Dr Greg Bahnsen - Transcendental Arguments: Four Types of Proof (Part 1)

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.

Heavenly Father, we come to you today grateful that you are our Father and that we have the privilege to call upon you as your children. We acknowledge very freely that we have not that right by anything in ourselves that we don't come by this naturally, but it's only by your supernatural grace and love that we belong to you. We confess our sins, and particularly this morning, Lord, we would confess the sins of our minds. We often do not reason in a way that shows your glory and is faithful to you. And we would ask, Lord, that you would help us as we are together, to study over these next three days to have our minds more fully conformed to your word, to be more faithful to you, to give greater glory to you. We ask that you be with us to help us understand when matters are difficult, help us to have clarity of vision and above all, fidelity to your word. We thank you for the opportunity to be together as your people and we pray you would bless us in our fellowship together and our time would be sanctified to your service. For we pray in Jesus name. Amen. Our seminar is on transcendental arguments. The natural question is why? Why talk about transcendental arguments now? In certain narrow areas of philosophical study, there is discussion of transcendental arguments going on. But I wouldn't expect a a broad cross section of the Christian church as we have here today to be interested just because some philosophers are talking about something arcane like transcendental arguments. So I'm going to take a few moments at the beginning of our seminar to try to explain to you why I think it's so important that we as Christians take a look at this subject. It's not just because there's a narrow interest in philosophy. In fact, to be honest with you, I'm a little bit surprised that there's any interest in it at all among philosophers. Because my conviction is to the degree that you get involved in transcendental reasoning, you're going to be forced to worldview considerations. By worldview considerations, I mean a consideration of what our basic perspective on the nature of reality is, how we know what we know, how we should live our lives, that network of assumptions in terms of which we organize all of our experience, make sense out of our lives, guide our lives, and so forth. Those of you who have studied philosophy will know what I'm talking about immediately when I say modern philosophy is almost allergic to worldview considerations. It is really out of touch. It's out of style. Many philosophers would consider it amateurish or gauche in some sense to even think about the big questions of philosophy anymore. Philosophy has taken such an analytical turn in the 20th century and that's what I have specialized in. So I'm not against analytical philosophy. I think it's valuable. But it's turned so much toward analysis that you have philosophers who focus very narrowly, not even on a broad field like epistemology, but, you know, some subsection of epistemology, the theory of knowledge or metaphysics or ethics or metaethics, something of that nature, philosophy of science, philosophy of language, subsections of that. Because the analytical approach is what break down bigger problems into smaller ones, right? Analyze, analyze, analyze. And so when you come along and you start talking about what is the broadest consideration in terms of which, what is the framework in terms of which all of that analysis makes sense. And you can take the work of one analyst over here and another analyst over here and bring them together and make some sense of them. When you start asking those broader questions, often philosophers, well, they kind of chuckle, they ridicule, they think it's kind of old fashioned, silly stuff. Sometime today we're going to go back and do a little bit on the history of philosophy so that you can understand the significance of Immanuel Kant and what he did when he introduced in a popular. Well, not popular, but I mean in a very explicit way the notion of transcendental reasoning. Anyway, that's old fashioned going back to Kant, to the idealists, you know, we're really past all that. So it's really surprising that there's any philosophical interest in analytical arguments at all. My analytical transcendental, pardon me. My interest in transcendental arguments didn't come, therefore, because I was studying philosophy with an apologetical interest. It came because I studied theology first and happened to come across the writings of a theologian apologist by the name of Cornelius Van Till. And what Van Till was doing, though sometimes hard to understand. And I understand why people, you know, they smile and they say, wow, what's this guy all about? Really is profound. We can clean up a little bit of what he's done, to be sure. But I think the, the heart and soul of what Van Till was doing is very important. And it's from him that I learned transcendental reasoning. Now, why, as a Christian, do I care about transcendental reasoning in general? I thought I would explain that to you in terms of arguments for God's existence. I'm convinced that the existence of God not only is objectively true, but it's also objectively provable. Now, this is politically incorrect. You have to understand that this is not what apologists say today. The existence of God might be shown to be probable. It might be shown to be preferable. But very few apologists today are going to say that the existence of God is objectively provable. But I do believe that it is objectively proven provable. We even have in the broader evangelical world today, writers who are trying to, I guess, encourage people in the defense of the faith and their Christian walk, who are suggesting that nothing is provable, ultimately that you can't know anything for sure. I mean, how is it that anybody could know anything? And though Christians look at that and sometimes are very distressed or enthusiastic for it, and they think, well, this is kind of a big deal in terms of our Christian ghetto, but what they don't realize that this is really just a pale reflection of what's going on in epistemological studies in general. It's part of the falliblest, what we call the falliblest tradition in epistemology. Everything is fallible. Nothing is infallible. Nothing can be known to be sure. Nothing has any guarantees in advance. And so as Christians start thinking this way, it's time for us to, I think, be worried and do some correction and maybe get back to where we should be in our thinking as Christians. So I'm going to begin by suggesting that the existence of God is objectively provable. And now I have to talk about proof, don't I? How am I going to objectively prove God's existence? Before we talk about types of proof, a little bit should be said about the notion of proof itself. In our day. It'd be nice if we could just take these things for granted. We can't. And so I'm going to bother you for a little while to talk about the nature of proof itself. The question of the truth of God's existence has nothing to do with the psychology and or character of those who are arguing one way or another about God. The question of the truth of God's existence is not related to the character of those who are arguing or the psychology of those who are arguing. In logic, if I could put it to you as we would in a logic class, we have to be very careful of what's called the genetic fallacy and ad hominem arguments. We don't want to say either in favor of God's existence or against God's existence. Things which really have nothing to do with the merit of the case, but only have to do with the subjective origin of the opinion being discussed, or the man himself who is doing the discussing. Many times unbelievers will tell us that they can't believe in the biblical God because of the kind of people Christians are. I'm sure you run into that. It's always embarrassing, especially embarrassing if you're the one who may be on the skewer for having, you know, defamed the faith. But it's important to remember that an objective proof of the truth of something really has nothing to do with the man who is arguing. If I happen to have learned algebra from a child molester, I don't have the right the rest of my life to say algebra is invalidated. After all, just look at what this algebra teacher was doing over here. Now, in that case, everyone understands very well that you can't engage in arguments about the man, because algebra and the truth or falsity or validity or invalidity of it has nothing to do with the man messenger himself. And that's true with respect to us as Christians as well. We want to make clear to the unbelieving world that we are not defending ourselves or the character of our compatriots. We are defending the objective truth of God's existence. And for you who are interested in apologetics, it's good for you to remember that every argument that's directed against Christians in one way or another, psychological and character, is a reversible argument. Nothing is proven or disproven by those considerations, as they're always reversible. For every case of a Christian