Dr Greg Bahnsen - Van Til Copernican Revolution: Apologetics Revolution (Part 3)

Just to make sure you're in the right place. This is a lecture on Van Til and the Copernican revolution in apologetics. My name is Greg Bonson and I hope you're in the right place because I'd like to tell you something that I consider very exciting and important. And if I hear rightly, in many of our discussions about presuppositional and evidential method, there may be some progress possible if we have a little bit better understanding of what Vanta was saying. In the last session, Ron told us that presuppositionalism represents basically the deductive approach to epistemology that is a kind of ontological dogmatism and that there's a place for that, but that evidentialism is a more inductive approach and doesn't hold to the dogmatic approach, but says that the evidences speak for themselves and so forth. I think that for many years the misconception has been just that, though we many times will talk about evidence being used by presuppositionalists and that therefore there is a middle way between these two schools of thought. To be more accurate, evidentialism and presuppositionalism represent two epistemologies. It's not an issue of whether evidence is used. It's not an issue of whether presuppositions are acknowledged. Both schools do both of those. Now, it is sometimes true that in the polemics of either of these schools, they sometimes de. Emphasize or want to own up to that. But both schools use assumptions, both schools appeal to empirical evidence. That has never been what the issue is. And so, with that background in mind and some quotations that I'll give you from Van Till at the end, you have some idea where I'm going. Let me get started by pointing out that 1995 is the centennial of Van Till's birth. He was born May 3, 1895, in Gruttegast, Holland, and Philadelphia was the place where he taught apologetics from the opening of Westminster theological seminary in 1929 for over 45 years. And so a meeting of the ETS focusing on apologetics convening in Philadelphia in the centennial of Van Till's birth could hardly have gotten together without some paper being presented on Van Til and his significance for 20th century apologetics. In the title of my lecture, I referred to Van Til and the Copernican revolution in apologetics. This is an obvious allusion to Kant's famous analogy. In the preface to the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant used this analogy for the significance and the impact of his own method on the history of philosophy. And he held that the Copernican revolution that he brought about focused on his transcendental critique of pure reason, by which he affirmed and denied crucial aspects of rationalism and empiricism, as well as answering skepticism and the disdain into which metaphysics had fallen at that time. Similarly, Van Till's transcendental presuppositional program for apologetics, I believe, revolutionizes the field, proving the certainty of Christian metaphysics over against the skeptical challenge while criticizing the traditional rational and empirical methods of apologetics, and yet upholding theistic proof and evidences. And that last sentence probably is, you know, enough of an earthquake in this setting, because the standard line is, Van Till doesn't believe in theistic proof, he doesn't believe in evidence. And yet from 1932 onward, he can be quoted as affirming both of those. Now, how did we get it wrong? Well, it's because I don't think we've understood the transcendental character of his apologetic. By grasping the nature of Van Till's revolution apologetics, I maintain that we can one, understand why his critics have so often misconstrued him. He was never a fetish, nor was he a deductive. Secondly, we can understand why his is a worldview apologetic, not a piecemeal apologetic or an inductive building up of evidences. Thirdly, we can understand his claim that there is an objective, rational proof of the Christian worldview that doesn't merely show its probability, but its necessity. Fourthly, we can understand how he affirmed and denied that presuppositionalism is circular in its reasoning. That has been, I think, a real bugaboo. People have taken it in different ways. And Vantil said, in one sense, of course, we deny all circularity. In another sense, it is circular. Only somebody who understands Kant, I think, can look at Van Til and say, oh yeah, that makes sense. Everybody else goes, well, you're contradicting yourself. Well, it's not at all. At least I don't think so. Fifthly, we can understand why the apologetical argument must be indirect. Sixthly, we can understand how it can deal with any kind of particular objection, be it scientific, historical, ethical, psychological, etc. And can deal with any general kind of competing worldview, whether secular or religious. Many times people will say, well, this is great. If you already accept revival, what about, you know, the Muslims? What can you do with that? Well, if you understood the transcendental nature of the argument, that wouldn't seem an objection at all. Seventhly, we can understand why it can accomplish all these things and yet be based on a