositions and worldview, etcetera, we won't get anywhere. First of all, and in other words, the Same problem with these two different types we have with Deniseration. So we have to look at how these two aren't working together to be able to understand how we can't really communicate the same way. Okay, we have to go and look at focus on why do arguments between believers and unbelievers tend to be inconclusive? Because we have a different approach to doing philosophy. We have a different approach to what the problems are, what the starting point, the non negotiables are. We have a different approach to what the method and standards should be. Our whole approach is different. I mean, it's not like we're all doing the same thing. And then one of us messed up in our homework, you know, we added two columns wrong. And so now all we need to do is go back and show the unbeliever. You see, if you just corrected your addition here, then you would come to Christian conclusions. It's not like that at all. He's doing different kinds of things when he argues than we are. There's different starting points, different methods, different things impress him, different things strike him as problematic. And that's why the argument between the believer and the unbeliever tends to be inconclusive. The only way we can get to the bottom of things is then attacking at the presuppositional level. We must deal with the underlying understanding of reality, of man, of the universe, of how we know and how we should live if we don't deal with presuppositions. Are apologetics for the most part. I'm not going to say evidentialism doesn't do any good. But for the most part the issue is presuppositional. It's not just a matter of who added up. All the evidence is right. If you understood the history of philosophy, you would know that presuppositionalism is what's going to be required and a huge and the major antithesis between believer and unbeliever. Now you see that between the schools of unbelievers, how much more than between all the unbelievers and the school of belief. So that's why we've had this part of the lecture which you haven't read on number four in tonight's lesson. I should probably let number three sink in for a second here. We have to focus on presuppositions if we're going to be able to have some kind of conclusive meaning of the issue between antithetical positions. Number four is the statement that what you stand as objective is determined by your worldview. What I'm doing here now is I'm responding to somebody who has followed the lecture to this point and might say, all right, there's this huge antithesis between the Christian way of thinking about reality, knowledge and conduct and the non Christian way of thinking about this. There is this antithesis, and I understand that we're going to have to argue presuppositions or else it's going to be all inconclusive. Ultimately, you got to get down to the worldview level or we're not going to be able to change people's minds or really demonstrate our point of view. And now the person says, however. However, the way in which we argue is going to be based on things that are objectively certain. We've got to go to the unbeliever and we've got to argue objectively, that is things that he cannot deny. We've got to work on those things, okay? And poor Dr. Bronson, Dr. Van Til and others, when they hear their students say that, they go, have you been with me so long? Do you not understand? Even what you think is objective is affected by your worldview, okay? And it's in order to flush out that I'm trying to kind of stage play what these technical articles are all about. That's what I'm fleshing out in the article that I once had entitled. I'll read a different title for it, Rose, is called Science, Subjectivity and Scripture. That's a new title from the original, but nevertheless. And as you read this, you may have wondered, has Dr. Bonson forgotten what we're dealing with here? Because I'll start out talking about the interpretation of Scripture, right? Okay. So I'm leading in from a different angle. Okay? I'm entering the playing field from center field rather than home base. But you don't get into this very far until you find out that what I'm really interested in talking about, this is a lecture I gave at the Evangelical Philosophical Society a few years ago. What I'm interested in talking about is everyone is calling for scientific biblical exegesis or scientific hermeneutics. And by scientific, what they meant is we've got to take an objective approach that everybody can agree to. I said, yeah, right. What do you mean by scientific? There's this honorific idea that the scientific approach is what everybody agrees to. There's this objective thing called the scientific method. You with me? And that's what I set out to knock down then. And I approached it from what was the issue of discussion? Hermeneutics. But people were proposing hermeneutics has got to be reined in by science. And by science we mean that which is objective, invariable, that everybody has to agree to, non negotiable. And so in the middle of page four, you'll notice the subhead, science and honorific conception. We