Dr Greg Bahnsen - Van Til's Presupp Apologetic: Cornelius Van Til & John Montgomery, Part 1 (Part 7)

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. I'm extremely grateful that I can be here tonight and that you were willing to come out and brave the elements and the adverse conditions to hear about a man that perhaps is not close to your hearts and maybe you haven't read anything about, but a man whose influence in evangelical circles, what we might call broadly the readership of Christianity Today and Lutheran circles in particular, has been. His influence has been very great. John Warwick Montgomery. Now, because of the snowstorm last night, the cancellation of one of our lectures, and due to the expansion of one of our earlier lectures, we find ourselves having to decide to drop two of the apologists that ordinarily would have been considered in this series were planned to be considered in this series. Imagine the dilemma. What would you do? We have left one meeting and we can talk about John Worth Montgomery. We can talk about R.C. sproul. We could talk about Francis Schaeffer. Now, we solicited advice informally in various places and we had support for taking on RC Sproul tonight. Support for Francis Schaeffer. Nobody asked that I consider John Warwick Montgomery, but that's what we're going to do. So you might say, well, why do that? The explanation is not really too difficult. First, there are ideological or philosophical reasons for doing so, and secondly, there are pragmatic reasons for doing so. The first reason for considering John Wallace Montgomery instead of the others is because, to be very honest, Dr. Montgomery is far more respectable scholar when it comes to the technical matters of philosophy and apologetics than are R.C. stroll and Francis Safer. Both Sproul and Schaeffer are what we might call popularizers. It doesn't mean they're wrong. It doesn't mean that what they're doing doesn't have value. In fact, it has great value. But it means that they are popularizers rather than technical scholars. Montgomery is much closer to a technical scholar. And on top of that, if you'll remember what we've done thus far, if the snow hasn't blanked out your memory from the theory thus far this week we have already considered the apologetic system of Gordon H. Clark. Dr. Clark is what we call in philosophy a rationalist. A rationalist, that is to say, that his theory of knowledge relies upon coherence as a test of truth and uses as its ultimate standard the laws of logic, the laws of reasoning from one premise to another, drawing inferences. Dr. Clarkson is called a rationalist in the history of philosophy, though there are many schools of epistemology, theory of knowledge that I can speak of, and I don't want to oversimplify, but it would still be a very accurate analysis, description, or survey to say that in the history of the theory of knowledge, there are two basic schools of thought. One, rationalism, stressing the ideas of the mind, and logical inference, the laws of logic, and empiricism, that is to say, trusting one's senses, one's perceptions, one's observations of the facts in the world. The rationalist, if I can, I know I'm oversimplifying, but I think it will help. The rationalist tends to say, let's stop and think about this. What follows from this premise? What logically is entailed by this premise? The empiricist is not the sort of person who says, let's stop and think and analyze and look for logical inference and test for coherence. He's the sort of man who says, let's go and let's look and see. We ask a question, let's look in the world and find some facts, find some evidence. And so he holds to a coherent, excuse me, a correspondence theory of truth, where if what's in my mind corresponds to what I can find with my senses, then I have truth. Now, those are the two basic schools of thought. When it comes to the theory of knowledge. We have looked at an apologist already, Gordon H. Clark, who holds to one the rationalist approach to knowledge. And so, in choosing John Worth Montgomery, I hope you can appreciate why I've done that, because Dr. Montgomery represents very clearly an empiricist approach to knowledge, the approach that says, let's look and see, let's find some facts, let's observe the world, let's use our senses. That is what we'll use to test hypotheses. And therefore, although Dr. Sproul or Mr. Sproul, I guess, to be honest, and Dr. Schaeffer, again an honorary degree, both of these men are very popular and popular in Presbyterian circles. The fact of the matter is, Dr. Montgomery is more of a scholar in technical matters, and Dr. Montgomery represents the exact opposite of Gordon H. Clark in epistemology. So it was my thinking that what we would be doing is covering the field topically. We'll be hitting the rationalist side of the theory of knowledge and the empiricist side of the theory of knowledge. And although it is hoped that we'll continue this series at a later date, we can come back and pick up Sproul and Schaeffer and doyouvaird and some others. Even if that and God's providence did not happen, we will have a theory that has considered, if you will, a rounded approach. We've covered both sides of the theory of knowledge and what I think is the far better alternative, the transcendental presuppositionalism of Cornelius Van Tilt. I said there was a pragmatic advantage too. Later on this evening, toward the end of our time together, I will give you just a few moments, few minutes preview of what I might say about RC's scroll as an apologist and about Francis Schaeffer as an apologist. And since they are by far the more popular of the available apologists to discuss, I think that might whet your appetite. And so when we continue this series, you'll all be more inclined to come back and hear some more. It'd be harder to get you to come back and hear Montgomery, but I think there'll be no difficulty getting you to come back and to know something further about Sproul and Shaffer. So Tony has taught me this. We must take a business approach to these things. So we will talk about scroll and paper, but I grant you it'll be a limited discussion and I'll encourage you to come back for more at another time. But for tonight, John Warwick Montgomery. And in my first hour I want to look at what Montgomery has said contrary to Van Tilt, his criticisms of Van Tilt, and answer them. In the second hour I want to look at Montgomery's own system of apologetics and do some critical analysis of it. And then, as I said towards the end of our time, a little preview of a couple of others. So then tonight we look in our first hour at Montgomery's