minister who gets caught in some kind of sexual scandal, we can easily match cases of people who openly profess a pagan outlook on life, who do terrible, miserable things as well. So all those sorts of things are reversible. Remember, we're dealing then with objective matters. The fact that they're objective doesn't take away from the fact that they are personal. The existence of God, obviously, is a very personal question. And it's personal because it touches on us deeply. It touches our lives vitally. Indeed, the most important aspects of human experience are affected by what you think regarding God. Who are we? The enigmas of suffering and evil in this world, or love and death? All these things are affected by whether you believe in God or you don't believe in God. So the question of God's existence is a very personal question. But the truth of God's existence has nothing to do with our personal needs or interests. It isn't to be thought that, well, the reason we're here today learning how to defend the faith better and to argue about God's existence is because we have a personal need that is met when we do this. And then there are other people who don't have that kind of personal need, as though we were just talking about musical preferences. Some people like Bach, some people like Bon Jovi. So is that what it is? You know, we're kind of like we're on the God wavelength in terms of our personal needs. No, we're not here. Although I would say I'm not embarrassed by this at all. When people say, you know, you obviously have a very deep personal need for God and that's why you believe this. I said, well, that's probably true. And that's the way God made me. God made me to need him and to glorify him and to live for Him. And so when people say those sorts of things, like, that's just so personal, you know, it's just like meeting a need. Don't think that that's a put down. You say, well, yeah, God made the world in such a way that we live best and are happiest when we know him and so forth. But nevertheless, the truth of his existence has nothing to do with my personal needs. Okay, so you're getting my point. We're not talking about psychology. We're talking about objective proof of an objective state of affairs, the truth that God exists. All right. Also, with respect to arguments in proof, you should note that an argument need not be accepted by everyone for it to be conclusive. An argument need not be accepted by everyone for it to be conclusive. I'm tempted to make reference to the O.J. simpson trial. My guess is, as long as we're on this planet, you're not going to get everybody convinced one way or another. Okay, now should we just say, well, then why don't we just give up courtroom protocol? You know, calling witnesses, garnering evidence, arguing with one another, because, you know, you can't get everybody to agree one way or another. So it's just really a crap shoe. So why don't we get together, throw the dice, flip the coin, whatever, decide whether the guy's guilty, him or anybody else, and then just get on with it. Our whole way of life, our culture, and I'm not, somebody might say, well, we can dump our culture, but for now, just. You have to realize that in our culture we know there's a difference between proof and persuasion, don't we? Not Everybody will be persuaded. But we think proof is available. And as Christians, that's a very important thing for us as well. When we say we can objectively prove God's existence, we're not saying we can universally persuade people. I'm told that it's Plato who said it first. I'm not really sure we'll give him the credit, though. A man convinced against his will is of the same opinion. Still, that's true. If I can prove something and in that sense be convincing, yet a man doesn't have a heart to go along with it, he's not going to cry uncle, he's not going to give up. We have to recognize that. And if you don't, you're really going to be strung out working on your Christian apologetic, I think, because over and over again what you're going to do is you're going to use an argument and you see that somebody doesn't just fall immediately and then you say, oh, I've got to revise the argument. Well, that isn't true. Sometimes you got to repeat the argument. Sometimes you just have to keep coming back, coming back, coming back till the coin drops for the person. But even when you have the greatest of arguments, really solid, cogent stuff, if the man's heart is not changed, he's not going to have the coin drop. He's not going to say he understands or that's all right. So when I say I believe the existence of God is objectively provable, first of all, remember I'm talking about an objective matter, not just personal desires, ad hominem or genetic considerations and all that. And secondly, remember that I'm talking about proof, not persuasion. Go right ahead. Remember I told you, though you may not raise your hand. Yes, the Latin expression ad hominem means to or against the man. So you make an appeal to the man or against the man. In some cases, when you don't look at the merits of the case, but you consider something about his personal life or needs or the background of the person who is arguing that sort of thing. So it's a more personal and psychological or genetic consideration rather than one that's relevant to what you're arguing. If somebody has an argument about what causes cancer, and then you stand up after he's presented his scientific paper and all this evidence and, and say, you know, I don't like your tie. How could you possibly dress that way in public? Most people are going to say, you know, that really has nothing to do with cancer. You know, you're talking about the man, you're saying your mother didn't teach you how to dress. But that doesn't take anything away from his argument. I mean, that's an outrageous example. But I'll tell you what an ad hominem argument is. Okay, so it doesn't deal with the issue of directly. Right. It skirts the merits of the case and looks at the circumstances of how it's being argued or who's arguing it. No, I don't think fallibilists have to say that all arguments are ad hominem. They do want to say all arguments are less than conclusive. And so they might grant, I'm sure they would grant, that many arguments are relevant, they're on point, but nothing can ever establish a conclusion. You know, infallibly, indubitably, one big long argument. Yeah, in a sense, you put it all together, it's going to be your word against mine, and therefore your character against my character, isn't it? Okay, so when I talk about proof being different from persuasion, I talk about the person arguing being distinguished from what he is arguing. This is a cousin to the distinction I want to introduce thirdly now, between metaphysics and epistemology. Metaphysics deals with what exists, what is real, the nature of reality, relationships between those things that exist, and so forth. Epistemology deals with how we know what we know, what are the nature and limits of human knowledge. And there's a difference between metaphysics and epistemology in the sense that something can exist, something can be real without us knowing it. Correct. For many, many years, DNA existed without us knowing it. So there's a difference between something existing and something being known to exist. There's also a difference between something existing and a person being able to prove it. Unless you are a very radical subjective idealist, you believe that it's possible that something exists that no one has proven. Not just that they don't know it or aware of it, but they're not able to prove it. The planet Uranus existed and was suspected to exist before there was proof of it. So existence is different from knowledge of existence is different than proof of. And something can exist even though a person offers reasons against it. That's obvious, isn't it? Sometimes people, it's not just we don't have reasons enough, but sometimes we have reasons that we think would show that it doesn't exist. The offering of reasons and even apparently cogent reasons does not show that something cannot or does not exist. I think I could give you pretty good arguments today against the idea that I have Diabetes. My doctor thought it was interesting that I felt that I had good arguments against my having diabetes when he was giving me the lab reports to show that I do have diabetes. And at least sometimes during the days that I live, I'm rational. People think that I'm an intelligent person. So here I'm arguing doctor to doctor about this matter. Now, do you think that had anything to do with whether I have diabetes? Of course not. Okay, now why am I telling you all this? Well, you probably can see the analogy that's coming right when I say that the existence of God is objectively true and objectively provable. I'm not at all suggesting that I can persuade everybody. I'm not talking about psychological considerations. And I realize that there are people who think they can offer arguments against God's existence. Okay? And we can't get into all those in a short three day seminar. But I would like to show you how you can prove the existence of God. That's a metaphysical truth. And you