are people who have the idea that science is objective, presuppositionless and invariable. In fact, if you look at the very last line before the middle of the page break on page six, I say, with Grant, we portray science as objective, neutral and invariant. If you have trouble reading the article, that's the key point. The idea that science is objective, neutral and invariant is what we are going to now analyze. Is science like that? Well, if it is, then we should be able to look somewhere in the realm of scholarship and find that. Okay? And everybody takes for granted you can do that. And what I want to suggest is you look around, you ain't gonna find it. There's good reason to call into question the uncritical conception of science which has been encountered above. And then the paragraph at the bottom of the page. At least two separate models of science can be countenanced in the past and current history of Western epistemology, that is theory of knowledge. Page six at the bottom, that paragraph that begins about five lines up, two separate models of science. Now, if I'm right that there are two models of science, then already we've lost the idea of science as an invariant universe program. All right? But some people think science is pursued this way, some this way. And the two models I call foundationalism and the other pragmatism. And I get into a lot of heavy scholarly detail. I know that. So my. My purpose tonight, and I only got about 10, 15 minutes left to do it. My purpose tonight is just to try to give you a thought, thumbnail squirt and overview so that you at least get something out of this. I find a rational too much to hope that you would read it over and over again. But I guarantee you that if you get up above the forest and get the layout, then you can come down and read it again and you'll get a good one. Pretty soon you can get right down in the trees and you'll start understanding what I'm going through. But you got to be willing to put in the time. I mean, I didn't write this lecture the first month I studied philosophy, so I can't expect. And you can't expect of yourselves that you're just going to jump in there and say, oh yeah, well, just snap it up. So tonight all I want to do is try to cover the high points for you. We're looking to see whether this idea that science is invariant, objective and neutral is borne out in the actual experience or program of science and scholarship. As a matter of fact and history. In Western history of philosophy, you have found very few schools of epistemology and you have pragmatic schools of epistemology. The foundationalist says everything is finally verified by getting down to a particular foundation. So if you can take your theories and put them on this kind of foundation, then they are going to be well anchored. Foundationalism tries to eliminate relativism and prejudice, tries to get certainty by looking for a secure basis to unassailable propositions that can be the foundation for your theories. Now, where did that foundation be found? One kind of foundation I'm in the middle of page seven now would be what's called common sense beliefs. Some people say, well, the foundation for everything else are certain things that are just common sense. And then what I do is I share with that. I mean, that doesn't work too well if that else it. I'm not going to tell you why, because if I do, I'm going to lose you. But I'm just worried for some one approach, the foundation is in common sense beliefs. Yeah, the world amounts to common sense. Okay. Others would say the foundation is in perceptual foundations. That is, they must be founded on something you can observe. If we do get all my theories down to what is observable, then they are well founded. And what I do now is I go into a number of problems with what is basically a perceptual approach to knowledge. But all knowledge ultimately comes down to perceptions. And then on page 10, I conclude that foundationalism doesn't work and it gives into skepticism. Then I turn to the second model for science, which is more popular nowadays, the pragmatic approach to science. Science doesn't refer to that which is very built on solid foundations. Science refers to that which is successful in solving problems. Do you all have a feel for what a dramatic difference that is between those two approaches? Somebody says, what is it to be scientific? One theory of thought says is to be scientific. Every one of your theories is based on secure foundations. Of course, we haven't found what they are. That's a real problem. The other school of science says, who cares about foundations? I heard accounts of solving problems. And so if your approach solves problems, if it's pragmatic, then it's scientific. And so then I start looking at the pragmatic approach to science and how do we justify our assumptions if we take this approach? And the problem is you can't agree over what problems should be solved and how they should be solved. And it wouldn't say that you're being pragmatic. You take the approach to preserving the species or the idea of saving your society or this or that. I mean, what are the problems to be solved and how should