criticisms of Van Hill, which are found, strangely enough in The Festscript for Dr. Van Til entitled Jerusalem in Athens. Here's a book of essays written in honor of Dr. Van Till. And the editor of that book decided it would be beneficial to include critical essays as well as supportive essays and essays which honor the good doctor. One of the critical essays was written by John Warwick Montgomery, who at that time was teaching at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School in Deerfield in the Chicago area of Illinois. Dr. Montgomery is a Lutheran, a staunch Lutheran, Missouri Synod Lutheran, well known for his defense of biblical inerrancy, for his opposition to the liberal movement in the Lutheran Church, well known, as I said, in the circles of Christianity today, inerrancy circles, if you will, the general evangelical world. I explained to Jack earlier in the day that out in Southern California, where Dr. Montgomery now resides. We've had a number of graduate students who have stopped by to visit or perhaps to attend our local congregation. And very often they have questions about apologetics and they're interested in talking to me about that. And in every case they are coming from the perspective of the school of Dr. Montgomery, what we call evidential apologetics. Dr. Montgomery says that when we defend the faith, we must have evidence for our faith, evidence from history, evidence that was amenable to the senses, that someone could perceive or observe. Empirical evidence for the Christian faith. He does not perceive Dr. Van Tyld to take that approach. And so in his thesperout article entitled Once upon an a priori meaning once upon the view that says we don't have to refer to our senses to know things as true, he says, consider a reversal of Dr. Van Till's approach in legitimate, unbelieving manner. Just imagine how somebody could easily reverse what Dr. Van Till is saying. Dr. Van Til, according to Dr. Montgomery, would simply approach an unbeliever and say, if you don't begin with my presupposition held on faith, then you don't see the world correctly. And every fact you appeal to, you have falsified, you have not seen correctly because you didn't begin with my a priori, my beginning apart from experience, faith commitment. Now this is Dr. Montgomery's analysis of Dr. Van Til. It's woefully deficient, but that's the way he sees it. And so he says, consider a reversal of that. Let's say that the Christian meets someone else who says, no, no, you Christians are wrong. I worship the true God. You must believe in my God or you don't see any fact correctly. You must begin with my faith commitment. Theoretically, what you have is Dan Till the apologist, saying, begin with my starting point or else you don't see things correctly. The other man says, no, you don't see things correctly in even saying that. You must have my starting point. Oh no, you are a, you are apostate. You don't see things correctly. You are reprobate. And the other man says, no, no, you are apostate. You are reprobate. You don't see things correctly. Infidel, Infidel. Atheist, atheist. And they just begin shouting at one another. They exchange their slogans, they exchange their name calling and that's all that can happen. According to Montgomery. He says, consider a reversal of Van Til's approach. Montgomery objects to Van Till's view that the facts of the world are powerless to stop non Christian myth making, since the unbeliever will twist them in the interest of his unbelief. Dr. Van Till says that the facts are always twisted or always seen according to the presuppositions of the natural man. And for that reason he doesn't see them correctly. He twists the fact that and as such the facts cannot challenge his naturalism because his naturalism interprets the facts. Montgomery objects to that. He says that Van Til's viewpoint is that the internal consistency of one's world picture, what I've called one's world in life view, cannot serve as a naked test for discerning the truth because the sinner system will be regarded as consistent by those who propose it. The sinner will think that he has a consistent system. And so you can't use internal consistency as a test. He always thinks that he has it. And Montgomery objects because Van Til makes acceptance of God's revelation on God's authority alone and therefore makes the fact impotent, powerless to convince anybody. As Montgomery says, if this is the case, no one would be able to criticize another person. Spectacles. Okay, this is playing on one of the popular metaphors that Dr. Van Til has used. Dr. Van Fil says that the unbeliever is like a man that has glasses cemented to his face. Okay? Everything is yellow to the jaundice eye. Those presuppositions of naturalism or of atheism, what have you, make him see everything in a distorted way. Montgomery says, oh, what if somebody else says, no, no, you have jaundice vision. You have the yellow glass of submitted to your faith. So no one is able to criticize another person's spectacle. And if you can't criticize another person's hypothesis or view of the world, the New Jerusalem and the city of Satan are really interchangeable. It doesn't make any difference. It's just faith commitments. Faith commitment to unbelief or Satan, faith commitment to Christ in the New Jerusalem. You can just put these, you know, in either place, or so Dr. Montgomery claims. He says that appeals to God's sovereign election of people to salvation, appeals to the doctrine of Scripture, appeals to the work of the Holy Spirit will not preserve Dr. Van Till from solipsistic collapse. Solipsistic collapse. Solipsism is a view that says that everything outside of a person is nothing but a state of his own mind. Everything that he perceives is really nothing more but the projection of his own mind. So if I were a solipsist. Well, if I were A solipsist I wouldn't be here tonight. Because you see, the reason there's snow out there is because I think there's snow out there. And the reason there are people sitting in here listening to this lecture is because, well, that's just the way my mind projects that situation. There really isn't anything else in this world. There isn't any snow and there isn't, there aren't any people listening to this lecture. That's just my mind doing that to me. The only thing that really exists is me. Not even my body, to be honest, my body is nothing more but perceptions that are projected by my mind. And so according to Dr. Montgomery, in this very cautious and sane analysis of Dr. Van Till, Dr. Van Till's presuppositionalism amounts to solipsistic collapse. So Montgomery's tact again is to conceive of a