transcendent revelational authority and not on an eminent and autonomous approach to reasoning. So that's why I wanted to give this paper, because it seemed to me it might accomplish some good in terms of understanding among evangelicals and of what the different epistemologies are and what Van Till was really proposing. To understand the character of Van Till's presuppositional apologetical argument for the truth of Christianity. I believe it will be instructive to rehearse a short segment of the history of philosophy, what we call the beginning of the modern period, the 17th and 18th centuries in Europe and England. Along with other influences, Descartes had situated epistemology at the center of philosophical speculation. What can we know for certain? What is beyond doubt? How do we psychologically come to know what we do know? How do we justify or prove our claims to knowledge? Prior to the arrival of Kant's critical approach to such questions, two major schools of thought competed with each other regarding epistemology. There was the rationalist of the approach to learning, knowing and proof advocated by Rene Descartes, Baruch Spinoza and Gottfried Leibniz on the continent. And then the competing school of thought took an empiricist approach to epistemology was represented by John Locke, George Barclay and David Hume. Both rationalism and empiricism adopted the autonomous spirit of Descartes starting point. They adopted the reference of man's self sufficient intellect as able to understand the world and put together a coherent total vision of what the world is and how man should live in it. How do we know what we know and how can we prove our beliefs to be true? The autonomous rational is to maintain there are self evident truths from which we can deduce substantial conclusions about the nature of reality. But you see, the wildly different conclusions about reality at which they arrived made it rather incredible that their premises were genuinely self evident and that their deductions were genuinely necessary. The autonomous empiricists rejected all innate ideas, maintained that only particulars exist and said we know improve things by common sense and observation of the world. But this too led to philosophical embarrassment in that the empirical demand for verification or the psychological tracing back to the origin of particular ideas was not itself a truth which could be empirically verified and the nature of the particulars which were acknowledged to exist was hotly disputed. Was there a particular substance underlying the particular attributes of things as Locke said? Or did material substance exist only as a mental idea or internal experience, as Barclay said? Or again, empirically speaking, must we not also reject any mental substance, since there's only a bundle of perceptions as well as enduring extra mental objects made up of isolated experience traits? And reject any causal relation between them all, as Hume said, because we have to be empirical. After all, Enlightenment epistemology was in shambles in both Europe, the rationalist and in the English Empire, the empiricists. And Hume could comment with embarrassment, if reasoning be considered in an abstract view, it furnishes invincible arguments against itself. The vaunted age of reason had collapsed into subjectivism and skepticism, failing to find a reliable method of reasoning and even disagreeing sharply over the nature of reasoning itself. There would seem to be then, no intellectual basis for confidence in man's ability to gain objective knowledge of the real world and the orderly world outside the mind. And thus, as the story runs, Immanuel Kant was awakened from his dogmatic slumbers by the shocking skepticism to which Hume was driven. And he pursued what he called a Copernican revolution in the way we should view the mind and its reasoning. Now, if you have your Kant with you today, we're going to turn to. In the preface to the second edition, Kant says, hitherto it has been assumed that all our knowledge must conform to objects. But all attempts to extend our knowledge of objects by establishing something in regard to them a priori by means of concepts have, on this assumption, ended in failure. We must therefore make trial whether we may not have more success and the task of metaphysics. If we suppose that objects must conform to our knowledge, this would agree better with what is desired, namely, that it should be possible to have knowledge of objects a priori, determining something in regard to them prior to their being given. We should then be proceeding precisely on the lines of Copernicus primary hypothesis, failing of satisfaction, factory progress in explaining the movements of the heavenly bodies, on the supposition that they all revolved around the spectator. He tried whether he might not have better success if he made the spectator to revolve and the stars to remain at rest. And he pursues that a few pages later as well. Basically, Kant was saying the mistake of all previous schools of epistemology is to assume that the knower is at rest and the world about and is moving, when, as a matter of fact, the spectator is moving and the other objects are the ones that