can epistemologically, in an objective, provable fashion, demonstrate this conclusion, even though not everyone's convinced and people may argue against it. This leads me to another introductory consideration. Now about the relationship of faith and reason. If we can get worked out this notion of an objective proof of God's existence along the lines of transcendental reasoning, which is the subject of our seminar, I think that it will really open the things up, will enlighten your minds with regard to the relationship of faith and reason. This old conundrum, this chestnut that has been there in the history of the church, I think all of a sudden gets resolved and very easily, in fact, so easily you look at it and say, how could we have missed this? It's really quite obvious. I think it is mistaken. And indeed it's misleading to think that Christian faith takes over where reason leaves off. Many people have the idea that we can reason about things such as, oh, science, medicine, industry, economics, history, whatever it may be, and reasoning will take you really, really far. But at some point, reasoning stops and then faith begins. So that for us as Christians, we agree with everybody else in the world when it comes to natural matters, matters of this life, temporal existence, nature. We agree with everybody else and their reasoning about those things. But then what we do is we add another story to the house of knowledge, or at least the personal living. And that's the story of faith, right? So everybody around here thinks in a natural way and uses reason and then we add faith to that. And I think that's misleading. I think it is mistaken. Faith is not without reason. Faith is not above reason. Faith is not contrary to reason in the outlook that I'll be trying to teach you in our seminar. To put it very simply, I do not in any sense endorse what is called fideism, if that's a new term for you. F I D E I S M literally faithism. Feedism says that Christian faith is independent of considerations of reason or reasoning. Christian faith is a personal commitment. Christian faith is a voluntary or voluntaristic leap. But it has nothing to do with reasoning, with argumentation. I don't believe that for a moment. I believe Christian faith is not only reasonable. There are plenty of people who say that you can't show that it violates anything that a reasonable man would say. But I maintain that Christian faith is demanded by reason. Reason can be affirmed without endorsing what's known as rationalism. Rationalism, however, is a term that's subject to so many different definitions. It's a specific school of epistemology, but it also is a broad attitude toward how we live our lives and conduct ourselves intellectually. Rationalism in the broad sense says that man's mind is the highest authority, or at least man's mind is autonomous. It never bows to any outside authority. The autonomous man might grant that there's a God. The man who says I'm intellectually self sufficient, I'm the final authority. Such a person might grant that there's a God. Usually he doesn't, to be sure, but you need to recognize to understand the character of autonomy. He could grant that there's a God, but it could never be the Christian God. Right? Why is that? Because the Christian God doesn't bow to the authority of the servant. The servant is to bow to the authority of the Lord. Now there are people who want to promote autonomous reasoning to get people to believe in the Christian God. And I think that is just so fundamentally wrong headed to try to say to somebody, you need to have faith in this God, and. And I'm going to prove to you, to your own satisfaction with you being the ultimate authority, that God is the ultimate authority. I say that again. I'm going to prove to you, to your ultimate authority and your reasoning that God is the ultimate authority. Well, you can't do that. Rationalism in that sense affirms that man's mind is the highest authority and that it operates independently of God and self sufficiently. And I've been in university training in the past and I continue to pay attention to higher education and to our Culture as well. And it just boggles my mind that anybody could believe in the autonomy of man's mind, the self sufficiency and independence of man's mind. If that were true, why is there such massive disagreement in the university still? What's wrong with man's mind? How does man's self sufficient mind not get things worked out? And it's not just that the psychologists differ with the political scientists. Political scientists can't agree among themselves and the psychologists can't agree among themselves. They say, yeah, well when you get over into other things that are not quite such soft issues like math or physics, then they all agree. Well no they don't. There are huge disagreements in schools, philosophies of math, huge disagreements among physicists and so forth. So the self sufficiency of man's mind, just on the face of it, is a silly doctrine. But that isn't to say it isn't the reigning dogma and prejudice of people. Nevertheless, rationalism is the idea that man's mind is self sufficient. It's the highest authority. That's different from rationality. Rationality refers to man's intellectual capability. And with all my heart and soul I affirm rationality. And I affirm it because God made us. He made us to think. He expects us to think. Indeed, since we're made in the image of God and he is supremely rational and coherent, he is the truth itself, as Jesus said, then we ought to be concerned about the truth and about reasoning and using our minds to glorify God. Paul put it this way. We are to bring every thought captive to the obedience of Christ. We're supposed to be using our minds and using them in a subservient way as a tool to glorify God. Some people use their minds as a tool to argue against God. We use our minds as a tool to argue for God. But we certainly affirm rationality. We're not feedists. We affirm reason. We do not affirm rationalism. In fact, this seminar, when you get to the end, if you look back over it, I hope you'll see in a sense the whole seminar is an attempt to show that the Christian use of rationality refutes rationalism. That if we're going to use our minds in the best way, you can't be a rationalist and against autonomy. I'm going to be arguing in our seminar that all reasoning rests upon faith. My first consideration was faith doesn't go beyond reason. Now I'm going to turn the tables and say to the unbelieving rationalist who's arguing, as a matter of fact, your rationality rests upon faith, that you can't justify reasoning without a worldview, broader considerations than analytic philosophers like to think about today. But you can't justify rationality without a broader consideration of the worldview that you have. And the only worldview that will allow for rationality or make intelligible the use of rational procedures is Christianity. And so this is pretty heavy stuff. As you can see, we're arguing that if anybody reasons at all, ultimately they are borrowing from or actually working in terms of the Christian outlook on life, that faith is foundational to all rationality, to all reasoning. Okay, are we whetting your appetite? We're getting some idea of where we're going now. How are we going to prove this? How are we going to prove that rationality itself is only intelligible or rational within the Christian worldview? Well, I began by saying I think Christianity is object of the existence of God as objectively true and objectively provable. So now we get around to talking about proof. How do we prove things? In particular, how do I prove in this objective massive way that I've laid out that the existence of God is necessary for anybody's reasoning? I'm going to give you there's different ways of cutting the cake. And I've kind of debated all the way up to the beginning of our seminar exactly how I wanted to do this. But I'm going to begin by suggesting there are four general kinds of proof or reasoning. And then I'm going to go back and do a little more detail and kind of deepen that initial summary or overview. You sure you don't want to interrupt me? I told you, I mean, I'll do this. It'll sound like a lecture if you don't do this every once in a while just for my sake. Make up a question. Say it again. Rationality is the use of man's intellectual ability. And I liken that to a tool. A tool is a form of capability. I now become able to saw this log or something because I have this tool. And the mind of man is a tool and we affirm it as a tool. It's the intellectual ability of men. We affirm over against the belief of. Okay, what kind of proof is argued by people? What kind of proof is offered by people to argue for conclusions to be very simplistic? I'll divide proofs up into four kinds. First of all, rationalist type proofs, empiricist type proofs, pragmatist Type proofs and then transcendental proofs. In the history of philosophy we're going to come back to this, so I'll give you greater detail at the end. But in the history of philosophy, some philosophers have argued that we prove things by showing that they can be deduced from more basic truths. And ultimately the basic