reversal to the approach of Dr. Van Til. Imagine you have an alternative to Dr. Van Til's Christianity with its own doctrine of election, its own inerrant scripture, maybe the Koran, its own self attesting inward experience of salvation produced by that religion's God. Montgomery says such an antagonist could also say that any evidence cannot attain to the status of a fact until one commits himself unreservedly to the true God, his own God. And what would that lead to? And I quote, neither viewpoint can prevail since by definition all appeal to neutral evidence is eliminated. Okay, Montgomery says, you have the Muslim over here who says, you must believe in my God, you must take my scripture, you must have faith in my starting point or you don't see anything correctly. And the Christian says, oh well now look, we have some facts we'd like to give you about the Christian faith. The Muslim says that's fine, bring on your facts. But on Van Till's approach, says Montgomery, on Van Till's approach, every fact presented to the Muslim will be twisted and seen in light of his presupposition. His starting point, his faith commitment will change everything and make it fit the world that he wants. And so then, as Montgomery thinks of Van Till, Van Till would say to the Muslims, now you must have my starting point. You must begin with faith in my God, in my inerrant scriptures. But then when the Muslim tries to present evidence and to argue, the Christian perverts all of that in favor of his preconceived ideas too. So you have one preconceived philosophy arguing with another preconceived philosophy and nobody can appeal the facts to settle their Disagreement, because what amounts to a fact is determined by what the philosophy that is already held. Neither viewpoint can prevail, since by definition all appeal to neutral evidence is eliminated. The admission that facts can be known by the opposition is useless, says Montgomery, because correct interpretation of the fact as bearing on the ultimate truth of religious claims rests only with the one who has seen the total picture truly by revelation. He here ridicules Van Till's position. He says it won't do any good. They say, well, the unbeliever, according to Dr. Van Till, can understand the facts different. Gummy says that won't make any difference because whatever facts he does understand still aren't interpreted right, still aren't interpreted in light of God's revelation. And so we see the stark horror when Christian presuppositionalism confronts non Christian presuppositionalism. You have your presuppositions, I have mine, and near the twain shall meet. Montgomery suggests that by negative implications that we should really handle the non Christians by showing that factual evidence is necessarily employed by everyone to evaluate alternative reality claims in all areas of life. Montgomery says, whenever we have a disagreement as to what the world is really like, whether it's created by God, whatever the truth about reality is, when we have disagreements, the only way to settle them is by appealing to the facts, the facts that can be observed and perceived factual evidence must be employed. Secondly, we must show that facts do not support the non Christian worldview. We must show that the non Christian is wrong because his view of the world is not in accord with the facts. And that in fact that rather there is compelling factual support for the Christian affirmation that God was in Christ, reconciling the world unto himself. All right, so what kind of apologetics should we have instead of this presuppositional one? We should say, you have your hypothesis, I have my hypothesis. Let's get out in the world and do some research and find out who's right. Let's get some facts to settle this disagreement. We'll show that the non Christian worldviews are not factual, that the Christian worldview is factual. Montgomery says that on Dr. Van Till's basis, without prior commitment to the truly meaningful context for the facts, facts are never compelling. And that internal consistency will not work in resolving disputes since neither the disputant, neither disputant here, the Christian or the non Christian, neither one allows a neutral standard of consistency to be imposed on his position from outside. And so again, by implication, we see that Montgomery wants us to be able to judge by the neutral facts of universal reality in the public marketplace of ideas. And he doesn't want us to reaffirm the way the universe looks after we have a faith commitment, he says we don't want to look at the universe through prejudice glasses through jaundiced eyes, if you will. Let's get out into this marketplace of ideas and find out where the facts are and whose hypothesis is supported. By rejecting the fact oriented alternative in apologetics, Dr. Van Til has eliminated all possibility of offering a positive demonstration of the truth of the Christian view, says Montgomery, in a contingent universe. And I want you to listen closely. In a contingent universe, there is an infinite number of possible philosophical positions, claims Montgomery. And when you demonstrate the fallacy of all the other positions minus one, your own, if you demonstrate the fallacy of all the other positions, that would not establish the validity of the remaining one. Unless we were of course, to introduce the gratuitous assumption that at least one had to be right. Now you can see this is the way I've criticized Dr. Clark previously. He says we have to eliminate all these other alternatives. Well, he doesn't really do that. But even if he did, unless he could positively show the Christian view to be right, all he would have shown is that we're just at the high end of the sinking rowboat. Others have gone under the water first, but we're on the way down too. So now Montgomery uses this against Van Til. It doesn't apply here, as I'll show in a few minutes, but he says in a contingent universe, there's an infinite number of possible worldviews, and even if you could refute all of them minus one, it wouldn't prove that the last one was the correct one or a correct one. I'm going to quote. When worldviews collide and appeal to common facts is the only preservative against philosophical solipsism and religious anarchy. Well, there's a bunch of fancy words at the end of that sentence. Basically what he says is when worldviews collide, when the outlook of the atheist, the naturalist, the materialist, when that worldview collides with the worldview of the Christian, following the Bible, worshiping Jesus Christ as his savior and Lord, when these two worldviews collide, the only way that you can avoid