he must now conform to his movement. Which is a nice analogy for his idea that the mind actively forms its objects and doesn't simply receive them as though the tabula rasa was being impressed by external sensations. The memorable opening line of the preface to the first edition of the Critique of Pure Reason stated, human reason has this peculiar faith that in one species of its knowledge it is burdened by questions which, as prescribed by the very nature of reason itself, it is not able to ignore, but which, as transcending all its powers, it is also not able to answer. It was scandalous, said Kant, to philosophy and to human reason, that and I quote, if anyone thinks good to doubt the existence and nature of things outside us, we are unable to counter his doubts by any satisfactory proof and must accept those things merely on faith. The rationalist and empiricist conceptions and methods of proof were obviously inadequate to counter the skeptic. But Kant felt that a different program, the philosophical analysis, could very well save science, as well as leaving room for a kind of mystical and moralistic religious faith. Kant's particular recommendation for doing this, his particular approach to bringing a Copernican revolution in philosophy, was in fact abhorrent to Cornelius Van Till. But the program that Kant proposed is exactly what Van Till said we must pursue. You see, Kant did not depart from the man centered and autonomous standpoint of Descartes, but actually intensified its inwardness, according to Van Til, making the mind of man the source of order or law in the world of experience. You may remember the famous quote from Kant where the mind of man is the lawgiver of nature. The mind, previously viewed as passive in the knowing process, should be looked at upon, he said, now as active in the acquisition of knowledge. It imposes order, the forms of time and space, categories like substance and causality, on the chaotic raw data of sensations. Against the rationalist, Kant taught that nothing could be known apart from experience or observation. But against the empiricist, he held that the mind is not a blank tablet, but constructive of the objects of knowledge. Kant's scheme was born arbitrary. That is, there's no proof that the structure of the mind is universally the same. And since it is contingent that our physical cognitive faculties are what they are, there is nothing to say they would not change from time to time. Ancont's scheme capitulated to subjectivism and skepticism. Since the mind knows objects only as they are formed by its dictates, thus only as they appear and experience, thus leaving objects as they are themselves yet unknowable. Kant's metaphysical agnosticism, as far as rational knowing, is concerned both about extra mental things of this world, the noumena and things that are beyond this world. Non empirical ideas such as God renders his autonomous philosophy thoroughly unacceptable, both philosophically and religiously. And though I've covered that quickly, I want to make it very clear. Van Till was no friend of Kant. In fact, throughout his writings, Mantill takes Kant as the supreme example of the autonomous spirit that we need to fight as Christians and apologetics at all times. Nevertheless, the general kind of program, the approach to proof of fundamental beliefs which Kant recommended to improve upon rationalism and empiricism, was convincing and effective. According to the assessment of Van Till as an apologist, Koch proposed to engage in transcendental analysis was asked, what are the preconditions for the intelligibility of human experience? Under what conditions is it possible, or what would also need to be true in order for it to be possible to make sense out of the experience we have of the world? To seek the transcendental conditions of knowing is to ask what is presupposed by any intelligible experience whatsoever. This kind of analysis takes us beyond the methods of rationalism and empiricism to see what is presupposed by them both. Kant wrote I entitled transcendental all knowledge which is occupied with the mode of our knowledge of objects. Insofar as this mode of knowledge is to be possible au priori with respect to those beliefs which are genuinely transcendental, then it is impossible that they be false and their certainty is ascertainable apart from specific empirical experiences which suggest the hypothesis or confirm it. Kant explained that the conclusion of a transcendental argument, or the conclusion of any transcendental analysis of experience, and I quote, has the peculiar character that it makes possible the very experience which is its own ground of proof, and that in this experience it must always itself be presupposed. End of quote. Now we have to note, well, and this I think mistaken, is made when people read Van Till occasionally, that not all claims that a belief or idea is transcendental are in fact true. Saying so does not make it so. Some candidates do not, after all, match the characteristics of transcendental necessity that I've just described. For instance, a dedicated opponent of Christian faith might allege that the empiricism to which he is committed is a transition transcendental