truths which are the foundation for what we are proving are known in a rational way because we have a concept or an idea that is clear to us and distinct and self evident, that it's the sort of thing you just can't deny. It's present before your mind in such a way, as Descartes said, that there's no way that you can not affirm it. It's self evident, it carries its own evidence within itself. Here's a self evident truth, I exist. How could I think otherwise? Right? Isn't that clear and distinct to me? In fact, Descartes thought he had an interesting way of proving that it had to be as he thinks. He said, because if I doubt that I exist, I have to exist in order to do the doubting. Right? Bertrand Russell was of sterner material, philosophically speaking, than Descartes. As Russell said about Descartes argument, which everybody should see, it begs the question, he said, the argument should be thinking is going on, therefore I exist. Of course, once you put it that way, the argument's a horrible argument. There's nothing about thinking in general that shows that you specifically and personally exist. And so Descartes had something which he thought was clear and distinct, self evident. But it turns out that disagreement is possible about that. Well, disagreement is really, it's more evident that disagreement is possible when you think about Descartes, colleagues in what's known as the school of continental rationalism. Not colleagues because they work together. But there were other philosophers at that time who felt that you could give a foundation in clear and distinct self evident truths or notions from which we can deduce substantial conclusions about reality. Another one, another philosopher who believed that was Spinoza. Spinoza began with his notion of substance, which he thought was a clear and distinct idea. And from it he concluded that there's only one thing that exists, it's the whole of nature, or you can call it God. He said it really doesn't make any difference. And so he was a monist, he believed there's only one reality. Descartes felt there had to be two types of reality, mental, which is not extended in space, and body, reality, matter, which is extended in space. So he is a dualist. So here you have one man claiming self evident truths as a foundation for a metaphysic of dualism, another man claiming self evident truths as a foundation for his metaphysic of monism. Then Leibniz came along and really spiced everything up by saying, you're both wrong. There's an infinite plurality of substances that he called monads that are running around in this world. And you don't want to get into all the details of that, at least not yet. But the point is that makes rationalist arguments very suspect. It would appear that rationalist type arguments reduce the subjectivism, or at least disagreement that it's unreliable. I mean, the foundations are unreliable because people disagree with them and do different things with them. Much more popular and easier for American and English students to understand are empiricist type arguments, because that's the culture in which we've been raised. We are more. Well, we like this idea that seeing is believing. The empiricist type argument appeals to foundations again. But these foundations are perceptual, or at least common sense, commonsensical in nature. So to know anything is to be able to trace what you're claiming to know and every aspect of it back to some kind of observational certainty. The empiricist tradition in the history of philosophy is always foundered, however, over, well, broadly considerations in cognitive psychology. That is looking at the economy of thinking. How do we think? What is the psychological process by which we cogitate? And if the truths that we believe need to be verified by being traced back through our cognitive psychology to perceptual foundations, then we're going to have to have a credible explanation of that psychological process. And it's never really been offered. In fact, in the case of David Hume, the cognitive psychology was completely blown out of the water because David Hume said, if everything is loose and disjoint, then I don't ever find myself when I look at the world as my observations never include an observation of me as a continuing thinking person or substance. You're sure you feel free to break in now at any point? Because I'm surprised no one has said, what are you talking about? I'm waiting so I can say, what at the very end here. Okay, so I'll assume that somebody is interrupted and said, how could David Hume say something like that? Well, you know, really, for all of the arcaneness of his point of view, David Hume's not hard to follow. I kind of like the guy. He said, okay, Locke says every judgment that we make breaks down into certain kinds of other Judgments, complex judgments into simple ones, and these simple ones can be traced to sensation and so forth. So Locke, excuse me, Hume, using the Lockean approaches. Well then, where do I ever see myself as the one who is receiving these sensations? It's not just that there are sensations that are coming to me, but there's got to be a receiver of these sensations, right? Well now what if there is no continuing receptor? What if there's just reception, reception, reception, reception, and they have no connection with one another. That's possible. Philosophically if somebody says, well, but that isn't what happened. As a matter of fact, there is one continuing self conscious receiver. He says, fine, show that to me in my observation. Where do I observe the self conscious continuation of my personal identity? You don't. And so empiricist type arguments. In our day and age, empiricism has really kind of shaded off into a kind of common sense perceptual approach where instead of going and looking at the psychology, the cognitive psychology of knowing, we just begin with, look, there are certain things that everybody knows. Everyone holds the hand in front of their face and says, I know that I have a hand with five fingers, okay? And then if you deny that kind of thing, it's like, I mean, how could you be rational? I mean, how could you even talk to a person? How could you formulate rules of rationality for a person who denies something that obvious? I don't think that's really a very good argument. But that's been popular in the 20th century. We do perceive certain things and people aren't being rational if they deny that. Hume does that. No, Hume didn't do that. Hume. Many people try to get around Hume's difficulties with cognitive psychology by saying, Hume's problem is he thought every sensation was separate from every other sensation. So that rather than my perceiving you, I'll just say as a human body or a humanoid right now, rather than taking you as a whole object. What I'm perceiving is the color of your shirt, the shape of your body, the numerical quality of how many eyes, ears and so on. And all these different things are coming in here. And Hume says, I don't know that there's anybody here who can receive that and make sense out of it. So you're loose and disjoint, I'm loose and disjoint. And you can see that picture of knowing destroys the possibility of knowing anything. So now the comeback is to say the unity of apperception, as Kant put it, has not been dealt with well, by modern philosophy at all, that is, how is it that I'm more than a bundle of perceptions? That's what David Hume said. You realize, of course, that on Hume's approach, he was cheating when he said he was a bundle of perceptions. His argument was, I'm nothing more but a bundle of perceptions. And that was enough to destroy science and the possibility of knowing. But of course, he's not a bundle of perceptions, is he? To call himself a bundle already assumes some kind of unity of perception. But on the other end, the common sense philosophers would say we don't perceive individual things like color, shape, number, those sorts of things, and then somehow mix it up and get it right in our head. They would say, we receive what we are perceiving are holes. Okay, so I perceive you as a person, I perceive this as a dog, that as a refrigerator, whatever it may be. And then that leads not into cognitive psychological difficulties or problems, but a discussion of how it is we categorize things. Why do we think in the categories we do? What relationship does that have to language and learning and all that? Where one culture might say the rabbit is running because of the category scheme that is used, another culture has one word, maybe one concept, as far as we can tell, for running rabbit, and another concept, completely different for sitting rabbit. So we break it up as rabbit, and then forms of motion, running, sitting, whatever. Whereas another culture might have a different conceptual scheme, and we can't get into all that. But that shades often into cultural relativism in terms of our cognitive schemes. Go ahead. Doesn't this fall apart the empirical approach, at the point of proving empirically the problem that we're dealing with here? In other words, does the rationalist ultimately reduce the subjectivism, the empirical approach, Bold mark at the point, approving, yes, it's true. Well, what you're