religious anarchy, where everybody just arbitrarily chooses to believe whatever they want individually goes their own way, the only way to avoid that is to appeal to common facts. There are facts in the world that this man should know and this man should know we can appeal to those common facts and resolve the worldview conflict. And now I quote again. But the apologetic presuppositionalist, according to Montgomery. But the apologetic presuppositionalist, as we have seen, cuts off all opportunity to determine the truth value of competing religious remedies prior to the acceptance of one of them as the first principle of all meaningful thinking. Montgomery claims that on Dr. Van Til's system the non Christian is not left without excuse, since the Christian can have no more claims on his life than any number of other competing views which also demand faith in them as the necessary condition for discovering truth. The presuppositionalist says, you must have faith in my beginning point or you can't discover truth. But there are other views out there who say if you don't start with my starting point, you can't discover truth. And so the Christian loses all claim on the unbeliever he can't call into a sentence. Montgomery says the only alternative is to appeal to objective evidence. We must operate on the non Christian's territory, even as the Lord did by his incarnation, coming into this world, operating on the non Christian turf, if you will, and I quote, the evidence of Christianity's truth has never been closeted in a presuppositional corner. It has always been in the public domain, capable of examination by all. So everyone says. Montgomery, Christian and non Christian alike will employ inductive procedures. Let me stop the quote to explain induction. Induction is a form of reasoning that goes like this. I see this fact, I see this particular fact. I see this particular fact. And when I take them together, it's very likely that, very probable that I can infer the following general conclusion. I take today as an example. We're driving down the street and as we drive down the street we go by a house that has looks like 2 1/2ft of snow blanketed in front of the house. I see back off the street a garage. The door is open, a car is parked in there, but I see no driveway. There is no clear path between the car and the street. I see no footprint, which would be very deep ones this morning. I see no lights on in the house, no smoke coming from the chimney. I say very likely, very probably these people are not up yet this morning and have not cleared their driveway. I know. Does that mean that necessarily that's the case, that it just has to be that way? Well, no. Somebody might have built a garage and put a car in there and left the door open without any driveway to get there. It's not impossible. And it's possible that in a morning like this somebody would not have turned on the lights or had a fire in their fireplace or been outside. It's possible, but very likely. This fact and this fact and this fact can be generalized to a conclusion as I've given you, or another inductive kind of reasoning. Every time I have let go of my apple, it's fallen to the ground. I did it just now. Oh, and I've done it again and I've let go of the apple and it's fallen to the ground again. And now the fourth time when I let go of the apple, what very probably will happen. It's not impossible that the apple might fly up in the air before, but inductively you would assume that it's very probable that when you let go of the apple this time it will fall again. Now that's inductive reasoning. Now back to the point. According to Montgomery, everyone, Christian and non Christian alike employ inductive procedures to distinguish fact from fiction. Everybody reasons in the way that I've been talking about to know the difference between fact and fiction, between true medicine and quackery, if you will. Both the Christian and the non Christian are able to compare alternative interpretations of facts and determine on the basis of the facts themselves which interpretation of life best fits reality. The acceptance of the assumptions of the inductive method do not commit someone to a metaphysic, to a view of reality, of scientism or atheism, or one that denigrates God's revelation, says Dr. Montgomery. It just makes possible the distinguishing of true revelation from false revelation. The non Christian must not be allowed to justify himself by his alien starting point. He must be led to see that he exceeds seeds to evidence in all spheres of life, comparable to the claims in Christianity. And this drives the non Christian to recognize that his rejection of Christ is on the basis of his will, not his intellect. He volitionally rejects Christ. That's what's going on now. According to Montgomery, at the end of his article, Christian dogmatics or theologies is directed at believers. It begins very properly with God's inerrant revelation of himself. But, says Montgomery, apologetic is directed not to believers, but to unbelievers who don't accept God's word. Yet here then, the focus is not on the beginning point of God's revelation. The focus must be on the need of the unbeliever. And the starting point has to be the common rationality, the inductive and deductive procedures which all men Share. I'll read that again. The starting point has to be the common rationality, the inductive and deductive procedures which all men share. Montgomery says that Van Till treats the non Christian very much as if he were a Christian already and offers him only an a priori dogmatic beginning rather than the factually compelling evidence he needs about the Christian's truth claim. Now, in recent days Dr. Montgomery has had occasion to write introductions to other works of apologetics and has said things in some of his other articles in passing about presuppositionalism and Dr. Van Till issue. And in most every case it can be summarized very well by saying that Montgomery sees Van Til as pure and simply a okay, A faith if comes from the Latin for faith to believe. What Van Til says is just believe. If somebody wants facts to say, according to Montgomery, Van Till would say, you can't understand anything right without first believing. So just believe. Take a jump into the Christian worldview and from there you will see things correctly. Just believe. And when somebody else comes along and they say just believe. If you don't, you won't see things correctly. You must be regenerated by my God. If somebody wants facts to say, according to Montgomery, Mantill would say, you can't understand anything right without first believing. So just believe. Take a