truth. And so they said, that's the end of the argument. You've got your transcendental, I have mine. That's not the end of the argument, that's just the beginning. It makes little or no sense to hold that all knowledge is based on observational Experience is something which could not possibly be false. And even worse, this principle is not by any means presupposed, nor does it make possible its own ground of proof. Far from being self attesting, empiricism is self refuting because the very demand of the empiricist cannot itself be empirically justified. And so I just in passing point that out that we talk about a transcendental proof. Just claiming that you've got a transcendental position doesn't mean you have a transcendental position. The transcendental method of knowing what one's fundamental beliefs or proving one's presuppositions, in which Van Till took a keen interest and advocated for apologetics from the late 1920s, has again come into vogue somewhat as a matter of fascination, both negative and positive, among philosophers of late, and I think here, particularly P F Strawson in books like Individuals and the Bounds of Sense, in which he's trying to revive the transcendental approach approach to those issues. Now, the difference between the kind of philosophical analysis and argument which was engaged in advance by Kant and the kind of analysis or argument set forth by a Descartes on the one hand or a Locke on the other, cannot credibly be reduced to a matter of rhetorical phrasing. And the same holds for the difference between the kind of apologetic argumentation offered by Van Gogh and that which has been proposed by rational and evidential apologists. The nature of one starting point for the rationalist and empiricist philosophers was selective, self evident and clear ideas for Descartes, simple ideas caused by sensation for Locke, and likewise rational proofs for God's existence. In apologetics do not start with just any truth, principle or concept at all, but with some specially important one, like the idea of cause or purpose or perfection. Evidential proofs do not start with just any fact whatsoever, but with some specially important one like Christ's resurrection or fulfilled prophecy. But this isn't true of a transcendental argument. Kant's analysis encourages one to start with any idea or fact whatsoever, no matter how mundane. The nature of one's method of reasoning or the rationalist and empiricist philosopher was by conceptual connection and unpacking in the case of Descartes, or by the connecting of ideas through inductive generalization or analysis of complex ideas into component simples by locked whereas for Kant the method of argument was not to take items of phenomenal experience, be they conceptual or perceptual themselves, and connect them to others, or break them down and unpack them, but rather to ask about something distinct from those ideas, namely, what conditions, what additional beliefs are needed for these first ideas to be intelligible. Kant's argument about the necessity of a causal understanding of our experience is nothing like a rhetorical variation on the kind of analysis and argumentation we find in the work of Descartes or Locke. They are concerned with different kinds of issues, different types of issues, and they appeal to different kinds of backing for the positions they take on those issues. But perhaps the most important difference between transcendental analysis and either deductive or inductive analysis is a matter of the logical character of the conclusions to which one comes. When he uses transcendental analysis for the sake of time, I'm simply going to summarize this. In a deductive argument, those of you who have studied logic, you know very well that relevant premises that establish a deductive conclusion when they are negated, therefore negate the conclusion as well. Likewise, in an inductive argument, the relevant premises that offer some kind of support for the conclusion when they are negated change the degree of support or maybe even the truth of the conclusion. But ironically and fascinatingly, this is not true of a transcendental argument. As Kant pointed out, and Van Till many times said, you take any judgment, whatever it may be, P and from it do a critical analysis and reach your transcendental conclusion. The fact is, you can go back now and start with not P and reach the same conclusion, which is not true deductively or inductively. The stunning application of this feature of transcendental arguments to apologetics which Van Til made, is precisely that. Not only do theistic premises or opinions establish the truth of the Christian worldview, but anti theistic beliefs or opinions do so as well. Stop and think about that if you haven't studied Van Till in depth. Let this whet your appetite. Van Til said. This is probably the shortest summary of Van Till you can find in three words. With my students I give these three words. I say, unpack this. Show me you understand Van Til. He said, anti theism presupposes theism. The ability to intelligently assert an antitheistic argument presupposes the very conclusion that the argument is intended to refute. Even if the unbeliever wants