bringing up, Scott, is a second problem with empiricism. If you look at the empiricist notion of concept formation or the empiricist view of the meaningfulness of language, essentially saying that all of our concepts, if they are true, must be traced to empirical experiences, observations. And any language we use, if it's going to be meaningful, has got to also make reference to those things which are known by observation, or to those things which are just logical constants by which we combine words and so forth, that falls apart because the very empiricist theory of concept formation or of meaningfulness of language itself cannot be traced back to observations or to observation language. And so you're right, empiricism Refutes itself. The argument I've been using up to this point is it's just not workable. I mean, as Hume showed, if you're going to trace everything you know back through various stages of combinations of judgments and sensations and so forth to a perceptual foundation, you're not going to get anything. Once you get back to your foundation, it's crumbled. And what you're adding is that there's also the logical problem that it can't live up to its own norms. It says this is what is required to know something or for it to be meaningful. And then it can't live up to that requirement itself. So then what you have left is a common, sensual approach. Yes, Common sense perceptualism says that we all have perceptions, and there's no question about it. Wittgenstein would say that you can't reason after a certain point. You can't reason with the person who doesn't use the same kind of language you do. If you say you see a hand in front of you and this person has doubts about that, he's using a completely different set of linguistic principles. He has a different category scheme or something. And Wittgenstein openly admitted you can't argue with certain people at that point, you get to rock bottom, you call each other heretic and go home. And so what does that reduce to? Well, fallibilism. Right. Skepticism. No one can know anything. Everything is certain only within a certain conventional way of looking at things or talking about things. Yep. See, now this is good. If all of you are on this wavelength, what happened to rationalism, skepticism, subjectivism and therefore skepticism? What happened to empiricism? It reduces to subjectivism and therefore skepticism. Now the. Go ahead. I see a pattern here. Yeah, there is a pattern. Yes. So you're saying that even those that fall to the common sense area, they're doing that. That's a subjective route. Of course, ultimately it is. If you just. I mean, you don't have to have advanced training and philosophy to see how this works out. Just think about if someone appeals to common sense. That appeal is only going to be good if it's common sense. But how do you know that it's common? The sad thing is, very few things are common in that way. But whether you know of people who disagree or not, you have to still philosophically deal with what if somebody didn't think about, didn't take as obvious truth what you think is obvious, what would you do? How would you deal with that? Well, you have conventionalist and relativist and skeptical ways of dealing with that, I think ultimate. Well, this in one way is one version of what our presuppositions are. Our presuppositions are these common sense notions. Yeah. I think you can see where we're going is the transcendentalist, you see, pushes so hard that he says those can't be your presuppositions. Or if they are, boy, you're in bad shape. You're reduced to subjectivism and skepticism. Well, the pragmatist approach to proof. Oh, before you go to pragmatist, when you talk about common sense and that it reduces to skepticism, is that on those particular views? I mean, because it seems to me, maybe I'm lost already, but it seems to me from the Christian worldview you can talk about common sense because you have a basis for common sense. So when you say it reduces the irrational, we're talking on those worldviews or on those presuppositions, it reduces the autonomous attempt to find irrefutable common sense notions reduces the subjectivism and therefore the skepticism. And I would say, Mike, that you're right, that from a Christian standpoint there are common sense notions. But from a Christian standpoint you also have to add that because men are not just rational beings, but sinners, they don't admit to what is commonsensical. What's the most commonsensical thing to believe? That God exists. Right. Not just a God, the God who's the creator of heaven and earth, who is triune, who is sovereign, who is personal, omniscient, the biblical picture of God that is common sense. I believe from Romans 1 that everybody believes that. Not everybody admits it though, do they? They suppress it in unrighteousness. I think most people, garden variety individuals living in our culture, not the special breed of people called philosophers. Most people, first of all don't self consciously think about what their proof theory is. Okay? So let's just be mindful of that. We're overdoing it if we think everybody is going through this and making a choice of a theory. Most people don't even think about it as a theory, but in their practice. I think you're absolutely right. Most people just kind of the transcendental one, they don't get into, but they tend to just freely go back and forth among you. Sometimes logic is what convince them. Sometimes it's seeing is believing, other times it is. I don't care how you intellectually work it out, it works. You know, this is what cures Polio. So that's good enough for me. Yeah, most people are like that. Now the second answer I give you is that when you talk about the philosophers, the interesting thing is you do have schools of philosophy that try to be exclusively one or the other. In fact, the most vicious approach to philosophy, or at least the most aggressive and cutting hard edged approach, is the approach that says ultimately everything is going to reduce to a natural experience. The popular thing in at least my generation of epistemology is the notion of what's called naturalizing epistemology, where theory of knowledge is no longer ultimately a philosophical subject. Philosophers talk about it, but what they talk about is how our knowing reduces to another branch of nature, you know, psychology or whatever it may be, sociology. And later on in my notes I'm going to be talking about this, we'll come back to it. So there are some who try to push that real hard. Those who are rationalist are not anywhere close to being mainstream and popular today. Most who defend a rationalist portion of rational. Well, how do I want to say this? Those who would be called rationalists today would not say that everything reduces to these clear and distinct ideas or self evident truths, but that there are some things that do. So you have rationalists in mathematics for instance, who say, well at least in this area everything is provable, deductively certain and it reduces to these self evident truths, so forth. But then there are people in the field of mathematics that make fun of that too. You know, not everything is provable. You know, you have Goodell and others who have shown it's impossible to prove everything, even in math. So to answer your question, yeah, your garden variety individual is going to go back and forth among these things. Philosophers haven't always done that, however. But then there are philosophers who do say the best thing is to try to bring all these things together. They like to see a perspective here and a perspective there that are beneficial. They usually are categorized as pragmatists, which is what I'm going to go on and talk about though. Mike, we getting ready to say something? Wouldn't Stein and the atheists and his group be considered rationalists and appeal? No Stein, he would say that he's a rationalist and an empiricist. He's one of these people who would. He doesn't have a very sophisticated epistemology, that's obvious. But to the degree he's thought about it, he thinks you need logic and you need experience. And I think when people start studying philosophy, I'm looking at you who have Studied philosophy, isn't that pretty natural for people to do? You see these arguments and you say, well, yeah, I mean, there's a place for logic and there's a place for experience. Why don't we just bring them together, you know, and wouldn't we all be happy? Well, except that philosophically they don't go together. They go together in our living, though, don't they? And that's why students, naive students, can think, well, I can just have logic and empiricism and so forth. Well, but you see, if you have an empiricism, then you have to ask, what's your observational foundation for logic? You say, oh, no, no, no, logic's not in that part. You say, okay, well then what is the unity of your theory of knowledge? How can you use logic with respect to empirical things? You can't say, I divide my field of knowledge so I don't have to have observational foundations for logic and then turn around and say, but I get to apply logic to what I observe. Aren't they attempting to apply rationality to that explanation, which