jump into the Christian worldview and from there you will see things correctly. Just believe. And when somebody else comes along and they say just believe, if you don't, you won't see things correctly. You must be regenerated by my God. Then Dante has no answer. World using collision, no way to resolve it, because Xantho was just a fetish. Feedism says basically there is no rational argument for the truth of Christianity. It is just a matter of volition, just making yourself believe it. Okay, now you have a pretty good idea of what Dr. Montgomery thinks is wrong with Dr. Van Til's system. And we can take the remaining moments in our opening lectures tonight to give a response to it. And I want to respond as courteously as I can and say that if it were not for the fact that Dr. Montgomery has a large following and many people have made similar mistakes and therefore will be misled by this caricature. If it weren't for that, I would say in all honesty, true scholarship need not even answer this. It is so preposterously false to what Dr. Van Kilme says that in all honesty, Montgomery has done no better but to set up a straw man. And then he's taken a running football tackle and laid it on that straw man and he's just demolished it. But it has nothing to do with Dr. Van Til. It's an artificial position that he's erected and knocked down for. Dr. Van Till doesn't say anything akin to what Dr. Montgomery has claimed. I'm going to go through very quickly, point by point and show you why Dr. Van Till either does not hold this view or does not fall prey to the criticisms that have been given in the first place. Is it the case that the transcendental method of Van Til can be reversed when we confront non Christian presuppositionalism? Is the Christian presuppositionalist without an answer? Is it just they trade epithets, trade name calling and say you're an atheist, you're an infidel, you can't see things right, you're prejudiced, you have the wrong presupposition. Is that all they can say to one another and then go their separate ways? Absolutely not. Listen to what Dr. Van Til says in the Christian Theory of knowledge, page 19. The natural man is quite able intellectually to follow the argument that the Christian offers for the truth of his position. He can therefore see that the wisdom of this world has been made foolishness. While like God, Christianity can be shown to be. Listen to those words. Christianity can be shown to be not just as good as or even better than the non Christian position, but the only position that does not make nonsense of human experience. According to Dr. Van Til, what we do is we challenge the unbeliever to give an account of what he claims to know. We challenge the unbeliever to make sense of the use of logic or an appeal to facts or the trustworthiness of his senses. Can the transcendental method be reversed? Well, of course not. But we're talking about the preconditions of knowledge and arguments about the preconditions of knowledge. One position. Well, it's conceivable that both positions could fail to have a. A proper view of the preconditions of knowledge. But you can't have two positions, two conflicting logically contrary positions that both have the preconditions of knowledge. In the nature of the case, you see, what Montgomery has done is he's interpreted Dan Till as making a bare formal authority claim. It's like the Christian comes up and he says on the authority of God, believe what I say. And then the Muslim says on the authority of Allah, believe what I say. And the Christian says no, on the authority of my God, believe what I say. And then you know it's just some kind of ridiculous child's game of yes it is. No it's not. Yes it is. No it's not. But Dr. Van Til is not presenting just a bare formal authority claim, saying, well, I got the authority of God, you must believe me. Rather, he is resting on what we call the self attesting authority of God. The self attesting. What does self attesting mean? To give. Attestation means to give witness, to give evidence. The self evidencing authority of God. God's authority is such that it carries its own evidence inherently. And how can you see that? You can say that if you don't begin with the authority of this God, your worldview is reduced to nonsense, to sound and fury, signifying nothing. We drive our unbelieving opponent to absurdity. Since Dan Till, we don't just exchange authority claims. I have the authority of Allah, the authority of Jehovah, I have the authority of Allah, the authority of Jehovah. Which is rather. If you don't begin with the outlook of the Christian Bible, you will have no sense, you can make no sense of your claims to personality, to morals, to facts, to logic. And so Montgomery has made his most elementary mistake in failing to see the transcendental nature of the Van Tillian argument. Van Till's not making bare formal authority claims. He's rather saying that the authority claim of the Scripture is self attesting. It carries its own evidence and it can be shown to carry its own evidence by looking for the transcendental for the preconditions of knowledge. Secondly, Montgomery has wrongly interpreted Van Til as rendering facts and logical consistency impotent in argumentation because allegedly the believer and unbeliever will both regard their respective systems as factual and logical. Now it's true, Van Till says, and I think it's obvious anybody who's engaged in apologetics is true, that the unbeliever will start out by thinking, well, I have the facts on my side, my system is logical. And the believer says the same thing. They both interpret themselves in light of their own presuppositions. But Montgomery wrongly thinks that therefore Van Till renders facts and logic impotent and argument as though it won't do any good to use the facts. Now it won't do any good to use logic because he'll always think that he's in accordance with it and I'll always think I am. So we just have to leave it at that. That is not at all what Dr. Van Til said. Not at all. First of all about the empirical method. You make up your own mind. I will just read Van Til for you. I will not do a lot of filler. You tell me if Dr. Van Till is against appeal to the fact is against the empirical method when you hear him say Survey of Christian Epistemology page 7 the greater the amount of detailed study and the more carefully such study is undertaken, the more truly Christian will the method be. It is important to bring out this point in order to help remove the common misunderstanding that Christianity is opposed to factual investigation. Does that sound like an anti empiricist to you? Our hope is that a