to start with the assertion that God does not exist, a transcendental analysis is such a statement would exhibit that the possibility of its coherence or meaningfulness assumes the very existence of God which it denies. I think it's easy to understand why Van Till and others find the transcendental approach to defending the faith compelling and attractive. To understand how Van Till utilized it, however, it's important to see that his was a unique version of Transcendental art documentation. Van Till pointed out that he was applying the method of Kant or the logic of idealism. But, he said, in a way in which they could not. In pursuing the project of discovering the preconditions for the intelligibility of man's experience, Van Till introduced significant changes in the way unbelieving philosophers pursued a similar aim. And so let me quote Van Till. He said again, we may speak of our method as being transcendental, but if we do, we should once more observe that our meaning of that word is different from the Kantian or modern meaning. Kantian thought does not really find its final reference point in God. Modern thought in general does not really interpret reality in eternal categories. Indeed, Van Till held that Valentine Hep was philosophically misguided to say, quote, Kant sought the solution of the question of certainty in the same direction in which a Christian should seek it. End of quote. And the reason why Van Till made a point of insisting on and distinguishing transcendental apologetics from Kant is that, and I quote him again, Kant's foundation of reasoning is wrong in so much as it is based upon the assumption of the ultimacy of the human mind, and in as much as it is, has assumed the existence of brute fact. And so the kind of transcendental critique in which Van Till engaged and encouraged his students to employ was not philosophically neutral, nor was it autonomous. It was not an abstract intellectual analysis which just any unbeliever could participate in without objection. It was not a project which, starting with no definite assumptions, reflects on imminent factors to discover the general foundations of thought in a way that any and all schools of philosophy might do in formal cooperation with each other. I quote Van Til, we do not first set out without God to find our highest philosophical concept in terms of which we think we can interpret reality, and then call this highest concept divine. God does not come in at the end of the process, having earned now the intellectual right to a firm place in our thinking. The very process of transcendental thinking or analysis must itself begin with belief in the living and true God, or it will never be successfully finished. Autonomous versions of transcendental critique consider transcendental apologetics distasteful. The reason for that is that Van Til's transition, transcendental reasoning has a transcendent and concrete starting point in the presupposition of the truth of Scripture. And I quote him again. It is not enough for a Christian to point to the mere fact of the necessity of an a priori element in science. He must also show that unless that a priori be given the Christian theistic basis, it is no true a priori. This is considerably too religious, too personal, too specific for autonomous philosophers and those who think as they do. Van Till knew that very well. I quote him again. We accept this God upon scriptural authority. In the Bible alone do we hear of such a God. Such a God to be known at all cannot be known otherwise than by virtue of his own voluntary revelation. The frank acceptance of our position on authority, which at first was flush because of our inveterate tendency to think along non Christian lines, seems to involve the immediate and total rejection of all philosophy. This frank acceptance on authority is philosophically our very salvation. The would be autonomous man openly disdains bringing the Bible into philosophical dialogue. He likewise derides giving serious consideration to a complex and overall worldview rather than the limited analytical details which are the only proper subject of philosophical discussion. I'll tell you, the kind of transcendental comparison or indirect argument which is encouraged by the Christian apologist is odious to him. He may ridicule it, but by the demands of philosophy itself he cannot ignore it. Presuppositional apologetics or orients the transcendental argument to entire worldviews which are in conflict with each other. This explains why. It is then that, as Vanta said, the argument for the Scripture as the infallible revelation of God is to all intents and purposes the same as the argument for the existence of God. Put it simply, it's a package deal. Christianity is defended as a unit. We have an epistemology and the metaphysic that we accept in one stroke, not beginning with one, leading to the other, or vice versa. And that too is a persistent misrepresentation. It says, though Van Till begins with an ontology and then gets his epistemology. And then other people are what are known as Methodist in epistemology. They begin with their method, their epistemology, and they work to their ontology. Van Till said both are absolutely