is ultimately subjective? No, what I'm saying is they're not being rational, they're being arbitrary. They would call it rational approach. Yeah, and let me tell you why. I hope you all have some familiarity with my debate with Gordon Stein, or at least his literature, so that this will make sense to more than just two of us here. Basically, Stein would. I mean, if he knew what to say. I don't think he understands the jargon at all, but if he knew what to say, he'd say that science is the model of rationality. Here's what scientists do. That's what rational people should do. That's what I'm doing. You're not. So I win. I'm rational, you're irrational. I mean, I've compressed it real quick. He is assuming, and this is what most people do. You look for a successful intellectual venture. We call that science. That's what's taught at the university. That's what's curing diseases and putting bridges together and so forth. And you say that then becomes the model of rationality. And then the transcendentalist comes along and says, okay, but we need to have some account for the success of science. You can't just say, do it this way because it's successful. If you're going to be philosophically sophisticated, you have to explain how it is that it's successful. And there's only one way to explain, I mean, one general way in which you can Answer that question. And that's to do metaphysics, you have to have some account of the nature of reality in terms of which that's why when we do the following kinds of things, procedurally, methodologically, we have success. So I'm already talking about pragmatism, but let me go back and just real quickly explain. The pragmatist sees the problems of the rationalist and the empiricist in terms of theory of knowledge and essentially says, I'm going to avoid those pitfalls by telling everybody they're irrelevant. This is a bold move. They don't always come out and put it this bluntly. I mean, there's more sophisticated ways of saying it, but essentially the practice says, who cares about Hume skepticism? We don't need to answer Hume because after all, we're able to build bridges and cure polio and do things. As long as a certain procedure helps us to adapt to our environment successfully, then it's rational. A certain procedure helps us to accomplish our ends, and that's why we choose it. We are pragmatic in our approach. Quine openly says that we prefer a certain approach because of survival of the fittest. I mean, I can't believe he's going to write out and says that the reason why we think inductively is because those who think inductively survive. It's just built into us. We don't worry about justifying induction. It's just a pragmatic matter. Now, the problem with pragmatism is that it presumes we know what ends to see. We know where we want to go, and there's an obligation to go there. But if you don't have a justification for the normativity of the end that is pursued by what you call rationality, then is rationality justified? I'm going to go slow here because I'm sure that this is what's going to confuse some of you. You should be stopping me. How do you justify rational procedure? How do you justify rationality? How do you make rationality itself rational? The pragmatist says, because it accomplishes our ends. But you see, that doesn't justify rationality unless you can. What? Justify your ends. This is what the pragmatist is unable to do. So pragmatism reduces to subjectivism. Hey, see, some of you are catching on, right? And so what seems to be the persistent problem in autonomous philosophy keeps getting reduced to subjectivism and skepticism. Pragmatism not only reduces, in the way that the others do, to skepticism, but I just want to add my own little 2 cents worth of a kick in the pants. It also is, I think, the chicken approach to philosophy. If I can be insulting here, it's just a refusal to face the tough questions. John Dewey looks at the history of philosophy and all these things. Dewey couldn't answer the problems. And so you know what he does? He says, well, then I won't play that game. And this is a rough analogy, but that'd be kind of like going out to the basketball court and realizing that maybe you don't have the ability to compete with Dr. Bonson's sons out there on the court. And then you say, after you've shown up for the game, who cares about basketball? Right. I just want you to be able to see in a mundane level, intellectually. Well, in intellectual circles, scholars, they always guard their pride, you know, and so you're not going to see them come out and do that. But essentially, John Dewey said, we're not able to do this. Who cares? We are able to do other things. And these other things we're able to do, we'll call the model of science. That's what it is to be rational. Oh, yes. Pragmatism is essentially political in nature. Yeah. The pragmatist would say, especially early on, Dewey would say the power is publicly observable. Okay. But as you know, Dewey has particular view of society and education and so forth. He thought he was being scientifically benef. It was being scientifically beneficial. It was beneficial scientifically. How do I understand this? His approach to education was scientific and therefore would benefit society. But he also said that what you do in the classroom is for the good of society. So he has two things going on here. His own view of education and then his own view of how we accomplish that. But in neither case was able to rationally justify them. It does reduce the subjectivism. Same thing in the medical. Actually, all fields are reducing to relativism in our day. And therefore I'm jumping back and forth between two sets of notes that I prepared for you. But in a little while I'm going to explain to you. When skepticism wins out, you always end up with either anarchism or dogmatism. Anarchism, the relativistic notion that everybody can say what's right in his own eyes, truth is, person, relative, that sort of thing. So it's all anarchistic. There's no objectivity. Where do we see anarchism in academic studies with a vengeance today? What's that? Well, in ethics, I mean, that battle was lost long ago. To the liberals. But we're beyond liberalism, we're beyond liberal ethics. Now, how about those people who say you don't even have objective meaning for literature, deconstructionism, ultimate anarchism in terms of, you know, a theory of knowledge. And then the other way you go is dogmatism. Now most people think of dogmatism because of historic associations with religious dogmatism. But that's not the only kind of dogmatism, right? Communist epistemology is dogmatic. You know, it's like you lose the argument because you're violating what is presumed to be the course of the dialectic working itself out in history. And therefore, if you speak contrary to the party line, you're really speaking contrary to humanity, speaking contrary to reality. And that's why we should execute you. Now, there are a lot of little steps in between, but those are the big steps. If anybody has any doubt about that, there's tons of literature, you know, on what academic pursuits are like under communist regimes. Well, so it's not just religious, but, you know, dogmatism doesn't even have to be, you know, like the Inquisition or communism in our culture. Dogmatism takes the form of what we popularly call political correctness. Right? You want to get a promotion at the university. If you even want a part time appointment, you better make sure that you fit in with the reigning paradigm. So if the university were committed to objective rationality, which is what I'm holding out for, then it wouldn't have to resort to dogmatism or just go like a wet noodle in the face of anarchism. But that's what we see happening, I think, with these big swings from a dogmatic approach to the anarchistic approach, to what we're able to know in the university today. The old model of the Enlightenment, of the objective, rational approach to things, is not a bad model. It's just impossible on autonomous presuppositions to do that. So in a sense we're saying we're going to go back and kind of rescue the history of philosophy, the history of the university and so forth. I know this sounds grandiose, but I want you to see what's at stake here. The other approach to proof in this very simplistic overview is what I'll call transcendental reasoning. Up to this point, it would be possible for you to have gotten the mistaken idea that when I talk about an empirical approach, I'm talking about particular empirical projects or things that have been learned empirically. So that some people would say, well, I would justify that particular conclusion by this empirical means. Therefore, when I come along now and suggest transcendentalism as an approach, that what I'm saying is I can justify that particular conclusion now by transcendental means. But that's not what we're talking about. We're talking about how do you prove your ultimate assumptions? What is the nature of argumentation? What is the nature of proof? So that the empiricist says, when all is said and done, proof is going to be tied to observation. To put it very simply, that means even at the lowest level, my foundational