general discussion may not be false to the facts as experts know them. Page Roman numeral 3 what shall be the attitude of the orthodox believer with respect to this? Shall he be an obscurantist and hold to the doctrine of authority of the Scripture, though he knows it can empirically be shown to be contrary to the facts of the Scriptures themselves? It goes without saying that such should not be his attitude. Christian Theory of knowledge page 35 the Christian position is certainly not opposed to experimentation and observation. It is quite commonly held that we cannot accept anything that is not the result of a sound scientific methodology. With this we can, as Christians heartily agree. Christian theistic evidence is paging 62 in Roman numeral. The Surely the Christian who believes in the doctrine of creation cannot share the Greek depreciation of the things of the sense world. Depreciation of that sense world inevitably leads to a depreciation of many of the important facts of historic Christianity which took place in the sense world. The Bible does not rule out every form of empiricism any more than it rules out every form of a priori reasoning, and that in the Introduction to Systematic Theology, page 45. Now this approach, from the bottom to the top, from the particular to the general, is the inductive aspect of the method of implication. All agree that the immediate starting point must be that of our everyday experience and the facts that are most close at hand. But the favorite charge against us is that we are employing the deductive method. Our opponents are thoughtlessly identifying our method with the Greek method of deduction. We need only to observe that a priori reasoning and a furiori reasoning appeal to facts are equally anti Christian if these terms are understood in their historical sense. That was from the Survey of Christian System and 120. Hence the difference between the prevalent method of science and the method of Christianity is not that the former is interested in finding the facts and is ready to follow the facts wherever they may lead while the latter is not ready to follow the facts. Every bit of historical investigation, whether it be in the directly biblical field, archaeology or in general history, is bound to confirm the truth of the claims of the Christian position. A really fruitful historical apologetic argues that every fact is and must be such as proves the truth of the Christian theistic position there from pages 1933 and 293 of the Christian theory of Knowledge. And then you'll notice that Dan Till is very critical of those who saw no way of harmonizing the facts of the Christian religion with the constitution and course of nature. They gave up the idea of a philosophical apologetics entirely. I'm still quoting. This attitude comes to expression frequently in the statement of the experiential proof of the truth of Christianity. People will say that they know that they are saved and that Christianity is true no matter what the philosophical or scientific evidence for or against it may be. But in thus seeking to withdraw from all intellectual argument, such feedists have virtually admitted the validity of the argument against Christianity. They will have to believe in their hearts what they have virtually allowed to be intellectually indefensible Christian theistic evidence is. Page 37. I could go on reading. Friends, I have pages more quotes. Dr. Montgomery is just not being true to what Dr. Van Till has said. Dr. Van Till is not against the empirical method. He is not against appealing to fast. He says in the Christian Theory of Knowledge I would use the historic argument for Christianity. He also says, but I wouldn't leave it at just that there is a place for is good for showing particular detailed arguments against Christianity to be wrong. It's good for debris clearing of the mind of the unbeliever to show him that we aren't just religious fanatics who don't have any empirical base for what we say. It's good for that. But usually the unbeliever, the thoughtful unbeliever, the philosophical unbeliever is going to need much more than that. So he says, I wouldn't appeal to the facts and facts and facts without eventually talking about the unbeliever's theory of fact, his philosophical presuppositions. But he says, I would appeal to the facts. I would appeal to history by all means. Moreover, Dr. Van Till is not against the use of logic. He says, on the other hand, if God recognized as the only and final explanation of any and every fact, neither the inductive appeal to facts nor the deductive appeal to logic, neither the inductive nor the deductive method can any longer be Used to the exclusion illusion of the other. He says, by all means I would use logic. The Christian theory of knowledge. Let me see. I don't think that is what I want to read for you. Yes, Christian Theory of knowledge, page 493. I do not artificially separate induction from deduction or reasoning about facts, the facts of nature from reasoning in an a priori analytical fashion about the nature of human consciousness. I do not artificially abstract or separate them from one another. On the contrary, I see deduction and analytical reasoning. Analytical reasoning would be very simplistically put as logical reasoning. I see induction and analytical reasoning as part of one process of interpretation. And then, if you'll bear with me, reading just a little bit more, Montgomery really makes it easy for me. I don't have to think real hard, I just have to look up quotes. In the Survey of Christian Epistemology, pages 204 and 5. The final question is in which framework or on which view of reality, the Christian or the non Christian? The law of contradiction can have application to any fact. The non Christian rejects the Christian view out of hand as being contradictory. Then when he is asked to furnish a foundation for the law of contradiction, he can offer nothing but the idea of contingency, that everything is by chance. What we shall have to do then is to try to reduce our opponent's position to absurdity. Nothing less will do. Without God, man is completely lost in every respect, epistemologically as well as morally and religiously. We must therefore give our opponents better treatment than they give us. We must point out to them that univocal reasoning itself leads to self contradiction, not only from a theistic point of view, but from a non theistic point of view as well. You don't have the Muslim over here saying, well, from my point of view, it's this way. The Christian from my point of view is this way. Daniel says, I can show you that you contradict yourself even on your