impossible because one's ontology is adjusted to his epistemology and vice versa. As a rational creature, the unbeliever can understand that one must either accept the whole of a system of truth or reject the whole of it. He can understand the idea of Scripture's necessity, its perspicuity, its sufficiency, and its authority as being involved in the Christian position as A whole. Now this whole is the approach, pardon the pun, to apologetical argument distinguishes the transcendental method employed by Van Till from what his idealist counterparts would have done or approved of. Van Till said the whole plan of Christian theism is in question. In any debate about any fact, Christian theism must be presented as that light in terms of which any proposition about any fact receives meaning. Without the presupposition of the truth of Christian theism, no fact can be distinguished from any other fact. To say this is but to apply the method of idealist logicians in a way that these idealist logicians, because of their own anti Christian theistic assumptions, cannot apply it. Because of the nature and content of the Christian's own fundamental presuppositions involving the authority of God in his revelation, even his conception and method of transcendental argumentation will be transformed. And his way of looking at the world and arguing with the natural man, the would be autonomous man, is going to be changed. Now, I probably should add before I end with a couple of quotes and let you ask me some questions, it's very important remember that Van Til's does not never did argue that unbelievers in fact do not count, do not reason, do not learn, do not communicate, do not engage in science, do not explain things, do not seek purpose, do not seek order. Vantil said, because they psychologically know God, they are both concerned for the issues such as these and to some extent successful in negotiations or applying them to understand the world and their personal experience. The issue is not what the unbeliever can do intellectually, but whether he can give an account of it epistemologically within a worldview that he has espoused. Because all autonomous perspectives take man's interpretation of the world to be original. That is, the autonomous man offers the primary order of particulars or rationalizing, making systematic sense out of them. It puts man at the center of the knowing process. And Vantil says in terms of apologetics, we must make them pay the price for doing so by pointing out that therefore it slips into subjectivism and skepticism. Ultimately, the only alternative, which is the Christian worldview, places the creative and providential outcome activity of the triune God back of all of man's experiences and intellectual efforts, thereby solving the fundamental problems of epistemology which leave the unbelieving critic nowhere to stand. Only Christianity can account for or make sense of the intellectual accomplishments of the unbeliever. All my well student in scholarly life I've heard people say Van Tuil says unbelievers can't know anything at all. Nothing could be further from the truth. Vantuul says it's just because they know things. We can hold them accountable and now reason with them and show they must know God if they know anything at all. Only Christianity can account for or make sense of the intellectual accomplishments of the unbeliever. The critic of the faith has been secretly presupposing the truth of the faith even as he argues against it. His own arguments would be, upon an analysis, meaningless unless they were wrong and Christian theism were true. And that's why yesterday in the session with Montgomery, I pointed out every student of Van Till remembers the analogy of the little girl sitting on her father's lap and slapping the father's face. Now, that may be. It may not be real sophisticated Kantian analysis. That's okay. We can put it in those words, but everybody can remember that. Van Till says, when you argue with somebody, remember they argue sitting on God's lap. Not just ontologically. It's not just that God created them. It's that they cannot reason in a meaningful way if they don't assume the existence of God, and yet they use their reasoning in order to say God doesn't exist. Van Til encapsulated the essence of the transcendental argument apologetics and expressed it memorably in the credo which he wrote for his Festru and his proposal for a consistently Christian method methodology of apologetics, Van Till proposed that we claim that Christianity alone is reasonable for men to hold. It is wholly irrational to hold any other position than that of Christianity. Christianity alone does not slay reason on the altar of chance. Accordingly, said Van Til, we must reason by presupposition. And here. Now you understand. I mean, this is a short lecture, but by now you can see the word presupposition does not mean hypothesis inductively, nor does it mean some kind of dogmatic deductive starting point. Presupposition means what the precondition of intelligibility and the presupposition is the whole of the Christian position. This is a very bold apologetic. Some of you may have trouble with it, and that's fine, but at least understand