assumptions have to be observational. The transcendentalist is not talking about how we learn how to fix a carburetor. You know, who won the battles of 1776? The transcendentalist is talking about how do we show the rationality of our ultimate presuppositions. So I'm drawing a distinction between how you justify your basic assumptions, how do you show rationality itself to be rational, and what might be considered the higher level considerations that we engage in intellectually to learn how to fix carburetors, learn about history, etc. Etc. I say that because sometimes people who don't like the transcendental approach will say, well, how does the transcendentalist give us a specific answer to this? Over here you say, well, it's not calculated to give you a specific answer to anything. It's calculated to show you how it's possible to be rational. So if I'm a transcendentalist, in my reasoning, do I reject empirical methods? Do I reject rational methods? Do I reject pragmatic considerations? No, not necessarily. I mean, some might, some might not. But you're not understanding the question properly. If you think they all stand over against one another, you can only have one of these. It's kind of like if you take the chocolate ice cream, you can't have the vanilla. But the transcendentalist says, if we understand how to justify our ultimate assumptions, we have laid a foundation in terms of which we can now use not empiricism, but empirical methods. Now we can use rational methods, we can even use pragmatic methods. But it won't do you any good to be empirical, rational or pragmatic. If in the end the skeptic wins and he says, well, how do you know ultimately then? And it's only the transcendentalist that I think can give an answer. Transcendental reasoning seeks the preconditions for the intelligibility of experience. I'm going to say that again, so you can get it in your notes. Transcendental reasoning seeks the preconditions of the intelligibility of experience. And when I say experience, I mean that in the broadest sense. Experience can be an internal thing. I'm not talking about experiencing the gardener coming on the wrong day here. I can have an experience internally that has no connection with the outside world. I can have a dream right now. Some people might say you have to first have other experiences before you have dreams. But the point is I can imagine things. I can imagine right now that I'm on the beach in Hawaii. I did that. I wasn't looking at the beach in Hawaii. So experience is internal. It can be an experience of something. So it can have an external referent, or at least what's thought to be an external reference. Experience can be conceptual. It can be. How do I want to put this? What's the word? Our thinking sometimes is in terms of images. Like when I stopped to think about being on the beach in Hawaii, I had an image in my mind. I was actually flashing back to an experience. But not all of our thinking is in terms of images. Sometimes it's computational, conceptual, relational, so forth. So any kind of experience about which we can speak, how is it intelligible? How can it be that we can talk about it, that we can communicate about it, we can reason about it, how is it possible there's objective truth, in terms of which some of these things are just imaginary, other things are not. When we get into these discussions about the rationality of our experience, what would have to be true? What would be the precondition in terms of which my experience is intelligible? Talk about able, arguable. And the transcendental types of arguments that we look at are an attempt to provide that precondition of intelligibility. And in this sense defeat radical doubt, defeat skepticism. It's not an attempt to tell you what theory of childhood cognition is correct, or what theory for curing AIDS is correct, or who actually was the person that led the troops in 1776. It's not an attempt to settle any specific issue. It's an attempt to show that issues are settleable. Pardon the English there. How is it possible to play the game of rationality regardless of what the outcome is? So the transcendental type of proof is an attempt to defeat skepticism, not by appealing to self evident truths like the rationalist, or to perceptual certainties like the empiricist, or to the success that is attainable as the pragmatist talks about, but rather it's an attempt to show what would have to be true. What are the preconditions for the intelligibility of all of our rational procedures. Excellent. Contrast that. At the end of your philosophy series you said, what's the bottom line? Well, all these different competing theories are inconclusive. And you're contrasting that with the transcendental approach and say it's settleable, issues are settled, they're conclusive. Does that be. Am I right? Well, actually, you're bringing a little bit different dimension here, but I thank you for that. Let me say two things about settle ability. Some arguments for the existence of God or the Christian worldview do not settle the issue. They say we're using common rational procedures that the unbeliever understands and we can show very likely that the Christian worldview is the one you should choose. But they can't settle it. It can't be conclusive. But what I was talking about, it's related to this issue. What I was talking about though is is it possible to have any settled conviction in the face of skepticism? And the transcendental approach to reasoning answers the skeptic in a way that the foundationalist, you know, be they common sense, perceptual, rational, what have you, and the pragmatist, on the other hand, cannot. So in terms of general formal considerations, Bill, transcendental reasoning is an attempt to answer skepticism that's different from the foundationalist and different from the pragmatist. So the transcendentalist is saying, things can be settled. Now, when you translate this into the Christian context, we're arguing for the Christian worldview, we're also saying, and we can settle the issue of God's existence early on, I've got to probably move a little bit faster. But early on I said I believe the existence of God is provable. Now let me go back and looking at these approaches show you by contrast, what I'm getting at. When I endorse a transcendental approach, I'm only going to use. I had thought about the others as well. But let's just take what is called the cosmological argument for God's existence. This is standard fare in apologetics. Cosmological argument tries to show that from a certain concept or principle that we have about the way the world is, God must exist. And the specific concept that is used, the principle that is used in the cosmological argument is that of causation. Every event has a cause. We all know that every event has A cause. Now, since we've had an experience of causes, what we'll call secondary causes, the cosmological argument says there must be a primary cause, a first cause for this causal network or chain that we've experienced ourselves. So we all know what it is to insulate our homes and see our fuel bill go down. We see there's a causal relationship there. We all have seen what it is to plant a peach tree and then eventually see peaches grow and we harvest them and eat them. We've all had experience of events being caused. The event of my fuel bill going down was caused. The event of eating the peaches was caused. And on and on and on. There seems to be here a principle, according to this argument, that every event has a cause. Or to put it more crudely, every object has an origin. Every event has a cause. Every object has an origin. So the cosmological argument starts with empirical premises. You've all experienced causation or origination, and from these observations generalizes that every event or object has a cause or origin, and then says, therefore the world as a whole must have a cause or an origin. That's what we call God. Now, is there anything wrong with this argument? Well, I hope all of you are just. I mean, there are so many fallacies in this argument. It's just incredible. Five years ago there wasn't. No, it was perfect. Thank you for that personal testimony, Mike. Anybody else would like to give their. As I was once a natural theologian. Well, let's go back to the. Just so we can pick at this a little bit for fun, can I generalize from many observations that events have causes, that all events have causes? Do I have any right to do that? That's a fallacy, isn't it? I can't argue from some to all unless what I assume the very thing that I'm supposed to be proving, the causation is a universal principle. But now, if causation is a universal principle, can I say that because each event has a cause, that all events together have a cause? Now, that's another logical fallacy, right? Fallacy of composition. What's true of the parts is not necessarily true of the whole. And yet the cosmological argument commits that fallacy. Can I argue that what I know from my natural experience is a foundation for what must be true of the supernatural? This was Kant's argument that at best, the cosmological argument tells us something about a natural cause of all things. It couldn't tell us