they be solved? The pragmatic approach doesn't give us unity either. All right. And so then we turn on page 12, the bottom page. I'll say, if the common conception of science as a presuppositionalist and strict discipline which overcomes spectacle relativism by offering justification for its assumptions and procedures is now recognized as mythical in character, the view of science as a settled and invariant manner of argumentation fares no better. And return now to the whole field of metaargumentation or the philosophy of logic. If you didn't like the previous section of the reading, you're really going to hate the next section. One, I know it gets difficult, but you, nothing else, even though you may be amateurs, you know, novices and this I want you to have the experience. If you look at some of these philosophical issues, we're going to push you away from this naive evidentialism that just holds sway in the Christian church. People will say, well, at least everyone agrees on logic. Oh, oh yeah. I can't believe it when I hear Christians say that. And by the way, when I challenge them, they offer literature like they really know everybody agrees on logic. Well, the last time I hear something, I say that often in this article. Why are all these disputes here? Why are there different kinds of logic? Why do logicians not agree even over what they're talking about when they talk about logic and propositions and sentences and laws and so forth? Okay, page 16, bottom of the page. We've surveyed two widely held models of science, foundationalist matter and the pragmatic reader can be said to be successful and offer a complete and objective justification for beliefs and methods in the scientific quest for knowledge. What also surveyed this is the last part, the progressive recognition that rational argumentation and scientific method are integral but universal, settled and invariant from field to field and from school to school. And so now jumping to the next subheading, where we come then more strictly to is the narrow field of the logic per se. And as I say, is this the last span. Many people say, okay, science is not invariant. Science is not objective. You got foundationalism, you got pragmatism. And the arguments between the schools, it's not there. Meta argumentation is not settled or invariant. But at least everybody agrees on logic, the laws of thought and so forth. And so then I go after that idea that logic then is the model for science and objectivity. And I share that it is not invariant or neutral either. Notice these important things in the middle of page 19. The apparent unit object which has been presented to many people is usually achieved through the indigenous heroes of the field and through sociological prejudice. But if I could write a textbook on logic and make it look like there aren't any arguments, how would I do that? I would just not mention those schools. That's not to disagree with me. And then all the freshmen who take my logic class will have this naive idea that well, this is what logic is. Because I have to say this is logic. Isn't that silly? And yet it's going on day after day after day in the university. People think oh well, at least everybody agrees on logic. They do not. And so when I go into these are part of the trees now, I'm not going to go down into all the trees. Problems, not problems, but differences with respect to the philosophy of logic and history of logic. For instance, when somebody says oh, everybody agrees about the laws of logic, you might just and say oh, in the history of logic everyone's agreed on the law of excluded metal. Is that right? And if they say yes, they have. You say, well, obviously an amateur, you don't know what you're talking about. That's been a real disputed point all the way back to the Greeks. Some Greek schools did not accept the law of excluded metal. Others did. And it's a big argument in the philosophy of mathematics today as well. Do you justify logic a priori or officer in disputes over that? Then it gets even nastier. What are we talking about when we talk about propositions and all that? When we get to page 28 that I've pretty much made the point that I want to for the purposes of our parameters course. Turn to page 29 and let me kind of summarize with this first four paragraphs. The problem is with grants quite intelligent conception of science. Mutual agreed upon presupposition, less objectivity in one's method of conclusions is certainly not to be found in science or logic. If you underline that sentence, that's kind of like the point that I want to make here. Objectivity is determined by your words view. It's not something that is Neutral and universal or invariant, neutral, agreed upon, presuppositionless objectivity and method and conclusions is simply not to be found in science or logic. To point this out is not to discredit science and logic, nor is it to capitulate the subject of relativism. There is a reality independent of man's mind, conceptions and beliefs that reality can be known. We can arrive at truth beliefs about it. Which among the welter of conflicting claims can be warranted by giving non arbitrary evidence? The