what he's claiming. What he's claiming is I can deal with anybody on the basis that I have a worldview. You have a worldview. And if you don't use my worldview, I conclude that you're using my worldview. What? If you don't use my worldview, I can show that you still are using my worldview, you're sitting on your Heavenly Father's lap even while you insult him. At this point, the unbelievers choices are either to acknowledge the truth revealed by God's Word and repent of his sins, including his intellectual autonomy, or to reject rationality itself. The unbeliever had demanded that the Christian give a reason for his firm conviction about Christ and His Word, and the non Christian must now accept the Christian's reasoning involving his concrete worldview or retreat from the task and normativity of giving reasons. When you do an analysis of rationality, intelligibility, meaning, logic, science, morality, beauty, on and on, on, it turns out that the unbeliever can't pursue his argument without assuming the very thing that he's trying to refute. In either case, the apologetical encounter has been successful for and in favor of the Christian position. Now let me quote Van Till and quickly take some questions if you'd like. And I'm quoting from his 1932 syllabus, then known as the Metaphysics of Apologetics. I say that because it's not as though only in recent years have Vantillians come to this understanding. In his very, very, very first class syllabus, Van Til said one more point should be noted on the question of method, namely that from a certain point of view, the method of implication, that's idealist vocabulary. The method of implication may also be called a transcendental method. We have already indicated that the Christian method uses neither the inductive nor the deductive method, is understood by the opponents of Christianity, but that it has elements of both induction and of deduction in it if these terms are understood in a Christian sense. Now when these two elements are combined we have what is meant by a truly transcendental argument. A truly transcendental argument takes any fact of experience which it wishes to investigate and it tries to to determine what the presuppositions of such a fact must be in order to make it what it is. It is the firm conviction of every epistemologically self conscious Christian that no human being can utter a single syllable, whether in negation or affirmation, unless it were for God's existence. Thus the transcendental argument seeks to discover what sort of foundations the house of human knowledge must have have in order to be what it is. One last one we can call the method of implication into the truth of God a transcendental method. That is, we must seek to determine what presuppositions are necessary to any object of knowledge in order that it may be intelligible to us. It is not as though we already know some facts and laws to begin with, irrespective of the existence of God. In order then to reason from such a beginning to further conclusions, it is certainly true that if God has any significance for any object of knowledge at all, the relation of God to that object of knowledge must be taken into consideration from the outset. It is this fact that the transcendental method seeks to recognize. So yesterday, when John Warwick Montgomery was pitting evidentialism and presuppositionalism against one another, you understand why I had to explain to him, you're not telling the truth about presuppositionalism as a transcendental method. It never has been in evidence. A matter of going to evidence. Sometimes when people are having trouble with this, I try to kind of loosen the gridlock and they're thinking by saying, have you ever thought about why it is that at Westminster Seminary Van Till worked with men like J. Graham Machen and E.J. young are here in men who were very interested in empirical historical evidence, and yet they found Van Till, you know, their hero, apologetically. How can that be if the common understanding of Van Till is true? You see, we haven't gotten it right. Van Till was not a deductivist who had then somehow to balance his diet with a little bit of inductivism over here. Van Till was a transcendentalist, and he said, therefore we use both deductive and inductive approaches. The appeal to evidence is perfectly fine. Not just perfectly fine. It's absolutely necessary if we're going to be true to the Christian worldview, because Christianity is a historical faith. Pardon me. Historical faith. Well, enough has been said. You probably have more questions than time will allow, but I'll try to take a few before we're out of time.

Yes, Dr. Bonsi? When Van Til says he would use evidences, it seems to me in the context of that statement that what he then says is, but we must use the evidences in such a way that we show that we argue that they must be Christian. They must be Christianly interpreted to be interpreted accurately. And isn't that really saying we can use evidences, but we can't use them using inductive reasoning. We must look at these evidences in this transcendental way. And therefore, isn't he really rejecting the use of evidence as in the traditional inductivist fashion?