own point of view. We must find a foundation for the laws of logic. Dan Till is not giving up the law of non contradiction. He's insisting on it. And he's insisting that the unbeliever can't use it. That's the problem with the unbeliever. He has created epistemological suicide, not just religious and spiritual suicide, by his unbelief. And one more and I will calm down. Page 189 the same book. The theist must contend that the anti theist has in effect fundamentally denied the very law of contradiction in as much as the law of contradiction has its foundation in the nature of God. And so my second criticism is that Montgomery has wrongly interpreted Van Til as rendering facts and logical consistency powerless in argumentation. Van Til says we must appeal to the facts. I would appeal to the facts. The law of contradiction is crucial. Even on the unbelievers ground. I can show him to be contradictory. But what Van Till is saying is we need to find a foundation for the laws of logic. We must find some worldview that makes sense out of appeals to fact. A theory of fact, if you will. So as you can see then, Van Till rejects appeals to neutral facts and neutral logic. He doesn't believe there's such a thing as a brute fact. Now let me tell you what a brute fact is. That doesn't mean a fact about some big linebacker in the NFL. There's a brute fact. No, a brute fact is one that's just there without interpretation. The sort of thing that you stub your foot against in the middle of the night, that's a brute fact. You didn't stop and think about it. You didn't put it into an order of interpretation. You didn't have it schematized in advance. You just, there it is. And now what do you do? Now according to so many apologists today, there's just so many obvious facts about the world. There are chairs in this room, the lights are on, the snow is on the ground. I have two hands, okay? There are all these facts. Now what we have to do is we have to find a corral for the fact. What you are to imagine, if you will, is that the facts are like spheres. I won't try to draw spheres. I'll just schematize them in football fashion is excellent. Okay? Now as we go through the world, we see this fact. Here's the fact that everything's in motion. Here's the fact that certain things breathe. Here's the fact that there's a strawberry in the field, whatever it is. But eventually we have to find some way of bringing this all together into a coherent interpretation. So many people think everybody, the Christian, the non Christian, says, there's the strawberry, there's the breathing person, here's the snow on the ground, whatever it is. And now what we do is we try to corral the spheres. And some people draw their corral like this. That would be their interpretation of life. They've corralled the facts according to this pattern. The facts of course, don't have any pattern through them. They're just random brute facts. The sorts of things without planning, you sub yourself on, right. But somebody else comes along and says, oh, no, no, no. Those facts aren't to be interpreted that way. Here's the way I'd corral those facts so you have a different way of drawing it all together. One interpretation draws this kind of line around the facts, another draws this kind of line around the facts. And that's what we're engaged in when we do apologetics. Mantill says, that's not right at all. That is not correct. The human mind does not find facts apart from a theory of the fact. One's presuppositions determine what the spheres will be. You see, instead of trying to draw a corral around all the recognized spheres of the world, the difference between the Christian and the non Christian is that in many very important cases, somebody says, that's a sphere, and another person says, no, it's a sp. What makes the difference? Is it the corral that makes the difference between the spears and the strawberries? No, it's your beginning assumptions that make the difference between the sphere and the strawberry. Every fact is an interpreted fact in the nature of the case. Not because we're malicious, not because we beg the question, not because everybody's just unwilling to look at the facts here and simple. But in the nature of the case, the human mind does not see facts apart from a. Apart from a pattern. There aren't any spheres, if you will, without a chorale around them. Of course, in the world there are spheres out on the open range without the corral. But in epistemology, there are no facts that do not have a corralling interpretation about them. Mantill does reject appeals to brute facts and brute logic. He says they are epistemologically impossible. There are no uninterpreted facts prior to a faith commitment. If you have any doubt about that, I recommend you pick up the second evening's lecture, where I spent two hours showing that modern epistemology is almost, well, not universally. That will never happen in philosophy, I guess, but there's such a strong thrust in that direction, even among unbelievers, to recognize that the difference between worldviews makes the difference in the way facts are interpreted and not vice versa. Moreover, Vantil does reject appeals to neutral facts and logic because such an appeal wouldn't show why the Christian epistemology is correct. And what we've read over and over again is that he says we can show our epistemology to be correct, to provide the preconditions of knowledge where the unbeliever can. Moreover, when you say that there's just these brute facts out in the world, these uninterpreted facts that everybody has to make something of now man, till you will not be able to challenge the non Christian's autonomy. We should rather make the unbelieving scientist justify his induction. Why does the scientist believe that when you drop the apple the fourth time it will drop? Why does he believe that when you let it go it's going to follow the law of gravity? Force him to justify that assumption. Force the logician to give more than an arbitrary or pragmatic defense of his laws of logic. It should be noted also that Dr. Van Til does not reject all appeal to common facts. You say. Wait a minute, didn't you just say he did that? No, I said he rejects appeals to brute back. But he admits there are common facts. In fact, as a matter of fact, Dr. Van Til says that the believer and the unbeliever have all facts in common. They live in the same world and the unbeliever sees the facts for what they are. But does what suppresses that truth? In unrighteousness, the unbeliever does see the facts. And we must appeal to that suppressed truth. We must drive the unbeliever to show him that he's living on borrowed