normative interpretive epistemology and its discussion of justification or rational decision procedures for conflicting claims to knowledge should not be naturalized. Nor do you need to abandon the cognitive certainty of a secure starting point in abdication to volunteerism, feudalism, obscurantism, unrealistic blind prejudice, relativism and skepticism. The question is not whether biblical interpretation or any other disciplined study can hope to clarify according to some reflection or ideal of science, but rather what realistically constitutes acceptable science. We have pointed out you cannot avoid ideal presuppositions. If you study philosophy, you can't get away from it. Underlying worldviews are going to determine the nature of the dispute. It will be inconclusive if you don't agree with presuppositions. But you cannot pretend that you can argue presuppositions objectively or scientifically because what you understand by scientific is determined by your worldview. Does that lead us on ultimate disperse? No way to get to the bottom of things. Well, stick with this class, because in our next session together I'm going to show you what a transcendental argument looks like to demonstrate that there's a way in which you can argue permissions and show that one set of presuppositions is necessary and the others are not. And that doesn't mean we're going to go back to this idea of objectivity and common notions of neutrality. So we're going to move ahead in that course. The one thing we didn't talk about tonight, but I want to pass at your exams is the article Pragmatism, Prejudice and Presuppositionalism. That article deals with the quest for certainty as an answer to skepticism. And what I look at are three 20th century attempts to deal with skepticism. Three 20th century attempts to deal with skepticism. One is called pragmatism. You've heard about that tonight a little bit already, pragmatism. The other is linguistic philosophy in the style of John Austin saying that knowledge is just a performative audience. And the third is the approach of Ludwig Wittgenstein and his approach to certainty which really prejudice. And then what I say is, does that mean we have no answer, but there's no way to find certainty? And all I want to do is look at the last paragraph of the article because that's where it gets to its conclude. I mean to its climax. I say on page 292, Harry Frankfurt once wrote, listen to this claim, the claim that a basis for doubt is inconceivable. That is when someone claims that you cannot doubt this there claims certainty. Okay, so certainty. He says the claim that a basis for doubt is inconceivable, the claim to certainty is justified whenever a denial of the claim that violates the conditions or presuppositions of rational inquiry. He says you have reached certainty and have answered skepticism when the denial of your claim would undermine rationality. And that's the theme of the vanteurous approach. He says when you deny the Christian worldview, you undermine rationality and therefore the quest for certainty can only be satisfied within the Christian worldview. But Banfill's contributor to the theory of knowledge is our true awareness that a reasonable basis for doubt is inconceivable with respect to God's revelation. And apart from this sure foundation, the sure foundation of God's revelation all over ground is sinking sand. And I think that's the genius of Van Til's contribution to the history of the parenthetics. What we will now in our next lesson, study as the transcendental approach to proving our presuppositions. People will tell you as your presupposition of you have one worldview, somebody else's another and you just kind of pick which one you like. You just have this faith commitment. And I hope that I will hear all of you in that slander against presuppositionalism by the end of my next meeting. I want to show that presuppositional. So you cannot argue about your presuppositions and if you deny the Christian worldview, you're denying rationality. Right. Could you give me a little more the down to earth summary of that or restatement of a frankly statement one more time. Copy anyone? Okay, you didn't get it on your tape I guess. Oh yes, I guess you might run that gut. Let me give it to you. She says the claim that a basis for doubt is inconceivable, that is a claim to certainty is justified. You can justify the claim that you've got a certain truth whenever a denial of your claim violates the presuppositions of rational inquiry. That is, to deny your presuppositions would destroy rationality. And if that's the case, then it is rational to say that you've achieved certainty not to advance this as we do as Christians. We've pointed out to the young believer that without Christianity. Christianity who destroys rationality? All right, I think we can turn off the tape. This recording has been released into the public domain by the Bonsen Institute. Duplication, sharing and distribution is encouraged. For more information about the life and ministry of Dr. Greg L. Bonson, visit our website, bonsoninstitute. Com. Where we aim to bring into captivity every thought to the obedience of Christ.