anything about a supernatural cause, or else we would have the fallacy of equivocation. Our premises would mean one thing, our conclusion would mean another when we talk about causes. So, well, then there's the child's question too. And just about any unbeliever at the university can figure this out. When the cosmological argument's given, every event has a cause. Naturally we're going to ask ourselves, well then what's the cause for the event we call God? If every object has an origin, what's God's origin? And Christians, I think, are notoriously embarrassing, you know, in the face of that kind of argument. You know, they always say, well, it's got to stop somewhere. To which Schopenhauer said, why shouldn't it stop at the world? You're going to take this taxi and arbitrarily get out of the taxi. Then you can choose where you get out. Okay, so the cosmological argument, though it is very popular. In fact, as Mike and others might testify, in evangelical circles there are people who say this is where the action is, right? Cosmological argument can be sliced and diced. So I started out by saying I think there's an objective proof for God's existence. Cosmological argument is not going to be it or arguments like it. I could give you examples from inductive arguments too. You like this one about how the New Testament documents are basically reliable. In them, we learn about Jesus who made certain claims and he rose from the dead. No other theory can account for that, you know, claim that he rose from the dead, except that in fact he did rise from the dead. Really, that's an amazing leap to me. But if you're a believer when you read that stuff, I think I'm probably tuning into all this. When I first read that stuff and I hadn't studied philosophy and so forth, I was still, I think I was a senior in high school. The first time I encountered what's called the historic argument for the resurrection, it clicked. I said, of course. That's it. That's right. Why? Well, because I had the right presuppositions. But then within the Christian worldview, it doesn't make sense to say that people would claim that Jesus rose from the dead on the swoon theory and on all these other sorts of things. But you know, out there in the world, if you think this is an objective, value free proof from history, well, you've got a real lesson coming to you. So how then can we objectively prove God's existence? Let me go back to the cosmological argument and try to Resurrect the. For you, the cosmological argument, as it's properly used, makes the mistake of trying to be neutral in our orientation. We say, let's everybody put aside their presuppositions. Let's just reason in a neutral way, and then tries to take observational truths which are then fallaciously generalized and pushed into the supernatural and all that to show that God exists. And the engine in the cosmological argument, if I can put it that way, is the causal principle. So I'm going to go back and I'm going to give you a cosmological argument, but not one that says let's put aside our presuppositions and go to our observations and then generalize and draw deductions and so forth. I am going to go to the causal principle, though. I'm going to say, let's look at that causal principle. The causal principle, to put it another way, is what we call the foundation of inductive reasoning. Inductive reasoning says that I can take instances from my experience and generalize from them either across time or ahead in time. By across time, I mean simply if I learn certain things about crows, I should be able to generalize about all crows at that very moment. I learned something about the nature of Cronus when I study individual crows. But that's an inductive generalization from particulars to the class of crows, okay? Or to the nature or property of Cronus ahead of time. What I mean by that is I can generalize from events that I'm familiar with what will happen in the future. So if I've dropped an apple 10 times in the past, or I've let go of the apple and it has dropped. So I've seen the event of letting go of the apple leads to the event of it dropping. I would inductively generalize that the event of letting go of the apple 10 seconds from now will lead to the event or would be followed by the event of it dropping to the ground. Inductive generalization is the basis then of our causal reasoning. But can that be justified? Is it reasonable to expect that we can generalize from particular cases to either properties or to future events? Now, what if we can't? What if it's not rational to do that? This is where a lot of students drop out of the philosophy class and say, I think I'll go take some psychology instead. So who cares about the inductive principle? Well, what I'm assuming here is that you care to be rational. I know that you care about the inductive principle because you can't live without it. You can't reason without it, you can't use language without it, you can't live your life. Simple illustration that many of you have heard. We all learn when we stub our toe to try to avoid stubbing our toe next time, right? Why do it? Because we assume that if it hurt in the past, it will hurt in the future. But that, of course, has. That presumes a certain view of reality, a certain kind of continuity or uniformity in the world in terms of which I can inductively generalize. So I'll go back to the cosmological argument, pick up the causal principle, and ask, now, is there a reason for believing that inductive reasoning is well grounded, that there is causation in the world? And I now address this to the unbeliever and say, now you need to use the causal principle. You need to use inductive reasoning. You're using it. Is it rational for you to do so? Let's say this unbeliever has come to me and has said, is it rational for you to be a Christian? Be prepared to give an answer to every man who asks you a reason for the hope that is in you. A guy comes in and says, is it rational to be a Christian? My approach to him apologetically is to ask him, well, is it rational to use the causal principle? Is it rational to engage in inductive reasoning? He says, well, of course it is. And it's because us scientists have used the causal principle in inductive reasoning that we know that you Christians are irrational. And I say, well, wait a minute, not so fast. How do you know that it's rational to use the inductive principle? What would have to be true in order for you to use the inductive principle? Now, if you study this or listen to my debates and lectures that I have on this, you already know the best in the unbelieving world openly admits that there is no justification for induction, no justification in the traditional, narrow philosophical sense. We can't offer you some principle which itself is well grounded, by which we could justify the inductive principle in the end. I already told you, Quine says, we use the inductive principle because we're the kinds of creatures that have survived, and the only reason we survived is because we use it. And when Klein says that in the web of belief, at least he's an honest enough philosopher, I have to respect him for that, he immediately says, and that, of course, is a subtle Begging of the question. I'm not quoting him, but it's words to that effect. He says something to the effect in subtle ways that's already assuming the inductive principle when I offer that as the rationale for the inductive principle. Okay, so now what I'm getting at is that I am going to offer a proof for the rationality of Christianity that goes something like without the Christian worldview, rationality itself is unintelligible. That the methods you have been using as a scientist to argue against me as a Christian themselves reduce the subjectivism and skepticism. Unless you have the Christian worldview as the framework or context for using them here. I'm not appealing to a rational deductive argument. I'm not saying I've got a clear and distinct idea of God's existence, nor am I giving a cosmological deduction. I'm not appealing to empirical evidence. I'm not appealing even to pragmatic success. Although you can rephrase the argument to look deductive, empirical or pragmatic in various ways. I mean, if you want to be successful at the game of intellect, then this is a pragmatic argument. But I hope you can all see that though you can metaphorically talk about a transcendental argument in those ways, it's a distinct form of reasoning that is asking what is the broader framework in terms of which we do these other things? In my Christian apologetic is to this effect that if you don't have the Christian worldview, you're not able to reason, make sense of reasoning, or prove anything at all. Ultimately, I'm not assuming that the unbeliever is able to prove things rationally or empirically, what have you. And now I'm going to try to satisfy him by giving him enough grist for his mill. It's not that I'm going to provide the raw material now that he can use his reasoning process and prove God's existence. I'm going to say your reasoning process proves God's existence. Because if God didn't exist, you couldn't make sense out of reasoning.

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