capital. We must make him see that he's assuming the Christian worldview even when he's attacking the Christian worldview. The entire domain of possible human knowledge is common to the Christian and the non Christian. And the believer and the unbeliever commonly use the presupposition of the Christian God because even though he doesn't want to say that it's true, the unbeliever is the image of God and he sees the facts for what they are. Listen to this quote from Dr. Van Til in the Survey of Christian Epistemology 204 and 205. We can start with any fact at all and challenge our friends the enemy to give us an intelligible interpretation of it. Since the non theist is so heartily convinced that univocal reasoning is the only possible kind of reasoning, we must ask him to reason univocally for us in order that we may see the consequences. What we shall have to do then is to try to reduce our opponent's position to an absurdity. Nothing less will do. We must point out to them that univocal reasoning itself leads to self contradiction not only from a theistic point of view, but from a non theistic point of view as well. It is this that we ought to mean when we say that we must meet our enemy on their own ground. It is this that we ought to mean when we say that we reason from the impossibility of the contrary. Vantil says we have all facts in common. Take any fact of the universe, challenge the unbeliever to make sense out of it. So you see again, Montgomery just has not understood what presuppositionalism is. His criticisms are not against Van Til, they're against an imaginary opponent. Montgomery. This is my third point. Montgomery seems to think also that Van Till merely eliminates all the competitors. He engages in a negative critique. He shows what's wrong with naturalism. He shows what's wrong with existentialism. He shows what's wrong with this position and that position and leaves it at that. Montgomery thinks Van Til merely eliminates all the competitors. But of course that misses what Van Til has said so many times. That apologetic procedure should be in two steps. We should have a two step method. We first of all do an internal critique of the other person's position. That's true, we eliminate our competitors. But then secondly, we should positively demonstrate that the Christian worldview does make sense of science, does make logic intelligible, can account for human personality and ethical absolute. It's not as though we eliminate everybody else and say, well, we're the only guys left. We must be the ones who are right. No, we go on to say where you have failed and where you have failed and where you have failed, we can provide the answer. We have a two step apologetic procedure. And I quote from the Defense of the Faith, pages 1, 16 and 17. To argue by presupposition is to indicate that we, excuse me, to indicate what are the epistemological and metaphysical principles that underly and control one's method. The Reformed apologist must point out that every method, the supposedly neutral one, no less than any other, presupposes either the truth or the falsity of Christian theism. And then Survey of Christian Epistemology, page 225. Van Till says the Reformed method of argument is first constructive. Is first constructive. It presents the biblical view positively by showing that all factual and logical discussions by men take place by virtue of the world being what God in Christ says it is. It then proceeds negatively to show that unless all facts and all logical relations be seen in the light of the Christian framework, all human interpretation fails instantly. And Montgomery hasn't caught that. You see, he has failed to see that our approach takes two steps. Not just the elimination of competitors, but the Positive demonstration that we can make science in fact meaningful. Fourthly, we have to ask ourselves, does Dr. Van Til fail to leave the unbeliever without excuse, since competing claims can also demand empty faith in them at the outset? Is it the case that Daniel says, look, just start with faith. You must have faith. In my position you won't understand anything. What you do begin with faith. And for that reason the outsider, the unbeliever, the negative position, the opponent, the false religion, is left with any number of excuses for failing to believe. Does Daniel fail to leave the unbeliever without excuse because he has mere a priori dogmatism versus the Muslims? Mere opioid dogmatism? Does Dan Till say that it's just an arbitrary thing? Take your pick. Does he say we're just to be feedistic, that we can just reason in some kind of blind circle? I've got my circle, you've got yours. Because we can't talk to each other. No, he doesn't. The Survey of Christian epistemology. Roman numeral 14. Vantil says it will then be possible to compare the Christian epistemology with any and all others. And being thus enabled to compare them all, we are in a position and place before the responsibility of choosing between them. And this choosing can then, in the nature of the case, no longer be a matter of artistic preference. We cannot choose it to philologies as we choose half. Such would be the case if it had been once for all established that the whole thing is a matter of taste. But that is exactly what has not been established. That is exactly the point in dispute. Danville doesn't say you start with your faith, I start with mine. It's just a matter of faith. Pages 196 and 197 of the same text. Ye therefore trust that the Holy Spirit, through whom in the economy of redemption the task has been a sign of convicting the world of judgment, will use the means of rational argumentation to accomplish his task. This hope is not inconsistent with the conception of the immediacy of the work of the Holy Spirit. The immediacy is complete. Our arguments, taken by themselves, affect nothing. While the Holy Spirit may very well convict without the use of our arguments, as we may convict with, excuse me, without the use of our precept. Yet, because God is himself a completely rational God and has created us in his image, there is every reason to believe that he will make arguments, faith and effective. Daniel says no, we don't just say, you have your faith, we have ours. You must reason, you must use argumentation, you can expect God will make it effective. Is it true that Dr. Van Till is left without any argument? No. Van Till's whole procedure is intended to drive his opponent to skepticism. The driving to absurdity. Our argument is that if you don't have our worldview, you can't know anything in principle. Remember that. What? 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