Well, he is certainly rejecting the use of evidences in the traditional inductivist fashion. The reason for that is because induction, inductivism as an epistemology is preposterous. I mean, sadly, many evangelicals buy into a naive empirical approach. Van Till was very studied in philosophy. It doesn't make him right, but, I mean, he knew better than to make those kinds of mistakes. I wrote an article for the ETS a number of years ago on inductivism and presuppositionism that rehearses some of the problems. But Van Till was very much in favor of inductive procedures. It's just that to do inductive procedures, you have to work within a worldview. You have to have some conditioning context in which you can make sense out of your experience. And if someone resists the evidence, Van Till said, then we can't argue simply about the facts. Eventually we have to talk about the philosophy of facts. But in the quotation that you cited, let me just remind you, it's easy to pass over this, but I think it's significant. Van Till said, people ask, why don't I do more of this? And he said, because my colleagues in the other departments are doing it so well. Why should I duplicate their efforts when my training's in philosophy and that sort of thing? So it isn't as though Van Til didn't think we should really do it. He said, other people are doing it. Here's the point. Van Til said, we should not appeal to the facts, facts and more facts, without eventually challenging the philosophy of fact by which the unbeliever is pushing the Christian position. So that. Let me illustrate this. When I do, I try to take apologetics to the streets and. And I do a number of debates and I evangelize people and so forth. If I talk to them about the resurrection of Christ and what that shows and so forth, they resist this. I can continue to give them other kinds of evidence, fulfilled prophecy. But eventually, I don't keep on that line. Eventually say, I need to understand where you're coming from, when you won't accept my interpretation, my approach, because I would argue that if you can't accept the resurrection of Christ, you've got an epistemology by which you can't know anything historically, by the way, you can't know anything logically or morally either. And so vantill was not against the use of evidence. It's just that he didn't think evidence stood on its own. How do you account for the misunderstanding of Van Till? Well, you know, I'm in an awkward position socially to comment on that, because in the end, these sorts of Things don't come about innocently. And so to answer the question without. I mean, I could mumble a bit and come. No, I think the answer is people have not done their homework. I find most evangelicals who have argued against Van Till. If I say, are you aware that Van Till said this? I won't cite a name, but I debated a fellow once who went on and on and on the evening before about Van Till this, Van Till that. The next day in my office, I pulled out about half a dozen Van Till's books show these quotes. And frankly, he was shocked. He said, where does he say that? Well, look, I love this fellow and I'm glad we're on the same team, all right? But you see, we've got to do our homework. That's what we tell our students. And the vast majority of people who misrepresent Van Til don't know what to talk. In the beginning of your paper, you said Van Till actually admitted that he believed that the existence was rational, accepted truth and in order to do our homework. I was wondering, did he publish that or did he leave any sort of. Oh, yeah. In the very first syllabus. In the first syllabus that he offered. Now, it's not delightful reading. It's not the sort of thing you can pick up and make an easy go of, but the whole syllabus is a long explanation of a transcendental. But he talks about what must you assume about the relationship between the object and the subject of knowledge, the object and object of knowledge, the subject and subject of knowledge. That's all idealist in its framework, but all of that syllabus is a long proof that unless you believe in God, you can't believe in anything else. And I think hopefully some of the students have done a little bit better job of popularizing it. I didn't do this for the sake of commercial advancement, but you might want to pick up some of the debates I've done on the existence of. Of God to illustrate this for you. When I debated Gordon Stein at the University of California, essentially I said, look, if you're going to do a debate, you got to believe in the laws of logic. No debate without the laws of logic. But the laws of logic don't fit into a materialist universe, okay? And therefore, by coming to the debate you lost, you see, you're arguing against your own worldview by showing up for this. Well, that sort of thing, people can pick up on, students can understand it, but that. I mean, I wish I were so smart as to do that. But I got that from Van Till right here. Is there a logical structure to Van Till's transcendentalism? Yeah, there is a logical structure. It would take longer to do than we can briefly and without a board. But remember this. When all is said and done, transcendental analysis of P leads to the conclusion God exists. Transcendental analysis of not PE leads to the existence of God as well. And that is the unique logical structure of all transcendental reasoning. I'm trying to get a lot in here real quickly. We're going to break in about two minutes right there in your debate with Dr. Stein, which I really appreciated. If he had at some point said, you know, you're right, how would you have taken him past the general theism to the Christian theism revealed in the Scriptures? Yeah, that's a good question. A lot of people think that a transcendental argument can be done somewhat in a deistic way. I touched it briefly, too briefly, in my lecture. Van Till says, it's the whole Christian worldview we're talking about now. You can't talk about everything in the Christian worldview simultaneously though, can you? So I can only talk about logic right now, or science or morality or redemption. But the point is, you couldn't even understand the logical argument for God's existence if he didn't have a redemptive worldview in terms of what you account for, wiring psychological things. So Van Til would say, once you take all the questions into account, students to Van Til, and you want to expose them to his own writings, what.

Would you recommend as the best available.

Single book in print? For starters or students? Yeah, for students. The best starter for Van Til is not the most sophisticated. By all means, pick up his pamphlet why I Believe in God. And when your student comes back and says, where's the argument? Then slowly show them. This is what transcends dental analysis. That's a brilliant little illustration of what Dantil's all about. Thank you very much.